The Shadow and Night (46 page)

A hint of a wry smile played across Vero's mouth, “Amid this tale of enormous evil, I'm touched by your concern about your thoughts. Anyway, the hour is late and we have much to go through. But now you believe it, eh?”

Anya was silent for a moment and then moved her head slowly up and down in unenthusiastic affirmation.

“Now we can move on. Only, when it came to faking our forester and me,” Vero said in a measured tone, “they did not have the time or data to do the job properly. So, they just faked the sound.”

Perena, who had been leaning forward over the table, suddenly looked up, her eyes carefully moving round the table. “I am as horrified at all this as my sister,” she said in her quiet but forceful voice, “but this means that they must have some entry into the Gate circuits. Either at the Gate itself, or—surely more probable—at one of the Gate signal relay stations.” Merral saw that she was doodling with a finger on the tabletop. Then she stared at Vero. “But you see,” she continued gently, “as our student of ancient history here will confirm, the Gates are the central nervous system of the Assembly. Those who control Farholme Gate control Farholme.”

“Well said,” responded Vero, “and that was one lesson learned in the last military action the Assembly took. In the Rebellion, because Jannafy had seized the Centauri Gate, the Assembly Force had to travel at sublight speed to get there. It took Ringell and his men six years. Once they had the Gate, they were home in an afternoon. Sorry, but it is an episode that has been on my mind much lately.”

Anya grimaced. “I really don't like that phrase, ‘the last military action.' ”

Vero shrugged. “Nor do I, Anya, but you saw the blood on Merral. He and—to a very much lesser extent—I fought today.
Fought
. . .” He hesitated, apparently suddenly hit by the significance of the word. “I, we, fought. Not as in sport, or as in a metaphor, but in reality, a bloody reality.” He stroked his chin, as if realizing that he needed a shave, and then continued. “But, if I may say so, I have a greater—if more subtle—concern, which I feel I must express.”

Merral stared at him, thinking that he needed a week to absorb all this and what it signified. But Vero was right, decisions had to be made and made tonight.

“My concern is this: They must know that they can't sustain such a scheme forever. Sooner or later Maya and Anya will correspond by paper—or even meet—and the trick will be apparent.”

There was silence as the implications sank in, then Vero continued, his face now bearing an expression of foreboding. “I think it is one of two things. Either it is a desperate measure or it is a short-term strategy . . . until—”

“Until what, Vero?” queried Perena in a keen and worried tone, her head slightly on one side.

“Frankly, I don't know.”

Everyone was looking at each other.
We are all out of our depth,
Merral realized.
None of us is stupid and yet here we haven't got a clue.

Vero sipped at his coffee and stretched back in his chair. “That's me finished, Merral. But I want us all to realize at the start of our discussion that there is no question that we face a powerful foe. And also, that we cannot now trust any diary conversation. It has occasionally been a theoretical sentinel concern that our communications in the Assembly are totally open. But we have never been able to justify the use of any encrypting practices.”

“Encrypting?” Anya queried.

“As in code. And not genetic. You scramble a message and disguise it so that only a recipient with the correct digital key can read it. You might do it with a personal diary.”

A look of anger erupted across her face. “Yes. That makes me so—” She shook herself in a barely restrained emotion. “No, continue.”

“Merral, over to you. Tell them exactly what happened.”

“Very well,” Merral said. “Although I'm at a loss to know where to start.”

Vero shrugged. “Just begin where you first noticed anything odd.”

Merral thought hard. “I would say just before Nativity.”

Vero started. “
Before
Nativity?” he queried sharply.

“Yes. At Herrandown. I had a nightmare of something evil coming out of the sea. And I think—in hindsight—my uncle did, too. But he denied it.”

Perena lifted her head and stared piercingly at Merral. “When ‘just before Nativity'?”

“Three nights before. The twenty-second.”

“The night of the meteor?”

“Yes.”

“What meteor?” Vero threw a sharp glance at Merral. “Why didn't you tell me?”

