“She was there, wasn’t she?” Beckia said with growing admiration. “Somehow. In the apartment when we were looking.”
“Unless she spent last month digging a tunnel, yes,” Oscar said.
Tomansio gave him a certain look. “It’s still cordoned off.”
“Let’s go.”
Their borrowed capsule was parked on the pad outside. Oscar raced past the waitress, feeling only mildly guilty for not leaving a tip.
It took Araminta two cups of tea and half the packet of cookies to work up enough nerve to shove the crate to one side and open the door a fraction. There was no one in the vestibule and no sound from anywhere inside the building as far as she could tell. Outside it was different. The angry shouting was loud. There were thuds as lumps of stone and concrete landed around the paramilitary troops; glass was being smashed constantly. The distinct humming of capsules ebbed and flowed. She strapped on her tool belt, shrugged into a thick fleece jacket to cover it, and headed for the stairwell.
The cordon included a shield reinforcing the broad garage door, which buzzed as if a high-voltage current was running through it. In the dim lighting that pervaded the ramp, Araminta could just see a dull sparkle shimmering off the door’s surface. There was no way she could get out; it would take a good quantity of enhanced explosives to break through. She turned and headed to the other side of the garage, which contained the utilities support area. It was dark inside the first room. Still reluctant to use any power, she fished a flashlight out of her belt and walked between two rows of big tanks. At the far end was a smaller door into the waste-handling room. She’d been in there only a couple of times before to make sure the interface with her new units was compatible.
Bulky, primitive-looking machinery filled most of the space: big metal spheres with lots of piping snaking about between them. Araminta wiggled between a couple of water sanitizer cisterns. Behind them, the side wall was a sheer surface of reinforced enzyme-bonded concrete. Just above her head was a rectangular hole where six feed pipes went outside to connect with the main civic water supply. The gap between the top of the pipes and the edge of the concrete was about half a meter. She clambered up one of the sanitizer cisterns, wincing every time she gripped a hot pipe by mistake. That put her level with the hole. A metal grid covered the far end. Grass and soil were pressed up against it.
Gritting her teeth in determination, she dropped her thick fleece and wormed her head and shoulders into the hole. She still had to stretch to apply the power socket against the grille’s locking bolts. They were stiff from disuse and she was scared of making too much noise with the power socket, but after several minutes of cursing and blinking sweat from her eyes, the grille came loose. Then it took another five minutes of pushing and shoving before the grass and soil gave way. The tool belt had to be discarded before she could claw her way through the uncomfortably claustrophobic gap.
Araminta crawled out onto the narrow strip of grass between the apartment wall and the wooden fence. Blouse torn on snags, skin scratched and bleeding, trouser knees muddy, hair a tangled mess, she was hot, flushed, and sweaty. She glared back at the little hole. I can’t have put on that much weight!
The noise of the crowd was a lot louder. Amplified voices warned them to back off. A capsule slid over the band of sky above her. She quickly pulled her tool belt out of the hole and started using the screwdriver on the fence boards. With three of them unfastened, she could slip through the triangular opening and into an almost identical strip of ground on the other side. The neighboring building was a combination of retail and office units, half of which were unoccupied and available for a low rent. She crept along the side of the building to the waste casket bay at the back. The gates beyond opened onto a thin alley of badly cracked concrete. Someone had left an old jacket on the ledge running along the bay. She pulled it on over her torn blouse and slung the tool belt over her shoulder. Then, taking a breath, she sauntered out into the alley.
Two of Ellezelin’s armor-suited paramilitaries were standing on cordon duty outside the back gate to the apartment block. Araminta ignored them and walked down the alley. Every second she expected a challenge, but it never came. After twenty meters she made a sharp left turn down another alley, taking her out of their view. Then she just kept walking.
