The Naked God, Part 2: Faith

623 Pages·2000·1.72 MB·English

by  Peter F. Hamilton

The Naked God – Faith
Peter F. Hamilton
Aspect
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0446605182
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780446605182
Chapter 01
It was a foul job, but better than scouting round the starscrapers. Tolton and Dariat
were driving a truck slowly over Valisk’s grass plains in search of servitor bodies. Food
was becoming a critical commodity within the enfeebled habitat. During Kiera’s reign
the possessed had simply helped themselves to existing supplies with little thought
devoted to replenishing them. Then after plunging into the dark continuum, the survivors
had turned to butchering the wild terrestrial animals that had fallen into
unconsciousness. Large cooking pits had been dug outside the northern endcap caverns,
where the Starbridge tribes took charge of trussing the beasts on long poles to be roasted
over the flames as if for a medieval banquet. It was a predictably monotonous diet of
goat, sheep, and rabbits; but nourishing enough. None of the other lethargic survivors
complained.
Now that operation was being accelerated. The animals were gradually slipping from
their strange comas into death. Their carcasses had to be recovered and cooked before
they started to decay. If it was hung in the coolest caverns, properly cured meat could be
stored for several weeks and still remain edible. Building up a stockpile of food was also
a logical precaution to be undertaken in times of war. Rubra’s regiment of descendants
all knew about the visitor, and had been surreptitiously supplementing their armaments
ever since. The remaining survivors hadn’t been told.
Tolton wondered if that was why he and Dariat had been given this particular task, so
he wouldn’t have much contact with the refugees occupying the caverns.
“Why should the personality distrust you?” Dariat asked as the street poet drove them
along the side of a stream in one of the shallow valleys meandering through the southern
grasslands. “You’re one of the real survivors of the possessed occupation. You’ve proved
yourself as an asset as far as it’s concerned.”
“Because of what I am; you know I’m on the side of the underclass, that’s my nature. I
might warn them.”
“Do you think warning them is helping them? They’re in no fit state to put up any
resistance if that thing comes back. You know damn well my illustrious relatives are the
only ones who stand a chance of stopping it. Go ahead and tell the sick there’s some
kind of homicidal ice dragon stalking us, see how much you improve their morale. I
don’t want to preach homilies, but class distinction has been suspended for the duration.
We’re divided into effectives and dependants, now. That’s all.”
“All right, damn it. But you can’t keep them in ignorance forever.”
“They won’t be. If that thing ever gets inside, everyone’s going to know about it.”
Tolton gripped the top of the steering wheel with both hands, and slowed so he could
watch Dariat’s answer. “You think it will come back?”
“The opinion is a resounding yes. It wanted something the first time, and all we did
was make it mad at us. Even assuming it has the wackiest psychology possible, it’ll
come back. The only questions are: when? And: will it be alone?”
“Bloody hell.” Tolton twisted the throttle again, and sent the truck splashing through a
shallow section of the stream. “What about the signalling project? Can we call the
Confederation yet?”
“No. There’s still a team working on it, but most of my relatives are doing what they
can to beef up the habitat defences.”
“We still have some?”
“Not many,” Dariat admitted.
Tolton saw a suspicious avocado-green lump amid the wispy tips of pink xenoc grass,
and slowed the truck to a halt. The body of a large servitor lizard was lying curled up on
the ground. A tegu, geneered for agronomy maintenance, it measured one and a half
metres from nose to tail, with long rake-like fingers on its hands. There were hundreds
of them in Valisk, patrolling the streams where they were employed to clear jams of
dead grass and twigs that built up along rocky snags.
Dariat stood and watched as his friend bent over and gingerly touched the creature’s
flanks.
“I can’t make out if it’s alive or not,” Tolton complained.
“It’s dead,” Dariat told him. “There is no life energy left in the body.”
“You can tell that?”
“Yeah. It’s like a little internal glow; all living things have it.”
