Most of the starship systems were powered down. He kept his SII suit on as he moved through the two darkened lower decks to the bridge. As soon as he was secured in the captain’s acceleration couch he accessed the flight computer and ordered a full status review.

It could have been a lot better. Tigara was in the maintenance bay for a complete refit. One of the fusion generators was inoperative, two energy patterning nodes were dead, heat exchangers were operating dangerously short of required levels, innumerable failsoft components had been allowed to decay below their safety margins.

None of the maintenance work had even been started. The owners hadn’t been prepared to commit that much money while the quarantine was in force.

Dear Lord, Erick thought, the Villeneuve’s Revenge was in better condition than this.

He datavised the flight computer to disengage the bay’s airlock tube, then initiated a flight prep procedure. The Tigara took a long time to come on-line. At every stage he had to order backup sequences to take over, or override safety programs, or re-route power supplies. He didn’t even bother with the life-support functions, all he wanted was power in the energy patterning nodes and secondary drive tubes.

With a fusion generator active, he ordered some sensor clusters to deploy. An image of the bay filled his mind, overlaid with fragile status graphics. He scanned the electromagnetic spectrum for any traffic, but there was only the background hash of cosmic radiation. Nobody was saying anything to anybody. What he wanted was someone asking Ethenthia what was happening, why they’d gone off the air. A ship close by that could help.

Nothing.

Erick fired the emergency release pins which the docking cradle’s load clamps were gripping. Verniers sent out a hot deluge of gas which shimmered across the bay’s walls, shaking loose blankets of thermal insulation from the gantries. Tigara rose a metre off its cradle, straining at the nest of umbilical hoses jacked into its rear fuselage. The snapfree couplings began to break, sending the hoses writhing.

The starship was low on cryogenic fuel; he couldn’t afford to waste delta-V reserve aligning himself on an ideal vector. The astrogration program produced a series of options for him.

None of them were what he’d been hoping for. So what else was new?

The last of the umbilicals broke, and the Tigara lurched up out of the bay. Erick ordered the flight computer to extend the communications array and align it on Golmo and the Edenist habitats orbiting there. Sensor clusters began to sink down into their recesses as energy poured into the patterning nodes.

The flight computer alerted him that an SD platform was sweeping the ship with its radar. Then it relayed a signal from traffic control into his neural nanonics.

“Is that you, Erick? We think it’s you. Who else is this stupidly ballsy? This is Emonn Verona, Erick, and I’m asking you: Don’t do it. That ship is completely fucked; I’ve got the CAB logs in front of me. It can’t fly. You’re only going to hurt yourself, or worse.”

Erick transmitted a single message to Golmo, then retracted the communications array down into its jump configuration. The SD platform had locked on. Some of the patterning nodes were producing very strange readings in the prejump diagnostic run-through. CAB monitor programs flashed up jump proscription warnings. He switched them off.

“Game over, Erick. Either return to the docking bay or you join our comrades in the beyond. You don’t want that. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Right? Of all people, you must believe that.”

Erick ordered the flight computer to activate the jump sequence.

The hellhawk Socratous was a flat V-shaped mechanical spacecraft with a grey-white fuselage made up from hundreds of different component casings, a veritable jigsaw of mismatched equipment, not all of it astronautic. Two long engine nacelles were affixed to the stern, transparent tubes filled with a heavy opaque gas which fluoresced its way through the spectrum in a three-minute cycle.

It was an impressive sight as it slid down out of the starfield for a landing on Valisk’s docking ledge. Had it been real, it would be capable of taking on an entire squadron of Confederation Navy ships with its exotic weapons.

The illusion popped as a crew bus rolled across the ledge towards it. Socratous reverted to a muddy-brown egg-shape with a crew toroid wrapped around its midsection. Rubra could just see two small ridges on the rear quarter which hadn’t been there before. They corresponded roughly with the nacelles of the fantasy starship. He wondered if the tumours would be benign. Did the energistic ability prevent metastasis from exploding inside possessed bodies as the wished-for changes became less illusion and cells multiplied to obey the will of the dominant soul? It seemed an awfully complex requirement for such a crude power, modifying the molecular structure of DNA and taming the mitosis process. The apparent milieux of their energistic ability was blasting holes through solid walls and contorting matter into new shapes; he’d never seen any demonstrations of subtlety.

Perhaps the whole possession problem would burn itself out in an orgy of irreversible cancer. Few of the returned souls were content with the physical appearance of the bodies they had claimed.

How superbly ironic, Rubra thought, that vanity could be the undoing of entities who had acquired near-godlike powers. It was also a dangerous prospect, once they realized what was happening. Those people remaining free would become even more valuable, the attempts to possess them ever more desperate. And Edenism would be the last castle to besiege.

He decided not to mention the prospect to the Kohistan Consensus. It was another small private advantage; no one else in the Confederation had such a unique and extensive vantage point of the possessed and their behaviour as him. He wasn’t sure if he could exploit the knowledge, but he wasn’t going to give it away until he was certain.

A sub-routine of his principal personality was designated to observe the aberrant melanomata and carcinomas developing on the possessed inside the habitat. If the growths turned malignant the current situation would change drastically right across the Confederation.

The crew bus had left the Socratous to trundle back across the ledge. Kiera and about forty of her cronies were flocking into a reception lounge. When the bus docked, it disgorged about thirty-five Deadnight kids. Eager besotted youngsters with red handkerchiefs worn proudly around their ankles and wonder in their eyes that they’d reached the promised land after so much difficulty.

Damn it, you have to stop these flights,rubra complained to the Kohistan Consensus. That’s nearly two thousand victims this week. There must be something you can do.

We really cannot interdict every hellhawk flight. Their objective does not affect the overall balance of strategic events, and is relatively harmless.

Not to these kids it isn’t!

Agreed. But we cannot be everyone’s keeper. The effort and risk involved in arranging clandestine rendezvous to pick up the Deadnights is disproportionate to the reward.

In other words, as long as the hellhawks are busy with this, they can’t cause much trouble elsewhere.

Correct. Unfortunately.

And you used to call me a heartless bastard.

Everybody is suffering from the effects of possession. Until we discover a solution to the entire problem, all we can hope for is to reduce it to an absolute minimum wherever possible.

Right. I’d like to point out that when Kiera reaches the magic number, it’s me who is going to be the one suffering.