The Night's Dawn Trilogy (458 page)

Oenone
emerged twenty kilometres from the dark Adamist ship.

“Contact locked,” Joshua datavised in confirmation to Syrinx as their dish acquired
Oenone
’s short-range beacon.
Lady Mac
’s full complement of survey sensors were rising out of their fuselage recesses, along with the new systems which Kempster
had requested. He could actually see a similar suite deploying from the pods riding in the voidhawk’s lower fuselage cargo
cradles.

“I see you,” she replied. “Confirming no rocks or dust clouds in our immediate vicinity. We’re starting the sensor sweep.”

“Us too.”

“How’s your thermal profile?”

“Holding fine,” Sarha replied when he consulted her. “It’s hot out there, but not as bad as the approach to the antimatter
station. Our dump panels can radiate it away faster than we’re absorbing it. Wouldn’t want you to fly us too much closer,
though. And if you can give us a slow continuing roll manoeuvre, I’d be happy. It’ll avoid any hot-spots building on the fuselage.”

“Do my best,” he told her. “Syrinx, we can cope. How about you?”

“Not a problem at this distance. The foam insulation is intact.”

“Okay.” He fired the starship’s equatorial ion thrusters, initiating the slow barbecue-mode roll Sarha wanted.

The crew were all at their bridge stations, ready to cope with any contingency the red giant threw at them. Samuel and Monica
were down in the main lounge in capsule B, sharing it with Alkad, Peter, and Oski, who were accessing the sensor data.
Oenone
’s results were being delivered directly to Parker, Kempster, and Renato. Both ships were exchanging their data in real time,
allowing the experts to review it simultaneously.

The image of local space built up quickly, charting the strong riot of particles flowing past the hull. Outside didn’t quite
qualify as a vacuum.

“Calmer than Jupiter’s environment,” Syrinx commented. “But just as dangerous.”

“Not as much hard radiation as we predicted,” Alkad said.

“The hydrogen bulk must be absorbing it before it reaches the surface.”

Their optical and infrared sensors were performing slow scans of space away from the red giant’s surface. Analysis programs
searched for shifting light-points which would indicate asteroids or moonlet-sized bodies, even a planet.
Oenone
’s distortion field could find little local mass bending space-time’s uniformity. The brawny solar wind seemed to have blown
everything away. Of course, they were looking at less than one per cent of the equatorial orbit track.

The first result came from a simple microwave frequency sensor that picked up an unidentified pulse lasting less than a second.
It was coming from somewhere closer to the surface.

“Kempster?” Oski datavised. “Is there any way a red giant could emit microwaves?”

“Not with any of our current theories,” the surprised astronomer replied.

“Captain, can we take a closer look at the source, please?”

On the bridge, Joshua gave Dahybi a warning look. Intuition fluttered his heart. “Node status?”

“We can jump clear, Captain,” Dahybi said quietly.

“Liol, keep monitoring our electronic warfare detectors, please. I want to play this very safe indeed.”

The flight computer reported the sensors had picked up another microwave pulse.

“That’s very similar to radar,” Beaulieu said. “But not a recognizable Confederation signature. It’s nothing like the Tyrathca
ships used, either.”

“Oski, I’m switching our sensor focus area for you now,” Joshua said.

Both passive and active sensor clusters rotated on the end of their booms to study the direction from which the pulse had
come. The flight computer assembled their results into a generalized neuroiconic image in accordance with its governing graphic-generation
programs, approximating the physical structure which the image enhancement subroutine was delivering and combining it with
a thermal and electromagnetic profile.

“Remind me again,” Sarha said in a subdued breath. “In our expert team’s professional opinion, we’re here for an aeons-dead
civilization whose relics are going to be extremely difficult to find. That’s what you sold us, wasn’t it?”

