The Night's Dawn Trilogy (146 page)

“He doesn’t know,” Reza muttered curtly.

Shaun Wallace practised a knowing, slightly condescending smile.

It was growing lighter around the hovercraft. Up ahead, Kelly could see the wonderfully welcome glare of pure sunlight striking
emerald foliage. A colour that wasn’t red! She had begun to believe that red was all there ever was, all there ever had been.

The hovercraft skimmed out from under the chafed edge of the cloudband. All of the mercenaries broke into a spontaneous cheer.

“What is that thing?” Kelly shouted above the rebel whoops, pointing up at the cloud.

“A reflection of ourselves, our fear.”

“What do you fear?”

“The emptiness of the night. It reminds us too much of the beyond. We hide from it.”

“You mean you’re making that?” she asked, scepticism warring with astonishment. “But it covers thousands of kilometres.”

“Aye, that it does. ’Tis our will that creates it; we want shelter, so shelter we have. All of us, Miss Kelly, even me who
shuns the rest of them, we all pray for sanctuary with every fibre of being. And it’s growing, this will of ours, spreading
out to conquer. One day soon it will cover all of this planet. But even that is only the first chapter of salvation.”

“What’s the second?”

“To leave. To escape the harsh gaze of this universe altogether. We’ll withdraw to a place of our own making. A place where
there is no emptiness hanging like a sword above the land, no death to claim us. A place where your butterfly will live for
ever, Miss Kelly. Now tell me that isn’t a worthy goal, tell me that isn’t a dream worth having.”

Reza watched the last of the jungle’s trees go past as the hovercraft reached the savannah. The lush green grassland seemed
to unroll on either side of the river as though it was only just coming into existence. He wasn’t really paying much attention;
the strange (supposed) Irishman was a captivating performer. “A closed universe,” he said, and the earlier scorn was lacking.

Kelly gave him a surprised glance. “You mean it is possible?”

“It happens thousands of times a day. The blackhawks and voidhawks open interstices to travel through worm-holes every time
they fly between stars. Technically they’re self-contained universes.”

“Yes, but taking a planet—”

“There are twenty million of us,” Shaun Wallace purred smoothly. “We can do it, together, we can pull open the portal that
leads away from mortality.”

Kelly’s neural nanonics faithfully recorded the silver chill tickling her nerves at the naked conviction in his voice. “You’re
really planning to generate a wormhole large enough to enclose the whole of Lalonde? And keep it there?”

Shaun Wallace wagged his finger at her. “Ah, now there you go again, Miss Kelly, putting your fine, elegant words in my mouth.
Plans, such a grand term. Generals and admirals and kings, now they have plans. But we don’t, we have instinct. Hiding our
new world from this universe God created, that comes as naturally as breathing.” He chuckled. “It means we can go on breathing,
too. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to stop me from doing that, would you now? Not a sweet lass like yourself.”

“No. But what about Rai Molvi? Tell me what happens to him afterwards?”

Shaun Wallace scratched his chin, looked round at the savannah, shifted the jump-suit fabric round his shoulders, pulled a
sardonic face.

“He stays, doesn’t he?” Kelly said stiffly. “You won’t let him go.”

“I need the body, miss. Real bad. Perhaps there’ll be a priest amongst us I can visit for absolution.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” Reza said charily, focusing an optical sensor on the cloudband behind, “then we really don’t
want to be staying here any longer than we have to. Wallace, when is this planetary vanishing act supposed to happen?”

“You have a few days’ grace. But there are none of your starships left to sail away on. Sorry.”

“Is that why you didn’t resist, because we can’t escape?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Malin, you’ve got me all wrong. You see, I don’t want much to do with my fellows. That’s why I live out in the
woods, there. I prefer being on my own, I’ve had a bucketful of their company. Seven centuries of it, to be precise.”

“So you’ll help us?”

He gathered himself up and threw a glance over his shoulder at the second hovercraft. “I won’t hinder you,” he announced magnanimously.

“Thank you very much.”

“Not that it will do you much good, mind.”

“How’s that?”

“There’s not going to be many places you can run to, I’m afraid. Quite a few of us have sailed away already.”

“Fucking hell,” Kelly gasped.

