“You don’t,” Jay said, shoving the full child-force of trusting worship behind the words. A belief which was a sheer impossibility for any adult to live up to.

Kelly kissed her forehead, emotions in a muddle. Kids today, so knowing, which only makes them even more vulnerable. She gently pushed Jay towards one of the pediatric nurses, and left them discussing what the little girl had eaten last, and when.

“Kelly, thank Christ!”

The familiar voice made her twitch, a movement which in free fall was like a ripple running from toe to crown. She held on to a grab hoop to steady herself.

Feetfirst, Garfield Lunde slid down into her vision field. Her direct boss, and the man who had authorized her assignment. A big gamble, as he told her at the time, this kind of fieldwork is hardly your forte. Putting her deeper in his debt; everything he did for his workforce was a favour, an against-the-rules kindness. He owed his position entirely to his mastery of office politics; sensevise talent and investigative ability never entered into it.

“Hello, Garfield,” she said in a dull tone.

“You made it back. Great hairstyle, too.”

Kelly had almost forgotten her hair, cut to a fine fuzz to fit her armour suit’s skull helmet. Style, dress sense, cosmetic membranes: concepts which seemed to have dissolved clean out of her universe. “Well done, Garfield; I can see why your observational ability pushed you right the way up the seniority league.”

He wagged a finger, almost catching his ponytail which was snaking around his neck. “Tough lady, at last. Looks like you lost your cherry on this assignment; touched a few corpses, wondered if you should have helped instead of recorded. Don’t feel bad, it happens to us all.”

“Sure.”

“Is anyone else coming back, any other starships?”

“If they’re not here by now, they won’t be coming.”

“Christ, this is getting better by the second. We’ve got us a total exclusive. Did you get down to the planet?”

“Yes.”

“And is it possessed?”

“Yes.”

“Magnificent!” He glanced contentedly around the reception chamber, watching children and Edenists in free-fall flight, their movements reminiscent of geriatric ballerinas. “Hey, where are the mercs you went with?”

“They didn’t make it, Garfield. They sacrificed themselves so the Lady Mac ’s spaceplane could lift the children off.”

“Oh, my God. Wow! Sacrificed themselves for kids?”

“Yes. We were outgunned, but they stood their ground. All of them. I never expected . . .”

“Stunning. You got it, didn’t you? For Christ’s sake, Kelly, tell me you recorded it. The big fight, the last noble stand.”

“I recorded it. What I could. When I wasn’t so scared I couldn’t think straight.”

“Yes! I knew I made the right decision sending you. This is it, babe. Just watch our audience points go galactic. We’re going to put Time Universe and the others out of business. Do you realize what you’ve done here? Shit, Kelly, you’ll probably wind up as my boss, after this. Wonderful!”

Very calmly, Kelly let Ariadne’s free-fall unarmed combat program shift into primary mode. Her sense of balance was immediately magnified, making her aware of every slight movement her body made in the minute air currents churning through the chamber. Her spacial orientation underwent a similar augmentation; distances and relative positions were obvious.

“Wonderful?” she hissed.

Garfield grinned proudly. “You bet.”

Kelly launched herself at him, rotating around her centre of gravity as she did so. Her feet came around, seeking out his head, legs kicking straight.

Two of the serjeants had to pull her off. Luckily the pediatric team had some medical nanonic packages with them; they were able to save Garfield’s eye; it would take a week before his broken nose knitted back into its proper shape, though.

All the passenger refugees had left Lady Mac . Overstressed environmental systems were calming. The docking bay’s umbilicals sent a cool wind washing through the bridge, taking with it the air of the voyage; ugly air with its smell of human bodies, humidity, and heavy carbon dioxide. To Joshua’s mind even the fans behind the grilles weren’t whining so much. Perhaps it was his imagination.

Now there was only the crew left to soak up the luxuriously plentiful oxygen. The crew minus one. There hadn’t been much time for Joshua to dwell on Warlow during the flight. Racing between jump coordinates, worrying about the energy patterning nodes holding out, the leakages, the damaged systems, children he had suddenly become responsible for, the desperate need to succeed.

Well, now he’d won, beaten the odds the universe had thrown at him. And it made him feel good, even though there was no happiness to accompany it. Self-satisfaction was a curious state, in this case roughly equivalent to fatigue-induced nirvana, he thought.

