Mother of Plenty

Book 431: Gateway Essentials

by Colin Greenland

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Captain Tabitha Jute is past the point of no return. Stripped of her command and her dignity, she has lost control of the huge alien starship called Plenty, and forefeited the devotion of the myriad lifeforms traveling with her in its dingy caverns and labyrinthine corridors. Now they all lie captive beneath the glowering red twin stars of Capella, awaiting the pleasure of the parasitic Guardinas. For the Guardians, who once gave Plenty to humanity, are now scheming with high-tech tyrants called the Seraphim. And Captain Jute and her followers are caught in the middle of a terrifying experiment in which the human race is the raw material. Her only option is to risk it all on one last headlong flight into the heart of a dying star system in a desperate attempt to uncover the final secrets of the Capellans. And as the Guardians will soon learn, Tabitha Jute doesnt want mauch . . .she only wants Plenty.

Release date: June 1, 1998

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Print pages: 451

Sample

 

 

The twins are old, and red, and fat.

They are old by any measurement of time, objective or subjective, atomic or sidereal. They are red with repletion, with rage and decay. They are fat with everything they have eaten, which was everything in sight.

The red twins circle each other like dinosaurs preparing for a fight. They are locked together, glaring at each other. They have been circling for a thousand million years.

So conjoined are the red twins that they have but one name between them.

They are Capella.

They are the old, red, fat Capella twins. To speak of one of them is to speak of both.

The red twins have surrounded themselves with a mantle of black flux, a vast slow blizzard of degenerate matter. Dyspeptically, they belch up clots of carbon thousands of kilometres across, cosmic smuts that swirl, coagulating, in hyperbolic disintegrating orbits, plunging eternally from destruction into destruction.

It is no wonder that the inhabitants of the Capella system took long, long ago to the high seas of interstellar space, and scattered themselves abroad.

The wonder is, that any of them remained.

On the outer edge of the slow and filthy tide there drifted a lump. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other lump in the stellar vicinity; though to a human observer the shape of it might perhaps have suggested from certain angles the shell of a tortoise; or the bun of a hamburger; or else a human brain.

It had, at one time or another, been compared with all those things.

In fact, it was a starship. It was a ship which had come, through years of torment and nightmare, all the way from Sol.

She was the ship called Plenty.

Her story was complicated and bizarre.

Plenty had been built by the attenuated aliens known as the Frasque, spun out of a particulate froth extruded from their own twiggy bodies, high above the bustling Earth. Before they could use their creation for whatever obscure purpose they intended, they were pounced upon by their enemies, the Capellans. Deploying a small battalion of enlisted human fighters, the Capellans, alien brain parasites and overlords of everywhere, burned the Frasque out of the corridors of Plenty and eradicated them from the Sol System.

Plenty lingered on, abused by entrepreneurs and opportunists, orbiting inert and dumb, until one day, more by luck than judgment, an ambitious bargee called Tabitha Jute seized upon her, plugged in the artificial persona from her old barge the Alice Liddell, and roused the stardrive that slept unsuspected within her sombre depths.

Delighted with her accomplishment, Captain Jute filled the caverns of her new starship with a highly heterogeneous population, and took her off for a jaunt to Proxima Centauri.

The history of humankind has been marked perhaps by worse ideas, but not many.

The trip went astray at once. The passengers and crew of Plenty sailed on for ten years longer and forty light-years further than they had intended. That gave them time, plenty of time, to inflict upon each other and upon themselves all the follies that their imaginations, warped by the inhospitable environment, could conceive.

Some of them survived. Among them, just about, was Tabitha Jute.

Others of the survivors were Captain Jute’s old shipmate Dodger Gillespie; Dodger’s lover, a sulky datapunk called Jone; and the maverick Cherub known as Xtasca. They were the ones who made the arduous descent into the bowels of the ship and discovered that it had been hijacked, by Tabitha’s own sister, a tool of the secretive Temple of Abraxas.

