The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “So now what?” the Delivery Man asked.

  “Find a haystack, then start searching for its needle.”

  The Delivery Man deliberately didn’t glare at the gold-faced man sitting in the shell chair opposite him. There was no point. “This planet is bigger than Earth,” he read from his exovision displays. “Surface area nearly eighty million square miles. That’s a lot of land to search with any degree of thoroughness.”

  “What makes you think it’s on land?”

  “Okay, what makes you think it’s even here? Was that in the summary? The Anomine had settled in eight other star systems that we know of.”

  “And they’re all deserted. That’s a goddamn fact. They came back here, every type of them. Another dumbass pilgrimage. This is where they elevated from.”

  “Oh, Great Ozzie,” the Delivery Man moaned. “You don’t know, do you? You’ve no bloody idea. You’re hoping. That’s all. Hoping there’s an answer here.”

  “I’m applying logic.”

  The Delivery Man wanted to beat his fists on the chair. But it wouldn’t be any use, not even as emotional therapy. He’d been committed from the moment he left Gore’s asteroid. “All right. But you must have some idea how to find the damn thing, right?”

  “Again, we’re going to apply logic. First we perform a complete low-orbit mapping flight and scan every inch of the place for exotic activity or gravity fluctuations, power generation, quantum anomalies—anything out of the ordinary.”

  “But that’ll take …”

  “Several days, yes.”

  “And if we don’t find anything?”

  “Go down and talk to the natives, see what they can tell us.”

  “But they’re an agrarian civilization, human equivalent to the mid-nineteenth century. They’re not going to know about machines that can turn you into an angel.”

  “They have legends; we know that. They’re proud of their history. The navy cultural anthropology team did some good work. We can even talk to them direct. And they’re more advanced than our nineteenth century—that I do remember from the files. Not that the comparison is entirely valid.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  Gore gave the briefest of nods and issued orders to the smartcore.

  “Why did you bring me?” the Delivery Man asked. “You and the ship can handle this.”

  “Backup,” Gore said flatly. “I might need help at some point. Who knows?”

  “Great.”

  “Get yourself some rest, son. You’ve been wired tight for days now.”

  The Delivery Man admitted he was too tired and edgy to argue. He went over to his private cubicle and rolled onto the small but luxurious cot that expanded out of the bulkhead. He didn’t expect to sleep. He was still wound up tight about Lizzie and the children. The ship’s TD link to the unisphere remained connected, so he could access all the news from back home.

  High Angel had arrived at the Sol system. After six hours Qatux had diplomatically announced to the President that there was nothing the huge arkship could do. The force field the Accelerators’ Swarm had deployed was too strong to break with any weapon they had.

  After switching through several ill-informed news shows, the Delivery Man fell into a troubled sleep.

  Corrie-Lyn woke up with a start, disoriented and unsure what had hauled her up out of such a deep sleep. She glanced around the small darkened cabin, listening intently, but there was nothing. Sometimes the Lindau’s poor battered systems would produce odd sounds. Pipes gurgled and bubbled, and the servicebots hammered away as they worked through their repair schedule; then there was that one time when she swore she’d heard the hull itself creak. But tonight it was silent aside from the constant hum of power, which was vaguely reassuring even though it shouldn’t be that loud. At least they still had power.

  Inigo stirred briefly beside her, and she smiled down gently at him. It was so good to have him back, physically as well as emotionally. Even though he wasn’t quite the messiah of yore, he was still her Inigo, concerned about different things now but still as determined and focused as before. She felt so much happier now that he was here to help, despite still being unable to escape Aaron.

