The bioware node spliced into his cortex which regulated his gland was also programmed to blank out nervous impulses above a predetermined pain level. Mindstar had included the limiter as an experiment to try and alleviate shock in combat injury cases, but the Army had never brought it into widespread use, there was too much danger of squaddies ignoring the damage they’d received and making it worse. The unyielding concrete of the quay arrested his helter-skelter momentum with a sickeningly loud slap. His brain seemed to be floating at the centre of a closed insensate universe. There was harsh laughter from afar followed by running feet. Hands grasped him, hauling him upright. ‘Shit. You OK? Can you walk?’ Tactile sensation eased back, the cortical node reopening enough nerve channels for him to regain control over his limbs. Bruises throbbed sharply across his legs, arms, and back. His left leg was shaking. Both hands smarted from wide slashes of grazed skin, filming over with blood. Tunnel vision showed his suede desert boots at some vast distance. He couldn’t breathe through his nose, it was full of warm sticky liquid. ‘Come on, lean on us.’ That was Suzi. Greg did so, gratefully. ‘You want those pillocks taken out?’ There was a note of hope colouring her voice. ‘No.’ He shook his head. Big mistake. The world reeled alarmingly, acid bile rose, scouring his throat. ‘Green south, green south, stand down. We’re bringing Thunderchild in. Gold west, cover please.’ There was a small Cambridge-blue three-wheel sweeper-float ahead of him now, its front roller brushes retracted, inclined at forty-five degrees, looking like rusty felt mandibles. The name GUS’S SANITIZING was written down the side in bold yellow letters. Greg was urged on to the narrow seat in the Perspex-bubble cab, and Des climbed in behind the wheel while Suzy rode shot-gun on the foorplate. The two Trinities were both wearing jaunty red shirts and matching trousers, complemented with Gus’s company caps, burger-bar uniforms. Des swooped the float into a hard turn, and set off hack PETER P. HAMILTON 262 down the quay at a good five kilometres per hour, squirting a thick spray of bubbly detergent in their wake. He fumbled with the dash switches and cut the rain of cleanliness, cursing hotly. ‘I’ve got to go back,’ Greg said, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger. ‘Fuck that,’ Des said. ‘We’ve blown cover hauling you out. I’ve gotta get my squad safeguarded. Standard procedure; you should know that, Mr Military Hotshot. This operation is now over.’ ‘What the hell do you want to go back for?’ Suzi asked. ‘I have to see something.’ They shot out on to the promenade, and Des tilted the joystick sharp left. Pedestrians hopped out of the way, hurling abuse. ‘Listen,’ Des said. ‘You wanna go back, that’s fucking fine by me. I’ll stop right now and you can walk. But you’re on your own. We’ve been burning our arses off for you, and I don’t see anything to show for it.’ -‘OK, drop me here.’ ‘Shit.’ Suzi and Des exchanged anxious befuddled glances. ‘You can’t,’ said Suzi. ‘Come on, Greg, you can’t hardly walk. We’ll bring you back in a couple of days, when it’s cooler.’ ‘It has to be now.’ ‘The photon amps are still in place, how about we take you back to Angelica’s? You can watch from there.’ Greg probed his nose tenderly, it didn’t feel broken, and it’d stopped bleeding. ‘Not that sort of watching, not visual. I want to use my espersense on them.’ ‘Jesus,’ Des spat. ‘You Mindstar?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Bloody hell,’ Suzi muttered. ‘I knew there was something about you. Father never said nowt.’ Greg said nothing, he had always held back from mentioning it to the Trinities. People developed funny attitudes to psychics, kids especially. Let them just think he was lucky, outfits like that put a lot in superstition. MINOSTAR RISING 263 ‘Jesus,’ Des said. ‘Fucking Mindstar active in Peterborough. Think on it. Party always pissed itself over you people. Look, just what is going down on that yacht?’ ‘If I knew for sure I wouldn’t have to go back.’ ‘Shit, just how close do you have to get?’ They compromised. Des drove into the maze of service alleys behind the promenade shops, and swapped clothes with Greg. Then he went off to organize the squad’s withdrawal, leaving Suzi to drive Greg. There’d be no more retrieval posses if Toby and Mike came after them; but the snipers would remain in place until Greg had finished. Suzi drove back out on to the promenade and deployed the brushes before moving up the quay next to the Mirriam’s mooring. Seagull crap dissolved into creamy puddles, frizzy bristles whisking it away into the float’s tanks. ‘Stop here,’ Greg told her once they were opposite Kendric’s yacht. She climbed out of the little cab. ‘Don’t be too long,’ she implored, and lifted the engine cowling. Greg relaxed, sinking back into the thin cushioning of the bench, and instructed the cortical node to shut out the sharp throbs of pain his nerves were reporting loyally. The gland: stressed, taut like a marathon runner’s calf on the home straight. A sluice of neurohormones bubbled out amongst his axons. He wanted a sensory extension that went way beyond his usual short-range emotion perception. To find it he retreated inward, ignoring his blood heat, heartbeats, breathing. The state waited for him right down at the bottom of the mental well, a fragile central pool. Gaseous shapes meandered below its surface. He slipped softly below the interface. Greg perceived shadows, treacherous grey cobwebs congealing into misleading forms, aching empty gaps of grainy mist The vision was silent, neither hot nor cold. Through it all, minds shone like diamond-point mirages, a flat cyclonic swirl of fireflies with himself at the tranquil storm-eye. He concentrated, seeking the opeque distortion of Mirriam, the familiar signature of one mind. 264 PETER F. HAMILTON The water resolved as a sheet of black ice, a dead zone; he drifted across it, stretching out close to his absolute limit. Mirriam’s hull rose above him, a cliff of insubstantial gauze. Passing through. The three figures were cloudy alien protrusions into his lonely universe; their shape fuzzy, a pseudo-locus rippling around a solid kernel. Kendric and Hermione slid fluidly over and round Katerina, the three together a tightly knit serpentine coil. Katerina was a soul in torment, hating herself for what she was doing, unable to refuse. She closed out the degradations Hermione performed, warm with the conviction her reward would come. Greg observed her arousal growing as Kendric pleasured himself with her, his mind leaking distorted pictures of Julia. Fissures of intense rapture multiplied through her mind, interlacing, spreading to conquer, reducing her to animal abandon. Orgasm brought a blazing concussion of frenzied ecstasy, a neural nova. Instinct and dusty memory fused within Greg’s tarnished cranium, and at last he knew what Kendric had done to her. The intangible universe twisted, spectral images elongating and spiralling down to a tightly wound vanishing point. The marina’s sights and sounds boiled up around him, solid and loud. ‘Let’s go home,’ he said wealdy. Sustaining such a vast psi-effusion was severely debilitating. Gravity seemed to have quadrupled. “Bout time,’ Suzi grumbled, slamming down the cowling and locking the catches with a vicious twist. ‘You look like shit, you know?’ ‘Thank you.’ The sky overhead was jaundiced, its turbidity fluctuating in time to his heartbeat. ‘That gland must really take it out of you.’ Her foot pressed down on the accelerator pad. ‘It does.’ ‘Thought so, you were thrashing about like you were having a nightmare. Get what you want?’ MINDSTAR RISING 265