The Night's Dawn Trilogy (284 page)

He stood before the stone altar which had been built in the park, studying the figure bound to the inverted cross on top.
It was an old man, which in some ways was good. This way Quinn confirmed his zero-rated compassion; only children held equal
status.

His loyal disciples stood in a circle around him, seven of them clad in blood-red robes. Faces shone as bright as their minds,
fuelled by greed and ominous desire.

Twelve-T was also in attendance, sagging with the formidable burden of merely staying alive. His maltreated head was permanently
bowed now. No possessed was imposing change upon him, but he was becoming almost Neanderthal in his posture.

Outside the elite coterie the acolytes formed a broad semicircle. All of them were wearing grey robes with the hoods thrown
back. Their faces illuminated by the unnaturally hot bonfires flanking the altar, a flickering topaz light caressing their
skin with fake expressions.

Quinn could sense several ghosts standing among them. They were frightened and demoralized as always and, as he had discovered,
utterly harmless. They were completely unable to affect any aspect of the physical world. Trivial creatures with less substance
than the shadows they craved.

In a way he was glad they were attending. Spying. This ceremony would show them what they were dealing with. They could be
tyrannized, he was sure, in that they were no different from any other human. He wanted them to realize that he would never
hesitate to inflict what pain he could upon them if they chose not to obey.

Satisfied, Quinn sang: “We are the princes of the Night.”

“We are the princes of the Night,” the acolytes chorused, it was a sound similar to the threat of thunder beyond the horizon.

“When the false lord leads his legions away into oblivion, we will be here.”

“We will be here.”

The old man was shaking now, moving his lips in prayer. He was a Christian priest, which was why Quinn had selected him. A
double victory. Victory over the false lord. And victory for the serpent beast. Taking a life for no reason other than you
wished it, for the pain it would cause others.

Such sacrifices had always focused on authority and its enforcement. A spectacle to coerce the weak. In pre-industrial times,
this rite might have been about the summoning of dark witchcraft; but in an age of nanonic technology man had long surpassed
magic, black or white. The sect arcology had known and encouraged the value of image, the psychology of precise brutality.
And it worked.

Who now among this gathering would stand to challenge him? It was more ordination than anything else, confirming his right
to reign.

He held out a hand, and Lawrence placed the dagger in his palm. Its handle was an elaborate ebony carving, but the blade was
plain carbotanium and very sharp.

The priest cried out as Quinn slid the tip into his paunchy abdomen. It deepened to a whimper as Quinn recited: “Accept this
life as a token of our love and devotion.”

“We love you, and devote ourselves to you, Lord,” growled the acolytes.

“God grant you deliverance, son,” the priest choked.

Blood was running down Quinn’s arm, splattering the altar. “Go fuck yourself.”

Lawrence laughed delightedly at the priest’s anguish. Quinn was immensely proud of the boy; he’d never known anyone to offer
himself up to God’s Brother so unreservedly.

The priest was dying to the harsh cheers of the acolytes. Quinn could sense the old man’s soul rising from the body, twining
like smoke in a listless sky to vanish through a chink in reality. He pressed himself forwards to lick ravenously at the ephemeral
stream with a narrow black tongue, enraptured.

Then another soul was pushing back down the trickle of energy, surging into the body.

“Shithead!” Quinn spat. “This body is not for you. It is our sacrament. Get the fuck out of it.”

The skin on the priest’s upside-down face began to flow like treacle. The features twisted themselves through a hundred and
eighty degrees so that the mouth was superimposed on the forehead. Then the skin hardened again and the eyes snapped open.

Quinn took a pace back in surprise. It was his own face staring at him.

“Welcome to the beyond, you little prick,” it told him. Then it smiled wickedly. “Remember this part?”

A streamer of white fire lashed out of the knife which was plunged deep into the priest’s chest. It struck Twelve-T’s right
arm, puncturing his chrome and steel wrist. The smoking mechanical hand dropped to the floor, fingers waggling as if they
were playing piano keys. His wrist joint was reduced to a jagged bracelet of metal with green hydraulic fluid spraying out,
and the frayed end of a power cable fluttering about.

