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Overview
Devastated by her husband’s death, Earth-based biologist Yoshiko Sunadomari journeys to the paradise world of Fulgar to see her estranged son in the hope of bridging the gulf between them. But Tetsuo is in trouble. His expertise in mu-space technology and family links with the mysterious Pilots have ensured his survival — so far. Now he’s in way over his head — unwittingly caught up in a conspiracy of illegal tech-trafficking and corruption, and in the sinister machinations of one of Fulgar’s ruling elite: the charismatic Luculentus, Rafael Garcia de la Vega. When his home is attacked, Tetsuo flees to the planet’s unterraformed wastes, home to society’s outcasts and eco-terrorists. So Yoshiko arrives on Fulgar to discover Tetsuo gone ... and wanted for murder. Ill at ease in this strange, stratified new world seething with social and political unrest but desperate to find her son and clear his name, she embarks on a course of action that will bring her face to face with the awesome, malevolent mind of Rafael.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781591028154 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Start Publishing Llc |
| Publication date: | 10/29/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 501 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
To Hold INFINITY
By JOHN MEANEY
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2006
John Meaney
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-489-7
Chapter One Winter rain falling, Icy thunder shaking cedars; No baby cries.
Dark clouds, tinged with eerie yellow, rolled over Hokkaido's majestic peaks. The island sternly frowned upon the sombre, swelling Pacific waves. As salt spray spattered Yoshiko's face, her fingers tightened on the cold safety rail.
Ken's grave. She hoped the children-no, Akira was thirty-five, his wife the same-would they give Ken's grave the care it needed, while she was gone?
Oh, Ken.
She should have planted that micro-maple.
Wind buffeted her small body and she stepped unsteadily backwards, the wet deck slippery beneath her feet. Though she looked like a forty-year-old athlete-her age held at bay by bushido discipline and femtocyte telomere-repair-inside, her full sixty years lay heavily upon her.
"Mother?" Akira's voice was almost lost upon the wind.
He stood with Kumiko, his wife, dutifully behind the fluorescent orange holo-ribbon which demarcated the embarkation strip. Kumiko's porcelain-pale face seemed almost to float in the eldritch prestorm light.
At their feet, a harnessed lynxette crouched, tufted ears laid flat.
The other passengers, some thirty people, were shuffling across the metal deck towards the boarding-ramp. Above them, the silver-white orbital shuttle hovered, poised like a hawk above the restless waves.
"He didn't reply," said Yoshiko, "to my last h-mail."
"He'll be there. With acceptance tests and only one small gateway, the infoflow to Fulgor is massive right now. Personal h-mail has no chance."
Full connection of Fulgor's Skein to EveryWare-the interwoven NetEnvs of fifty worlds, including Earth-was imminent. In the skewed topology of commerce, Skein was fast becoming civilization's heart. It was technically superior, the heart of Fulgor's previously isolationist economy. Akira had explained all this.
"If you say so." Yoshiko's voice was soft.
Tetsuo. If you wanted to, you would surely have found a way.
The boarding chime sounded, oddly flat.
Yoshiko picked up her narrow carry-case from the deck. It was two and a half metres long, the one item she had not entrusted to a smartcart.
Akira and Kumiko bowed, the precision of that gesture a token of their love.
Yoshiko made her way to the other passengers.
Most were middle-aged Terrans, finely dressed in comparison to Yoshiko's plain jumpsuit. A few children. Among the crowd, a trio of tall, pale people-the tallest humans Yoshiko had ever seen-stood out. Silver light glittered from the fine headgear twisted through their hair.
Luculenti.
She wondered what they had been doing on Earth.
As she watched them-they appeared to be conversing without words, changing expressions flickering across their features-she wondered at their height and slender strength. Natural genetic drift, under offworld conditions?
Maybe. But Yoshiko's professional instinct was aroused. She suspected semilegal morphing femtocytes. Fulgor had only been settled for two centuries.
She drifted closer.
The Luculenta woman held her head close to her male companion. Yoshiko looked at her sculpted coiffure, interwoven with silver fibres. Did the headgear ever get caught in things? Did it hurt?