Shaun Wallace frowned in disapproval. “To be sure, that’s no word for a lady to be going and using.”

Kelly made sure he was in perfect focus. “Are you telling me that what’s happening on Lalonde is going to happen on other
planets as well?”

“Indeed I am. There’s a lot of very anguished souls back there in the beyond. They’re all in dire need of a clean handsome
body, every one of them. Something very much like the one you’ve got there.”

“This is occupied, to the hilt.”

His eyes flashed with black amusement. “So was this one, Miss Kelly.”

“And all these worlds the possessed have gone to, are you going to try and imprison them in wormholes?”

“That’s a funny old word you’re using there: wormholes. Little muddy tunnels in the ground, with casts on top to show the
fishermen where they are.”

“It means chinks in space, gaps you can fall through.”

“Does it now? Well, then, I suppose that’s what I mean, yes. I like that, a gap in the air which leads you through to the
other side of the rainbow.”

Surreal. The word seemed to be caught on some repeater program in Kelly’s neural nanonics, flipping up in hologram violet
over the image of a mad, dead Irishman sitting in front of her, grinning in delight at her discomfort. Worlds snatched out
of their orbits by armies of the dead. Surreal. Surreal. Surreal.

Fenton rose growling to his feet, fangs barred, hackles sticking up like spikes. Shaun Wallace gave the hound an alarmed look,
and Kelly’s retinas caught the minutest white static flames twinkle over his fingertips. But Fenton swung his head round to
the prow and barked.

Jalal’s gaussrifle was already coming round. He saw the huge creature crouched down in the long grass at the side of the water
thirty-five metres ahead of the hovercraft. The Lalonde generalist didactic memory called it a kroclion, a plains-dwelling
carnivore which even the sayce ran from. He wasn’t surprised, the beast must have been nearly four metres long, weighing an
easy half-tonne. Its hide was a sandy yellow, well suited to the grass, making visual identification hard (infrared was, thankfully,
a furnace flame). The head—like a terrestrial shark—had been grafted on, all teeth and tiny killer-bright eyes.

Blue target graphics locked on. He fired an EE round.

Everyone ducked, Kelly jamming her hands over her ears. A dazzling explosion sent a pillar of purple plasma and mashed soil
spouting twenty metres into the air. Its vertex flattened out, a ring of soot-choked orange flame rolling across the river.
The ululate crack was loud enough to drown out the tattoo of thunder chasing them from the red cloud.

Kelly lifted her head carefully.

“I think you got him,” Theo said drily, as he steered the hovercraft away from the quaking water sloshing round the new crater.
A semicircle of grass on the bank was burning.

“They’re vicious bastards,” Jalal protested.

“Not that one, not any more, as anyone within five kilometres will tell you,” Ariadne said.

“And you could have dealt with it better?”

“Forget it,” Reza said. “We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“You believe what this dickhead has been telling us?” Ariadne asked, jerking a thumb at Shaun Wallace.

“Some of it,” Reza said noncommittally.

“Why thank you, Mr. Malin,” Shaun Wallace said. He watched the burning crater closely as the hovercraft sped past. “Fine shooting
there, Mr. Jalal. Those old kroclions, they put the wind up me and no mistake. Old Lucifer was on form the day he made them.”

“Shut up,” Reza said. The one optical sensor he had left focused on the edge of the red cloud showed him a lone tendril starting
to swell out, extending along the line of the narrow river behind them. Too slow to catch them, he estimated, but it was a
graphically disturbing demonstration that the cloud and the possessed inhabitants were aware of the team’s presence.

He opened a channel to his communication block and datavised a sequence of orders in. It began scanning the sky for communication-satellite
beacons. Two of the five satellites the blackhawks had delivered into geosynchronous orbit were above the horizon and still
broadcasting. The block aimed a tight beam at one, requesting contact with any of Terrance Smith’s fleet. No ship was left
in the command net, the satellite’s computer reported, but there was a message stored in its memory. Reza datavised his personal
code.

“This is a restricted access message for Reza’s team,” Joshua Calvert’s voice said from the communication block. “But I have
to be sure it is you and only you receiving it. The satellite is programmed to transmit it on a secure directional beam. If
there is any hostile within five hundred metres of you who can intercept then do not request access. In order to access the
recording, enter the name of the person who came between me and Kelly last year.”

