“Ah now, there was that, as I recall. A gentleman by the name of Custer.”
Pat’s neural nanonics ran a fast check. “An American army general? He lost a fight with the Sioux Indians in the nineteenth century.”
“Aye, that’s the one. Don’t be telling me you’ve heard of him in this day and age?”
“He’s in our history courses. How did he feel about it? Losing like that?”
Shaun Wallace’s expression cooled. “He didn’t feel anything about it, Mr. Halahan. He was like all of us, crying without tears to shed. You’re equating death with sanity, Mr. Halahan. Which is a stupid thing to do, if you don’t mind me saying. You’ve heard of Hitler now? Surely, if you’ve heard of poor damned George Armstrong Custer?”
“We remember Hitler. Though he was after your time, I think.”
“Indeed he was. But do you think he changed after he died, Mr. Halahan? Do you think he lost his conviction, or his righteousness? Do you think death causes you to look back on life and makes you realize what an ass you’ve been? Oh no, not that, Mr. Halahan. You’re too busy screaming, you’re too busy cursing, you’re too busy coveting your neighbour’s memory for the bitter dregs of taste and colour it gives you. Death does not bestow wisdom, Mr. Halahan. It does not make you humble before the Lord. More’s the pity.”
“Hitler,” Kelly said, entranced. “Stalin, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Helmen Nyke. The butchers and the warlords. Are they all there? Waiting in the beyond?”
Shaun Wallace gazed up at the domed ceiling partially lost amid a tapestry of shadows thrown by sparse alien architecture; for a moment his features portraying every year of his true age. “Aye, they’re all there, Miss Kelly, every one of the monsters the good earth ever spawned. All of them aching to come back, waiting for their moment to be granted. Us possessed, we might be wanting to hide from the open sky, and death; but it’s not paradise we’re going to be making down here on this planet. It couldn’t be, there’ll be humans in it, you see.”
It wasn’t true daybreak, not yet. The sun was still half an hour from bringing any hint of grizzled light to the eastern horizon. But the rain-clouds had blown over, and night had sapped the wind’s brawn. The northern sky glowed with a grievous fervour, blemishing the savannah grass a murky crimson.
Octan watched the dark speck moving along the side of the river, heading upstream towards the Tyrathcan tower house. Heavy moist air stroked the eagle’s feathers as he dipped a wing, curving down in a giddy voluted dive. Pat Halahan gazed out at the lonely nocturnal wanderer through his affinity bonded friend’s narrow peerless eyes.
Kelly came awake at the touch of a hand on her shoulder, and the sound of feet rapping on the hard dry floor of the second storey, where the team had rested up for the night. Neural nanonics accelerated her fatigue- soaked brain into full alertness.
The last of the combat-boosted mercenaries were disappearing down the ramp.
“Someone coming,” Shaun Wallace said.
“Your people?”
“No. I’d know if it was. Not that Mr. Malin asked, mind you.” He sounded cheerful.
“Good heavens, anyone would think he doesn’t trust you.” She shoved back the foil envelope she’d been sleeping in. Shaun Wallace offered his hand to help her to her feet. They made their way down the ramp to the ground-floor hall.
The seven mercenaries were clustered round the hole in the door, red light shining dully off their artificial skin. Fenton and Ryall were on their feet, growling softly as they were caught in the backwash of agitation coming from their master’s mind.
Reza and Sewell slipped through the hole as Kelly reached them.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Horse coming,” Pat told her. “Two riders.”
Kelly peered round him just as Reza and Sewell activated their chameleon circuits and flicked into the landscape. For a few seconds she tracked them thanks to the circular medical nanonic package on the big combat- adept’s leg, but even that was soon lost amongst the unsavoury coloured grass.
It was one of the plough horses favoured by the colonists. A young one, but clearly on its last legs; the neck was drooping as it plodded gamely along, mouth flecked with foam. Reza worked his way unobtrusively down the slope from the tower house towards the animal, leaving Sewell to cover him. His optical sensors showed him the two people on its back; both wore stained poncho capes cut from a canvas tarpaulin. The man was showing the first signs of age, stubble shading heavy jowls, temples touched with grey; and he’d recently lost a lot of weight by the look of him. But he had a vigour animating his frame which was visible even from Reza’s position across the swaying grass. The young boy behind him had been crying at some time, he had also been soaked during the ride, and now he was shivering, clinging to the man in a wearied daze.
They didn’t pose any threat, Reza decided. He waited until the horse was twenty metres away, then switched off his chameleon circuit. The horse took a few more paces before the man noticed him with a start. He reined in the lethargic animal and leaned over its neck to peer at Reza in bewilderment.
“What manner of . . . You’re not a possessed, you don’t have their emptiness.” His fingers clicked. “Of course! Combat boosted, that’s what you are. You came down from the starships yesterday.” He smiled and whooped, then swung a leg over the horse and slithered to the ground. “Come on, Russ, down you come, boy. They’re here, the navy marines are here. I said they’d come, didn’t I? I told you, never give up faith.” The boy virtually fell off the horse into his arms.
Reza went over to help. The man was none too steady on his feet, either, and one of his hands was heavily bandaged.
“Bless you, my son.” Horst Elwes embraced the surprised mercenary with tears of gratitude and supreme relief shining in his eyes. “God bless you. These weeks have been the sorest trial my Lord has ever devised for this weak mortal servant. But now you are here after all this time spent alone in the Devil’s own wilderness. Now we are saved.”
Chapter 11
Boston had fallen to the possessed, not that the rapidly disintegrating convocation of Norfolk’s martial authorities would admit it.
Edmund Rigby looked out of the hotel window, across the provincial city’s steep slate rooftops. Fires were still burning in the outlying districts where the militia troops had tried to force their way in. The Devonshire market square had been struck by a navy starship’s maser last Duchess-night. Its granite cobbles had transmuted to a glowing lava pool in less than a second. Even now, with its surface congealing and dimming, the heat was enough to barbecue food. Nobody had been in the square at the time; it was intended as a demonstration only. A show of naval might: you there, ant folk crawling on the filthy ground far below, we angels above have the very power of life and death over all of you. As one, the possessed had laughed at the circling starships, rendered impotent by their lack of targets. Yes, they had the physical power to destroy, but the fingers on the trigger were snared in the perpetual dilemma of the great and the good. Hostages had always struck a paralysing blow into the heart of governments. The starships wanted to pour sterilizing fire down from the sky, the officers yearning to burn the loathsome low-life crop of anarchists and revolutionaries from the pastoral idyll planet, but the city hadn’t been cleaned of decent people, the women and children and frail, kindly grandparents. As far as the planetary authorities and navy officers knew this was just an uprising, a political revolt, they believed the meek were still mingled with the wolves. The lofty orbiting angels had been castrated.
Even if they suspected, believed the rumours of atrocities and massacres flittering from mouth to mouth through the nearby countryside, they could do nothing. Boston was no longer alone in its dissent, it was simply the first. Edmund Rigby had planted the germs of insurgency in every city across the planet’s islands, cabals of possessed who were already annexing the populace. A captain in the Australian Marines, he had died from a landmine explosion in Vietnam in 1971; but he had studied military tactics, had even been sent to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth for officer training. And this vast space empire of Confederated planets, for all its awesome technology, was no different to the Earth upon which he had once walked. Vietcong insurgency tactics from the past were just as applicable now, and he knew them by heart. Securing the entire planet had been his principal objective
