Silence and Carrion found they were standing before Jesus again. He looked seriously angry.
“I make a Heaven for you, and you spit in my face! Must man always walk away from paradise?”
“Every dream has to end sometimes,” said Silence. “Even yours, Marlowe.”
“Don’t call me that! That man is dead!” Jesus had lost his halo, and his crown of thorns had caught fire. Flames danced on his brow and in his eyes. “You can have no comprehension of what I’ve become!”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Silence. “Both Carrion and I have known the touch of a greater force in our time. We just never lost our sense of proportion.” He moved over to the esper Morrell, standing a little to one side. “What was your dream like?”
“Never had one,” said the esper briskly. “The moment he came fumbling round my mind, I put up the toughest mental shield I could fashion. He didn’t even come close to cracking it. He may command the nanotech, but as a telepath, he’s strictly low level. I have to say, this guy is a real letdown. The nanos gave him control over an entire planet, and all he does is play childish games. He hasn’t even touched his real potential.”
“Hold everything,” said Carrion. “Where’s Barron?”
They looked around, but he was nowhere to be seen. There were only the three of them, and Jesus, and the whirling dust storm. Jesus was smiling again. Silence glared at him.
“What have you done with Barron, Marlowe?”
“He gave in to his dream,” said Jesus. “In the end, he was just a lost child, who only wanted to be the man his father was. And now he is. He belongs to me, and soon you will too. Since you won’t accept my Heaven, I condemn you to Hell.”
Flames leapt up everywhere, replacing the dust storm. The landing party flinched back from the heat, even though it couldn’t touch them through their shields. The sky was dark, lit by lightning, and clawed and fanged demons soared overhead on huge batwings. From everywhere came the sounds of countless people screaming in horrible agony. Silence and Carrion and Morrell moved close together.
“Damn,” said Morrell. “He’s got past my shields!”
“Either he’s getting stronger,” said Carrion, “or he’s getting more determined.”
“This isn’t real,” said Silence. “Don’t believe in it.”
“It’s as real as the nanos can make it,” said Carrion. “This vision comes from Marlowe’s mind, not ours. Disbelieving in it won’t make it disappear. Not when he’s obviously enjoying himself so much.”
They looked at Marlowe, and where Jesus had been now stood the Devil, with scarlet skin, cloven feet, and a goat’s head with curling horns. It was more like a child’s picture than a detailed creation, but it made Marlowe’s state of mind clear enough. The thick lips leered. “I’m tired of being the Prince of Peace. I think this will be much more fun. I’ll just hold you here till your shields go down, and then you’ll be mine, to make and remake as the whim takes me. I’ll stir my sticky fingers in your flesh, and mold you into your worst nightmares. You’ll be my playthings, forever and ever and ever.”
“He could do it,” said Morrell, his face white and desperate. “I can’t break his hold on my mind. Oh God ... Captain; do something!”
Silence turned to Carrion. “Call the Ashrai. See if they’re still angry.”
“They’re already here,” said Carrion, smiling a very dark smile.
Huge forms came plunging down from above, gargoyle faces roaring their rage in a sound almost too loud to be borne. The Devil snarled, and threw demons at them with a wave of a clawed crimson hand. The huge forms slammed together, filling the dark sky. More and more demons formed out of nothing, created by Marlowe’s nanos. Silence and Carrion looked at each other. Almost against their will, their altered minds reached out to each other, and came together in a fusion that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Morrell cried out, and had to look away, hiding behind his strongest shields for fear of being blinded by the light their fusion was generating. Silence and Carrion struck out at the Devil, and it was only the work of a moment for their more powerful will to snatch control of the nanos away from Marlowe. He really wasn’t much of a telepath, and he’d been alone so long with no one to challenge his will.