Ashly Hanson came up through the decking hatch and took a swift glance around the lethargic forms still encased by their acceleration couch webbing. “Flight’s over, you know,” he said.

“Yeah.” Joshua datavised an instruction into the flight computer. Harlequin schematics of the starship’s principal systems vanished from his mind, and the webbing peeled back.

“I think the cleaning up can wait until tomorrow,” Dahybi said.

“Message received,” Joshua said. “Shore leave is now granted, and compulsory.”

Sarha glided over from her couch and gave Joshua a tiny kiss. “You were magnificent. After all this is over, we’re going back to Aethra so we can tell him we escaped and got the children off.”

“If he’s there.”

“He’s there. You know he is.”

“She’s right, Joshua,” Melvyn Ducharme said as he cancelled the neurographic visualization of Lady Mac ’s power circuits. “He’s there. And even if the transfer didn’t work, his soul is going to be watching us right now.”

“Jesus.” Joshua shivered. “I don’t even want to think about that.”

“We don’t have a lot of choice in the subject anymore.”

“But not today,” Ashly put in heavily. He held out an arm to Sarha. “Come along, we’ll leave these morbids to moan among themselves. I don’t know about you, but I’m having one very stiff drink in Harkey’s first, then it’s bed for a week.”

“Sounds good.” She twisted her feet off the stikpad by Joshua’s couch and followed the old time-hopper pilot through the hatch.

A vaguely nonplussed expression appeared on Joshua’s face as they left together. None of your business, he told himself. Besides, there was Kelly to consider, though she’d been almost unrecognizable since returning from Lalonde. And then there was Louise. Ione, too.

“I think I’ll skip the drink and go straight to bed,” he announced to the other two.

They went out of the bridge hatch one at a time. It was only when they got to the airlock that they encountered the service company’s systems specialist coming the other way. She wanted the captain’s authority to begin assessing the ship so she could assemble a maintenance schedule. Joshua stayed behind to discuss priorities, datavising over the files on systems which had taken punishment above Lalonde.

There was nobody about when he finally left the starship. The circus in the reception chamber had ended. The reporters had packed up. There wasn’t even a serjeant left to check him over for possession. Sloppy, he thought, not like Tranquillity at all.

A commuter lift took him along the spindle which connected the spaceport disk to the centre of the habitat’s northern endcap. It deposited him in one of the ten tube stations which served the hub; deserted but for a single occupant.

Ione stood outside the waiting tube carriage, dressed in a sea-blue sarong and matching blouse. He smiled ruefully at the memory that evoked.

“I remember you,” she said.

“Funny, I thought you’d forgotten.”

“No. Not you, no matter what.”

He stood in front of her, looking down at a face which owned far too much wisdom for such delicate features. “I was stupid,” he confessed.

“I think you and I can withstand one argument, don’t you?”

“I was stupid more than once.”

“Tranquillity’s been reviewing the memories of the Edenists you saved. I’m very proud of what you achieved on that flight, Joshua, and I don’t just mean all that fancy flying. Very proud indeed.”

All he could do was nod ineffectually. For a long time he’d dreamed about a reunion like this; going off after they’d had a fight had left too many things open-ended, too much unsaid. Now it was actually happening, his mind was slipping to Louise, who had also been left behind. It was all Warlow’s fault, him and that damn promise to be a little less selfish with his girls.

“You look tired,” Ione said, and held out her hand. “Let’s go home.”

Joshua looked down at her open hand, small and perfect. He twined his fingers through hers, rediscovering how warm her skin was.

Parker Higgens thought it must have been about twenty years since he last left Tranquillity, a short trip on an Adamist starship to a university on Nanjing so he could deliver a paper and assess some candidates for the Laymil project. He hadn’t enjoyed the experience; free-fall nausea seemed capable of penetrating whatever defences his neural nanonics erected across his nerve pathways.

This time it was pleasantly different. The gravity in the blackhawk’s life-support capsule never fluctuated, he had a comfortable cabin to himself, the crew were friendly, and his navy escort officer was a cultured lady who made an excellent travelling companion.

