‘Behind you!’ someone yelled. Victor began firing his carbine back up the stream. Teddy was pointing his at Roddy and the sentinel, unable to shoot. The sentinel was tossing the man about as though he was a doll. Eleanor yanked the Braun from her belt, leaning forwards. Saturated black fur twisted into view below her outstretched hand, she jabbed the laser down until it hit something solid and tugged the trigger. There was a blur of infrared energy, flash of singeing fur, 392 PITER F. HAMILTON Hot pain smashed into her belly, ripping. Oblivion was smothering in soft black velvet-
‘. . . coming outta it.’ ‘Come on gal, up you get.’ Swirling pearl-grey mists resolved into two figures wearing energy dissipater jumpsuits. Hard lumpy stone pressed into Eleanor’s back, Water was gurgling round her feet. ‘The sentinel,’ she cried. ‘Dead,’ Teddy answered, There was absolutely no sensation coming from her abdomen; no cold, warmth, pain. Nothing. That frightened her more than having a nagging pain. She glanced down: a cauliflower oval of analgesic foam was clinging to the front of her jumpsuit. ‘Roddy?’ ‘Giving St Peter a hard time. Come on, gal. Up.’ Strong hands gripped under her shoulders, lifting. She stood, fighting the dizziness which blanked out her vision for a moment, ‘Can you carry anything?’ ‘I – yes, I’ll try.’ Eleanor was curiously unmoved by Roddy’s death. His body had been dragged out of the stream, lying on the rocky bank, limbs bent oddly, head kinked at an impossible angle. They must’ve infused her with something; and she didn’t particularly mind, it was nice having thoughts this peaceful. Teddy handed her the Rockwell again, Nicole raking the second power unit. Suzi took up position on her flank, When Eleanor looked round she saw Victor limping behind her, a ring of ana’gesic foam around his left thigh. One dead, three walking wounded. If it wasn’t for the drug she knew she’d have given up right there and then. Teddy led them on, The stream continued its inexorable advance up Eleanor’s legs. Solid footing was hard to find, the fast current pushing insistently at the back of her knees. A raggedy curtain of pigtail ivy ribbons hung from the gnarled branches above her, 4 MINDSTAR RISING 393 long enough to trail in the water, an irritant she was constantly having to sweep aside. There were big boulders in the stream now, creating a turbulent white-water surface. The stone-lined banks were closing in, becoming steeper. She and Des were pressing together, Suzi occasionally bumping into her. The stream was being channelled for some reason. Teddy made them stop, then walked on alone, struggling to keep his balance. The second laser found him, inflaming his jumpsuit to a lambent crimson. His AK sent a burst of slugs back along the beam, A pyrotechnic shower of sparks erupted from a big acacia tree. ‘OK people, last stage. Easy does it.’ Teddy waited for the others to reach him, and they began to move off together. Eleanor heard a low rumbling coming from somewhere ahead. Couldn’t quite place the sound, her ears still had a residual ringing from the pickets. The water reached her waist. ‘Hey-‘ Victor began. Teddy snarled a curse and vanished from view. Eleanor took a step forwards, and found the stream bed falling away. Instinct made her tighten her grip on the Rockwell, she knew she’d never be able to fight the water, she had to let it take her, Her feet were swept from under her, dunking her below the water. She breathed out, expelling air from the filter nozzle until she broke surface. Bobbing around like a piece of driftwood. The stone banks were like cliffs whizzing by. Ivy fronds slapped at her, She shifted the Rockwell round, hugging it to her numb chest. The rumbling was growing steadily louder. Memory placed it: waterfall. Eleanor twisted desperately, getting her feet out in front, locking her legs straight. Slaloming round the last bend she saw Wilholm manor dead ahead. The building was floodlit, its roof blanked out, hidden in shadow. Biolum lights glared from the windows of the top two storeys, the ground floor was a featureless slate-grey band. There was a vast expanse of flat exposed lawn surrounding