Hot, steaming water began to seep through the force field to splatter the pool area. The villa’s protective force field shone like a red dwarf sun that was being eaten by black cancers. Paula’s full field function scan was burning its way through the faltering dome. She could make out several weapons enrichments powering up in the Amazon women. But there was no sign of Troblum.
‘Where are you?’ she muttered. Another heavily enriched human was moving slowly inside the villa. Hard to pinpoint with the tormented force field still obstinately functional. Her field function still couldn’t locate Troblum, he must be deeper inside, possibly underground.
Lightning lashed down again. The combatbots added three proton laser strikes to the impact. It was too much. The force field collapsed in a devastating sonic shockwave that ripped the pool plants to shreds, sending a plume of smouldering leaves cascading up into the sodden sky. Windows burst apart, flinging long shards of glass across the paving slabs.
Paula swooped into the pool area as the downpour saturated the villa. The Amazon women fired a barrage of X-ray lasers and disruptor pulses at her. Jelly gun shots slashed harmlessly across her armour’s force field. She was puzzled by that. Surely Stubsy or whoever had blown apart the glide boat had stronger weapons that this?
‘Deactivate your enrichments right now,’ Paula commanded. The combatbots streaked through the deluge towards the women. Two of them fired at the hulking bots as they withdrew back into the villa. Paula pushed a disruptor pulse into one of the waterfall boulders just as the one in the bright green bikini left it to scamper through a ruined patio door. The boulder detonated into thousands of fragments which embedded themselves in the villa walls. ‘Halt,’ she yelled. But the women scattered inside what she took to be a long lounge. Again they were in a defensive formation. ‘Troblum, come out. I’m here at your invitation for heaven’s sake.’
Another fusillade of energy shots hammered into her force field. Dazzling purple static webs roared out from the impact points, vaporizing the rain pouring down her shoulders. Paula sighed, it was going to be difficult to neutralize the stupid women without damaging them. Her field function swept through the villa. The enriched person she’d spotted before was creeping along the back of the room the women were protecting. She still couldn’t locate Troblum.
‘Enough of this,’ Paula decided. The armour’s regrav lifted her off the ground, starting to power her forward. She fired a disruptor pulse, blasting apart the wall in front of her and half of the roof above, opening up the lounge. A cascade of debris came tumbling down along with the rain. The women dived for cover, immediately reorganizing their fire pattern.
The sensor remotes outside the villa reported something approaching the estate through the torrent of rain. A large craft, keeping very low, flying the same route as Troblum’s scooter out of the forest. His starship. Paula slowed abruptly, uncertain of the ship’s ability.
In front of her, yellow and purple petals of exotic energy erupted from the floor of the lounge. Eight of them, curving up like the jaws of some vicious predator. They swept past barely a metre from her armour, clashing together to form a broad column. It began to twist, the petals separating out again, stretching out towards her, elongating fast.
Paula’s suit regrav shoved at her violently, pushing her backwards as she gasped in shock. She and the three combatbots unleashed a torrent of firepower at the base of the exotic energy manifestation. Trying to kill the generator. The tip of exotic energy stroked the front of her armour’s force field. Weird warning symbols erupted across her exovision.
The ground exploded upwards.
Paula was flung high into the air above the villa, spinning out of control. For a second she thought she’d punctured the exotic energy generator. But the yellow spectres were still leaping around like flames in a hurricane. They lasted for a second before snuffing out.
Paula stabilized her tumbling flight fifty metres above the villa. When her sensors swept the scene below, she saw a huge crater had completely ruptured one side of the building. It was twenty metres wide, with walls of raw smouldering earth. The bottom was open, leading into some underground space. Twisted metallic wreckage lay everywhere.
‘Get here now,’ Paula ordered the Alexis Denken. She directed the three combatbots to attack the coordinate of the exotic energy generator. A lethal barrage of disruptor pulses and proton lasers lashed down, illuminating the broken villa with an incandescent nimbus far brighter than the lightning flaring overhead.