At the end of the flight he even accessed the blackhawk’s electronic sensors to watch their approach to Trafalgar. Dozens of navy starships swarmed around its two large spaceport globes. Avon provided a sumptuous backdrop; the warm blues, whites, greens, and browns of a terracompatible planet were so much kinder than the abrasive storm bands of Mirchusko, he realized. Parker Higgens almost laughed at the stereotype image he presented as he gawped like some stupefied tourist: the dusty old professor finally discovers there is life outside the research centre.

Pity he didn’t have time to enjoy it. The navy officer had been datavising Trafalgar constantly since their wormhole terminus closed behind them, outlining their brief and authenticating it with a series of codes. They’d been given a priority approach vector, allowing them to curve around one of the spaceports at an exhilarating speed before sliding into the huge crater which served as a docking ledge for bitek starships (they were the only blackhawk using it).

After that he’d had a couple of meetings with the First Admiral’s staff officers, an exchange of information which chilled both sides. Parker found out about possession, they were given the data on the Laymil home planet, Unimeron. They decided there wasn’t any room for doubt.

When he was shown into Samual Aleksandrovich’s big circular office the first thing Parker Higgens felt was an obscure burst of jealousy. The First Admiral had a view out over Trafalgar’s biosphere which was more impressive than the one in his own office back on the Laymil project campus. A true dedicated bureaucrat’s reaction, he chided himself; prestige is everything.

The First Admiral came around from behind his big teak desk to greet Parker with a firm handshake. “Thank you for coming, Mr Director; and I’d also like to convey my gratitude to the Lord of Ruin as well for acting so promptly in this matter. It would appear she is a strong supporter of the Confederation; I just wish other heads of state followed her example.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her,” Parker said.

The First Admiral introduced the others sitting around his desk: Admiral Lalwani, Captain Maynard Khanna, Dr Gilmore, and Mae Ortlieb, the President’s science office liaison aide.

“Well the Kiint did warn us, I suppose,” Admiral Lalwani said. “All races eventually face the truth about death. It would appear the Laymil lost their confrontation.”

“They never said anything before,” Parker said bitterly. “We have six Kiint assisting the project back at Tranquillity; I’ve worked with them for decades; they’re helpful, cooperative, I even considered them as friends . . . And never once did they drop the slightest hint. Damn them! They knew all along why the Laymil killed themselves and their habitats.”

“Ambassador Roulor did say it was something which we must come to terms with on our own.”

“Very helpful,” Dr Gilmore grunted. “I have to say it’s a typical attitude to take given their psychology inclines towards the mystic.”

“I think any race which has uncovered the secret of death and survived the impact is inevitably going to take a highly spiritual approach to life,” the First Admiral said. “Don’t begrudge them that, Doctor. Now then, Mr Director, it would appear that our possession and the Laymil reality dysfunction are one and the same thing, correct?”

“Yes, Admiral. In fact, in the light of what we know now, the Laymil shipmaster’s reference to the Galheith clan’s death essence makes perfect sense. Possession was spreading across Unimeron as he left orbit.”

“I think I can confirm that,” Admiral Lalwani said. She glanced at the First Admiral for permission. He inclined his head. “A voidhawk messenger has just returned from Ombey. Several possessed got loose there; fortunately the authorities were remarkably successful in hunting them down. However, despite that success, they’ve had to cede some ground to them. We have a recording of the phenomena.”

Parker accessed the flek of images compiled by Ombey’s Strategic Defence sensor satellites, seeing the remarkably smooth red cloud slowly sheathing Mortonridge. Time-lapse coverage showed the planet’s terminator cruise in across the ocean. At night the peninsula’s covering glowed a hostile cerise, its edges flexing in agitation over the crinkled coastline.

“Oh, dear,” he said after he cancelled the visualization.

“They match,” Dr Gilmore said. “Absolutely, the same event.”

“Admittedly Laton was in a hurry and under a great deal of stress,” Lalwani said. “But if we understand him correctly, once that red cloud envelops a world completely, the possessed can take it right out of the universe.”

“Not outside, exactly,” Dr Gilmore said. “If you can manipulate space-time to the extent they apparently can, then you should be able to format a favourable micro-continuum around a world. The surface simply won’t be accessible through ordinary space-time. A wormhole might reach them, if we knew the correct quantum signature for its terminus.”