After forever he strode through a white jungle. Trees of translucent crystal towered above him, refracting a soft shimmer of pure sunlight, sprouting long white leaves. The undergrowth was thick, with creepers and bushes mangled into dense tangles of silver hues that were impossible to push through. White clouds scudded overhead. A cloying mist wove long swirling streamers around the shiny tree trunks, reducing visibility. White birds darted about, triangles of feathers fluttering fast. White rodents scampered around his booted feet. His boots were clotted with white mud from the steaming loam.
“I know it’s difficult,” said the voice behind the trees. “But you have to choose.”
He longed for color. Darkness, even. But all the jungle offered was faint shadows. Shapes were starting to blur together, losing cohesion. The blazing universe was absorbing him. When he lifted his hands, they were hard to see. White on white. Just looking at them was dizzying.
“You can lose yourself. Lose what is. Lose what you have done. Your life will never have existed. Sometimes I wish I could offer that to myself.”
Then the enemy started to close in. He saw them all around, little flickers of motion darting through the undergrowth. They were waiting for him. He knew it. It was an ambush.
He yelled defiance at them. His biononics unleashed a terrible burst of energy. Clumps of undergrowth disintegrated into kinetic maelstroms. He was thrown from side to side by the sharp leaf and stone fragments swatting against him. Vision was reduced, but still it was all white: in front, on both sides, above, below. White. White. White.
Through it all crept the enemy—malicious, determined, lethal. He blasted away at them, seeing them burn. Powerful white flame consumed them, sending torrents of white smoke into the sky.
Shot after shot was fired into the suffocating uniform whiteness. It began to constrict about him. No matter how violent his energy discharges, they couldn’t penetrate it.
“Help me,” he cried out to the voice. “Take me out of this. I choose. I choose! I remember I chose. I wanted not to happen.”
He no longer could tell which way was up and tumbled through the whiteness. His own screams were loud in his ears as the whiteness slipped and banged against his suit visor. Then he hit something that stopped his headlong rush with a suddenness that knocked the wind from him. There at last was another color; red sparkles of pain danced across his vision as he drew a desperate breath. He closed his eyes, squeezing the lids shut and then blinking them open.
Shards of gray-black rock lay sizzling against the ice, slowly sinking in through the puddles they were creating.
“Shit,” Aaron groaned gloomily. He forced himself onto all fours, then slowly staggered upright.
The whiteout had gotten to him, providing an insidious outlet for the demons churning around his subconscious.
What the hell is inside me? What did I try to cast away?
He shook his head, running a full status check through his biononic systems and reviewing the routines in his macrocellular clusters as well. Cooler air blew into his helmet, allowing him to take some sobering breaths. Looking around, he saw he’d left the field of ice boulders behind. The wind had dropped, leaving just a few flurries of snow skipping through the air. Steam was pushing up out of a dozen craters where his energy shots had vaporized the ice. He could see the serrated crystalline boulders lining the horizon behind him. Exovision superimposed his route, sketching it with simple lines of glowing orange. The ground crawler had been easy to follow through the field, scraping past boulders to leave crumbled shards on the ground or showing where Inigo had simply carved his way through the smaller gaps. Now that they were out on the open top of the glacier, it was hard to tel
l.
Aaron trotted away from the area he’d devastated, circling around it. There was no indication of the ground crawler at all. The thin dusting of ice shifted continually, completely eradicating any sign of the tracks. As he stood and watched, his own footprints were smeared away behind him almost as soon as he made them. There was no residual heat signature. It had been at least six hours since Inigo and Corrie-Lyn had driven out of the boulder field. On this frozen world, their infrared traces would have vanished within twenty minutes.
He had absolutely no way of telling which way they’d gone.
“Fuck it.” There were no options left. His inertial guidance mapped a route back to Jajaani via the Olhava camp, the only route he was sure didn’t have glacier cliffs or other obstacles. Not that he’d ever get there before the planet imploded, he reflected, but if any rescue attempt was going to happen, that would be where the starship landed. It was all he had left. Simply lying down and waiting for the end wasn’t him. Whoever me is.
