the rooms they’d covered and open all the remaining grilles, no matter what size. A possessed could easily hollow out a small nest for themselves in the rock.
He waited seventy minutes before ordering the zero-tau pod to be switched off. The woman inside was wearing a tattered and burnt laboratory tunic with the CNIS insignia on her shoulder. She was weeping fervently as she tottered out, clutching at a bloody wound across her abdomen. Murphy’s characteristics recognition program identified her as Toshi Numour, one of the weapons section’s biophysics researchers.
“Shit,” Murphy groaned. “Dr Gilmore,” he datavised. There was no reply. “Doctor?” The communications processors in the secure laboratory complex reported they couldn’t acquire Dr Gilmore’s neural nanonics.
Murphy burst out into the main corridor, and shouted at his squad to follow. With ten suited figures clattering along at his heels, he sprinted for Gilmore’s office.
As soon as the black shell of the zero-tau field had snapped up around Jacqueline Couteur, Pierce Gilmore headed back for his office. He didn’t protest at Hewlett’s continuing restrictions in preventing them from leaving the secure laboratory complex. In fact, he rather approved. He’d received a nasty shock when Couteur escaped, on top of the asteroid physically shaking in the wake of the antimatter blast. Under the circumstances, such precautions were both logical and sensible.
The office door slid shut behind him, and some of the lighting came on. Current power rationing permitted him only four of the ceiling panels, the kind of light provided by a cold winter afternoon. None of the holographic windows were active.
He walked over to the percolator jug, which was still bubbling away contentedly, and poured himself a cup. After a moment of regret, he switched it off. There probably wouldn’t be enough space in his evacuation allocation to take it or any of the bone china cups with him. Assuming there would be any allocation for personal effects. With over three hundred thousand people to evacuate in a week, the amount of baggage they could take with them would be minimal to zero.
The small solaris tube running above his orchids was also off. Several of the rare pure-genotype plants were due to flower, their fleshy buds had almost burst. They never would now. There would be no light and fresh air, and the heat would arrive soon. The secure laboratory was closer to the surface than most of the asteroid’s habitable sections, it would receive the worst of the inward seepage. Furniture, equipment, it would all be lost. The only thing to survive would be their files.
Pierce sat behind his desk. In fact, he really ought to be drawing up procedures to safeguard the information ready for when they transferred to their secondary facility. He put his cup down on the leather surface, next to an empty cup. That hadn’t been there before.
“Hello, Doctor,” Jacqueline Couteur said.
He did flinch, but at least he didn’t jump or yelp. She didn’t have the satisfaction of witnessing any disconcertion, which in the game they played was a big points winner. His eyes locked on an empty section of wall directly ahead, refusing to turn round and look for her. “Jacqueline. You have no feelings. Poor Lieutenant Hewlett really won’t enjoy being outsmarted in this manner.”
“You can stop trying to datavise for help now, Doctor. I disabled the room’s net processors. Not with my energistic power, either, there was no glitch to alert the AI. Kate Morley had some knowledge of electronics, a couple of old didactic courses.”
Pierce Gilmore datavised the comprehensive processor array installed in his desk. It reported that its link with Trafalgar’s communication’s net had been removed.
Jacqueline chuckled softly as she walked round the desk into his line of sight. She was carrying a processor block, its small screen alive with graphics that monitored his datavises. “Anything else you’d like to try?” she enquired lightly.
“The AI will notice the processors have gone off line. Even if it isn’t caused by a glitch, a marine squad will be sent to investigate.”
“Really, Doctor? A lot of systems were damaged by the EM pulse. I’ve apparently been caught and shoved into zero-tau, and the marines have already cleared this level. I think that gives us time enough.”
“For what?”
“Oh dear me. Is that finally a spike of fear I sense in your mind, Doctor? That has got to be the first arousal of any kind you’ve had for many a year. Perhaps it’s even a hint of remorse? Remorse for what you put me through.”
“You put yourself through it, Jacqueline. We asked you to cooperate; you were the one who chose to refuse. Very bluntly, as I recall.”
“Not guilty. You tortured me.”
“Kate Morley. Maynard Khanna. Should I go on?”
She stood directly in front of the desk, staring at him. “Ah. Two wrongs making a right? Is that what I’ve reduced you to, Doctor? Fear does things to the most brilliant of minds. It makes them desperate. It makes them pitiful. Is there any other excuse you’d like to offer?”
“If I was facing a jury, good and true, I could offer several justifications. Such arguments would be wasted on a bigot.”
“Petty, even for you.”
“Cooperate with us. It’s not too late.”
“Not even cliches change in five hundred years. That says quite a lot about the human race, don’t you think? Certainly everything I need to know.”
“You’re transferring onto an abstract concept. Self-hatred is a common aspect of a diseased mind.”
“If I’m the one that’s ill and incapable, how come you’re the one in terminal trouble?”
“Then stop being the problem, and help us with a solution.”
“We are not
“You’re taking your situation far too personally. Understandably, after all, you can hardly retreat from it. You lack the courage for that.”
“No.” She straightened up. “But I can make my last noble stand. And depriving the Confederation Navy of your so-called talent will be a satisfactory achievement for me. Nothing personal, you understand.”
“I can put an end to this, Jacqueline. We’re so very close to an answer now.”
“Let’s see how your rationality endures the reality of the beyond. You will now experience every facet of it. Being possessed by one of its inhabitants; living within it, and if you’re really fortunate, as a possessor, forever terrified that some lucky living bastard is going to rip you out of your precious new prize and send you back screaming. What will your answer be then, I wonder?”
“Unchanged.” He gave her a sad defeated smile. “It’s called resolution, the ability and determination to see things through to the end. However unexpected or disappointing that end turns out to be. Not that anyone will ever know now. But I held true to myself.”
Alarmed by his mind tone, Jacqueline started to point her right arm. Slivers of white fire licked up from her wrist.
In Gilmore’s mind the alternatives were stark. That she would torture him was inevitable. He would be possessed, or more likely damaged so badly that his body died, banishing his soul to the beyond. That was where logic broke down. He believed, or thought he did, that there was a way out of the beyond. Doubt undermined him, though. Factious, unclean human emotion, the type he hated so. If a way through the beyond existed, why did the souls remain trapped? There was no certainty any more. Not for him, not there. And he couldn’t stand that. Facts and rationality were more than the building blocks of his mind, they were his existence. If the beyond was truly a place without logic, then Pierce Gilmore had no wish to exist there. And his own sacrifice would advance human understanding by a fraction. Such knowledge was a fitting last thought.
He datavised the processor array for the latest version of the anti-memory. Jacqueline’s hand was already lining up desperately on him when the desktop AV projection pillar silently pumped a blindingly pervasive red light