“The Laymil homeworld wasn’t destroyed,” Parker said slowly. “Of that we are sure. We speculated that it could have been moved, but naturally we considered only physical movement through this universe.”

“Then the possessed Laymil must have worked this vanishing trick,” Lalwani said. “It really is possible.”

“Dear God,” the First Admiral murmured. “As if it wasn’t enough trying to find a method of reversing possession, we now have to to consider how to bring back entire planets from some demented version of Heaven.”

“And the Laymil in the spaceholms committed suicide rather than submit,” Lalwani said bleakly. “The parallel between the Ruin Ring and Pernik island is one I find most disturbing. The possessed confront us with a single choice; surrender or die. And if we do die, we enhance their own numbers. Yet Laton chose death; indeed he seemed almost happy at the prospect. Right at the end he told Oxley he would begin what he named the great journey, though he never elaborated. But the intimation that he would not suffer in the beyond was a strong one.”

“Unfortunately it’s hardly something you can turn into a firm policy,” Mae Ortlieb observed. “Nor one to reassure people with even if you did.”

“I am aware of that,” Lalwani told the woman coolly. “What this information can do is point us towards areas which should be investigated. From the result of those investigations, policies can then be formulated.”

“Enough,” the First Admiral said. “We are here to try and decide which is the most fruitful line of scientific inquiry. Given we now have a basic understanding of the problem confronting us I’d like some suggestions. Dr Gilmore?”

“We’re continuing to examine Jacqueline Couteur to try and determine the nature of the energy which the possessing soul utilizes. So far we’ve had very little success. Our instruments either cannot read it, or suffer glitches produced by it. Either way, we cannot define its nature.” He gave the First Admiral a timorous glance. “I’d like your permission to move on to reactive tests.”

Parker couldn’t help the disapproving snort which escaped from his lips. Again reinforcing the persona of crusty old academic; but he deplored Gilmore’s wholehearted right-wing militarism.

No one would think of it to look at him now, but Parker Higgens had done his stint for radicalism and its various causes during his student days. He wondered if that was on the file Lalwani must invariably keep on him, aging bytes in an obsolete program language detailing his protests over military development work carried out on the university campus. Had she accessed that before he’d been allowed in here, the heart of the greatest military force the human race had ever assembled? Perhaps she judged him safe these days. Perhaps she was even right in doing so. But people like Gilmore reopened all the old contemptuous thoughts. Reactive tests, indeed.

“You have a problem with that, Mr Director?” Dr Gilmore asked with formal neutrality.

Parker let his gaze wander around the office’s big holoscreens, watching the starships shoaling over Avon. Readying themselves for combat. For conflict. “I agree with the First Admiral,” he said sorrowfully. “We must attempt to locate a scientific solution.”

“Which is only going to happen if my research can proceed unhindered. I know what you’re thinking, Mr Director, and I regret the fact that we’re dealing with a live human here. But unless you can offer me a valid alternative we must use her to add to our knowledge base.”

“I am aware of the argument about relative levels of suffering, Doctor. I just find it depressing that after seven centuries of adhering to the scientific method we haven’t come up with a more humane principle. I find the prospect of experimenting on people to be abhorrent.”

“You should review the file Lieutenant Hewlett made when his marine squad were sent on their capture mission to obtain Jacqueline Couteur. You’d see exactly who really practises abhorrent behaviour.”

“Excellent argument. They do it to us, so we’re fully justified doing it to them. We are all people.”

“I’m sorry,” the First Admiral interjected. “But we really don’t have time for the pair of you to discuss ethics and morality. The Confederation is now officially in a state of emergency, Mr Director. If that turns us into what you regard as savages in order to defend ourselves, then so be it. We did not initiate this crisis, we are simply reacting to it the only way I know how. And I am going to use you as much as Dr Gilmore will use the Couteur woman.”

Parker straightened his spine, sitting up to stare at the First Admiral. Somehow arguing with him as he had with the navy scientist wasn’t even an option. Lalwani was right, he acknowledged sorely. Student politics didn’t stand much chance against his adult survival instinct. We are what our genes made us. “I don’t think I would be much use to your endeavour, Admiral. I’ve made my contribution.”

“Not so.” He gestured to Mae Ortlieb.