“Hell. You can see that?”
“It’s similar to seeing, yes. I guess my brain just interprets it as light.”
“You haven’t got a brain. You’re just a ghost. A whole bunch of thoughts strung
together.”
“There’s more to me than that, if you don’t mind. I’m a naked soul.”
“Okay. There’s no need to get touchy about it.” Tolton grinned. “Touchy. Get it? A
ghost, touchy.”
“I hope your poetry is better than your humour. After all, you’re the one that’s got to
pick it up.” His translucent foot nudged the dead lizard.
Tolton’s grin crumpled. “Bugger.” He went round to the back of the truck, and lowered
the tailgate. There were already three dead servitor chimps lying on the metal floor. “I
didn’t mind the goats so much, but this is like cannibalism,” he grumbled.
“Monkeys were a delicacy in several pre-industrial societies back on Earth.”
“No wonder they all died out, then; their kids ran off to the city and lived happily ever
after on Chinese takeaway.” He put his hands under the lizard’s body, disgruntled by the
dry-slippery feel of the scales and the way they shifted so easily over protuberant bones.
Muttering about the truck’s lack of a winch, he started to drag the body over to the
tailgate. The lizard was quite a weight, needing several stages to haul it up the steep
ramp. Tolton was flushed by the time he finally skewed it over the chimps. He jumped
down and shoved the tailgate back up, shoving the latches home.
“Good job,” Dariat said.
“Just as long as I don’t have to butcher them, I don’t care.”
“We should get back. That’s a big load already.”
Tolton grunted in agreement. The trucks had been stripped down to the minimum
number of systems; there were no governing processors, no power steering, no collision
alert radar, nor impact-triggered seat webs. A power cell was wired directly to the wheel
hub motors, with the throttle as the only control. Such an arrangement gave the vehicles
a modicum of reliability, though even that was far from a hundred per cent. Switching
them on was always a lottery. And if they had too much weight in the back they
wouldn’t work at all.
Dariat,the personality called. The visitor is back, and it’s not alone.
Oh Thoale. How many?
A couple of dozen, I think. Maybe more.
Once again, Dariat knew how much mental effort it took for the personality to focus
on the approaching specks. Even then, he wasn’t sure it was observing all of them. As
before, pale streaks of turquoise and burgundy were fluxing within the strands of the
dusky nebula outside. A scattering of wan grey dots swished between the ragged strands,
curving sharply at each turn, but always coming closer. Their movements were
confusing, but even so the personality should have been able to track them.
Dariat looked through the truck’s grimed windscreen. The Northern endcap was thirty
kilometres away, suddenly a huge distance across the rolling grasslands and scrub desert.
It would take them at least forty minutes to get there, assuming the cloying blades of
pink grass didn’t get any thicker before they reached one of the rough tracks. And that
was a long time to be alone in this continuum. Not that the caverns would offer much
sanctuary.
It was ironic, Dariat thought: he who had managed to isolate himself for thirty years,
now wanted to surround himself with people. He could never forget that debilitating
cold the visitor had inflicted on him last time. His soul was unprotected in this realm. If
he was going to truly die, he preferred to do it in the company of his own kind. He
turned to Tolton, making sure his lips were exaggerating his words. “Does this thing go
any faster?”
The street poet gave him a panicked glance. “Why?”
“Because now would be a good time to find out.”
“The bastard’s come back?”
“More than one.”
Tolton twisted the throttle urgently, nudging the speed up to over forty kilometres an
hour. The wheel hub motors started making erratic buzzing sounds—normally they were
completely silent. Dariat used affinity to watch the visitors’ approach. The personality
had activated the seven lasers and two masers emplaced around the rim of the counter-
rotating spaceport. As before, there was no radar return from any of the visitors.