For a fraction of a second, Merral was tempted to be angry. “Sorry, Vero . . . I hadn't assumed it was significant. This is Worlds' End.
Nothing
happens here. Or did.”

Perena looked at Merral. “If I may interrupt. I believe that it is significant. I have been doing some checking up. For about a week before the night Merral is speaking of, one of the Guardian Satellites had been tracking a sunward meteoroid of around two thousand tons apparent mass. As soon as it was noticed, its trajectory was calculated—of course—and it was determined that it would miss Farholme by at least fifty thousand kilometers and eventually hit the sun. There was nothing alarming about either its size, speed, or path, and obviously, no action was necessary, so they just kept a regular watch on it. Just in case it broke up or did anything odd.” She looked at Vero. “I should say that, at any one time, there are a dozen of this size of thing within a few million kilometers of Farholme, but they just let them through when they are certain that they are going to miss. It's a minimum intervention policy. So, the existence of this particular moving block of rock wasn't even flagged to the human supervision office in Isterrane.”

Vero nodded and gestured for her to continue. “So, it was routinely tracked every fifty minutes. The last reported sighting was at 4:20 p.m. Central Menaya Time. It was still coming sunward and nearly at the point of closest approach to Farholme—estimated to be at one hundred thousand kilometers out—but was still behaving itself. When the Guardian checked again at 5:10 p.m., it expected to find it sunward of us, but it was absent from the predicted path.”

“Ah!” muttered Vero. “How interesting. But I interrupt.”

Perena looked at the wall clock. “Yes, we must watch the time. Machine logic being what it is, they looked around for it and, having failed to find either it or fragments, they did the electronic equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and got on with life as usual. Remember, only the presence of a meteoroid is a problem, not an absence. They did, however, tag the case to the supervisors just in case it was the first hint of a malfunction. They assumed it was and rescheduled the next overhaul sooner.”

“So,” Merral said, “the meteoroid changed course and came to Farholme where I saw it coming in.”

“Oh, I wish you'd told me, Merral,” Vero interjected. “I might have been more suspicious.”

Merral, feeling tired, sighed. “It was just a meteor, Vero. An incoming pile of rock and metal. It's not rare here. It's different from the solar system: for a start we have two debris belts, one on either side of Fenniran. It was just larger than usual.”

Vero looked at Perena. “And let me guess: it wasn't a meteoroid, it was a ship.”

She gave him a strange, subdued smile. “Not so fast, my friend. In theory, yes, it could have been a ship, mimicking a meteoroid. But there is a timing point. It had gone by at 5:10 p.m. Central Menaya Time and Merral saw his object come in ten minutes earlier at around 6:00 p.m. Eastern Menaya Time. Incidentally, confirmed by a record of a small and poorly defined shallow-focus earthquake around two hundred and fifty kilometers north of Herrandown at 6:02 p.m. But there is a major problem.”

“What?” asked Vero, looking crestfallen.

Merral spoke slowly. “I see it. It had to change course, travel over a hundred thousand kilometers, and decelerate into a landing mode in under fifty minutes.”

Perena looked appreciatively at him. “Good. Let me translate. If we are right in linking the meteoroid in space with Merral's meteor, then it did what our fastest unmanned ships would take at least a half a day to do in around twenty minutes. It pushes engineering beyond anything we can envisage.”

Vero closed his eyes. Merral decided that he was imagining what it must be like to be in a ship doing that sort of a maneuver.

“So there may be a ship there,” he said slowly. “I was beginning to wonder about that. But can we find it?”

Perena looked at him, her face expressionless. “That is the next task. I have already ordered satellite imagery over the Carson's Sill area from the next overflight.”

“Which is when?” Vero asked.

“In an hour or so. Not the best resolution, but it may show something. There's a better one midmorning.”

A silence fell and Merral realized that, once more, everybody was staring at him. “Then,” he began again, “other strange but apparently unrelated things happened. . . .”