“The Laymil must have tried to prevent possession from engulfing their spaceholms before they committed suicide,” she said. “I believe that is what the essencemasters were on board the ship for.”

“Yes, but it couldn’t have worked.”

“No.” She gave him a heavily ironic smile. “So I’d like to use the scientific method, Mr Director: eliminate the impossible and all you’re left with is the possible. It would be a lot of help to us if we knew what won’t work against the possessed. A great deal of time would be saved. And lives, too, I expect.”

“Well yes, but our knowledge is extremely limited.”

“I believe there are still many files in the Laymil electronics stack which have not been reformatted to human sense compatibility?”

“Yes.”

“Then that would be a good start. If you could return to Tranquillity and ask Ione Saldana to initiate a priority search for us, please.”

“That was in hand when I left.”

“Excellent. My office and the navy science bureau here in Trafalgar can provide fresh teams of specialists to assist in the analysis process. They’d probably be better qualified in helping to recognize any weapons.”

Parker gave her an exasperated look. “The Laymil didn’t work like that; weapons are not part of their culture. Their countermeasures would consist principally of psychological inhibitors distributed through the spaceholms’ life-harmony gestalt. They would attempt to reason with their opponents.”

“And when that failed, they might just have been desperate enough to try something else. The Laymil possessed weren’t above using violence, we saw that in the recording. Their reality dysfunction was incinerating large portions of land.”

Parker surrendered, even though he knew it was all wrong. These people could so easily believe in the concept of superweapons hidden amid the fractured debris of the Ruin Ring, a deus ex machina waiting to liberate the human race. The military mind! “Anything is possible,” he said. “But I’d like to go on record as saying that in this case I strongly doubt it.”

“Of course,” the First Admiral said. “However, we do need to look, I’m sure you can appreciate that. May we send our specialists back with you?”

“Certainly.” Parker didn’t like to think what Ione Saldana would say about that. Her one principal limitation on the project was the right to embargo weapons technology. But these people had outmanoeuvred him with astonishing ease. An acute lesson in the difference between political manoeuvring practised on the Confederation capital and one of its most harmless outpost worldlets.

Samual Aleksandrovich watched the old director knuckle under, even feeling a slight sympathy. He really didn’t like to invade the world of such a blatantly decent man of peace. The Parker Higgenses of this universe were what the Confederation existed to defend. “Thank you, Mr Director. I don’t want to appear an ungracious host, but if you could be ready to leave within a couple of hours, please. Our people are already being assembled.” He carefully avoided Higgens’s sharp glance at that comment. “They can travel on navy voidhawks, which should provide you a suitable escort back to Tranquillity. I really can’t run the risk of your mission being intercepted. You’re too valuable to us.”

“Is that likely?” Parker asked in concern. “An interception, I mean?”

“I would certainly hope not,” the First Admiral said. “But the overall situation is certainly less favourable than I’d hoped. We didn’t get our warnings out quite fast enough. Several returning voidhawks have reported that the possessed have gained an enclave on various worlds, and there are seven asteroid settlements we know of that have been taken over completely. Most worrying is a report from the Srinagar system that they have taken over the Valisk habitat, which means they have a fleet of blackhawks at their disposal. That gives them the potential to mount a substantial military operation to assist others of their kind.”

“I see. I didn’t realize the possessed had advanced so far. The Mortonridge recording is a distressing one.”

“Precisely. So you can appreciate our hurry in acquiring what information we can from the Laymil recordings.”

“I . . . I do yes.”

“Don’t worry, Mr Director,” Lalwani said. “Our advantage at the moment is that the possessed are all small individual groups, they lack coordination. It is only if they become organized on a multistellar level that we will be in real trouble. The Assembly’s prohibition on commercial starflight should give us a few weeks grace. It will be difficult for them to spread themselves by stealth. Any interstellar movements they make from now on will have to be large scale, which gives us the ability to track them.”

“That is where the navy will face its greatest challenge,” the First Admiral said. “Also our greatest defeat. In space warfare there is no such thing as a draw, you either win or you die. We will be shooting at complete innocents.”

“I doubt it will come to that,” Mae Ortlieb said. “As you said, they are a disorganized rabble. We control interstellar communications, it should be enough to prevent them merging to form a genuine threat.”