"-children's nexus ware." The Luculentus man had switched to speech. "A stability other cultures lack, don't you think?"
His patrician accent stiffened Yoshiko's spine.
"Awful conditions," the man added, looking around. "Local colour, I suppose."
The third of the Luculenti, a crimson-haired teenage girl, looked embarrassed.
"Temporary facilities, I believe," said the Luculenta woman soothingly.
Yoshiko smiled inwardly. Perhaps, truly, the outdoor platform and the long wait were not what a Luculentus was used to.
Everyone shuffled closer to the ramp. A child's laughter rang out.
Above, the sky was darkening quickly.
Suddenly, white and purple lightning spat, and the shuttle's wings flashed white. Torrential rain began to fall in silver sheets, crashing upon the metal deck.
There was a visceral crash of thunder.
Yoshiko took her place on the boarding-ramp's moving strip. She looked back through the near-metallic haze at Akira's forlorn figure. Kumiko must have taken the lynxette below.
The ramp lurched, and stopped.
Yoshiko grabbed for the rail but a strong young hand grasped her arm, steadying her. The Luculenta girl, crimson hair turned purple by the rain and plastered against her headgear.
"It's kind of fun, isn't it?" The girl shouted above the torrent's roar. "The storm, I mean."
Yoshiko looked around at the other passengers. Their shoulders were hunched, their faces pinched and miserable. The rain was implacable.
Yoshiko laughed.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, it is."
Until this moment, she had moved in a daze, coerced by friends and family to take this trip. They were worried, she knew, about the black depression hanging over her since Ken's death. But suddenly, right now, she saw that this journey was right. Something she had to do.
Buffeted by wind and rain, she walked up the stalled ramp with the Luculenta girl at her side.
At the hatchway, where a steward was ushering people in, she looked back. Akira was gone, and she felt the old darkness pressing at her again.
The hardwood sheath at her waist, tucked inside her jumpsuit, dug into her like guilt. The tanto dagger was legal. It was also the samurai woman's traditional suicide weapon.
No one bowed farewell to her.
Storm-rain fell, sweeping chaos across the deck, as pitiless and inevitable as death.
In the darkness, twigs snagged his headgear, and leaves scrunched under foot. His skin crawled. He pictured wriggling insectoids, dropping from the night-bound branches.
Forest. Wilderness.
Rafael Garcia de la Vega despised it.
He blinked his smartfilmed eyes twice, stepping up the gain. The moonlight scarcely penetrated the shadows. He double-blinked again, to extend the frequency range.
Tiny heat-sparks of life, everywhere. Rafael shuddered.
If Marianan were alive he could have done this remotely, through Skein-though he had not risked such a thing before.
But she was dead. Offline. If he wanted her, he had to have her physical remains.
His ankles ached.
Rustling sounds. Ignore.
He pushed through undergrowth, pulled aside a fernlike frond.
Sloping below, a long meadow, pale silver in the moonlight. Beyond, a crystal villa, its peach and orange radiance spilling out into the night. Faint strains of swirling music.
By the villa, a tower pointed like a bony finger towards the alpha moon.
Hidden by the hated forest, he crouched, afraid to leave its cover.
Marianan.
Down there, she waited for him. The sweet decaying fragments of her once-ripe soul.
Laughter rose inside him. What good was the game, without attendant risk?
He stepped out into the open.
Slowly, heart thumping, he moved down the grassy slope. Stars wavered and broke apart above him, their light scattered by his drifting smartatom film, his protection from SatScan surveillance.
Drenched with chill sweat, he stepped over a low stone wall, and crouched beneath ornate topiary.
Cut-off point.
He knelt, scanning with enhanced vision, slipping into control interface with the smartatom lattice hovering above him.
No scan-systems flared. No EM pulses tore his smartatoms apart.
The Ortegas were fools. This far from a city, and no security. Hardly a worthy challenge.
He slipped past a raven-shaped hedge. A woman's laughter rang out as he crossed a patio through a pool of light. He could hear men's voices, the clink of glasses.
