The crowd of anti-invasion protesters down in the park gasped in unison as the Silverbird juddered, then let out a long 'Ohooo, of wonder and relief. Araminta couldn't help but join in, thankful Justine had survived the third shockwave propagated by the pursuing Raiel warships and was now picking herself up off the cabin floor again. It was a sound which was replicated right across Colwyn City and beyond. A long way beyond.
She slipped in through the apartment block's underground garage entrance. The door was still open a couple of metres, not wide enough to admit a capsule, but sufficient for her to take her trike out. She'd deactivated the mechanism as she left, opening up the little control box and physically disconnecting the wiring. Now she plugged the coloured cables back into their blocks. The door slid shut behind her, and she hurried through the near-deserted concrete cave to the lifts.
'You okay? Gore asked.
'Bastards! Justine replied shakily. 'What, this isn't hard enough already?
Araminta sank back against the cool metal wall of the lift, feeling the way Justine looked. She'd driven round for an hour on the trike before parking it in a public bay at the Tala mall. Now there was nothing to prove she was at the apartment block — it was the best cover she could think of. The walk back to the Bodant district had taken forty minutes, during which the Raiel warships had started blowing up small moons to try and stop Justine. Everyone accessed that. It made her kind of conspicuous; she was just about the only person moving on Colwyn's streets.
'You're doing fine, Gore assured his daughter. 'Just fine.
Araminta used her old override code to unlock the door to Danal's apartment. Neither he nor Mareble were in. Presumably I hey were out partying with the occupying army, she thought resentfully. The bare structure of the place had just been finished when Araminta handed it over. Since then, Mareble had moved in a few basic furnishings. Araminta gave the cooker a critical glare, the big metal thing looked ridiculously primitive. It had taken Mr Bovey a long time to find it for her, and installing it had been a nightmare.
In Araminta's exovision, Justine was climbing back into her chair, which folded protectively around her. 'Main systems are functional. Drive units have reduced capacity. These energy bursts are stressing a lot of components. I guess they're trying to wear me down.
Araminta crept over to the balcony windows, and peered out across the park. There were several Ellezelin capsules hanging above the encircling road. They were all stationary; like everyone else their occupants were captivated by the chase thirty thousand lightyears away. Below them, the crowd stared up into the heavens whose stars were smeared by the weather dome. She nodded in satisfaction.
'They're firing again, Justine yelped. 'Oh Christ.
The Silverbird shuddered violently. Araminta gritted her teeth, feeling the huge tremor of anticipation in the gaiafield. More sections of the ship reported overloads. The speed fell off as the drive reconfigured its energy manipulation functions around degraded components. Justine changed course, streaking into the loop, the shortest distance to the barrier. Both Raiel warships followed unerringly. Closing the gap.
Araminta pulled a big sky-blue cushion out of a nest pile and into the middle of the living room. She was annoyed to see the ebony-wood parquet had been stripped back to the bare wood. Didn't Mareble understand how difficult it was to get the varnish application correct? The work that had gone into cleaning the little wooden blocks!
She sat down on the cushion and crossed her legs, banishing such negative thoughts.
'Good strategy, darling, Gore said. 'There aren't many planets inside the loop.
Araminta retrieved Likan's program from her storage lacuna, feeling her mind finally settle. It was a risk using this apartment, but she wasn't sure how good Living Dream was at tracking people through the gaiafield. The day Danal had moved in he'd confided to her that he was helping with the search for the Second Dreamer, and how the confluence nests were being altered somehow to facilitate that. So she certainly didn't want to be in her own place when she did this, just in case they were accurate enough to fix the exact location. And they might just think Danal's apartment was some kind of false reading. She didn't know anywhere else she could go. Other than to Mr Bovey's house, but that would expose him to the paramilitaries, which she could never do.
The shadowy spectres of sensation that lurked within her subconscious expanded outwards. She let her attention swim across the myriad thoughts it contained. Drifting. Content in a way the program alone could never kindle.
Most of the thoughts she could ignore. Some were intriguing. One had a mental signature she knew, associated with a dark tone that almost made her shy away. Instead, she concentrated.
'My Lord, Ethan was pleading. 'Hear us please.
He was calling with all his mental strength, amplified by countless confluence nests, directing his appeal outwards into the infinite. Wrong., she mused from her lofty Olympian distance. The Skylord is not beyond us, it is within.
She drifted further, devoid of urgency.
'If you don't call them off I will personally rip your fucking arkship apart molecule by molecule with all of you in it, Gore was yelling. 'You think the Void is a Bad Thing? Do you, huh? You believe that? Because let me tell you: it is your mommy with her titty out for you to suck on compared to me.
Araminta couldn't help grinning. Now that's the kind of father I would have liked. Out in the park, people were cheering. A cry taken up across hundreds of planets. The gaiafield filled with determination and support, the raw emotion of billions, swelling the sense of unification to near ecstasy. Go Gore, humanity whooped. Araminta added her blessing, a whisper lost in the multitude.
'I can do nothing, Qatux protested. 'They are warrior Raiel. Not our kind, not any longer.
'Find a fucking way!
Araminta lifted herself away from the turmoil, drifting towards a strand of familiar quiet thought. Opening herself in greeting. The nebulas of the Void emerged from darkness to glimmer spectacularly around her. Half of space was a gauzy splash of aquamarine with a few distant stars shining though. She recognized it as Odin's Sea where a Skylord coasted between two of the scarlet promontories, spikes of whorled gases lightyears long, swelling to buds big enough to contain a globular cluster. And here, the thoughts of what once was mingled with more purposeful notions. An awareness wove through this space, not conscious, but knowing purpose.
Silverbird burst out of the loop and streaked towards the final implacable barrier. All around it, broken stars sleeted inwards, shedding the glowing husks of the planets they had once birthed as if they were an encumbrance during the final tumultuous plunge to extinction.
'Oh God, here we go again, Justine whimpered. Ten lightyears behind her a gas-giant imploded. Hyperluminal quantum distortions burst out from its vanishing point.
The Silverbird dropped out of hyperspace, flying free in spacetime that no human would recognize. It was a dark universe inside the Wall stars. Thick braids of dust and gas shielded the light of the galactic core behind the starship. Ahead, few photons escaped the macrogravity cloak of the Void as suns sank through the event horizon. A lurid vermilion band shimmered across space, the swirl of ion clouds enraged by the loop's fatal discharge, illuminating the fuselage like the devil's own gaze. Radiation alarms howled in fright as the force field started to collapse. The fuselage blistered.