The most powerful telescopes
Oenone
and
Lady Mac
carried were quickly aligned on the structure which the sensor clusters had located, amplifying and clarifying the first
low-resolution image. Orbiting twenty million kilometres ahead of the star-ships, a city was flying unperturbably above the
slow-churning blooms of the convection currents which contoured the red giant’s surface. Spectrography confirmed the presence
of silicates, carbon compounds, light metals, and water. Microwaves buzzed across its turrets. Butterfly wing magnetic fields
flapped in a steady heartbeat. A forest of rapier spines rose from its darkside, gleaming at the top of the infrared spectrum
as they radiated away its colossal thermal load.

It was five thousand kilometres in diameter.

Quinn used simple timing rather than risk sending his orders out through London’s communication net. No matter how innocuous
the message, there was always a chance the supercops would pick up the chain. Even though they thought they’d eliminated him
in the Parsonage Heights strike, they would be watching for signs of other possessed in the arcology. Standard procedure.
Quinn would have done the same in their place. However, their paranoia had been quenched amid the flames and death engulfing
the tower’s penthouse. With that came a slight relaxation of effort, falling back to established routine rather than determined
proactive searches. It gave him the interlude he desired.

By necessity, London was now destined to be the capital of His empire on Earth. Such honour would be visited upon the ancient
city and its outlying domes only by using possessed as disciples to deliver His doctrine. But there were inherent problems
recruiting them. Even they were reluctant to follow the gospel of God’s Brother to its exacting, painful letter. As he’d learned
on Jesup, violent coercion was often required to obtain the wholehearted cooperation of non-sect members. Even Quinn was limited
in the number of people he could intimidate at once. And without that strict adherence to His cause, the possessed would do
what they always did and snatch this world from the universe. Quinn couldn’t allow that, so he’d adopted a more tactical strategy,
borrowing heavily from Capone’s example, exploiting the hostility and avarice most possessed exhibited on their return to
the universe.

The possessed from the Lancini had been carefully and stealthily scattered throughout the arcology and provided with very
detailed instructions. Speed was the key. Come the appointed hour, each one would enter a preselected building and open the
night staff to possession. When the day workers arrived, they would be possessed one by one, jumping the numbers up considerably
but stopping short of exponential expansion. Quinn wanted about 15,000 by ten o’clock in the morning.

After that had been achieved, they would surge out of their buildings and physically disperse across the arcology. By then,
there would be little the authorities could do. It took an average of five to ten well-armed police officers to eliminate
one possessed. Even if they could track them via electronic glitches, they simply didn’t have the manpower available to deal
with them. Quinn was gambling that Gov-central wouldn’t use 15,000 SD strikes against London. The rest of the population would
be his hostages.

While that was going on, Quinn himself would be establishing a core of loyalists who would venture forth to exert a little
discipline: again, a hierarchy based on the Organization. The newly emerged possessed would be taught that they had to maintain
the status quo, and encouraged to target the police and local government personnel—anyone who could organize resistance. A
second stage would see them shutting down the transport routes, then going on to seize power, water, and food production centres.
A hundred new fiefdoms would emerge, whose only obligation was obedience and tribute to the new Messiah.

With his empire founded, Quinn intended to put the non-possessed technicians to work on secure methods of transport that would
enable him to carry the crusade of God’s Brother to fresh arcologies. Eventually, they would gain access to the O’Neill Halo.
From there, it was only a matter of time until His Night fell across this whole section of the galaxy.

______

The night after the Parsonage Heights incident, patrol constables Appleton and Moyles were cruising their usual route in central
Westminster. It was quiet at two o’clock in the morning when their car passed the old Houses of Parliament and turned down
Victoria Street. There were few pedestrians to be seen walking along outside the blank glass facades of the government agency
office buildings which transformed the start of the street into a deep canyon. The constables were used to that; this was
a bureaucrat district after all, with few residents or nightlife to attract anyone after the shops and offices closed.

A body fell silently out of the black sky above the lighting arches to smash into the road thirty metres ahead of Appleton
and Moyles. The patrol car’s controlling processor automatically reversed power to the wheel hub motors, and turned the vehicle
sharply to the right. They braked to a halt almost directly beside the battered body. Blood was flowing out of the jump-suit’s
sleeves and trouser legs to spread in big puddles across the carbon-concrete surface.

