The Night's Dawn Trilogy (349 page)

Louise stroked her sister’s hair. “I’m here now.”

“It’s been forever. Days!”

“No, no. It just seems like that.”

“Days,” Genevieve insisted.

Louise managed a slightly uncertain smile; wanting for herself the reassurance she was attempting to project. “Have they been
questioning you?”

“Yes,” Genevieve mumbled morosely. “They kept on and on about what happened in Norwich. I told them a hundred times.”

“Me too.”

“Everybody must be really stupid on Earth. They don’t understand anything unless you’ve explained it five times.”

Louise wanted to laugh at the childish derision in Gen’s voice, pitched just perfectly to infuriate any adult.

“And they took my games block away. That’s stealing, that is.”

“I haven’t seen any of my stuff either.” “The food’s horrid. I suppose they’re too thick to cook it properly. And I haven’t
had any clean clothes.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

Brent Roi hurried into the room, and dismissed the two waiting police officers with a casual wave. “Okay, ladies, take a seat.”

Louise flashed him a resentful look.

“Please?” he entreated without noticeable sincerity.

Holding hands, the sisters sat on the settee opposite him. “Are we under arrest?” Louise asked.

“No.”

“Then you believe what I told you?”

“To my amazement, I find sections of your story contain the odd nugget of truth.”

Louise frowned. This attitude was completely different to the one he’d shown her during the interview. Not that he was repenting,
more like he’d been proved right instead of her.

“So you’ll watch out for Quinn Dexter?”

“Most assuredly.”

Genevieve shuddered. “I hate him.”

“That’s all that truly matters,” Louise said. “He must never be allowed to get down to Earth. If you believe me, then I’ve
won.”

Brent Roi shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, we’ve been trying to decide what to do with the pair of you. Which I can tell you
is not an easy thing, given what you were attempting. You thought you were doing the right thing, bringing Christian here.
But believe me, from the legal side of things, you are about as wrong as it’s possible to be. The Halo police commissioner
has spent two days being advised by some of our best legal experts on what the hell to do with you, which hasn’t improved
his temper any. Ordinarily we’d just walk you past a warm judge and fly you off to a penal colony. There’d be no problem obtaining
a guilty verdict.” He gazed at Genevieve. “Not even your age would get you off.”

Genevieve pushed her shoulders up against her neck, and glowered at him.

“However, there are mitigating circumstances, and these are strange times. Lucky for you, that gives the Halo police force
a large amount of discretion right now.”

“So?” Louise asked calmly. For whatever reason she wasn’t afraid; if they were due to face a trial none of this would be happening.

“So. Pretty obviously: we don’t want you up here after what you’ve done; plus you don’t have the basic technical knowledge
necessary to live in an asteroid settlement, which makes you a liability. Unfortunately, there’s an interstellar quarantine
in force right now, which means we can’t send you off to Tranquillity where your fiancÉ can take care of you. That just leaves
us with one option: Earth. You have money, you can afford to stay there for the duration of the crisis.”

Louise glanced at Genevieve, who squashed her lips together with a dismissive lack of interest.

“I’m not going to object,” Louise said.

“I couldn’t care less if you did,” Brent Roi told her. “You have no say in this at all. As well as deporting you, I am officially
issuing you with a police caution. You have engaged in an illegal act with the potential of endangering High York, and this
will be entered into Govcentral’s criminal data memory store with a suspended action designation. Should you at any time in
the future be found committing another criminal act of any nature within Govcentral’s domain this case will be reactivated
and used in your prosecution. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” Louise whispered. “You cause us one more problem, and they’ll throw you out of the arcology and lock the door behind
you.”

“What about Fletcher?” Genevieve asked.

“What about him?” Brent Roi said.

“Is he coming down to Earth with us?”

“No, Gen,” Louise said. “He’s not.” She tried to keep the sorrow from her voice. Fletcher had helped her and Gen through so
much, she still couldn’t think of him as a possessor, one of the enemy. The last image she had was of him being led out of
the big airlock chamber where they’d been detained. A smile of forlorn encouragement on his face, directed at her. Even in
defeat, he didn’t lose his nobility.

