“Our main concern is that nobody attempts any foolhardy liberation missions,” Lalwani said. “There would be few national navies capable of mounting a successful operation along those lines. At the moment any troops entering such an environment are liable to be possessed themselves.”

“There will be political pressure on the military to act, though,” the First Admiral said dourly. “So far our only notable public success has been the destruction of the Yaku in the Khabrat system. Trivial. What we need above all is some kind of weapon which is able to incapacitate the possessed. That or an effective method of exorcism. Preferably both.” He gave Dr Gilmore a questing gaze.

“I believe we can now help you on the first count,” the implant specialist said confidently. They stopped before the biological isolation facility, and he datavised his code at the door.

Euru’s researchers had acted swiftly as soon as they’d obtained permission to advance their studies. The First Admiral flinched at the sight which greeted him within the examination room. On his side, the monitoring consoles were fully staffed; remorselessly obsessive scientists and technicians absorbed in the displays projected by AV pillars. A scene of brisk competence and scientific endeavour, as always reinforcing the concept of impersonal efficiency.

Samual Aleksandrovich doubted there was any other way the team could cope with their objective; it must act as a psychological buffer between them and the subject. Subject —he chided himself silently. Although he’d witnessed inhumanity on a far more brutal scale than this during his active service days.

With Captain Khanna at his side he walked hesitantly up to the transparent wall which cut the rock chamber in two, wondering if he should show signs of dismay or approval. In the end he settled for the same bleak acceptance which everyone else in the room had put on along with their baggy white lab overalls.

A naked and shaven Jacqueline Couteur had been immobilized on a surgical bed. Although wired into it would be a more honest evaluation, the First Admiral thought. Grey composite ribs formed a cage over the length of her body, supporting clamps which pressed pairs of large circular electrodes against her forearms, abdomen, and upper legs; clear jell was leaking out from beneath the silvery metal, ensuring better contact and conductivity. Two ceiling-mounted waldo arms had been equipped with sensor arrays, like bundles of fat white gun muzzles, which they were sweeping slowly and silently up and down the prone body. The thick circular brace which held her head fast looked as if it had melded with her skin. A plastic defecation tube had been inserted in her anus, while a free-fall toilet suction catheter adhered to her vagina. He couldn’t decide if that was a civilized courtesy or the final humiliation.

Not that Couteur would care, not in her present condition.

Her entire musculature twitched and rippled in random spasms. The flesh quivering on her face made it seem as though she were enduring a ten-gee acceleration.

“What the hell are you doing to her?” Maynard Khanna asked in a guttural whisper.

It was the first time the First Admiral could ever remember the staff captain speaking before his superiors.

“Neutralizing her offensive potential,” Dr Gilmore said with a tone of high satisfaction. “The report we received from Lalonde contained a reference from Darcy and Lori that electricity affects the possessed in an adverse fashion. We checked and discovered it’s true. So we’re running a current through her.”

“Dear God, that’s . . .” His face crunched up in a disgusted grimace.

Dr Gilmore ignored him, addressing himself solely to the First Admiral. “She is having to use her entire energistic ability to ward off the current. We experimented with the voltage level until we achieved this balance. Her physiological functions continue to operate normally, but she is completely incapable of manifesting any reality dysfunction effect. She can no longer distort matter, create illusions, or conjure up white fireballs. It means we are free to study her without any interference; even our electronic systems have recovered eighty-five per cent of their efficiency in her presence.”

“So what have you learned?” the First Admiral asked.

“Please bear in mind we are on the threshold of a completely new field here.”

“Doctor,” the First Admiral cautioned.

“Of course. Firstly, we have developed a screening method which can pick out any possessed. There is a tiny but constant discharge of static electricity right across their bodies. We think it must be a by-product of their beyond continuum spilling into ours. Such an influx surge would also account for the energy they constantly have at their disposal.”

“Static electricity?” a bemused Lalwani said.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s beautiful: the sensors that will pick it up are cheap, easy to mass-produce, simple to use; and if they malfunction it’s a certainty that a possessed is nearby anyway. Now we know what to look for they will find it impossible to hide in a crowd or infiltrate new areas.”

