The Night's Dawn Trilogy (143 page)

Mzu was silhouetted perfectly against the white blaze reflected off the sea, encased in the black skin of the spacesuit, a
consummate monochrome picture.

Shock immobilized Samuel’s body for a precious second. Out of the centre of the fading star a blackhawk came skimming silently
over the sea towards Mzu; a compressed ovoid one hundred and thirty metres long, with a horseshoe life-support section moulded
round the rear dorsal bulge. Its blue polyp hull was marbled with an imperialpurple web.

“Jesus wept!” Pauline said in an aghast whisper. “It jumped inside. It’s come right into the fucking habitat!”

“Get her!” Monica cried. “For Christ’s sake stop the bitch!” She ran forwards.

“No, stop! Come back,” Samuel yelled. But Pauline was already charging out of the trees after the ESA agent, boosted muscles
accelerating her to a phenomenal speed. “Oh, shit.” He started to run.

Meyer saw the small spacesuited woman standing at the water’s edge, and
Udat
obligingly angled round towards her. Tension had condensed his guts into a solid lump. Swallowing
inside
a habitat, it had to be the craziest stunt in the history of spaceflight. Yet they’d done it!

We are in,
Udat
observed sagely.
That’s halfway.

And don’t I know it.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Tranquillity’s outraged broadcast thundered into the blackhawk’s mind.

Meyer winced. Even
Udat
’s calm thoughts fluttered.

The woman is a political dissident being persecuted by the Kulu ESA,
Meyer replied with shaky bravado.
Of all people, Ione Saldana should sympathize with that. We’re taking her where she will be safe.

STOP IMMEDIATELY. I WILL NOT PERMIT THIS.
UDAT
, SWALLOW OUT NOW.
The force of the mental compulsion which the habitat personality exerted was incredible. Meyer felt as though someone had
smashed a meat hook into his skull to pull his brain out by the roots. He groaned, clutching at the cushioning of his acceleration
couch, heart pounding in his ears.

STOP!

“Keep going,” he gasped. His nose started to bleed. Neural nanonics sent out a flurry of metabolic overrides.

Alkad waded through the shallows as the blackhawk descended, gliding fastidiously round one of the cove’s small islands. She
hadn’t grasped how big the bitek creature was. To see that almighty bulk suspended so easily in the air was an uncanny marvel.
Its rounded nose was streaked with long frost rays as the sea’s humidity gusted over polyp which was accustomed to the radiative
chill of deep space. A huge patch of water below the hull began to foam and churn as the distortion field interacted with
it. She suddenly felt as though the horizontal was rolling.
Udat
turned through ninety degrees, and tilted sharply, bringing the portside wing of its life-support horseshoe down towards
the water. An airlock slid open. Cherri Barnes stood inside, wearing her spacesuit. Orange silicon-fibre straps tethered her
securely to the sides of the small chamber. She threw a rope-ladder down.

On the beach five figures were racing over the dunes.

Ione said:
Kill her.

The serjeants pulled laser pistols from their holsters. Alkad Mzu already had her foot on the first rung.

Udat
’s maser cannon fired.

Monica Foulkes pounded hard across the sand, neural nanonics commands and boosted muscles meshing so that her body ate the
distance effortlessly, a hundred and fifty metres in nine seconds. The prime order of the ESA’s Tranquillity operation was
to prevent Mzu from leaving, that took precedence over everything. It didn’t look like Monica was going to get to the blackhawk
in time, Mzu had started to claw her way up the rocking ladder. She reviewed which of her weapon implants would have the best
chance; the trouble was most of them were designed for unobtrusive close-range work. And that bloody Lunar SII spacesuit didn’t
help. It would have to be a microdart, and hope the tip penetrated. She was aware of the serjeants off to her left pulling
out their laser pistols.

A metre-wide column of air fluoresced a faint violet, drawing a line from a silver bubble on the blackhawk’s lower hull to
a serjeant. The bitek servitor blew apart in an explosion of steam and carbon granules. Fifteen metres behind it, where the
beam struck the beach, a patch of sand became a puddle of glass, glowing a vivid rose-gold.

