The Night's Dawn Trilogy (103 page)

They left the stairwell on his floor, and he datavised a code at his apartment door. Nothing happened. He flashed her a strained
smile, and datavised the code again. This time it opened, juddering once or twice as it slid along its rails. Marie went in
first. Anders deliberately kept the inside lights low, and codelocked the door behind him—at least the processor acknowledged
that. He put his arm round her shoulder and steered her into the biggest of the three bedrooms. That door was codelocked too.

Marie walked into the middle of the room, eyes straying to the double bed. There were long velvet straps fixed to each corner.

“Take your clothes off,” Anders told her. An uncompromising sternness appeared in his voice. He datavised an order to the
overhead light panel, but it remained at its lowest level. Shit! And she was obediently stripping off. Nothing for it, he’d
have to stay with the deep shadows and hope everyone found it erotic.

“Now take mine off,” he ordered. “Slowly.”

He could feel her hands trembling as she pushed the shirt off his broad shoulders, which made a nice touch. Nervous ones were
always more responsive.

His eyes ran over her with expert tracking as she walked ahead of him to the bed, capturing every square centimetre of flesh
on display. When she was lying on the water mattress his hands traced the same route. Then his boosted cock was swelling to
its full length, and he focused on her face to make sure he captured her fear. That was always a big turn on for the punters.

Marie was smiling.

The lights sprang up to full intensity.

Anders twisted round in confusion. “Hey—”

At first he thought someone had crept up and snapped handcuffs round his wrists, but when he looked he saw it was Marie’s
elegant feminine hands gripping him.

“Let go.” The pain as she squeezed harder was frightening. “Bitch! Let go. Christ—”

She laughed.

He looked back down at her, and gasped. She was sprouting hair right across her chest and stomach, thick black bristles that
scratched and pricked his skin where he lay on top of her. Individual strands began to harden. It was like lying on a hedgehog
hide. The long tips were puncturing his own skin, needling in through the subcutaneous layers of fat.

“Fuck me, then,” she said.

He tried to struggle, but all that did was push more needle spines into his abdomen. Marie let go of one wrist. He hit her
then, on the side of her ribs, and her flesh gave way below his fist. When he brought his hand away it was covered in yellow
and red slime. The spines piercing him turned to worms, slick and greasy, licking round inside the swath of puncture holes
down his torso. Blood trickled out.

Anders let out an insane howl. She was rotting below him, skin melting away into a putrescent crimson film of mucus. It was
acting like glue, sticking him to her. The stench was vile, stinging his eyes. He puked, the wine from the Tabitha Oasis splattering
down on her deliquescing face.

“Kiss me.”

He bucked and floundered against her, weeping helplessly, praying to a God he hadn’t addressed in over a decade. The worms
were wriggling between his abdominal muscles, twining round tendon fibres. Blood and pus

squelched and intermingled, forming a sticky glue which wedded them belly to belly like Siamese twins.

“Kiss me, Anders.”

Her free hand clamped onto the back of his skull. It felt like there was nothing left on it but bone. Sludge dripped into
his coiffured hair.

“No!” he whimpered.

Her lips had dribbled away like candle wax, leaving a wide gash in the bubbling corruption that was her face. The teeth were
a permanent grin. His head was being forced down towards her. He saw her teeth parting, then they were rammed against his
own face.

The kiss. And hot, black, gritty liquid surged up out of her throat. Anders couldn’t scream any more. It was in his own mouth,
kneading its way down his air passage like a fat, eager serpent.

A voice from nowhere said: “We can stop it.”

The liquid detonated into his lungs. He could feel it, hot and rancid inside his chest, swelling out to invade every delicate
cavity. His ribcage heaved at the alien pressure from within. He had stopped struggling.

“She’ll kill you unless you let us help. She’s drowning you.”

He wanted to breathe. He wanted air. He would do anything to breathe. Anything.

“Then let us in.”

He did.

Using the sensitive cells in the polyp above Anders Bospoort’s bed, Dariat watched as the injuries and manifestations reversed
themselves. Marie’s glutinous skin hardened, bristles retracting. The wounds down Anders Bospoort’s abdomen closed up. They
became what they were before: satyr and seraph.