He screamed as Hell flickered out and was gone, like a blown-out candle. Silence and Carrion and Morrell stood on a bare rock plain, facing a man already crumbling and falling apart. Only the nanos had kept him alive, and now they were deserting his body like rats leaving a sinking ship. He became dust and less than dust, and blew away on a gusting wind. Above, the sky was clear of Ashrai and demons. Silence and Carrion separated their thoughts, and looked away from each other, embarrassed by the enforced intimacy of their sharing. They could have retained control of the nanos, but chose not to. They had come far enough from humanity as it was. They had enough damnation on their souls already without adding further temptation.
“Well,” said Morrell, just a little breathlessly. “That was ... interesting. Can we get the hell out of here now, please, Captain?”
“We might as well,” said Silence. “This mission is a bust. There’s nothing here we dare let loose. No one can be trusted with this kind of power. I’d recommend scorching the world from orbit, if I thought it would do any good, but the nanos might survive even that. So we leave the genie in the bottle, until Humanity’s evolved into something wise enough to use it correctly.”
“And we lost Barron,” said Carrion. “I brought him here. He trusted me. He should have remembered I was always a bird of ill omen.”
Silence looked around at the empty rocky plain. “I wonder what the nanos will make of this place, now they no longer have a human mind to guide or limit them. Might be worth coming back here in a few centuries, just to see what kind of world the nanos make.”
He put in a call to the pinnace waiting in orbit, and it came down and hovered above the rocky ground as the landing party took turns to jump awkwardly up into the open airlock. Silence was last off, as Captain. He took one last look back, and off in the distance he thought he saw Barron, standing alone, waving good-bye. Silence turned his back on Zero Zero, and let the pinnace take him back to the Dauntless, and his duty.
CHAPTER FOUR
From the Undermind to the Oversoul
Once upon a time, she was just an esper named Diana Vertue, but things had become rather complicated since then. As Jenny Psycho she’d been a hard-core terrorist and a saint of the Mater Mundi, but she’d outgrown both those roles. She’d gone looking for the truths of her existence, the meaning and purpose behind the events that had shaped her life, and unfortunately for her, she found them. Now she was just an esper on the run, hiding out in what used to be Finlay Campbell’s old bolt-hole; a single cramped apartment in the warrens under the Arenas. The place was a mess, but she couldn’t seem to raise the strength of purpose to do anything about it. She lay on her back on the unmade bed, wearing dirty sweat-stained clothes because she had nothing to change into, staring up at the ceiling above her, seeing everything and nothing.
Her mental shields were all in place, as strong as she could make them. The most powerful espers in the Empire could have walked past her door and not known she was there. Theoretically. Once, Diana would have been sure, but there were a lot of things she wasn’t sure about anymore. It helped that directly above her were the killing grounds of the Arenas, where the dying never stopped. The endless flow of suffering and slaughter, and the raging emotions and blood lust of the watching crowds, set up a constant mental bedlam that no one should be able to detect anything through. Diana was as safe and hidden as it was possible for anyone to be.
And none of that mattered a damn, because she was hiding from the Mater Mundi. It would find her eventually, if only through the process of elimination. There were only so many places on Golgotha where you could hope to hide from a determined telepath. With millions of minds to search with, the Mater Mundi would track her down in time, and then Diana would have to run again or stand and fight. Either choice seemed likely to end in her death.
Diana Vertue laced her fingers across her stomach, and wondered what the hell she was going to do next.
How had her life come to this? A fugitive in a dirty room, contemplating her own imminent death? She’d had such plans, when she was younger. Such fervent hopes and great intentions. All the wondrous things she was going to do ... Of course, she’d had a lot of the fire and innocence knocked out of her on the ghostworld Unseeli. Used as bait to catch a monster, by her own father. Menaced and driven to the point of madness, and only saved at the last by the song of the dead Ashrai. She was never the same, afterward. As soon as her father’s old ship, the
Darkwind
, had docked at Golgotha, she deserted the Navy and went underground, joining the espers rebelling against Imperial authority. She thought she’d found friends and allies there, and a cause to believe in, but in the end they just used her too. They hid her thoughts behind a fake personality called Jenny Psycho, and then allowed her to be captured and sent to the esper prison Silo Nine, also known as Wormboy Hell.
