“Huh,” Tracy sniffed critically. “If you’re quite finished.”
Richard rolled his eyes for Jay’s benefit. “Sweet dreams, Jay. I’ll see you tomorrow, we’ve got lots to talk about.”
“Richard,” Tracy asked reluctantly. “Did Calvert do it?”
A huge smile flashed over his face. “Oh yeah. He did it. The Alchemist is neutralized. Just as well, it was a brute of a weapon.”
“Typical. If they’d just devote ten per cent of their military budget and all that ingenuity into developing their social conditions.”
“Preaching to the converted!”
“Are you talking about Joshua?” Jay asked. “What’s he done?”
“Something very good,” Richard said.
“Amazingly,” Tracy muttered dryly.
“But . . .”
“Tomorrow, sweetie,” Tracy said firmly. “Along with everything else. I promise. Right now, you’re going to bed. Enough delaying tactics.”
Richard waved, and walked away. Jay held Prince Dell against her tummy as Tracy’s hand pressed into her back, propelling her up the steps and into the chalet. She glanced down at the ancient bear again. His dull glass eyes stared right back at her, it was an incredibly melancholic expression.
The first hellhawk came flashing out of its wormhole terminus twelve thousand kilometres from Monterey asteroid. New California’s gravitonic detector warning satellites immediately datavised an alert to the naval tactical operations centre. The high pitched audio alarm startled Emmet Mordden, who was the duty officer in the large chamber. At the time he was sitting with his feet up on the commander’s console, reading through a four-hundred-sheet hard copy guide of a Quantumsoft accountancy program in preparation for his next upgrade to the Treasury computers. With most of the Organization fleet away at Tranquillity, and the planet reasonably stable right now, it was a quiet duty, just right to catch up on his technical work.
Emmet’s feet hit the floor as the AI responsible for threat analysis squirted a mass of symbols and vectors up on one of the huge wall-mounted holoscreens. In front of him, the equally surprised SD network operators scrambled to interpret what was happening. There weren’t many of them among the eight rows of consoles in the centre, nothing like the full complement which the Organization had needed at the height of the Edenist harassment campaign. Right now, spaceflight traffic was at a minimum, and the contingent of Valisk hellhawks on planetary defence duty had done a superb job of clearing Edenist stealth mines and spy globes from space around the planet.
“What is it?” Emmet asked automatically; by which time another three wormholes had opened. The precariously-stacked pile of hard copy avalanched off his console as he determinedly cleared his keyboard ready to respond.
The AI had acquired X-ray laser lock on for the first four targets, and was requesting fire authority. Another ten wormholes were opening. Jull von Holger, who acted as the go-between for the Valisk hellhawks and the operations centre, leapt to his feet, shouting: “Don’t shoot!” He waved his arms frantically. “They’re ours! They’re our hellhawks.”
Emmet hesitated, his fingers hovering over the keys. According to his console displays, over eighty wormholes had now opened to disgorge bitek starships. “What the fuck do they think they’re doing busting in on us like that? Why aren’t they with the fleet?” Suspicion flowered among his thoughts; and he didn’t care that von Holger could sense it. Hellhawks were dangerously powerful craft, and with the fleet away they could make real trouble. He’d never really trusted Kiera Salter.
Jull von Holger’s face went through a wild panoply of emotion-derived contortions as he conducted fast affinity conversations with the unexpected arrivals. “They’re not from the fleet. They’ve come here directly from Valisk.” He halted for a moment, shocked. “It’s gone. Valisk has gone. We lost to that little prat Dariat.”
“Holy shit,” Hudson Proctor gasped.
Kiera stuck her head round the bathroom door as the beautician tried to wrap her sopping wet hair in a huge fluffy purple towel. The Quayle suite in the Monterey Hilton was a temple to opulence and personal luxury. As Rubra had denied everyone access to the Valisk starscrapers, along with their apartment bathrooms, Kiera had simply groomed herself with energistic power alone. She had forgotten what it was to sprawl in a Jacuzzi with a selector that could blend in any of a dozen exotic salts. And as for having her hair styled properly rather than forcing it into shape . . .
“What?” she snapped in annoyance; though the beacon-bright dismay in her associate’s mind tempered any real fury at being interrupted.
“The hellhawks are here,” he said. “All of them. They’ve come from Valisk. It’s . . .” He flinched in trepidation. Delivering bad news to Kiera was always a desperately negative career move. Just because she had the kind of teenage-sweetheart looks which could (and had) suckered in non-possessed kids from right across the Confederation didn’t mean her behaviour matched. Quite the opposite—she took a perverse enjoyment from that, too. “Bonney chased after Dariat, apparently. There was a big fight in one of the starscrapers. Plenty of our people got flung back into the beyond. Then she forced him to ally with Rubra, or something.”
“What happened?”
“They, er—Valisk’s gone. The two of them took the habitat out of the universe.”
Kiera stared at him, little wisps of steam starting to lick out of her hair. She’d always bitterly regretted that Marie Skibbow didn’t have some kind of affinity faculty; its absence had always put her at a slight disadvantage in Valisk. But she’d coped, the entire worldlet and its formidable starships had belonged to her. She’d been a power to contend with. Even Capone had sought out her help. Now—
Kiera gave the non-possessed beautician girl a blank-eyed glance. “Get lost.”
“Ma’am.” The girl curtseyed, and almost sprinted for the suite’s double doors on the other side of the lounge.
Kiera allowed herself a muted scream of fury when the doors closed. “That fucking Dariat! I knew it! I fucking knew he was a disaster waiting to happen.”
“We’re still in charge of the hellhawks,” Hudson Proctor said. “That gives us a big chunk of Capone’s action; and the Organization is in charge of a couple of star systems, with more on the way. It’s not such a loss. If we’d been inside the habitat it would be one hell of a lot worse.”
“If I’d been inside, it would never have happened,” she snapped back. Her hair was abruptly dry, and her robe blurred, running like hot wax until it became a sharp mauve business suit. “Control,” she murmured almost to herself. “That’s the key here.”
Hudson Proctor could sense her focusing on him, both her eyes and her mind.
“Are you with me?” she asked. “Or are you going to ask good old Al if you can sign on as one of his lieutenants?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if I can’t keep control of the hellhawks, I’m nothing to the Organization.” She smiled thinly. “You and I would have to start right back at the beginning again. With the hellhawks obeying us, we’ll still be players.”
He glanced out of the big window, searching space for a sight of the bitek starships. “We’ve got no hold on them any more,” he said dejectedly. “Without the affinity-capable bodies stored in Valisk, there’s no way they’ll do as they’re ordered. And there aren’t any more of Rubra’s family left for us to replace them with. We’ve lost.”
Kiera shook her head impatiently. Considering she’d coopted the ex-general to her council for his ability to think tactically, he was doing a remarkably poor job of it. But then, maybe a politician’s instinct was naturally quicker at finding an opponent’s weakness. “There’s one thing left which they can’t do for themselves.”
“And that is?”
“Eat. The only sources of their nutrient fluid which they’ll be able to use are on Organization-held asteroids. Without food, even bitek organisms will wither and die. And we know our energistic power can’t magic up genuine food.”