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 couldnt open. If hed stopped to think, he might have sabotaged Joshuas 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 fortunes 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 hadnt 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 colonist-carrier starships 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 Govcentrals 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 hadnt happened. Quinn, it seemed, wasnt 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 Banneths attention, her bed and her smile, a place in the Light Bringer sects hierarchy. Youths with verve, with more style than Quinn. Youths who would strut rather than sweat when they were carrying Banneths cargo of weird persona-sequestrator nanonics into Edmonton. Who wouldnt 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 Edmontons Justice Hall. The carton had self-destructed, of course, an internecine energy flare reducing the nanonics to indecipherable clusters of crumbling molecules. The police couldnt 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 sects sign to the crewman, the inverted cross, fingers squeezing so tight his knuckles had whitened. Help me! But the man hadnt noticed, or understood. Did they even have Light Brother sects out amongst the stars?
The pod cover closed.
Banneth didnt care about him, Quinn realized bitterly. Gods Brother, after the loyalty hed 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 didnt 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 theyd done to him, what theyd 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 Gods Brother they were right to do so.
The pod cover opened.
Ill get you, Quinn Dexter whispered through clenched teeth. Whatever it takes, Im 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 wasnt the same man that had put Quinn into the pod seconds before. Days before. Weeks ...
Gods 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. Gods 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 sects faith in him, in his abilities. Copying someones 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. Hed used it on over seventeen victims in the last five months.
A quick status check revealed both the nanonic clusters were still functional. Gods Brother hadnt deserted him, not entirely.
Smart boy. Come on, then. The crewman grabbed Quinns 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 didnt even know where he was now, nothing had been said about his destination during his fifty-second hearing in front of the magistrate.