Aaron flung his head back. “Get away from me, you monster.”
“It’s not me,” Inigo whispered, fearful of whatever stalked them through the gloom that was now busily eating away at the edge of his own vision. He could see her smile now, predatory teeth bared. If she did break through to whatever Aaron believed to be reality, there was no telling what would happen.
The laser beams started to curve through the air, sliding smoothly around Inigo to cage him in red threads. Their tips studded Corrie-Lyn’s naked body.
“I can be as bad as her,” Aaron purred with smooth menace. “After all, she taught me. I can make this last for hours. You will hear Corrie-Lyn plead with you to switch it off. She will beg you to kill her as the only way to stop the pain.”
“Please,” Inigo said. “Listen to me. I’m not doing this to you.”
The arching lasers grew brighter. Corrie-Lyn’s skin sizzled and blackened where the tiny points touched her. She gritted her teeth against the pricks of pain. “Wait,” she gasped. “Where are we?”
Aaron was shuddering as if someone were shoving an electric current through his body. “Location?”
The darkness surrounding the cabin pulsed with a heart’s rhythm, stirring up a gust of air that pushed against them.
“Yes!” Corrie-Lyn demanded. “Our location. Are we near the Spike?”
“It’s two hundred and seventy light-years away.”
“Is that close enough for the dream? Is that what we’re feeling?”
Aaron cocked his head to one side, though his hand remained steady just centimeters in front of Inigo’s face. A drop of saliva dribbled out of his mouth. “Dream? You think this to be a dream? She’s here. She’s walking through the ship. She’s here for me. She never forgets. Never forgives. For that is weakness and we are strength.”
“Not your dream, you fucking moron,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Ozzie’s dream. The galactic dream he left the Commonwealth to build.”
“Ozzie’s dream?” The curving lasers dimmed slightly. Corrie-Lyn wriggled away from their enclosure.
“That’s right,” Inigo cried. “This effect is like an emotion amplifier. I knew the sex was good, but …”
Corrie-Lyn stopped rubbing her burns. “Hey!”
“Don’t you see?” Inigo urged. “He’s heightened our emotional responses through the gaiafield. But with your screwed-up psyche that’s simply helped with the destabilization. Whatever controls your masters installed are starting to crack under the pressure.”
The blackness pulsed again. Inigo swore he could feel the pressure increase on his inner ears.
“My gaiamotes are closed,” Inigo hissed.
“They can’t be! I’m witnessing your dreams.”
“He’s right,” Corrie-Lyn said. “My gaiamotes are shut, too, but this fucking nightmare is terrorizing us all. It’s not the gaiamotes.”
Aaron’s targeting beams snapped off. “What, then?” he demanded. His knees nearly buckled. “I cannot risk my mission failing in this fashion. It leaves you open to capture. We will have to die.” His hand moved to clamp his fingers over Inigo’s face. Inigo’s exovision was suddenly swamped by warning symbols as his force field began to glow a weak violet. “Your memorycell, too,” Aaron said. “Nothing of you must survive to fall into the hands of the enemy, especially her.”
“He’s circumvented it,” Inigo said, trying to keep calm. Violence wasn’t the solution to this; he had to break through Aaron’s neuroses. “This is Ozzie’s dream; it doesn’t need the gaiafield anymore. He’s propagated the feelings through spacetime itself.”
“This is an attack,” Aaron vowed.
“It’s not. I promise. He’s a genius, an authentic off-the-scale live genius. The gaiafield was just a warm-up for him. Don’t you see? He’s created real telepathy. Ozzie has made something that can make mind speak directly to mind just like he always wanted. It’s internal. Do you understand? Your instability is coming from within.”
“No.” Aaron fell to his knees, gasping for breath, pulling Inigo down with him.
“You are the cause of the mission failure. The damage is coming from your own subconscious.”
“No.”
“It is.”
“Make it stop. She can’t get me. I can’t allow that. Not again.”
