Nemesis (44 page)

Zoe pressed up next to him. ‘We should stay close,’ she said, her teeth chattering. ‘It’s too fucking cold in here.’

Mark squeezed closer. Proximity certainly helped.

‘Put your arms around me, you idiot,’ she told him. ‘I’m dying here.’

He did as she asked and felt a little better. He chose to ignore how pleasant it felt. Despite the hours of panic they’d endured, somehow her hair still managed to smell nice. Zoe made a small sigh of relief.

‘You want some of this?’ he asked Venetia.

‘Don’t worry about me – the engine’s keeping me warm,’ she said. ‘You guys huddle up. And besides, we’ll unbalance the boat if we’re all in the same spot.’

Gloomy hours slid by. By Mark’s reckoning, there couldn’t be much daylight left. He felt like he’d been underground for ever. It would be dark by the time they reached the coast, which would only compound their temperature problems. Then, just as he decided to ask Venetia where they were, she spoke up.

‘Look!’ she said, her voice hushed and excited.

She pointed ahead to a place where the wall-art had been damaged. The faces had been smashed off the statues.

‘We must be close. The sect Leading have that done to stop the Following from worshiping the Fecund.’

‘Does that really happen?’ said Zoe, her voice trembling from the cold.

‘It did at least once. There was this group that got hold of a working Fecund food machine and retro-fitted it for human-compatible protein. As soon as the Following had an independent food supply with no drugs in it, they started to get their own ideas. Weird ones, admittedly. It didn’t end well, I’m told.’

Mark wrapped his arms tighter around Zoe and frowned. He suspected that half the horror stories made up about Flags had been concocted by the FPP. He found it hard to believe that the kind of people he’d lived with in New York could be reduced to worshiping parrot-monkeys in a frozen tunnel. Those were the kind of lies you invented about people you wanted to dehumanise.

‘Please tell me these guys aren’t going to be scumbags,’ said Zoe quietly. ‘Tell me we’re not walking into the arms of a bunch of rapists.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Mark. ‘They’re just people. But if anyone so much as touches you, I’ll rip their head off.’

‘If I thought there was a risk of that kind of behaviour we wouldn’t be here,’ said Venetia. ‘Flag colonies are grim, don’t get me wrong, but the sect Leading are big on moral order. They have to be. They sit on powder kegs full of angry young men. The moment someone steps out of line, they string them up. So long as you keep your mouth shut and don’t piss anybody off, they aren’t likely to do much more than stare at you.’

A kilometre further on, the canal gave way to chunks of ice, forcing them to abandon the raft and walk. Though the air temperature kept dropping, Mark could feel himself warming a little from the exercise. He was glad of it. Without something to warm them up they were heading for hypothermia. His breath made pale clouds in the shafts of meagre lamplight.

‘Here!’ said Venetia. ‘We have to be right near the coastal cliffs. Look.’

She pointed along the tunnel ahead where the braille had been smashed off the walls with flenser fire. Spent flechettes littered the floor.

‘Knocking off that braille is like trashing the local signposts,’ said Venetia. ‘Makes it hard for anyone exploring down here to tell where they are, or how to get out. We must be close. This is kidnap country.’

She strode ahead of them, taking the lantern with her. Mark and Zoe had to jog to keep up.

‘If they find us, let me do the talking,’ Venetia warned. ‘Some of these groups brainwash their soldiers for aggression – one word against their faith and they’ll cut you open without thinking.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Mark. He couldn’t help himself. With Sam’s words still ringing in his ears, this was a slander too far. ‘Have you seen that yourself, or did somebody tell you?’

‘I study culture, Mark. I’ve not seen it myself but there are accounts—’

‘Mind programming was the very first thing to be banned after the war,’ he said. ‘Every sect in the Kingdom signed up. They wrote half the damned treaty. You’re telling me they’re breaking that now?’

Bullies and exploiters they might be, but Mark had trouble believing the sects’ leadership would stoop to thought-control. He couldn’t reconcile that picture with the planet full of struggling people where he’d lived. Life on Earth was cheap, but not
that
cheap.

Venetia gave him a sad look. ‘Mark, I can only go by what I’ve read. I’m not trying to insult anyone here.’

‘Any chance you’ve been reading propaganda?’

