The Night's Dawn Trilogy (226 page)

“It’s some kind of interception manoeuvre,” Bajan shouted. “Those are navy ships. And the Halo’s SD platforms are locking
on.”

“I thought we were in a legitimate emergence zone.”

“We are.”

“Then what—”

“Priority signal for the
Tantu
’s captain from Govcentral Strategic Defence Command,” the flight computer announced.

Quinn glowered at the AV projection pillar which had relayed the message. He snapped his fingers at Bajan.

“This is Captain Mauer, commander of the CN ship
Tantu”
Bajan said. “Can somebody tell me what the problem is?”

“This is SD Command, Captain. Datavise your ship’s ASA code, please.”

“What code?” Bajan mouthed, completely flummoxed.

“Does anybody know what it is?” Quinn growled.
Tantu
had already datavised its identification code as soon as the jump was completed, as per standard procedure.

“The code, Captain,” SD Command asked again.

Quinn watched the fluorescent orange vectors of another two ships slide into the holoscreen display. Their weapons sensors
focused on the
Tantu’s
hull.

“Computer, jump one light-year. Now,” he ordered.

“No, the sensors… ” Bajan exclaimed frantically.

His objection didn’t matter. The flight computer was programmed to respond to Quinn’s voice commands alone.

The
Tantu
jumped, its event horizon slicing clean through the carbon-composite stalks which elevated the various sensor clusters out
of their recesses. Ten of them had deployed as soon as the starship emerged above Earth: star trackers, midrange optical sensors,
radar, communications antennae.

All seven warships racing towards the
Tantu
saw it disappear behind ten dazzling white plasma spumes as its event horizon crushed the carbon molecules of the stalks
to fusion density and beyond. Ruined sensor clusters spun out of the radioactive mist.

The SD Command centre duty officer ordered two of the destroyers to follow the
Tantu
, cursing his luck that the interception squadron hadn’t been assigned any voidhawks. It took the two starships eleven minutes
to match trajectories with the
Tantu
’s jump coordinate. Everybody knew that was too long.

Soprano alarms shrilled at painful volume, drowning out all other sounds on the
Tantu
’s bridge. The holoscreens which had been carrying the sensor images turned black as soon as the patterning nodes discharged,
then flicked to ship schematic diagrams. Disturbing quantities of red symbols flashed for attention.

“Kill that noise,” Quinn bellowed.

Bajan hurried to obey, typing rapidly on the keyboard rigged up next to his acceleration couch.

“We took four hull breaches,” Dwyer reported as soon as the alarm cut off. He was the most ardent of Quinn’s new apostles,
a former black stimulant program pusher who was murdered at the age of twenty-three by a faster, more ambitious rival. His
anger and callousness made him ideal for the cause. He’d even heard of the sects, dealing with them on occasion. “Six more
areas have been weakened.”

“What the fuck was that? Did they shoot at us?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Bajan said. “You can’t jump with sensors extended, the distortion effect collapses any mass caught in the field. Fortunately
it’s only a very narrow shell which covers the hull, just a few micrometers thick. But the atoms inside it get converted directly
into energy. Most of it shoots outwards, but there’s also some which is deflected right back against the hull. That’s what
hit us.”

“How much damage did we pick up?”

“Secondary systems only,” Dwyer said. “And we’re venting something, too; nitrogen I think.”

“Shit. What about the nodes? Can we jump again?”

“Two inoperative, another three damaged. But they’re failsoft. I think we can jump.”

“Good. Computer, jump three light-years.”

Bajan clamped down on his automatic protest. Nothing he could do about the spike of anger and exasperation in his mind though,
Quinn could perceive that all right.

“Computer, jump half a light-year.”

This time the bridge lights sputtered almost to the point of extinction.

“All right,” Quinn said as the gloomy red illumination grew bold again. “I want some fucking sensor visuals on these screens
now. I want to know where we are, and if anyone followed us. Dwyer, start working around those damaged systems.”

“Are we going to be okay, Quinn?” Lawrence asked. His energistic ability couldn’t hide the sweat pricking his sallow face.