“There is nobody there. She is just a memory, a screwed-up memory you don’t know how to contain, there’s so much fear embedded with the experience.”
Aaron suddenly let go of Inigo, stumbling around to face the broken door in a martial arts pose. “She’s here.”
“Aaron, listen to me. Ozzie’s dream is corroding your rationality because it was never designed to deal with circumstances like these. You have to let them go; you have to let the real you out of those constraints your boss imposed. You must come forward. This artificial personality can’t cope.”
“Not good enough?”
“The real you is more than adequate. Come out. Come on, it’s the only way you can beat this.”
“Damage control …” Aaron slowly sank to his knees, and then his back curled as he dropped his head between his legs. His breathing started to calm. The eerie semihallucinations around the periphery of the cabin began to melt away.
Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other an anxious look. “Do you think?” she asked.
“The Lady alone knows,” he murmured back.
They stood up. Corrie-Lyn hurriedly pulled her woolen robe back on, then they both approached the crouched figure cautiously. Inigo reached out tentatively but didn’t quite have the courage to touch Aaron. He wondered if that was the dream field—or whatever—amplifying the worry. But it seemed sensible enough. Surely an emotional enhancer would boost his sympathy correspondingly. Maybe that was the way it worked, everything raised equally so that everything stayed in the same balance as before—no alteration to personality, just a greater perception or empathy.
Aaron’s head came up; his biononics performed a thorough field scan of the starship. He stood up and looked at Inigo and Corrie-Lyn. His weapon enrichments sank back down into his hand; ripples of skin closed over them.
“Hello?” Corrie-Lyn said hopefully. “Aaron, is that really you now?”
Inigo wasn’t so sure. There wasn’t a trace of emotion coming from the man. In fact …
“I am Aaron,” he said.
“That’s good,” Corrie-Lyn said hesitantly. “Have the disturbances gone?”
“There are no disturbances in my head. My thought routines have been reduced to minimum functionality requirement. This mission will be completed now. Arrival at the Spike is in eighteen hours. Inigo will accompany me to Oswald Fernandez Isaacs. You will then both be given further instructions.” He turned and walked out the door.
“What in Honious was that?” a startled Corrie-Lyn asked.
“The last fallback mode by the sound of it; probably installed in case his brain got damaged in a firefight. He’s running on minimum neural activity. Whoever rebuilt him must have had a real fetish about redundancy.”
She shivered, clutching at the robe. “He’s even less human than before, isn’t he? And he was never much to begin with.”
“Yeah. Ladydamnit, I thought this was our chance to break his conditioning.”
“Crap.”
“But at least we know I don’t get shot before we meet Ozzie.”
“Oswald? I never knew that was his name.”
“No, me neither.”
She let out a long breath, then narrowed her eyes to stare at him. “The sex wasn’t that good naturally?”
“Ah. I had to say something that would shock him.”
“Really?” She glanced around the cabin. Tiny shards of sharp metal debris glinted on every surface. “Honious, this is a mess.”
“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Yes, you are. I can sense it.”
“What? Oh!” Her eyes widened as she realized
she could sense his mind as clearly as if they were fully sharing within the gaiafield.
He smiled weakly. “That Ozzie, he’s really something. Over two hundred and fifty light-years away, and it already affects us. Whatever it really is.”
“Do you think it can be used to connect everyone with the Void?”
“I have no idea. But I suspect we’re going to find out. Maybe that’s why Aaron’s controllers want me there. I have proven access to thoughts from the Void; maybe they want to see if I can connect directly to the Heart.”
“So what can this effect do?” she mused.