For the next few minutes he described, as best he could, these other things. At Vero's prompting—and then only reluctantly—he outlined how his uncle had altered a re-created voice and how, in a subtle way, things had begun to go wrong at Herrandown. He then went on to explain, largely for Perena's benefit, how Elana had been scared by seeing a creature, and how he and Isabella had gone to investigate and found evidence that there had indeed been some sort of strange being there.

At this point Vero interrupted. “Merral, excuse me, I think this is the time for us to find out what Anya saw when she looked at that strand of hair.”

Anya wrinkled her nose as if smelling something distasteful. “Well, the most obvious interpretation was that it was a mixture of two natural genetic codes: human and ape—probably gorilla. Along with some unknown, but probably artificial, segments. It was not a result I was happy with. I would have preferred almost any other interpretation.”

Merral looked at Vero, who nodded gently and pursed his lips. “That would fit our ape-creatures.”

A frown darkened Anya's face. “I can't believe that these things exist. But you really saw them?”

“I'm afraid so,” Vero answered. “And more. . . .”

She shuddered and then looked at Merral. “Go on then. I need to hear what happened when you went north.”

Reluctantly, Merral told of what had transpired over the last few days. He began with the meeting with Jorgio and his vision of the testing of the Assembly, with the command to watch, stand firm, and hope. Then Merral went on to tell of the trip north. At times he paused and had to be encouraged by Vero. In places, notably where it came to bloodier dealings, Vero had to draw out the events from him sentence by sentence. And as he recounted the tale, Merral was aware of a growing intensity to the atmosphere in the room.
It is as if the shadow has spread over us.
Where appropriate they ran the images from Merral's diary, and both Perena and Anya took copies of the images of the ape-creatures and cockroach-beasts and stared at them. When it came to the description of the imitation bird, there was horror and disgust and, despite Merral's invitation, Vero declined to talk about it. “Later,” he demurred, “later. . . . In daylight perhaps.”

Then, with the aid of more substantial encouragement from Vero, Merral reluctantly told of the last half an hour on the summit. With the account of the rescue by Perena's ship, he fell silent.

It was Anya, looking round the table with broad and worried eyes, who broke the ensuing silence. “A tale that is darker than I can understand. I wish it was a vision or even the result of hallucinations. . . .” She paused, her fingers locking and unlocking. “But, as with the Maya Knella incident, I
must
believe it. We have the images, the testimony, the genetic data from the hair, and will shortly have the blood results. And there is Merral's wound. . . .” She shook her head.

Perena spoke, her voice full of a restrained bewilderment as if she were thinking through a dream. “Like my sister, I would like to try and dismiss it all. But then I think of the holes in my ship.” She gestured over her shoulder in the direction of Bay One.

Vero, who had been staring at his hands again, looked up. “Good, but unfortunately it is more than what we believe that is the problem. It is how we are to act. Thank you, Merral, for your account. It is, I think, obvious to you, Perena and Anya, how extraordinarily able my friend here was when it became necessary to fight these things. It is, I believe, a most significant and encouraging matter that our first contact with these things should have involved Merral.”

Merral, wondering whether to protest, was aware of Anya looking at him with admiration, and the unsettling thought came to him that he found her attention pleasing.

Vero raised a finger. “Merral, time is moving on and delay may not be good for us. But I feel there may be more questions. And I want us to have all the data we can have before we decide what to do. Anya, comments on the biology?”

Anya bit her lip and shook her head. “Yes. I suppose. We have two sorts of—let's call them ‘intruders.' You say, Merral, you saw no evidence of male or female with either?”

“That's right,” Merral agreed. “It was less clear with the cockroach-beasts, I suppose. And we saw fewer of them.”

Anya nodded. “Size variation of any type?”

“No. Each species—if that's what they were—seemed the same size.”

“Like identical twins?”

“Yes.”

“So they were probably cloned. Bred somehow in vitro.”

Vero threw her a puzzled glance. “That's a very old phrase. I suppose it predates even basic genetics. In glass. Outside the womb?”

“Yes, laboratory generated. Very intriguing.” She looked around. “Well, that does me. I'm still absorbing it all.”