Then they were made to walk through a kind of open framework. When it was his turn Coton felt a kind of tingling, a heat that penetrated to his core.
The troopers puzzled over the resulting Virtual images of his head and Vala’s – and Coton stared, astonished, at the sponge-like structures they had detected, meshed within the frontal lobes of both of their brains.
Vala had no patience with this procedure. She tapped the tattoo on her forehead. ‘Don’t you recognise this? We’re Adepts. And Adepts are born with technology in their heads, just as you see here. Check your databases, man. We’re known. We’re harmless!’
While the man checked, Coton murmured to his grandmother, ‘Technology? What technology?’ Even though he had known he was an Adept, he’d had no idea that he had a head full of technology; his parents had told him nothing of this. It was another unwelcome surprise.
And Vala winked. ‘Only the best. Alien expertise. Silver Ghost technology . . .’
The Ghosts: ancient enemies of mankind, long extinct. And he’d been born with their stuff inside his head? Coton, shocked, couldn’t take it in.
It took a while longer, and another referral to the superior, before they were allowed to pass.
The flitter itself was expensive-looking, but heavily armoured. Once inside they were led down a short corridor to an expansive cabin. Here an officer sat behind a desk, with images flickering in the air around her head in response to her murmured commands. She wore a uniform of electric-blue fabric adorned with gold lacing, and a peaked cap sat on the desk beside her. This, evidently, was Marshal Sand. The cabin was functional; there was a cot folded up against one wall, and what looked like a small galley at the back behind the desk. An aide stood at Sand’s side, a tough-looking soldier with a gun cradled in his arms.
While the guard didn’t take his eyes off Vala and Coton, Sand didn’t look up, or acknowledge them in any way. There were no seats, so they had to stand before the desk. Vala, irritable all morning, grew impatient quickly. Coton, aware of the guard’s glare, longed for her to stay quiet.
At length the Marshal snapped her fingers, and her Virtual displays folded away and winked out of existence. She looked up at Vala. She had grey-blonde hair shaved short, and her features were strong, symmetrical. She might have been forty. ‘I apologise for keeping you waiting—’ She turned her head, and a Virtual copy of Vala’s summons popped into the air before her. ‘Academician Vala. Ah, yes, the Starfolk scholar.’ She glanced at Coton. ‘And this is your grandson.’
Vala snapped, ‘Do you not have chairs for your guests?’
Sand seemed amused. ‘You aren’t guests. And meetings with me generally don’t last long enough for chairs to be necessary.’ She eyed their tattoos. ‘I did not realise you were Weaponised, however.’ She checked over the Virtual summary. ‘Adepts. Both of you? Your talent is inactive—’
‘We are born with the hardware in our heads, but not the ability. Not for generations.’
‘Of course.’
‘We had another summons that clashed with yours. To be “processed” with the other Weaponised.’
‘You did?’ Sand prodded the air, in the middle of the Virtual. ‘There. I’ve rescheduled your processing, with a note that you’re a special case, Academician.’
‘Thank you,’ Vala said acidly. ‘And what does this “processing” entail?’
‘These are times of turbulence,’ the Marshal said. ‘Of huge population movements – the coming of the Scourge sees to that. Times of fear and suspicion. We’re taking steps to ensure the Weaponised and other minorities are protected. Useful roles will be found for them—’
‘Ghettos? Forced labour?’
‘The policy is not mine. I just implement it, as efficiently as I can. In any event, it will not affect you. Academician, let’s get to the point. I need to discuss your work.’
‘Do you indeed? You might find it’s a short conversation.’
Sand held Vala’s gaze, evidently weighing her up. ‘You’re not the first scholar I’ve spoken to, here on this world of universities and museums – in this bubble of privilege. Well, we of the Second Coalition, dealing with the issues of the real world, are only human. But you will learn that we are in fact mankind’s last hope against the Scourge. Which is why I need to speak to you.’
Vala stood up straight, a small, frail woman in this military ship. ‘You think a lot of yourself, don’t you? Are you going to send me to the front against the Xeelee?’
‘Not you,’ Sand said, unfazed. ‘Your Starfolk.’ She snapped her fingers to summon up more Virtuals.
And they spoke of the Scourge.
It was a story that stretched back nearly half a million years.
From out of the dark aftermath of the Qax Occupation, the Interim Coalition of Governance had turned mankind into a colonising, appropriating force that had ultimately, in the form of the Exultant generation, driven the Xeelee themselves out of the heart of the Galaxy. That had taken twenty thousand years. And then the expansion had continued, deeper in time, beyond the Galaxy.
But the superhuman unity of the Transcendence, half a million years after the Qax terror, had proved the high water mark of humanity’s achievement. When the Transcendence fell, man’s ultimate enemies stirred.
Though they were always distracted by their cosmic war against a greater foe, the star-infesting photino birds, the Xeelee had not forgotten their defeats at the hands of humans. Their vengeance, the Scourge, was a simple strategy, but relentless. One by one the worlds of humanity fell dark, their stars cloaked in an impenetrable shell of the Xeelee’s fabled construction material. And humanity was beaten back.
Sand said, a cold anger in her voice, ‘Here they are, back in the Galaxy the Exultants won from them. Here they are, sweeping through the plane of the disc, and on the verge of crossing into the spiral arm containing Sol. It will take millennia more. But they will, in the end, take Earth itself – unless we make a stand.’
Coton found himself oddly stirred by her words. ‘Make a stand? Where?’
‘Have you ever heard of the Orion Line, lad? One of the most famous sites in human history – the inner edge of the Orion Arm, which contains Sol. Here the great human expansion across the Galaxy was held up for centuries by resistance from a species called the Silver Ghosts. Well, we won that war, and now nothing remains of the Ghosts.’
But Coton exchanged a glance with his grandmother, for now he knew that wasn’t true, that the Ghosts, in some way, lived on in his own head, and in Vala’s.
‘After the collapse of unified government, mankind suffered hundreds of millennia of bifurcation. Even speciation, which the First Coalition would never have allowed. But now – in the coming centuries – a new unified government, the Second Coalition, intends to make its own stand on the Orion Line.’
‘How?’ Vala snapped. ‘What bright new weapon do you have that could possibly stop the Xeelee?’
‘Oh, nothing new,’ Marshal Sand said. ‘You know the nature of the age we live in better than most, I’m sure. A million years after mankind first left Earth, anything you can dream of has been invented before, and forgotten, a dozen times: archaeology is a better bet than innovation. And our own clever scholars have dug up a weapon we can use against the Xeelee.’
‘The Weaponised?’ Vala asked. ‘The Starfolk? Are you going to start hurling neutron stars around the Galaxy again?’