The Night's Dawn Trilogy (145 page)

“Adds a bit of spice to the recording, a bit of drama,” Ariadne said. “Speaking of which, you’re not going to blow us out,
are you? I mean, we are the good guys.”

“Yeah. You’re the good guys.”

“Great, always wanted to be a sensevise star.”

Kelly accessed her Lalonde sensevise report memory cell file and turned her head until Ariadne was in the centre of her vision
field (wishing the combat-boosted could produce some halfway decent facial expressions). “What did you learn from the sample
you took from the houses?”

“Nowt. It was dust, that’s all. Literally, dry loam.”

“So these ornamental buildings are just an illusion?”

“Half and half. It isn’t a complete fiction; they’ve moulded the loam into the shape you see and cloaked it with an optical
illusion. It’s similar to our chameleon circuit, really.”

“How do they do that?”

“No idea. The closest human technology can come is the molecular-binding generators starships use to strengthen their hulls.
But they’re expensive, and use up a lot of power. Be cheaper to build a house, or use programmed silicon like you suggested.
Then again”—she tilted her head back to focus her sensors on the cloudband above the trees—“logic doesn’t seem to be playing
a large part in life on Lalonde right now.”

The hovercraft eased in against the crumbling loam bank. Ryall was standing among the qualtook trees above the water, waiting
for them. Reza jumped ashore and ruffled the big hound’s head. It pressed against his side in complete devotion.

“Jalal and Ariadne, with me,” Reza said. “The rest of you stay here and keep the hovercraft ready. Pat, monitor us through
Octan. If we blow the snatch, I suggest you keep heading south. There’s a Tyrathca farming settlement on the other side of
the savannah. It’s as good a place as any to hide out. This snatch is our last stab at completing the mission. Don’t waste
yourselves trying to gather further Intelligence, and don’t attempt a rescue. Got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Pat said.

Jalal and Ariadne joined Reza on the top of the bank. The big combat-adept mercenary had plugged a gaussrifle into one elbow
socket and a TIP rifle into the other; power cables and feed tubes looped round into his backpack.

“Kelly?” Reza asked ingenuously. “Not wanting to come with us this time?”

“It took eight generations of cousins marrying to produce you,” she told him.

The three mercenaries on the bank activated their chameleon circuits. Laughter floated down to the hovercraft out of unbroken
jungle.

Fenton watched the little clearing from under the sloping lower branches of an infant gigantea. The light here wasn’t the
pure solar white of the villages, but the universal redness had veered into a pale pink shade. A log cabin had been built
in the centre, not the kind of frame and plank arrangement favoured by the colonists but a rugged affair that could have come
straight from some Alpine meadow. A stone chimney-stack formed almost all of one side, smoke wound drowsily upwards. A lot
of trouble had been taken to transform the clearing; undergrowth had been trimmed back, animal hides were stretched drying
over frames, timber had been cut and stacked, a vegetable plot planted.

The man who had done it was a well-built thirty-five-year-old with inflamed ginger hair, wearing a thick red and blue check
cotton shirt and mud-caked black denim jeans. He was working at a sturdy table outside his front door, sawing up wood with
old-fashioned manual tools. A half-completed rocking chair stood on the ground behind him.

Fenton moved forwards surreptitiously out of the shaggy gigantea’s shade, but keeping to the cover provided by bushes and
smaller trees ringing the clearing. Between thunder broadsides he could hear the regular stifled ripping sound as the man
planed a piece of wood on the table. Then the sound stopped and his shoulders stiffened.

Reza wouldn’t have thought it possible. The man was a good fifty metres away, with his back to the hound, and the thunder
was unrelenting. Even his enhanced senses would have difficulty picking out Fenton under such circumstances. He and the other
two mercenaries were still four hundred metres away. Nothing else for it… Fenton cantered eagerly into the clearing.

The man looked round, bushy eyebrows rising. “What’s this, then? My, you’re a roguish looking brute.” He clicked his fingers,
and Fenton trotted up to him. “Ah, you’ll not be on your own, then. That’s a shame, a crying shame. For all of us. Your master
won’t be far behind, I’ll warrant. Will you? Came down on the spaceplanes this morning no doubt, didn’t you? That must have
been a trip and a half. Aye, well, I’ll not be finishing my chair this afternoon then.” He sat down on a bench beside the
table, and started to change, his shirt losing colour, hair fading, thinning, stature diminishing.