“Do it!” the forged face yelled.

Twelve-T lunged towards Quinn, shoving his broken arm forwards. A mad smile cracked his face.

Lawrence wailed:
“No,”
and flung himself into Twelve-T’s path.

The broken wrist joint rammed into Lawrence’s throat. A bright spark of electricity twinkled at the end of the ragged power
cable as it touched the boy’s skin.

Lawrence shrieked as his whole body silently detonated into sunlight brilliance. He froze with his arms still outstretched,
a frantic expression etched on his face. The light was so fierce he became translucent—a naked angel bathing in the heart
of a star. Then his extremities began to shrivel, turning black. He had time to shriek once more before the internecine fire
ate him away.

The dreadful light shrank, revealing a patch of baked earth and droppings of fine white ash. Twelve-T lay next to it where
he had stumbled, the fall jolting his brain out of his half skull like wine from a goblet. It was rolling over the grass.

“Ah well,” said the forged face. “I guess we both lost this time around. Be seeing you, Quinn.” It began to untwist, reverting
to the priest’s startled death rictus. The incursive soul flowed away, retreating into the beyond.

“COME BACK!” Quinn roared.

There was a last ironic laugh, and his tormenter was gone.

For all his power and strength, there was nothing Quinn could do. Absolutely nothing. His impotence was an agonizing humiliation.
He screamed, and the altar shattered, sending the priest’s battered body tumbling. The acolytes began to run. Quinn kicked
Twelve-T’s brain, and the grisly organ burst apart, sending a splat of gore across his terrified disciples. He turned back
and discharged a bolt of searing white fire into the priest’s remnants. The body ignited instantly, but the flames were only
an effete mockery of the incendiary heat which had consumed Lawrence.

The disciples shrank away as Quinn sent blast after blast of white fire into the pyre, reducing the body and the crumbling
stones to radiant magma. When they reached the boundary of light given off from the bonfires, they too turned and fled after
the acolytes.

Only the ghosts remained, safe from the fury of the black-robed figure in their secluded lifeless realm. After a while they
saw him sink to his knees and make the sign of the inverted cross on his chest.

“I will not fail you, my Lord,” he said quietly. “I will quicken the Night as I promised. All I ask as the price of my soul
is that when it has fallen you bring me the fucker who did this.”

He rose and made his way out of the park. This time he was truly alone. Even ghosts quailed before the terrifying thoughts
alight inside his head.

•  •  •

Hoya
was the first of the four voidhawks to emerge above Nyvan. Niveu and his crew immediately began scanning the local environment
for threats.

“No ships within twenty thousand kilometres,” he said, “but the SD networks are shooting off electronic warfare blitzes at
each other. Looks like the nations are in their usual confrontational state.”

Monica accessed the sensor suite in the voidhawk’s lower hull, and the starfield projected into her mind came alive with vivid
coloured icons. Two more voidhawks were holding formation a hundred kilometres away. As she watched, another wormhole terminus
opened to disgorge the fourth. “Are we being targeted by the platforms?” she asked. She appreciated the way the Edenists unfailingly
spoke out loud in her presence, keeping her informed. But their display symbology was very different to that used by the Royal
Navy, she hadn’t quite mastered the program yet.

“There are very few specific targets,” Samuel said. “The networks appear intent on jamming and disrupting every processor
out to geosync orbit.”

“Is it safe for us to approach?”

Niveu shrugged. “Yes. For now. We’ll monitor the local news to find out what’s going on. If there’s any indication of them
advancing the hostilities to an active stage, I’ll review the situation again.”

“Does your service have any stations down there?” she asked Samuel.

“There are some assets, but we don’t have any active operatives. We don’t even have an embassy. There’s no gas giant in this
system, it was colonized long before their presence was deemed necessary to develop an industrialized economy. Frankly, the
price of having to import all their He3 is partly responsible for Nyvan’s current state.”

“It also means we have no backup,” Niveu said.

“Okay, let me have a communications circuit. We have a couple of embassies and several consuls. They should be monitoring
starship traffic.”