“Excellent,” the First Admiral said. “We’ll have to see that this information is distributed as fast as our original warning.” He moved right up to the transparent wall, seeing his breath mist the surface, and activated the intercom. “Do you remember me?” he asked.

Jacqueline Couteur took a long time to answer, her syllables maimed by the laboured gurgling of vocal cords not fully under control. “We know you, Admiral.”

“Is she in communication with those in the beyond?” he asked Dr Gilmore quickly.

“I cannot give you an absolute, Admiral. However, I suspect not; at least nothing more than leaking a rudimentary form of contact back into her own continuum. Our Jacqueline is very fond of dominance games, and ‘we’ tends to sound impressive.”

“If you are in pain,” the First Admiral told her, “I apologize.”

“Not as sorry as that shit’s going to be when I catch up with him.” Bloodshot eyes juddered around to focus on Dr Gilmore.

He responded with a thin superior smile.

“Exactly how much pain do you inflict on the mind of the body you have stolen?” Samual Aleksandrovich asked mildly.

“Touch

“As you see, we are learning from you as I said we would.” He gestured at the sensors which the waldo arms were sliding over her head and torso. “We know what you are, we know something of the suffering which awaits you back in the beyond, we understand why you are driven to do what you do. I would ask you to work with me in helping to solve this problem. I do not wish there to be conflict between us. We are one people, after all, albeit at different stages of existence.”

“You will give us bodies? How generous.” Somehow she managed to grin, lips wriggling apart to dribble saliva down her cheeks.

“We could grow bitek neural networks which you could inhabit. You would be able to receive the full range of human senses. After that they could be placed in artificial bodies, rather like a cosmonik.”

“How very reasonable. But you forget that we are human, too; we want to live full human lives. For ever. Possession is only the beginning of our return.”

“I am aware of your goals.”

“Do you wish to help us?”

“Yes.”

“Then terminate your life. Join us. Be on the winning side, Admiral.”

Samual Aleksandrovich gave the vibrating, abused body a final, almost disgusted glance, and turned his back to the transparent wall.

“She says the same thing to us,” Dr Gilmore said as if in apology. “Repeatedly.”

“How much of what she says is the truth? For instance, do they really need human bodies? If not, we might just be able to force them into a compromise.”

“Verification may be difficult,” Euru said. “The electricity has contained the worst excesses of Couteur’s reality dysfunction, but a personality debrief in these circumstances may prove beyond us. If the nanonics were to malfunction during axon interface they could cause a lot of damage to her brain.”

“The possessed are certainly capable of operating within bitek neurone structures,” Lalwani said. “Lewis Sinclair captured Pernik’s neural strata; and we have confirmed that Valisk’s blackhawks have also been captured.”

“Physically they’re capable of it, yes,” Euru said. “But the problem is more likely to be psychological. As ex-humans, they want human bodies, they want the familiar.”

“Acquire what information you can without risking the actual body itself,” the First Admiral instructed. “In the meantime have you developed any method of subduing them?”

Dr Gilmore indicated the surgical table with a muddled gesture. “Electricity, Admiral. Equip our marines with guns that fire a dart that contains a small electron matrix cell and simply push a current into them. Such weapons were in widespread use from the mid-twentieth century right up until the twenty-third. We’ve already produced a modern chemical-powered design with a range over five hundred metres.”

Samual Aleksandrovich didn’t know whether to berate the implant specialist or commiserate with him. That was the trouble with laboratory types, all theory, no thought about how their gadgets would perform in the field. It was probably just the same in Couteur’s time, he reflected. “And how far can they project their white fire?”

“It varies depending on the individual.”

“And how will you determine what voltage to discharge from the electron matrix cell? Some will be stronger than Couteur, while others will be weaker.”

Dr Gilmore glanced to Euru for support.

“Voltage regulation is a problem area,” the suave, black-skinned Edenist said. “We are considering if a static scanner can determine the level in advance. It may be that the quantity of static exuded might indicate the individual’s energistic strength.”

“In here, possibly,” the First Admiral said. “In combat conditions I very much doubt it. And even if it did work, what do you propose we should do with the captive?”

“Put them in zero-tau,” Dr Gilmore said. “We know that method has enjoyed a hundred per cent success rate. They employed it on Ombey.”