———
They spent the next few hours experimenting. The effect was remarkably like the longtalk they knew so well from the Void. When one of them carefully formed words or phrases, the other could perceive it, though they never worked out anything like the directed longtalk available to the residents of Querencia. But it was the constant awareness of emotion that was the most disquieting. If they hadn’t already been so intimate and adept at using the gaiamotes to connect emotionally, Corrie-Lyn thought they would have had real trouble with guilt and resentment at such openness. As it was, the effect took a long time to accept at an intellectual level. Being so exposed and having no choice in the matter made her apprehensive. She was all right with Inigo, but knowing the machinelike Aaron could perceive her every sentiment was unpleasant at the very least, and as for the prospect of every alien on the Spike being able to see into her mind … She wasn’t sure she could cope with that.
The one time she gave a bottle of Rindhas a longing look, she immediately knew of Inigo’s disapproval, which triggered her own shame to new heights. No wonder the cranky old Aaron had broken down under the mental stress. It was a weird kind of human who could cope with having his heart on his sleeve the entire time.
And yet, she told herself, that’s what we were all wishing to undergo in the Void. Especially the all-inclusive telepathy as it was in the Thirty-seventh Dream. Perhaps it’s just people who are at fault. If I didn’t have so much to hide, I wouldn’t fear this as much. My fault I’m like this.
They went to sleep a few hours later, with Inigo using a low-level field scan to monitor Aaron just in case. They woke in time for a quick breakfast before they reached the Spike.
The Lindau dropped out of hyperspace fifty AUs above the blue-white A-class star’s south pole. The emergence location allowed it an unparalleled view of the star’s extensive ring system. Visual sensors swiftly picked out the Hot Ring with its innermost edge two AUs out from the star and a diameter of half an AU. A hoop of heavy metallic rocks glittering brightly in the harsh light as they tumbled around their timeless orbit. Three AUs farther out, the Dark Ring was a stark contrast, a slender band of carbonaceous particles inclined five degrees out of the ecliptic, so dark that it seemed to suck light out of space. The angle allowed it to produce a faint umbra on the so-called Smog, the third ring, composed of pale silicate dust and light particles combined with a few larger asteroids that created oddly elegant curls and whorls within the bland ocher-tinted haze. Beyond that, at seventeen AUs, was the Band Ring, a thin, very dense loop fixed in place by over a hundred shepherd moonlets. After that there was only the Ice Bracelet, which began at twenty-five AUs and blended into the Oort cloud at the system’s edge.
There were no planets, an idiosyncrasy that sorely puzzled the Commonwealth astronomers. The star was too old for the rings to be categorized as any kind of accretion disc. Most wrote it off as a quirk caused by the Spike, but that had been in place only for at the most fifty thousand years; in astrological time that was nothing. Unless of course it had obliterated the planets when it arrived, which would make it a weapon of extraordinary stature. Again highly unlikely.
From their position poised above the system, Aaron asked for approach and docking permission. It was granted by the Spike’s AI, and they slipped back into hyperspace for the short flight in.
The Spike was in the middle of the Hot Ring. It was an alien artifact whose main structure was a slim triangle that curved gently around its long axis, which measured eleven thousand kilometers from the top to an indeterminate base. There was no way to determine the exact position of the base because that part of the Spike was still buried within some dimensional twist. To the navy exploration vessel that had found it in 3072, it was as if a planet-sized starship had tried to erupt out of hyperspace with only partial success, the nose slicing out cleanly into spacetime while the tail section was still lost amid the intricate folds of the universe’s underlying quantum fields. The only thing that ruined that big-aerodynamic-starship image was the sheer size of the brute. On top of the triangle was a five-kilometer-diameter spire that was a further two thousand kilometers in length—function unknown.
Contrary to all natural orbital mechanics, the Spike remained oriented in one direction, with the tip pointing straight out of the Hot Ring ecliptic. Its concave curve also tracked the star as it traveled along its perfectly circular orbit like some heliotactic sail-shaped flower always following the light. Thus, the anchoring twist that held its base amid the whirling rocky particles was obviously active, although its mechanism was somewhere within the unreachable base. Few people still believed it was a ship, though the notion remained among the romantically inclined elements of the Commonwealth’s scientific community and the more excitable Raiel/Void conspiracy theorists.
