“I have already explained, my lady,” Titreano said. “What I can never do is bring you to believe what I am. That must come of its own accord, as God wills.”
He went over to the stallion and held his arms up. “Come on, little one, down you come.”
Genevieve hesitated.
“Go on,” Louise said quietly. Plainly, if Titreano had wanted to harm them, he would have done it by now. The more she saw of these strange people, the more her heart blackened. What could possibly fight such power?
Genevieve smiled scampishly and swung a leg over the stallion. She slithered down his flank into Titreano’s grip.
“Thank you,” she said as he put her down. “And thank you for helping us, too.”
“How could I not? I may be damned, but I am not devoid of honour.”
Louise got most of the way down the stallion before she accepted his steadying hand. She managed a fast, embarrassed grin of thanks.
“I’m sore all over,” Genevieve complained, hands rubbing her bottom.
“Where to?” Louise asked Carmitha.
“I’m not sure,” the Romany replied. “There should be a lot of my folk in the caves above Holbeach. We always gather there if there’s any kind of trouble abroad. You can hold those caves for a long time; they’re high in the cliffs, not easy to reach.”
“It would be a short siege this time, I fear,” Titreano said.
“You got a better idea?” she snapped back.
“You cannot stay on this island, not if you wish to escape possession. Does this world have ships?”
“Some,” Louise said.
“Then you should try to buy passage.”
“To go where?” Carmitha asked. “If your kind really are after bodies, exactly where would be safe?”
“That would depend on how swiftly your leaders rally. There will be war, many dreadful battles. There can be nothing less. Both our kinds are fighting for their very existence.”
“Then we must go to Norwich, the capital,” Louise said decisively. “We must warn the government.”
“Norwich is five thousand miles away,” Carmitha said. “A ship would take weeks.”
“We can’t hide here and do nothing.”
“I’m not risking myself on some foolhardy errand, girl. Fat lot of good you precious landowners will be, anyway. What has Norfolk got which can fight off the likes of him?” She waved a hand towards Titreano.
“The Confederation Navy squadron is still here,” Louise said, her voice raised now. “They have fabulous weapons.”
“Of mass destruction. How’s that going to help people who have been possessed? We need to break the possession, not slaughter the afflicted.”
They glared at each other.
“There’s an aeroambulance based at Bytham,” Genevieve said brightly. “That could reach Norwich in five hours.”
Louise and Carmitha stared at her. Then Louise broke into a grin and kissed her sister. “Now who’s the clever one?”
Genevieve smiled around pertly. Titreano made a face at her, and she giggled.
Carmitha glanced down the road. “Bytham’s about a seven hour journey from here. Assuming we don’t run into any more problems.”
“We won’t,” Genevieve said. She took hold of Titreano’s hand. “Not with you with us.”
He grinned halfheartedly. “I . . .”
“You’re not going to leave us alone,” a suddenly stricken Genevieve asked.
“Of course not, little one.”
“That’s that, then.”
Carmitha shook her head. “I must be bloody mad even thinking of doing this. Louise, tether your horse to the caravan.”
Louise did as she was told. Carmitha climbed back up on the caravan, regarding it suspiciously as she put her weight on the driver’s seat. “How long is that repair going to last for?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Titreano said apologetically. He helped Genevieve up beside Carmitha, then hoisted himself up.
When Louise clambered up, the narrow seat was cramped. She was pressed against Titreano, and not quite sure how she should react to such proximity. If only it were Joshua, she thought wistfully.
Carmitha flicked the reins, and Olivier started forwards at an easy trot.
Genevieve folded her arms in satisfaction and cocked her head to look up at Titreano. “Did you help us at Cricklade as well?”
“How’s that, little one?”
“One of the possessed was trying to stop us from riding away,” Louise said. “She was hit by white fire. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“No, Lady Louise. It was not I.”
Louise settled back into the hard seat, unhappy the mystery hadn’t been solved. But then by today’s standards it was one of the lesser problems confronting her.
Olivier trotted on down the road as Duke finally disappeared below the wolds. Behind the caravan, more of Colsterworth’s buildings had started to burn.
• • •
Guyana’s navy spaceport was a standard hollow sphere of girders, almost two kilometres in diameter. Like a globular silver-white mushroom on a very thin stalk, it stuck out of the asteroid’s rotation axis; the massive magnetic bearings on the end of the connecting spindle allowed it to remain stationary while the colossal rock rolled along its orbital track. The surface was built up from circular docking bays linked together by a filigree of struts and transit tubes. Tanks, generators, crew stations, environmental maintenance machinery, and shark-fin thermo dump panels were jumbled together in the gaps between bays, apparently without reference to any overall design logic.
Narrow rivers of twinkling star-specks looped around it all, twining in elaborate, interlocked figure-eights. The rivers had a current, their points of light drifting in the same direction at the same speed; cargo tugs, personnel commuters, and MSVs, firing their reaction drives to maintain the precise vectors fed to them by traffic control. Ombey’s code three defence alert had stirred the spaceport into frantic activity for the second time in twenty-four hours. But this time instead of preparing to receive a single craft, frigates and battle cruisers were departing. Every few minutes one of the big spherical Royal Kulu Navy ships would launch from its docking bay, rising through the traffic lanes of smaller support craft with an arc-bright glare of secondary fusion drives. They were racing for higher orbits, each with a different inclination; Strategic Defence Command positioned them so they englobed the entire planet, giving full interception coverage out to a million kilometres. If any unidentified ship emerged from a ZTT jump within that region, it would be engaged within a maximum of fifteen seconds.
Amid the departing warships a lone navy flyer rose from the spaceport. It was a flattened egg-shape fuselage of dark blue-grey silicolithium composite, fifty metres long, fifteen wide. Coherent magnetic fields wrapped it in a warm golden glow of captured solar wind particles. Ion thrusters fired, manoeuvring it away from the big frigates. Then the fusion tube in the tail ignited, pushing it down towards the planet seventy-five thousand kilometres below.
The one-gee acceleration sucked Ralph Hiltch gently back into his seat, making the floor stand to the vertical. On the seat next to him, his flight bag rolled over once to lie in the crook of the cushioning.
“This vector will get us to Pasto spaceport in sixty-three minutes,” Cathal Fitzgerald datavised from the pilot’s seat.
“Thanks,” Ralph replied. He widened the channel to include the two G66 troopers. “I’d like you all to access the briefing that Skark gave me. This kind of information could be critical, and we need all the breaks we can get around here.”