  The name acted like some kind of recognition key. He was why she’d woken. Her mind was abruptly aware of the turmoil bubbling out from the agent’s gaiamotes. There were images her own brain instinctively tried to shut out, repulsive sensations of pain—not direct impulses but memories of suffering that verged on nauseous, but worst of all were the emotions of guilt and fear that bridged the gap between them, plunging her into his nightmare of darkness and torment. She was suffocating in some giant cathedral where men and women were being sacrificed on a crude pagan altar. She was standing behind the high priest as the curved dagger was raised again. Screams blasted out from those awaiting an identical fate as the blade flashed down, then rose again, dripping with blood. The figure in the white robe turned, and it wasn’t a male priest. She smiled gleefully, the front of her robe soaked in scarlet blood, making the fabric cling obscenely to her body, emphasizing breasts and hips.

  “You don’t leave me,” she explained as the smile widened. Lips parted to reveal fangs that grew and grew as the cathedral faded away. There was only darkness and her. The robe was gone now; blood glistened across her skin. The mouth opened wider, then wider still; there was no face anymore, only teeth and blood. “Come back where you belong.”

  He wanted to scream, joining the clamor kicked up by the others lost somewhere out there in the impenetrable blackness. But when he opened his mouth, blood poured in, filling his lungs, drowning him. Every muscle shook in the terrible struggle to be free, to be free of her, of what she’d made him do.

  “It’s all right, son,” a new, soothing voice chimed in. “Let me help you.”

  A soft irresistible force closed around his body, solidifying, immobilizing him. He stopped gagging for breath as bright red laser fans swept across the darkness, quickly arranging themselves into a spiral web with his head in the center. They contracted sharply, sending light pouring into his brain. Pain soared to unbelievable heights—

  “Yech!” Corrie-Lyn shook her head violently, closing off her gaiamotes. The sickening sensations vanished. Now she heard a sound, a muffled yell from the captain’s cabin on the opposite side of the narrow companionway. “Sweet Lady,” she grunted. No mind could survive that kind of psychological torment for long, not and remain sane and functional. She stared at the cabin door, fearful he would come bursting through, his weapon enrichments activated. But he didn’t. There were another couple of defiant cries and then some whimpering like an animal being soothed before silence claimed the starship again.

  Corrie-Lyn let out a long breath, seriously alarmed by how great the threat of him going completely insane had become. Her skin was coated in cold sweat. She pulled the tangle of quilts off herself and wriggled over to the ablution alcove. Taking care to be quiet so she didn’t wake Inigo, she slowly sponged herself down with a mild-scented soap. It cooled her skin, leaving her feeling a little better. Nothing she could do about the sensations crawling along the inside of her skin—the residual shock of the dream.

  If that’s what it is.

  It was all a little too coherent for comfort. Not a brain naturally discharging its accumulated experiences orchestrated by the peaks of lingering emotion, the way humans were designed to cope with everyday experiences. These were like broken memories pushing up from whatever dark zone of the psyche they’d been imprisoned in. “What in Honious did they do to you?” she murmured into the gloomy cabin.

  The next morning the servicebots had finished tailoring some of the fresh clothes as she’d instructed. “Not bad,” Inigo said admiringly as she pulled on the navy tunic with shortened sleeves. She grinned as she wiggled into a pair of tunic trousers. They were tight around her hips. “Not bad at all.”

  “I need some breakfast first,” she told him with a grin. The one—and only—advantage of the
ir weird imprisonment was the amount of time alone they could spend catching up.

  They held hands as they went into the lounge. Inigo of course used the culinary unit to prepare some scrambled eggs and smoked haddock. She delved into the pile of luxury supplies the crew had stored on board. The only thing the unit made that she could force down was the drinks, and that was pretty much limited to tea and tomato juice, neither of which was a firm favorite. She tucked into a mix of toffee banana cake and dried mortaberries, gulping the tea down quickly so she could convince herself the taste was Earl Grey, albeit with milk and strawberry jam.

  Aaron came in and helped himself to his usual poached egg and smoked salmon. Without a word, he shuffled himself into his broken chair almost at the other end of the lounge.

  “Who is she?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The high priestess or whatever she was. The one with all the blood. The one that scares you utterly shitless.”

  Aaron stared at her for a long time. For once, Corrie-Lyn wasn’t intimidated. “Well?” she asked. “You shared last night.”

