A lump of clear ice coasted past, as broad as his hand. There was a turquoise and orange fish inside, three eyes around a triangular beaklike mouth, staring ahead, as if it was somehow aware of its surroundings, swimming along its eternal migration path. He watched it dwindle away, too numb to try and collect it—gone for ever now.
He had virtually fallen asleep when the inertial-guidance program warned him he was now falling behind the Madeeir. The manoeuvring-pack jets began to fire in a long, elaborate pattern, reducing his velocity and altitude again, sending him curving down behind the Madeeir.
Sam’s datavise: “... response from the flight computer ... photonic interface point ...”
Octal’s datavise: “... fission blade won’t work, the fucking hatch is monobonded carbon, I’m telling you ... Why don’t you listen, arsehole ...”
Sam’s datavise: “... little shit ... find his body ... chew on his bones ...”
The manoeuvring pack took Joshua behind the Madeeir, the ship a fuzzed pink outline a kilometre ahead of him. He could catch an intermittent view of it through the swirl of particles. Then he lowered his orbit again, a few hundred metres this time, and orbital mechanics reeled him in towards it with painful slowness.
His approach was conducted solely within its blind spot, a cone extending backwards from its reaction drive. All he had to do was keep the bulk of the engine bay between himself and the sensors protruding from the life-support module, and he would remain undetected, especially in the clutter of the Ruin Ring. He also had the advantage that they thought he was dead. They wouldn’t be looking, not for anything as small as a suit.
The last hundred metres were the worst. A quick burst of speed, rushing headlong into the twin pits of the reaction-drive nozzles. If they started up now ...
Joshua slid between the two fat bell-shapes, and anchored himself on the maze of thrust-distribution struts. The rockets were similar in principle to the engines in his spaceplane, though he didn’t know the marque. A working fluid (usually a hydrocarbon) was pumped into an energizer chamber where it was heated to about seventy-five thousand degrees Kelvin by a colossal discharge from the power cells. It was a simple system, with few moving parts, little to go wrong, and cheap to maintain.
Scavengers didn’t need anything more, the delta-V you needed to travel between Tranquillity and the Ruin Ring was small. Joshua couldn’t think of anyone who used a fusion drive.
He began to move around the gimbals, going hand over hand, careful not to jar his feet against anything. The power leads were easy to find, superconductor cables as thick as his arm. He fished round his belt for the fission knife. The ten-centimetre blade glowed a spectral yellow, unusually bright in the shade-soaked engine bay. It made short work of the cables.
Another quick climb brought him up against the hulking tanks. They were covered by a quilt of nultherm insulation blanket. He settled himself at the bottom of one tank, and stripped a patch of the insulation away. The tank itself was a smooth dull silver, merging seamlessly into the turbopump casing at its base. He jammed the thermal inducer into a support-strut joint, squirted on some epoxy to make sure it wouldn’t slip, and datavised a series of orders into its processor.
Ten minutes later, the processor switched on the thermal-induction field.
Joshua had programmed it to produce a narrow beam, ten centimetres wide, three metres long. Three-quarters of it was actually projected inside the tank, where it started to vaporize the hydrocarbon liquid. Frenzied currents churned, carrying more fluid into the field. Pressure built swiftly, rising to dangerous levels.
The metal shell of the tank wasn’t quite so susceptible to the field. Its molecular structure retained cohesion for almost twenty seconds before the sheer quantity of heat concentrated into such a small area disrupted the valency bonds. The metal turned malleable and began to bulge outwards, impelled by the irresistible pressure mounting inside the tank.
In the Madeeir’s cramped cabin, Sam Neeves widened his eyes in horror as datavised alarms shrilled in his brain. Complex ship schematics unfurled across his consciousness, fuel sections a frantic red. Emergency safety programs sent a torrent of binary pulses into the engine bay. None of it made any difference to the rising pressure.
They were contingencies for malfunctions, he realized. This was something else, the tank was being subjected to a tremendous energy input. The trouble was external. Deliberate.
“Joshua!” he roared in helpless fury.
