She stepped through the gap, pulling Gerald after her. “Now we run,” she told him happily.
As the sanatorium was operated by the Royal Navy the guards were armed. It didn’t make any difference, they weren’t front-line combat troops. Whenever one of them got near to Gerald and the woman she would use her white fire to devastating effect. The asteroid’s internal security centre could trace her position purely because of the wave of destruction she generated around herself. All electronics and power circuits were ruptured by flares of white fire, doors were simply ripped apart, environmental ducts were battered and split, mechanoids reduced to slag. She did it automatically, a defensive manoeuvre burning clean any conceivable threat in front of her. Crude but effective.
The asteroid went to an immediate status two defence alert. Royal Marines were rushed from their barracks to the sanatorium.
But as with all asteroid settlements, everything was packed close together, and made as compact as possible. It took the woman and Gerald ninety seconds to get from the lounge to the sanatorium’s nearest entrance. Sensors and cameras in the public hall caught her emerging from the splintered door. Terrified pedestrians sprinted from the vicious tendrils of white fire she unleashed; it was almost as though she were using them as whips to drive people away from her. Then the images vanished as she hammered at the net processors and sensors.
The Royal Marine commander coordinating the emergency at least had the presence of mind to shut down the lifts around the hall. If she wanted out, she’d have to walk. And when she did, she’d run smack into the marines now deploying in a pincer movement around her.
Both squads were edging cautiously down the public hall, hurrying civilians out of the way. They approached the sanatorium’s wrecked entrance from opposite directions, chemical projectile rifles held ready, electronic warfare blocks alert for any sign of the distortion pattern given off by a possessed. When they came into view of each other they froze, covering the length of the hall with their rifles. No one was left between them.
The squad captain of one side shouldered his weapon. “Where the fuck did she go?”
“I knew they’d stop the lifts,” the redhead said in satisfaction. “Standard tactics for dealing with the possessed is to block all nearby transport systems to prevent us from spreading. Bloody good job they were on the ball today.”
Gerald agreed, but didn’t say anything. He was concentrating on the rungs in front of his face, not daring to look down.
The possessed woman might have smashed open all the doors in the medical facility, but once they were out in the hall she had stood in front of the lift doors and made a parting motion with her hands. The lift doors had obeyed, sliding open silently. After that they had started to climb down the ladder set in the wall of the shaft. There wasn’t much light to see where he was putting his hands and feet, just some sort of bluish radiance coming from the woman above him. Gerald didn’t want to see how she was making it.
It was cold in the shaft, the air tasting both wet and metallic. And silent, too, the darkness above and below swallowing all sounds. Every minute or so he could just make out another door in the shaft wall; the buzz of conversation and tiny slivers of light oozing around the seals.
“Careful,” she said. “You’re near the bottom now. Ten more rungs.”
The light increased, and he risked a glance down. A metal grid slicked with condensation glinted dully at the foot of the ladder. Gerald stood on it, shivering slightly and rubbing his arms. Mechanical clunks started to rumble down from above.
The possessed woman jumped nimbly past the last two rungs and gave him an enthusiastic smile. “Stand still,” she said, and put her hands on either side of his head, spreading her fingers over his ears.
Gerald quivered at her touch. Her hands were starting to glow. This was it. The start of the pain. Soon he would hear the demented whispers emerging from the beyond, and one of them would pour into his body again. All hope would die then. I might as well refuse, and let her torture kill me. Better that than . . .
She took her hands away, their internal glimmer fading away. “I think that should do it. I’ve broken down the debrief nanonics. The doctors and police would only use you to see where we were and what we were doing, then they’d send you to sleep.”
“What?” He started to probe his skull with cautious fingers. It seemed intact. “Is that all you did?”
“Yes. Not so bad was it?” She beckoned. “There’s a hatch here which leads to the maintenance tunnels. It’s only got a mechanical lock, so we won’t trigger any processors.”
“Then what?” he asked bleakly.
“Why, we get you off Guyana and on your way to Valisk to find Marie, of course. What did you think, Gerald?” She grasped the handle on the metre-high hatch and shoved it upwards. The hatch swung open, revealing only more darkness behind.
Gerald felt like crying. His head was all funny, hot and light, which made it very hard for him to think. “Why? Why are you doing this? Are you just playing with me?”
“Of course I’m not playing, Gerald. I want Marie back to normal more than anything. She’s all we have left now. You know that. You saw the homestead.”
He sank to his knees, looking up at her flat-featured face and immaculate hair, trying desperately to understand. “But why? Who are you to want this?”
“Oh, dearest Gerald, I’m sorry. This is Pou Mok’s body. It takes up far too much concentration to maintain my own appearance, especially with what I was doing up there.”
Gerald watched numbly as the copper hair darkened and the skin of her face began to flow into new features. No, not new. Old. So very very old. “Loren,” he gasped.
Chapter 15
After five centuries of astounding technological endeavour and determined economic sacrifice by the Lunar nation, the God of War, Mars, had finally been pacified. The hostile red gleam which had so dominated Earth’s night skies for millennia was extinguished. Now the planet had an atmosphere, complete with vast swirls of white and grey clouds; blooms of vegetation were expanding across the deserts, patches of sepia and dark green vegetation staining the tracts of rust-red soil. To an approaching starship it seemed, at first, almost identical to any other terracompatible planet to be found within the Confederation’s boundaries. Disparities became apparent only when the extent of the remaining deserts was revealed, accounting for three-fifths of the surface; and there was a definite sparsity of free water. Although there were thousands of individual crater lakes, Mars had only one major body of water, the Lowell Sea, a gently meandering ribbon which wrapped itself around the equator. Given the scale involved it appeared as though a wide river were flowing constantly around the planet. Closer inspection showed that circumnavigation would be impossible. The Lowell Sea had formed as water collected in the hundreds of large asteroid-impact craters which pocked the planet’s equator in an almost straight line.
Population, too, was one of the planet’s quirks: a phenomenon which was also visible from orbit, provided you knew what to look for. Anyone searching the nightside for the usual sprawling iridescent patches of light which marked the kind of vigorous human cities normally present after five centuries of colonization would be disappointed; only six major urban areas had sprung up so far. Towns and villages were also present amid the rolling steppes, but in total the number of people living on the surface didn’t exceed three million. Phobos and Deimos were heavily industrialized, providing homes for a further half-million workers and their families. They at least followed a standard development pattern.