Gravity was at a forty-degree angle to the horizontal when he came to, and holding steady.
I’m coming. I’m coming. I’m coming,Oenone was braying.
Horrified, Ruben linked into the voidhawk’s sensor blisters. They were heading down towards Atlantis at two and a half gees. Reaction to the berserker power thundering through the energy patterning cells made the muscles in his arms and legs bunch like hot ropes.
Fast-moving specks were rising above the hazy blue-white horizon, skimming over the atomic fog of the thermosphere like flat stones flung across a placid sea. The other voidhawks: their calls redoubled in urgency. But Oenone was immune to them, to the Atlantean consensus’ imperious orders. Rushing to help its beloved.
They’re too far away, Ruben realized in dismay, they won’t reach us in time.
The consensus relaxed its contact with Oxley, allowing him complete independence to pilot the floundering flyer, letting his instinct and skill attempt to right the craft unencumbered. He shot order after order into the bitek processors, receiving a stream of systems information in return. The coherent magnetic generators were failing, databuses were glitched, the fusion generator was powering down, electron-matrix crystal power reserves were dropping. Whatever electronic warfare techniques Pernik had, they were the best he had ever encountered, and they were trying to kill him.
He concentrated on the few control channels which remained operational, reducing the spin and flattening out the dive. The faltering magnetic fields squeezed and pushed at glowing ion streams, countering the corkscrew trajectory. Black ocean and lustrous island chased each other round the sensor images at a decreasing rate.
There was no panic. He treated it as though it was just another simulation run. An exercise in logic and competence set by the CAB to try and trip him.
At the back of his mind he was aware of further pandemonium breaking out amid the consensus. A ghost image lying across the flyer’s sensor input visualization showed him Oenone plummeting towards the planet.
With only a kilometre of altitude left the flyer lost its spin. The nose was dangerously low. He poured the final power reserves into raising it, using the craft’s ellipsoid surface as a blunt wing, gaining a degree of lift in an attempt to glide-curve away from the island. Distance was his only chance of salvation now. Streaks of reflected starlight blurred on the sable water below, growing closer. There was no sign of the electronic warfare assault abating.
Pernik’s resplendent silhouette winked out. Silence detonated into the affinity consensus, absorbing the entire planet’s mental voice.
Into the emptiness came a single devastating identity trait.
Your attention, please,laton said. We don’t have much time. Oenone , resume your orbit now.
The flyer’s crashed systems abruptly sprang back into zealous life. And a shock-numbed Oxley was pressed deep into his seat as it vaulted back into the sky.
Lewis Sinclair watched keenly as the torturer manipulated Syrinx’s mangled leg with a pair of ruddy glowing tongs and a mallet. She wasn’t screaming so loudly now. The fight was going out of her. But not the spirit, he suspected. She was one tough lady. He had seen the type before back in Messopia; cops mainly, the special forces mob, hard-eyed and dedicated. A pusher Lewis worked for had captured one once, and it didn’t matter what was done to the man, they couldn’t get him to tell them anything.
Lewis didn’t think the possessed were going to gain control of the voidhawk through Syrinx. But he didn’t say anything, let them sweat it. It wasn’t so much his problem, possessing the island gave him a measure of security a mere human body could never offer. The range of physical sensations and experiences available to him was truly astonishing.
The sensitive cells woven through the polyp were fantastically receptive; people with their mundane eyes and ears and nose were almost insensate by comparison. His consciousness roved at random through the huge structure, tasting and sampling. He was getting the hang of splitting himself into multiples, supervising a dozen actions at once.
Syrinx groaned again as the souls from beyond sang into her mind with their strange icy promises. And Lewis saw a girl standing at the back of the dungeon. The quake her presence sent through his psyche perceptibly rocked the entire island, as though it had ridden over a tidal wave. It was her! The girl from Messopia, Thérèse, the one he’d fought and died over.
Thérèse was tall for thirteen, skinny, with breasts that had been pushed into maturity by a course of tailored growth hormones. Long raven hair, brown eyes, and a pretty, juvenile face with just the right amount of cuteness; everybody’s girl next door. She was wearing black leather shorts to show off her tight little arse, and her breasts were almost falling out of a scarlet halter top. Her pose was indolent, chewing at her gum, one hand on her hip.
Where the hell did she come from?lewis asked.
What?the possessed eysk asked.
Her. Thérèse. There, behind you.
Eysk turned round, then frowned angrily at the ceiling. Very funny. Now fuck off.
But—
Thérèse gave a bored sigh and sauntered out of the dungeon.
Can’t you see her?