“Your big sister’s right,” Brent Roi told Genevieve. “Stop thinking about Fletcher.”

“Have you killed him?”

“Tough to do. He’s already dead.”

“Have you?”

“At the moment he’s being very cooperative. He’s telling us about the beyond, and helping the physics team understand the
nature of his energistic power. Once we’ve learned all we can, then he’ll be put into zero-tau. End of story.”

“Can we see him before we go?” Louise asked.

“No.”

______

The two female police officers escorted Louise and Genevieve directly up to the counter-rotating spaceport. They were given
a standard class berth on the
Scher
, an inter-orbit passenger ship. The interstellar quarantine hadn’t yet bitten into the prodigious Earth, Halo, Moon economic
triad; outsystem exports made up barely fifteen per cent of their trade. Civil flights between the three were running close
to their usual levels.

They arrived at the departure lounge twelve minutes before the ship was scheduled to leave. The police returned their luggage
and passports, with Earth immigration clearance loaded in; they also got their processor blocks back. Finally, they handed
Louise her Jovian Bank credit disk.

Louise had her suspicions that the whole procedure was deliberately being rushed to keep them off-balance and complacent.
Not that she knew how to kick up a fuss. But there was probably some part of their treatment which a good lawyer could find
fault with. She didn’t really care.
Scher
’s life support capsule had the same lengthy cylindrical layout as the
Jamrana
, except that every deck was full of chairs. A sour stewardess showed them brusquely to their seats, strapped them in, and
left to chase other passengers. “I wanted to change,” Genevieve complained. She was pulling dubiously at her shipsuit. “I
haven’t washed for ages. It’s all clammy.”

“We’ll be able to change when we get to the tower station, I expect.”

“Which tower station? Where are we going?” “I don’t know.” Louise glanced at the stewardess, who was chiding an elderly woman’s
attempts to fasten her seat straps. “I think we’ll just have to wait and find out.” “Then what? What do we do when we get
there?” “I’m not sure. Let me think for a minute, all right?” Louise squirmed her shoulders, letting her muscles relax. Freefall
always made her body tense up as it tried to assume more natural gravity-evolved postures. Thankfully, the cabin chairs were
almost flat, preventing her from getting stomach twinges.

What to do next hadn’t bothered her much while she’d been in custody. Convincing Brent Roi about Dexter was her only concern.
Now that had been accomplished, or seemed to be. She still couldn’t quite believe he had taken her warnings particularly seriously;
they’d been released far too quickly for that. Dismissed, almost.

The authorities had Fletcher in custody, and he was cooperating with them about possession. That was their true prize, she
thought. They were confident their security procedures would spot Dexter. She wasn’t. Not at all. And she’d made one solemn
promise to Fletcher, which covered exactly this situation.

If I can’t help him physically, at least I can honour my promise. If our positions were reversed, he would. Banneth, I said
I’d find and warn Banneth. Yes. And I will. The sudden resolution did a lot to warm her again.

Then she was aware of a strangely rhythmic buzzing sound, and blinked her eyes open. Genevieve had activated her processor
block; its AV projector lens was shining a conical fan of light directly on her face. Frayed serpents of pastel colour stroked
her cheeks and nose, glistening on a mouth parted in an enraptured smile. Her fingers skated with fast dextrous motions over
the block’s surface, sketching eccentric ideograms.

I’m really going to have to do something about this obsession, Louise thought, it can’t be healthy.

The stewardess was shouting at a man cradling a crying child. Tackling Gen was probably best delayed until they reached Earth.

______

It wasn’t rugged determination, or even victorious self-confidence which brought him back. Instead, came the slow, dreadful
comprehension that this awful limbo wouldn’t end if he did nothing.

