He hugged her, and her arms wrapped round his waist. “Don’t go, Daddy,” she whispered.
“I have to. It won’t be for long.”
She sniffed hard, and nodded. “I understand.”
He kissed Marjorie, ignoring the whistles and cheers which rang out from the carriages at the rear of the train.
“Now don’t you try and prove anything,” she said in that weary half-censorious way which meant she was scared to the core. So he said, “Of course I won’t, I’ll just sit in the command tent and let the youngsters get on with it.”
Marjorie put her arm around Louise as they waved the train out of the station. The platform was a solid mass of women with handkerchiefs flapping from frantic wrists. She wanted to laugh at how silly they must all look to the men on the train. But she didn’t because she was a Kavanagh, and must set an example. Besides, she might have started crying at the futility and stupidity of it all.
In the clear sky above, silver lights flashed and twisted as the navy squadron changed formation and orbital inclination so that Boston was always in range to one of their number.
Dariat was nerving himself up to commit suicide. It wasn’t easy. Suicide was the culmination of failure, of despair. Since the return of the dead from the realm of emptiness, his life had become inspiring.
He watched the couple make their cautious way down the starscraper’s fetid stairwell. Kiera Salter had done well seducing the boy, but then what fifteen-year-old male could possibly resist Marie Skibbow’s body? Kiera didn’t even have to enhance the physique she had possessed. She just put on a mauve tank top and a short sky-blue skirt and let nature wreak havoc on the boy’s hormone balance—as she had done with Anders Bospoort.
The monitoring sub-routine assigned to observe Horgan flowed through the neural cells behind the stairwell’s polyp walls, spreading out through the surrounding sectors to interface with the starscraper’s existing routines. An invisible, all-encompassing guardian angel. It was checking for threats, the possibility of danger. Horgan was another of Rubra’s myriad descendants. Cosseted, privileged, and cherished; his mind silently, stealthily guided into the correct academic spheres of interest, and bequeathed a breathtaking arrogance for one so young. He had all the hallmarks of conceit endemic to Rubra’s tragic protégés. Horgan was proud and lonely and foul tempered. A lanky youth with dark Asian skin, and giveaway indigo eyes, if his chromosomes had granted him the muscle weight to back up his narcissistic personality he would have been involved in as many fights as the young Dariat.
Naturally he admitted no surprise when Kiera/Marie confided her attraction to him. A girl like that was his due.
Kiera and Horgan stepped out of the stairwell onto the eighty-fifth-floor vestibule.
Dariat felt the monitoring routine flood into the apartment’s stratum of neural cells and interrogate the autonomic routines within, reviewing local memories. This was the crux. It had taken him two days to modify the apartment’s routines. None of his usual evasions had ever had to withstand examination by such a large personality sub-routine before, it was virtually sentient in its own right.
There was no alarm, no bugle for help to Rubra’s principal consciousness. The monitor routine saw only an empty apartment waiting for Horgan.
“They are coming,” Dariat told the others in Anders Bospoort’s bedroom. All three possessed were with him. Ross Nash who rode in Bospoort’s own body, a Canadian from the early twentieth century. Enid Ponter, from the Australian-ethnic planet Geraldton, dead for two centuries, who occupied Alicia Cochrane’s mortal form. And Klaus Schiller, possessing Manza Balyuzi’s body, a German who muttered incessantly about his Führer, and seemingly angered at having to take on an Asian appearance. The body was now markedly different to the image contained in his passport flek the day he disembarked from the Yaku . His skin was blanching; jet-black hair streaked with expanding tufts of fine blond strands; the gentle facial features shifting to rugged bluntness, eyes azure blue. He had even grown a couple of centimetres taller.
“And Rubra?” Enid Ponter asked. “Does he know?”
“My disruption routines have worked. The monitor can’t see us.”
Ross Nash looked slowly round the bedroom, almost as though he was sniffing a trace of some exotic scent in the air. “I sense it. Behind the walls, there is a coldness of heart.”
“Anstid,” Dariat said. “That’s what you sense. Rubra is just an aspect of him, a servant.”
Ross Nash made no attempt to hide his disgust.
None of them really trusted him, Dariat knew. They were strong enemies who had agreed a precarious truce because of the damage they could each inflict on the other. Such a stand-off could never last long. Human doubts and insecurities gnawed at such restraints, chafing at reasonableness. And the stakes on both sides were high, accelerating the devout need to see treachery in every hesitant breath and wary footstep.
But he would prove his worthiness as few had done before. Entrusting them with not merely his life, but his death as well. It was all so absurdly logical.
He needed their awesome powers of manifestation, and at the same time retain his affinity. Their power came from death, therefore he must die and possess a body with the affinity gene. So simple when you say it quick. And completely mad. But then what he had seen these last few days defied sanity.
Horgan and Kiera entered the apartment. They were kissing even as the door closed.
Dariat concentrated hard, his affinity strumming the new neural routines alive with a delicate harmony of deceit. The image of the twined figures was incorporated into one of them. An illusive fallacy; generated by a misappropriated section of the habitat’s neural cells massing ten times that of the human brain. Small in relation to the total mass of the neural strata, but enough to make the illusion perfect, giving the phantom Horgan and Kiera weight and texture and colour and smell. Even body heat. The sensitive cells registered that as they started to tug each other’s clothes off with the typical impatience of teenagers in lust.
Most difficult of all for Dariat to mimic was the constant flow of emotion and feeling Horgan emitted unconsciously into the affinity band. But he managed it, by dint of careful memory and composition. The monitor routine looked on with tranquil disinterest.
There was a split in Dariat’s mind, like alternative quantum-cosmology histories, two realities diverging. In one, Horgan and Kiera raced for the bedroom, laughing, clothes flying. In the other . . .
Horgan’s eyes blinked open in surprise. The kiss had delivered every promise her body made. He was primed for the greatest erotic encounter of his life. But now she was sneering contemptuously. And four other people were coming into the lounge from one of the bedrooms. Two of the men were huge, in opposite directions.
Horgan barely paid them any attention. He had heard of deals like this, whispered terrors amongst the kids in the day clubs. Snuffsense. The bitch had set him up as the meat they would rape to death. He turned, his leg muscles already taut.
Something—strange, like a hard ball of liquid—hit him on the back of the head. He was falling, and in the distance a choir of infernal angels was singing.
Dariat stood aside as Ross Nash hauled the semiconscious Horgan into the bedroom. He tried not to stare at the boy’s feet, they were floating ten centimetres in the air.
“Are you ready?” Kiera asked, her tone dripping with disdain.
He walked past her into the bedroom. “Do we get to screw afterwards?”
Dariat had favoured an old-fashioned capsule you swallowed rather than a transfusion pad or medical package. It was black—naturally—two centimetres long. He had acquired it from his regular narkhal supplier. A neurotoxin, guaranteed painless, she promised. As if he could complain if it wasn’t.