The first ones began their final dash from the shifting fringe of the nebula through the
clear space to the habitat’s shell. They were condensing the darkness around themselves
now, twirling sharp horns of light in kaleidoscopic arcs. Optical sensors locked on,
aligning the energy weapons on one of the giveaway distortion swirls. Nine intense
energy beams pinioned the visitor. Its sole response was to spin faster, wriggling wildly
along its trajectory as it plummeted in towards the shell. The radial spires of distorted
luminescence flared brighter and higher. Then it was falling behind the tips of the
starscrapers, beyond the weapons’ elevation. They slid back to find another target. It,
too, was unaffected by the energy strike.
The personality stopped firing. Anxiety spread like a mental virus among Rubra’s
descendants as they waited to see what the visitors would do next. The personal
weapons they’d prepared were distributed and primed. Not that anyone held out much
hope. If the spaceport lasers couldn’t harm them, then rifles (however large the calibre)
were going to be completely useless. Not that anybody refused them. Having a hefty
chunk of destructive hardware you could grip in your hands was always a nice
psychological boost.

The Orgathé led a swarm of its eager kith towards the giant living object, soaking up
the blaze of heat which it threw away so casually. They had come to pre-empt the
absorption that was the fate of all beings in the dark continuum, gorging on as much of
its life-energy as they could before it reached the mélange. Once that happened, so many
of the entities entombed within would be empowered to resurrection and individuality
that the whole mélange would be loosened, possibly even breaking apart for a short
while. But there would never be enough energy to return them all to the place from
which they’d fallen. That privilege could only be granted to those who empowered
themselves before the dispersal.
That was why it had called upon the others, the strongest of their kind, able to fly far
and long from the mélange. Together they might successfully storm the object where one
had failed. To be rewarded with enough energy to elevate themselves out of the dark
continuum was worth any risk.
The Orgathé swooped closer. Huge waves of thought rippled through the layer of life
energy below the object’s surface, focusing on it. Pillars of energy lashed out from the
dead section at the far end; a kind unusable by the Orgathé. It closed its boundary
against the flow, letting the power splash apart harmlessly. The pillars of energy
vanished when it dove down close to the surface. Its kith were following it down,
hungered by the abundant energy, crying victoriously among themselves.
Ahead now were the hollow spindles protruding from the object’s midsection. The
Orgathé increased its speed, hardening itself with a reckless expenditure of energy. It
remembered the sheet of transparent matter it had landed on before. Easy to identify
amid the thousands of other identical sheets inlaid along the length of the spindle, a dead
section, drained of life-energy and heat. This time, the Orgathé didn’t slow down.
The window of Horner’s bar detonated inwards with a terrifyingly violent explosion.
Craggy shards of crystal blasted into the bar, scything through the furniture. Frozen, ice-
cloaked tables and chairs disintegrated into billowing clouds of glossy silvery fragments.
Then the entire maelstrom reversed its flow, and howled out through the shattered
window. The badly shredded main door into the vestibule buckled and collapsed,
allowing the air to rush through.
Emergency pressure locks all across the twenty-fifth storey started to slide shut. They
were mechanical systems, self-powered, activated by simple failsafe pressure sensors.
The majority of them were unaffected by the malaise inflicted by the dark continuum.
Only a minority of the starscraper’s muscle membranes reacted to the potentially lethal
development.
The personality concentrated hard, ensuring that the muscle membranes around the
Djerba’s lobby were shut, then tried to reach the floors immediately below that. Its
thought routines encountered a tide of exhaustion that grew worse the further it inserted
itself into the starscraper. Only the vaguest images from the twenty-fifth floor were
available.
The Orgathé gripped the rim of the bar’s window with several appendages, waiting
until the gale subsided. Bottles detonated in mid flight as they were swept across the
room, their exotic liquor solidifying in weird bulbous shapes the instant they broke free
of the glass. Anything which struck the Orgathé simply bounced off, gyrating away into
the void outside. As soon as the roar of air began to ebb, it moved into the starscraper.