“Sure. Now shut the fuck up, let me think.” He slowly unbuckled the straps holding him into his acceleration couch. Using
the stikpads he shuffled on tiptoe over to Bajan’s couch. His black robe swirled like bedevilled smoke around him, the hood
deepening until his face was almost completely hidden. “What,” he asked in a tight whisper, “is an ASA code?”

“I dunno, Quinn, honest,” the agitated man protested.

“I know
you
don’t know, dickhead. But the captain does. Find out!”

“Sure, Quinn, sure.” He closed his eyes, concentrating on the captain’s mind, inflicting as much anguish as he could dream
of to wrest free the information. “It’s an Armed Ship Authorization designation,” he grunted eventually.

“Go on,” Quinn’s voice emerged from the shadows of his hood.

“Any military starship which jumps to Earth has to have one. There’s so much industry in orbit, so many settled asteroids,
they’re terrified of the damage just one rogue ship could cause. So the captain of every Confederation government navy ship
is given an ASA code to confirm they’re legally entitled to be armed and that they’re under official control. It acts as a
fail-safe against any hijacking.”

“It certainly does,” Quinn said. “But it shouldn’t have done. Not with us. You should have known.”

Nobody else on the bridge was looking anywhere near Bajan, all of them hugely absorbed with their own tasks of stabilizing
the damage. And Quinn, looming over him like some giant carrion creature.

“This Mauer is a tough mother, Quinn. He tricked me, that’s all. I’ll make him suffer for it, I swear. The Light Bringer will
be proud of the way I let my serpent beast loose on him.”

“There’s no need,” Quinn said genially.

Bajan let out a faltering whimper of relief.

“I shall supervise his suffering myself.”

“But… how?”

In the absolute silence of the bridge, Lawrence Dillon sniggered.

“Leave us, Bajan, you little prick,” Quinn ordered. “You have failed me.”

“Leave? Leave what?”

“The body I provided for you. You don’t deserve it.”

“No!” Bajan howled.

“Go. Or I’ll shove you into zero-tau.”

With a last sob, Bajan let himself fall back into the beyond, the glories of sensation ripping out of his mind. His soul wept
its torment as the crowded emptiness closed around him once again.

Gurtan Mauer coughed weakly, his body trembling. He had lurched from one nightmare to another. The
Tantu’s
bridge had become an archaic crypt where technological artifacts protruded from whittled ebony, as if they were the foreign
elements. A monk in midnight-black robes stood at the side of his couch, the hint of a face inside the voluminous hood indicated
by the occasional carmine flicker striking alabaster skin. An inverted crucifix hung on a long silver chain around his neck;
for some reason it wasn’t drifting around as it ought in free fall.

“You didn’t just defy me alone,” Quinn said. “That I could almost accept. But when you held back that fucking ASA code you
defied the will of God’s Brother. Right now I should have been in the docking station, by morning I would have kissed the
ground at the foot of the orbital tower. I was destined to carry the gospel of the Night to the whole mother-fucking world!
And
you fucked with me
, shithead. You!”

Mauer’s ship-suit caught light. In free fall the flame was a bright indigo fluid, slithering smoothly across his torso and
along his limbs. Scraps of charred fabric peeled off, exposing the charcoaled skin below. Fans whirred loudly behind the bridge’s
duct grilles as they attempted to suck the awful stench from the compartment’s air.

Quinn ignored the agonized wailing muted by the captain’s clamped mouth. He let his mind lovingly undress Lawrence.

The slight lad drifted idly in the centre of the bridge, smiling dreamily down at his naked body. He allowed Quinn to shape
him, the young stable boy’s skinny figure developing thick sinuous muscles, the width of his shoulders increasing. Clad only
in a barbarian warrior garb of shiny leather strips, he began to resemble a dwarf addicted to bodybuilding.

The blue flame cloaking Mauer dribbled away as the last of the ship-suit was consumed. With a simple wave of his hand, Quinn
healed the captain’s burns, restoring skin, nails, hair to their former state. Mauer became a picture of vitality.

“Your turn,” Quinn told Lawrence with a deviant laugh.

The pain-shocked, imprisoned captain could only stare upwards in terror as the freakishly hulking boy grinned broadly and
glided in towards him.

