“It means nothing to me.”
“I assure you that on his homeworld it means a great deal more. Ormazd was a failed tyrant, fleeing a political counter-revolution on Zion. He had murdered and cheated his way to power on Zion, burning his rivals in their houses while they slept. But there’d been a backlash. He got out just before the ring closed around him-him and a handful of his closest allies and devotees. They escaped aboard the Pelican in Impiety.”
“And Ormazd died here?”
“Yes-but his followers didn’t. They made it to Haven, our world. And once there they began to proliferate, spreading their word, recruiting new followers. It didn’t matter that Ormazd was gone. Quite the opposite. He’d martyred himself; given them a saint figure to worship. It evolved from a political movement into a religious cult. The Vahishta Foundation’s just a front for the Ormazd sect.”
Naqi absorbed that, then asked: “Where does Amesha come into it?”
“Amesha was his daughter. She wants her father back.”
Something lit the horizon, a pink-edged flash. Another followed a minute later, in nearly the same position.
“She wants to commune with him?”
“More than that,” said Weir. “They all want to become him; to accept his neural patterns on their own. They want the Jugglers to imprint Ormazd’s personality on all his followers, to remake them in his own image. The aliens will do that, if the right gifts are offered. And that’s what I can’t allow.”
Naqi chose her words carefully, sensing that the tiniest thing could push Weir into releasing the globe. She had prevented his last attempt, but he would not allow her a second chance. All he would have to do would be to crush the globe in his fist before spilling the contents into the ocean. Then it would all be over. Everything she had ever known; everything she had ever lived for.
“But we’re only talking about nineteen people,” she said.
Weir laughed hollowly. “I’m afraid it’s a little more than that. Why don’t you turn on the radio and see what I mean?”
Naqi did as he suggested, using the boat’s general communications console. The small, scuffed screen received television pictures beamed down from the comsat network. Naqi flicked through channels, finding static on most of them. The Snowflake Council’s official news service was off the air and no personal messages were getting through. There were some suggestions that the comsat network itself was damaged. Yet finally Naqi found a few weak broadcast signals from the nearest snowflake cities. There was a sense of desperation in the transmissions, as if they expected to fall silent at any time.
Weir nodded with weary acceptance, as if he had expected this.
In the last six hours at least a dozen more shuttles had come down from the Voice of Evening. They had been packed with armed Vahishta disciples. The shuttles had attacked the planet’s major snowflake cities and atoll settlements, strafing them into submission. Three cities had fallen into the sea, their vacuum bladders punctured by beam weapons. There could be no survivors. Others were still aloft, but had been set on fire. The pictures showed citizens leaping from the cities’ berthing arms, falling like sparks. More cities had been taken bloodlessly, and were now under control of the disciples.
None of those cities were transmitting now.
It was the end of the world. Naqi knew that she should be weeping, or at the very least feel some writhing sense of loss in her stomach. But all she felt was a sense of denial; a refusal to accept that events could have escalated so quickly. This morning the only hint of wrongness had been a single absent disciple.
“There are tens of thousands of them up there,” Weir said. “All that you’ve seen so far is the advance guard.”
Naqi scratched her forearm. It was itching, as if she had caught a dose of sunburn.
“Moreau was in on this?”
“Captain Moreau’s a puppet. Literally. The body you saw was just being tele-operated by orbital disciples. They murdered the Ultras; commandeered the ship.”
“Rafael… Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“My position was too vulnerable. I was the only anti-Ormazd agent my movement managed to put aboard the Voice of Evening. If I’d attempted to warn the Turquoise authorities… Well, work it out for yourself. Almost certainly I wouldn’t have been believed, and the disciples would have found a way to silence me before I became an embarrassment. And it wouldn’t have made a difference to their takeover plans. My only hope was to destroy the ocean, to remove its usefulness to them. They might still have destroyed your cities out of spite, but at least they’d have lost the final thread that connected them to their martyr.” Weir leaned closer to her. “Don’t you understand? It wouldn’t have stopped with the disciples aboard the Voice. They’d have brought more ships from Haven. Your ocean would have become a production line for despots.”
“Why did they hesitate, if they had such a crushing advantage over us?”
“They didn’t know about me, so they lost nothing by dedicating a few weeks to intelligence gathering. They wanted to know as much as possible about Turquoise and the Jugglers before they made their move. They’re brutal, but they’re not inefficient. They wanted their takeover to be as precise and surgical as possible.”
“And now?”
“They’ve accepted that things won’t be quite that neat and tidy.” He flipped the globe from one palm to another, with a casual playfulness that Naqi found alarming. “They’re serious, Naqi. Crane will stop at nothing now. You’ve seen those blast flashes. Pinpoint antimatter devices. They’ve already sterilised the organic matter within the Moat, to stop the effect of my weapon from reaching farther. If they know where we are, they’ll drop a bomb on us as well.”
“Human evil doesn’t give us the excuse to wipe out the ocean.”
“It’s not an excuse, Naqi. It’s an imperative.”
At that moment something glinted on the horizon, something that was moving slowly from east to west.
“The shuttle,” Weir said. “It’s looking for us.”
Naqi scratched her arm again. It was discoloured, itching.
Near local noon they reached the next node. The shuttle had continued to dog them, nosing to and fro along the hazy band where sea met sky. Sometimes it appeared closer, sometimes it appeared farther away. But it did not leave them alone, and Naqi knew that it would only be a matter of time before it detected a positive homing trace, a chemical or physical trace in the water that would lead to its quarry. The shuttle would cover the remaining distance in a matter of seconds, a minute at the most, and then all that she and Weir would know would be a moment of cleansing whiteness, a fire of holy purity. Even if Weir released his toxin just before the shuttle arrived it would not have time to dissipate into a wide enough volume of water to survive the fireball.
So why was he hesitating? It was Mina, of course. Naqi’s sister had given a name to the faceless library of stored minds he was prepared to erase. She had removed the one-sidedness of the moral equation, and now Weir had to accept that his own actions could never be entirely blameless.
“I should just do this,” he said. “By hesitating even for a second, I’m betraying the trust of the people who sent me here, people who have probably been tormented to extinction by Ormazd’s followers.”
Naqi shook her head. “If you didn’t show doubt, you’d be as bad as the disciples.”
“ You almost sound as if you want me to do it.”
She groped for something resembling the truth, as painful as that might be. “Perhaps I do.”
“Even though it would mean killing whatever part of Mina survived?”
“I’ve lived in her shadow my entire life. Even after she died… I always felt she was still watching me, still observing my every mistake, still being faintly disappointed that I wasn’t living up to all she had imagined I could be.”
“You’re being harsh on yourself. Harsh on Mina too, by the likes of things.”
“I know,” Naqi said angrily. “I’m just telling you how I feel.”
The boat edged into a curving inlet that pushed deep into the node. Naqi felt less vulnerable now: there was a significant depth of organic matter to screen the boat from any sideways-looking sensors that the shuttle might have deployed, even though the evidence suggested that the shuttle’s sensors were mainly focussed down from its