Over-hyped nerves sent Monica diving for cover the instant the beam appeared. She hit the loose sand, momentum ploughing a
two and a half metre long furrow. There were two near-simultaneous thuds behind her as Samuel and Pauline flung themselves
down. The second serjeant erupted into a black-grain mist with a loud burping sound as the maser hit it. Monica’s mind gibbered
as she waited, head buried in the sand. At least with that power rating it’ll be quick…

A wind began howling over the dunes.

Samuel raised his head to see his worst expectation confirmed. A wormhole interstice was opening around the nose of the blackhawk.
Alkad Mzu was halfway up the rope-ladder.

You must not take her from here,
he pleaded with the starship.
You must not!

The interstice widened, a light-devouring tunnel boring through infinity. Air streamed in.

“Hang on!” Samuel shouted to the two women agents.

COME BACK!
Tranquillity commanded.

Meyer, his mind twinned with the blackhawk, quailed under the habitat’s furious demand. It was too much, the storm voice had
raged inside his skull for what seemed like days, bruising his neurons with its violence. Welcome surrender beckoned—to hell
with Mzu, nothing was worth this. Then he felt local space twisting under the immense distortion which
Udat
’s energy patterning cells exterted. A pseudoabyss leading into freedom opened before him.
Go,
he ordered. The cold physical blackness outside invaded his mind, plunging him into glorious oblivion.

A small but ferocious hurricane set Alkad spinning like a runaway propeller at the end of her precarious siliconfibre ladder.
“Wait!” she datavised in mounting terror. “You’re supposed to wait till I’m in the airlock.” Her digitalized vehemence made
no impression on
Udat
. The air buoyed her up as though she had become weightless, swinging her round until the ladder was horizontal. Oscillating
gravity was doing terrible things to her inner ears. Screaming air tried to tear her from the ladder. Neural nanonics pumped
muscle-lock orders into her hands and calves to reinforce her grip. She could feel ligaments ripping. Collar sensors showed
her the fuzzy rim of the wormhole interstice sliding inexorably along the hull towards her. “No. In the name of Mary, wait!”
And then Dr Alkad Mzu was suddenly presented with every physicist’s dream opportunity: observing the fabric of the universe
from the outside.

Monica Foulkes heard Samuel’s shouted warning and instinctively grabbed a tuft of reedy dune grass. The wind surged with impossible
strength. Gravity shifted round until the beach was above her. Monica wailed fearfully as sand fell up into the sky. She felt
herself following it, feet pulled into the air and sliding round to point at the interstice surrounding the blackhawk’s nose.
The grass clump made an awful slow tearing sound. Her hips and chest left the ground. Sand was blasting directly into her
face. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. The grass clump moved several centimetres. “OhdearGodpreservemeee!”

A long-fingered hand clamped around her free wrist. The grass clump left the sand with a sharp sucking noise, its weight wrenching
her arm out towards the blackhawk. For an eternal second Monica hung splayed in the air as the sand scudded around her. Someone
groaned with pained effort.

The wormhole interstice closed behind
Udat
.

Sand, water, mangled vegetation, and demented fish cascaded down out of the sky. Monica landed flat on her belly, breath knocked
out of her. “Oh my God,” she wheezed. When she looked up, the haggard Edenist was crouched on his knees, panting heavily as
he clutched his wrist. “You”—the words were difficult to form in her throat—“you held on to me.”

He threw her a nod. “I think my wrist is broken.”

“I would have… ” She shuddered, then gave a foolish jittery laugh. “God, I don’t even know your name.”

“Samuel.”

“Thank you, Samuel.”

He rolled onto his back and sighed. “Pleasure.”

Are you all right?
Tranquillity asked the Edenist.

My wrist is very painful. She’s heavy.

Your colleagues are approaching. Three of them are carrying medical nanonic packages in their aid kits. They will be with
you shortly.

Even after all this time spent in Tranquillity, he couldn’t get used to the personality’s lack of empathy. Habitats were such
an essential component of Edenism. It was disconcerting to have one treat him in this cavalier fashion.

Thank you.

“I didn’t think voidhawks and blackhawks could operate in a gravity field,” Monica said.

“They can’t,” he told her. “This isn’t gravity, it’s centrifugal force. It’s no different to the docking-ledges they use outside.”