Paula was dropping fast now, anxious to escape any possible contact with the exotic energy. She’d been lucky before, but that generator was quite capable of caging her, suit and all. Someone was scrambling up out of the crater. Her field scan showed her a large person. Higher, with an integral force field that was barely functional.
‘Troblum,’ she broadcast.
He stumbled to a halt at the top of the crater. Head swinging round as if he were drunk.
The Alexis Denken broke surface and accelerated hard. Ten combatbots shot out of its forward hold to add their protective cover. And another craft was suddenly streaking in towards the villa at mach nine, slicing round the low surrounding hills in a cacophony of brutalized air.
Paula touched down on a patch of muddy soil that minutes before had been a pleasant herbaceous border. The first starship had reached the crater, its profile a classic rocketship cone with eight radial forward-swept tailfins. Its nose dipped down towards Troblum, an airlock irising open.
‘Stop,’ Paula told him. Then her field function showed her another figure emerging out of the ground into the ruins of Florac’s villa. This one was glowing white, completely impervious to any field scan. Paula instinctively ignored Troblum, knowing she was now confronting the real threat. They faced each other across the steaming remains of the swimming pool.
The Alexis Denken came thundering through the monsoon surrounded by its entourage of combatbots. It halted behind Paula, hovering a couple of metres off the ground, and extended its force field to envelop her. Enough firepower to vaporize a medium-sized city focused on the lambent figure standing calmly inside the shattered walls. Troblum vanished inside his starship’s airlock, and the craft swung through ninety degrees to point at the storm clouds. Then the third starship arrived. Paula expected it to fire on Troblum’s ship. But instead it took up position behind the white figure, mirroring Paula and the Alexis Denken. Troblum’s ship accelerated upwards at twenty-five gees. The Alexis Denken reported a great deal of powerful weapon systems in the interloper’s starship were powered up.
‘Marius, is that you?’ Paula asked.
The white figure pointed. Somehow Stubsy Florac had survived the carnage. He was crawling over the smashed wooden floorboards, blood seeping from dozens of lacerations.
‘Damn it,’ Paula hissed. If she slugged it out with her opponent the outcome was uncertain. ANA had equipped her well, but the Faction whose representative she was obviously facing had a pretty formidable arsenal, too. If she won, she’d never know who was challenging her, and through her ANA, so brazenly. There would be nothing left of the vanquished except a dispersing ion swarm. And whoever won, it would mean the certain bodyloss of Stubsy Florac, and probably his death. There might even be more survivors hidden in the villa’s wreckage; he did have several of the stupid Amazon bodyguards. Despite all the traits and qualities she had cast off over the centuries, her certainty of right and wrong remained absolute. She, Paula Myo, did not have the right to put civilians in danger, even civilians as repugnant as Florac. Her place in the universe was to uphold the law. However inconvenient Florac was at this moment, she could not risk allowing him to come in harm’s way.
In any case, Florac would be a valuable witness. An opponent such as a Faction was best dealt with by ANA, not herself and a representative clashing in this fashion.
She stood still, staring at the cold glowing figure on the other side of the pool. Her field scan probed at the lustrous force field, but couldn??
?t find a single flaw. One thing: it wasn’t Marius – too short.
The white figure was drawn up into its starship. A hand was raised in a mocking wave. A silly wiggle of the hips and then the airlock closed, cutting off the shining aurora. The starship slid smoothly into the storm clouds, creating a dark whorl as it vanished into the stratosphere. Paula used the sensors on the Alexis Denken to track it as far as possible. The stealth effect came on when it was clear of the ionosphere. There was a minute quantum signature which the smartcore could just detect as it accelerated high above the equator, then it must have dropped into hyperspace. The finest sensors ANA could devise picked up a tiny disturbance among the quantum fields which indicated an ultradrive. Then there was nothing.