After operating for twenty-five seconds at maximum expenditure the thermal inducer’s electron matrix was exhausted. The field shut down. But the damage had been done.
The protuberance swelling from the tank was glowing a brilliant coral-pink. Its apex burst open. A fountain of boiling gas streaked out, playing across the engine bay. Thermal blankets took flight, whirling away; composite structures and delicate electronics modules melted, sending out spumes of incendiary droplets. Madeeir lurched forward, slewing slowly around its long axis as the rocketlike thrust of the erupting tank shoved against the hull.
“Holy shit,” Sam Neeves spat. “Octal! Octal, for Christ’s sake get back here!”
“What’s happening?”
“It’s Joshua, he’s fucked us. Get back here. The reaction control can’t keep her stable.”
Even as he said it the guidance data pouring into his mind showed the thruster clusters losing the battle to hold the ship level. He tried to activate the main drive, the only engines with the strength to compensate for the rogue impulse of the ruptured fuel tank. Dead.
A neural nanonic medical monitor program overrode his pacemaker, calming his frightened heart. Adrenalin buzzed in his head.
Sensors and control linkages from the engine bay were failing at an unbelievable rate. Large areas of the schematic in his mind were an ominous black. The shell section loomed large in the forward sensors.
Joshua watched from behind the relative safety of a boulder three hundred metres away. The Madeeir was starting to tumble like the universe’s largest drumstick. Sparkly gas spewed out of one end, tracing a wavering arc through space.
“We’re going to hit!” Sam Neeves datavised.
The Madeeir had already wobbled past the spaceplane, giving Joshua a nasty moment. Now it was careering towards the shell section. He held his breath.
It should have hit, he thought, it really should. But the rotation it had picked up saved it. Madeeir flipped over the edge of the polyp cliff as if it was on pivots, its life-support module no more than five metres from the surface. At that speed it would have been split open as though it was made of glass.
Joshua sighed as the gritty tension contracting every tendon drained away. They deserved death, but it would just have to wait now. He had other priorities. Like making sure he lived. At the back of his mind there was a phantom throbbing from his feet. His neural nanonics were reporting his blood was laced with toxins, probably some contamination from the burned flesh, too.
Madeeir raced onwards, deeper into the Ruin Ring. Already two hundred metres beyond the shell section. The plume of gas was visibly weaker.
A small pearl-white mote curved over the edge of the shell section, chasing after the ship. Octal, desperate not to be stranded alone with a spaceplane he couldn’t open. If he’d stopped to think, he might have sabotaged Joshua’s craft.
Be thankful for small mercies, Joshua told himself.
The manoeuvring pack lifted him from his hiding place behind the boulder.
Its gas reserve was down to five per cent. Just enough to get back to the spaceplane. Although he would have found a way even if it was empty.
Somehow. Today he was fortune’s child.
Chapter 05
Like a fool Quinn Dexter had been waiting for the jolt, a blink of cold emptiness which would tell him the voyage had actually taken place. It hadn’t happened, of course. The crewman had tugged him into the coffin-sized zero-tau pod, one of thousands arranged in a three-dimensional lattice within the col
onist-carrier starship’s vast life-support capsule. Unfamiliar with free fall, and hating the disorientating giddiness every motion brought, Quinn had meekly allowed himself to be shoved about like he was so much cargo. The cortical-suppressor collar pinching his neck made any thoughts of escape a pitiful fantasy.
Right up until the moment the pod cover had hinged smoothly over him he refused to believe it was happening, clinging to the notion that Banneth would pull strings and get him off. Banneth was plugged into Govcentral’s State of Canada administration as deep as a high magus in a virgin. One word, one nod of her head, and he would be free once more. But no. It hadn’t happened. Quinn, it seemed, wasn’t important enough. There were hundreds of eager waster boys and girls in the Edmonton arcology who even now would be vying to replace him, hungry for Banneth’s attention, her bed and her smile, a place in the Light Bringer sect’s hierarchy. Youths with verve, with more style than Quinn. Youths who would strut rather than sweat when they were carrying Banneth’s cargo of weird persona-sequestrator nanonics into Edmonton. Who wouldn’t be dumb enough to try and run when the police stopped them at the vac train station.