The wall around the empty door simply burst apart as it went through.
Still there was no clear image of it as it moved along the vestibule; all the sensitive
cells could discern before they died was a tumour of darker shadow within the lightless
chamber. And now the habitat personality was having to divert its attention to the rest of
the Orgathé swarm that were slamming their way through other starscraper windows.
Emergency pressure locks and muscle membranes were closing throughout the deserted
structures, desperately trying to contain the atmospheric breaches.
The Orgathé continued to surge forward into the starscraper, hunting round for
concentrations of life-energy to consume. It was spread thinly here, nothing like as rich
as the layer beneath the object’s outer surface. Instinctively, the Orgathé barged upwards
towards that mammoth source. Flat planes of matter splintered as it hammered through
them. Further harsh gusts of gas whistled past. Then it found what it wanted, a solid
stream of liquid suffused with life-energy pouring along the core of the starscraper. It
moved as close as it could, siphoning the heat out of the thick wall of matter surrounding
the stream until the outside began to crack. Then it bored through with a couple of
appendages, and immersed their tips in the current. Sweet, vital life-energy flowed back
into the Orgathé, replenishing it after its considerable exertions. It settled down and
began consuming the apparently infinite torrent, growing in a way impossible before.

Three trucks approached the ring of dilapidated hovels encircling the Djerba’s lobby.
Each vehicle had two people inside, a nervous driver and an even more nervous lookout
armed with a heavy calibre rifle. They began to nudge along the muddy tracks between
the precarious walls, heavy wheels squelching cans and empty sachet wrappers into the
ground.
Past the hovels, they pulled up short of the lobby. As with all Valisk’s internal
buildings, it was an elaborate edifice, a dome shape from gradually inclined tiers of long
white polyp window arches with a circular apex of amber-tinted crystal. Inside, it had
the kind of furniture nests and large marble floors endemic to any human travel station.
A few cracked windows along the bottom tier, and smashed furniture smeared across the
floor, was the only evidence of past battles between Kiera and Rubra.
Tolton gave it all a jaundiced look. “God, I really didn’t expect to be coming back
here,” he grumbled.
“You’re not alone,” Dariat told him.
Erentz climbed down out of the passenger seat, keeping her rifle trained squarely on
the lobby. The visitors had been in Valisk for thirty hours now. In all that time, not one
of them had emerged from a starscraper, nor made any hostile move. If it hadn’t been for
the broken windows and closed emergency locks there would be no evidence of their
incursion at all. After their desperate efforts to gain entry, such inactivity had everyone
troubled and confused. The personality was determined to discover what nefarious
activity they were cooking up in the starscrapers.
The lifts were clumped together in the centre of the lobby, a broad column of grey
polyp reaching half way to the amber crystal above. Its curving wall was inset with
silvery mechanical doors. One of them slid open as the group approached. Erentz put
down the large case of equipment she was carrying, and inched over to the rim so she
could snatch a look down. The top of the lift was out of sight, leaving a dark circular
shaft with vertical rails that faded from sight after a few metres. She shone a torch into
the gulf. All that did was show her more of the rails, and another set of emergency fire-
control doors on the inside. If she leaned right over, she could just make out the door
below.
From what I can discern, the visitor is now on the twenty-second floor,the personality
said. I have managed to seal off the floors below, so the twenty-second remains fully
pressurized. The twenty-third is the same. Twenty-four is partially pressurized. Twenty-
five is now in a vacuum. Your only escape route, Erentz, is up. Dariat, I imagine you can
use the lower floors. A vacuum really shouldn’t bother you.
Dariat nodded thoughtfully. Let’s try not to put that theory to the test, okay? Besides,
where would I go once I reach the bottom?