The Temple’s motives, as usual, were known to themselves alone. Obviously if there was a starship going begging, the Temple, that decadent cabal of post-human supremacists, would like to have it. But, having somehow got their agent aboard, why in all the worlds had they promptly sent it winging off to Capella?

The Capellans, presumably, were behind it all. On board Plenty, a vermiform Capellan now sat coiled inside the skull of each of ten hapless quislings, newly promoted ‘Guardians’.

The Guardians occupied the bridge, the nerve centres of the alien vessel. They sailed through the residential districts, dispensing homilies and toffees, and smiling, smiling, smiling.

Battered and warped by her passage through the probability fault popularly known as hyperspace, the great dun ship rode ponderously in the ocean of ash. Her colossal flanks were cloaked in sooty dust, stained with the red light of the angry twins.

Perhaps she did still resemble the shell of a tortoise: the most horribly mutated tortoise ever born.

Her interior was damaged too. The entire Starboard Inferior Frontal had disappeared. Apartments, businesses, road and foot tunnels, together with their inhabitants, transients, pets, pests, traffic, miarolitic encrustations and coagulating garbage – all had vanished, as if excised by some titanic surgical operation. Aft, several Limbic shafts now bore no relation to the docks beneath, but ran down into what appeared to be a little leftover piece of the discontinuum: a bit of hyperspace itself. It shimmered faintly, like fractal porridge.

The docks of Plenty were full of smouldering spaceships.

Immediately forward of the hyperspatial fault, the ceiling had come down. Vessels, and those who had fought so frantically for possession of them, lay buried together in crumbled matrix and cheap concrete. The crisis orange uniforms of the Hands On Caucus made an especially bright display among the rubble.

Smoke drifted about, drawing its curtains this way and that, concealing and revealing the ultimate effects of greed, desperation, righteousness. Personal flight bags and their contents lay scattered among the spent ammunition. Fire drones still trundled through the wreckage, spraying the fitful flames with jets of suffocating foam.

High in an upper tier of the parking bays, a Navajo Scorpion looked down on the silent chaos. Unlike many of the parked ships, she seemed to have been maintained during her decade of disuse, and had sat out of reach of the riots. A few over-optimistic looters had got into her bay, Bay 490–9. They lay around her where they had fallen, unmarked, quite dead.

The name of the Scorpion was lettered on her sharp prow. She was the All Things Considered. It seemed an appropriate name. There was something judicious about the sharpness of her profile, and she was equipped with a surprising amount of surveillance and recording equipment.

On board the All Things Considered, things were not in such good order. In her stateroom, particularly, the scattered blood clashed unpleasantly with the pink and orange decor. Fortunately the lights were low.

There was a circular bed surrounded by a rampart of AV monitors all turned inward to provide a wall of identical images.

There was a gap at the foot of the bed, and another where a stack of monitors had been severely disarranged, some of them overturned. Several of the remaining screens were blank, or fizzed emptily. The rest continued to show fancifully stylized examples of Terran wildlife engaged in raucous violence.

The bed itself seemed to have been the centre of the disturbance. Its sheets were torn and tangled up with articles of clothing. A liqueur glass had been trampled into the carpet. Everything had been smeared with non-human ordure, blood and chocolate.

Also in the stateroom was a holodais, a basic commercial model. It stood opposite the foot of the bed, clearly visible through the gap in the wall of monitors. The image it showed was a life-size one, of a light brown woman dressed only in a long black coat. The sound was off. Apart from the background hum of the air systems, the only sound in the cabin was the hectic slithering of an orchestra recorded long before to accompany the antics of the animated creatures.

The hologram was on a timer. Every thirty seconds the woman opened her coat and exposed herself to the bed. On her face was an expression of terror.

A sophisticated system kept the air circulating on board the All Things Considered, and heated it to a very comfortable 24°. One of the vents was high in the sternward wall of the stateroom, covered by a grille. The system had already mixed the odours of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and Thrant excrement together quite thoroughly. Now it had begun to introduce to the mixture another distinctive scent: the complex olfactory signature of human decay. This issued primarily from the remains of the human that lay on the carpet, a naked white-skinned male. He was headless, and had been disembowelled.