She looked disappointed in him. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to be careful, does it?’

She stopped at the entrance to yet another lab lined with nearly human-looking workbenches of featureless metal. Smashed equipment filled it from end to end. This one was different from the others they’d seen by simple virtue of having windows. The Fecund glass here had obviously been left exposed to the elements when the planet died as most of it had been scoured to a matte opacity. In a few curious patches, though, Mark could make out the dry ocean bed many stories below, overlooked by a thick blanket of stars.

‘Flags have been here recently,’ said Venetia as she picked her way through the glass and shrapnel on the floor. ‘See how new these breaks are? There’s no dust on them. This equipment must have been sealed up in those wall pods until just weeks ago.’ She pointed at boot prints on the floor. ‘They poach electronics mostly,’ she explained, picking up a piece of ceramic tubing. ‘Lab equipment if they can get it. There’s a huge market for this stuff in the home system. The sect Leading like to decorate their private worlds with genuine alien tech. That’s before you even start counting the odd medical or engineering miracle people sometimes find down here.’

‘Do you think they’ll come back here tonight?’ said Mark.

‘No way of knowing,’ said Venetia, ‘but there’s reason to hope. Last I heard, activity in this area was red hot, but that was a few years ago. And they keep moving around to avoid the colony patrols. If nobody shows, we’re in trouble,’ she added. ‘If the cold doesn’t get us, starvation will. Either that or Sam’s people will find us. They’ll put two and two together eventually.’

‘Little worry of that,’ said Zoe, her voice strained.

Mark turned back towards her. She was standing with her arms in the air. In the doorway behind them stood a young man in a black thermal jacket. He was pointing a flenser right at them.

‘Nobody move,’ he said. ‘You move, you die.’

14.5: ANN

While the hours ticked painfully by, Ann sat in her suite, planned her next move and tried not to scream at the walls. They were about to wreak havoc on the human race and apparently no one wanted to know about it. And by ‘no one’, of course, she meant Parisa Voss. Ann shuddered with anger. Was the senator in on Sam’s scheme or simply guilty of the most unforgivable self-serving myopia?

Ann knew she had to get out but they’d cut off her access to the network and locked the door. The room only had one exit and that was through the guards. Her choices, as she saw them, were twofold. First, to try to make Senator Voss see reason. That was likely to be difficult given the woman’s intransigence so far. Ann didn’t even have a way to reach the senator other than by talking at the walls and hoping they had surveillance running.

The other option was to trick her way past the guards. Given that they had fibre-optic nerve enhancements, accelerator glands and biopolymer-assisted muscle tissue, that would probably require some serious finessing. One wrong move and they’d kill her. Fleet Spatials had a reputation for taking orders extremely literally.

Before Ann could devise a solution, a shrieking alarm cut the air.

‘What’s that?’ she demanded of the walls. ‘Anybody care to explain what’s going on?’

She strode over to hammer on the door just as the guards opened it.

‘Come with us,’ said the larger of the two. ‘You’re wanted on the command deck. Quickly.’

Ann stood her ground. ‘For what?’

They simply gestured with their guns.

Ann marched out of the room, glad of the opportunity but nervous all the same. Nobody appeared to be evacuating. If anything, the Fleet scientists looked even busier than usual. Had Monet done something? Then one monitor she passed showed a familiar spectroscopic spike – the kind that indicated a major Nem arrival event. She stalled, staring at the signal in horror. If that data was fresh, the implication was definitely
not
good. It would indicate Nem behaviour way outside the predicted paradigm.

‘Move!’ said the guard, spurring her back into motion.

Ann’s mind started to race. A Nem departure in their direction was the one event the stealth watcher drones at the edges of the Tiwanaku System couldn’t warn them of. They simply couldn’t fly fast enough. But the risk hadn’t been considered serious.

Will’s ugly predictions sprang to mind. Maybe at one time the Nems had genuinely represented a predictable weapon, but Sam Shah had changed that by deliberately pushing their behaviour into an uncharted regime.

When Ann reached the command area, she found Senator Voss standing at the centre of a small crowd of scientists and engineers. They all appeared to be trying to talk at once while she coaxed them back into some kind of order. Then she caught sight of Ann. She pointed a sharp, manicured finger in her direction.

