The Night's Dawn Trilogy (445 page)

“They’ll last long enough. That’s all that matters.”

“I told you, you want decent possessed you gotta go to the sects for bodies. Fuck, they worship you. All you’ve gotta do it
tell them to bend over, they ain’t gonna put up no fight.”

“God’s Brother,” Quinn growled. “Don’t you ever think, shithead? The sects are a lie. I’ve told you, they’re controlled by
the supercops. I can’t go to them for anything, we’d just give ourselves away. This place is fucking perfect. Nobody’s going
to notice people going missing from here, as far as this world’s concerned they stopped existing as soon as they walked through
the door.” His face jutted out of the hood to grin down at Paul. “Right?”

“I have money.” It was Paul’s last gambit, the one thing everyone desired.

“That’s good,” Quinn said. “You’re almost one of us already. You don’t have far to go.” He pointed a finger, and Paul’s world
howled into pain.

______

Western Europe had hooked eight AIs in to London’s communication net, which gave him enough processing capacity to review
each chunk of electronic circuitry in the arcology on a ten second cycle, providing it had a net connection. All processor
blocks, no matter what their function, were datavised on a fifteen-second rota and examined for suspect glitches.

He wasn’t the only worried citizen. Several commercial software houses had gripped the marketing opportunity and offered possession
monitoring packages. It consisted of a neural nanonics program which sent a continual capacity diagnostic and location datavise
to the company security centre, who would alert the police if the user suffered an unexplained glitch or drop out. Bracelets
were also spilling into the shops which did the same thing for kids too young for neural nanonics.

Communication bandwidth was becoming a serious problem. Western Europe had used GSDI authority to prioritize the AI scanning
programs, leaving them unimpeded while civil data traffic suffered unheard of capacity reductions and switching delays.

The visualization of the arcology’s electronic structure was a theatrical gesture, impressing no one. It stood on the table
of the sensenviron secure conference chamber like an elaborate glass model of the ten domes. Fans of coloured light rotated
through the miniature translucent structures with strobe-like repetition.

South Pacific studied their movement as the other B7 supervisor representations came on line around the oval table. When all
sixteen were there, she asked: “So where is he, then?”

“Not in Edmonton,” North America said. “We kicked their asses out of the universe. The whole goddamn nest of them. There’s
none of the bastards left.”

“Really?” Asian Pacific said. “So you’ve accounted for the friend of Carter McBride as well, have you?”

“He’s not a threat to the arcology, he only wants Dexter.”

“Crap. You can’t find him, and he’s just an ordinary possessed.” Asian Pacific waved an arm at the simulacrum of London. “All
they have to do is steer clear of electronics, and they’re safe.”

“Got to eat sometime,” Southern Africa said. “It’s not like they’ve got friends to take care of them.”

“The Light Bringer sect loves them,” East Asia grumbled.

“The sects are ours,” Western Europe said. “We have no worries in that direction.”

“Okay,” South Pacific said. “So tell us how you’re doing in New York? We all thought the police had got them that time as
well.”

“Ah yes,” Military Intelligence said. “What’s the phrase the news anchors keep using? Hydra Syndrome. Shove one possessed
into zero-tau, and while you’re doing that five more come forth. Emotive figures, but true.”

“New York got out of hand,” North America said. “I wasn’t prepared for that.”

“Obviously. How many domes have been taken over now?”

“Figures of that magnitude are unnecessarily emotive,” Western Europe said. “Once the possessed base population climbs above
two thousand, there’s nothing anyone can do. The exponential curve takes over and the arcology is lost. New York is going
to be this planet’s Mortonridge. It’s not our concern.”

“Not our concern!” North Pacific said. “This is bullshit. Of course it’s our concern. If they spread through the arcologies
this whole planet will be lost.”

“Large numbers are not our concern. The military will have to deal with New York later.”

“If it’s still here, and if they don’t turn cannibal. The food vats won’t work around possessed, you know, and the weather
shields won’t hold, either.”

“They’re reinforcing the domes they’ve captured with their energistic power,” North America said. “The arcology caught the
tail end of an armada storm last night. The domes all held.”