“Yes,” the First Admiral acknowledged, recalling the file he’d accessed, the battle to capture the possessed inside the big department store. “And at what cost? I don’t intend to be cavilling about your endeavours, Doctor, but you really need to bring some experienced combat personnel into your consultation process. Even conceding your stun gun could work, it would take two or three marines to subdue a possessed and place them in zero-tau. During which time those possessed remaining at liberty would have converted another five people. With that ratio we could never win. We must have a single weapon, a one-shot device which can rid a body of the possessing soul without harming it. Will electricity do that? Can you increase the voltage until the incursive soul is forced out?”

“No, Admiral,” Euru said. “We have already tried with Couteur. The voltages necessary will kill the body. In fact we had to abandon the procedure for several hours to allow her to heal herself.”

“What about other methods?”

“There will be some we can try, Admiral,” Dr Gilmore insisted. “But we’ll need to research her further. We have so little data at the moment. The ultimate solution will of course be to seal the junction between this universe and the beyond continuum. Unfortunately we still cannot locate the interface point. Those scanners we are operating in there are some of the most sensitive gravitonic distortion detectors ever built, yet there is no sign of any space-time density fluctuation in or around her. Which means the souls are not returning through a wormhole.”

“Not wormholes as we understand them, anyway,” Euru finished. “But then, given Couteur’s existence, our whole conception of quantum cosmology is obviously seriously incomplete. Having the ability to travel faster than light isn’t nearly as smart as we once thought it was.”

It had taken Quinn some time to modify the Tantu ’s bridge. It wasn’t the look of the compartment which bothered him so much; the frigate was configured for high gee acceleration, its fittings and structure were correspondingly functional. He liked that inherent strength, and emphasised it by sculpting the surfaces with an angular matte-black bas-relief of the kind he imagined would adorn the walls of the Light Brother’s supreme temple. Lighting panels were dimmed to a carmine spark, flickering behind rusty iron grilles.

It was the information he was presented with, or rather the lack of it, which displeased him, and consequently required the longest time to rectify. He had no neural nanonics, not that they would have worked even if he did have a set. Which meant he didn’t know what was happening outside the ship. For all of Tantu ’s fabulous high-resolution sensor array, he was blind, unable to react, to make decisions. To have the external universe visible was his first priority.

Possessing the frigate’s nineteen-strong crew had taken barely twenty minutes after he and Lawrence had docked. Initiating the returned souls into the sect, having them accept his leadership, had required another hour. Three times he had to discipline the faithless. He regretted the waste.

Those remaining had worked hard to build the displays he wanted; fitting holoscreens to the consoles, adapting the flight computer programs to portray the external environment in the simplest possible terms. Only then, with his confidence restored, had he ordered their departure from Norfolk orbit.

Quinn settled back in his regal, velvet-padded acceleration couch and gave the order to jump away. Twenty seconds after they completed the operation, the holoscreens showed him the little purple pyramid which represented the squadron’s lone pursuit ship lit up at the centre of the empty cube. According to the scale, it was three thousand kilometres away.

“How do we elude them?” he asked Bajan.

Bajan was possessing the body of the Tantu ’s erstwhile captain, the third soul to do so since the hijacking began. Quinn had been dissatisfied with the first two; they had both lived in pre-industrial times. He needed someone with a technological background, someone who could interpret the wealth of data in the captain’s captive mind. A civil fusion engineer, Bajan had died only two centuries ago; starflight was a concept he understood. He also had a sleazy, furtive mind which promised instant obedience to both Quinn and the sect’s doctrines. But Quinn didn’t mind that, such weaknesses simply made him easier to control.

Bajan’s fists squeezed, mimicking the pressure he was placing on the mind held within. “Sequential jumps. The ship can do it. That can throw off any pursuer.”

“Do it,” Quinn ordered simply.

Three jumps later, spanning seven light-years, they were alone in interstellar space. Four days after that, they jumped into a designated emergence zone two hundred thousand kilometres above Earth.