Paula put her lips together and whistled a long single note. The combatbots hovering above the villa showed her Stubsy Florac writhing in agony on his decimated wooden flooring. She hurried over in time to see strange grey growths blooming from his mouth and nose.
Her u-shadow opened a link directly to his macrocellular clusters. ‘Florac? Can you receive this?’
The furry grey substance was emerging from his eyes.
‘Who was it, Florac? Do you know who did this?’
The only reply that came down the link was a burst of white noise.
‘Okay, I’m getting you into a medical chamber. My ship has the best in the Commonwealth. You’ll be fine.’ She picked him up and flew straight into the airlock, ordering the smartcore to initiate level one decontamination procedures. She really didn’t like the look of the grey fungal stuff.
‘Hang on in there, Florac, you’ll be okay. You stay with me, understand?’
It only took her a few seconds to get to the cabin, but he was convulsing by the time she lowered him into the coffin-sized medical chamber. The steel-sheen malmetal top closed fluidly over him.
A scan revealed that the grey substance had invaded his entire body, consuming and corrupting every organ. It had twined itself round his nerves, not damaging them, but embracing them. Paula watched the read-outs in disgust and dismay as the intruder fed a continuous stream of impulses into every nerve fibre in Florac’s body. Fronds inside his brain stimulated selected neural pathways to ensure his consciousness remained intact.
There wasn’t enough of his original flesh left for the medical chamber to sustain. As Paula watched, Florac died in as much agony as it was possible for a human nervous system to conduct.
‘Extract his memorycell,’ she ordered the medical chamber. But even that wasn’t possible, the grey fronds had gnawed away at the memorycell, breaking it apart. She reviewed the read-outs with growing alarm. The grey stuff seemed to be some kind of biononic viral, capable of breaking down both organic and inorganic compounds. It was already seeping into the instruments and manipulators interfaced with Florac’s body, transforming them into more of itself, an effect inching into the casing of the medical chamber.
‘Hell!’ she grunted. The Alexis Denken shot out of the atmosphere to an altitude of five thousand kilometres, then ejected the entire medical chamber. It tumbled away from the starship, sunlight glinting off its bright metal and plastic surfaces. Paula swept a powerful gamma-ray laser through it several times, making sure every molecule of the viral was disassociated, then finished it off with a single disruptor pulse. The now white-hot slag of the medical chamber burst apart in a sparkling swarm of effervescence.
Several ground-based sensor systems locked on to the Alexis Denken. The smartcore received identification demands from every city on the planet. Paula simply ignored them, and flew back down to the villa again.
The combatbots were circling overhead as the monsoon continued to soak the rubble. Long rivulets gurgled along the cracked paving, thick with scum and powdery mud. Paula’s armour boots splashed through them as she made her way cautiously to the crater. The torn earth walls were mildly radioactive. Spybots swooped down to scan the remnants of the underground chamber. The first thing they detected amidst all the charred plastic and warped metal was the burned body. It appeared to be another of Florac’s bodyguards. Then they picked up the signature of the grey substance. There was a patch clinging to a chunk of fractured rock. Its edges rippled as it sought to grow.
‘Damnit,’ Paula swore. There was nothing for it. She called two of the combatbots down, and began a systematic sterilization of the site using gamma-lasers. That was when she called ANA. ‘Things are getting a little crazy out here,’ she confessed.
‘The Accelerators must be desperate to keep Troblum silenced.’
‘No. That’s not what happened here.’ Paula was standing in the remnants of the lounge, using her field scan on the broken fragments of the exotic matter generator. There wasn’t much left, and she was fairly certain her own firepower hadn’t been wholly responsible. It had self-destructed at some point during the fight. ‘Whoever was here could have eliminated him the second he turned up. They didn’t. They wanted to use him as bait for me. This exotic matter system was intended to capture me. It’s an extremely elaborate trap. Someone went to a lot of trouble. I got lucky Troblum’s ship arrived when it did, another second and I would have been engulfed.’
‘You have acquired a great many enemies over the years.’