Of his innards, little remained in the cabin. Small portions might possibly have been identified here and there among the ruined furnishings. His head lay against the sternward wall, some distance from the rest of him. It lay, as it happened, directly beneath the vent.

Through the grille of the vent a tiny, pointed, bluish-white blob had begun to ooze. It resembled at first a curd of milk, or a drip of latex.

On the banked monitors a goggle-eyed predator assumed a look of comic dismay. He had run and run until he realized too late there was no longer any ground beneath his feet.

The hologram looped. The terrified brown woman opened her coat again.

From the ventilator the blob extended itself downwards like a tendril, a rootlet, four centimetres long. Now it looked like a miniature white finger, a finger without a fingernail.

As if gravity were a consequence of consciousness, instead of the other way round, the cartoon predator on the monitors fell rapidly through the air. From a high perch his erstwhile prey regarded his whistling descent, beaming idiotically.

On the cartoon soundtrack, violins exulted. Trumpets blared.

The long white blob emerged entirely from the vent. There were perhaps ten centimetres of it. It began crawling down the wall, towards the head beneath.

The head beneath the vent was the head of a human male, thirtyish, Caucasian, with black hair. A pair of small round black glass spectacles was still attached to one ear, though one lens, the left, had been smashed. His left eye was a bloody mess. His hair was, as ever, immaculate.

It was the head of the Scorpion’s last owner, the man called Grant Nothing. The head lay tilted at a slight angle. It looked as if Grant Nothing was still, in death as in life, listening out for something.

The last sentients to see him, those who had put such effort into accomplishing his demise, had departed hurriedly some time ago. Few others knew of his predicament.

The man called Grant Nothing had been a secretive individual, busy everywhere, detectable nowhere.

Who would notice the disappearance of an invisible man?

As if spurred on by consideration of the incubation rate of bacteria in mortified flesh, the white blob proceeded down the wall. It moved very much in the manner of a caterpillar, bunching itself up in the middle and pushing itself downwards.

Having travelled its own length twenty times over, with care the diminutive intruder negotiated the transfer between the vertical surface of the wall and the rear slopes of the displaced head.

At the apex of the occipital curve it paused, as if to take breath. It looked very white on Grant Nothing’s shiny black hair.

On the cartoon soundtrack, the strings made a thrilling sound.

The creature began to move again. It slid more easily across the smooth coiffure. Down the pale escarpment of the forehead it ventured.

At the bow of the buckled spectacles it paused again. It reared up and waved its tiny pointed head in a circle, as if protesting against the obstacle. Then it made a move. The juicy liquefaction of the left eye was calling it.

The creature slipped into the crater of the exposed socket and sipped there a while.

Then on it went, squirming diligently down behind the spectacles, between the frame and the face, following the angle between nose and cheek. Setting its proleg finally on the well groomed upper lip, it curled around and entered the left nostril.

Slowly, effortfully, it wriggled up and up until it was out of sight.

In a moment a soft, moist, munching sound commenced.

On the holodais opposite the foot of the bed the brown woman continued to open and close her long black coat.

On the twenty-first day after Emergence, in the green dome that housed the bridge the humans had installed in the alien ship, a blonde woman in a pink fur top and glytex leg-gear approached a man with a grotesquely enlarged cranium.

‘Geneva McCann,’ she told him, beaming. ‘Channel 9.’

The woman had a hovercam tethered to her belt. She sent it up to look the man in the face.

The man stood with his hands on his hips. He had a ruffled white shirt on, tight leopardskin trousers, and a short cape of quilted gold. Under the crepe soles of his blue suede boots there was fifteen clear centimetres of artificial air.

‘Geneva,’ he said, in a voice like a pipe organ’s deepest and most sincere bass. He spread his cape with his elbows.

