real fury at being interrupted.
“The hellhawks are here,” he said. “All of them. They’ve come from Valisk. It’s . . .” He flinched in trepidation. Delivering bad news to Kiera was always a desperately negative career move. Just because she had the kind of teenage-sweetheart looks which could (and had) suckered in non-possessed kids from right across the Confederation didn’t mean her behaviour matched. Quite the opposite—she took a perverse enjoyment from that, too. “Bonney chased after Dariat, apparently. There was a big fight in one of the starscrapers. Plenty of our people got flung back into the beyond. Then she forced him to ally with Rubra, or something.”
“What happened?”
“They, er—Valisk’s gone. The two of them took the habitat out of the universe.”
Kiera stared at him, little wisps of steam starting to lick out of her hair. She’d always bitterly regretted that Marie Skibbow didn’t have some kind of affinity faculty; its absence had always put her at a slight disadvantage in Valisk. But she’d coped, the entire worldlet and its formidable starships had belonged to her. She’d been a power to contend with. Even Capone had sought out her help. Now—
Kiera gave the non-possessed beautician girl a blank-eyed glance. “Get lost.”
“Ma’am.” The girl curtseyed, and almost sprinted for the suite’s double doors on the other side of the lounge.
Kiera allowed herself a muted scream of fury when the doors closed. “That fucking Dariat! I knew it! I fucking knew he was a disaster waiting to happen.”
“We’re still in charge of the hellhawks,” Hudson Proctor said. “That gives us a big chunk of Capone’s action; and the Organization is in charge of a couple of star systems, with more on the way. It’s not such a loss. If we’d been inside the habitat it would be one hell of a lot worse.”
“If I’d been inside, it would never have happened,” she snapped back. Her hair was abruptly dry, and her robe blurred, running like hot wax until it became a sharp mauve business suit. “Control,” she murmured almost to herself. “That’s the key here.”
Hudson Proctor could sense her focusing on him, both her eyes and her mind.
“Are you with me?” she asked. “Or are you going to ask good old Al if you can sign on as one of his lieutenants?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if I can’t keep control of the hellhawks, I’m nothing to the Organization.” She smiled thinly. “You and I would have to start right back at the beginning again. With the hellhawks obeying us, we’ll still be players.”
He glanced out of the big window, searching space for a sight of the bitek starships. “We’ve got no hold on them any more,” he said dejectedly. “Without the affinity-capable bodies stored in Valisk, there’s no way they’ll do as they’re ordered. And there aren’t any more of Rubra’s family left for us to replace them with. We’ve lost.”
Kiera shook her head impatiently. Considering she’d coopted the ex-general to her council for his ability to think tactically, he was doing a remarkably poor job of it. But then, maybe a politician’s instinct was naturally quicker at finding an opponent’s weakness. “There’s one thing left which they can’t do for themselves.”
“And that is?”
“Eat. The only sources of their nutrient fluid which they’ll be able to use are on Organization-held asteroids. Without food, even bitek organisms will wither and die. And we know our energistic power can’t magic up genuine food.”
“Then Capone will control them.”
“No.” Kiera could sense his anxiety at the prospect of losing his status, and knew she could rely on him. She closed her eyes, focusing on assignments for the small number of her people she’d brought with her to Monterey. “Which is the most reliable hellhawk we’ve got on planetary defence?”
“Reliable?”
“Loyal, idiot. To me.”
“That’ll probably be Etchells in the
“Perfect. Call him back to Monterey’s docking ledges and go on board. I want you to visit every Organization asteroid in this system with a nutrient fluid production system. And blow it to shit.”
Hudson gave her an astounded look, trepidation replacing the earlier anxiety. “The asteroids?”
“No, shithead! Just the production systems. You don’t even have to dock, just use an X-ray laser. That’ll leave Monterey as their only supply point.” She smiled happily. “The Organization has enough to do right now without the burden of maintaining all that complicated machinery. I think I’ll go down there right now with our experts, and relieve them.”
It wasn’t dawn which arose over the wolds, in as much as there was no sun to slide above the horizon any more, but none the less the darkened sky grew radiant in homage to Norfolk’s lost diurnal rhythm. Luca Comar felt it developing because he was a part of making it happen. By coming to this place he had freed himself from the clamour of the souls lost within the beyond, their tormented screams and angry pleas. In exchange he had gained an awareness of community.
Born at the tail end of the Twenty-first Century he’d grown up in the Amsterdam arcology. It was a time when people still clung to the hope that the planet could be healed, their superb technology employed to turn the clock back to the nevertime of halcyon pastoral days. In his youth, Luca dreamed of the land returned to immense parkland vistas with proud white and gold cities straddling the horizon. A child brought up by some of the last hippies on Earth, his formative years were spent loving the knowledge that togetherness was all. Then he turned eighteen, and for the first time in his existence reality had bitten, and bitten hard; he had to get a job, and an apartment, and pay taxes. Not nice. He resented it until the day his body died.
So now he had stolen a new body, and with the strange powers that theft had bestowed, he’d joined with the others of this planet to create their own Gaia. Unity of life was a pervasive, shroud-like presence wrapping itself around the planet, replacing the regimented order of the universe as their provider. Because the new inhabitants of Norfolk wished there to be a dawn, there was one. And as they equally desired night, so the light was banished. He contributed a little of himself to this Gaia, some of his wishes, some of his strength, a constant avowal of thanks to this new phase of his existence.
Luca sat on the edge of the huge bed in the master bedroom to watch the light strengthen outside Cricklade; a silver warmth shining down from the sky, its uniformity leaving few shadows. With it came the sense of anticipation, a new day to be treasured because of the opportunity it might bring.
The woman on the bed beside Luca stretched and rolled over, resting her chin in her hand and smiling up at him. “Morning,” she purred.
He grinned back. Lucy was good company, sharing a lot of his enthusiasms, as well as a wicked sense of humour. A tall woman, great figure, thick chestnut hair worn long, barely into her mid-twenties. He never asked how much of her appearance was hers, and how much belonged to her host. The age of your host had swiftly become taboo. He liked to think himself modern enough so that bedding a ninety-year-old wouldn’t bother him, age and looks being different concepts here. He still didn’t ask, though. The solid image was good enough.
An image so close to Marjorie it verges on the idolatrous. Did this Lucy see that in my heart?
Luca yawned widely. “I’d better get going. We have to inspect the mill this morning, and I need to know how much seed corn we’ve actually got left in the silos over in the estate’s western farms. I don’t believe what the residents are telling me. It doesn’t correspond with what Grant knows.”
Lucy pulled a dour face. “One week in heaven, and the four horsemen are already giving us the eye.”
“Alas, this is not heaven, I’m afraid.”
“And don’t I know it. Fancy having to work for a living when you’re dead. God, the indignity.”
“The wages of sin, lady. We did have one hell of a party to start with, after all.”
She flopped back down on the bed, tongue poised tautly on her upper lip. “Sure did. You know I was quite repressed back when I was alive first time around. Sexually, that is.”
“Hallelujah, it’s a miracle cure.”