  It wasn’t embarrassment—she suspected he was incapable of that—but he did lower his gaze. “I don’t know,” he said eventually.

  “Well, you must—” She stopped, took a breath. “Look, I’m actually not trying to needle you. If you must know, I’m worried.”

  “About me? Don’t be.”

  “Nobody can take that kind of punishment night after night and not have it affect them. I don’t care what you’ve got enriched and improved and sequenced into every cell. That kind of crap is toxic.”

  “And yet here I am each morning, functioning perfectly.”

  “Seventeen hours ago,” Inigo said.

  “What?”

  “You were supposed to be on the bridge monitoring the ship. You actually slipped into the reverie. I felt it.”

  “My operational ability is unimpaired.”

  “It’s being undermined,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Can’t you see that? Or is it that you just can’t admit it?”

  “I can help,” Inigo said.

  “No.”

  “You have instructions for just about every eventuality,” Inigo said. “Is there one for your own breakdown?”

  “There is nothing wrong with me a bit of hush in the morning won’t fix. A man likes to break his fast in goodly contemplative silence.”

  “Contemplate this: If you go gaga, how are we going to reach Ozzie?”

  Aaron grinned contentedly. “You want to?”

  “Yes,” Inigo said with great seriousness. “I don’t know who programmed you, but I think they might be right about getting the two of us together.”

  “Now, ain’t that something; progress at last.”

  “The only thing that can stop us reaching the Spike now is you,” Corrie-Lyn said.

  “I imagine that if bits of me start to fall off, I will …” He stopped, the humor fading from his face.

  “Suicide?” Inigo supplied.

  Aaron was staring at a point on the bulkhead, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. “No,” he said. “I’d never do such an unrighteous thing. I’m not that weak.” Then he frowned and glanced over at Corrie-Lyn. “What?”

  “Oh, Lady,” Inigo grunted.

  Corrie-Lyn was fascinated, suspecting that the real Aaron had surfaced, if only for a moment. “You’re not going to make it,” she said flatly.

  “We’ve got barely two days to go until we reach the Spike,” Aaron said. “I can hold myself together for that kind of time scale. Trust and believe me on that.”

  “Nonetheless, it would be prudent for you to load some kind of emergency routine into the smartcore,” Inigo suggested.

  “I can match that; in fact, I can top it in a big way on the survival stakes. I would strongly suggest, now that you’ve figured out I’m not on the side of harming you and that you and the great Ozzie are going to be best buddies standing before the tsunami of evil, you think about how to stop the Void.”

  “It can’t be stopped,” Inigo said. “It simply is. This I know. I have observed it from Centurion Station, and I have personally felt the thoughts emanating within. Out of all of humanity, I know this. So believe me when I tell you that if you want to exist in the same universe, you have to find a way around it. Our best bet would be to turn around and ask the High Angel to take us to another galaxy.”

  Aaron drank some of his coffee. “Someone thinks differently,” he said, unperturbed. “Someone still believes in you, Dreamer; someone believes you can truly lead us to salvation. How about that? Your real following is down to one: me. And for now I’m the only one that counts.”

  They began to feel the Spike’s wierd mental interference while they were still a day and a half out. At first it was nothing but a mild sensation of euphoria, which was why they didn’t notice at first. Corrie-Lyn had cut down on her drinking, but there were still some seriously good bottles cluttering up the crew’s personal stores. Be a shame to waste them. A couple—the Bodlian white and the Guxley Mountain green—were reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. Definitely a shame. Especially as there was nothing else to do on board ship.

  So in the afternoon she’d gotten a bot to make up, or rather unmake, a semiorganic shirt so that just a couple of buttons held the front together. Satisfied the end product was suitably naughty, she stripped off and stepped into the ablution alcove. While she was in the shower, the bot also remade a thick wool sweater into a long robe; it was scratchy on her arms, but what the Honious.

  She’d left Inigo in the lounge reviewing astronomical data on the Void. Now he hurried to their cabin when she called him, saying something important had happened.