Even the police had thought Quinn was crazy for doing that, laughing as they hauled his twitching stunned body back to Edmonton’s Justice Hall.
The carton had self-destructed, of course, an internecine energy flare reducing the nanonics to indecipherable clusters of crumbling molecules.
The police couldn’t prove he was carrying anything illegal. But the charge of resisting arrest was good enough for the magistrate to slap an Involuntary Transport order on him.
Quinn had even tried giving the sect’s sign to the crewman, the inverted cross, fingers squeezing so tight his knuckles had whitened. Help me! But the man hadn’t noticed, or understood. Did they even have Light Brother sects out amongst the stars?
The pod cover closed.
Banneth didn’t care about him, Quinn realized bitterly. God’s Brother, after the loyalty he’d shown her! The atrocious sex she had demanded from him. “My little Sunchild,” she had crooned as he penetrated and was penetrated. The pain he had pridefully endured at his initiation to become a sergeant acolyte. The weary hours spent on the most trivial sect business. Helping to recruit his own friends, betraying them to Banneth.
Even his silence after he was arrested; the beating the police had given him. None of it meant shit to Banneth. He didn’t mean shit to Banneth.
That was wrong.
After years bumming round as an ordinary waster kid, it had taken the sect to show him what he really was, an animal, pure and simple. What they’d done to him, what they’d made him do to others, it was liberation, freeing the serpent beast which lurked in the soul of every man. Knowing his true self was glorious. Knowing that he had the power to do what he wanted to others, simply because he chose to. It was a magnificent way to live.
It made the lower ranks obey, out of fear, out of respect, out of adoration. He was more than their chapter leader, he was their saviour.
As Banneth was his.
But now Banneth had abandoned him, because Banneth thought him weak. Or perhaps because Banneth knew his true strength, the conviction he had in himself. There were few in the sect who were as committed to worshipping the Night as Quinn. Had she come to see him as a threat?
Yes. That was more likely. The true reason. Everyone feared him, his purity. And by God’s Brother they were right to do so.
The pod cover opened.
“I’ll get you,” Quinn Dexter whispered through clenched teeth. “Whatever it takes, I’m coming after you.” He could see it then: Banneth violated with her own persona-sequestrator nanonics, the glittery black filaments worming their way through her cortex, infiltrating naked synapses with obscene eagerness. And Quinn would have the command codes, reducing mighty Banneth to a puppet made of flesh. But aware. Always aware of what she was being made to do. Yes!
“Oh, yeah?” a coarse voice sneered. “Well, cop this, pal.”
Quinn felt a red-hot needle jab up his spine pressing in hard. He yelped more with shock than pain, his back convulsing frantically, pushing him out of the pod.
The laughing crewman grabbed him before he hit the mesh bulkhead three metres in front of the pod. It wasn’t the same man that had put Quinn into the pod seconds before. Days before. Weeks ...
God’s Brother, Quinn thought, how long has it been? He gripped the mesh with sweaty fingers, pressing his forehead against the cool metal. They were still in free fall. His stomach oscillating like jelly.
“You going to put up a fight, Ivet?” the crewman asked.
Quinn shook his head weakly. “No.” His arms were trembling at the memory of the pain. God’s Brother, but it had hurt. He was frightened the neural blitz had damaged his implants. That would have been the final irony, to have got this far only for them to be broken. The two nanonic clusters the sect had given him were the best, high quality and very expensive.
Both of them had passed undetected in the standard body scan the police had given him back on Earth. They had to, possessing the biolectric pattern-mimic cluster would have qualified him for immediate passage to a penal planet.
Being entrusted with it was another token of the sect’s faith in him, in his abilities. Copying someone’s biolectric pattern so he could use their credit disk inevitably meant having to dispose of them afterwards. Weaker members might shirk from the task. Not Quinn. He’d used it on over seventeen victims in the last five months.