Appleton datavised a priority alert to his precinct station, requesting back-up; while Moyles ordered Victoria Street’s route
and flow processors to divert all traffic away from them. They emerged from the patrol car with their static-bullet carbines
held ready, holding position behind the armoured doors. Retinal implants scanned round in all spectrums, motion detector programs
in primary mode. There was nobody on the pavements within a hundred metres. No immediate ambush potential.

Cautiously, they started scanning the sheer cliffs of glass and concrete on either side, hunting for the open window from
which the body had come. There wasn’t one.

“The roof?” Appleton asked nervously. His carbine was swinging about in a wide arc as he tried to cover half the arcology.

The precinct station duty officers were already accessing the Westminster Dome’s sensor grid, looking down from the geodesic
structure to see the two officers crouched down beside their car. Nobody was on the roofs of the buildings flanking the road.

“Is he dead?” Moyles yelled.

Appleton licked his lips as he weighed up the risks of leaving the cover of the door to dash over to the body. “I think so.”
Assessing severely battered and bloody flesh it was an old bloke, really old. There was no movement, no breathing. His enhanced
senses couldn’t detect a heartbeat, either. Then he saw the deep scorch marks branding the corpse’s chest. “Oh bloody hell!”

______

The civil engineering crew had repaired the hole in the Westminster Dome with commendable speed. A small fleet of crawler
pods had traversed the vast crystal edifice, winching a replacement segment along with them. Removing the old hexagon and
sealing the new segment into place had taken twelve hours. Molecular bonding generator tests were initiated, making sure it
was now firmly integrated with the rest of the dome’s powered weather defences.

Checking the superstrength carbon lattice girders and beefing up suspect strands of the geodesic structure was still going
on as darkness fell; work continued under the pods’ floodlights.

Far below them, the clearing up of Parsonage Heights tower was an altogether messier affair. Fire service mechanoids had extinguished
the flames in the shattered stub of the octagonal tower. Paramedic crews hauled the injured out of the remaining seven towers
of the development project that had been bombarded with a blizzard of shattered glass and lethal debris. Smaller fires had
broken out on the two skyscrapers next to the one hit by the SD strike. Council surveyors had spent most of the day examining
the damaged buildings to see if they could be salvaged.

There was no doubt that the remnants of the tower struck by the X-ray laser would have to be demolished. The remaining eight
floors were dangerously weak; metal reinforcement rods had melted to run out of the carbon-concrete slabs like jam from a
doughnut. It was the local coroner’s staff who went in there after the fire mechanoids were pulled back and the walls had
cooled down. The bodies they recovered were completely baked by the X-ray blast.

It was London’s biggest spectator event, drawing huge crowds which spilled over into the open market and surrounding streets.
Civilians mingled with rover reporters, gawping at the destruction and the knot of activity on the dome high above. It was
the crawler pods which proved that some kind of SD weapon had been used, despite the original denials of the local police
chief. By early morning a grudging admission had come from the mayor’s office that the police had suspected a possessed to
be holed up in the Parsonage Heights tower. When pressed how a possessed had infiltrated London, the aide pointed out that
a sect chapel was established in the warehouse below the tower. The acolytes, she assured reporters, were now all under arrest.
Those that had survived.

Londoners grew jittery as more facts were prised out of various Govcentral offices over the long morning and afternoon, a
lot of the information contradictory. Several lawyers acting for relatives of the tower’s vaporized residents lodged writs
against the police for the use of extremely excessive force and accused the Police Commissioner of negligence in not attempting
an evacuation first. Absenteeism all over the arcology grew steadily worse during the day. Productivity and retail sales hit
an all-time low, with the exception of food stores. Managers reported people were stocking up on sachets and frozen meat bricks.

All the while, images of the broken tower with its blackened, distended, mildly radioactive fangs of carbon-concrete were
pushed out by the news companies. Bodybags being carried over the rubble remained the grim background for everybody’s day,
talked over by new anchors and their specialist comment guests.