They had the battle weary confidence of victorious soldiers who have been given the order to withdraw.
The ground car swung round a corner and screeched to a halt. Another machine was parked right across the road. Its armoured bodywork was a dull grey, and it carried the orange insignia of the occupation police. Orange helmeted figures in black suits were holding a group of civilians at gun point. These were A.A. Catto’s occupation forces. One, with the tags of an officer on his suit, was questioning the civilians. The sound from the small video unit was distorted and A.A. Catto couldn’t make out what he was saying. She saw to her satisfaction that the civilians seemed cowed and broken.
More orange helmeted figures came past the camera from the car it was mounted on. A large, flat sided, grey personnel carrier pulled up, and the police began to herd the civilians inside it. The administrative takeover of Feld seemed to be progressing quickly and efficiently. A.A. Catto reached for the touch panel and killed all four screens. Her hand moved again, and the music of Cole Porter came from hidden speakers.
Nancy opened her eyes.
‘Have you been awake long?’
A.A. Catto lay face down on the bed with a sigh of contentment.
‘I’ve been checking on the war.’
‘Is everything okay?’
A.A. Catto closed her eyes.
‘Perfect.’
Nancy ran her fingers down A.A. Catto’s smooth back. A.A. Catto stretched and made a soft moaning sound.
‘That feels nice.’
Nancy reached down beside the bed and produced a narrow cylindrical object. It was rounded at the end, and transparent. Nancy pressed a stud on the side and it started to hum and vibrate. A violet light glowed inside it. Nancy rubbed it against her cheek and grinned. A.A. Catto heard the noise and opened one eye. Nancy slowly began to rub the vibrator up the soft skin on the inside of A.A. Catto’s thigh. She sighed and rolled over on to her back.
***
She/They had interwoven the extremes of Her/Their control zone with a semi-stable fold of matter. It created a blue, faintly translucent hemisphere in the rolling, grey, flickering storm of chaotic, unordered matter.
In a more normal situation She/They would have extended Her/Their control to the optimum of Her/Their perception. Chaos was totally familiar to Her/Them. Her/Their earliest memories of the time of peace and order, before the disruptors had torn through the levels of the finite world, were old and clouded. The most She/They could recall was a longing for a secure patterned existence. It came to Her/Them as pale fragments of contentment.
She/They had long abandoned all hope that She/They might regain that ordered world. The most that She/They could do was extend Her/Their personal environment as far as possible. For a long time, it had worked very well. She/They had existed under a white sky, amid a smooth, flat landscape of even black and white chequers, in a clear cold silence, all of Her/Their own creating.
She/They might have maintained these conditions almost to infinity if it hadn’t been for the encroachments of the disruptors. The sound sluglike entities ripped through the few areas of stasis, sucking in the stable matter and leaving a broad wake of grey, shimmering chaos.
The disrupters had grown more numerous and more voracious. They seemed drawn by a unique hunger towards the energy that She/They generated to maintain Her/Their control area. It had become impossible to erect a full control area any longer. She/They now expended the minimum energy, contracting Her/Their whole environment to the single blue hemisphere. She/They calculated that there would not be sufficient power circulating to attract disruptors and this would give Her/Them time to contemplate Her/Their future course of action.
She/They floated a few inches above the flat upper surface of the hemisphere. She/They had adopted Her/Their most regular form, the triple. The three identical women, who looked as one and moved as one. The slim erect figures were concealed by the while ankle length cloaks that fell in exactly the same folds. Her/Their heads were encased in silver helmets with high crests and curving side plates that covered Her/Their nose and cheek bones, leaving only dark slits for Her/Their eyes.
Her/Their senses were all turned inwards, directed solely at the problem of the disruptors. She/They saw nothing of the grey waste all around. She/They had already been damaged once by a disrupter. It was imperative that She/They reached an ultimate solution.
‘Data.’
The word hung in the air above Her/Their heads. It was the same blue as the hemisphere.
‘Data source on the disruptor is confined to my/our observation.’
‘The disruptors are semi-sentient entities of an animal/machine origin.’
‘They are dark grey with occasional red identification marks unique to the individual object.’
‘They range in size from one to one hundred metres, although it is conceivable that they may achieve even greater dimensions.’
‘They take in stable matter through a front aperture and expel disordered space from another opening at the rear.’
‘They appear to be attracted by any emission of stable energy.’
‘That is the limit of our observation.’
She/They paused. The words faded and vanished.
‘Speculative projections from the given data.’
‘The disruption process takes place within the body of the entity.’
‘It is a process of breaking the matter-energy links that maintain the state of stasis.’
‘The disruptors absorb these matter-energy links. It would appear they feed on them.’
‘Their speed of movement and rate of growth indicate that they consume in excess of their individual requirements.’
It is possible they have the faculty to transmit this excess to some second entity.’
‘This entity could be a more complex form that utilizes the excess for a purpose of its own.’
‘This entity could be the origin of the disruptors. They could simply be matter-energy receivers for the said entity.’
‘This hypothetical entity has been making increasing matter-energy demands.’
‘Such an intake would be hard to account for if it was simply being absorbed.’
‘The hypothetical entity must be converting its matter-energy intake and projecting it in another form.’
‘Such a projection will be subject to detection.’
‘Option.’
‘To locate the hypothetical entity by its projection of converted mass-energy.’
‘Designation.’
‘Such a search must be our primary task.’
***
Billy stirred in his sleep, and abruptly came awake. His head hurt from the previous night’s drinking. He moved slightly and felt Carmen the Whore’s full body beside him. It was warm and comforting. He opened his eyes and looked across the pillows at her. Her head turned away from him. Her unnaturally yellow hair was spread out across the coarse material of the sheet. Billy was aware of the way her hair began to turn dark, down towards the roots.
Billy sat up. He blinked as an instant of dizziness hit him between the eyes. He reminded himself of how he kept promising to cut down on the local gin. It was the second week he and the Minstrel Boy had been hiding in the brothel known as the Tarnished Flowers on the Court of Angels. He knew they had to take the risk of getting out of the occupied city.
There were no windows in the small attic room, although a few beams of dull light filtered through a half dozen chinks in the roof. Two weeks in the same room was beginning to get on Billy’s nerves. In their routine searches of the building, the occupation police hadn’t found the little room. Despite that, Billy was beginning to feel as much of a prisoner as if he had been picked up by the Ocpol.