  “What is it?” he asked as the door parted. Then he stopped, surprised and then intrigued by the low lighting and the three candles flickering on nearly horizontal surfaces. The culinary unit might be rubbish at food, but it could still manage wax easily enough.

  Corrie-Lyn gave him a sultry look and ordered the door to close behind him. He saw the bottle of Bodlian and the two long-stemmed glasses she was holding in one hand.

  “Ah.” His gaiamotes emitted a simultaneous burst of nerves and interest.

  “I found this,” she told him in the huskiest voice she could manage without giggling. “Shame to waste it.”

  “Classic,” he said, and took the proffered bottle. She kissed him before he’d even gotten the cap off, then began to nuzzle his face. He smiled and pressed himself up against her while she toned up the mood her gaiamotes were leaking out. Together they undid the belt of the crude robe. “Oh, dear Lady, yes,” he rumbled as the wool slipped down to reveal what remained of the shirt.

  Corrie-Lyn kissed him again, the tip of her tongue licking playfully. “Remember Franlee?” she asked. “Those long winter nights they spent together in Plax.”

  “I always preferred Jessile.”

  “Oh, yes.” She sipped some of the wine. “She was a bad girl.”

  “So are you.” He poured his own glass and ran one hand down her throat, stroking her skin softly until he came to the top button. His finger hooked around it, pulling lightly to measure the strain.

  “I can be if you ask properly,” she promised.

  Two hours later Aaron fired a disrupter pulse into their locked cabin door. The malmetal shattered instantly, flinging a cloud of glittering dust into the confined space. Corrie-Lyn and Inigo were having a respite, sprawled over the quilts on the floor. Inigo held a glass of the Bodlian in one hand, carefully dripping the wine across Corrie-Lyn’s breasts. Secondary routines in his macrocellular clusters activated his integral force field instantly. Corrie-Lyn screamed, crabbing her way back along the floor until she backed into a bulkhead.

  “Turn it off!” Aaron bellowed. His cheeks were flushed as he sucked down air. Jaw muscles worked hard, clamping his teeth together.

  Inigo rose to his feet, standing in front of Corrie-Lyn. He expanded the force field to protect her from dire
ct energy shots, knowing it would ultimately be futile against Aaron. “The force field stays on. Now, in the Lady’s name, what’s happened?”

  “Not the fucking force field!” Aaron juddered, taking a step back. Weird unpleasant sensations surged out of his gaiamotes, making Inigo flinch. It was a torrent of recall from the strange cathedral with the crystal arches, terrified faces flashing past, weapons fire impossibly loud. Each memory burst triggered a devastating bout of emotion. Even Inigo felt tears trickling down his cheeks as he swung between fright and revulsion, defiance and guilt.

  “The mindfuck,” Aaron yelled. “Turn it off or I swear I’ll kill her in front of you.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Inigo yelled back. “What’s happening? What is this?”

  Aaron sagged against the side of the ruined door. “Get them out of my head!”

  “Deactivate your gaiamotes; that’ll kill the attack.”

  “They are off!”

  Inigo’s skin turned numb with shock—his own emotion rather than the chaotic barrage coming from Aaron. “They can’t be. I can feel your mind.”

  Aaron’s hand punched out, knuckles finishing centimeters from Inigo’s face. Enhancements rippled below his skin, and squat black nozzles slid out of the flesh. “Turn it off.”

  “I’m not doing anything!” Inigo yelled back. Ridiculously, he felt exhilarated: This was living, the antithesis of the last few decades. He cursed himself for hiding away rather than facing up to everything the universe could throw at him. Which was stupid …

  Four ruby-red laser targeting beams fanned out of Aaron’s enrichments, playing across Inigo’s face. “Switch. It. Off,” the crazed agent growled. Somewhere close by dark wings flapped in pursuit. The edge of the cabin began to shimmer away as if the darkness were claiming it molecule by molecule. Her presence was chilling, seeping through Inigo’s force field to frost his skin.