“Do you think . . .”

He trailed off just as Voi burst back into the lounge. She was gripping a maser carbine tight in her hand.

The penthouse’s entrance door swung open. Three people were standing behind it, their features lost in the darkened corridor.

“Do not come in,” Alkad said loudly. “My weapons will work, even against you.”

“Are you quite sure, Doctor?”

Sections of Alkad’s neural nanonics were dropping out. She datavised a primer code at the small sphere she held in her hand before she lost even that ability. “Fairly sure. Do you want to be the first experimental subject?”

“You haven’t changed; you were always so confident you were right.”

Alkad frowned. It was a female voice, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t have the processing power left in her neural nanonics to run an audio comparison program. “Do I know you?”

“You used to. May we come in, please? We really aren’t here to harm you.”

Since when did the possessed start saying please? Alkad thought the circumstances out and said: “It only needs one of you to speak. And if you’re not a threat, stop glitching our electronics.”

“That last request is difficult, but we will try.”

Alkad’s neural nanonics started to come back on-line. She quickly re-established full control over the device.

“I’ll call the police,” Voi datavised. “They can send a Tac Squad. The possessed won’t know until it’s too late.”

“No. If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it by now. I think we’ll hear what she has to say.”

“You shouldn’t expose yourself to a negative personal safety context. You are the only link we have to the Alchemist.”

“Oh, shut up,” Alkad said aloud. “All right, come in.”

The young woman who walked into the penthouse was in her early twenties. Her skin was several shades lighter than Alkad’s, though her hair was jet black, and her face was rounded by a little too much cellulite for her to be pretty; it fixed her expression to one of continual shy resentment. She wore a long tartan-print summer dress, with a kilt-style skirt that had been the fashion on Garissa the year of the genocide.

Alkad ran a visual comparison program search through her memory cells. “Gelai? Gelai, is that really you?”

“My soul, yes,” she said. “Not my body. This is just an illusion, of course.” For a moment the solid mirage vanished, revealing a teenaged Oriental girl with fresh jagged scars on her legs.

“Mother Mary!” Alkad croaked. She’d hoped the tales of torture and atrocity were just Confederation propaganda.

Gelai’s usual profile returned. The flicker of exposure was so fast, it made Alkad’s mind want to believe Gelai’s was the true shape; the abused girl was something decency rejected.

“What happened?” Alkad asked.

“You know her?” Voi demanded indignantly.

“Oh, yes. Gelai was one of my students.”

“Not one of your best, I’m sorry to say.”

“You were doing all right, as I recall.”

“This enhances stress relief nicely,” Voi said. “But you haven’t told us why you’re here.”

“I was killed in the planet-buster attack,” Gelai said. “The university campus was only five hundred kilometres from one of the strikes. The earthquake levelled it. I was in my residence hall when it hit. The thermal flash set half of the building alight. Then the quake arrived; Mary alone knows how powerful it was. I was lucky, I suppose. I died in the first hour. That was reasonably quick. Compared to a lot of them, anyway.”

“I’m so sorry,” Alkad said. She had rarely felt so worthless; confronted by the pitiful evidence of the greatest failure it was possible to have. “I failed you. I failed everybody.”

“At least you were trying,” Gelai said. “I didn’t approve at the time. I took part in all the peace demonstrations. We held vigils outside the continental parliament, sang hymns. But the media said we were cowards and traitors. People actually spat on us in the streets. I kept going, though, kept protesting. I thought if we could just get our government to talk to the Omutans, then the military would stop attacking each other. Mary, how naive.”

“No, Gelai, you weren’t naive, you were brave. If enough of us had stood for that principle, then maybe the government would have tried harder to find a peaceful solution.”

“But they didn’t, did they?”

Alkad traced Gelai’s cheeks with her finger, touching the past she’d thought was so far behind her, the cause of the present. Feeling the ersatz skin was all she needed to know she had been right to do what she’d done thirty years ago. “I was going to protect you. I thought I’d sold my very soul so that you would all be safe. I didn’t care about that. I thought you were worth the sacrifice; all you bright young minds so full of the silliest hopes and proudest ideals. I would have done it, too, for you. Slain Omuta’s star, the biggest crime in the galaxy. And now all that’s left of us are the ones like these.” She waved a hand limply at Voi and Eriba. “Just a few thousand kids living in rocks that mess with their heads. I don’t know which of you suffered the worst fate. At least you had a taste of what our people might have achieved if we’d lived. This new generation are just poor remnants of what they could’ve been.”

Gelai puffed up her lips and stared firmly at the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I came here. Warn you or kill you.”

“And now?”

“I didn’t realize why you were doing it, why you went off to help the military. You were this aloof professor that we were all a bit in awe of, you were so smart. We respected you so much, I never gave you human motives, I thought you were a lump of chilled bitek on legs. I see I was wrong, though I still think you are wrong to have built anything as evil as the Alchemist.”

Alkad stiffened. “How do you know about the Alchemist?”

“We can see this universe from the beyond, you know. It’s very faint, but it’s there. I watched the Confederation Navy trying to get people off Garissa before the radiation killed them. I’ve seen the Dorados, too. I even saw you a few times in Tranquillity. Then there are the memories that we tear from each other. Some soul I encountered knew about you. Perhaps it was more than one, I don’t know. I never kept count; you don’t, not when you do that hundreds of times a day. So that’s how I know what you built, although no one knows what it is. And I’m not the only one, Doctor; Capone knows about it too, and quite a few other possessed.”

“Oh, Mother Mary,” Alkad groaned.

“They’ve shouted into the beyond, you see. Promised every soul bodies if they cooperated in finding you.”

“You mean the souls are watching us now?” Voi asked.

Gelai smiled dreamily. “Yes.”

“Fuck!”

Mzu glanced at the penthouse’s door, which was closed on Gelai’s two companions. “How many possessed are on Nyvan?”

“Several thousand. It will belong to us within a week.”

“That doesn’t leave us much time,” Alkad said.

Voi and Eriba were starting to look panic-stricken.

“Forget the Alchemist,” Voi said heatedly. “We must get ourselves outsystem.”

“Yes. But we have a few days grace. That gives us time to be certain about our escape, we can’t afford a mistake now. We’ll charter a ship as we always intended; Opia’s service subsidiary can do that for us. But I don’t think there will be enough time to have the carrier built. Ah well, if it comes to it, we can always load the Alchemist onto a combat wasp.”

“You can fit it on a combat wasp?” Voi was suddenly intrigued. “Just how big is it?”

“You don’t need to know.”

The tall girl scowled.

“Gelai, will you warn us if any of the possessed come close?”

“Yes, Doctor, we’ll do that much. For a couple of days anyway, just while you find a ship. Are you really going to use the Alchemist after all this time?”

“Yes, I am. I’ve never been as sure about it as I am now.”