He started to run again. His biononic energy currents reconfigured to scream a distress signal into the eternal storm.
The local star’s azure spectrum shone brightly on the hull of Mellanie’s Redemption as it dropped out of hyperspace five hundred kilometers above Orakum. Troblum accessed the external sensors, seeing a planet that was essentially the same as every human-settled world in the Greater Commonwealth: blue oceans swathed in puffy white cloud, brown landmasses with a fuzz of green. Its electromagnetic emissions were a lot lower than those of a Central world, reflecting the relatively small population of Advancers and Naturals. It was the kind of world that provided an ideal quiet life. Knowing what he did about Oscar Monroe, Troblum wasn’t at all surprised that the old war hero had chosen this place to settle.
He ordered the starship’s smartcore to enter the atmosphere in full stealth mode. His muscles ached from the crouch position he’d been compressed into for the last ten hours. Even now that he’d finally made some headway into cataloging and arranging the components into distinct piles, the starboard midsection hold was still badly cramped. He was beginning to worry about the assembly process, which was going to require a decent volume to work in. Not that he was anywhere close to starting that yet.
When Mellanie’s Redemption passed through the ionosphere, he went back into the cabin and took a quick spore shower. There were still sore patches on his skin where the medical module had repaired the damage he’d received at Florac’s villa.
“You should put some cream on those,” Catriona told him. The beautiful girl’s curly hair bobbed about as she tilted her head to one side, registering deep concern.
“It doesn’t matter,” he grunted back.
“It matters to us,” Trisha cooed.
Troblum pulled his shabby purple toga suit on, somehow strangely concerned about his dignity in front of the two girls. Having them see him naked was oddly disquieting. Back at the Arevalo apartment they never did, because the daily routines were all perfectly established. He was comfortable with those. But here in the starship’s cabin there was little privacy, and the projectors could throw the images just about everywhere. “Thank you,” he said, hoping it would shut them up. He didn’t want to load in program restrictions, not now that he’d constructed their personalities so perfectly. “I’m all right.” The last seam on the suit fastened, and he straightened himself without wincing.
“What are you going to ask him?” Trisha asked as the starship sank down through the clouds. Far below the fuselage the sensors already had picked out the white circle of the house set in its rambling grounds on the edge of a vast prairie of native vegetation.
“I just want five minutes of his time, that’s all. Then this will all be over.”
Troblum switched the stealth effect off when they were below five hundred meters of altitude. The starship settled on a big patch of level grass where two capsules were parked in the shade of tall red-brown trees. He walked down the airlock stairs, sniffing the faint alien pollen in the air. Two figures were hurrying down the spiral stair that was wrapped around the house’s central pillar. Although he normally hated the countryside, Troblum had to admit the raised house in this bucolic setting was fabulous.
His u-shadow reported pings being aimed at him by the men walking toward him. He responded courteously enough with his identity certificate, praying they wouldn’t send too many queries about him into the unisphere. The Accelerators would be waiting for any giveaway, though even if they confirmed his location, he should be relatively safe from Marius here.
“I’m Dushiku,” the first man said. “Can we help you?”
“Is that really your starship?” the second one asked. He was younger, definitely a Firstlifer. Everything about him leaked eagerness and an endearing naïveté. “It looks fantastic.”
“Thank you.”
“Are those wings?”
“Heat radiators.”
“Oh.”
“Jesaral, enough,” Dushiku chided.
“Sorry.”
“I’d like to speak to Oscar, please,” Troblum said.
Their attitude changed immediately. Dushiku chopped off his gaiafield emissions as his face hardened, and Jesaral allowed a wave of upset and worry to spill out of his mind.
“Oscar is not here,” Dushiku said stiffly.
“Have I said something wrong?”