“Home,” Quinn said, and smiled. The frigate’s visible-spectrum sensors showed him the planet’s nightside, a leaden blue-grey crescent which was widening slowly as the Tantu ’s orbit inched them towards the edge of the penumbra. First magnitude stars blazed on the continents: the arcologies, silently boasting their vast energy consumption as the light from the streets, skyscrapers, stadiums, vehicles, parks, plazas, and industrial precincts merged into a monochrome blast of photons. Far above the equator, a sparkling haze band looped around the entire world, casting the gentlest reflection off the black-glitter oceans below.

“God’s Brother, but it’s magnificent,” Quinn said. They hadn’t shown him this view when he’d been brought up the Brazilian orbital tower on his way to exile. There were no ports in his deck of the lift capsule, nor on the sections of the mammoth docking station through which the Ivets had passed. He’d lived on Earth all his life, and never seen it, not as it should be seen. Exquisite, and tragically fragile.

In his mind he could see the dazzling lights slowly, torturously, snuffed out as thick oily shadows slid across the land, a tide which brought with it despair and fear. Then reaching out into space, crushing the O’Neill Halo, its vitality and power. No light would be left, no hope. Only the screams, and the Night. And Him.

Tears of joy formed fat distorting lenses across Quinn’s eyeballs. The image, the conviction, was so strong. Total blackness, with Earth at its centre; raped, dead, frozen, entombed. “Is this my task, Lord? Is it?” The thought of such a privilege humbled him.

The flight computer let out an alarmed whistle.

Furious that his dreams should be interrupted, Quinn demanded: “What is it?” He had to squint and blink to clear his vision. The holoscreens were filling with tumbling red spiderwebs, graphic symbols flashed for attention. Five orange vector lines were oozing inwards from the edge of the display to intersect at the Tantu ’s location. “What is happening?”

“It’s some kind of interception manoeuvre,” Bajan shouted. “Those are navy ships. And the Halo’s SD platforms are locking on.”

“I thought we were in a legitimate emergence zone.”

“We are.”

“Then what—”

“Priority signal for the Tantu ’s captain from Govcentral Strategic Defence Command,” the flight computer announced.

Quinn glowered at the AV projection pillar which had relayed the message. He snapped his fingers at Bajan.

“This is Captain Mauer, commander of the CN ship Tantu ,” Bajan said. “Can somebody tell me what the problem is?”

“This is SD Command, Captain. Datavise your ship’s ASA code, please.”

“What code?” Bajan mouthed, completely flummoxed.

“Does anybody know what it is?” Quinn growled. Tantu had already datavised its identification code as soon as the jump was completed, as per standard procedure.

“The code, Captain,” SD Command asked again.

Quinn watched the fluorescent orange vectors of another two ships slide into the holoscreen display. Their weapons sensors focused on the Tantu ’s hull.

“Computer, jump one light-year. Now,” he ordered.

“No, the sensors . . .” Bajan exclaimed frantically.

His objection didn’t matter. The flight computer was programmed to respond to Quinn’s voice commands alone.

The Tantu jumped, its event horizon slicing clean through the carbon-composite stalks which elevated the various sensor clusters out of their recesses. Ten of them had deployed as soon as the starship emerged above Earth: star trackers, midrange optical sensors, radar, communications antennae.

All seven warships racing towards the Tantu saw it disappear behind ten dazzling white plasma spumes as its event horizon crushed the carbon molecules of the stalks to fusion density and beyond. Ruined sensor clusters spun out of the radioactive mist.

The SD Command centre duty officer ordered two of the destroyers to follow the Tantu , cursing his luck that the interception squadron hadn’t been assigned any voidhawks. It took the two starships eleven minutes to match trajectories with the Tantu ’s jump coordinate. Everybody knew that was too long.

Soprano alarms shrilled at painful volume, drowning out all other sounds on the Tantu ’s bridge. The holoscreens which had been carrying the sensor images turned black as soon as the patterning nodes discharged, then flicked to ship schematic diagrams. Disturbing quantities of red symbols flashed for attention.

“Kill that noise,” Quinn bellowed.

Bajan hurried to obey, typing rapidly on the keyboard rigged up next to his acceleration couch.

“We took four hull breaches,” Dwyer reported as soon as the alarm cut off. He was the most ardent of Quinn’s new apostles, a former black stimulant program pusher who was murdered at the age of twenty-three by a faster, more ambitious rival. His anger and callousness made him ideal for the cause. He’d even heard of the sects, dealing with them on occasion. “Six more areas have been weakened.”