Contact with the fourteen known alien species living inside, which was remarkably easy, didn’t advance the exploration starship’s understanding of the Spike’s origin or purpose one byte. All the species who’d found a home among the myriad habitation chambers had arrived there relatively recently, the Chikoya longest ago at four and a half thousand years. They, along with all those who had found a home in the Spike over the millennia, had made their adaptations and alterations to the basic structure to a point where it was difficult to know what was original anymore.
When the Lindau emerged from hyperspace again, they were eight hundred kilometers sunward and level with the top of the Spike, so that the massive spire stabbed up into the southern starfield above them. The smartcore accelerated them in, matching the massive structure’s errant velocity vector. Ahead of them the curved inner surface was segmented by crystalline chambers like a skin of bubbles. The smallest extended over a hundred kilometers wide, while the largest, an Ilodi settlement, stretched out to a full three hundred kilometers in diameter. Eight tubes wove around and through the chambers, each of them a convoluted loop with a diameter of thirty kilometers, acting as the Spike’s internal transport routes. Seven of them had an H-congruous oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere; the eighth supported a high-temperature methane/nitrogen environment.
Aaron directed them into a metal mushroom sprouting from one of the H-congruous tubes. There were hundreds of similar landing pads scattered randomly along all the tubes. Some of them were crude, little more than slabs of metal with a basic airlock tunnel fused onto the tube. When the Lindau settled on it, a localized artificial gravity field took over, holding the starship down at about a tenth of a gee.
Inigo and Corrie-Lyn were standing behind Aaron in the starship’s small bridge compartment, images of the Spike projecting out of a half dozen portals all around them. They could see a lot of movement on the surface. A huge variety of drones were crawling, rolling, sliding, skating, and hopping along the tubes and chambers, performing various repair and maintenance functions. All of them were operated by the controlling AI, itself a patchwork of processor cores that had been grafted onto the original management network by the residents who had come and gone over the millennia.
“The effect’s no stronger here than when it first hit us. It must be uniform,” Corrie-Lyn said wonderingly as she tried to sort through the multitude of foreign sensations that Ozzie’s telepathy effect were allowing to impact on her mind. She could feel Inigo’s mind as before and the odd unemotional threads buzzing through Aaron’s brain, but beyond them was a sensory aurora not too dissimilar
to the gaiafield. Human minds were present, though she wasn’t sure how many, probably no more than a few thousand. Alien minds were also intruding that were intriguingly weird, possessing a different intensity and emotions that were subtly different.
“What I’m feeling can’t represent everyone on the Spike,” Inigo said, perceiving her interest. “For a start, there’s over a million of the Ba’rine-sect Chikoya, who settled here after they got kicked off their homeworld. They’re aggressive in their beliefs and not afraid to show it. That level of animosity is absent. Then there’s the Flam-gi and their whole nasty little speciesism superiority—they’re definitely not sharing. And Honious alone knows who or what’s in some of the sealed chambers.”
“So they’re not all part of Ozzie’s dream, then?”
“It would seem not.”
“Why?” Even as she asked it, she could sense his dismissal.
“I don’t know. We’ll just have to ask him. Aaron, do you know where he is?”
“No.” The agent’s head didn’t move; he was studying a projection of the Spike’s entire inner surface. Some kind of mapping program was active, sending flashes of color across sections and down tubes. “The controlling AI has no information on him. U-shadow-based data retrieval routines do not function effectively in the network, and some compartment sections are blocked; I cannot check the data with any accuracy.”
“Reasonable enough,” Inigo said. “There’s no overall government as such. From what I remember, you just turn up and find somewhere that supports your biochemistry and move in.”
“So what now?” Corrie-Lyn asked.
“We will visit the largest human settlement and ask them for Isaacs’s location.”
“And if they don’t know?” Inigo asked.
“He is renowned. Someone will know.”
“But he already knows we’re here,” Inigo said.
Aaron turned to stare at him. “Have you signaled him?”
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 186