Anders began to stroke himself, hands tracing lines of muscle across his chest. He looked down on his body with a childlike
expression of awe which swiftly became a broad grin. “I’m magnificent,” he whispered. “Utterly

magnificent.” The accent was different to Anders’ usual. Dariat couldn’t quite place it.

“Yes, you look pretty good,” she replied indifferently. She sat up. The sheets were stained a faint pink below her back.

“Let me have you.”

Her mouth wrinkled up with indecision.

“Please. You know I need to. Hell, it’s been seven hundred years. Show a little compassion here.”

“All right then.” She lay back down. Anders started to lick her body, reminding Dariat of a feeding dog. They fucked for twenty
minutes, Anders rutting with a fervour he’d never shown in any of his fleks. Electric lights and household equipment went
berserk as they thrashed about. Dariat quickly checked the neighbouring apartments; a stimulant-program writer was yelling
in frustration as his processors crashed at tremendous speed; a clone merchant’s vats seethed and boiled as regulators fried
the fragile cell clusters which they were wired up to. Doors all around the vestibule opened and shut like guillotines. He
had to launch a flurry of subversive affinity orders into the floor’s neural cells to prevent the local personality subroutines
from alerting Rubra’s principal consciousness.

When he arrived, puffing heavily, outside the apartment, Marie and Anders Bospoort were getting dressed. He used a black-market
customized processor block to break the door’s codelock, and walked straight in.

Marie and Anders looked up in alarm. They ran out of the bedroom. The processor block died in Dariat’s hand and the apartment
was plunged into pitch darkness.

“The dark doesn’t bother me,” he said loudly. The sensitive cells showed him the two of them were walking towards him menacingly.

“Nothing will bother you from now on,” Marie replied.

The belt of his toga robe began to tighten round his belly. “Wrong. Firstly you won’t be able to tyrannize me like you did
poor old Anders, I’m not that weak. Secondly, if I die Rubra will see exactly what’s been going on, and what you are. He might
be crazy, but he’ll fight like a lion to defend his precious habitat and corporation. Once he knows you exist you’ve lost
ninety per cent of your advantage. You’ll never take over Valisk without my help.”

The lights came back on. His belt loosened. Marie and Anders regarded him with expressionless faces.

“It’s only thanks to me he doesn’t know already. You obviously don’t understand much about bitek. I can help there as well.”

“Perhaps we don’t care if he knows,” Anders said.

“OK, fine. You want me to lift the limiter orders I put on this floor’s sensitive cells?”

“What do you want?” Marie asked.

“Revenge. I’ve waited thirty years for you. It’s been so long, so very tiring; I nearly broke on more than one occasion. But
I knew you would come in the end.”

“You expected me?” she asked derisively.

“What you are, yes.”

“And what am I?”

“The dead.”

EXPANSION

Gemal
emerged from its jump six hundred and fifty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, where the gas giant’s gravity anchored it
in a slightly elliptical orbit; Tranquillity, in its lower circular orbit, was trailing by two hundred thousand kilometres.
Oliver Llewelyn, the colonist-carrier’s captain, identified his starship to the habitat personality, and requested approach
and docking permission.

“Do you require assistance?” Tranquillity asked.

“No, we’re fully functional.”

“I don’t get many colonist-carrier vessels visiting. I thought you might have been making an emergency maintenance call.”

“No. This flight is business.”

“Does your entire passenger complement wish to apply for residency?”

“Quite the opposite. The zero-tau pods are all empty. We’ve come to hire some military specialists who live here.”

“I see. Docking and approach request granted. Please datavise your projected vector to spaceport flight control.”

Terrance Smith datavised a sensor access request into the starship’s flight computer, and watched the massive bitek habitat
growing larger as they accelerated towards rendezvous in a complex manoeuvre at two-thirds of a gee. He opened a channel to
the habitat’s communication net, and asked for a list of starships currently docked. Names and classifications flowed through
his mind. A collation program sorted through them, indicating possibles and probables.

“I didn’t realize this was such a large port,” he said to Oliver Llewelyn.