The woman’s smile was electric.

‘Marco Metz, or should I say Brother Melodious, you are a phenomenon. Not only are you actor, musician, producer, dancer and AV personality, you’re also the sexiest man on the ship.’

The leopard-patterned Guardian preened.

Across the chamber in her life-support chair, the deposed Captain grunted. Her thin consort tutted and rubbed her shoulders soothingly.

‘Well, gee, I don’t know what to say, Geneva,’ boomed Brother Melodious.

He indicated the crowd that followed him and his confrères everywhere they went. They wore togas, made out of spare bed-linen. Some wore sandals. Hope had already led several of them to shave their heads.

‘All I ever did was try to make people happy,’ said Brother Melodious.

His interviewer wriggled. ‘And you did, Brother Melodious,’ she said, ‘all the way from stem to stern.’ She contrived to shake her bottom at him. ‘Why, we can’t even begin to count the women who can vouch for that!’

Brother Melodious lowered his hi-lited eyelids and glanced at the tips of his right fingers, where the fingernails would have been if his hand had not been made of glass. ‘I have the deepest respect for women,’ he avowed, with husky might.

His interviewer ignored a small disturbance from the other side of the chamber. That she could edit out. She increased the wattage of her smile as the Guardian subtly flexed his thighs.

‘Where would we be without ‘em?’ he asked.

‘Not here in Capella System, that’s for sure,’ purred Geneva, indicating the big screen, where the red twins hung like stoplights in fog.

Tabitha Jute groaned. Saskia Zodiac stroked her head and murmured in her ear. Beside them Eeb the Altecean snuffled mournfully and wiped her snout on the back of her paw.

‘Brother Melodious, the Emergence of Plenty into real space has coincided with your own Emergence into new realms of personal influence and prestige. You are now a powerful and significant Guardian, host to a personal Capellan mentor of your own.’ Geneva’s camera flew a circle around his expanded brow. ‘You can tell us, Marco – does it hurt?’ She pouted with imagined pain.

The hovering Guardian angled for a close-up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘okay, let me tell you about that, Geneva. Bonding with a Capellan has no unpleasant or harmful side-effects at all.’

Geneva’s camera hugged Brother Melodious’s plump cheeks. ‘Is it true you experience a two hundred per cent increase in your personal mental power?’

‘Sure,’ he said easily. ‘Sure. Though you know, I’ve always been pretty bright. Wrote all my own material, always. All my own ideas. But the day I ran into this little guy,’ claimed Brother Melodious, touching his real hand to the side of his head, ‘that was the day my career truly started.’

His interviewer took a step backwards. She raised her eyebrows. ‘You’ve had a wonderful career,’ she chided him, lovingly.

Brother Melodious’s tones took a drop into triple-enriched intimacy. ‘You know, you’re right, Geneva,’ he said. ‘Those years were great. I played some great crowds, I met some wonderful people. Let’s not forget the day I was playing in a bar in Schiaparelli when a little lady called Tabitha Jute walked in.’

Smugly he saluted Captain Jute.

There were some scattered, nervous sounds of appreciation.

Across the chamber, Tabitha Jute gazed at him expressionlessly.

Brother Melodious pretended she was smiling, and gave her a wink. Evolved or no, he was a performer still, first and last. He pointed a ring at the floating camera and boosted the volume.

‘That was the day the whole thing started!’

He raised his glass hand and, activating its induction circuits, began to play ‘Goodbye, Blue Sky’, that stirring song.

The crowd of acolytes promptly joined in. In a moment, all around the bridge, at the navigation desks and chart consoles and transfer stations, everyone was singing along.

Ten years or more had passed since they had sung it last, but its words had not been erased from their minds. They had known them all their lives, ever since Capella had given them the power to leave the surface of their planet and spread throughout Sol System. Now they had succeeded, quite illegally, in venturing further. The journey had been arduous, a long bad dream. They were happy to have come out of it to find their benefactors waiting for them, ready to welcome and forgive them.