Enjoy the party.
Something-
He stepped into darkness and froze.
Slowly, he raised his arm, activating the silver bracelet round his wrist.
A small feline shadow slipped across the lawn. A pet. A parasite. Rafael aimed the bracelet-then lowered it.
It wasn't worth spoiling this moment of communion.
A white marble archway led to the family shrines. They beckoned him, as surely as Marianan's pale flawless skin had attracted him in life.
He remembered: bare white shoulders, copper hair, amethyst-beaded headpiece, copper eyes. He had met her just once, at the Perigee Fair, and known immediately that she must be his.
But she had died, in a tragic flyer accident. No one had invited Rafael to the funeral.
No matter. She waited for him, still.
He moved, almost gliding, between two vast and overdecorated family mausoleums. Past a tasteless tomb, its passé holo hypersphere shining brightly.
Marianan's grave, he noted with relief, was simple and classical. A herb-scented candle-real, not holo-flickered before the shrine. Reflected flame danced upon the small crystal dome.
Rafael knelt on the damp-smelling soil. He lifted the dome, and reverently set it aside.
The cylinder, now revealed, was icy silver, trapped by moonlight and candlelight. Marianan's plexcore, offline.
The dead Luculenta's shattered soul awaited him.
Slowly, exquisitely slowly, he dug his fingers into the soil, and felt for the button's indentation like a lover's secret core.
He pressed inwards.
Inside the cylinder, unfocussed thoughts and memories burgeoned as the plexcore powered up. Though her fragile organic brain was decomposing with the rest of her bloated corpse, buried in the soil below, the torn half of Marianan's mind which lay not in organic substrates would soon be his.
Devoid of senses, remembering death, trapped within the activating plexcore, the half-sentient mind-fragments must be tearing themselves apart in pain and confusion.
Don't worry, my sweet. Release is at hand.
Rafael closed his eyes.
[[[(HeaderBegin: Module = Node 12A3.33Q8: Type = QuaternaryHyperCode: Axes = 256 Concurrent_Execute ThreadOne: Shuddering, he loosed his vampire code. Burning claws raked his brain, scraped his spine, hooked into his nerves and slowly drew them apart. He gasped and shivered at the cold wash of plexcore ware flooding into his cache, filling his torso-implants. Too much. Keep control. He had to contain the torn remnants of Marianan's mind, hold back from integration, until he was safely home. "Tarfus?" A deep shudder passed through Rafael. "Come on, boy. Let's get you in for supper." Control. Control, damn it. The woman's voice was uncultured. Not Luculenta. Calling the damned feline, as though it couldn't hunt smaller vermin by itself. Rafael straightened up, forced a straight face despite the dark hunger roiling his guts, and stepped out into the light cast by a large window. "Oh!" The serving-maid jumped. The gold and purple feline in her arms spat, baring teeth. "I beg your pardon," said Rafael, turning on his most disarming smile. "I didn't mean to startle you. I was just out for some fresh air." "That's all right, sir," said the Fulgida maid, bobbing a short curtsy. "I'm sorry." Rafael stepped aside, and gestured for her to pass. Fulgida, not Luculenta. Without true Skein access, and the means to identify him. As he waved the woman by, he aimed his bracelet, with its load of soluble toxic darts, at her throat. The feline hissed. "Be nice, Tarfus." The maid's eyes were troubled. "He's beautiful," said Rafael. "Gorgeous coat. And those eyes." The maid blushed slightly. She cradled the feline more tightly, and carried him into the villa. "Good night," called Rafael softly, and lowered his arm, deactivating the bracelet. His heart was pounding. Chaos was mounting, pulsing and burning, inside his implanted cache. Control. Trembling, holding his plundered soul-fragments tightly within himself, Rafael retraced his steps, past shrines and mausoleums, out into the dark and pregnant night. (Continues...)
Excerpted from To Hold INFINITY by JOHN MEANEY Copyright © 2006 by John Meaney. Excerpted by permission.
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