“Lucky you. Do you know what a sight you are?”
“What about you? What do you want waiting on the other side?”
“You know that: Anastasia. I lived for her. I died for her. I sacrificed my soul for her . . . wel, her sister anyway. I thought she might be watching at the time. Wanted to make a good impression.”
“Don’t worry, you already have, man. I keep telling you, a love like yours is going to make her giddy. The chicks really dig that kind of mad devotion crap.”
“You’re the most insensitive poet I’ve ever met.”
“Street poet. I don’t do the roses and chocolates routine, I’m too much of a realist.”
“I bet roses and chocolates pay more.” When there was no answer, Dariat took a close look at Tolton’s face. He was still breathing, but very slowly, air whistling past the fangs of ice crusting his mouth. There were no shivers any more.
Dariat rolled back onto his own acceleration couch and waited patiently. It took another twenty minutes before Tolton’s ghost rose up out of the bloated bundle of fabric. He took one astounded look at Dariat, then put his head back and laughed.
“Oh shit, will you grab a load of this. I’m the soul of a poet.” The laughter degenerated into sobbing. “The soul of a poet. Get it? You’re not laughing. You’re not laughing and it’s fucking funny. It’s the last funny thing you’ll ever know for the rest of all eternity.
“Shush.” Dariat’s head came up. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear them? There’s a billion trillion souls out there. Of course I can fucking hear them.”
“No. Not the souls in the mйlange. I thought I heard someone calling. A human voice.”
Chapter 14
It had been a long night for Fletcher Christian. They’d kept him chained to the altar with electricity coursing through him while the madness whirled all around. He’d seen Dexter’s followers chopping up the beautifully crafted wooden model of St Paul’s which Sir Christopher Wren had built to show off his dream, throwing splintered fragments into the iron braziers which now illuminated the building. The silent slaughter as people were dragged up to the altar where Dexter waited with the anti-memory weapon. Fletcher wept as their souls were destroyed in readiness for their bodies to be replenished by those from the beyond, personalities more compliant to the dark Messiah’s wishes. Salty tears leaked into the runes mutilating his cheeks, stinging like acid. Courtney’s crazed shrieking laugh as Dexter ravaged her until blood flowed and skin blistered.
Sacrilege. Murder. Barbarism. It never stopped. Each act pounding away at the few senses he had remaining. He recited the Lord’s Prayer over and over until Dexter heard him, and the possessed closed in, screaming some obscene chant in counter. Their cruel words slipped into him with the force of daggers, their joy in evil tormenting him into silence. He feared his mind would snap from the pressure of such depravity.
Throughout it all, the font of energistic power increased along with their numbers, spreading out to engulf mind and matter alike. This was not the shared longing he’d known on Norfolk, the genuine appetite to hide from emptiness. Here Dexter absorbed what strength his followers offered and forged its shape with his own damned desires.
As the sullied red light crept through the open door, mocking the night, Fletcher finally heard the cries of the fallen angels. On top of everything else, their diabolical poignancy nearly broke his resolve. Surely not even Dexter could think of letting such beasts loose upon the earth.
“No,” Fletcher wailed. “You cannot bring them forth. It is madness. Madness. They will consume us all.”
Dexter’s face slid into view above him, coldly radiant with satisfaction. “About fucking time you understood.”
Star tracker sensors slid out of their recesses, gathering up the faint harvest of photons. Navigation programs correlated what was there, defining their position.
Joshua triangulated on their target, an unremarkable point of light only thirty-two light-years away now. Their next jump coordinate sprang into his mind, blinking purple at the end of a long neuroiconic tube of orange circles. The star was slightly to one side of it, a distance that represented relative delta-V. Starship and star were still moving at very different velocities as they orbited the galactic core.
“Stand by,” he said. “Accelerating.”
There were groans across the bridge. They dried up soon enough as he activated the antimatter drive. Four gees pushed everyone down into their couches except for Kempster Getchell; the old astronomer had gone into a zero-tau pod after the second jump. “Too much for my bones,” he’d complained gamely. “Fetch me out when we get there.”
Everyone else stuck it out. Not that the crew had a choice. Seventeen jumps in twenty-three hours, each one fifteen light-years long. In itself, probably a record. Nobody was counting now; they’d devoted themselves entirely to keeping the systems functioning smoothly, a professionalism not many could match. Pride had increased to accompany an edgy anticipation as the Sleeping God star grew closer.
Joshua remained in his acceleration couch, piloting them to each coordinate with his usual sublime competence. Nothing much was said as the Orion Nebula shrank away behind them. It was smaller in every star tracker scan, dwindling down to a diminutive fuzzy patch of light the last familiar astronomical feature left in the universe. Every fusion generator was running at maximum capacity, recharging the nodes fast. That was why Joshua used high gees between coordinates, instead of the usual one tenth. Time. It had become the most precious commodity left to him.
Instinct drove him on. That enigmatic, bland star holding steady at the apex of the sensor lock was giving out the same siren song as those strikes in the Ruin Ring once had. So much had happened on this flight. So much of his own hope had been invested now. He couldn’t, didn’t, believe that it had all been for nothing. The Sleeping God existed. A xenoc artefact, powerful enough to interest the Kiint. They’d been right all along, the discoveries made throughout the flight continually emphasising its importance.
“Nodes charged and ready, Captain,” Dahybi reported.
“Thanks,” Joshua said. He automatically ran a vector check. The old girl was performing well. Three more hours, two more jumps, and they’d be there. The flight would be over. That was the part he found hard to credit. There were so many roots elevating the
He didn’t believe in odds that long. That just left destiny, divine intervention.
Interesting, given what they were supposedly flying towards.
Louise awoke in some confusion. A young man was lying on top of her. Both of them were naked.
Andy, she remembered. It was his flat: small, grubby, cluttered, and so warm the air itself seemed to have thickened. Condensation had licked every surface to glisten in the dark-pink light of dawn that drizzled through the fogged window.
I will not regret what we did last night, she told herself firmly. I have no reason to feel guilty. I did what I wanted to. I am entitled to do that.
She tried to ease him to one side and slip out from underneath, but the bed simply wasn’t big enough. He stirred, frowning as he focused on her. Then he flinched in shock.
“Louise!”
