Context (115 page)

Tom nodded. ‘I thought we could
get far away on foot before I signalled my contact. But now ...’

Elva touched the back of his
hand. ‘Not with thousands of Eminence-Absorbed around us.’

‘Absorbed?’

‘What it sounds like.’ Then she
sat back, clasping her hands round her knees. ‘Signalled how?’

‘What do you— Oh. Like this.’

Tom reached inside his mouth with
thumb and forefinger, steeled himself, then twisted. There was a
crunch,
and
the tooth came free.

He held out the red-stained molar
and spat warm blood.

‘Transmitter seed.’

‘Not very big.’ Elva, with no
hint of squeamishness or distaste, took the tooth. Her strong fingers split it
apart. ‘Null-gel coated. Good. But no range to speak of.’

‘I know.’

If only there‘d been a way to set
up long-range comms...

‘But’—Elva held it up, checking its
design—‘it can feed off almost any energy-source, I’d say.’

‘I guess so.’ Tom frowned. ‘Does
that help?’

‘Tell me again about the crystal
building.’

In
a lifetime of taking risks, Tom did something that scared him more than all the
rest combined.

After waiting for the last of the
marching crowds to disappear inside, through the ground-level entrances set all
around the convex crystalline building, Tom crawled over the ridgeline and
stood up.

He waited for a burst of
automated graser fire, a shout of alarm, but nothing happened.

Then slowly he made his way
downslope, walking as though he had every right to be here, heading down
towards the place where tens of thousands of his enemies, or human components
of the one Enemy, were congregated to carry out strange purposes of their own.

Blades of grass whipped around
his feet.

Closer.

And then he was at the bottom,
before a blank entrance, and the great convex building curved outwards, above
his head, an improbably massive structure which surely could not hold its own
weight.

Entranceway.

Tom closed his eyes briefly.

For Elva.

And walked inside.

~ * ~

64

NULAPEIRON
AD 3422

A
passageway like glass led onwards to what might have been a great arena.
Massive waves of sound—no voices, but rasp of cloth and sound of breath from
such a multitude magnified, took on a life of its own, became a deep inchoate
roar of white noise—beat down upon him, froze him in place. People were
standing up ahead—

But there was a small opening to
his left and he slid into it.

It was a curved tubular shaft,
twisting and curling, elaborate in shape, leading upwards.

Climb.

There might have been a flicker
of motion outside the shaft—broken kaleidoscopic images shattered and refracted
by the complex inner structure of this place—but Tom was already ascending.
Counterpressure techniques allowed him to chimney-climb, faster than he would
have thought possible, propelled by fear.

No shouts followed from below.

Climb.

It was glassine more than
crystal: no sharp edges, but with an impossibly convoluted organic structure,
as though it were some vast living flower through which the microscopic Tom
Corcorigan was crawling.

Faster.

There was a tricky traverse, a
junction between capillaries, and he slipped.

But he slid only a few metres
before catching a lip, a junction, and then he was moving upwards through the
transparent structure once more.

And
came out, with the yellow sky blazing overhead.

Like an insect—and likewise
insignificant, he hoped—Tom crawled along a narrow curving glassine ridge, part
of the ‘roof’ of the great complex blossom, and looked over the edge, into the
hollow centre.

As he had seen earlier from the
hilltop, the glassine pleats and petals folded and bent through strange,
extradimensional axes which the human eye could not follow. When Tom tried to
focus on the phenomenon, he felt vertiginously sick, clutched his handhold,
looking away quickly before he fell.

Beneath, the blossom-building’s
core was hollow, and vast numbers of grey-uniformed people were already seated.
Twenty thousand people, Tom eventually estimated, and many more were still
taking up their positions.

Movement, overhead.

It was skyborne, a distant
watcher-drone, and Tom slipped over the edge, and braced himself inside a capillary.

Foot pressure alone kept him in
place as he adhered the tiny tooth-transmitter to the glassine material. If the
energy focus was anything like he and Elva expected, the transmitter’s
nanosecond burst would reach clear to the Academy, thousands of klicks away. It
would modulate some of the Blight’s own radiated power, before the immense
concentration burned the transmitter itself into a miniature smoking ruin.

Go now.

He swallowed, holding still. The
feel of the crowd, the invisible vibration of those myriads of wills subsumed
into one...

But a security drone was coming—perhaps
it, too, was an infinitesimal sub-component of the Blight: that dark power
surely transcended the organic—and Tom had to move.

He let go.

I’m scared.

Slid downwards.

There
were few drones sweeping the sky.

From his hiding place, crouched
at the glassine exit, Tom kept careful watch, analysing the pattern. Then, when
he was sure—as sure as he could be—that he was in an observation gap, he broke
into an uphill run. Running outright—no point in acting nonchalant—pushing
hard, lungs bursting and thighs burning, deep in the animal joy of it, up to
the top of the slope, then down over the ridgeline without looking back.

Nothing followed.

There was something hidden in the
grass, a root, and he tripped without injury, turning his fall into a roll, and
rolled again sideways and into the knot of trees. A laugh rose inside him, but
he quelled it; despite his relief, the danger was not over yet.

He crawled, gasping yet feeling
energized, to their makeshift shelter.

But it was empty.

NO!

He checked again, but it was
true, the shadowed interior was empty.

Elva was gone, taken by drones.