“Only until they complete their takeover,” South Pacific said. “The remaining domes can’t barricade themselves in forever.”

“New York’s inevitable fall is regrettable, I’m sure,” Western Europe said. “But not relevant. We have to accept it as a defeat
and move forward. B7 is about prevention, not cure. And in order to prevent Earth itself from falling, we have to eliminate
Quinn Dexter.”

“So like I asked, where is he?”

“Undetermined at this moment.”

“You lost him, didn’t you? You blew it. He was a sitting duck in Edmonton, but you thought you were smarter. You thought your
dandy little psychology game would triumph. Your arrogance could have enslaved us all.”

“Interesting tense, there,” Western Europe snapped. “Could have. You mean, until you saved the day by closing down the vac-trains,
after we agreed not to screw each other over.”

“The President had a very strong public mandate for closing them down. After Edmonton’s High Noon firefight, the whole world
was clamouring for a shutdown.”

“Led by your news companies,” Southern Africa said.

Western Europe leaned over the table towards a smiling South Pacific, his head centimetres short of the simulacrum. “I got
them back, you moronic bitch. Banneth and Louise Kavanagh returned to London safely. Dexter will do everything in his power
to follow them there. But he can’t bloody well do that if he’s trapped in Edmonton. Six trains, that’s all that got out before
your stupid shut down order. Six! It’s not enough to be certain.”

“If he’s as good as you seem to think, he would have got on one of them.”

“You’d better hope he has, because if he was left behind you can kiss goodbye to Edmonton. We have nothing in place there
which could confirm his existence.”

“So we lose two arcologies. The rest are now guaranteed safe.”

“I lose two arcologies,” North America said. “Thanks to you. Do you realize how much territory that is for me?”

“Paris,” South Pacific said. “Bombay, Johannesburg. Everyone’s taking losses today.”

“You’re not. And the possessed are on the run in those arcologies. We have them locked down, thanks to the sects. None of
those will escalate into a repetition of New York.”

“We hope,” said India. “I’m managing parity at the moment, that’s all. But panic is going to be a factor in the very near
future. And that works to their advantage.”

“You’re quibbling over details,” South Pacific said. “The point is, there are methods of solving this problem other than obsessing
over Dexter. My policy is the correct one. Confine them while we engineer a permanent solution. If that had been adopted at
the start, we would have lost the Brazilian tower ground station at most.”

“We didn’t know what we were dealing with when Dexter arrived,” South America said. “We were always going to lose one arcology
to him.”

“Dear me, I had no idea this was a policy forum,” Western Europe said. “I thought we were conducting a progress review.”

“Well, as you’ve made no progress…” South Pacific said sweetly.

“If he’s in London, he won’t be found by conventional means. I thought we’d established that. And for your information, total
inactivity isn’t a policy, it’s just the wishful thinking of small minds.”

“I’ve stopped the spread of possession. Remind us what you’ve achieved?”

“You’re fiddling while Rome burns. The cause of the fire is our paramount concern.”

“Eliminating Dexter will not remove the possessed in New York or anywhere else. I vote we devote a higher percentage of our
scientific resources to finding a permanent solution.”

“I find it hard to credit that even you are playing politics with this. Percentages aren’t going to make the slightest difference
to the beyond at this stage. Anyone who can provide a relevant input to the problem had been doing just that since the very
beginning. We don’t need to call in the auditors to verify our compassion credentials, they’re hardly quantifiable in any
case.”

“If you don’t want to be a part of the project, fine. Be sure you don’t endanger us any further by your irresponsibility.”

Western Europe cancelled his representation, withdrawing from the conference. The simulacrum of London vanished with him.

______

The cave was at the lowest level of the endcap caverns, protected on all sides by hundreds of metres of solid polyp. Tolton
felt quite secure inside it; first time in a long time.