A quick status check revealed both the nanonic clusters were still functional. God’s Brother hadn’t deserted him, not entirely.
“Smart boy. Come on, then.” The crewman grabbed Quinn’s shoulder, and began to swim along the mesh with nonchalant flips of his free hand.
Most of the pods they passed were empty. Quinn could see the outlines of more pods on the other side of the mesh. The light was dim, casting long grey shadows. Looking round him he knew how a fly must feel crawling about inside an air-conditioning duct.
After the life-support module, there were a couple of long tubular corridors. Crewmen and colonists floated past. One family was clustered around a wailing four-year-old girl who clung to a grab hoop with a death-grip. Nothing her parents could say would make her let go.
They went through an airlock into a long cylindrical compartment with several hundred seats, nearly all of them occupied. Spaceplane, Quinn realized. He had left Earth on the Brazilian orbital tower, a ten-hour journey crammed into a lift capsule with twenty-five other Involuntary Transportees. It suddenly struck him he didn’t even know where he was now, nothing had been said about his destination during his fifty-second hearing in front of the magistrate.
“Where are we?” he asked the crewman. “What planet?”
The crewman gave him a funny look. “Lalonde. Why, didn’t they tell you?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, you could have copped a worse one, believe me. Lalonde is EuroChristian-ethnic, opened up about thirty years ago. I think there’s a Tyrathca settlement, but it’s mainly humans. You’ll do all right. But take my advice, don’t get the Ivet supervisor pissed at you.”
“Right.” He was afraid to ask what a Tyrathca was. Some kind of xenoc, presumably. He shuddered at that, he who had never ventured out of the arcologies or vac-train stations back on Earth. Now they were expecting him to live under open skies with talking animals. God’s Brother!
The crewman hauled Quinn down to the rear of the spaceplane, then took his collar off and told him to find a spare seat. There was a group of about twenty people sitting in the last section, most of them lads barely out of their teens, all with the same slate-grey one-piece jump suit he’d been issued with. IVT was printed in bright scarlet letters on their sleeves. Waster kids. Quinn could recognize them, it was like looking into a mirror which reflected the past. Him a year ago, before he joined the Light Brothers, before his life meant something.
Quinn approached them, fingers arranged casually in
the inverted cross sign. Nobody responded. Ah well. He strapped himself in next to a man with a pale face and short-cropped ginger hair.
“Jackson Gael,” his neighbour said.
Quinn nodded numbly and muttered his own name. Jackson Gael looked about nineteen or twenty, with the kind of lean body and contemptuous air that marked him down as a street soldier, tough and uncomplicated. Quinn wondered idly what he had done to be transported.
The PA came on, and the pilot announced they would be undocking in three minutes. A chorus of whoops and cheers came from the colonists in the front seats. Someone started playing a mini-synth, the jolly tune grating on Quinn’s nerves.
“Balls,” Jackson Gael said. “Look at ’em, they want to go down there. They actually believe in that New Frontier crap the development company has peddled them. And we’ve got to spend the rest of our lives with these dickheads.”
“Not me,” Quinn said automatically.
“Yeah?” Jackson grinned. “If you’re rich how come you didn’t bribe the captain, have him drop you off at Kulu or New California?”
“I’m not rich. But I’m not staying.”
“Yeah, right. After you finish your work-time you’re gonna make it as some hotshot merchant. I believe you. Me, I’m gonna keep my head down. See if I can’t get assigned to a farm for my work-time.” He winked. “Some good-looking daughters in this batch. Lonely for them out there in their little wilderness homesteads. People like you and me, they start looking at us in a better light after a while. And if you ain’t noticed yet, there ain’t many Ivet fems.”
Quinn stared at him blankly. “Work-time?”
“Yeah, work-time. Your sentence, man. Why, you think they were going to turn us loose once we hit the planet?”
“They didn’t tell me anything,” Quinn said. He could feel the despair opening up inside him, a black gulf. Only now was he beginning to realize how ignorant of the universe outside the arcology he truly was.
“Man, you must’ve pissed someone off bad,” Jackson said. “You get dumped on by a politico?”