The Night's Dawn Trilogy Read Free Page B

prepared.
    “Wouldn’t you feel guilty?” she asked irritably. She didn’t want to talk, but she didn’t want to be silent either.
    “Yes. But not as much as you. You’re taking the blame for the entire conflict. You shouldn’t do that. Both of us, all of us,
     everyone on the planet, we’re all being propelled by fate.”
    “How many despots and warlords have said that down the centuries, I wonder?” she retorted.
    His face managed to be sad and sympathetic at the same time.
    Alkad relented, and took his hand. “But thank you for coming with me, anyway. I don’t think I could stand the navy people
     by myself.”
    “It will be all right, you know,” he said softly. “The government isn’t going to release any details, least of all the name
     of the inventor.”
    “I’ll be able to walk straight back into the job, you mean?” she asked. There was too much bitterness in her voice. “As if
     nothing had happened?” She knew it wouldn’t happen that way. Intelligence agencies from half the governments in the Confederation
     would find out who she was, if they hadn’t already. Her fate wouldn’t be decided by any cabinet minister on politically insignificant
     Garissa.
    “Maybe not nothing,” he said. “But the university will still be there. The students. That’s what you and I live for, isn’t
     it? The real reason we’re here, protecting all that.”
    “Yes,” she said, as if uttering the word made it fact. She looked out of the window. They were close to the equator here,
     Garissa’s sun bleaching the sky to a featureless white glare. “It’s October back there now. The campus will be knee deep in
     featherseeds. I always used to think that stuff was a bloody great nuisance. Whoever had the idea of founding an African-ethnic
     colony on a world that’s three-quarters temperate zones?”
    “Now that’s a tired old myth, that we have to be limited to tropical hellholes. It’s our society which counts. In any case,
     I like the winters. And you’d bitch if it was as hot as this place the whole year round.”
    “You’re right.” She gave a brittle laugh.
    He sighed, studying her face. “It’s their star we’re aiming for, Alkad, not Omuta itself. They’ll have a chance. A good chance.”
    “There are seventy-five million people on that planet. There will be no light, no warmth.”
    “The Confederation will help. Hell, when the Great Dispersal was at its peak, Earth was deporting over ten million people
     a week.”
    “Those old colony-transport ships have gone now.”
    “Earth’s Govcentral is still kicking out a good million a week even now; and there are thousands of military transports. It
     can be done.”
    She nodded mutely, knowing it was all hopeless. The Confederation couldn’t even get two minor governments to agree to a peace
     formula when we both wanted it. What chance has the Assembly got trying to coordinate grudgingly donated resources from eight
     hundred and sixty disparate inhabited star systems?
    The sunlight pouring through the mess window deepened to a sickly red and started to fade. Alkad wondered woozily if the Alchemist
     was already at work on it. But then the stimulant programs steadied her thoughts, and she realized she was in free fall, her
     cabin illuminated by a weak pink-tinged emergency light. People were floating around her.
Beezling
’s crew, murmuring in quiet worried tones. Something warm and damp brushed against her cheek, sticking. She brought her hand
     up instinctively. A swarm of dark motes swam across her field of view, glistening in the light. Blood!
    “Peter?” She thought she was shouting his name, but her voice seemed very faint. “Peter!”
    “Easy, easy.” That was a crew-member. Menzul? He was holding her arms, preventing her from bouncing around the confined space.
    She caught sight of Peter. Two more crew were hovering over him. His entire face was encased by a medical nanonic package
     which looked like a sheet of