Originally a servitor veterinary centre, it had been pressed into use as a physics lab. Dr Patan headed up the team which
the Valisk personality had charged with making sense of the dark continuum. He’d greeted Dariat’s arrival with the joy of
a long-lost son. There had been dozens of experiments, starting with simple measurements: temperature (Dariat’s ersatz body
was eight degrees warmer than liquid nitrogen, and almost perfectly heat resistant) electrical resistivity (abandoned quickly
when Dariat protested at the pain). Then came energy spectrum and quantum signature analysis. The most interesting part for
a layman observer like Tolton was when Dariat gave a sample of himself. Patan’s team quickly decided an in-depth study was
impossible when the fluid was being animated by Dariat’s thoughts. Attempts to stick a needle into him and draw some away
proved impossible, the tip wouldn’t penetrate his skin. In the end it was down to Dariat himself, holding his hand over a
glass dish and pricking himself with a pin which he’d conjured into existence by imagination. Red blood dripped out, changing
as it fell away from him. Slightly sticky grey-white fluid splattered into the bowl. It was carried away triumphantly by the
physicists.

Dariat and Tolton exchanged a bemused look, and went to sit at the back of the lab.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tear off a bit of cloth from your toga?” Tolton asked. “I mean, it’s all the same stuff,
right?”

Dariat gave him a flabbergasted look. “Bugger. I never thought of that.”

They spent the next couple of hours talking quietly, with Dariat filling in the details of his ordeal. The conversation stopped
a couple of hours later when he fell silent, and gave the physicists a cheerless glance. They’d been quiet for several minutes,
five of them and Erentz studying the results of a gamma spike microscope. Their expressions were even more worried than Dariat’s.

“What have you found?” Tolton asked.

“Dariat might be right,” Erentz said. “Entropy here in the dark continuum appears to be stronger than in our universe.”

“For once I wish I hadn’t said I told you so,” Dariat said.

“How do you know?” Tolton asked.

“We have contended this state for some time,” Dr Patan said. “This substance seems to confirm that. Although I can’t give
you an absolute yet.”

“What the hell is it, then?”

“Best description?” Dr Patan smiled thinly. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing? But he’s solid.”

“Yes. The fluid is a perfect neutral substance, the end product of total decay. That’s the best definition I can give you
based on our results. A gamma spike microscope allows us to probe sub-atomic particles. A most useful device for us physicists.
Unfortunately, this fluid has no sub-atomic particles. There are no atoms as such; it appears to be made up from a single
particle, one with a neutral charge.”

Tolton summoned up his first grade physics didactic memories. “You mean neutrons?”

“No. This particle’s rest mass is much lower than that. It has a small attractive force, which gives it its fluidic structure.
But that’s its only quantifiable property. I doubt it would ever form a solid, not even if you were to assemble a supergiant
star mass of the stuff. In our own universe, that much cold matter will collapse under its own gravity to form neutronium.
Here, we believe there’s another stage of decay before that happens. Energy is constantly evaporating out of electrons and
protons, breaking down their elementary particle cohesion. In the dark continuum dissipation rather than contraction would
appear to be the norm.”

“
Is
evaporating? You mean we’re leaking energy out of our atoms right now?”

“Yes. It would certainly explain why our electronic systems are suffering so much degradation.”

“How long till we dissolve into that stuff?” Tolton yelped.

“We haven’t determined that yet. Now we know what we’re looking for, we will begin calibrating the loss rate.”

“Oh shit.” He whirled round to face Dariat. “The lobster pot, that’s what you called this place. We’re not going to get out,
are we.”

“With a little help from the Confederation, we can still make it back, atoms intact.”

Tolton’s mind was racing ahead with the concept now. “If I just fall apart into that fluid, my soul will be able to pull it
back together. I’ll be like you.”

“If your soul contains enough life-energy, yes.”

“But that fades away as well.… Yours does, you had to steal more from that ghost. And those entities outside, they’re all
battling for life-energy. That’s all they do. Ever.”

Dariat smiled with sad sympathy. “That’s the way it goes here.” He broke off and stared at a high corner of the cave. The
physicists did the same, their expressions all showing concern.

“Now what?” Tolton demanded. He couldn’t see anything up there.

“Looks like our visitors have got tired with the southern endcap,” Dariat told him. “They’re coming here.”