‘You,’ said Voss. ‘
Ms
Ludik. Do
you
have a theory about what’s going on here?’

Ann took a moment to try to parse the senator’s expression and thought she saw a little panic hiding in those imperious eyes. On the other hand, the fact that she’d brought Ann out of confinement to participate in the dialogue suggested that the senator hadn’t completely abandoned rationality. Perhaps it was time to recalibrate their relationship.

‘Explain what’s happening and I’ll give you my assessment,’ she said flatly. If the senator was going to pretend she wasn’t a Fleet officer, she saw no reason to be courteous.

Voss gestured at a lanky communications officer. ‘Foster, fill her in.’

‘We have an unscheduled Nemesis machine arrival event,’ said Foster. His hands twisted together anxiously. ‘A large one.’

A scientist next to him wearing a full immersion visor shook her head.

‘It’s not just that. We see a Nem warp signature but no drone scatter. Instead, there’s something like a nestship gravity footprint.’

Ann’s blood ran cold. She strode to the nearest display wall to look for herself.

‘Is Nem-cloaking active?’ she demanded.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the scientist in the visor.

‘Give me a full sensor spread,’ said Ann. ‘Point every telescope you have at the Nem arrival if it isn’t already. What was the insertion distance? How long do we have?’

‘Light-lag is estimated at ninety minutes.’

Jaco Brinsen strode in from the pod bay. ‘Senator, I’ve seen the scans. This shouldn’t be happening.’

‘Clearly,’ Voss snapped. ‘So why is it?’

Jaco’s mouth worked silently while he searched for an answer. ‘At this point, we’d expect the Nems to be in final drone production prior to their Earth assault,’ he said at length. ‘Given the relative strengths of the warp trails, Earth should be their next target. But it’s possible that they’re here chasing the
Ariel Two
instead. Nems usually chase
out
from their homeworld, not inwards. They leave that to subsequent attack waves. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. The
Ariel Two
must constitute a new level of threat.’

‘But why bring a nestship?’ said Ann.

‘Extra firepower,’ said Jaco. ‘If they realised their drones weren’t cutting it, they might try trading up for something else.’

‘Really?’ Ann zoomed in on the Fecund vessel and threw up a display to fill the wall. ‘It’s in terrible condition – it’s tumbling already. The shield hull is inoperable and showing major fissures visible even from this distance. And it’s not alone. Look – here, here and here.’ She pointed at three smudges surrounding the giant hulk, as if shepherding it along. ‘Three more vessels – larger than drones. That’s a design we haven’t seen before.’

She could see Jaco’s confidence slipping. About time.

‘The Nems have been exploring Tiwanaku’s out-system ruins and have simply decided to utilise them as part of their reflection phase,’ he said.

‘Obviously,’ said Ann. ‘But this is despite the fact that they’ve never shown any interest in Fecund ruins before, which have been present in almost every system where we deployed the Nems.’

‘We just used one to shoot at them,’ he retorted. ‘If the
Ariel Two
didn’t give them a clear idea of what a nestship was capable of, it’s hard to imagine what would.’

Ann shot him a level glare. ‘I don’t dispute that. I’m just not convinced that this is some kind of standard retaliation event. That’s speculation, and right now speculation is dangerous. A cloud of drones is one thing, but nestships are
planet-busters
.’

‘Koenig,’ said the senator, ‘do we have a flight vector for those Nem ships? Are they headed for
Ariel Two
or not?’

‘Unclear at this distance,’ said the scientist in the wraparound visor. ‘Nelson has stationed
Ariel Two
at Snakepit’s L5. That puts it too close to us for a clear read until they correct course from their insert frame.’

Ann rounded on the senator. ‘What we’re seeing here is either a genuinely new behaviour or a modelled one so distorted that it makes no difference,’ she said. ‘If we have to wait for them to bear down on us to confirm Jaco’s optimistic assessment then we’re already in trouble. We need to bring Will Monet up here immediately.’

Voss’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

‘One, he knows nestships better than anyone on this station. Two, he anticipated a change in Nem behaviour, as I tried to point out to you earlier. And three, because none of us have the first clue why they’re back here, and he’s got more experience dealing with alien intelligence than
any human being in history
. How many reasons do you need?’