Reality Dysfunction - Expansion

Revenge those long months ago.

It hits us all in the end, son, Olsen Neale thought soulfully to himself. We deliberately bring ourselves down to their level so we can blend in, and sometimes it costs just too much. Because nothing can go lower than human beings.

Erick remained unmoved by the compliment. “You can have Duchamp and the rest of the crew arrested immediately,” he said. “My neural nanonics recording of our attack on the Krystal Moon will be more than enough to convict them. I want you to tell the prosecutor to ask for maximum penalties. We can have them all committed to a penal planet. The whole lot of them, and that’s better than they deserve.”

And it transfers your guilt, as well, Neale thought silently. “I don’t think we can do that right now, Erick,” he said.

“What? Three people have died just so that you have enough evidence against Duchamp. Two of them I killed myself.”

“I’m truly sorry, Erick, but circumstances have changed somewhat radically since your mission began. Have you accessed Time Universe’s Lalonde sensevise?”

Erick gave him a demoralized stare, guessing what was coming. “Yes.”

“Terrance Smith has signed on the Villeneuve’s Revenge for his mercenary fleet. We’ve got to have somebody there, Erick. It’s a legal mission for a planetary government, there’s nothing I can do to prevent them from leaving. Christ, this is Laton we’re talking about. I was about ten years old when he destroyed Jantrit. One and a quarter million people just so he could make a clean getaway, and the habitat itself; the Edenists had never lost a habitat before, their life expectancy is measured in millennia. And now he’s had nearly forty years to perfect his megalomaniac schemes. Shit, we don’t even know what they are; but what I’ve heard about Lalonde is enough to frighten me. I’m scared, Erick, I’ve got a family. I don’t want him to get his hands on them. We have to know where he went on the Yaku . Nothing is more important than that. Piracy and flogging off black-market goods are totally irrelevant by comparison. The navy has to find him and exterminate him. Properly this time. Until he’s dead, we have no other goal. I’ve already sent a flek to Avon, a courier left on a blackhawk an hour after the Time Universe people told me about their recording.”

Erick’s brow crinkled in surprise.

Olsen Neale gave a modest smile. “Yes, a blackhawk. They’re fast, they’re good. And Laton will ultimately have them too if we don’t stop him. Their captains are just as unnerved by him as we are.”

“All right.” Erick gave up. “I’ll go.”

“Anything. Any piece of data. What he’s done out in the Lalonde hinterlands. Where the Yaku went. Just anything.”

“I’ll get whatever I can.”

“You could try asking this journalist, Graeme Nicholson.” He shrugged at Erick’s expression. “The man’s smart, resourceful. If anyone on that planet had the presence of mind to track the Yaku ’s jump coordinate, it’ll be him.”

Erick rose to his feet. “OK.”

“Erick . . . take care.”

The heavy curtains in Kelly Tirrel’s bedroom were drawn across the two oval windows. Ornate wall- mounted glass globes emitted a faint turquoise light. It made the white bedsheets shimmer as if they were the surface of a moonlit lake; human skin was dark and tantalizing.

Kelly let Joshua run his hands over her, parting her legs so he could probe the damp cleft hidden below her tangle of pubic hair.

“Nice,” she purred, squirming over the rumpled sheets.

His teeth shone as he parted his lips. “Good.”

“If you take me with you, there will be five days of this. Nonstop; and in free fall, too.”

“A powerful argument.”

“Money as well. Collins will pay triple rate for my passage.”

“I’m already rich.”

“So get richer.”

“Jesus, you’re a pushy bitch.”

“Is that a complaint? Did you want to be with someone else tonight?”

“Er, no.”

“Good.” Her hand slid round his balls. “This is the one for me, Joshua. This is my make or break chance. I blew the Ione story because of someone not a million kilometres from here.” Her fingers tightened slightly. “Opportunities like this don’t come to a place like Tranquillity three times in a life. If I pull it off I’ll be made; top of the seniority table, good assignments, a decent bureau posting, a real salary. You owe me this, Joshua. You owe me very big.”

“Suppose the mercenaries don’t want you with them?”

“You leave them to me. The way I’ll pitch it at them, they’ll eat up the offer. Heroes up against frightening odds helping to flatten Laton, rogues with a heart of gold, sensevised into every home in the Confederation. Come on!”

“Jesus.” There was still an uncomfortable pressure round his balls, long red nails touching his scrotum, a little too sharply to be described as tickling. She wouldn’t. Would she? Her smart, expensive grey-blue Crusto suit was folded neatly over a chair by the dresser. It had been taken off with military regimentation as she prepared for sex.

She probably would. Jesus.

“Of course I’ll take you.”

Thumb and forefinger nipped one ball impishly.

“Yow!” His eyes watered. “You don’t think you’re getting carried away with this idea, do you? I mean, there are career moves and career moves. Landing on a hostile planet behind enemy lines is pushing company loyalty to extremes.”

“Crap.” Kelly rolled onto one elbow and glared at him. “Did you see who Time Universe had introducing their studio segments? Matthias bastard Rems, that’s who. Just because he was in the right place at the right time. That lucky little shit. He’s younger than me, barely out of his nursery pen. And they gave him three days prime scheduling time. And market research says he’s popular because he’s boyish. Some women like that, it turns out. Eighty-year-old virgins, I should think. The reason Time Universe won’t let him record sensevises is because then we’d all know for sure he hasn’t got any balls.”

“Not a problem in your case, is it?”

It came out before he could think. Kelly spent a hot violent twenty minutes making him wish it hadn’t.

The nineteen starships under Terrance Smith’s command assembled a thousand kilometres beyond Tranquillity’s spaceport: the Gemal with five thousand general troops, three cargo clippers carrying their equipment and supplies, and fifteen combat-capable ships, six of which were blackhawks.

Tranquillity watched their drives come on, and the flotilla moved in towards Mirchusko at one gee. The Adamist starships employed a single-file formation (with Gemal leading) which the blackhawks encircled insolently. Strategic-defence sensor-platforms detected a vast amount of encrypted data traffic being exchanged between the ships as communication channels were tested and combat tactics exchanged.

They curved around the gas giant, heading towards its penumbra. Their drive exhausts shortened and vanished while they were still a hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometres above the unruly cloudscape, coasting towards the jump co-ordinate. Tranquillity saw the faint blue flickers of ion jets perfecting their orbital tracks; then the thermo-dump panels and sensor clusters began to withdraw. The blackhawks rushed away from the main convoy, freed of the constraints imposed by their Adamist partners, expanding in a perfectly spaced rosette. Then the bitek starships performed their swallow manoeuvre, jumping on ahead to scout for any possible trouble. Space reverberated with the gravity-wave backwash of their wormhole interstices snapping shut behind them, impinging on the habitat’s sensitive mass-detection organs.