The possessed wished it gone. And the muggy fog obeyed, rushing aside to let them pass. But not before it reduced their fireballs to impotent wispy swirls of fluorescing mist.
The manager reached the stairwell. Rubra closed the muscle-membrane door behind him, clenching it tight as several balls of white fire slammed into the surface, burrowing in like lava worms.
Kiera Salter ran out into the vestibule just as the last of the stinking mist vanished. Red emergency lights had come on, bringing an antagonistic moonlight glow to the broad chamber. She saw the stairwell’s muscle-membrane door slap shut ahead of the vengeful mob.
“Stop!” she yelled.
Some did. Several threw white fire at the muscle membrane.
“Stop this right now,” she said, this time there was an edge in her voice.
“Fuck you, Kiera.”
“He zapped Ross, goddamnit.”
“I’m gonna make him suffer.”
“Maybe.” Kiera strode into the centre of the vestibule and stood there, hands on her hips, staring around at her precariously allied colleagues. “But not like this.” She gestured at the smoking muscle membrane door, which was still shut. The grey surface was visibly quivering. “He knows now.” She tipped her head back, calling out at the ceiling. “Don’t you, Rubra?”
The ceiling’s electrophorescent cells slowly came back on, illuminating her upturned face. Lines of darkness flowed across them, taking shape. YES.
“Yes. See?” She dared any of the possessed to challenge her; a couple of her more powerful new lieutenants, Bonney Lewin and Stanyon, came forward to stand beside her for emphasis. “We’re playing a different game now, no more skulking about. Now we take over the entire habitat.”
NO, printed the ceiling.
“That wasn’t a deal, Rubra,” she shouted up at him. “I’m not offering to make you a partner. Got that? If you’re real, real lucky, then you get to live on. That’s all. If you don’t piss me off. If you don’t get in my way. Then maybe we’ll have a use for your precious Valisk afterwards. But only if you behave. Because once I’ve taken over your population it’s going to be easy to fly away. Only before we go, I’ll use the starships to cut you into little pieces; I’ll split your shell open, I’ll bleed your atmosphere out, I’ll freeze your rivers solid, I’ll blast your digestive organs out of the endcap. It’ll take a long time hurting for you to die completely. Decades, maybe. Who knows. You want to find out?”
YOU ARE COMPLETELY ALONE. POLICE AND COMBAT-BOOSTED MERCENARIES ON THEIR WAY. SURRENDER NOW.
Kiera laughed brutally. “No, we’re not alone, Rubra. There are billions of us.” She looked around at the possessed in the vestibule, not seeing any dissenters (except ones like Dariat and Canaan, who really didn’t count). “Okay, people, as from now we’re going overt. I want procedure five enacted this minute.” A casual click of her fingers, designating tasks. “You three, override the lift supervisor processors, have them ready to take us up into the parkland. Bonney, track down that little shit who wiped Ross, I want him creatively hurt. We’ll set up our command centre in Magellanic Itg’s boardroom.”
The first lift arrived at the seventeenth floor. Five of the possessed hurried in, anxious to show Kiera their eagerness to obey, anxious to reap the rewards. The doors slid shut. Rubra overrode the starscraper’s power circuit safeguards, and routed eighty thousand volts through the metal tracks which lined the lift shaft.
Kiera could hear the screams from inside the lift, feel the agony of forced banishment. The silicon rubber seal between the doors melted and burned, allowing the fearsome light of the bodies’ internecine flame to spew out of the crack.
NOT SO EASY, IS IT?
For about twenty seconds she stood absolutely still, face a perfect cage around any emotion. Then her finger lined up on a spindly youth in a baggy white suit. “You, open the muscle membrane; we’ll use the stairs.”
“Told you so,” the youth said. “We should have gone for him first.”
“Do it,” Kiera snapped. “And the rest of you, Rubra’s demonstrated what he can do. It’s not much compared to our ability, but it’s an irritant. We’ll cut through the neural strata’s connections with the starscrapers eventually, but until then, proceed with caution.”
The muscle-membrane door parted smoothly, allowing the now slightly subdued possessed to troop up the seventeen flights of stairs to the parkland above.
It wasn’t a pure affinity command,rubra told the Kohistan Consensus. I felt what was almost like a power surge through the neural cells around the muscle membrane. It came in with the affinity command, just wiped all my routines completely. But it’s localized, an area roughly five metres in diameter; it can’t reach into the main neural strata.
Laton claimed that Lewis Sinclair had that same kind of supercharged affinity when he took over Pernik island,the consensus replied.It works through brute strength, and as such can be subverted. But should one of them succeed in transferring his personality into you, the energistic ability increases in proportion to the number of cells subsumed. You must not allow that to happen.
Fat chance. You know Valisk’s neural cells were sequenced from my DNA, they will only process my thought routines. I guess that’s similar to what Laton did to Pernik when he altered the island’s neural strata with his proteanic virus. The affinity-capable possessed might be able to knock out some functions like the muscle membranes, but their personalities wouldn’t function as independent entities in the neural strata, not unless they operate as a subsection of my pattern. I’d have to let them in.
Excellent news. But can you protect your general population from possession?
It’s going to be tricky,rubra admitted reluctantly. And I’ll never save all of them, not even a majority. I’m going to have to take a whole load of internal damage, too.
We sympathise. We will help you rebuild afterwards.
If there is an afterwards.
Chapter 08
Culey asteroid was an almost instinctive choice for André Duchamp. Located in the Dzamin Ude star system, a healthy sixty light-years from Lalonde, it acted as a ready haven for certain types of ships in certain circumstances. As if in reaction to its Chinese-ethnic ancestry, and all the clutter of authoritarian tradition which came with that, the asteroid was notoriously lax when it came to enforcing CAB regulations and scrutinizing the legitimacy of cargo manifests. Such an attitude hadn’t done its economy any harm. Starships came for the ease of trading, and the astroengineering conglomerates came to maintain and support the ships, and where the majors went there followed a plethora of smaller service and finance companies. The Confederation Assembly subcommittee on smuggling and piracy might routinely condemn Culey’s government and its policies, but nothing ever altered. Certainly in the fifteen years he’d been using it, André never had any trouble selling cargo or picking up dubious charters. The asteroid was virtually a second home.
This time, though, when the Villeneuve’s Revenge performed its ZTT jump into the designated emergence zone, Culey spaceport was unusually reticent in granting docking permission. During the last three days the system had received first the reports of Laton’s re-emergence, and secondly the warning from Trafalgar about possible energy virus contamination. Both designated Lalonde as the focus of the trouble.
“But I have a severely injured man on board,” André protested as his third request to be allocated a docking bay was refused.
“Sorry, Duchamp,” the port control officer replied. “We have no bays available.”
“There’s very little traffic movement around the port,” Madeleine Collum observed; she’d accessed the starship’s sensor suite, and was viewing the asteroid. “And most of that is personnel commuters and MSVs, no starships.”