Kiera dismissed the impudent girl from her thoughts with a derisory mental sneer. Her gaze found a rather delicious nineteen-year-old hammering his fists into a long leather punch bag. The desperate aggression and sweating muscles were highly arousing. He knew she was standing behind him, but refused to turn. Hoping if he avoided eye contact she would pass by. She crooked a finger at Malone, who came over reluctantly.
“What’s his name?” she asked huskily.
“Jamie.” The squat trainer’s thoughts were full of contempt.
“Are you frightened of me, Jamie?”
He stopped punching, steadying the bag. Gentle grey eyes stared at her levelly. “You, no. What you can do, yeah.”
She applauded languidly. “Very good. Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.” She glanced down at Malone. “I’ll bring him back to you in the morning.”
Malone took his cap off, and spat on the floor. “Whatever you say, Kiera.”
She walked right up to Jamie, enjoying his discomfort at her proximity. “Oh dear, I’m not that bad am I?” she murmured.
He was a head taller than her. When he looked down, his eyes were drawn the rich tanned skin revealed by her mauve summer dress. Embarrassment warred with other, more subtle emotions. Kiera grinned in victory. At least something was going right tonight. Capone and his damn sedition plans! She took his big hand in hers, and began to lead him out of the gym like a giant puppy. Before she reached the double doors, they swung open. Luigi barged through, carrying a pile of towels. He caught sight of Kiera, and glared angrily. Commander of the fleet, now running trivial demeaning errands for the nonentity Malone. The resentment twisting him up was almost strong enough to manifest itself as pernicious violence; he was sure she was here simply to witness his humiliation first hand. The boss’s new favourite gloating over her ex-rival’s downfall.
“Luigi,” Kiera said brightly. “Fancy seeing you here. How wonderful.”
“Piss off, bitch.” He elbowed past her, scowling.
“After the towels, will you be going down on your knees to tie up their shoes?”
Luigi twisted in mid step, and marched back to her. He thrust his head forward so their noses were touching. “You’re a whore. A very cheap whore. With only one thing to sell. When the Organization has used up your hellhawks, you’ll be nothing. Best thing is, you know it’s coming. Your bullshit ice empress routine doesn’t fool anyone. This whole damn asteroid is laughing at you.”
“Of course it’s coming,” she said serenely. “But they wouldn’t be used up if the fleet was commanded properly.”
Confusion marred his face and his thoughts. “What?”
That uncertainty was enough for Kiera. She patted Jamie’s heavily muscled forearm. “Why don’t you take those heavy towels from Luigi, darling. It looks like I won’t be needing you tonight, after all.”
Jamie peered over the pile of towels unexpectedly dumped in his arms, watching the doors close behind Kiera and Luigi. “I don’t get it,” he complained. Part of him had actually been quite looking forward to the sex, despite what the others kept saying about the Deadnight witch.
Malone patted the big lad’s shoulder in a paternal fashion. “Don’t worry about it, my boy. You’re well off out of that kind of scene.”
Given Dr Pierce Gilmore’s senior position within the CNIS’s scientific staff, weapons analysis division, it was inevitable that a large part of his nature tended towards the bureaucratic. Precise and methodical in his work, he believed strongly in following sanctioned procedures to the letter during his investigations. Such adherence to protocol was something of a joke among his department’s junior staff, who accused him of inflexibility and lack of imagination. He endured their behind-his-back humour stoically, while politely and consistently refusing to take short cuts and play up to wild hunches. To his credit, it was exactly the kind of leadership the weapons division needed. Eternal patience is a prime requisite in the dismantling of unknown weapons that have been designed illegally (mostly under government patronage) and tend to incorporate elements that actively discourage close examination. In the seven years he’d held his post, the division’s safety record was exemplary.
Also to his credit, he didn’t indulge in the usual internal empire building so beloved of government employees, especially those who, like him, were essentially unaccountable. As a result, his office was a modest one, roughly equivalent to the entitlement of a middle manager in some multistellar company. There were few personal items, some ornaments and desktop solid images; a shelf of Stanhopea orchids flourishing under a slim solaris tube. The furniture was formal, a comfortable reproduction of the flared darkwood Midwest-ethnic style he’d grown up with. Broad holographic windows of Cheyenne’s heroically rugged countryside did little to disguise the room’s actual location, buried deep inside Trafalgar. In its favour, the electronic suite Gilmore had installed was a top-of-the range Edenist processor array verging on AI status. Such a system helped facilitate the twice weekly multi-disciplinary councils he chaired to investigate the capabilities of the possessed.
This was the second time the team heads had met since Jacqueline Couteur had made her bid for freedom in maximum security court three, and the aftermath was still affecting everyone’s mood. Professor Nowak, the quantum physicist, was first to arrive, helping himself to some of the coffee from the percolator jug which Gilmore kept going full time. Dr Hemmatu, the energy specialist, and Yusuf, the electronics chief, came in together talking in low tones. They gave Gilmore a perfunctory nod and sat down at the conference desk. Mattox was next, the neurology doctor keeping to himself as usual, choosing a chair one along the desk from Yusuf. Euru completed the group, sitting directly opposite Gilmore. In contrast to the rest of them, the dark-skinned Edenist appeared almost indecently happy.
Gilmore had known his deputy long enough to see it wasn’t just the usual contentment which all Edenists shared. “You have something?” he enquired.
“A voidhawk has just arrived from the Sinagra system. It was carrying an interesting recording.”
Hemmatu perked up. “From Valisk?” The independent habitat had supplied a large amount of very useful data on the behaviour of the possessed before it vanished.
“Yes, just before Rubra and Dariat took it away,” Euru said, smiling broadly. He instructed his bitek processor block to datavise the file to them.
The sensevise they received was a strange one, lacking the resolution normally associated with full nerve channel input. Conversions from Edenist habitat memories to a standard Adamist electronic format were notoriously quirky, but this was something else again. Nesting within its environment of pastel colours, tenuous scents, and mild tactorials, Gilmore tried bravely to avoid using the connotation: spectral. He failed dismally.
The memory was of Dariat, while he bobbed about on the surface of some icy water inside a dark polyp-walled tube. The cold was severe enough to penetrate even his energistic protection, judging by the way it was numbing his appropriated limbs, and making him shiver. A plump black woman clung to him, shaking violently inside her strange waistcoat of cushions.
Did you gain any impression of size?the kohistan consensus asked Dariat.
Not really, a universe is a universe. How big is this one?
Consensus received his quick recollection of the beyond. His soul had become a feeble flicker of identity adrift in a nowhere at one remove from reality. Nowhere full of similar souls; all of them with the same craving, the sensations available on the other side.
The memory of someone else’s memory: if the sensenviron of the Valisk starscraper waste tube was tenuous, this was as insubstantial as a nearly-forgotten dream. The beyond, as far as Dariat was concerned, lacked any physical sensation, all that betrayed its presence was a transparent tapestry of emotions. Anguish and yearning flooded through the realm Souls clustered round, desperately suckling at his memories for the illusion of physical sensation they contained.