The tip of the cloud tendril was a couple of kilometers away. Reza turned to face Shaun Wallace. “Can any of your friends
intercept a radio transmission?”

“Well, now, there’s some of them living in one of the old savannah homesteads. But they’re a few miles from here, yet. Is
that more than five hundred metres?”

“Yes. Kelly, the name please.”

She gave him a stonefaced smile. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t leave me behind at Pamiers?”

Jalal laughed. “She got you there, Reza.”

“Yes,” Reza said heavily. “I’m glad we didn’t leave you behind. The name?”

Kelly opened a channel to his communication block and datavised: “Ione Saldana.”

There was a moment’s silence while the satellite’s carrier wave emitted a few electronic bleeps.

“Well remembered, Kelly. OK, this is the bad news: the hijacked starships have started fighting us and the navy. There’s a
real vicious battle going on in orbit right now.
Lady Mac
got clear, but we’ve taken a bit of punishment in the process. Another story for you sometime. I’m about to jump us out to
Murora. There’s an Edenist station in orbit there, and we’re hoping to dock with it to make our repairs. We estimate the damage
can be patched up in a couple of days, after which we’ll come back for you. Kelly, Reza, the rest of you; we’re only going
to make one fly-by. Hopefully you took my earlier advice and are now heading hell for leather away from that bloody cloud.
Keep going, and leave your communication block scanning for my transmission. If you want to be picked up then you’ll have
to stay away from any hostiles. That’s about it, we’re battening down to jump now. Good luck, I’ll see you in two, maybe three
days.”

Kelly rested her head in her hands. Just hearing his voice again was a fantastic tonic. And he was alive, smart enough to
elude a battle. And he was going to come back for them. Joshua, you bloody splendid marvel. She wiped tears from her cheeks.

Shaun Wallace patted her shoulder tenderly. “Your young man, is it?”

“Yes. Sort of.” She sniffed, and brushed away the last of the tears in a businesslike manner.

“He sounds like a fine boy to me.”

“He is.”

Reza datavised a summary of events to the second hovercraft. “I’m in complete agreement with Joshua about keeping clear of
the cloud and the possessed. As of now our original mission is over. Our priority now is just to stay alive and make sure
what information we have gets back to the Confederation authorities. We’ll keep going up this river to the Tyrathca farmers
and hope that we can hold out there until the
Lady Macbeth
comes back for us.”

It was the rygar bush which had brought the Tyrathca farmers to Lalonde.

When they were searching for their initial backing, the LDC sent samples of Lalonde’s aboriginal flora to both of the xenoc
members of the Confederation; it was standard practice to try and attract as wide a spectrum of support as possible for such
ventures. The Kiint, as always, declined to participate. But the Tyrathca considered the small berries of the rygar bush a
superlative delicacy. Ripe berries could be ground up to produce a cold beverage, or mixed with sugar to form a sticky fudge;
LDC negotiators claimed it was the Tyrathcan equivalent of chocolate. The normally cloistered xenocs were so enamoured at
the prospect of wholesale rygar cultivation they agreed to a joint colony enterprise with their merchant organization taking
a four per cent stake in the LDC. It was only the third time since joining the Confederation that they had ever participated
in a colony, a fact which lent the hardpressed LDC considerable badly needed respectability. Even better for the LDC board:
to a human palate the rygar berries tasted like oily grapes, so there would never be any conflict of interest arising.

Five years after the dumpers had dropped out of the sky to form the nucleus of Durringham the first batch of Tyrathcan breeder
pairs arrived and settled in the foothills of the mountain range which made up the southern border of the Juliffe basin where
the rygar bushes flourished. The LDC’s long-range economic plans foresaw both the human and Tyrathcan settlements expanding
from their respective centres until they met at the roots of the tributaries. By the time that happened both groups would
have risen above their initial subsidence level and be prosperous enough to trade to their mutual enrichment. But that date
was still many years in the future. The human villages furthest from Durringham were all as poor as Aberdale and Schuster,
while the Tyrathcan plantations had barely cultivated enough rygar to fill the holds of the starships their merchants sent
twice a year. Contact had so far been minimal.