A voice from nowhere said: “We can stop it.”
The liquid detonated into his lungs. He could feel it, hot and rancid inside his chest, swelling out to invade every delicate cavity. His ribcage heaved at the alien pressure from within. He had stopped struggling.
“She’ll kill you unless you let us help. She’s drowning you.”
He wanted to breathe. He wanted air. He would do anything to breathe. Anything.
“Then let us in.”
He did.
Using the sensitive cells in the polyp above Anders Bospoort’s bed, Dariat watched as the injuries and manifestations reversed themselves. Marie’s glutinous skin hardened, bristles retracting. The wounds down Anders Bospoort’s abdomen closed up. They became what they were before: satyr and seraph.
Anders began to stroke himself, hands tracing lines of muscle across his chest. He looked down on his body with a childlike expression of awe which swiftly became a broad grin. “I’m magnificent,” he whispered. “Utterly magnificent.” The accent was different to Anders’ usual. Dariat couldn’t quite place it.
“Yes, you look pretty good,” she replied indifferently. She sat up. The sheets were stained a faint pink below her back.
“Let me have you.”
Her mouth wrinkled up with indecision.
“Please. You know I need to. Hell, it’s been seven hundred years. Show a little compassion here.”
“All right then.” She lay back down. Anders started to lick her body, reminding Dariat of a feeding dog. They fucked for twenty minutes, Anders rutting with a fervour he’d never shown in any of his fleks. Electric lights and household equipment went berserk as they thrashed about. Dariat quickly checked the neighbouring apartments; a stimulant-program writer was yelling in frustration as his processors crashed at tremendous speed; a clone merchant’s vats seethed and boiled as regulators fried the fragile cell clusters which they were wired up to. Doors all around the vestibule opened and shut like guillotines. He had to launch a flurry of subversive affinity orders into the floor’s neural cells to prevent the local personality subroutines from alerting Rubra’s principal consciousness.
When he arrived, puffing heavily, outside the apartment, Marie and Anders Bospoort were getting dressed. He used a black-market customized processor block to break the door’s codelock, and walked straight in.
Marie and Anders looked up in alarm. They ran out of the bedroom. The processor block died in Dariat’s hand and the apartment was plunged into pitch darkness.
“The dark doesn’t bother me,” he said loudly. The sensitive cells showed him the two of them were walking towards him menacingly.
“Nothing will bother you from now on,” Marie replied.
The belt of his toga robe began to tighten round his belly. “Wrong. Firstly you won’t be able to tyrannize me like you did poor old Anders, I’m not that weak. Secondly, if I die Rubra will see exactly what’s been going on, and what you are. He might be crazy, but he’ll fight like a lion to defend his precious habitat and corporation. Once he knows you exist you’ve lost ninety per cent of your advantage. You’ll never take over Valisk without my help.”
The lights came back on. His belt loosened. Marie and Anders regarded him with expressionless faces.
“It’s only thanks to me he doesn’t know already. You obviously don’t understand much about bitek. I can help there as well.”
“Perhaps we don’t care if he knows,” Anders said.
“OK, fine. You want me to lift the limiter orders I put on this floor’s sensitive cells?”
“What do you want?” Marie asked.
“Revenge. I’ve waited thirty years for you. It’s been so long, so very tiring; I nearly broke on more than one occasion. But I knew you would come in the end.”
“You expected me?” she asked derisively.
“What you are, yes.”
“And what am I?”
“The dead.”
Chapter 04
Gemal emerged from its jump six hundred and fifty thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, where the gas giant’s gravity anchored it in a slightly elliptical orbit; Tranquillity, in its lower circular orbit, was trailing by two hundred thousand kilometres. Oliver Llewelyn, the colonist-carrier’s captain, identified his starship to the habitat personality, and requested approach and docking permission.
“Do you require assistance?” Tranquillity asked.
“No, we’re fully functional.”
“I don’t get many colonist-carrier vessels visiting. I thought you might have been making an emergency maintenance call.”
“No. This flight is business.”
“Does your entire passenger complement wish to apply for residency?”
“Quite the opposite. The zero-tau pods are all empty. We’ve come to hire some military specialists who live here.”
“I see. Docking and approach request granted. Please datavise your projected vector to spaceport flight control.”
Terrance Smith datavised a sensor access request into the starship’s flight computer, and watched the massive bitek habitat growing larger as they accelerated towards rendezvous in a complex manoeuvre at two-thirds of a gee. He opened a channel to the habitat’s communication net, and asked for a list of starships currently docked. Names and classifications flowed through his mind. A collation program sorted through them, indicating possibles and probables.
“I didn’t realize this was such a large port,” he said to Oliver Llewelyn.
“It has to be,” the captain replied. “There are at least five major family-owned civil carrier fleets based here purely because of the tax situation, and most of the other line companies have offices in the habitat. Then you’ve got to consider the residents. They import one hell of a lot; everything you need to live the good life, from food to clothes to pretentious art. You don’t think they’ll eat the synthesized pulp the starscrapers grow, do you?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“A lot of ships pick up contracts for them, bringing stuff in from all over the Confederation. And of course Tranquillity is the Confederation’s principal base for blackhawk mating flights now Valisk is falling from favour with the captains. The eggs gestate down in the big inner ring. It all adds together. The Lords of Ruin have built it into one of the most important commercial centres in this sector.”
Terrance looked across the bridge. Seven acceleration couches were arranged in a petal pattern on its composite decking, and only one of them was empty. The compartment had an industrial look, with cables and ducts fixed to the walls rather than being tucked neatly out of sight behind composite panels. But then that was a uniform characteristic throughout the Gemal and her sister ships which shuttled between Earth and stage one colony worlds. They were bulk carriers whose cargo happened to be people, and the line companies didn’t waste money on cosmetic finishes.
Captain Llewelyn was lying inertly on his acceleration couch, surrounded by a horseshoe of bulky consoles; a well-built sixty-eight-year-old oriental with skin as smooth as any adolescent. His eyes were shut as he handled the datavise from the flight computer.
“Have you been here before?” Terrance asked.
“I stopped over two days, that was thirty-five years ago when I was a junior officer in a different company. Don’t suppose it’s changed much. Plutocrats put a lot of stock in stability.”
“I’d like you to talk to the other captains for me, the independent trader starships we want to hire. I haven’t exactly done this kind of work before.”
Oliver Llewelyn snorted softly. “You let people know what kind of flight you’re putting together, then start flashing that overloaded Jovian Bank credit disk around, and you’ll be beating them off with a stick.”
“What about the mercenaries and general troops?”