Context (113 page)

They
left him, five troopers running towards the sound, with only one remaining—and
his attention was not on Tom. A fatal error, as Tom added one more to the list
of dead souls who would stand before him in his dreams; it took an ankle sweep
assisted by a hand-edge throat-strike, then a knee-drop to the fallen man—an
audible crack as the ribs went—and a foreknuckle collapsing the laryngeal
cartilage to make sure.

Tom cast aside the baggy outer
clothes and sprinted after the patrol.

A row of membrane doors extended
beneath curved arches, one of them already dissolved, and that was where the
patrol headed. Tom upped the pace, legs pumping, silent across the thick blue
carpeting.

This is my future.

And then he was into it.

This is my Now.

Inside the chamber, a trooper was
down and another on one knee, clutching his eyes and softly whimpering. Elva
was grappling with another, using her teeth against his throat, while another
tried to hook punches over his comrade and into the side of Elva’s head.

The five reinforcements,
sensibly, were holding back. Their leader gave the command to draw grasers—but
Tom was upon them then, and it was too late to play a waiting game.

Spilled crystals scrunched underfoot
but he kept his balance, scythed a shin-kick across one man’s thigh—the trooper
dropped, muscles paralysed—used finger-claw, elbow and knee in quick
combination on a second, and then, incredibly, Tom laughed.

He took out another man with a
spectacular spinning hook-kick, which amazed himself after the fact.

‘Elva.’ Sidestepping. ‘Didn’t you
know I’d come back for you?’

Side-kick, and he bounced the
patrol leader off the wall and met the returning body with a throat-punch. A
heavy blow exploded on the back of Tom’s head but he spun regardless,
conditioned to hard contact, and his answering combination used knee and
palm-strikes, and then he was behind the man, and his arm slipped softly,
serpent-like, round the throat, grabbed the man’s left epaulette, then a bend
and twist and he was out of it.

Elva’s opponents, too, were down.
With a grim efficiency Tom had not seen before, she used a small triangular
black knife to finish them.

‘Quickly, now. They didn’t call
for assistance’—she was gathering up a spherical grey bag (it might have
contained a large children’s lightball, from its size) and a handful of
crystals—‘but we don’t have much time.’

After Tom had pulled on a uniform
over his bodysuit, they left together. His was the lower nominal rank, so he
took the black satchel, now with the round grey bag and stolen crystals inside,
and walked to Elva’s right, half a pace behind, keeping in step.

It was what the Seer showed me.

The fight in the office. The
Seer-given vision of Elva which had guided Tom for so long—but no longer.

We’re in an unknown future now.

At
an intersection, with a great round-domed hall beyond, a patrol moved across
their path, jogging at double-march, graser rifles at port-arms, and Tom almost
stopped dead. But he took his cue from Elva, recovered his pace, and heard her
murmur:

‘If they’d found the bodies, the
Eminence itself would look for us.’

The Blight.

And it would find them. Tom had
no doubts of that.

We’re insects before it.

Or perhaps that was not it.
Crazily, since their lives depended on acting calmly, Tom found his thoughts
wandering, drawn to the intellectual puzzle.

Perhaps It, the Blight, is more
like a sea of bacteria.

Ten per cent of every person’s
body weight is bacterial. At a deeper level, mitochondria, the powerhouse
organelles of all animal cells—which drive all movement, all being—have their
own DNA inherited solely, always, from the mother: evidence of a symbiosis
between two bacterial species, one absorbed inside the other, which eventually
became animal life.

We’re just emergent properties of
a vast bacterial sea.

On Terra, as in Nulapeiron,
bacteria crawled, lived, reproduced, struggled and died on every visible
surface, on the deep ocean floor, and inside the very world-stuff, inside both
planets’ crusts as far down as anyone had ever measured. It had been one of the
first lessons Tom had learned in his emergenics studies at the Sorites School.

But bacteria could—chemically—communicate
as well as fight, and could swap DNA across ‘species’ so easily that the term
sometimes became nonsense, in a vast planet-wide, microscopic-dimensioned,
eternally uninhibited ongoing orgy.

And perhaps that was the natural
way of things, as Terra’s NetWars had given hint of, as the Fulgor Anomaly had
possibly proved.

Vast communal beings, stretching
across entire worlds, if not further.

Individual animal and human
organisms, perhaps, were in the same boat as archaic bacteria. A stage in
evolution, still existing, still contributing to biomass, but scarcely aware
-except in the most peripheral way, when more complex beings’ actions led to
proliferation or extinction as a result of purposes and actions unknowable by
simpler organisms—of the growth in intellect, in society.

What did a human global economy
mean to a single bacterium? What could the powers and intentions of the vast
Blight mean to a single human being?

Humans were a part of it, Tom was
sure, only in the same way that
E.coli
bacteria are part of every
person. Were its capabilities as far beyond human thought as intellect is above
the simple chemical reactions of a bacterium or virus?

You can’t fight a god.

Then Elva’s soft words broke his
reverie.

‘Checkpoint ahead. Follow my lead.’

They
passed through the first checkpoint, and the next.

But the Blight-controlled
territories stretched a thousand klicks or more in every horizontal direction,
and they would never get away from here on foot through public tunnels. Or
escape an extended search if they became the subject of a realm-wide manhunt.

Whatever they did next, it would
have to be swift, imaginative, and undetectable.

‘This way,’ said Elva.

~ * ~

63

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

Below
the chamber’s open portal, the walls dropped almost sheer to the bottom of the
pit. Brass ramps spiralled down to the pit floor, where half a dozen flyers and
cargo-bugs sat waiting, all with hulls coloured pale grey, zigzagged with
scarlet lightning flashes.

Tom edged back from the opening,
into the half-lit chamber.

Elva had been Tom’s security
chief, and a good one. Sneak-and-peek had been her favourite impromptu
exercise, using burglary techniques to pass through smartfilms and avoid
patrols, testing his demesne’s defences which she herself helped to design and
continually upgrade.

She’s better at this than I am.

They were inside a cargo chamber,
in a high-security section of this realm which, vertically, spanned seven
strata: a military base within the greater occupied territory. And Elva had
sneaked them inside as part of a general’s entourage, following the bewigged
burly man with the purple cape and ample brocade, splitting off from among the
following junior officers, and bypassing every automated scanfield until they
reached this hiding place.

Her eidetic memory helped, of
course: she had visited here only once, had caught a single brief subsequent
glance of the base schematics.

Now he waited among
teardrop-shaped steel containers, while Elva worked on gaining access.

‘Done it.’

They crawled inside the dark
container, exchanged a long mutual look while there was still illumination—the
words of love unspoken—then Elva pulled the hatch shut behind them with a muted
clang.

Darkness.

And the long wait.