“So, shitbrain, why hasn’t he done any of that already?” Stanyon asked contemptuously.

Kiera put a restraining hand on his leg under the table. He was a good deputy for her, his intimidating strength accounting for a great deal of the obedience she was shown; he also made an excellent replacement for Ross Nash in her bed. However, vast intelligence was not one of his qualities.

“Yes,” she said levelly to Dariat. “Why not?”

“Because we have one key element left to restrain him,” Dariat said. “We can kill him. The hellhawks are armed with enough combat wasps to destroy a hundred habitats. We’re in a deterrence situation. If we fight each other openly, we both die.”

“Openly?” Bonney challenged.

“Yes. Right now, he will be conferring with the Edenist Consensus about methods of reversing possession. And as you know, I’m investigating methods of transferring my personality into the neural strata without him blocking it. That way I could assume control of the habitat and eliminate him at the same time.”

Which isn’t exactly the solution I want, Kiera thought.

“So why don’t you just do it?” Stanyon asked. “Shove yourself in there and fight the bastard on his own ground. Don’t you have the balls for it?”

“The neural strata cells will only accept Rubra’s thought routines. If a thought routine is not derived from his own personality pattern it will not function in the neural strata.”

“But you fucked with the routines before.”

“Precisely. I made changes to what was there, I did not replace anything.” Dariat sighed elaborately, resting his head in his hands. “Look, I’ve been working on this problem for nearly thirty years now. Conventional means were utterly useless against him. Then I thought I’d found the answer with affinity enhanced by this energistic ability. I could have used it to modify sections of the neural strata, force the cells to accept my personality routines. I was exploring that angle when that drunk cretin Ross Nash blew our cover. So we went overt and showed Rubra what we can do; fine, but by doing that we threw away our stealth advantage. He is on his guard like never before. I’ve had enough evidence of that over the last ten hours. If I try to convert a chunk of the neural strata ready to accept me, it drops out of the homogeneity architecture, and he does something to the cells’ bioelectric component, too, which kills them instantly. Don’t ask me what—breaks down the natural chemical regulators, or simply electrocutes them with nerve impulse surges. I don’t know! But he’s blocking me every step of the way.”

“All very interesting,” Kiera said coldly. “What we need to know, however, is can you beat him?”

Dariat smiled, his gaze unfocused. “Yes. I’ll beat him, I feel the lady Chi-ri touching me. There will be a way, and I’ll find it eventually.”

The rest of the council exchanged irritated or worried glances; except for Stanyon who merely gave a disgusted groan.

“Can we take it then, that Rubra does not pose any immediate threat?” Kiera asked. She found Dariat’s devotion to the Starbridge religion with its Lords and Ladies of the realms another indication of just how unstable he was.

“Yes,” Dariat said. “He’ll keep up the attrition, of course. Electrocution, servitor housechimps cracking rocks over your skull; and we’ll have to abandon the tubes and starscraper lifts. It’s an annoyance, but we can live through it.”

“Until when?” Hudson Proctor asked. He was an ex-general Kiera had drafted in to her initial coterie to help plan their takeover strategy. “Rubra is in here with us, and the Edenists are outside. Both of them are doing their damnedest to push us back into the beyond. We have to stop that, we must fight back. I’m damned if I’m prepared to sit here and let them win.” He glanced around the table, buoyed by the level of silent support shown by the council.

“Our hellhawks are easily a match for any voidhawk,” Kiera said. “The Edenists cannot get inside Valisk, all they can do is sit at a safe distance and watch. I don’t consider them a problem at all, let alone a threat.”

“The hellhawks might be as good as a voidhawk in a fight, but what’s to make them stay and guard us?”

“Dariat,” Kiera said, irked at having to defer to him again. But he was the one who’d worked out how to keep the hellhawks loyal to Valisk.

“The souls possessing the hellhawks will help us for as long as we want,” Dariat said. “We have something they ultimately want: human bodies. Rubra’s descendants can all use their affinity to converse with Magellanic Itg’s blackhawks. That means the souls can get out of the hellhawks and into those bodies the same way as they got in. During our takeover we captured enough of Rubra’s descendants to provide each hellhawk possessor with a human body. They’re all stored in zero-tau, waiting.”

“Waiting for what?” Hudson Proctor asked. “This is what gets me. I don’t even know why we’re bothering with this discussion in the first place.”

“What do you suggest we should be doing, then?” Kiera asked.

“The blindingly obvious. Let’s just go. Now! We know we can do it; together we have the power to lift Valisk clean out of this universe. We can create our own universe around us; one with new laws, a place where there’s no empty eternity around us, and where we’re safely sealed off from the beyond. We’ll be safe there, from Rubra, from the Edenists, from everybody. Safe and immortal.”

“Quite right,” Kiera said. Most possessed had only been back for a few hours, but already the urge was growing. To run, to hide from the dreadful empty sky. Enclosed Valisk was better than a planet; but Kiera had hated the starscrapers with their windows showing the naked stars, always reminding her of the beyond. Yes, she thought, we will have to leave that sight eventually. But not yet. There were other, older instincts prising at her thoughts. For when Valisk departed to a universe where anything became possible to every individual, the need for leadership would fade away, lost among the dream of eternal sybaritic life into which they would all fall. Kiera Salter would cease to be anything special. Maybe it was inevitable, but there was no need to rush into it. “What about the threat from ourselves?” she asked them, a high note of curiosity in her voice. As if they’d already solved the obvious problem.

“What threat?” Stanyon asked.

“Think about it. How long are we intending to leave this universe for?”

“I wasn’t planning on coming back,” Hudson Proctor said caustically.

“Me neither. But eternity is rather a long time, isn’t it? And those are the terms we’re going to have to start thinking in nowadays.”

“So?” he demanded.

“So how many people are there in Valisk right now? Stanyon?”

“Close to nine hundred thousand.”

“Not quite nine hundred thousand people. And the purpose of life, or the nearest definition I’ll ever make, is to experience. Experience whatever you can for as long as you can.” She gave the councillors a morbid smile. “That isn’t going to change whatever universe we occupy. As it stands, there aren’t enough of us; not if we want to keep providing ourselves with new and different experiences for all of eternity. We have to have variety to keep on generating freshness, otherwise we’ll just be playing variants on a theme for ever. Fifty thousand years of that, and we’ll be so desperate for a change that we’ll even come back here just for the novelty.” She’d won them; she could see and sense the doubt and insecurity fission in their minds.

Hudson Proctor sat back in his chair and favoured her with a languid smile. “Go on, Kiera, you’ve obviously thought this through. What’s the solution?”

“There are two possibilities. First, we use the hellhawks to evacuate ourselves to a terracompatible world and begin the possession campaign all over again. Personally I’d hate to risk that. Srinagar’s warships might not be able to break into Valisk, but if we tried to land on the planet it would be a shooting gallery. Alternatively, we can play it smart and gather people in to us. Valisk can support at least six or seven million, and that’s without our energistic ability enhancing it. Six million should be enough to keep our society alive and fresh.”