It took a long time to establish contact. After hours subjected to the output from the SD platforms, the national civil communications
satellites were now almost completely inoperative. She eventually got around the problem by aligning one of
Hoya
’s antennae directly on the cities she wanted, which limited her to those on the half of the planet ahead of the voidhawks.

“Mzu’s here,” she said at last. “I got through to Adrian Redway, our station chief in the Harrisburg embassy. The
Tekas
arrived yesterday. It docked at Tonala’s principal low orbit station, and four people took a spaceplane down to Harrisburg.
Voi was one of them, and so was Daphine Kigano.”

“Excellent,” Samuel said. “Is the
Tekas
still here?”

“No. It departed an hour later. And no other starship has left since. She’s still down there. We’ve got her.”

“We have to go in,” Samuel told Niveu.

“I understand. But you should know that several governments are claiming New Georgia has fallen to the possessed. New Georgia
is denying it of course, though it does seem as though they have lost their asteroid, Jesup. Apparently Jesup dispatched some
inter-orbit ships to the three abandoned asteroids. It is being heralded as a breach of sovereignty, which of course is taken
extremely seriously here.”

“Could the ships be carrying escapees?” Monica asked.

“It is possible, I suppose. Although I can’t think of any reason why anyone should consider those asteroids to be a refuge;
they were badly damaged in the ’32 conflict. No one even bothered to salvage them. But we ought to know what the Jesup ships
are doing before too long; the governments which own the abandoned asteroids have dispatched their own ships to investigate.”

“If it turns out those ships from Jesup are crewed by possessed, then the situation will deteriorate rapidly,” Samuel said.
“The other governments are unlikely to come to New Georgia’s aid.”

“True enough,” Monica said pensively. “They’re more likely to nuke the whole country.”

“I don’t imagine we will be staying long,” Samuel said. “And we will have the flyers with us, we can evacuate within minutes.”

“Yeah sure. There’s one other thing.”

“Oh?”

“Redway said one other starship has arrived since the
Tekas
left. The
Lady Macbeth
, she’s docked at Tonala’s main low-orbit station.”

“How intriguing. The Lord of Ruin obviously knew what she was doing when she chose this Lagrange Calvert.”

Monica was sure there was a note of admiration in his voice.

The four voidhawks accelerated in towards Nyvan. After receiving permission from traffic control, they slotted into a six-hundred-kilometre
orbit, adopting a diamond formation. Four ion field flyers left their hangars and curved down towards the planet, heading
into the huge swirl of angry cloud that covered most of Tonala.

•  •  •

Jesup’s Strategic Defence control centre had been hollowed out of the rock deep behind the habitation section. It was New
Georgia’s ultimate citadel: safe from any external attack which didn’t actually crack Jesup open, equipped with enough security
systems to fend off an open mutiny by the asteroid’s population, and fitted with a completely independent environmental circuit.
No matter what happened to Jesup and New Georgia’s government, the SD officers could continue to fight on for weeks.

Quinn waited for the monolithic innermost door to slide open, displaying a serenity that was harrowing in its depth. Only
Bonham accompanied him now as he strode around the asteroid, the other disciples were too afraid.

There had been a few modifications to the control centre. Console technology had devolved considerably; in most cases processors
and AV projectors had abated to a simple telephone. A whole rank of the black and silver machines were lined up along a wall,
where they were jangling incessantly. A group of officers in stiff grey uniforms were snatching up the handsets as fast as
they could. In front of them was a big square table with a picture of Nyvan and its orbiting asteroids covering its surface.
Five young women were busy moving wooden markers across it with long poles.

The adrenaline-powered clamour faltered as Quinn walked in. There was no sign of any face inside his robe’s hood; light fell
into the oval opening never to return. Only the pearl-white hands emerging from his sleeves suggested a human was in residence.

“Keep going,” he told them.

The voices sprang back, far louder than before so as to demonstrate their loyalty and commitment.

Quinn went over to the commander’s post, a pulpitlike podium which overlooked the table. “What is the problem?”