“It has to be,” the captain replied. “There are at least five major family-owned civil carrier fleets based here purely because
of the tax situation, and most of the other line companies have offices in the habitat. Then you’ve got to consider the residents.
They import one hell of a lot; everything you need to live the good life, from food to clothes to pretentious art. You don’t
think they’ll eat the synthesized pulp the starscrapers grow, do you?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“A lot of ships pick up contracts for them, bringing stuff in from all over the Confederation. And of course Tranquillity
is the Confederation’s principal base for black-hawk mating flights now Valisk is falling from favour with the captains. The
eggs gestate down in the big inner ring. It all adds together. The Lords of Ruin have built it into one of the most important
commercial centres in this sector.”

Terrance looked across the bridge. Seven acceleration couches were arranged in a petal pattern on its composite decking, and
only one of them was empty. The compartment had an industrial look, with cables and ducts fixed to the walls rather than being
tucked neatly out of sight behind composite panels. But then that was a uniform characteristic throughout the
Gemal
and her sister ships which shuttled between Earth and stage one colony worlds. They were bulk carriers whose cargo happened
to be people, and the line companies didn’t waste money on cosmetic finishes.

Captain Llewelyn was lying inertly on his acceleration couch, surrounded by a horseshoe of bulky consoles; a well-built sixty-eight-year-old
oriental with skin as smooth as any adolescent. His eyes were shut as he handled the datavise from the flight computer.

“Have you been here before?” Terrance asked.

“I stopped over two days, that was thirty-five years ago when I was a junior officer in a different company. Don’t

suppose it’s changed much. Plutocrats put a lot of stock in stability.”

“I’d like you to talk to the other captains for me, the independent trader starships we want to hire. I haven’t exactly done
this kind of work before.”

Oliver Llewelyn snorted softly. “You let people know what kind of flight you’re putting together, then start flashing that
overloaded Jovian Bank credit disk around, and you’ll be beating them off with a stick.”

“What about the mercenaries and general troops?”

“The captains will put you in touch. Hell, the combat boosted will pay the captains for an introduction. You want my advice,
delegate. Find yourself ten or twenty officer types with some solid experience, and let them recruit troops for you. Don’t
try and do it all yourself. We haven’t got time, for a start. Rexrew gave us a pretty tight schedule.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re paying, remember?”

“Yeah.” It had taken twenty thousand fuseodollars just to get Oliver Llewelyn to agree to take the
Gemal
to Tranquillity. “Not part of my LDC contract,” the captain had said stubbornly. Money was easier than datavising legal requirements
at him. Terrance suspected it was going to cost a lot more to take the
Gemal
back to Lalonde. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” he said, mildly intrigued.

“I’ve flown a lot of different missions in my time,” the old captain said indifferently.

“So where do I meet these starship captains?”

Oliver Llewelyn accessed a thirty-five-year-old file in his neural nanonics. “We’ll start at Harkey’s Bar.”

Fifteen hours later Terrance Smith had to admit that Oliver Llewelyn had been perfectly correct. He didn’t need to make any
effort, the people he wanted came to him. Like iron to a magnet, he thought, or flies to shit. He was sitting in a wall booth,
feeling like an old-style tsar holding court, receiving petitions from eager subjects. Harkey’s Bar was full with starship
crews hunched around tables, or concentrating in small knots at the bar. There was also a scattering of the combat boosted
in the room. He had never seen them before, not in the flesh—if that’s what it could be called. Several of them resembled
cosmoniks, with a tough silicon outer skin, and dual—even triple—lower arms, sockets customized for weapons. But the majority
had a sleeker appearance than the cosmoniks, whose technology they pilfered; they’d been sculpted for agility rather than
blunt EVA endurance, although Terrance could see one combat boosted who was almost globular, his (her?) head a neckless dome,
with a wrap-around retinal strip, grainy auburn below its clear lens. The lid rippled constantly, a blink moving round and
round. There were four stumpy legs, and four arms, arranged symmetrically. The arms were the most human part of the modified
body, since only two of them ended in burnished metal sockets. He tried not to stare at the assembled grotesqueries, not to
show his inner nerves.