Reality Dysfunction — Expansion

started, a priest. He’s been looking after a bunch of young children. There’s twenty-nine of them. And now they’re trapped under that cloud. They’re near the village that was our original target, so that gives you a rough idea where we are. We’re going back for them, Joshua, we’ll be on our way by the time this message reaches you. They’re only children, for Christ’s sake, we can’t leave them. The trouble is that once we’ve got them we won’t be able to run far, not with our transport. But we’re pretty sure we can get the children out from under the cloud by this afternoon. Joshua . . . you have to pick us up. Today, Joshua. We won’t be able to hold out for long after sunset. I know your lady friend wasn’t feeling too well when you left, but bandage her up as best you can, as soon as you can. Please. We’ll be waiting for you. Our prayers are with you. Thank you, Joshua.’ ”

“It is repeating,” Aethra said.

“Oh, Jesus.” Possession. The dead returned. Child refugees on the run. “Jesus fucking wept. She can’t do this to me! She’s mad. Possession? She’s fucking flipped.” He stared aghast at the ancient Apollo computer, arms half in his sleeves. “No chance.” His arms were rammed into the ship-suit sleeves. Sealing up the front. “She needs locking up for her own good. Her neural nanonics are looped on a glitched stimulant program.”

“You said you believed the red cloud effect was fundamentally wrong,” Aethra said.

“I said it was a little odd.”

“So is the notion of possession.”

“When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

“Twelve who died when the station was destroyed are stored within me. You make continual references to your deity, does this not imply a degree of belief in the nature of spirituality?”

“Je—Shit! Look, it’s just a figure of speech.”

“And yet humans have believed in gods and an afterlife since the day you gained sentience.”

“Don’t you fucking start! Your lot are supposed to be atheists, anyway.”

“I apologize. I can sense you are upset. What are you going to do about rescuing the children?”

Joshua pressed his fingers to his temple in the vain hope it would halt the dizzy sensation. “Buggered if I know. How do we know there really are any children?”

“You mean it is just a bluff to trick you into returning to Lalonde?”

“Could be, yeah.”

“That would imply that Kelly Tirrel has been possessed.”

Very calmly, he datavised: “Sequestrated. It implies she has been sequestrated.”

“Whatever has befallen her, you still have a decision to make.”

“And don’t I know it.”

Melvyn was alone on the bridge when Joshua came gliding through the hatch from his cabin.

“I just heard the message,” the fusion expert said. “She can’t mean it.”

“Maybe.” Joshua touched his feet to a stikpad beside his acceleration couch. “Call the crew in, and Gaura as well. I suppose the Edenists are entitled. It’s their arses on the line as well.”

He tried to think in the short time it took for them to drift into the bridge, make some kind of sense out of Kelly’s message. The trouble was she had sounded so convincing, she believed what she said. If it was her. Jesus. And it was a very strange sequestration. He couldn’t forget the chaos in orbit.

He accessed the navigation display to see just how practical any sort of return flight was. It didn’t look good. Maranta and Gramine had confined their search to the section of ring which was electrically charged, which meant one of them was always within three thousand kilometres of Lady Mac . The jump coordinate for Lalonde was a third of the way round the gas giant, over two hundred and seventy thousand kilometres from their present position. Out of the question. He started to hunt round for options.

“I think it’s a load of balls,” Warlow said when they were all assembled. “Possession! Kelly’s cracked.”

“You said it yourself,” Ashly said. “It’s a bad form of sequestration.”

“Do you believe in the dead coming back?”

The pilot grinned at the huge ochre cosmonik clinging to a corner of an acceleration couch. “It would make life interesting. Admit it.”

Warlow’s diaphragm issued a sonic boom snort.

“It doesn’t matter what name we choose to call the process,” Dahybi said. “The sequestration ability exists. We know that. What we have to decide is whether or not Kelly has been taken over by it.” He glanced at Joshua and offered a lame shrug.

“If she hasn’t then we’re all in a great deal of trouble,” Sarha said.

“If she hasn’t ?” Melvyn asked.

“Yes. That will mean there are twenty-nine children we have to get off that planet by this afternoon.”

“Oh, hell,” he mumbled.

“And if she has been sequestrated then she knew we were coming back anyway. So why try and get us to come back earlier? And why include all that crap about possession, when all it would do was make us more cautious?”

“Double bluff?” Melvyn said.

“Come on!”

“Sarha’s right,” Ashly said. “We always planned to go back; as far as Kelly knew, in a couple of days. There’s no logical reason to hurry us. And we know they try and hijack the spaceplanes which land. It’s not as if we wouldn’t have taken precautions. All this has done is make us even more cautious. My vote says she is in trouble, and they have found these stray children.”

“And me,” Dahybi said. “But it’s not our decision. Captain?”

It was the kind of oblique compliment about his status Joshua could really have done without. “Kelly would never call unless she really was desperate,” he said slowly. “If she has managed to avoid sequestration, or whatever, she would never have mentioned possession unless it was true. You all know what she’s like: facts no matter what it costs. And if she had been possessed, she wouldn’t tell us.” Oh, Jesus, be honest, I know she’s in deep shit. “They need to be picked up. Like she said: today.”

“Joshua, we can’t,” Melvyn said. He looked desperately torn. “I don’t want to abandon a whole bunch of kids down there any more than you. Even if we don’t know exactly what’s going on below those bloody cloudbands, we’ve seen and heard enough to know it ain’t good. But we’re never going to get past the Maranta and the Gramine . And I’ll give you good odds they’ve picked up Kelly’s message as well. They’ll be extra vigilant now. Face it, we’ve got to wait. They’ll spot us the second we turn our drive on.”

“Maybe,” Joshua said. “Maybe not. But first things first. Sarha, can our environmental systems cope with thirty kids and the mercenaries as well as the Edenists?”

“I dunno how big the kids are,” Sarha said, thinking out loud. “Kelly did say young. There’s probably room for four more in the zero-tau pods if we really cram them in. We can billet some in the spaceplane and the MSV, use their atmospheric filters. Carbon dioxide build-up is our main problem, the filters could never scrub the amount seventy people produce. We’d have to vent it and replace it from the cryogenic oxygen reserve.” Neural nanonics ran a best and worst case simulation. She didn’t like the margins on the worst case, not one bit. “I’ll give you a provisional yes. But thirty is the absolute limit, Joshua. If the mercenaries run into any other worthy cause refugees, they’re just going to have to stay down there.”

“OK. That leaves us with picking them up. Ashly?”

The pilot gave one of his engaging grins. “I told you, Joshua, I promised them I’d go down again.”

“Fine. That just leaves you, Gaura. You’ve been very quiet.”

“It’s your ship, Captain.”

“Yes, but your children are on board, and your friends and family. They’ll be exposed to a considerable risk if Lady Mac attempts to go back to Lalonde. That entitles you to a say.”

“Thank you, Joshua. We say this: if it was us stranded on Lalonde right now, we would want you to come and pick us up.”

“Very well. That’s settled then. We’ll try and rescue the mercenaries and the children.”

“One small point, Joshua,” Melvyn said loudly. “We’re stuck in the rings, with one combat wasp left, forty