By the time Reza, Jalal, and Ariadne walked into the clearing he had become an undistinguished middle-aged man with brown
skin and thin features, wearing an ageing LDC one-piece jump suit. Fenton was noisily lapping up water out of a bowl at his
feet, mind radiating contentment with his new friend.

Reza walked over cautiously. His retinal implants scanned the man from head to toe, and he datavised the pixel sequence into
his processor block for a search and identify program. Although the earlier phantom lumberjack image had vanished, Reza saw
the roots of the man’s black hair were a dark ginger. “Afternoon,” he said, not quite sure how to react to this display of
passivity.

“Good afternoon to you. Not that I’ve seen anything like you before, mind. Not outside a kinema, and perhaps not even there.”

“My name is Reza Malin. We’re part of a team employed by the LDC to find out what’s going on down here.”

“Then with every ounce of sincerity I own, I wish you good luck, my boy. You’re going to need it.”

An ounce was an ancient unit of measure, Reza’s neural nanonics informed him (there was no reference to kinema in any file).
“Are you going to help me?”

“It doesn’t look to me like I’ve got a lot of choice, now does it? Not with your merry gang and their big, big weapons.”

“That’s true. What’s your name?”

“My name? Well, now, that’d be Shaun Wallace.”

“Bad move. According to the LDC files you’re Rai Molvi, a colonist who settled Aberdale.”

The man scratched his ear and gave Reza a bashful grin. “Ah now, you’ve got me there, Mr. Malin. I must admit, I was indeed
old Molvi. Charmless soul he is, too.”

“OK, smartarse, game over. Come on.”

Reza led the way back to the hovercraft, with Jalal walking right behind their captive, gaussrifle trained on the back of
his skull. A couple of minutes after they left the clearing the pink light began to dim back into the same lustreless burgundy
of the surrounding jungle. As if immediately aware of the abandonment, playful vennals slithered into the trees around the
edge of the clearing. The more venturesome among them dared to scamper over the grass to the cabin itself, searching for titbits.
After quarter of an hour the cabin emitted a vociferous creak. The vennals fled
en masse
back into the trees.

It was another couple of minutes before anything else happened. Then, with the tardiness of a sinking moon, its surface texture
leaked away to reveal a starkly primitive mud hut. Tiny arid flakes moulted from the roof, resembling a sleet of miniature
autumn leaves as they scattered over the grass below; rivulets of dust trickled down the walls. Within twenty minutes the
entire edifice had dissolved like a sugar cube in soft, warm rain.

Forget discovering Ione Saldana existed, forget discovering Laton was still alive, this was the ultimate interview. For
this
Collins would make her their premier anchorwoman for the rest of time. For this she would be respected and lionized across
the Confederation. Kelly Tirrel was the first reporter in history to interview the dead.

And as the dead went, Shaun Wallace was agreeable enough. He sat on the rear bench of the lead hovercraft, facing Kelly, and
stroking Fenton the whole while. Jalal kept a heavy-calibre gaussrifle levelled at him. On the front bench beside her, Reza
was listening intently, making the occasional comment.

The trees were thinning out as they raced for the end of the jungle. She could see more of the red cloudband through the black
filigree of leaves overhead. It too was becoming flimsier; there were definite fast-moving serpentine currents straining its
uniformity. Strangely, for there was no wind at ground level.

Shaun Wallace claimed he had lived in Northern Ireland during the early twentieth century. “Terrible times,” he said softly.
“Especially for someone with my beliefs.” But he had just shaken his head and smiled distantly when she asked what those beliefs
were. “Nothing a lady like yourself would want to know.” He died, he said, in the mid-1920s, another martyr to the cause,
another victim of English oppression. The reason the soldiers shot him was not volunteered. He claimed he hadn’t died alone.

“And after?” Kelly said.

“Ah, now, Miss Kelly, afterwards is the work of the Devil.”

“You went to hell?”

“Hell is a place, so the good priests taught me. This beyond was no place. It was dry and empty, and it was cruel beyond physical
pain. It was where you can see the living wasting their lives, and where you drain the substance from each other.”