At the helm, Mr Spinner sang weakly, self-consciously, one arm in a sling. Behind his back a Guardian hovered, like Conscience in an old painting.

Brother Melodious acknowledged the cheers and applause. He insisted on applauding them too.

‘Community singing,’ announced the Disaster Commissioner, striding in from the foyer with Dodger Gillespie and others in tow. The Commissioner got up on a desk to shake Marco Metz’s famous glass hand. ‘No, don’t bother to come down, I’ll come up. Community singing. Nothing like it! Marco Metz, Brother Melodious, let me congratulate you.’

He grinned at everyone in sight, and especially at the camera. He was perspiring. He spotted Captain Jute, and saluted her. He looked guilty.

‘Well, Mr Metz, you clearly haven’t lost any of that old power to make people happy!’ Geneva McCann brought the camera back for a two-shot, the Guardian and the ship’s officer, an image of the new partnership.

‘I love music!’ said the Disaster Commissioner. ‘The power of music!’ He clutched Brother Melodious’s hand as if he thought it might hoist him up into the air too.

With a muttered oath, Captain Gillespie folded her long legs and squatted down beside Tabitha’s chair. Her breath and clothing smelt of tobacco. ‘’Old up, gel,’ she said.

‘Dodger,’ said Captain Jute dully. The return of the Capellans had provoked a relapse, a deterioration in her condition. Brother Valetude had had to step up the sedatives again.

‘She should be in bed,’ Saskia Zodiac said to Captain Gillespie. Eeb nodded fretfully. They had not wanted the Captain to come to the bridge today. There was no point in her being here. It only made her difficult.

‘Now I think it’s generally known that the stars we can all see out there are not, as we had hoped, Proxima Centauri and its partners Alpha and Beta, but the constituent parts of the far younger star Capella,’ recited Geneva McCann, stepping daintily backwards and swivelling towards the helm.

She addressed the Guardian who had stationed himself behind Mr Spinner. ‘Kybernator Astraghal, it’s quite a thrill for all of us to be here in the home system of the most advanced race in the galaxy! What can you tell us about this next phase of our epic journey through interstellar space? Are we going to visit your homeworld?’

The Guardian had narrow, sleepy eyes and a voice like a big cat. ‘All in good time,’ he said. He spread his hands on the snowy front of his toga.

‘1–7–5–0–2–4–5,’ reported Mr Spinner, from the level of the Kybernator’s knees. He looked sombre. The failure of the Proxima expedition was eating at his professional pride. He seemed to take the return of the Capellans as a punishment. In consequence, he was behaving with the undeviating rectitude of an autonomic system. ‘1–7–5–0–9. 245 and steady.’ He put his eyes to a viewer, which a cadet adjusted for him.

‘Roll 35.07°. Arc point 07. Point 08. 085.’

Corrections came from the approximators. Kybernator Astraghal pointed a majestic finger at the big screen. He touched a ring and changed the picture.

Grey snow tracked slowly through black vacuum, each particle trailed by a white ghost and a purple one. Search grids webbed the image, a chequerboard of different levels of resolution. Multicoloured telltales decorated the edge of the picture, icons for data access.

‘TARGET VESSEL IN RANGE,’ said a voice from nowhere in particular.

Geneva McCann clucked and headed for the screen, while the Kybernator said humorously, ‘Oh dear me, that does sound so very martial.’

The Disaster Commissioner chuckled and agreed, yes, it did.

‘“Host vessel”, I think, please, Persona,’ said the Kybernator.

Captain Jute spoke loudly. ‘Her name is Alice,’ she said.

‘Go ask Alice,’ sang Brother Melodious, while his hand played high-pitched primitive guitar, ‘I think she’ll know!’ He smiled fondly at the Captain, as if considering whether he should dedicate this number to her.

‘HOST VESSEL 23 DEGREES 52 MINUTES 06 SECONDS NORTH ELEVATION 65 POINT 70,’ said the persona.