•  •  •

Alkad Mzu accessed the
Samaku’s
sensor suite via the flight computer, allowing the picture to share her mind with a sense of benevolent dismay. This is what
we fought over? This was what a planet died for? This? Dear Mary!

Like all starships jumping insystem, the
Samaku
had emerged a safe half-million kilometres above the plane of the eliptic. The star known as Tunja was an M4-type, a red
dwarf. Bright enough from the starship’s forty million kilometres distance, but hardly dazzling like a G-type, the primary
of most terracompatible planets. From Alkad’s excellent vantage point it hung at the centre of a vast disk of grizzled particles,
extending over two hundred million kilometres in diameter.

The inner (annulet), surrounding Tunja out to about three million kilometres, was a sparsely populated region where the constant
gale of solar wind had stripped away the smaller particles, leaving only tide-locked boulders and asteroid fragments. With
their surfaces smoothed to a crystalline gloss by the incessant red heat, they twinkled scarlet and crimson as if they were
a swarm of embers flung off by the dwarf’s arching typhonic prominences. Further out, the disk’s opacity began to build, graduating
into a sheet of what looked like dense grainy fog; bright carmine at the inner fringe, shading away to a deep cardinal-red
ninety million kilometres later. A trillion spiky shadows speckled the uniformity, cast by the larger chunks of rock and metal
bobbing among the dust and slushy gravel.

No terracompatible planet was conceivable in such an environment. The star was barren except for a single gas giant, Duida,
orbiting a hundred and twenty-eight million kilometres out. A couple of young Edenist habitats circled above it, but the main
focus of human life was scattered across the disk.

A disk of such density was usually the companion of a newborn star, but Tunja was estimated to be over three billion years
old. Confederation planetologists suspected the red dwarf’s disk had its genesis in a spectacularly violent collision between
a planet and a very large interstellar meteor. It was a theory which could certainly explain the existence of the Dorados
themselves: three hundred and eighty-seven large asteroids with a near-pure metal content. Two-thirds of them were roughly
spherical, permitting the strong conclusion that they were molten core magma material when the hypothetical collision took
place. Whatever their origin, such abundant ore was an immensely valuable economic resource for the controlling government.
Valuable enough to go to war over.

“Ayacucho’s civil traffic control is refusing us docking permission,” Captain Randol said. “They say all the Dorados are closed
to civil starflight and we have to return to our port of origin.”

Alkad exited the sensor visualization and stared across the
Samaku’s
bridge. Randol was wearing a diplomatically apologetic expression.

“Has this ever happened before?” she asked.

“No. Not that we’ve been to the Dorados before, but I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

I have not waited this long, nor come so far, to be turned away by some bloody bureaucrat, Alkad thought. “Let me talk to
them,” she said.

Randol waved a hand, signalling permission. The
Samaku’s
flight computer opened a channel to Ayacucho asteroid’s traffic control office.

“This is Immigration Service Officer Mabaki, how can I help you?”

“My name is Daphine Kigano,” Alkad datavised back—she ignored the speculative gaze from Randol at the name on one of her passports.
“I’m a Dorado resident, and I wish to dock. I don’t see why that should be a problem.”

“It isn’t a problem, not under normal circumstances. I take it you haven’t heard of the warning from the Confederation Assembly?”

“No.”

“I see. One moment, I’ll datavise the file over.”

Alkad and the rest of the crew fell silent as they accessed the report. More than surprise, more than disbelief, she felt
anger. Anger that this should happen
now
. Anger at the threat it posed to her mission, her life’s duty. Mother Mary must have deserted the Garissan people long ago,
leaving the universe to place so much heartbreak and malicious catastrophe in their path.

“I would still like to come home,” she datavised when it was over.

“Impossible,” Mabaki replied. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m the only one who will enter the asteroid. Even if I were possessed I would present no threat. And I’m quite willing to
be tested for possession, the Assembly warning says electronics malfunction in their presence. It should be simple enough.”

“I’m sorry, we simply can’t take the risk.”

“How old are you, Officer Mabaki?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your age?”

“Is there some relevance to this?”

“Indeed there is.”

“I’m twenty-six.”