You should have identified yourself to us,the personality said in censure.
I have been busy thinking, discovering what I am.
And that is?
I’m not quite sure yet.
Tolton whooped happily, and emerged from behind his pillar.
“Careful!” Erentz warned.
“Dariat? Hey, is that you?” Tolton hurried along the platform, grinning madly.
“It’s me.” There was only a slightly sardonic tone colouring his voice.
Tolton frowned. He’d heard his friend’s voice loud and clear, never even needing to concentrate on the lip movement. He came to a confused halt. “Dariat?”
Dariat put his hands flat on the platform edge, and heaved himself up like a swimmer emerging from a pool. It looked like a lot of effort to lift so much weight. His toga stretched tight over his shoulders. “What’s up, Tolton? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” He chuckled as he walked forward. The frayed hem of his toga brushed against one of the fast-food packets, and sent it spinning.
Tolton stared at the rectangle of plastic as it skidded to a halt. The others were bringing their weapons to bear again.
“You’re real,” Tolton stammered. “Solid!” The obese grinning man standing in front of him was no longer translucent.
“Damn right. The Lady Chi-Ri smiled on me. A warped kind of smile, I guess, but definitely a smile.”
Tolton reached out gingerly and touched Dariat’s arm. Cold bit into his questing fingers like razor fangs. He snatched his hand back. But there had definitely been a physical surface; he’d even felt the crude weave of the toga cloth. “Shit! What happened to you, man?”
“Ah, now there’s a story.”
“I fell,” Dariat told them. “Ten bloody stories down that lift shaft, screaming all the way. Thoale alone knows why suicides are so fond of jumping off cliffs and bridges; they wouldn’t if they knew what that trip’s like. I’m not even sure I did it on purpose. The personality was bullying me to do it, but that thing was getting closer, which made me weaker. I probably lost control of my legs I was so debilitated. Whatever . . . I went over the edge and landed smack on top of the lift. I even penetrated it a few centimetres I was falling so hard. Shit, I hate that. You’ve no idea how bad solid matter feels to a ghost. Anyway, I was just forcing my legs through the lift’s roof to get out of there when the bloody bogeyman lands right bang beside me. I could even feel it coming, like a gust of liquid helium blowing down the shaft. But the thing is, it didn’t break when it hit. It splashed.”
“Splashed?” Tolton queried.
“Absolutely. It was like a goo bomb detonated on top of the lift. The whole shaft was splattered in this thick fluid. Everything got coated, including me. But the fluid reacted to me, I could feel the droplets. It was like getting caught in a spray of ice.”
“How do you mean, reacted?”
“They changed while they were going through me. Their shape and colour tried to match the section of my body they were in. I figured it’s like my thoughts have a big influence over them. I’m imagining my shape, right. So that imagination interacts with the fluid and formats it.”
“Mind over matter,” Erentz said sceptically.
“You got it. Those creatures are no different from any human ghost, except they’re made up of this fluid; a solid visualization. They’re souls, just like us.”
“So how come you became solid?” Tolton asked.
“We fought for it, me and the other entity’s soul. The impact made it lose concentration for a moment, that’s why the stuff went flying off. Both of us started scrambling round to suck up as much as we could. And I was a hell of a lot stronger that it was. I won. Must have got seventy per cent of what was there before I made a run for it. Then I hid in the bottom floors until the rest of them had gone.” He looked round the circle of faintly suspicious faces. “That’s why they’ve come here. Valisk is saturated with energy that they can use. It’s the kind of energy that makes up our souls, life-energy. The attraction is like a bee for pollen. This is what they crave; they’re sentient just like us, they’ve come from the same universe as us, but blind instinct rules them now. They’ve been here so long they’re severely diminished, not to mention totally irrational. All they know is that they have to feed on life-energy, and Valisk is the biggest single source to emerge here that they can remember.”
“That’s what they were doing to the nutrient fluid,” the personality said. “Absorbing the life-energy from it.”
“Yeah. Which is what trashes it. And once it’s gone, you’ll never be able to produce any more. This dark continuum is like a bedamned version of the beyond.”
Tolton slumped onto the bottom stair. “Just fucking great. This is worse than the beyond?”
“I’m afraid so. This must be the sixth realm, the nameless void. Entropy is the only lord here. We will all bow down before him in the end.”
“This is not a Starbridge realm,” the personality retorted sharply. “It’s an aspect of physical reality, and once we understand and tabulate its properties we will know how to open a wormhole interstice and escape. We’ve already put a stop to these creatures consuming any more of us.”
Dariat glanced suspiciously round the empty station. “How?”
“The habitat’s nutrient fluid arteries have been shut down.”
“Uh oh,” Dariat said. “Bad move.”
With their nourishment denied them, the Orgathй began to search round for further sources of raw life- energy, crying out in their own strange intangible voices. Their kith who had infested the southern endcap organs shrilled in reply. Even there, the rich fluids were drying up, but the organs themselves were suffused with a furnace glow of life-energy. Enough for thousands.
The Orgathй pummelled their way up through the starscrapers one by one, and took flight.
Dariat, Tolton, Erentz, and several others stood outside one of the endcap caverns they were using as a garage for the rentcop trucks. They shielded their eyes from the bruised tangerine nimbus of the light-tube to watch one of the dark colossi soar upwards from a collapsing lobby. With its tattered wing sails extended, it was bigger than a cargo spaceplane. A small pearl-white twister of hail and snow fell from its warty underbelly.
Erentz puffed a relieved breath out through her teeth. “At least they’re still heading for the southern endcap.”
There are over thirty of them gnawing their way through our organs now,the personality said. The damage they are inflicting is reaching dangerous levels. And there’s only a single pressure door in the Igan starscraper preventing an atmosphere breach. You will have to go on the offensive. Dariat, will the flame throwers kill them?
No. Souls cannot be killed, even here. They just fade away to wraiths, maybe shadows not even that strong.
You know what we mean, boy!
Yeah, sure. Okay, the fire will fuck with their constituent fluid. They’re taking a long time to acclimatize to the heat levels in the habitat. We’re Thoale alone knows how many thousands of degrees above the continuum’s ambient.
You mean hundreds.
I don’t think so. Anyway, they can’t take a direct blast of physical heat. Lasers and masers they can simply deflect, but flame should dissipate the fluid and leave their souls naked. It’ll turn them into another just bunch of ghosts skulking round the parkland.
Excellent.
“If they can’t die, what do they want with all that life-energy?” Erentz asked.
“It boosts them above the rest,” Dariat said. “Once they’re strong, they’ll stay free for a long time before the life-energy leaks away again.”
“Free of what?” Tolton asked uneasily. He had to stand several paces away from his friend. Not out of rudeness; Dariat was
