Assuming they did pass.
Roger and Nectarblossom walked along a grey-carpeted central corridor, wide and tastefully lit and scented, trailed by twenty-four hopeful Haxigoji of both sexes, dressed in the dark sleeveless jackets and breeches that served as tac uniforms, giving off a faint odour of excitement that even Roger had learned to recognise. To Nectarblossom, the scent would be anything but faint, he guessed. Then he stopped, and the recruits did likewise as Nectarblossom walked on to check the testing area.
‘All right.’ He turned to face them. ‘Good luck, everyone. We’ll call you in one by one. The exit from the testing-area is on the other side, where you’ll meet up afterwards. You can do it.’
Amber eyes with horizontal slits were fastened on him. Several Haxigoji nodded: a learned human gesture.
‘Crisp,’ he added, ‘you’ll be first. Two minutes, and we start.’
Then he strode ahead, passed through unfolding security doors, nodded to the two heavily armed Pilots on guard – there were half a dozen others stationed at sensible locations – and passed through to what had been a viewing gallery. The entire wall to his right formed a window on space, opposite a relaxation area on the left, now transformed into a series of seven open-fronted cells. Each cell’s opening glowed dull orange: inbuilt weaponry ready to blast any person or thing that tried to pass through.
Inside each cell was a single captive; and the central cell was occupied by a Pilot called Morik, the one captured on Göthewelt. He sat pale and glowering, darkness lapping strongly around him. A smartmiasma guarded him, sensitive to his biochemistry, ready to respond to a build-up of adrenaline, satanin or other precursor to physical action.
The teams of guards were highly trained, with careful procedures ensuring only one prisoner was on the move at a time. With Roger and Nectarblossom present, there was the added advantage that any change in the quality of darkness would be apparent to them. And also to the recruits they were about to test, they hoped.
Cells two and five contained guards who had been ‘volunteered’ to act as prisoners; the recruits were expected to detect their freedom from dark influence.
‘Time to start,’ said Nectarblossom, and summoned Crisp.
Crisp was tall even among Haxigoji, straight-shouldered as he walked to the first cell, stopped and considered the enemy for a few moments, moved to the second – this time a twitch of those shoulders indicated his amusement at the deception – and on to the next cell and the next. The prisoners this time were well-behaved, or rather subdued – during the two earlier tests, some had become aggressive – and when Crisp stopped before the cell containing Morik, he seemed rapt in concentration due to Morik being a darkness-controlled Pilot rather than ordinary human.
It took Roger over five seconds to realise that something was going wrong.
Shit!
Crisp shuddered as the darkness entered him.
‘Shut him down!’ Roger shouted. ‘Shut Morik down!’
One of the guards gestured, and in his cell, Morik collapsed. But that did nothing to stop Crisp falling back onto the deck, where a tremendous shaking took hold of him, limbs thumping in some awful response to the twists of darkness around his head, and how could anyone prevent such an infiltration? If Crisp became a creature of the darkness then what did that mean for—?
Stillness.
The change had happened so fast.
‘We will honour him,’ came softly from Nectarblossom’s torc.
‘What?’ said Roger.
Those amber eyes were matt-looking, no longer lustrous. Medical scanners opened up holo phase spaces all around, with textual annotations explaining the readings’ significance, summed up by three words: Crisp was dead.
When Roger looked up, he realised that all of the cells’ occupants were unconscious, including the two unfortunate volunteers. Guards swarmed, taking up new positions. Total lockdown.
‘I’m sorry, Nectarblossom.’ Roger did not know what else to say.
Morik had been careful, setting up whatever process he had used – perhaps it was similar to the way the Anomaly spread, perhaps it was something else: Admiralty analysts would be poring over data from the smartmiasma and other devices here – and aiming to influence one of the Haxigoji rather than a human, either because he thought the guards would be less likely to suspect what was happening, or because for the process to work, the intended target had to be an individual naturally sensitive to the darkness.
That latter seemed more likely to Roger. He was trained to continue thinking while danger or potential danger threatened, but all the while, sour regret and mourning swirled through him. He had been with these recruits for half a standard year, and liked them all no matter how tough he was with them, and Crisp had been one of the best.
Nectarblossom’s huge double-thumbed hand clasped Roger’s shoulder.
‘I’ll tell the others the test is cancelled,’ she said. ‘And explain why.’
She went off, ceremonial tabard rustling against the silk garments beneath, dressed for a different kind of eventuality to this tragedy, poor Crisp’s body lying sightless on the deck.
There’s always another way to look at things.
Dad had drilled that dictum into him. When you had good reason to mourn, you must mourn: using cognitive techniques to bypass such a process would make one inhuman. But in perspective shifts lie the possibility of future resolution: as a heuristic, there are always three ways (or more) to view a situation.
Crisp was dead, and Roger would mourn him.
You were a good person.
And if Roger could find a way to kill Morik undetected, he would do that too.
You were—
He realised what his subconscious had already noticed, the reason he had remembered Dad’s words about perspective shifts: because Crisp’s death had another implication.
The Haxigoji could not be suborned by the darkness.
Better than human.
If they could not fight it off, they reacted at a deep cellular level – the evidence was in the shifting, coloured holo images surrounding Crisp’s body – shutting down all the way into death.
Roger would have to fly to Labyrinth.
But first he summoned the most experienced of the team leaders, explained his thinking about Crisp, and told her to pass the word on to the others, because if something happened to him, this news needed to reach the Admiralty.
Then he braced himself for the painful part: rejoining Nectarblossom and the remaining recruits. For even with the strategic importance of what he had learned, these were his people and he had to mourn with them.
THIRTY
EARTH, 1956 AD
Gavriela punished Rupert by insisting they meet at Imperial, where they sat in a lecture theatre in the Huxley building listening to her friend Jane talk about warfare among ants, Jane’s words being illustrated with bizarre and gruesome colour slides. The point was that Rupert wanted Gavriela to debrief while she wanted to go to Oxford to pick up Carl – she had flown into Heathrow from Tempelhof late last night – so she compromised by agreeing to talk but refusing to go to Headquarters on Broadway.
Rupert sat with elegant legs crossed, his trousers steam-pressed with knife-edge creases, and gave every sign of enjoying Jane’s lecture, which had not been Gavriela’s intention.
Several slides showed African termites, globitermes sulfureus, squirting sticky yellow fluid from their mouths. ‘They eject the nasty stuff,’ Jane told the audience, ‘pumped from two dorsal glands, and it snags up enemy soldier termites. The termites doing the ejecting are tangled up with the enemy. Guess what they do then?’
A few grins showed among the biologists, while most of those from other disciplines looked intrigued, then half-amused, half-horrified when Jane pushed the next slide into projector. The camera had caught the termites in mid-explosion, fluid and guts everywhere.