‘Yes, but this one has the backing of a Faction. They had an ultradrive ship effectively equal to the Alexis Denken, they had this revolting viral, and they knew I was coming to meet with Troblum. Logically, they must be allied with the Accelerators, yet they didn’t eliminate Troblum. Who would the Accelerators possibly turn to at this point, who then wouldn’t do what they needed most and silence Troblum? It’s not logical. This person certainly doesn’t seem to have any moral qualms about killing anyone. And I was obviously intended for the torture chamber, or some variant.’ Even as she said it, a really bad feeling was growing in her mind. She remembered that ridiculous wiggle which the glowing white figure had performed as it ascended into the starship. There was certainly one person who would fit the bill – but that wasn’t possible. She was very definitely in suspension, and had been for over nine hundred years. Of course, if anyone had the ability to break her out, it would be a Faction . . . ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ she whispered. But the Accelerators were becoming increasingly arrogant. And they had been planning their moves for decades.
‘What do you intend next?’ ANA asked.
Paula stared round at the rain-sodden area as the lightning flickered again. ‘I need a full forensic examination here. It’s a long shot, but if there’s anything that will tell us where the exotic matter cage was built and by whom, I need to know.’
‘I will dispatch a team immediately.’
‘Thank you. I’m going to investigate Troblum a little closer. I need to work out where he’s gone. There’s nothing else I can do until Oscar snags the Second Dreamer for us.’
‘As you wish.’
Paula looked up into the wild clouds, wishing she could see the stars. ‘Any change on the devourment phase?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Will you be able to survive it?’
‘I don’t know. What will you do?’
‘Ultimately? If it can’t be stopped. I’m not sure. The High Angel will take me to another galaxy if I want. But right now we need to prevent our dear species from making things any worse.’
*
Araminta didn’t sleep the whole night long. How could she?
No, she’d said.
No to the Skylord. No to the entity that was offering to guide a goodly portion of humanity to what they regarded as their nirvana.
No. Said because: I’m the Second Dreamer.
It’s me. Me!
Oh, Ozzie, please help me. This simply cannot be.
Me, she kept turning that over and over. How could it be me? Because of some distant ancestor she’d never even heard of until the other day, this Mellanie and her friendship with the Silfen. All that, all those unknowns from centuries ago had come pressing down on her, had taken away her des
tiny, her self-determination. Fate had chosen her.
Me!
And now the millions, the billions, of Living Dream followers would look to her to help them join with the Skylord. And she’d said no.
The Skylord had been surprised. Shocked, even. She’d felt that wounded astonishment linger as she withdrew her mind from contact. That wasn’t an answer which fitted its reality. She might just as well have said no to gravity for all the sense it made.
What she’d done terrified her. But it was instinctive. She didn’t want to be the Second Dreamer. Just hours before the contact she’d decided her future after days of soul-searching and self-discovery. She was going to be Mrs Bovey(s). She was going to get herself more bodies and become multiple. And they’d live here in this grand house, or a new one she’d build, equally delightful. And half of their bodies would be in bed together the whole time. She would make him as happy as he made her. And the future would be bright and lovely and full of promise. There might be children. What kind of children did multiples have? Did he want them? They’d never talked about any of this yet. So much was waiting for her out there in the years to come, so many discoveries. So much joy.
Of course she’d said no. What else could she say?
I will not be a part of that. That is not me.
Billions wanted it to be. They were going to insist.
But they will never know who I am. I will never talk to the Skylord again.
That was the decision she’d made when dawn came to the sky outside the bedroom. She was wretchedly tired, and shaking. There were dried tears on her cheeks from the quiet sobbing in the lonely hours as gentle rain had pattered against the window. But she knew her mind now. She would stand firm.
On the big bed beside her the blond teenage Mr Bovey lay on his back with a slight frown, mouth twitching as he dealt with a sour dream.
Nothing as bad as mine, she told him silently. He too would never know, she decided, the burden would be too much. This will end. Eventually. I will endure and ride it out.