“Except . . .” Parker said, he caught himself, then gave a penitent sigh. “Some of our greatest generals and military leaders must be waiting in the beyond. They will understand just as much about tactics as we do. They’ll know what they have to do in order to succeed.”

“We’ll be ready for them,” the First Admiral said. He tried not to show any disquiet at Parker’s suggestion. Would I really be able to compete against an alliance between Napoleon and Richard Saldana?

Dariat walked up the last flight of stairs into the foyer of the Sushe starscraper. None of the possessed used the lifts anymore—too dangerous, with Rubra still controlling the power circuits (and as for taking a tube carriage . . . forget it). The once-stylish circular foyer echoed a war zone, its glass walls cracked and tarnished with soot, furniture mashed and flung about, dripping with water and grubby grey foam from the ceiling fire sprinklers. Black soil from broken pot plants squelched messily underfoot.

He refused to say it to the others picking their way through the wreckage: If you’d just listened to me. They’d heard it from him so many times they didn’t listen; besides, they followed Kiera slavishly now. He had to admit the council she’d put together was effective at maintaining control within the habitat. And precious little else. He found it a telling point that the possessed hadn’t bothered using their energistic power to return the lobby to its original state; it wasn’t as if they had to go around with a brush and sponge. Rubra’s continuing presence and war-of-nerves campaign was taking its toll on morale.

He stepped through the twisted doors out onto the flagstones ringing the lobby building. The surrounding parkland had, at least, retained its bucolic appearance. Emerald grass, unblemished by a single weed, extended out to the rank of sagging ancient trees two hundred metres away, crisscrossed by hard-packed gravel paths leading off deeper into the habitat interior. Dense hemispherical bushes with dark violet leaves and tiny silver flowers were scattered about. Small reptilian birds that were little more than triangular wings of muscle, with scales coloured turquoise and amber, swooped playfully through the air overhead.

The corpse spoilt the idyll; lying with its legs across one of the gravel paths, one ankle twisted at an awkward angle. There was no way of telling if it was male or female. Its head looked as if it had been shoved into a starship’s fusion exhaust jet.

The remains of the perpetrators, a pair of servitor housechimps, were smouldering on the grass twenty metres away. One of them held a melted wand which Dariat recognized as a shockrod. A lot of the possessed had been caught unawares by the harmless-looking servitors. After a couple of days of unexpected, and unpredictable, attacks, most people simply exterminated them on sight now.

He walked past, wrinkling his nose at the smell. When he reached the trees he saw one of the triangular birds had alighted on the topmost branch. They eyed each other warily. It was a xenoc, so he was reasonably sure it wasn’t affinity-bonded. But with Rubra, you could never be certain. Now Dariat thought about it, the servitors would be an excellent way of keeping everyone under observation, circumventing the disruption he’d been inflicting on the neural strata’s subroutines. He scowled up at the bird, which rippled its wings but didn’t take off.

Dariat moved swiftly through the woods to a large glade which Kiera was using. Impressively tall trees with grey-green leaves formed a valley on either side of a wide stream, their black trunks host to a furry moss-analogue. Long grass fringed the water, littered with wild poppies.

Two groups of people were occupying the glade. One was comprised entirely of youngsters, couples in their late teens and early twenties; boys all with bare chests, wearing shorts or swimming trunks; girls in light summer dresses or bikinis, emphasising their femininity. Both genders had been chosen for their beauty. Four or five children milled about looking completely bored; girls in party frocks and ribbons in their hair, boys in shorts and smart shirts. Two of the under sevens were smoking.

At the other end of the glade four people in ordinary clothes stood in a group, talking in loud strained voices. Arms waved around as fingers jabbed for emphasis. Various electronic modules were scattered on the grass around their feet, the paraphernalia of a professional MF recording operation.

Dariat saw Kiera Salter was standing among the recording team, and went over. She was wearing a white cotton camisole with tiny pearl buttons down the front, the top half undone to display her cleavage; and a thin white skirt showing tanned legs and bare feet. With her hair unbound over her shoulders the effect was awesomely sexy. It lasted right up until she turned her gaze on him. Marie Skibbow’s body might be a male fantasy made flesh, but the maleficent intelligence now residing in her skull was instantly chilling.