There was a hoarse, mad voice bellowing, the sound of it torn at by the wind that moaned in across the salt marsh. Belatedly he realized it was his own, shouting at the insensate machines that wouldn’t do his bidding. Lante and Rani’s glitched words sounded sane by comparison. There were tears stinging the corners of his eyes. Everything had come to an end.
They were coming, of course. Baltiel turned to see them: Lante strode, bow-legged, smiling pleasantly, her face tilted away from the red-orange sun. Rani followed, lurching, occasionally going down on one knee amongst the rock-pools, ripping her clothes, gashing her skin, feeling none of it. Her smile was painfully wide, eyes likewise. They were calling his name.
We had such plans. But it wasn’t true, not in the end, not after that savage disconnection from all their pasts. They had been marking time ever since, writing reports for nobody, inventing pastimes to cover up the hollow emptiness inside. And now something had come to fill it. Perhaps Lante – this new puppet Lante – was right after all.
But something within him bucked at that. He was Yusuf Baltiel. He was his own man, singular, aloof. He was the leader. He was not led by the nose by some alien parasite.
He hefted the axe and waited for them to come closer.
9.
‘Disra? Disra, speak to me, please. I need to hear your voice.’
Disra Senkovi stared blankly at the interior of the Aegean’s crew quarters, wondering why he was there. He linked to the ship’s internal cameras and replayed his weaving progress, realizing he’d been drifting aimlessly from room to room for quite a while now. Probably he’d had some intent at the start, but that had fallen by the wayside long ago. In a sudden panic he called up a display of the key terraforming objectives, but everything was on target or even ahead of schedule. He knew that if he probed into the details of how those targets had been met, the details would be an impenetrable tangle of weird solutions, unintuitive, even contradictory on the surface, and yet all working together to make Damascus that much more habitable for Earth-based life. The last ice had gone from the poles, he’d seen – the big orbital mirrors had been yanked way out of position to focus the sun on the final gleam of it. One hundred per cent of the surface water was sufficiently oxygenated, and penetration went far enough that half the deep sea floor was liveable, too. The Aegean’s factories had been cracking asteroids brought in by its deteriorating fleet of remotes, and the debris had been shipped down the gravity well to where the Pauls and Salomes and the rest were busy building colonies, expanding their network of holes and tunnels around the various terraforming installations, creating cities. He hadn’t told them to do any of that, but nor had he stepped in to stop them. He had watched and watched, and at last he realized he was waiting for them to need him, for them to screw it up. And they hadn’t. And that meant they didn’t need him.
They still spoke to him, but he had a sense of the preoccupied now. He was just one point in their complex social calendars. When he called, at least some of them listened, but he characterized their manner as a sort of fond nostalgia for some childhood imaginary friend.
I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, he thought. Beyond Baltiel’s wishes, certainly. And he remembered that he’d been getting a battery of messages in the last minute or so, which had brought him back to himself. Am I in trouble, then?
‘Yusuf,’ he said, connecting and letting Baltiel’s image appear on the nearest screen. He hadn’t been down in the crew quarters for a long, long time. It was rattlingly empty there.
‘Disra, listen to me!’ Baltiel looked terrible: grey and haggard.
‘Are you . . . well?’ Senkovi asked leerily. Baltiel was crammed into the pilot seat of a shuttle, unshaven, wild-eyed, looking like he hadn’t washed in a month. ‘Is it Gav, has he—?’
‘Listen to me!’ Baltiel fairly shrieked. ‘He’s dead. Lante’s dead. Rani’s dead. Disra, it got them. It . . .’ Senkovi watched him visibly get a hold of himself. ‘Listen, don’t speak, just listen. The stuff that got into Lortisse, it infected him somehow. It got into his mind. It was controlling him, Disra. He wasn’t himself.’ A shudder and a sob wracked the Overall Commander, and that more than anything else kept Disra from interjecting. Baltiel had always been the iceman, harsh and distant and lacking in sentiment. This was not the same man. Broken, Disra thought numbly.
‘He attacked us. He got it into Lante and Rani, Disra. He infected them. And it was faster with them. The stuff was learning, I swear. It had worked out how to get at our biology, our neurology! I know how mad that sounds, but it’s true, you have to listen. It got to them. It took them all. They weren’t themselves. I swear they weren’t themselves in the end, Disra. Even though they sounded the same, even though they . . .’ Muscles twitched at the corners of Baltiel’s mouth as though he was forcing back vomit. ‘I had to kill them, Disra. I had to do it.’
Senkovi stared at the stains bespattering Baltiel’s filthy clothing. He had been about to ask why Baltiel had waited so long to pass on vital news, but the words fell away at this last revelation. Is that blood? Lortisse’s? Rani’s?
‘I’m sending you all the imagery from the habitat,’ Baltiel whispered. ‘Judge for yourself. I stand by what I did, even though I . . . though I did . . . what I did, what I . . . had to . . . Disra, this stuff is deadly. Keep away from Nod. There can’t be any more contact between us.’
‘I . . .’ And then Senkovi’s words dried up as he stuttered through the recording, now speeding up, now slowing down, now hearing familiar voices say abominable things. ‘Impossible,’ he got out, staring at the evidence that proved him a liar. And ‘Dead . . .?’ even though, was there any doubt of it? Was it something Baltiel would confess to as a joke?
‘I had to, Disra, we . . . there was no choice.’
It’s just you and me, thought Disra. The idea came to him, absurdly selfish, that Baltiel wouldn’t be fighting him over what happened to Damascus now. He shook it off, trying to feel the proper measure of grief and horror. It eluded him, though. He remembered how he had been hit by the other deaths – Skai and Han and the rest, and of course all of humanity as they knew it. That had struck home, but somehow this new tragedy was too big to deal with. Lante, Rani, Lortisse . . . couldn’t be dead, surely. Couldn’t be taken over by some alien infection and then dead, in quick succession. He hadn’t seen any footage from outside the habitat. He hadn’t seen Baltiel swing the axe. They weren’t dead.
Something had been nagging at him, something left over from his childish thought about Baltiel’s plans for Damascus, and something about the rapid exchange of their conversation. He picked at it, because that was easier than actually dealing with what he’d been told.
‘Yusuf,’ he said slowly. ‘You said there can’t be any more contact, because of the, because of the thing, the thing that happened.’
‘Yes,’ Baltiel agreed immediately. ‘This stuff, this parasite, Disra, it’s—’
‘Then why are you in a shuttle most of the way over here?’
‘I . . .’ There was a moment, then, when an absolute despair gripped Baltiel’s features, a realization that the most dreadful of fates had come to pass, irrevocable and forever, without him even knowing. And then it was gone, drowned in the bland stare that rose to consume it. ‘Because we’re going on an adventure.’