The Night's Dawn Trilogy (19 page)

It was when Quinn was striding along one of the interminable bare-rock tunnels linking the discarded cavities that he sensed the first elusive presence. He stopped so abruptly that Lawrence almost bumped into him.

“What was that?â€

Alkad Mzu hadn’t seen snow since she left Garissa. Back in those days she’d never bothered indexing a memory of winter in her neural nanonics. Why waste capacity? The season came every year, much to Peter’s delight and her grudging acceptance.

The oldest human story of all: I never knew what I had until I lost it.

Now, from her penthouse in the Mercedes Hotel, she watched it falling over Harrisburg, a silent cascade as inexorable as it was gentle. The sight made her want to go outside and join the children she could see capering about in the park opposite.

The snow had begun during the night, just after they landed at the spaceport, and hadn’t let up in the seven hours since. Down on the streets tempers were getting shorter as the traffic slowed and the pavements turned slippery with the slush. Ancient municipal mechanoids, backed up by teams of men with shovels, struggled to clear the deep drifts which blockaded the main avenues.

The sight didn’t exactly bode well. If the Tonala nation’s economy was so desperate that they used human labour to clean the streets of their capital . . .

So far Alkad had managed to keep her objective in focus. She was proud of that; after every obstacle thrown in her way she had proved herself resourceful enough to keep the hope alive. Even back on the
Tekas
she’d thought she would soon be retrieving the Alchemist.

Nyvan had done much to wreck her mood and her confidence. There were starships docked at the orbiting asteroids,
and the local astroengineering companies could probably provide her with the equipment she wanted; yet the decay and suspicion native to this world made her doubt. The task was slipping from her grasp once more. Difficulties were piling up against her, and now she had no more fallback positions. They were on their own now: she, Voi, Lodi, and Eriba, with money as their only resource. True to his word, Prince Lambert had taken the
Tekas
out of orbit as soon as they’d disembarked. He said he was flying to Mondul, it had a strong navy, and he knew people there.

Alkad resisted accessing her time function. Prince Lambert must have made his third ZTT jump by now, and another potential security hazard was no more.

“That’s a new one,â€

Admiral Motela Kolhammer and Syrinx arrived at the First Admiral’s office just as the Provost General was coming out. He almost bumped into them, head down and scowling. Kolhammer was given a brief grunt of apology before he strode off, chased by three aides in an equally flustered mood. The admiral gave them a curious look before stepping into the office.

Captain Maynard Khanna and Admiral Lalwani were sitting in front of the First Admiral’s desk. Two more blue-steel chairs were distending up out of the circular pools of silver on the floor.

“What was all that about?â€

There were nearly three thousand people in the crowd which assembled outside the starscraper lobby. Most of them looked fairly pissed at being summoned, but nobody actually argued with Bonney’s deputies when they came calling. They wanted a quiet life. On a planet they could have just walked away into the wilderness; here that option did not exist.

Part of the lobby’s gently arching roof had crumpled, a remnant of an early battle during their takeover of the habitat. Bonney started to walk up the pile of rubble. She held a processor block in one hand, turning it so she could see the screen.

“Last chance, Rubra,â€

The Kulu embassy was situated just outside Harrisburg’s central governmental district; a five-storey building in the civic tradition, granite block walls and elaborately carved windows. Slender turrets and retro-modernist sculptures lined the roof in an attempt to grant the stark facade some degree of interest. To no avail; Harrisburg’s ubiquitous granite reduced the most ornate architecture to the level of a neo-Gothic fortress. Even the setting, in one of the wealthier districts laid out with parks, wide streets, and century-old trees, didn’t help. An office cube was an office cube, no matter what cosmetics it dabbed on.

