“Such a worrier, Miss Kelly.” Shaun smiled congenially.
The hovercraft swerved, pushing her against him—for the briefest second the channel to her sensorium flek recorder block dropped out—and he smiled politely as they righted themselves. “You mean I shouldn’t be worrying?”
“Now I never said that. But worry is the Devil’s disciple, it rots the soul.”
“Well, you’d certainly be the one to know all about souls.”
Shaun chuckled softly.
Kelly glanced up at the red cloud. They had been under it for half an hour now. It was thicker than it had been yesterday, its constituent tresses twirling sluggishly. Somehow she was aware of its weight, a heaviness necessary to blot out not just the sight of space but the physical laws governing existence. A complex intertwining of associated emotions defeated her, as though she was sensevising some obscure xenoc ceremony. “That cloud means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” she asked.
“Not the cloud itself, Miss Kelly, that’s nothing, but what it represents, yes. That’s like seeing your aspirations take form. To me, to all of us damned souls, it means freedom. A precious commodity when you’ve been denied it for seven hundred years.”
Kelly switched her attention to the second hovercraft, with Horst Elwes and Russ sitting on the bench behind Ariadne, faces ploughed up against the biting slipstream wind. Cannonades of thunder thrashed overhead, as if the cloud was the taut skin of some gigantic drum. She saw Russ push himself closer against the priest. The simple act of trust was immensely poignant.
The privation dropped upon Shaun Wallace without the slightest warning. He experienced the dreadful exodus, the flight of souls expelled from the universe exerting a tidal force on his own precarious possession. Their lamentations and enmity spilled back from the beyond in that eerily pervasive chorus, and then came venomous anger of those who accompanied them on their expulsion, those they had possessed. All of them, preying on each other, hating each other. The conflict permeated his skull, wrenching at his thoughts. He gagged, eyes widening in shock. His face betrayed an emotion of uttermost despair, then he flung his head back and howled.
Reza never wanted to hear a cry like it again. The outpouring of anguish compressed into that one cataclysmic bawl spoke for an entire planet. Grief paralysed him, and loss, loss so profound he wanted the universe to end so he could be spared.
It finished as Shaun ran out of breath. Unsteadily, Reza twisted round on the front bench. Tears were streaming down the possessed man’s cheeks. He drew breath and howled again.
Kelly’s hands were clasped against her puckered lips. “What?” she wailed. “What is it?” Her eyes shut instinctively at the next outburst.
Reza tried to block it all out and project some comfort to Fenton and Ryall. “Pat?” he datavised. “Can Octan see anything happening?”
“Not a thing,” the second-in-command answered from the other hovercraft. “What’s going on? Wallace frightened the shit out of us.”
“I’ve no idea.”
Kelly shook Shaun’s arm imploringly. “What’s wrong? What is it? Speak to me!” Panic was giving her voice a shrill edge. “Shaun!”
Shaun gulped down a breath, his shoulders shivering. He lowered his head until he was staring at Reza. “You,” he hissed. “You killed them.”
Reza looked at him through a cross-grid of yellow target graphics, his forearm gaussrifle was aimed directly at the possessed man’s temple. “Killed who?”
“The city, the whole city. I felt them go, thousands upon thousands blown back to the beyond like so much ash. Your devil bomb, it went off. No, it was set off. What kind of creatures are you to slaughter so indiscriminately?”
Reza felt a grin reflex coming on, which his restructured face portrayed as a moderate widening of his mouth slit. “Someone got through, didn’t they? Someone hit back.”
Shaun’s head sagged brokenly. “One man. That’s all, one bloody man.”
“So you’re not so invincible, after all. I hope it pains you, Mr. Wallace, I hope it pains all your kind. That way you may begin to know something of the horror we felt when we found out what you did to this planet’s children.”
The flash of guilt on the man’s face proved the barb had hit home.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Wallace, we know. Even if Kelly here is too tactful to mention it. We know the barbarism we are dealing with.”
“What bomb?” Kelly asked. “What are you two talking about?”
“Ask him,” Shaun said, and sneered at Reza. “Ask him how he was intending to help the poor people of this planet he was hired to save.”
“Reza?”
The mercenary leader swayed as the hovercraft banked around a boulder. “Terrance Smith was concerned we might not get all the fire support we needed from the starships. He gave each team leader a nuke.”
“Oh, Christ.” Kelly looked from one man to the other. “Do you mean you’ve got one as well?”
“You should know, Kelly,” Reza said. “You’re sitting on it.”
She tried to jump to her feet, only to have Shaun grab her arm and keep her sitting.
“Have you learned nothing of him yet, Miss Kelly? There’s no human part left in that mockery of a body.”
“Point to your body, Mr. Wallace, the one you were born with,” Reza said. “After that I’ll talk morality and ethics with you all day long.”
They stared at each other.
Darkness began to fall. Kelly looked up to see the red light bleeding from the cloud, leaving behind a swollen slate-grey mantle massing sinisterly low overhead. A blade of purple-white lightning screwed down on the savannah to the east.
“What’s happening?” Kelly shouted as thunder crashed over the hovercraft.
“You are happening, Miss Kelly. They sense you. They fear and hate you now your true nature and power has been exposed. This is the last mercenary team left, you see. None of the others survived.”
“So what will they do?”
“Hunt you down, whatever the cost below the muzzles of your weapons.”
Two hours after Warlow had left Lady Mac Joshua was accessing the flight computer’s memory cores, looking for records of starships jumping from inside a Lagrange point. He and Dahybi had gone through the small amount of available data on Murora VII, using it to refine their computations of the Lagrange point’s size and position, locking the figures into the trajectory plot. He could pilot Lady Mac right into its heart—no doubt about that: now he wanted to know what would happen when the energy patterning nodes were activated. There was a lot of theory in the physics files about how it should be possible, but no actual verified ZTT jump.
Who’s going to be stupid enough to take part in an experiment like that? he asked himself. But he was lying on his acceleration couch, and Dahybi, Ashly, and Sarha were on the bridge with him, so he kept any qualms to himself. He was just wondering if there would be a reference in a history file, surely the ZTT pioneers would want to know the limits of their craft, when Aethra datavised him.
“Warlow wants to talk with you,” the habitat said.
He cancelled the link to the memory cores. “Hello, Warlow. How’s it going?”
“Superbly,” Warlow said.
“Where are you?” The cosmonik ought to be back on board in another twenty minutes if everything was running on schedule. Joshua had helped draw up the flight vector through the ring.
“Twenty kilometres from Gramine .”
“What?”
“I can see it.”
“Jesus shit, Warlow. What the fuck are you playing at? The schedule doesn’t have any margin for error.”