‘We have visual confirmation,’ said Mr Spinner.

‘There we are, visual confirmation!’ said Geneva McCann, filming the big screen as she waved wildly for a tech to link her in.

On the screen a white circle appeared, isolating one blurred white blip among the snow. The auton scanners struggled for definition as the enhancers began to grip.

Captain Jute rolled over to the helm, her escort in pursuit. ‘Alice is such a humble name,’ the Kybernator ruminated, looking down at her from the corner of his eye. ‘Such an unparticular name. Signal Perlmutter, coms, would you? Tell him we have him in sight.’

The blip was starting to resolve into a familiar shape, like a white bird, a swan, perhaps, with wings upraised.

Captain Jute glanced at the image with hatred. She looked broodingly at the empty plaque reader that stood beside Mr Spinner.

‘How about Marilyn?’ suggested Brother Melodious.

Com screens were flashing into life. They showed, in quick succession, Brother Poesy, in a candlelit observatory, his exorbitant temples wreathed with laurels; Brother Valetude, in his surgery, examining a bald-headed young acolyte’s breasts with his stethoscope; and Brother Justice, floating on his back like a great walrus, in a bath full of frothy beer.

‘Beatrice,’ said Brother Poesy, in the Italian way, savouring all four syllables.

‘Florence,’ said Brother Valetude. ‘The Lady with the Lamp.’ His acolyte jumped. ‘Lamp, my dear,’ said the medical Guardian smoothly, ‘not lump.’

Brother Justice belched. His jowls quivered. ‘Fanny!’ he said fervently.

‘The debate over renaming the ship’s persona continues,’ commented Geneva to her hovercam, ‘even as we begin our approach to the host Capellan ship. Some of the people I’m talking to today think this ship will be one we’ve seen before, back in our very own solar system.’

Captain Jute took hold of Mr Spinner’s chair. He twitched, aware of her, but did not turn.

Captain Gillespie’s scarred white ringers closed over Captain Jute’s brown ones. ‘Leave it,’ she said in an undertone. ‘Let it go.’

Captain Jute looked up at her, unconvinced. Her old shipmate’s eyes were full of warning. Above her gaunt head Kybernator Astraghal’s hung like a huge and patient satellite.

‘We don’t really need a voice at all,’ the Kybernator observed. ‘At least, I can’t see that we do. Do you need one, Spinner?’

Captain Jute let go of the chair. In a cold, slurred voice she said: ‘Just fucking leave her alone.’

Eeb cooed concernedly. Saskia rubbed Tabitha’s shoulders.

Kybernator Astraghal was aloof, preoccupied. ‘Brother Melodious, perhaps you could explain to her again.’

‘It’s just a program, Tabitha,’ said Brother Melodious, stepping towards them through the air.

Her voice cracked, as if with panic. ‘Stay away from me, Marco Metz!’

Brother Melodious halted obligingly. ‘The persona is just a little program for the unimproved human brain, so you can interface with the ship,’ he told her, as if she hadn’t been flying professionally, continuously, for twenty years and more, real time.

He smiled at Dodger Gillespie, the Altecean and the acrobat. ‘Alice isn’t real, sugar, you know that!’

‘Don’t patronize me, you fucking wormhead,’ said Captain Jute clearly.

The acolytes twittered, shocked at her effrontery. Brother Melodious gave her a wry smile, meant for all the ship to see.

Geneva took a shot of the Captain leaning exhaustedly from her chair. She really did look quite ill. Her skin was khaki.

‘I know what Alice is,’ Captain Jute told Brother Melodious. ‘And I know what you are too.’

‘CAPTAIN, IT REALLY MIGHT BE BETTER IF YOU DIDN’T INTERFERE JUST AT PRESENT,’ said the gentle voice of Tabitha’s oldest and most loyal companion. ‘THIS IS GOING TO BE QUITE A DELICATE MANOEUVRE, YOU SEE, AND WE HAVEN’T HAD VERY MUCH PRACTICE NEGOTIATING TRANSITS IN REAL –’

‘Mr Spinner,’ said the Guardian behind his chair.

