came here to you because I have to. There’s no one else left for me now. But I want to be with you as well. Do you understand that?”
“Not really. What’s happened to you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m still me. For now.” She kissed him, urgency arousing her in a way she hadn’t experienced before. The desperate need to be held, and adored, to be promised that the whole world was a fine and good place after all.
She demanded all that from Andy on his small disorderly bed. Spending the night being worshiped, listening to his ecstatic cries twist away into the disco music while the hazy dapple of iridescent light played across the ceiling. Air in the small confined room grew stifling from the heat and sweat evaporating off their skin. It made them oblivious to the Westminster dome’s giant air circulation systems shutting down.
By the time the first tendrils of thin mist were rising from the Thames to squat listlessly above the riverside buildings, their bursts of orgasmic pleasure had become close to pain as program abuse forced already overdriven flesh to continue. Finally, with the exquisite narcotic of desperation spent, they clung to each other, too senseless to know that a thin layer of cloud had started glowing red above the heart of the ancient city outside.
Chapter 12
Liol piloted
Working out a procedure for bringing Quantook-LOU and five of his entourage inside the starship had taken up the entire trip from the transparent bubble to the rim airlock hatch. They eventually agreed that two of Joshua’s crew, Quantook-LOU, and another Mosdva would ride the MSV out to the starship first. There would be three shuttle flights in all, and Joshua would be the last over. That way the distributor of resources would be satisfied that the starship wouldn’t fly away as soon as its captain was on board, leaving him behind. The idea that Joshua, as commander, wouldn’t desert any crew was obviously foreign to him. An interesting outlook, the humans agreed, and a good marker for future behaviour.
The xenocs were assigned the lower lounge in capsule D, which had its own bio-isolation environmental circuit. Sarha modified it to provide a mix of gas to match Tojolt-HI’s atmosphere, not that they carried a great deal of argon, and she had to omit the hydrocarbons altogether.
Once Quantook-LOU was inside and Joshua was back on the bridge, the Mosdva would provide the coordinates of their destination.
Mosdva spacesuits were made from a tight-fitting fabric and woven with heat regulator ducts. Only the upper two sets of limbs were given sleeves, the lower legs were tucked up next to the body, making the lower section look as if it was the end of a giant stocking. The helmet was chunky, with internal mechanisms bulging up like warts and a forward glass visor that had several protective slide-down shields. Their life-support backpack was a cone whose tip flared out into a fringe of small jet-black fins. A single, thick armoured cable linked it to the helmet. An oversuit web carried electronic modules and canisters the same way as their torso jackets.
Beaulieu and Ashly watched the xenocs through a ceiling sensor as they came through the connecting airlock into the lounge. They didn’t move with quite the same ease as they did back in the diskcity, lacking the fronds to give them stability. But they were adapting fast to grab hoops and the inter-deck ladders.
When the last one was inside, Ashly closed the hatch and let the new atmosphere in. Quantook-LOU waited in the middle of the lounge, while the others conducted a detailed examination. Most of the fittings had been stripped out for this flight anyway, leaving a spartan cabin. It didn’t leave them much technology to probe, and there was certainly nothing critical they could damage. The Mosdva satisfied themselves that the lounge wasn’t actively hostile, and confirmed the atmosphere was compatible before removing their suits. They quickly transferred the electronic modules from their oversuits to their usual jackets.
Beaulieu had used a neutrino-scattering detector when they were in
More interesting were the number of implants each of them was loaded with. The central nervous column, running through the centre of the body, had a number of attachments spliced into it, artificial fibres spread out through the tissue to form a secondary nervous system. Biochemical devices were grafted on to glands and circulatory networks, supplementing organ functions. Compact weapons cylinders were buried in limb muscles.
“The weapons I can understand,” Ruben said when Beaulieu displayed the images over the general communication link. “But the rest seem redundant. Perhaps their organs still haven’t fully evolved to freefall conditions.”
“I disagree,” Cacus said. “Quantook-LOU doesn’t have the same degree of enhancements as the other five. I’d say his escort are the Mosdva equivalent of our boosted mercenaries. They’ll be able to keep functioning even when they’re badly damaged.”
“It’s probably significant that Quantook-LOU’s physiological condition is generally superior to the others’,” Parker said. “His bone structure is certainly thicker, and from what we can understand of his internal organs their biochemical functions have a higher degree of efficiency. That suggests to me that he was actually bred. Fifteen thousand years isn’t long enough for a full genetic evolutionary adaptation to freefall, there are just too many changes from a gravity environment to incorporate.”
“If you’re right, that would confirm an aristocracy-based social structure,” Cacus said. “Their whole administration class would be an elite.”
“He does have a large amount of processors hardwired into what passes for his cortex,” Oski said. “A lot more than the soldiers. They augment his memory and analytical abilities to a similar level as neural nanonics.”
“Physical and mental superiority,” Liol said. “That’s very fascist.”
“Only in human terms,” Ruben chided. “Imposing our values on xenocs and then going on to judge them is the height of conceit.”
“Pardon me,” Liol mumbled. He checked round the bridge to find Ashly and Dahybi grinning at the Edenist’s snobbery; Sarha gave him a thumbs up.
“An aristocracy is historically arrogant,” Syrinx said. “If all the dominions are structured the same way, it would explain why they are so quick to escalate their disagreements into war. The administration class would regard the soldiers as expendable. Like everything else here, they are resources to be exploited to the advantage of the dominion.”
“Then where exactly do we fit into their neat little hierarchy?” Sarha asked.
“What we have is valuable to them,” Parker said. “What we are, is not. They will deal with us on that level only.”
Joshua slid through the lower deck hatch into the bridge, and settled onto his acceleration couch. He datavised the flight computer for a systems review, and took over the command functions from Liol. “We’re ready,” he told Quantook-LOU. “Please give us the location.”
One of the Mosdva’s electronic modules transmitted a stream of data.
“That’s one of the tangles in the web, nine hundred kilometres away,” Beaulieu said. She datavised a string of instructions to the ELINT satellites, using the closest one to give the section a close scan. “The knot itself is approximately four kilometres across, rising seventeen hundred metres above the disk’s median level. A lot of infrared seepage in the surrounding area. Most of the knot’s web tubes are dead. The thermal exchange mechanisms around it are still functioning, but with a reduced output.”
“Somebody’s still alive there,” Sarha said.
“Looks that way.”
“We have the position,” Joshua told Quantook-LOU. “What kind of acceleration can you withstand?”
