The Night's Dawn Trilogy (142 page)

“Just wonderful, Sarha, thanks,” Joshua proclaimed. “You got any other morale boosters for us?”

Warlow climbed the ladder into the lounge deck, boosted muscles lifting him easily against the heavy gravity. Carbon composite
rungs creaked in dismay under his tripled weight. There were Edenists packed solid across the lounge floor, none of the acceleration
couches had been activated—not that there were enough anyway. They didn’t have neural nanonics, the cosmonik realized. And
because of it their children whimpered and snivelled in wretched distress without any cushioning below them.

He walked over to the smallest girl, who was lying wide-eyed and terribly pale beside her mother. “I’m putting her into zero-tau,”
he announced shortly, and bent down. He had plugged a pair of cargo-handling arms into his elbow sockets before coming up
the ladder, they had wide metal manipulator forks which would act as a good cradle. The girl started crying again. “There
will be none of this acceleration in the pod. Explain to her. She must not squirm when I pick her up. Her spine will break.”

Be brave,
Tiya told her daughter.
He will take you to a safe place where you won’t hurt so.

He’s horrible,
Gatje replied as the metal prongs slid underneath her.

You will be all right,
Gaura said, reinforcing the pacific mental subliminal Tiya was radiating.

Warlow took care to keep Gatje’s spine level, supporting her head with one set of forks while the other three arms were positioned
under her torso and legs. He lifted gingerly.

“Can I help?” Gaura asked, levering himself onto his elbows. His neck felt as though it was being slowly compressed in a hydraulic
vice.

“No. You are too weak.” Warlow clumped out of the lounge, an outlandish faerie-legend figure walking amongst the prone hurting
bodies with a grace completely at variance with his cumbersome appearance.

There were seven children under ten years old. It took him nearly five minutes to shift them from the lounge to the zero-tau
pods. His neural nanonics monitored their flight on a secondary level. The attacking starships were matching
Lady Mac
’s three-gee acceleration. Combatwasp submunitions produced a continual astral fire of plasma between them.

Lady Mac
swept over the fringes of the ring, two thousand kilometres above the ecliptic as Warlow lowered the last child into the
zero-tau pod.

“Thank Christ for that,” Joshua said when the pod was enveloped by the black field. “OK, people, stand by for high acceleration.”

Lady Mac
’s thrust increased to seven gees, tormenting the Edenists in the lounge still further. For all the stamina of their geneered
bodies they had never been supplemented to withstand the onerous burden of combat spaceflight.

Maranta
and
Gramine
began to fall behind. Sensors showed three more combat wasps eating up the distance.

“Jesus, how many of the fucking things have they got left?” Joshua asked as he launched four of the
Lady Mac
’s remaining six drones in response.

“I estimate ten,” Melvyn datavised. “Possibly more.”

“Wonderful.” Joshua angled the
Lady Mac
down sharply towards the rings.

The slow moving pack of dusty ice chunks reflected an unaccustomed radiance as the three starships streaked past. After millennia
of stasis, stirred only by the slow heartbeat of the gas giant’s magnetosphere, the ring’s micrometre dust was becoming aroused
by the backwash of electromagnetic pulses from the fusion bombs exploding above it. Dark snowflake-crystal patterns rippled
elegantly over its surface. The temperature rose by several fractions of a degree, breaking up the unique and fantastically
delicate valency bonds between disparate atoms which free fall and frigidity had established. Behind the starships, the rings
quivered like a choppy sea before the storm was unleashed.

Those on board the
Lady Macbeth
able to receive the sensor images watched with numbed fascination as the ring particles grew larger, changing from a grainy
mist to a solid plain of drifting mud-yellow boulders. It took up half of the image; they were close enough now to make it
seem like the floor of the universe.

The penultimate combat wasp darted out of the
Lady Macbeth
’s launch-tubes. Submunitions ejected almost at once, scattering like a shoal of startled fish. A hundred kilometres behind
her, twenty-seven fusion bombs arrayed in an ammonite maculation detonated simultaneously, throwing up a temporary visual
and electronic barrier. She turned, unseen by her pursuers, triple drive exhausts scoring vast arcs across the stars. Then
the three barbs of superenergized helium were searing into the ice and rock of the ring. No physical structure was capable
of withstanding that starcore temperature. The agitated surface cratered and geysered as though a depth charge had been set
off far below.