It took twenty minutes to prepare. Three of the group started to rig up a winch they’d
brought, securing it on the lobby floor with large bolts. The rest helped Erentz into the
silver-grey suit which she was going to wear for the reconnaissance. They’d chosen a
thermal emission suit, capable of protecting its wearer from extreme temperatures. It had
a thick layer of insulation with a molecular structure similar to the nulltherm foam used
by starships. The one drawback to that particular property was that the heat generated by
a living body’s organs and muscles couldn’t escape. Any wearer would cook themselves
to death inside thirty minutes. So before getting into it, Erentz had to put on a tight-
fitting regulator overall made from heat absorber fabric. It was capable of soaking up
and storing her body’s entire output for seven hours before having to be drained.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Tolton asked as he sealed the outer gauntlets to
her sleeves. The suit’s puffy appearance was making her look like an arctic skier.
“You were down there with it before,” she answered. “It has some kind of active heat-
sink ability. I’ve got to have something to shield me from that if I get too close. And I
can’t risk wearing an SII suit, not in this continuum; there’s no guarantee it’ll even work
below the first floor.”
“All right. If you’re happy . . .”
“I’m not.” She slipped the suit’s breathing mask on, fiddling with it until it was
comfortable. The suit wasn’t pressurized, but the mask maintained her air supply at a
constant temperature.
Tolton handed her the electron rod. Its spiked tip was capable of giving off a ten
thousand volt shock. “This should stop it getting too close. Electricity seems to be our
one constant these days. It can blast the possessed back into the beyond, and it certainly
scared the visitor.”
She held up the rod, then slipped it into her belt next to a laser pistol and a fission
blade. “I feel like I’m off to poke the tiger,” she mumbled round the mask.
I’m sorry,said the personality. But we really do need to know what these things are up
to.
Yeah yeah.she pulled the helmet visor down, a transparent material thick enough to
give the world a gentle turquoise shade. You ready?she asked dariat.
Yes.his affinity voice might have said it, but his mind didn’t.
The winch cable had been looped round a pulley at the top of the lift shaft. It ended in
a couple of simple straps which Erentz clipped onto a harness around her torso. Above
the straps, there was a simple control box on a flexible stalk, with four buttons to govern
the winch. She tugged at the thin cable, testing its strength.
It’s a linked molecule silicon fibre,explained one of the engineers who’d rigged it up.
Totally reliable; it can support a hundred times your body weight.he indicated a small
toggle-like handle nesting in the junction between the two straps. This is your fast
retrieval handle. The winch drum is recoil-wound, like a spring. The further you go
down, the tighter the tension. So if you need to get back up here in a hurry, forget the
control box, simply twist and pull. It’ll reel you in fast. And the whole mechanism is
mechanical, so no demon spook can mess with it.
Thanks.erentz touched the little toggle reverently, the way she’d seen Christians
stroking a crucifix. She walked over to the rim of the lift shaft, switching on her helmet
and wrist lights. We’re on.
Dariat nodded and came over to stand behind her. He put his arms round her chest. His
legs he bent so they were wrapped round hers, his feet hooking together between her
ankles. It felt like a solid hold. I think I’m secure.
Erentz stepped off into space, and swung out into the shaft. She dangled over black
emptiness, rotating very slowly. Dariat weighed nothing at all. The only way she knew
he was still there was the faintest glow coming from his arms as they clung to her. All
right, let’s go see what it’s up to.she pressed the descent button, and the cable started to
play out, lowering her. The last she saw of the lobby was three people crowded shoulder
to shoulder in the bright doorway, craning down to watch her. Twenty-two floors is a
long way to go when you’re hanging on the end of an invisible cable in absolute
darkness.
The shaft’s horizontal pressure seal on the thirtieth storey is closed,the personality
said. The drop is not as fearsome as you imagine it.
I’m really trying not to imagine it at all,she shot back waspishly.
Dariat didn’t say anything. He was too busy fighting the fatigue trembles in his legs.
The awkward position he was in made his muscles prone to cramps. Stupid for a ghost,
he told himself repeatedly.