Everyone had been so full of praise for the way he had flown Lady Mac . If only they knew the emotional cold turkey that hit him once the danger was over and he stopped operating on nerve energy and arrogance. The fear from realizing what one—just one—mistake would have spelt.
I should have listened to Ione. What I had before was enough.
He held her image in his mind as he fell asleep, she made it a lot easier to relax, floating away on the rhythm of night. When he woke, drowsy, warm, and randy, he accessed a memory of their time back in Tranquillity. Out in the parkland, lying on the thick grass beside a stream. The two of them clinging together after sex; Ione on top, sweaty and dreamily content, light glinting an opulent gold off her hair, skin warm and soft against him, kissing him oh so slowly, lips descending along his sternum. Neither spoke, the moment was too perfect for that.
Then her head lifted and it was Louise Kavanagh, all trusting and adoring in that way only the very innocent can achieve. She smiled hesitantly as she rose up, then laughed in rapturous celebration as she was impaled once again, luscious dark hair tossed about as she rode him. Thanking him. Praising him. Promising herself for ever his.
And loving a girl hadn’t been that sweet since he was her age.
Jesus! He cancelled the memory sequence. Even his neural nanonics were playing him dirty.
I do not need reminding. Not right now.
The flight computer datavised that Aethra was requesting a direct channel. Joshua acknowledged the distraction with guilty relief. Space warfare was easy.
Sarha had done a good job interfacing the bitek processor to Lady Mac ’s electronics. He had talked to the habitat yesterday, which was engrossing; it came across as a mixture of child and all-knowing sage. But it had been very interested in hearing about Tranquillity. The images he received from its shell’s sensitive cells were different to the Lady Mac ’s sensor clusters. They seemed more real, somehow, bestowing a texture of depth and emptiness which space had always lacked before.
Joshua unsealed the side of the sleep cocoon and swung his legs out. He opened a locker for a fresh ship-suit. There were only three left. Sighing, he started to pull one on. “Hello, Aethra,” he datavised.
“Good morning, Joshua. I hope you slept well.”
“Yeah, I got a few hours.”
“I am picking up a message for you.”
He was instantly alert, without any stimulus from his neural nanonics. “Jesus. Where from?”
“It is a microwave transmission originating from the civil communication platform orbiting Lalonde.”
He was shown the starfield outside. The sun was a white glare point, nine hundred and eighty-nine million kilometres distant; to one side Lalonde shone steadily, if weakly, a sixth-magnitude star. It had now become a binary, twinned with a violet glint.
“You can see microwaves?” he asked.
“I sense, eyes see. It is part of the energy spectrum which falls upon my shell.”
“What is the message?”
“It is a voice-only transmission to you personally from a Kelly Tirrel.”
“Jesus. Let me hear it.”
“ ‘This is Kelly Tirrel calling Captain Joshua Calvert. Joshua, I hope you’re receiving this OK; and if not, could someone at Aethra’s supervisory station please relay this to him immediately. It’s really important. Joshua, I’m not sure if the possessed can overhear this, so I won’t say anything too exact, OK? We got your message about returning. And the time-scale you mentioned is no use to us. Joshua, virtually everyone down here has been possessed. It’s like the worst of the Christian Bible gospels are coming true. Dead people are coming back and taking over the living. I know that sounds crazy to you; but believe me it isn’t sequestration, and it isn’t a xenoc invasion. I’ve talked to someone who was alive at the start of the twentieth century. He’s real, Joshua. So is their electronic warfare ability, only it’s more like magic. They can do terrible things, Joshua, to people and animals. Truly terrible. Shit, I don’t suppose you believe any of this, do you? Just think of them as an enemy, Joshua. That’ll help make them real for you. And you saw the red cloud-bands over the Juliffe basin, you know how powerful that enemy is.
“ ‘Well, the red cloud is swelling, Joshua, it’s spreading over the planet. We were heading away from it. Just like you said we should, remember? But we’ve found someone who has been in hiding since the possession started, a priest. He’s been looking after a bunch of young children. There’s twenty-nine of them. And now they’re trapped under that cloud. They’re near the village that was our original target, so that gives you a rough idea where we are. We’re going back for them, Joshua, we’ll be on our way by the time this message reaches you. They’re only children, for Christ’s sake, we can’t leave them. The trouble is that once we’ve got them we won’t be able to run far, not with our transport. But we’re pretty sure we can get the children out from under the cloud by this afternoon. Joshua . . . you have to pick us up. Today, Joshua. We won’t be able to hold out for long after sunset. I know your lady friend wasn’t feeling too well when you left, but bandage her up as best you can, as soon as you can. Please. We’ll be waiting for you. Our prayers are with you. Thank you, Joshua.’ ”
“It is repeating,” Aethra said.
“Oh, Jesus.” Possession. The dead returned. Child refugees on the run. “Jesus fucking wept. She can’t do this to me! She’s mad. Possession? She’s fucking flipped.” He stared aghast at the ancient Apollo computer, arms half in his sleeves. “No chance.” His arms were rammed into the ship-suit sleeves. Sealing up the front. “She needs locking up for her own good. Her neural nanonics are looped on a glitched stimulant program.”
“You said you believed the red cloud effect was fundamentally wrong,” Aethra said.
“I said it was a little odd.”
“So is the notion of possession.”
“When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“Twelve who died when the station was destroyed are stored within me. You make continual references to your deity, does this not imply a degree of belief in the nature of spirituality?”
“Je—Shit! Look, it’s just a figure of speech.”
“And yet humans have believed in gods and an afterlife since the day you gained sentience.”
“Don’t you fucking start! Your lot are supposed to be atheists, anyway.”
“I apologize. I can sense you are upset. What are you going to do about rescuing the children?”
Joshua pressed his fingers to his temple in the vain hope it would halt the dizzy sensation. “Buggered if I know. How do we know there really are any children?”
“You mean it is just a bluff to trick you into returning to Lalonde?”
“Could be, yeah.”
“That would imply that Kelly Tirrel has been possessed.”
Very calmly, he datavised: “Sequestrated. It implies she has been sequestrated.”
“Whatever has befallen her, you still have a decision to make.”
“And don’t I know it.”
Melvyn was alone on the bridge when Joshua came gliding through the hatch from his cabin.
“I just heard the message,” the fusion expert said. “She can’t mean it.”
“Maybe.” Joshua touched his feet to a stikpad beside his acceleration couch. “Call the crew in, and Gaura as well. I suppose the Edenists are entitled. It’s their arses on the line as well.”
He tried to think in the short time it took for them to drift into the bridge, make some kind of sense out of Kelly’s message. The trouble was she had sounded so convincing, she believed what she said. If it was her. Jesus. And it was a very strange sequestration. He couldn’t forget the chaos in orbit.