Lady Macbeth
dived straight into the rings, decelerating at eleven gees.

The watchers were there when Alkad Mzu arrived at the shoreline of Tranquillity’s circumfluous salt-water sea. As always they
remained several hundred metres behind, innocuous fellow hikers enjoying the balmy evening, even a couple on horses trekking
along the wilder paths of the habitat. She counted eight of them as she walked along the top of the steep rocky escarpment
to the path which led down to the beach. This cove was one of the remoter stretches of the northern shoreline; a broad curve
of silver-white sand two kilometres long, with jutting headlands of polyp-rock cliffs. Several small islands were included
within the bay’s sweeping embrace, tenanted by willowy trees and a fur of colourful wild flowers. A river emptied over the
escarpment two hundred metres from the path where she stood, producing a foaming waterfall which fell into a rock pool before
draining away over the sands. Overhead, the giant habitat’s lighttube had languished to an apricot ember strung between its
endcap hubs. Vitric water caught the final rays to produce a soft-focus copper shimmer across the wavelets.

Alkad picked her way carefully along the shingle-strewn path. An accident now would be the ultimate irony, she thought. There
was the familiar nagging ache in her left leg, exacerbated by the rough incline.

Her retinal implants located a pair of adolescent lovers in the dunes at the far end of the beach. Craving solitude amid the
deepening shadows, their dark entwined bodies were oblivious to the world, and nearly invisible. The girl’s baby-blonde hair
provided a rich contrast to her ebony skin, while the boy reminded Alkad of Peter as he stroked and caressed his willing partner.
An omen, though Alkad Mzu no longer really believed in deities.

She reached the warm, dry sands and adjusted the straps of her lightweight backpack. It was the one she had brought with her
to the habitat twenty-six years ago; it contained the cagoule and flask and first aid kit which she carried unfailingly on
every ramble through the interior. By now the routine of her hike was scribed in stone. If she hadn’t worn it, the Intelligence
agencies would have been suspicious.

Alkad cut across the dunes at an angle, aiming for the middle of the beach, her feet leaving light imprints in the powdery
sand. Three watchers made their way down the path behind her, the rest carried on walking along the top of the escarpment.
And—a recent development, this—a couple of Tranquillity serjeants stood impassively at the foot of the escarpment beside the
waterfall. She only saw them against the craggy polyp because of their infrared emission. They must have been positioned there
in anticipation of her route.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Tranquillity would have informed Ione Saldana about all those agency-teasing meetings with
starship captains. The girl was erring on the side of caution, which was quite acceptable. She did have the rest of the population
to think about, after all.

Alkad peered ahead, out over the huge grey valley of water to the southern shore, searching. There, to the right, twenty degrees
up the curve. The Laymil project campus was a unique splash of opal light on the darkened terraces of the southern endcap.
Such a shame, really, she thought with a tinge of regret. The work had been an interesting challenge, interpreting and extrapolating
xenoc technology from mere fragments of clues. She had made friends there, and progress. And now the whole campus was animated
with the discovery of the Laymil sensorium memories that young scavenger had found. It was an exciting time to be a project
researcher, full of promise and reward.

In another life she could easily have devoted herself to it.

Alkad reached the water’s edge as the light-tube cooled to a smirched platinum. Ripples sighed contentedly against the sand.
Tranquillity really was a premium place to live. She shrugged out of her backpack, then touched the seal on her boots and
started to pull them off.

Samuel, the Edenist Intelligence operative, was six metres from the foot of the scarp path when he saw the lone figure by
the water bend over to take her boots off. That wasn’t part of the humdrum formula which governed Mzu’s activities. He hurried
after Pauline Webb, the CNIS second lieutenant, who had reached the beach ahead of him. She dithered in the grove of palm
trees which huddled along the base of the escarpment, debating whether to break cover and walk openly on the sands.

“It looks like she’s going for a swim,” he said.