“What the fuck was that? Did they shoot at us?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Bajan said. “You can’t jump with sensors extended, the distortion effect collapses any mass caught in the field. Fortunately it’s only a very narrow shell which covers the hull, just a few micrometers thick. But the atoms inside it get converted directly into energy. Most of it shoots outwards, but there’s also some which is deflected right back against the hull. That’s what hit us.”

“How much damage did we pick up?”

“Secondary systems only,” Dwyer said. “And we’re venting something, too; nitrogen I think.”

“Shit. What about the nodes? Can we jump again?”

“Two inoperative, another three damaged. But they’re failsoft. I think we can jump.”

“Good. Computer, jump three light-years.”

Bajan clamped down on his automatic protest. Nothing he could do about the spike of anger and exasperation in his mind though, Quinn could perceive that all right.

“Computer, jump half a light-year.”

This time the bridge lights sputtered almost to the point of extinction.

“All right,” Quinn said as the gloomy red illumination grew bold again. “I want some fucking sensor visuals on these screens now. I want to know where we are, and if anyone followed us. Dwyer, start working around those damaged systems.”

“Are we going to be okay, Quinn?” Lawrence asked. His energistic ability couldn’t hide the sweat pricking his sallow face.

“Sure. Now shut the fuck up, let me think.” He slowly unbuckled the straps holding him into his acceleration couch. Using the stikpads he shuffled on tiptoe over to Bajan’s couch. His black robe swirled like bedevilled smoke around him, the hood deepening until his face was almost completely hidden. “What,” he asked in a tight whisper, “is an ASA code?”

“I dunno, Quinn, honest,” the agitated man protested.

“I know you don’t know, dickhead. But the captain does. Find out!”

“Sure, Quinn, sure.” He closed his eyes, concentrating on the captain’s mind, inflicting as much anguish as he could dream of to wrest free the information. “It’s an Armed Ship Authorization designation,” he grunted eventually.

“Go on,” Quinn’s voice emerged from the shadows of his hood.

“Any military starship which jumps to Earth has to have one. There’s so much industry in orbit, so many settled asteroids, they’re terrified of the damage just one rogue ship could cause. So the captain of every Confederation government navy ship is given an ASA code to confirm they’re legally entitled to be armed and that they’re under official control. It acts as a fail-safe against any hijacking.”

“It certainly does,” Quinn said. “But it shouldn’t have done. Not with us. You should have known.”

Nobody else on the bridge was looking anywhere near Bajan, all of them hugely absorbed with their own tasks of stabilizing the damage. And Quinn, looming over him like some giant carrion creature.

“This Mauer is a tough mother, Quinn. He tricked me, that’s all. I’ll make him suffer for it, I swear. The Light Bringer will be proud of the way I let my serpent beast loose on him.”

“There’s no need,” Quinn said genially.

Bajan let out a faltering whimper of relief.

“I shall supervise his suffering myself.”

“But . . . how?”

In the absolute silence of the bridge, Lawrence Dillon sniggered.

“Leave us, Bajan, you little prick,” Quinn ordered. “You have failed me.”

“Leave? Leave what?”

“The body I provided for you. You don’t deserve it.”

“No!” Bajan howled.

“Go. Or I’ll shove you into zero-tau.”

With a last sob, Bajan let himself fall back into the beyond, the glories of sensation ripping out of his mind. His soul wept its torment as the crowded emptiness closed around him once again.

Gurtan Mauer coughed weakly, his body trembling. He had lurched from one nightmare to another. The Tantu ’s bridge had become an archaic crypt where technological artifacts protruded from whittled ebony, as if they were the foreign elements. A monk in midnight-black robes stood at the side of his couch, the hint of a face inside the voluminous hood indicated by the occasional carmine flicker striking alabaster skin. An inverted crucifix hung on a long silver chain around his neck; for some reason it wasn’t drifting around as it ought in free fall.

“You didn’t just defy me alone,” Quinn said. “That I could almost accept. But when you held back that fucking ASA code you defied the will of God’s Brother. Right now I should have been in the docking station, by morning I would have kissed the ground at the foot of the orbital tower. I was destined to carry the gospel of the Night to the whole motherfucking world! And you fucked with me , shithead. You!”

