“If necessary, we can just scout round the stars closest to Mastrit-PJ for other Tyrathca colonies. There must be a lot of them in that area. They won’t have been warned about us devious humans yet. The point is, we can find copies of that almanac on the other side of the nebula.”
“I wasn’t disputing that,” Oski said. “I’m just saying, for the record, there may be problems.”
“You’re all overlooking one thing,” Joshua said. He almost smiled when he received their indignant looks. “Is there even going to be a Sleeping God waiting for us if the Kiint get there first? And what the hell do they want with it anyway?”
“We can’t not continue because of the Kiint,” Syrinx said. “In any case, we don’t have real proof that . . .” she trailed off under Joshua’s mocking gaze. “All right, they were at Tanjuntic-RI. But we knew they were interested before we set out. It’s because of them we’re here now. To my mind, this just proves the Sleeping God is a big deal.”
“All right,” Joshua said. “The other side of the nebula, it is.”
Chapter 02
Fifty years ago, Sinon had visited the Welsh-ethnic planet Llandilo, where he’d spent a cold three hours straddling sunrise to watch a clan of New Druids welcome the first day of spring. As pagan ceremonies went, it was a fairly boring affair for an outsider, with off-key singing and interminable Gaelic invocations to the planet’s mother goddess. Only the setting made it worthwhile. They’d gathered on the headland of some eastward-facing coastal cliffs, where a line of tremendous granite pillars marched out to sea. God’s colonnade, the locals called it.
When the sun rose, pink and gold out of the swaddling sea mist, its crescent was aligned perfectly along the line of pillars. One by one, their tops had blazed with rose-gold coronas as the shadows flowed away. Gladdened by nature’s poignancy, the congregation of white-clad New Druids had finally managed to achieve a decent harmony and their voices rang out across the shore.
It was a strange recollection for Sinon to bring to his new serjeant body with its restricted memory capacity. He certainly couldn’t remember his reason for retaining it. An overdose of sentiment, presumably. Whatever the motive, the Llandilo memory was currently providing a useful acclimatisation bridge to the present. Nine thousand of the serjeants trapped on Ketton’s island had gathered together near the edge of the plateau to exert their will, with the remainder joining their endeavours via affinity as they walked resolutely over the mud towards the rendezvous point. They weren’t praying, exactly, but the visual similarity with the New Druids was an amusing comfort. The beleaguered Edenists needed whatever solace they could garner from the dire situation.
Their first, and urgent, priority had been to stem the gush of atmosphere away from the flying island before everybody suffocated. A simple enough task for their assembled minds now they had acquired some degree of energistic power; the unified wish bent whatever passed for local reality into obedience. Even Stephanie Ash and her raggedy little group of followers had aided them in that. Now it was as though the air layer around the outside of the island had become an impregnable vertical shield.
Encouraged and relieved, they stated their second wish loud and clear: to return. In theory, it should have been easy. If a massive concentration of energistic power had brought them here to this realm, then an equally insistent concentration should be able to get them back. So far, this argument of logical symmetry had failed them utterly.
“You dudes should give it a rest,” Cochrane said irritably. “It’s real spooky with all of you standing still like some zombie army.”
Along with the others of Stephanie’s group, the redoubtable hippie had spent a quarter of an hour trying to help the serjeants open some kind of link back to the old universe. When it became obvious (to them) that such a connection was going to be inordinately difficult, if not impossible, he’d let his attention drift. They’d ended up sitting in a circle round Tina, giving her what support and comfort they could.
She was still very weak, sweating and shivering as she lay inside a heavily insulated field sleeping bag. One of the serjeants with medical knowledge who’d examined her said that loss of blood was the biggest problem. Their direct infusion equipment didn’t work in this realm, so it had rigged up a primitive intravenous plasma drip feed for her.
Stephanie’s unvoiced worry was that Tina had suffered the kind of internal injuries they could never repair properly with their energistic power, however much they willed her to be better. As with Moyo’s eyes, the subtleties of the flesh had defeated them. They needed fully-functional medical nanonic packages. Which wasn’t going to happen here.
Her other concern was exactly what would happen to the souls of anyone whose body died in this realm. Their connection with the beyond had been irrevocably severed. It wasn’t a prospect she wanted to explore. Though looking at Tina’s poorly acted cheer, she thought they might all find out before too long.
Sinon broke out of his trance-state, and looked down at Cochrane. “Our attempt to manipulate the energistic power is not a physically draining exercise. As there is nothing else for us to do here, we consider it appropriate to continue with our efforts to return home.”
“You do, huh? Yeah, well, I can dig that. I purge myself with yoga. It’s righteous. But, you know, us cats, we’ve got to like
“I’m sorry, you should have said.” Sinon walked over to one of the large piles of backpacks and weapons which the serjeants had discarded. He found his own and unfastened the top. “We don’t ingest solid food, I’m afraid, but our nutrient soup will sustain you. It contains all the proteins and vitamins required by a normal human digestion system.” He pulled out several silvery sachets and distributed them round the dubious group. “You should supplement the meal with water.”
Cochrane flipped the cap off the sachet’s small valve and sniffed suspiciously. With everyone watching intently, he squeezed a couple of drops of the pale amber liquid onto his finger, and licked at them. “Holy shit! It tastes like seawater. Man, I can’t eat raw plankton, I’m not a whale.”
“Big enough to qualify,” Rana muttered under her breath.
“We have no other source of nourishment available,” Sinon said in mild rebuke.
“It’s fine, thank you,” Stephanie told the big serjeant. She concentrated for a moment, and her sachet solidified into a bar of chocolate. “Don’t pay any attention to Cochrane. We can imagine it to be whatever taste we like.”
“Bad karma’ll get you,” the hippie sniffed. “Yo there, Sinon. You got a glass going spare? I figure I can still remember what a shot of decent bourbon tastes like.”
The serjeant rummaged round in his pack, and found a plastic cup.
“Hey, thanks, man.” Cochrane took it from him, and transformed it into a crystal tumbler. He poured a measure of the nutrient soup out, watching happily as it thinned into his favourite familiar golden liquor. “More like it.”
Stephanie peeled the wrapper from her chocolate, and bit off a corner. It tasted every bit as good as the imported Swiss-ethnic delicacy she remembered from her childhood. But then, in this case the memory is the taste, she told herself wryly. “How much of this nutrient soup have you got left?” she asked.
“We each carry a week’s supply in our pack,” Sinon said. “That period is calculated on the assumption we will be physically active for most of the time. With careful rationing it should last between two and three weeks.”
Stephanie gazed out across the rumpled grey-brown mud which made up the surface of the flying island. Occasional pools of water glinted in the uniform blue-tinted glare that surrounded them. A few scattered ferrangs and kolfrans nosed around the edges of drying mires, nibbling at the fronds of smothered vegetation. Not enough to provide the combined human and serjeant inhabitants with a single meal. “I guess that’s all the time we’ve got then. Even if we had warehouses full of seed grain, three weeks isn’t enough time to produce a crop.”
“It is debatable if the air will sustain us for that long anyway,” Sinon said. “Our estimate for the human and serjeant population on this island is twenty-thousand-plus individuals. We won’t run out of oxygen, but the increase in carbon dioxide caused by that many people breathing will reach a potentially dangerous level in ten days’ time
