The iron ball whistled low over Chas’s boat with a backlash crack that set the insecure craft rocking, then splattered into the snowlily mush thirty metres away. Purple smoke and ten-metre magnesium flames squirted joyously into the air like a jumbo Roman candle.
Chas shunted round on his elbows, looking in disbelief at the chromatic blaze. The snowlilies started to melt away around his boat, lowering it into sparkling clear blue water. Whoops and catcalls wafted over the river from the shore. He twisted round.
Durringham with all of its white towers and onion-dome spires and lofty castles and lush hanging gardens formed a magnificent backdrop to the armada racing to collect him. There were Polynesian war canoes with flower-garlanded warriors digging their paddles into the clear water; rowing eights with lean young men sweating under the cox’s bellowed orders; triremes, their massed oars flashing in immaculate unison; Viking marauders sporting resplendent scarlet and gold sun-god sails; dhows whose lateens strained ahead of the fresh breeze; junks, sampans, ketches, sloops . . . and riding fast and proud out in front was a big three-masted buccaneer, its crew in striped shirts scrambling over the rigging. A quarter of the city’s population crowded the circular harbours (now ancient solid stone) cheering on their chosen team in a boisterous rollicking carnival atmosphere.
Chas gagged at the sight of it all; the nightmare dormant in every human brain the entire world is out to get me. The whole city was chasing him, wanted him, hated him. He was their new toy, the day’s amusement.
His body spasmed in massive quakes, implants faltering. Intolerable waves of pain from his leg crashed past the crumbling analgesic blocks. “Bastards!” he roared. “You shit-eating bastards. You don’t play with me. I am your enemy. I am not a joke. Fear me. Fear me, God damn you!”
A dainty ring of smoke puffed out of the buccaneer’s forward gun. Chas screamed, fury and terror in one incoherent blast of sound.
The cannon-ball hit the water ten metres away, sending up a sheet of steaming white water. Wavelets rushed out, slapping his boat.
“Bastards.” It wasn’t even a whisper. Adrenalin and nerves could do nothing more for him, he was devoid of strength. “I’ll show you. Freaks. Zoo people. I am not a joke.” Somewhere far away a soprano chorus was singing black canticles.
Chas datavised the activation code into the kiloton bomb strapped in its harness at his side. Good old faithful bomb. Stuck to him the whole time. That’ll wipe the smile off their faces.
Nothing happened, his neural nanonics had shut down. Pain was burning through him, leaving only numbness in its wake. Fingers scrabbled feebly at the bomb’s small manual control panel, prising open the cover. His head flopped to one side to follow the movement. He eventually managed to focus an optical sensor. The panel keyboard was dark, inert. It had failed. He had failed.
Almost forgotten natural tear glands squeezed out their very last drops as he slowly knocked a fist on the wooden planking in utter futility.
A couple of the triremes were gaining on the buccaneer. It was developing into a three-boat race, though one of the war canoes refused to give up, warriors pounding the water with their paddles, skin gleaming as though they were sweating oil. Back on the harbours the elated cheering mixed with songs and chants from across five millennia.
The buccaneer crew fired another cannon to terrorize their crushed victim.
“You won’t have me!” Chas cried in defiance. He put a hand on each gunwale and started to rock the boat as the cannon-ball’s wavelets broke against the hull. “Never. Never. I won’t be a part of it, not of you.”
Pain and numbness had gorged on his torso. His arms began to fail as the swaying reached a peak. Water slopped in over the narrow gunwale. The flimsy boat turned turtle, dumping him into the Juliffe. He saw bubbles churning past. The rumpled silver foil of the surface receded. Neural nanonics told him his lungs were filling with water. Pain diminished. His implants were working again. They couldn’t reach him under water, he was beyond them here. He focused every sensor he had on the bomb whose weight was dragging him down.
On shore the audience had stopped cheering when their prey (so unsportingly) capsized himself. A groan went up. He’d pay for that.
Boat crews stopped rowing and slumped over their oars, exhausted and angry. The buccaneer’s sails calmly rolled themselves up as the sailors hung like listless spiders in the rigging. They stared morosely at the tiny half-sunken boat bobbing about ahead of them.
Together Durringham’s possessed exerted their power. The river around the hull of Chas Paske’s boat began to ripple energetically.
“Hey look, it’s Moses!” someone yelled from the harbour wall. A laugh ran along the spectators. They clapped their hands and stomped their feet, a stadium crowd demanding their sporting hero appear. “Moses! Moses! Moses!”
The waters of the Juliffe parted.
Chas felt it happening. His surroundings were getting lighter, pressure was reducing. Below his fingers the bomb’s keyboard was a glowing ruby chessboard. He typed in the code, refusing to hurry, watching the numbered squares turn green. There was a loud gurgling sound building all around. Fast-conflicting currents sucked at him, twisting his lifeless legs about. Then the rucked surface came rushing down to seek him out. Too late.
The kiloton nuke detonated at the bottom of a twenty-metre crater in the river. Its initial blast pulse was punched straight up into the core of the transplanarity ferment raging above. A solar fireball arose from the water with splendid inevitability, and the entire river seemed to lift with it. Energy in every spectrum poured outwards, smashing solid matter apart. None of those lining the harbour wall really knew what was happening. Their stolen bodies disintegrated before the nerve impulses could reach the brain. Only after annihilation, when the possessing souls found themselves back in the bestial beyond, did the truth dawn.
Two seconds after the bomb exploded, a forty-metre wall of water moving at near-sonic speed slammed into Durringham. And the dead, ensconced in their beautiful new mansions and fanciful castles, died again in their tens of thousands beneath the usurping totem of the radiant mushroom cloud.
Chapter 12
With his enhanced retinas switched to full sensitivity it appeared as though Warlow was flying through a dry iridescent mist. Ring particles still crawled with wayward spurts of energy; micrometre dust flowed in slow streams around the larger boulders and ice chunks. Despite the shimmering phosphorescence he was basically flying blind. Occasionally he could catch a glimpse of stars flickering past his feet, short-lived embers skipping from an invisible bonfire.
After leaving the Lady Macbeth he had moved twelve kilometres out from Murora, an orbit which saw him falling behind the sheltering starship. The big dark sphere, upper hull glinting in the livid red glow from its own thermo-dump panels, had been lost from sight in three minutes. Isolation had tightened its bewitching fingers almost immediately. Strangely enough, here, where he could barely see ten metres, a realization of the universe’s vastness was all too strong.
The ten-megaton bomb was strapped to his chest, a fat ovoid seventy-five centimetres high. Weightless, yet weighing heavily in his heart—titanium and composite device though it was.
Sarha had given him one of the Edenist bitek processor blocks which she had modified with augmentation modules. The idea was to provide him with a link to Aethra in case the Gramine should unexpectedly alter track.
Makeshift, like this whole mission.