The Naked God — Faith

sat Gerald in one of the passenger seats, and drove it round to the airlock.

When the chamber’s inner hatch swung open, Jed checked his sensor reading before he cracked his visor up. A lifetime of emergency procedure drills back on Koblat made him perpetually cautious about his environment.

“There’s nobody even close to you,” Rocio said. “Go get them.”

Jed hurried along the corridor, took a right turn, and saw the broad door to the maintenance shop, three down on the right. It opened for him as he touched the lock panel. The lights sprang up to full intensity, revealing a basic rectangular room with pale-blue wall panelling. Cybernetic tool modules stood in a row down the centre, encased in crystal cylinders to protect their delicate waldos. A grid of shelving covered the rear wall, intended to hold a stock of spares used regularly by the shop. Now there were just a few cartons and packages left scattered around—apart from the large pile in the middle which the mechanoid had delivered.

“Oh Jeeze, Rocio,” Jed complained. “There’s got to be a hundred here. I’m never going to muscle that lot out, it’ll take forever.” The components were all packed in plastic boxes.

“I’m getting a sense of deja vu here,” Rocio said smoothly. “Just pile them onto the freight trolley and dump them in the airlock chamber. It’ll be three trips at the most. Ten minutes.”

“Oh brother.” Jed grabbed a trolley and shoved it over to the shelving. He started to throw the boxes on. “Why didn’t you get the mechanoids to dump them at the airlock for me?”

“It’s not a designated storage area. I would have had to reprogram the management routines. Not difficult, but it might have been detected. This method reduces the risk.”

“For some,” Jed muttered.

Gerald walked in. Jed had almost forgotten him. “Gerald, you can take your helmet off, mate.” There was no response.

Jed went up to him and flipped the helmet seals. Gerald blinked as the visor was raised.

“Can’t stay in that spacesuit here, mate, you’ll get noticed. And you’ll suffocate eventually.”

He thought Gerald was about to start crying, the bloke looked so wretched. To cover his own guilt, Jed went back to loading the boxes. When he had as many as the trolley could handle, he said: “I’m going to get rid of this bundle. Do me a favour, mate, start loading the next lot.”

Gerald nodded. Even though he wasn’t convinced, Jed hurried out back to the airlock. When he got back, Gerald had put two boxes on the second trolley.

“Ignore him,” Rocio said. “Just do it yourself.”

It took a further three trips to carry all the boxes to the airlock. Jed finished loading the trolley for the last time, and paused. “Gerald, mate, look, you’ve got to get a grip, okay?”

“Leave him,” Rocio said curtly.

“He’s gone,” Jed said sadly. “Total brainwipe this time. That corpse did for him. We can’t leave him here.”

“I will not permit him back on board. You know what a danger he has become. We cannot treat him.”

“You think this gang are going to help him?”

“Jed, he did not come here looking for their help. Don’t forget he has a homemade bomb strapped to his waist. If Capone does become unpleasant with Gerald, he’s going to be in for a nasty surprise himself. Now get back to the airlock. Beth and your sister are the people you should be concentrating on now.”

More than anything, Jed wanted another dose out of the suit’s medical kit. Something to take away the hurt of abandoning the crazy old man. “I’m real sorry, mate. I hope you find Marie. I wish she wasn’t, well . . . what she is now. She gave a lot of us hope, you know. I guess I owe both of you.”

“Jed, leave now,” Rocio ordered.

“Screw you.” Jed steered the trolley at the wide door. “Good luck,” he called back.

He forced himself not to go fast on the drive back to the Mindori . There was too much at stake now to risk drawing attention to himself by a last minute error. So he resisted twisting the throttle as he passed the fateful airlock with the corpse behind it. Rocio said the net in that section had returned to full operation and the corridor’s emergency doors had opened, but no one had found the body yet.

Jed drove under the big hellhawk and parked directly below one of its barnacle-like cargo holds. Rocio opened the clamshell doors, and Jed set about transferring the boxes over onto the loading platform which telescoped down. At the back of his mind he knew that when the last box was on board, then he and Beth and the kids were no longer necessary. And probably a liability to boot.

He was quite surprised to be allowed back up the ladder into Mindori ’s airlock. Shame finally overwhelmed him when he took his helmet off. Beth was standing in front of him, ready to help with his suit; face composed so she didn’t show any weakness. The enormity of everything he’d done snatched the strength from his legs. He slid down the bulkhead, and burst into tears.

Beth’s arms went round him. “You couldn’t help him,” she crooned. “You couldn’t.”

“I never tried. I just left him there.”

“He couldn’t come back on board. Not now. He was going to blow us up.”

“He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He’s mad.”

“Not really. Just very sick. But he’s where he wanted to be, near Marie.”

Jack McGovern drifted back into consciousness aware of a sharp, deep stinging coming from his nose. His eyes fluttered open to see dark-brown wood crushed against his cheek. He was lying on floorboards in near darkness in the most uncomfortable position possible, with his legs bent so his feet were pressing into his arse and his arms twisted behind his back. Blood was pounding painfully in his forearms. His hangover was the greatest yet. When he tried to stir, he couldn’t. His wrists and ankles were all bound up together by what felt like a ball of red hot insulating tape. An attempt to groan revealed his mouth was also covered with tape. One nostril was clogged with dry blood.

That frightened him badly, sending pulse and breathing wild. Air hissed and thrummed through his one small vulnerable air passage. It was like reinforcement feedback, making him even more aware of how dependant he was. Attempting to hyperventilate and half-suffocating because of it made his head pound worse than ever. His vision vanished under a red sparkle.

Insensate panic dragged on for an indeterminable time. All he knew was that when his sight finally returned along with his sluggish thoughts, his breathing was slowing. His attempted thrashing had shifted him several centimetres across the floorboards. He calmed a lot then, still wishing his hangover would fuck off and leave him alone. The memory of what had happened in the Black Bull’s toilet trickled back into his mind. He found that the tape across his mouth didn’t stop him from whimpering at the back of his throat.

A possessed! He’d been mugged by a possessed. Yet . . . he wasn’t possessed himself, which is what they always did to people—everyone knew that. Unless this was the beyond?

Jack managed to roll round onto his side and take a look round. Definitely not the beyond. He was in some kind of ancient cube of a room, a half-moon window set high up on one wall. Old store display placards were stacked opposite him, fading holophorescent print advertising brands of bathroom accessories he could dimly remember from his childhood. A heavy chain led from his ankles to a set of metal pipes that ran straight up from the floor to the ceiling.

He shuffled along the floor for all of half a metre, until the chain was tight. Nothing he did after that even scratched the pipes, let alone weakened them or made them bend away from the wall. He was still three metres from the door. Bracing and clenching his arm and shoulder muscles had the solitary effect of making his wrists hurt more. That was it then. No escape.

His hangover had long abated when the door finally opened. He didn’t know when; only that hours and hours had passed. Cold arcology night light slithered in through the high window, painting the bare plaster walls a grubby sodium yellow. It was the possessed man who came in first, moving without sound, his black monk robe swirling round him like orderly mist. Two others followed him in, a young teenage girl and a sulky, adolescent boy. They were hauling a woman along between them; middle-aged, her shoulders slumped in defeat. Her chestnut hair was arranged in a pleated crown, as if she’d put it up ready for a shower; wisps had escaped to dangle in front of her eyes. It hid most of her face, though Jack could make out the broken, lonely expression.

The boy bent down and yanked the tape over Jack’s mouth as hard as he could. Jack grunted at the pulse