Pauline gave him a cursory nod. The CNIS and the Edenists cooperated to a reasonable degree in their observation.

“At night?” she said. “By herself?”

“The doctor is a solitary soul, but I concede this isn’t the most sensible thing she’s ever done.” Samuel was thinking back
to that morning when the news of Omuta’s sanctions being lifted had appeared in the AV projection at Glover’s restaurant.

“So what do we do?”

Monica Foulkes, the ESA operative, caught up with them. She increased the magnification factor of her retinal implants just
as Alkad Mzu pulled her sweatshirt off over her head. “I don’t know what you two are panicking over. Nobody as smart as Dr
Mzu would choose drowning as a method of suicide. It’s too prolonged.”

“Maybe she is just going for a quick swim,” Pauline suggested, without much hope. “It’s a pleasant enough evening.”

Samuel kept watching Mzu. Now her boots and clothes were off she was removing the contents of her backpack and dropping them
on the sand. It was the casual way she did it which bothered him; as if she was without a care. “I somehow doubt it.”

“We’re going to look particularly stupid charging over there to rescue her if all she’s doing is taking a dip to cool off,”
Monica groused.

The middle-aged Edenist’s lips pursed in amusement. “You think we don’t look stupid anyway?”

She scowled, and ignored him.

“Does anyone have any relevant contingency orders?” Pauline asked.

“If she wants to drown herself, then I say let her,” Monica said. “Problem solved at long last. We can all pack up and go
home then.”

“I might have known you’d take that attitude.”

“Well, I’m not swimming after her if she gets into trouble.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” Samuel said, without shifting his gaze. “Tranquillity has affinity-bonded dolphins. They’ll assist
any swimmers that get into difficulties.”

“Hoo-bloody-rah,” Monica said. “Then we can have another twenty years of worrying about who the daft old biddy will talk to
and what she’ll say.”

Alkad datavised a code to the processor in her empty backpack. The seal around the bottom opened, and the composite curled
up revealing the hidden storage space. She reached in to remove the programmable silicon spacesuit which had lain there undisturbed
for twenty-six years.

Ione,
Tranquillity said urgently.
We have a problem developing.

“Excuse me,” Ione said to her cocktail party guests. They were members of the Tranquillity Banking Regulatory Council, invited
to discuss the habitat’s falling revenue which the massive decrease in starship movements was causing. Something needed to
be done to halt the stock market’s wilder fluctuations, so she had thought an informal party was the best way of handling
it. She turned instinctively to face her apartment’s window wall and the shoals of yellow and green fish nosing round the
fan of light it threw across the dusky sand.
What? It’s Alkad Mzu. Look.

The image fizzed up into her mind.

Samuel frowned as Mzu drew some kind of object from deep inside her backpack. It looked ridiculously like a football, but
with wings attached. Even with his retinal implants on full magnification he couldn’t quite make it out. “What is that?”

Mzu fastened the collar round her neck, and bit down on the nozzle of the respirator tube. She datavised an activation code
into the suit’s control processor. The black ball flattened itself against her upper chest and started to flow over her skin.

Both the other Intelligence operatives turned to look at the sharpness in Samuel’s voice. The two serjeants began to walk
forwards over the beach.

Ione!
Tranquillity’s thoughts rang with surprise, turning to alarm.
I can sense a gravitonic-distortion zone building.

So?
she asked. Every starship emerging above Mirchusko registered in the habitat’s mass-sensitive organs. There was no requirement
for the usual network of strategic warning grav-distortion-detector satellites which guarded ordinary asteroid settlements
and planets, Tranquillity’s perception of local space was unrivalled, making threat response a near-instantaneous affair.
Is the starship emerging too close? Arm the strategic-defence platforms.

No use. It’s—

At first Samuel mistook it for a shadow cast by an evening cloud. There was still enough pearly radiance coming from the light-tube
to give the circumfluous sea a sparse shimmer, a cloud would produce exactly that patch of darkness. But there was only one
patch of darkness; and when he glanced up the air was clear. Then the noise began, a distant thunderclap which lasted for
several seconds, then chopped off abruptly. A brilliant star shone at the centre of the darkness, sending long radials of
frigid white light into the habitat.