Dariat’s thoughts hung amid vast clusters of soil molecules, membranous twists of nebula dust webbing the space between stars,
insipid, enervated. Completely unable to evaporate, to fade away into blissful non-existence. Instead, they hummed with chilly
misery as they conducted pain-soaked memories round and around on a never ending circuit, humiliation and fear undimmed by
time and repetition.

Worse than the beyond. At least in the beyond, there were other souls, memories you could raid to bring an echo of sensation.
Here there was only yourself; a soul buried alive. Nothing to comfort you but your own life. Screaming from the pain of the
blows which battered him down might have stopped, but the internal scream of self-loathing could never cease. Not incarcerated
here. He didn’t want to go back, not to the dimly sensed light and air above, the vicious brutality of the ghosts waiting
there. Every time he emerged, they would pummel him down again. That was what all of them wanted. He would go through the
same suffering again and again. Yet he couldn’t stay here, either.

Dariat moved. He thought of himself, visualised pushing his bulky body up through the soil, as if he was doing some kind of
appalling fitness-fad exercise. It wasn’t anything like that easy. Imagination couldn’t power him as before. Something had
happened to him, weakening him. The vitality he owned, even as a ghost, had been leeched out by the matter with which he was
entwined.

Fantasy muscles trembled as he strained. Finally, along his back, sensation was returning in a paltry trickle. A warmth, but
not on his skin. Inside, just below the surface.

It inspired greed, a hunger for more. Nothing else mattered, the warmth was revitalising, a font of life. It lent to his strength,
and he began to rise faster through the soil, sucking in more warmth as he went. Soon, his face cleared the ground, and he
was moving at an almost normal speed. Extricating himself from the soil meant discovering just how cold he was. Dariat stood
up, teeth chattering, arms crossed over his chest, hugging tight as his hands tried to rub some heat into icy flesh. Only
his feet were warm, though that was a relative term.

The grass around his sandals was a sickly yellow-brown, dead and drooping. Each blade was covered in a delicate sprinkle of
hoarfrost. They made up a roughly oval patch about two metres long. Body-shaped, in fact. He stared at it, completely bewildered.

Damn, I’m cold!

Dariat? That you, boy?

Yes, it’s me.
One question—he didn’t really want to ask, but had to know.
How long was I… out for? It’s been seventeen hours.

Seventeen years was a figure he could have believed in quite easily.
Is that all?

Yes. What happened?

They beat me into the ground. Literally. It was… Bad. Real bad.

Then why didn’t you come out earlier?

You won’t understand.

Did you kill the grass?

I don’t know. I suppose so.

How? We thought you didn’t interact with solid matter.

Don’t ask me. There was a kind of warmth as I came out. Or maybe it was just hatred which killed the grass, concentrated hatred.
That’s what they were giving off; Thoale be damned, but they hated me. I’m cold now.
He scanned round, searching through the tree trunks for any sign of the other ghosts. After a moment, he walked away from
the patch of dead grass, spooked by the place. The opposite of consecrated ground.

Movement felt good, it was making his legs warm up. When he glanced down, he saw a line of frosted footsteps in the grass
trailing back to the burial patch. But he was definitely getting warmer. He started walking again, a meagre lick of heat seeping
up from his legs to his torso. It would take a long time to dispel the chill, but he was sure it would happen eventually.

The starscraper is the other way,
the personality said.

I know. That’s why I’m going back to the valley. I’ll be safe there.

For a while.

I’m not risking another encounter.

You have to. Look, forewarned is forearmed. Just take it carefully. If you see any ghosts waiting ahead of you, go around
them.

I’m not doing it.

You have to. Our internal status is still decaying. We must have those descendants out of zero-tau. What good will a dead
habitat do you? You know they’re the only chance of salvation any of us have. You know that. You just showed us how bad entombment
here is; that could become permanent if we don’t get clear.

Shit!
He stopped, standing with his fists clenched. Tendrils of frost slithered out from under his soles to wilt the grass.

It’s common sense, Dariat. You won’t be giving in to Rubra just by agreeing. That’s not—

Ha. Remember what we are. All right! Bastards. Where’s Tolton?