None of them answered him. He knew she was real, he could hear her clicking walk, feel the weight of her black stilettos on his polyp, olfactory cells picked up the sugary whiff of gum on her exhaled breath. She walked away from the dungeon, down a long corridor. For some reason it was difficult to keep his perception focused on her. She was only walking, but she seemed to be moving so fast. He barely noticed as the polyp of the corridor gave way to concrete. The light became a harsh electric yellow coming from bulbs on the ceiling, each one cupped by a protective wire cage. She hurried on ahead of him, feet sending out that regular click click click as her stilettos rapped the ground. His filthy jeans restricted his movements, clinging to his legs as he trailed after her. The air was cooler here, he could see his breath emerging as white streamers.
Thérèse slipped through a big set of grey-painted metal doors ahead. Lewis followed her into the empty subterranean warehouse in Messopia five hundred and fifty years ago. He gagged. It was a square chamber, sixty metres to a side, twenty metres high, rough poured concrete ribbed with steel beams coated in red-oxide paint. Striplights cast a feeble moon-white glow from on high. As before, leaking sewage pipes dripped rank liquids onto the floor.
She stood in the middle of the floor, looking at him expectantly.
He glanced down, seeing his body for the first time. “Oh no,” he said in a desperate voice. “This isn’t happening.”
Loud, positive footsteps sounded from the far end of the warehouse. Lewis didn’t wait to see who was emerging from the gloom, he spun round. There was no door any more, just a concrete wall. “Jesus Almighty. Fuck!”
“Hello, Lewis.”
His body was compelled to turn, leg muscles working like dead meat fired by a cattle prod. He bit hard on his trembling lip.
Thérèse had gone. The person walking towards him was the body he had possessed on Lalonde.
“You’re dead,” Lewis whispered through a fear-knotted throat.
Laton merely smiled his superior smile. “Of all the people resident in this universe today, Lewis, you should know there is no such thing as death.”
“I’m in charge here,” Lewis yelled. “I am Pernik.” He tried to fling the white fire, to conjure up energistic devastation, to flay the zombie to its stinking corrupt bones and beyond.
Laton halted five metres away. “You were Pernik. I told you once that we would meet again as equals. I lied. You cannot even begin to conceive the processes involved in your manifestation within this universe. You are a Neanderthal out of time, Lewis. You believed brute force was the key to conquest. Yet you failed to even think about the source of your energistic power. I know, I’ve been analysing your tiresomely sluggish thoughts ever since you possessed my body.”
“What have you done to me?”
“Done? Why, Lewis, I have made you a part of me. Possession of the possessor. It is possible given the right circumstances. In this case I simply corrupted Pernik’s neural stratum with my biological weapon. The neuron cells and nerve paths only conduct my thought impulses now. You can kill the cells, but you can’t subvert them. It’s a question of coding, you see. I know the codes, you don’t. And please don’t ask me for them, Lewis, it’s nothing as simple as a number. You now operate only as a subsidiary part of me, you only think because I allow you to. That is how I summoned you here.”
“I think because I am! I have been me for centuries, you bastard.”
“And were you to go back there to the beyond, you would be you again. Free and independent. Do you want to go, Lewis? That is your escape from my bondage. In this universe you require a physical, living biological matrix in which to function. You may depart now if you wish.”
A weight pulled at Lewis’s belt. When he looked down he saw it was the power-blade knife hanging in its sheath. “No.” He shook his head feebly, quailing at the prospect. “No, I won’t. That’s what you want. Without me Pernik would be free again. I’m going to stop that, I’m going to beat you.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Lewis. I will never allow you to resume your barbaric act of sodomy. You think of yourself as strong, as purposeful. You are entirely incorrect. You and the other returners have a nebulous plan to re-establish yourselves permanently in this physical universe. You do so because of your own quite pathetic psychological weaknesses.”
Lewis snarled at his tall tormentor. “So fucking smart, aren’t you. Let’s see what you’re like after a hundred fucking years of nothing; no food, no breathing, no touch, just fucking nothing. You’ll be begging to join us, shithead.”
“Really?” Laton’s smile no longer contained even a vestige of humour. “Think what you are, Lewis. Think what all the returners are. Then ask yourself, where is the rest of the human race? The hundreds of billions who have died since the day our ancestors first struck two flints together, from the time we watched the glaciers retreating as we battled with mammoths.”
“They’re with me, billions of them. They’re waiting for their chance. And when they get into this universe they’re gonna come gunning for you, shithead.”
“But they’re not with you in the beyond, Lewis, there are nothing like enough souls to account for everyone. You cannot lie to me, you are part of me. I know. They’re not there. Ask yourself who and why, Lewis.”
“Fuck you.” Lewis drew the knife from its scabbard. He thumbed the switch in a smooth motion and the silver blade emitted a dangerous buzz.