Its neighbours comprised rich legal practices, capital-city headquarters of large companies, and expensive apartment blocks. Directly opposite, in an office which claimed to be an aircraft charter broker, Tonala’s security police kept a twenty-four hour watch on everyone who went in or out. Forty minutes ago they had gone up to alert condition amber three (foreign covert action imminent) when five large, screened cars from the diplomatic fleet slid down into the embassy’s underground car park. None of the officers on duty were sure if that particular alert status applied in this case; according to their colleagues at the city spaceport, the cars were full of Edenists.

The arrival of Samuel and his team had drawn considerable interest from staff inside the embassy, too. Curious, slightly apprehensive faces peered out of almost every doorway as Adrian Redway led Monica Foulkes and her new allies through the building. They took a lift eight stories below
ground, to a floor which didn’t exist on any blueprints logged on the city council’s civil engineering computer.

Adrian Redway stopped at the door to the ESA station’s operational centre and gave Samuel an awkward look. His eyes slid over the tall Edenist’s shoulders to the other six Edenists waiting patiently in the corridor.

“Listen,â€

The
Leonora Cephei
’s radar was switched to long-range scanning mode, searching for any sign of another ship. After five hours gliding inertly along its orbital path, there hadn’t been a single contact.

“How much longer do you expect me to muck in with this charade of yours?â€

Earth.

A planet whose ecology was ruined beyond repair: the price it paid for elevating itself to be the Confederation’s supreme industrial and economic superpower. Overpopulated, ancient, decadent, and utterly formidable. This was the undeniable imperial heart of the human dominion.

It was also home.

Quinn Dexter admired the images building up on the bridge’s holoscreens. This time he could savour them with unhurried joy. Their official Nyvan flight authority code had been accepted by Govcentral Strategic Defence Command. As far as anyone was concerned, they were a harmless ship sent by a tiny government to buy defence components.

“Traffic control has given us a vector,â€

The star wasn’t important enough to have a name. The Confederation Navy’s almanac office simply listed it as DRL0755-09-BG. It was an average K-type, with a gloomy emission in the lower end of the orange spectrum. The first scoutship to explore its planets, back in 2396, took less than a fortnight to complete a survey. There were only three unremarkable inner, solid planets for it to investigate, none of which were terracompatible. Of the two outer gas giants, the one furthest from the star had an equatorial diameter of forty-three thousand kilometres, its outer cloud layer a pale green with none of the usual blustery atmospheric conditions. As worthless as the solid planets. The innermost gas giant did raise the interest of the scoutship’s crew for a short while. Its equatorial diameter was a hundred and fifty-three thousand kilometres, making it larger than Jupiter, and coloured by a multitude of ferocious storm bands. Eighteen moons orbited around it, two of which had high-pressure atmospheres of nitrogen and methane. The complex interaction of their gravity fields prohibited any major ring system from forming, but all of the larger moons shepherded substantial quantities of asteroidal rubble.

The scoutship crew thought that such abundant resources of easily accessible minerals and ores would make it an ideal location for Edenist habitats. Their line company even managed to sell the survey’s preliminary results to Jupiter. But once again, DRL0755-09-BG’s mediocrity acted against it. The gas giant was a good location for habitats, but not exceptional; without a terracompatible planet the Edenists weren’t interested. DRL0755-09-BG was ignored
for the next two hundred and fifteen years, apart from intermittent visits from Confederation Navy patrol ships to check that it wasn’t being used by an antimatter production station.

As the
Lady Mac
’s sensor clusters gave him a visual sweep of the penurious star system, Joshua wondered why the navy wasted its time.

He cancelled the image and looked around the bridge. Alkad Mzu was lying prone on one of the spare acceleration couches, her eyes tight shut as she absorbed the external panorama. Monica and Samuel were hovering in the background, as always. Joshua really didn’t want them on the bridge, but the agencies weren’t prepared to allow Mzu out of their sight now.

“Okay, Doc, now what?â€

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

THE NAKED GOD. Copyright © 2000 by Peter F. Hamilton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information address Warner Books, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2000 by Warner Books. A mass market edition was published in two volumes in 2000 by Warner Books.