‘Aye-aye, sir,’ said Mr Spinner. He did not look at Captain Jute. He had not looked at her since they brought her in.

He pressed a sequence.

The voice ceased.

Captain Jute slumped further. Dodger Gillespie took hold of her shoulders, bracing her. ‘Not a problem,’ she murmured.

Tabitha glared at her.

Captain Gillespie directed her attention to the big screen, where the swan seemed to rear, wings spread stiffly to attack or embrace them. Its shiny breast flared with spectral instabilities.

‘Starship,’ said Dodger. ‘Got to be.’

Tabitha Jute sneered with distaste. Geneva’s camera approached, probing discreetly. Not discreetly enough for Eeb, who made a clumsy swipe at it. The camera made an evasive swerve.

‘The Citadel of Porcelain at First Light,’ said Captain Jute, with an effort.

‘Okay,’ said Dodger. She pondered.

‘Oh yes, so it is,’ said Saskia to Tabitha. She swivelled to face Captain Gillespie like a lily turning to face the moon. ‘It’s good there. They have gold on the walls. They can make the air smell of anything you like.’

‘Yeah, all right, Saskia,’ said Dodger Gillespie.

‘The food is wonderful,’ said Saskia.

Tabitha waved impatiently at the screen.

Saskia tried again to comfort her. ‘It will be better there,’ she said.

But the Captain continued to wave her hand, as if she thought she too could change the channel.

The Guardians had begun rounding up the children of the voyage. ‘They’ll be fine now,’ they said, as one by one the mole-eyed creatures were dumbly handed over. ‘They need the very best care, and that’s what they’re going to have.’

Four women came from Snake Throat Rookery, looking for the Captain. Their offspring had already been taken. One told how, before the Emergence, she had seen the Mystery Woman on a giant flying screen, promising salvation. No salvation had come.

‘It wasn’t her,’ said Saskia, curtly. ‘It was Alice.’

The ambassadors groaned and grumbled. They would not look at her.

The artificial woman turned a pirouette in pure frustration. She struck a fighting posture in the hallway. ‘The Captain is sick. What do you think she can do anyway?’

The clothes of the ambassadors were rags. They wore them in layers, with things pinned everywhere. Animal bones, flattened drink tubes, fragments of picture postcard. Those were their souvenirs of the Earth they barely remembered. All they knew was that the woman behind the bedroom door owed them something.

The door opened. Tabitha came rolling out. ‘Get in the car,’ she told them.

Saskia spread herself across the way. ‘You can’t go,’ she shouted.

‘You’re driving,’ said Tabitha.

Colonel Stark sat in her hoverjeep by the side of Long Fiss road, where brawny tattooed men toiled sullenly at the behest of young men and women in crisp black shirts and red berets. The labourers were the captive remnants of the Horde of Havoc, set to repair the damage they had done in the last battle.

The Colonel was proud to be back in the service of the Capellans, and was looking forward to the arrival of the Eladeldi, a species with 100 per cent organizational capacity. She was at this point at this hour to effectuate her routine inspection of the operation. ‘Work on Pier 1 is in progressive condition and attaining a readiness status equivalent to minus 12.5 shifts,’ she reported into the jeep com. ‘Plus or minus point five.’

On the com screen, Brother Justice smiled greasily. ‘What’s point five between friends?’

In the arches beneath the Sylvian Aqueduct, the battlebikes of Havoc were up on stands with their back wheels off, running cement mixers. None of the deviants now wore anything more menacing than a chain headband, or a single nut and bolt through an ear lobe. They were still dirty, but the dirt was acceptable dirt, the dirt of reparation. Their boots were caked with dribbled rockfoam.

A convoy of decommissioned combat trucks ground up and down the sulci with load after load of artificial sand. The Havoc Khan drove point, his prestige scars