Mauer’s ship-suit caught light. In free fall the flame was a bright indigo fluid, slithering smoothly across his torso and along his limbs. Scraps of charred fabric peeled off, exposing the charcoaled skin below. Fans whirred loudly behind the bridge’s duct grilles as they attempted to suck the awful stench from the compartment’s air.

Quinn ignored the agonized wailing muted by the captain’s clamped mouth. He let his mind lovingly undress Lawrence.

The slight lad drifted idly in the centre of the bridge, smiling dreamily down at his naked body. He allowed Quinn to shape him, the young stable boy’s skinny figure developing thick sinuous muscles, the width of his shoulders increasing. Clad only in a barbarian warrior garb of shiny leather strips, he began to resemble a dwarf addicted to bodybuilding.

The blue flame cloaking Mauer dribbled away as the last of the ship-suit was consumed. With a simple wave of his hand, Quinn healed the captain’s burns, restoring skin, nails, hair to their former state. Mauer became a picture of vitality.

“Your turn,” Quinn told Lawrence with a deviant laugh.

The pain-shocked, imprisoned captain could only stare upwards in terror as the freakishly hulking boy grinned broadly and glided in towards him.

Alkad Mzu accessed the Samaku ’s sensor suite via the flight computer, allowing the picture to share her mind with a sense of benevolent dismay. This is what we fought over? This was what a planet died for? This? Dear Mary!

Like all starships jumping insystem, the Samaku had emerged a safe half-million kilometres above the plane of the eliptic. The star known as Tunja was an M4-type, a red dwarf. Bright enough from the starship’s forty million kilometres distance, but hardly dazzling like a G-type, the primary of most terracompatible planets. From Alkad’s excellent vantage point it hung at the centre of a vast disk of grizzled particles, extending over two hundred million kilometres in diameter.

The inner (annulet), surrounding Tunja out to about three million kilometres, was a sparsely populated region where the constant gale of solar wind had stripped away the smaller particles, leaving only tide-locked boulders and asteroid fragments. With their surfaces smoothed to a crystalline gloss by the incessant red heat, they twinkled scarlet and crimson as if they were a swarm of embers flung off by the dwarf’s arching typhonic prominences. Further out, the disk’s opacity began to build, graduating into a sheet of what looked like dense grainy fog; bright carmine at the inner fringe, shading away to a deep cardinal-red ninety million kilometres later. A trillion spiky shadows speckled the uniformity, cast by the larger chunks of rock and metal bobbing among the dust and slushy gravel.

No terracompatible planet was conceivable in such an environment. The star was barren except for a single gas giant, Duida, orbiting a hundred and twenty-eight million kilometres out. A couple of young Edenist habitats circled above it, but the main focus of human life was scattered across the disk.

A disk of such density was usually the companion of a newborn star, but Tunja was estimated to be over three billion years old. Confederation planetologists suspected the red dwarf’s disk had its genesis in a spectacularly violent collision between a planet and a very large interstellar meteor. It was a theory which could certainly explain the existence of the Dorados themselves: three hundred and eighty-seven large asteroids with a near-pure metal content. Two-thirds of them were roughly spherical, permitting the strong conclusion that they were molten core magma material when the hypothetical collision took place. Whatever their origin, such abundant ore was an immensely valuable economic resource for the controlling government. Valuable enough to go to war over.

“Ayacucho’s civil traffic control is refusing us docking permission,” Captain Randol said. “They say all the Dorados are closed to civil starflight and we have to return to our port of origin.”

Alkad exited the sensor visualization and stared across the Samaku ’s bridge. Randol was wearing a diplomatically apologetic expression.

“Has this ever happened before?” she asked.

“No. Not that we’ve been to the Dorados before, but I’ve never heard of anything like it.”

I have not waited this long, nor come so far, to be turned away by some bloody bureaucrat, Alkad thought. “Let me talk to them,” she said.

Randol waved a hand, signalling permission. The Samaku ’s flight computer opened a channel to Ayacucho asteroid’s traffic control office.

“This is Immigration Service Officer Mabaki, how can I help you?”