“No,” Jesaral said. His handsome face frowned in misery. “It’s just that Oscar isn’t very popular around here right now. He left us in a hurry a few days ago. Apparently we don’t mean nearly as much to him as he does to us. That’s always good to know, isn’t it? Poor old Anja is still crying her eyes out.”
Dushiku’s arm went around the younger man’s shoulder, squeezing in comfort. “It’s okay; he’ll be back.”
“Who cares?” Jesaral said with sudden contempt.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?” Troblum asked.
“No.” Dushiku gave him a sharp look. “Do you know him?”
“We have a mutual friend. It is rather important I contact him.”
“His u-shadow is blocking our calls,” Jesaral said. “But don’t let that put you off; you might have better luck.”
“I’ll try that, thank you.”
“Really?” Dushiku said. “Why didn’t you do that originally instead of coming here?”
“I, er …” Troblum’s social program reported that Dushiku was becoming irate and curious and that he should say something soothing. It didn’t say what. “It’s complicated. Where’s he gone?”
“Ask her,” Jesaral said with an effusive glower.
“Who?”
“That Paula Myo character. She was the last of his ‘old friends’ to turn up here unannounced. I didn’t know there were so many of you.”
Troblum stood perfectly still, staring at the now-wary men. That’s a big coincidence. Very big. Why would Paula visit Oscar? And what is he doing now? Could they be working together? I didn’t see him at Florac’s villa.
“Do you know her?” Dushiku asked.
“I know of her. I have to go now.” Troblum turned and made for the airlock ramp.
“Hey!”
“Sorry to have bothered you.”
“What the hell did you want from him?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Who in Ozzie’s universe are you people?”
With the ramp under his feet, Troblum felt a lot safer. He was already ordering the smartcore to power up the drive.
“Give him back to us,” Jesaral yelled. “I want Oscar back. I want my Oscar. You bastard.”
The airlock closed. Mellanie’s Redemption lifted immediately, accelerating hard, only just keeping subsonic. Troblum knew his reaction was ridiculous; Oscar’s lovers didn’t present the remotest threat. Yet he wanted to get away from them fast. The stealth effect shrouded the fuselage in a refractive smear as he reached cloud level. Troblum checked, but there were no sensors probing the sky for him.
; “Well, they were terrifying,” Trisha said contemptuously. She and Catriona were snuggled up together on the cabin’s long couch.
“Worse than the Cat.”
“You were lucky to get out of there alive.”
“Shut up,” Troblum snapped.
Both girls pouted, then turned to each other, pawing and stroking like kittens. Troblum ignored them and slumped into a big chair. He was still shocked by the revelation. Paula Myo had visited Oscar! It was the last thing he’d expected. He let out a small grunt of admiration. That was it. Of course, those two working together would be the last thing anyone would expect.
So what’s he doing for her?
The starship reached four hundred kilometers of altitude. Troblum told it to go FTL and fly ten light-years clear from Orakum.
Oscar’s unisphere code hung in his storage cluster. It was immensely tempting, but since Sholapur he simply didn’t trust the unisphere. Knowing Oscar and Paula were in contact surely gave him some kind of advantage. He just couldn’t think what.
Catriona raised her head and gave him an affectionate look. “So where are we going?”
“Nowhere,” he said, coming to a decision. “I’m going to assemble the ultradrive. After that I’ll do what I can to warn Paula and ANA. At least if it all goes wrong then, I can run.”
Paula hadn’t visited Paris for decades. The city had been reduced considerably since its heyday in the First Commonwealth era. ANA had been as ruthless here as it had everywhere on Earth, pruning away buildings it considered irrelevant. Residual national nostalgia didn’t carry much weight in its hard-nosed analysis. However, the truly historic remained: the Eiffel Tower, of course, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Place de la Concorde. Most of the original buildings along the Seine.
She teleported in from Sky Pier station above Bordeaux, materializing outside the ancient five-story building where she’d spent so many centuries working before the days of ANA and Higher culture. Beside the door, the original brass sign still gleamed against the dull stonework.
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 94