And then the Mater Mundi manifested through her, giving her the power to free herself and the other esper prisoners. Diana thought she’d finally found her role. She embraced the Jenny Psycho persona, and allowed other espers to declare her a living saint of Our Mother of All Souls. But that turned out to be a lie too, when the Mater Mundi abandoned her on Mistworld, just when Diana needed her most. She should have known. She should have expected it. The one continuing factor of her young life had always been betrayal.
Then the great rebellion, the overthrowing of Lionstone, and a chance for a new life for all espers. So Diana put the Jenny Psycho persona behind her, and tried to create a new role for herself, only to face the greatest betrayal of all. The new order turned out to be just as corrupt as the old, only more subtle. The new freedom for espers included the freedom to starve and die and be forgotten. And the esper underground, that great force for justice and the good, turned out to be an unknowing tool of its own subconscious. The last and greatest betrayal; that the cause to which she’d given her life had proven to be nothing but a mask for the same kind of heartless manipulation she’d been fighting.
Diana idly wondered why she clung so grimly to a life that had brought her only disappointment and the destruction of her beliefs. Perhaps she continued just to spite the fates that seemed so determined to grind her down. There was a strong stubborn streak in Diana that would not yield to any outside pressure, no matter how great. Perhaps the only useful thing she’d inherited from her illustrious father. She was damned if she’d just give up and die, if only to frustrate the Mater Mundi one more time. She smiled widely at the ceiling above her, a thin-lipped snarl that had only the blackest of humor in it. Diana Vertue, or Jenny Psycho, or whoever the hell she really was at heart, had always been a fighter. Once more into the breach, into the Valley of Death, into darkness and damnation if necessary; just for a chance to drag her enemy down with her.
It occurred to her then, in something very like an epiphany, that she wasn’t necessarily alone in this fight. There were others like her, powerful minds unconnected to the Mater Mundi, that might yet be convinced to fight beside her. She reached out with her altered, expanded mind, in directions only she could sense, sending out a call for help that only minds like hers could hear, let alone respond to. To confuse and confound the searching Mater Mundi, Diana sent her mind shooting up and out of her body, up past the bloody sands of the Arenas, up and beyond the Parade of the Endless, until finally Golgotha itself lay turning slowly beneath her. The world looked very vulnerable, all alone in the dark. Some way off in the distance, but drawing slowly closer all the time, was the Recreated. A great howling black hole, trying to suck her thoughts and her soul into its awful inhuman self. But it was still too far away to be able to compel her, and Diana turned her mental back on it, secure behind her shields. She called out again, need and desperation giving strength and urgency to her appeal for help.
To her great surprise, the first response came from a dead man.
Hi,
said Owen Deathstalker.
What’s up?
You’re supposed to be dead!
said Diana, too startled to be polite.
No one’s been able to contact you, or find any trace of you, for ages.
Sorry to disappoint you,
said Hazel d‘Ark, dryly,
but we’ve been kind of busy.
The mind boggles at what,
said Diana.
We’ve just finished wiping out the Blood Runners,
said
Owen. They’d used a rather unusual power source to create their own subspace dimension; a private little reality of their own where they could concentrate on torture and murder undisturbed. But I found a way in. Now the subspace, the homeworld, and the Blood Runners no longer exist.
We kicked their ass, said Hazel.
Well, thank the good God you’re back, said Diana, because I’ve got an enemy here that could seriously use a good kicking, and I can’t do it alone.
Hold everything, said Owen. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we have our own mission now we’re back, and we can’t afford to be distracted. We have to go back into the Darkvoid. Back to the Wolfing World. Something’s happening there, something bad. Something only we can deal with.
Whatever it is, it
can
wait, said Diana
firmly.
A lot’s happened while you were ... out of touch. Most of it really bad.
Department of absolutely no surprise there, said Hazel. We take our eye off the ball for five minutes, and everything goes to hell.
What’s happened about the Royal Wedding? said
Owen suddenly.
I mean, if everyone thinks I’m dead
...