it. Killing ground, she thought. Then she went over the lip. The waterfall wasn’t high, three metres. She seemed to hang in the air, floating down, 394 PETER F. HAMILTON MASER ATTACK, shouted scarlet graphics. The photon- amp image dimmed. Thick fog exploded around her. Eleanor hit the lake hard, her backside taking the impact. The Rockwell knocked the breath out of her. Don’t drap it, her only thought. The weight of the weapon and the jumpsuit held her down, Rising with terrible slowness, her lungs bursting. Water had defeated the photon amp, all she could see was a uniform powder-blue mist. Eleanor surfaced, keeping the water level above her shoulders, bracing herself for the graphic warning again. It remained off. Treading water. Somehow she’d turned round to face the waterfall. A dark figure shot over the lip, arms flapping at the air. The curving torrent of water behind it boiled furiously again as the manor’s Bofors masers fired, ‘Check in,’ a voice called out. ‘Teddy? Teddy, I’m here, it’s Eleanor.’ ‘Christ, gal. OK, you still got the Rockwell?’ Eleanor padded her one free hand, cumbersome in the thick garment, turning until she spotted him, a small mound protruding from the lake’s gently rippling surface. ‘I’ve got it., ‘Thank you, sweet Jesus.’ ‘Father, Suzi here.’ ‘Victor held the power unit.’ ‘Terrific.’ Eleanor saw Teddy bring the message laser out of the water. ‘Shit,’ Des’s voice, high and panicky. ‘Being lasered.’ There was a splash somewhere off to Eleanor’s left, ‘Nicole, ‘nother unit.’ The faзade of the manor seemed to flicker, its brightness oscillating. Tiny points of bright-red light twinkled from the second-storey windows, LASER ATTACK. The photon-amp image went completely white. Eleanor drew a deep breath and sank below the surface. The photon-amp image reverted to blue with slashes of black. This time she could make slightly more sense of it; three MINDSTAR RISING 395 intense dots of brighter blue above her, where the lasers from the manor were striking the surface, bubbles fizzing up around her. She kicked with her feet, moving away. ‘-look you bastards,’ Teddy was shouting as Eleanor came up. ‘Christ,’ he ducked below the lake. White. LASER ATTACK. The blueness was speckled with red and green, throbbing. Her lungs burnt. Can’t do this many more times. Up again. Droplets of water came in with the air. Eleanor coughed, swallowing some. It tasted foul. ‘They’ve stopped,’ Suzi called out. ‘Now what?’ Des asked. ‘Wait,’ said Teddy. ‘Eleanor, you and Victor come over to me, slow and easy. I wanna get that Rockwell sorted.’ Eleanor rolled over, letting herself float on her back with the water lapping round her chin. Waving her feet, creeping towards Teddy. Will they think grouping together is hostile? Eleanor was about five metres short of Teddy when a voice boomed out from the manor. ‘Who the hell are you people?’ It sounded angry. Teddy began to flash the laser again. Eleanor stopped moving. Whatever morse code was, it seemed incredibly ponderous. ‘You want to come in and talk about Mandel? Who’ve you got as a guarantee?’ ‘Do your thing, Victor,’ Teddy grunted. ‘Right.’ He submerged. Eleanor felt insufferably weary. Just wanted it all to be over. The infusion must be wearing off, she thought, Victor came up without his hood, hair plastered across his forehead. ‘Smile, man.’ ‘Victor,’ the voice blared, ‘Hell, it is you. Are these people genuine? We’ve got them covered if they try and force you. Nod for yes. Shake for no.’ ‘Jesus wept,’ said Teddy. ‘Paranoid or what.’ ‘All right,’ said the voice. ‘And just how do you reckon on 396 PETER F. HAMILTON getting across the lawn? We can’t shut off the masers, and the ground floor’s sealed tight.’ The message laser flashed out a long complicated story. ‘No way!’ the voice called. ‘Screw you, arsehole,’ Suzi shouted. ‘Throttle down, gal,’ said Teddy, and even he sounded tired, The message laser flashed once more. ‘All right,’ said the voice. ‘Listen good. Only Victor may use the cannon. If one of those plasma shots lands anywhere but on a maser you are dead.’ ‘And up yours, too,’ said Teddy. ‘OK, let’s get the Rockwell together.’ Eleanor started kicking again, her legs like lead. Teddy and Victor were moving forwards, towards the shore. ‘Touching ground,’ Teddy said. He was five metres short of the lawn. Eleanor came up beside him, toes prodding the viscous lake bed. ‘Let’s have it, gal.’ Victor drifted up on the other side. He and Teddy started muttering at each other as they mated the Rockwell’s cable to the power unit by touch alone, With the Rockwell gone, Eleanor thought she’d be able to fly. She weighed nothing at all. Victor stuck the Rockwell’s targeting imager over his right eye, its cable coiling down below the water. ‘Ready,’ he said. Eleanor saw that Des, Suzi, and Nicole had swum up level with her. Unidentifiable, blind tumours of crкpe fabric. Behind them, on the shore where the trees bordered the lawn were ~, two swift-moving red blobs. No, her mind cried, Enough, we’ve had enough, ‘Sentinels,’ she called out, voice rasping in her throat. ‘Sentinels, they’re coming.’ Victor fired the first plasma bolt. A solar-bright fireball ~ tearing through the night, overloading Eleanor’s photon amp. A near-ultrasonic whine ending in a stentorian thunderclap. One of the manor’s chimney stacks exploded. The sentinels were sprinting for the lake shore. Eleanor MINDSTAR RISING 397 watched the two people closest to them churn about, trying to reach their weapons. Steam billowed up around one of them as the frantic motion lifted their shoulders out of the water. Eleanor started to swim breaststroke. Suzi had said the Braun was waterproof, although she had no idea if it would work in the water. Both sentinels leapt together. MASER ATTACK, Eleanor duckdived fast. Surfacing, just in time to hear the second concussion as more of the manor’s masonry was vaporized. Three more to go. A locust-swarm of slate fragments tumbled through the air high above Wilholm. The sentinels were in the water, two whirlpools of surf. Des was screaming. Eleanor headed for the nearest conflagration. Couldn’t even remember if she’d recharged the Braun. MASER ATTACK. Plunging. A sentinel shrieked in mortal terror, a keening that sliced right through Eleanor. The sound electrified, freezing her limbs. What in God’s name could a sentinel possibly fear? She saw it disappear below the surface of the lake, sucked down backwards in a maelstrom of bubbles. Something was floating inertly where it’d vanished, undulating with the swell. The third plasma bolt speared a small ornate rotunda, its detonation shockwave flinging smoking chunks of stone halfway across the lawn. Eleanor was looking straight at a sentinel three metres away. Its jaws were open showing a double layer of shark-teeth, huge eyes staring at her. Powerful bands of muscle rippled along its back as it paddled towards her. Cats can’t swim! Her feet sank into muck up to her ankles and she stood, MASER ATTACK. Counting off the seconds. One. A storm-cloud of steam raged around her, Two. THERMAL INPUT APPROACHING MAXIMUM SHUT CAPACITY. The sentinel was a metre and a half from her when its fur ignited. It yowled in pain, skin crisping, cracking, thick fluid oozing out. Three. Eleanor could feel her skin beginning to blister as a wave of searing heat poured through the jumpsuit insulation. The PETER F. HAMILTON 398 sentinel gave a convulsive shudder, its back was flayed down to its ribcage, skull exposed, eyes roasted. Blood gushed out of its mouth, splattering on her suit. Four. THERMAL SATURATION ALERT. Dead. Eleanor collapsed back into the lake, her own body on fire. Somewhere inside her belly she could feel dampness. The sentinel’s corpse sank as she floated up. A plasma bolt flashed overhead. Part of a very distant universe. Something shot up out of the water near by. ‘Got the bastard!’ Nicole. The marine-adept woman swam clumsily over to the floating shape. ‘Eleanor, hey, Eleanor, give me a hand with Suzi. Think she’s still alive.’ ‘Go on, gal,’ Teddy called. ‘Masers are out.’ Eleanor moved sluggishly. Between them they dragged Suzi on to the lawn. The girl’s jumpsuit was in tatters, blood soaking the grass. Eleanor knelt beside her, and tugged her hood off, water flooded out. Suzi’s tongue protruded. Victor appeared and bent to breathe air into her. Eleanor was thankful, she certainly didn’t have the strength left to resuscitate her. ‘Lost the aid kit,’ Nicole said dully. Her forearms were lacerated, tatters of skin hung loosely. ‘They’ll have something for her in the manor,’ said Teddy. Suzi spluttered weakly, liquids gurgling inside her. There was no sign of Des. ‘OK, let’s move,’ Teddy urged. ‘Remember the ground traps.’ Eleanor slowly pulled her own hood off, sobbing softly. Proper colours deluged her eyes. The foam across her abdomen was flaking off, blood mingling with water in her lap. ‘Come on, gal,’ Teddy said. ‘You made it now. Jesus must really love you.’ He handed her his AK. ‘Safety’s off. Cover us if any more sentinels show.’ Rabbits, she’d shot rabbits back at the kibbutz. Victor hoisted Suzi on to Teddy’s back, and the big man set off towards the manor, message laser banging against his A 399 MINDSTAR RISING side. They followed in single file as he traced a path across the lawn, Wilhohn’s floodlights casting long spidery shadows as they wove round the traps. Flat metal slabs had slid out of the manor’s stonework to seal the ground floor’s doors and windows. Teddy set Suzi down against the wall and unslung a small pack. Eleanor and Victor watched the grounds, AKs held ready, as Teddy slapped a thermal-slice tape on the slab of metal covering a window, It was a thick flexible tube which hissed as it adhered to the slab. ‘OK, don’t look.’ Startlingly bright blue-white light glared out, buzzing and sizzling. Eleanor saw sparks skipping along the paving slabs around her feet, She could feel its warmth on the back of her neck. ‘Here it comes.’ The light dimmed, and there was a loud resonant clang, smashing glass. A fan of milder biolu.m light spilled out across the grass. Eleanor kept looking over the lawn. Her nerves raw-edged. She expected to see a mass charge of sentinels coming at her. They’ll never let us get in. Not those devils. There was grunting and shuffling from behind her, ‘Don’t touch the edge,’ she heard Teddy warning, He was shoving Suzi through the hole. ‘Got her? OK, for Christ’s sake go easy. You next, Nicole.’ Eleanor began to back towards the window, shivering uncontrollably. ‘You make it with that leg, Victor? OK, I’ll boost you.’ Silence. Eleanor knew she was alone. Sweeping the AK in wild arcs. Nothing moved on the lawn. ‘Move it, Eleanor.’ The jagged hole was roughly square, one and a half metres high, its lower rim a metre off the ground. She put a leg through. ‘All right, lady, hands where we can see them, and moving real slow.’ The room inside was huge, its floor an intricate mosaic of olive-green and cream tiles; there were chandeliers hanging on A PETER F. HAMILTON 400 gold chains, pastel frescoes of waterfowl on the walls, Regency furniture, a grand piano. Smoke layered the air, two people were using fire extinguishers on the windowframe, glass crunched under her foot. A small army was pointing Uzi hand-lasers at her. Standing in the middle of the room was a dignified grey-haired man whose face was stiff with tension and suspicion. Had to be Walshaw. Suzi was lying on the floor, chest a mass of gore, blood 1.. pooling on the shiny tiles. There was a woman kneeling beside ~ her, working frantically. Medical gear modules were scattered round, red and amber LEDs flashing, their needle sensors jabbing through the remnants of the jumpsuit. The woman slapped a bioware mask over Suzi’s face, a rubbery sac concertinaed out of it and began palpitating. Nicole was slumped motionless against a wall. Two of the security people were covering her with Uzis while a third wrapped fluffy aquamarine towels around her shredded arms, blood staining them brown. Victor was standing, hands on head, eyes red with pain. A grim-faced woman was frisking him with expert thoroughness. Three security people surrounded Teddy. He was face-down on the floor, spread-eagled, his hood thrown back, an Uzi pressed against the back of his bare neck. Right at the back of the room Eleanor saw a tall teenage ~. girl with a pretty oval face, and long straight chestnut hair, wearing an expensive black dress. Julia Evans; shouldering her way past a big man and an imposing woman, arm rising to point a rigid accusing forefinger straight at Eleanor. ‘SIT!’ Julia barked in a voice so commanding that Eleanor’s nerves went dead. She heard a quiet sighing sound at her back, and turned to see a sentinel folding on to its haunches not a metre behind her. It licked its muzzle with a long pink tongue. ‘Good girl,’ Julia enthused warmly. ‘Who’s a good girl, then?’ Eleanor’s legs gave out, CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE ‘Greg!’ ‘Huh, yeah?’ Monastic silence had enveloped the tower, the light diffusing into their makeshift prison reduced to the minutest candle glimmer from above, The basement was inky black. Gabriel’s strained face was ghostly pale. ‘Greg, we’re going to die.’ ‘Come on, Gabriel. Don’t give the bastards the satisfaction.’ ‘Screw you, Mandel,’ she hissed. ‘I’m not cracking up. I’ve got it back again, thank Christ. The future. It’s all fuzzy. But I can see it, and it all comes to an end in about forty minutes.’ Greg’s cuffs clanged loudly against the rail as her words penetrated. He squirmed round to look at her, trepidation and hope heating his blood. Psi meant crushing Armstrong’s mind inside his skull, raping every thought with obscene distortions, drowning him in his own agonizing insanity. Making him love his own death. Greg hadn’t known he could hate someone that much. But he could do it. For Armstrong, he could do it. No messing. The gland: quavering like a cardiac victim. He waited in a funk of anticipation for the tower to fade from sight, for his thoughts to levitate, liberating him from the confines of his own skull. But there was nothing, only the bitter sense of frustration. ‘Are you sure?’ he hissed back testily. ‘I still can’t sense your mind.’ ‘Sure? Course I’m fucking sure,’ Gabriel raged. The old Gabriel. Fabulous. But why hadn’t his own ability returned? ‘Can you see a Tau line which has us escaping?’ Greg demanded. ‘It’s not like that. Not my usual ability. No Tau lines. There’s only the one vision. Christ, Greg, the whole tower’s just going to blow. Like an atom bomb, or something.’ 402 PETER F. HAMILTON ‘A nuke?’ he asked incredulously. He was picking up on the rising panic pulling at her thorax. He believed without the espersense. An event so powerful it’d burst through the twins’ nullifying blockade. Which meant it was all too real. There was the weirdest tickle at the back of Greg’s throat. He knew if he opened his mouth it would burst out as a giddy laugh. ‘I don’t know,’ Gabriel protested. ‘There’s no details, just a bloody great bang.’ ‘Electron compression,’ Greg said, half to himself. ‘Has to be.’ Doubt rotted the upspring of bold conviction. Philip Evans had been given a warhead once, For one specific task. The American government wouldn’t hand them out like sweets. And yet. . . the original warhead had been intended for Armstrong. Could Julia or Waishaw have got hold of another one from Horace Jepson? They would have to prove Armstrong was still alive, first. Concrete proof. ‘Ellis,’ Greg said excitedly. ‘Lord bless that skinny little fart. He came through.’ But uncertainty still nagged malevolently. Even if Ellis had left details about Armstrong in the Crays, someone had moved bloody fast to mount a strike by tonight. Perhaps it was just a colossal conventional bomb. Julia had Prowlers, maybe she’d got a B5 stashed away somewhere, too. Or a Hades, Or a Tochka. Now that was an interesting way to spend your last half-hour, he mocked himself. See how many tactical weapon systems you can name which could blow you out of existence, At least anything powerful enough to take out the entire tower promised to be quick. Not for Gabriel, though. She had half an hour of mental torment left. Better than being beaten to a pulp for his heroism, or thrashing about in the mud’s ~’-embrace, ‘This attack must mean Armstrong and Kendric aren’t having it all their own way,’ he said with a barely suppressed excitement. ‘Maybe Julia survived. Yeah. And Waishaw interrogated the mole. They’re hitting back, Gabriel.’ Gabriel’s breathing was coming in ragged gasps. ‘But what do we do?’ she whined. MIND$TAN RI$ING 403