“Each other? You weren’t alone?”

“There was millions of us. Souls beyond the counting of a simple Ballymena lad like myself.”

“You say you can see the living from the other side?”

“From the beyond, yes. ’Tis like through a foggy window. But you strive to make out what it is that’s happening in the living
world. All the time you strive. And you yearn for it, you yearn for it so hard, lass, that you feel your heart should be bursting
apart. I saw wonders and I saw terrors, and I could touch neither.”

“How did you come back?”

“The way was opened for us. Something came through from this side, right here on this sodden hot planet. I don’t know what
the creature was. Nothing Earthly, though. After that, there was no stopping us.”

“This xenoc, the creature you say let you through; is it still here, still bringing souls back from the beyond?”

“No, it was only here for the first one. It vanished after that. But it was too late, the trickle was already becoming a flood.
We bring ourselves back now.”

“How?”

Shaun Wallace gave a reluctant sigh. He was quiet for so long Kelly thought he wasn’t going to answer; he even stopped stroking
Fenton.

“The way the devil-lovers of yesterday always tried to do it,” he said heavily. “With their ceremonies and their pagan barbarism.
And God preserve me for doing such things, I used to think what I did before was sinful. But there’s no other way.”

“What is the way?”

“We break the living. We make them want to be possessed. Possession is the end of torment, you see. Even with our power we
can only open a small gateway to the beyond, enough to show the lost souls the way back. But there has to be somewhere waiting
for them, some host. And the host has to be willing.”

“You torture them into submission,” Reza said bluntly.

“Aye, that we do. That we do, indeed. And, mark you, there’s no pride in me for saying it.”

“You mean, Rai Molvi is still there? Still alive inside you?”

“Yes. But I keep his soul locked away in a dark, safe place. I’m not sure you could call it living.”

“And this power you mentioned.” Kelly pressed the point. “What is your power?”

“I don’t know for sure. Magic of a kind. Though not a witch’s magic with its spells and potions. This is a darker magic, because
it’s there at a thought. So easy, it is. Nothing like that should be given easily to a man. The temptations are too strong.”

“Is that where the white fire comes from?” Reza asked. “This power you have?”

“Aye, indeed it is.”

“What’s its range?”

“Ah now, Mr. Malin, that’s difficult to say. The more of you that fling it, the further it will go. The more impassioned you
are, the stronger it will be. For a cool one such as yourself, I doubt it would be far.”

Reza grunted and shifted back on the bench.

“Could you demonstrate the power for me, please?” Kelly asked. “Something I can record and show people. Something that will
make them believe what you say is true.”

“I’ve never known a newspaper gal before. You did say you were from a newspaper, now didn’t you?”

“What newspapers eventually became, yes.” She ran a historical search request through her neural nanonics. “Something like
the Movietone and PathÉ reels at the cinema, only with colour and feeling. Now, that demonstration?”

“I normally prefer gals with longer hair, myself.”

Kelly ran her hand self-consciously over her scalp. She had shaved her hair to a blueish stubble so she could wear the armour’s
shell-helmet. “I normally have longer hair,” she said resentfully.

Shaun Wallace winked broadly, then leant over the gunwale and scooped up one of the long-legged insects scampering over the
snowlilies. He held it up in the palm of his hand; a long spindly tube body, dun brown, with a round bulb of a head sprouting
unpleasant pincer mandibles. It was quivering, but stayed where it was as though glued to his skin. He brought his other hand
down flat on top of it, making a show of pressing them together, squashing the insect. Kelly’s eyes never wavered.

When he parted his hands the prince of butterflies was revealed, wings almost the size of his palms, patterned in deep turquoise
and topaz and silver, colours resistant to the red light of the cloud, shining in their own right. Its wings flexed twice,
then it flew off, only to be kicked about in the air by the wash of the hovercraft’s powerful slipstream.

“There, you see?” Shaun Wallace said. “We don’t always destroy.”

Kelly lost sight of the delightful apparition. “How long will it stay like that?”

“Mortality is not something you measure out like a pint of ale, Miss Kelly. It will live its life to the full, and that’s
all that can be said.”