“Ah, of course. Have you ever heard of one coming inside a habitat before?”

“Never. A swallow like that requires phenomenal accuracy. From a strictly chauvinistic point of view I hate to say this, but
I think it would be beyond most voidhawks. Even most blackhawks, come to that. Mzu made an astute choice. This was a very
well thought out escape.”

“Twenty-six years in the making,” Pauline said. She climbed slowly to her feet, shaking her cotton top, which had been soaked
by the falling water. A fat blue fish, half a metre long, was thrashing frantically on the sand by her shoes. “I mean that
woman had us fooled for twenty-six goddamn years. Acting out the role of a flekhead physics professor with all the expected
neuroses and eccentricities slotting perfectly into place. And we believed it. We patiently watched her for twenty-six years
and she behaved exactly as predicted. If my home planet had been blown to shit, I’d behave like that. She never faltered,
not once. But it was a twenty-six-year charade. Twenty-six goddamn years! What kind of a person can do that?”

Monica and Samuel exchanged an anxious look.

“Someone pretty obsessive,” he said.

“Obsessive!” Pauline’s face darkened. She leant over to pick the big fish up, but it squirmed out of her hands. “Keep bloody
still,” she shouted at it. “Well, God help Omuta now she’s loose in the universe again.” She finally succeeded in grabbing
hold of the fish. “You do realize that thanks to our sanctions they haven’t got a defensive system which can even fart loudly?”

“She won’t get far,” Monica said. “Not with this Laton scare closing down all the starship flights.”

“You hope!” Pauline staggered off towards the waterline with her wriggling burden.

Monica clambered to her feet and brushed the sand off her clothes, shaking it out of her hair. She looked down at the lanky
Edenist. “Dear me, CNIS entrance standards have really gone downhill lately.”

He grinned weakly. “Yeah. But you know she’s right about Mzu. The good doctor had us all fooled. Clever lady. And now there’s
going to be hell to pay.”

She put her hand under his shoulder and helped him up. “I suppose so. One thing’s for certain, there’s going to be a mad scramble
to catch her. Every government is going to want her tucked away on their own planet in order to safeguard democracy. And,
my new friend, there are some democrats in this Confederation I don’t ever want to find her.”

“Us, for instance?” Monica hesitated, then gave her head a rueful shake. “No. But don’t tell my boss I said that.”

Samuel watched the two agents on horseback galloping across the beach toward them. Right now he couldn’t even remember which
services they belonged to. Not that it mattered. In a few hours they’d all be going their separate ways again. “Damn, Tranquillity
really was the only place for her, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Come on, let’s see if these two have got anything for your wrist. I think that’s Onku Noi on the second horse. The Imperial
Oshanko mob are always loaded down with gadgets.”

According to his neural nanonics’ timer function it was high noon. But Chas Paske wasn’t sure how to tell any more. There
hadn’t been any fluctuation in the red cloud’s lambent emission since he started walking—hobbling, rather. The black and red
jungle remained mordantly uninviting. Every laboured step was accompanied by the incessant hollow rolls and booms of thunder
from high above.

He had managed to splint his leg, after a fashion: five laths of cherry oak wood that stretched from his ankle to his pelvis,
lashed into place by ropy vines. The thigh wound was still a real problem. He had bound it with leaves, but every time he
looked it seemed to be leaking capacious amounts of ichor down his shin. And it was impossible to keep the insects out. Unlike
what appeared to be every other living creature, they hadn’t abandoned the jungle. And devoid of other targets, they massed
around him—mosquito-analogues, maggot-analogues, things with legs and wings and pincers that had no analogue. All of them
suckling at his tender flesh. Twice now he’d changed the leaves, only to find a seething mass of tiny black elytra underneath.
Flies crawled round his skin burns as though they were the only oases of nourishment in a barren world.

According to his guidance block he had come two and a half kilometres in the last three hours. It was hard going through the
virgin undergrowth which lay along the side of the river. His crutch kept getting snagged by the thick cords that foamed over
the loam. Slender low-hanging branches had a knack of catching the splint laths.

He picked the small wrinkled globes of abundant vine fruit as he went, chewing constantly to keep his fluid and protein levels
up. But at this rate it was going to take him weeks to get anywhere.