The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “The control processes seem instinctive,” Inigo countered. “Direct willpower is the driving force for any modification within the Void itself.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Aaron felt a sigh building in his chest as they started to argue again. Her smile became mocking.

  “I can get you there in time,” Troblum said.

  Everyone turned to the giant dull gray figure looming over them. Myraian let out the faintest giggle.

  Ozzie pushed a big frond of floppy hair back from his forehead. “Dude, how are you going to do that?”

  “I have the Anomine planetary FTL engine in my starship.”

  Silence again.

  “The what?” Oscar asked.

  “The Anomine didn’t build the Dyson Pair force field generators; they acquired them from the Raiel. To get them into position, they used an FTL system big enough to move a planet. I have it. Or a copy of it. Actually, it’s a copy of what I believe they built.”

  Aaron didn’t care how uncertain the others were. “Is it faster than an ultradrive?” he asked.

  “Yes. It’s effectively instantaneous. It’s a wormhole.”

  “A wormhole big enough to shove a planet through?” Ozzie’s voice had risen a notch with incredulity.

  “Yes.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Actually, it’s perfectly possible,” the house smartcores announced.

  Ozzie growled and shot the ceiling a furious look.

  “Wormhole structure is dependent on the power source,” the smartcores said. “The greater the available power, the bigger the size you can achieve—theoretically.”

  “That’s right,” Troblum said.

  “Okay,” Ozzie said. “So what do you use to power the mother of all wormholes?”

  “A nova. Nothing else approaches the required output peak.”

  “Well, that’s handy, dude. We’ll just hang around and see if one happens.”

  “You don’t need to,” the smartcores said in the same voice, but with a gloating edge.

  “Ah.” Aaron smiled. “Novabomb.”

  “Yes,” Troblum said. “With a diverted energy function.”

  “Clever,” Inigo said.

  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” Ozzie yelled.

  “I think it will work,” Troblum said.

  “You mean you haven’t tried it?” Tomansio asked.

  Myraian started giggling again, louder this time.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “And it can get us to the galactic core ahead of the Pilgrimage fleet?” Aaron persisted.

  “It should. I envisaged transporting a Saturn-sized planet five hundred light-years as a test. But there are variables. If we make the wormhole diameter smaller—”

  “You can increase the reach,” Inigo finished. “So for something the size of a starship …”

  “I estimate we can extend the wormhole approximately twenty-five to thirty thousand light-years. If we trigger it today, it will put us ahead of the Pilgrimage fleet.”

  Ozzie stood up. “Okay, then. My work is done. Good luck to all of you.”

  “You’re not coming?” Inigo asked.

  “Hey, dude, I’m an aging irrelevancy with only half a brain, remember. And then there’s—” He frowned expressively, clicking his fingers. “What was it? Oh, yeah: I want to stay alive!”

  “Ozzie, you’d be a valuable member of any team working to prevent the expansion phase,” Corrie-Lyn said.

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Myraian said. She smiled sweetly at Corrie-Lyn. “Ozzie stays here, where I can cuddle him safe.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Ozzie said triumphantly.

  Aaron was beginning to question exactly what Myraian was. He’d assumed she was just some worshipful groupie with a dipsy habit. But now that he’d been here a few days, he was realizing she actually had quite a say in the relationship. No doubt it was a strange relationship, but then, that was Ozzie for you. Even with his reduced memories, Aaron knew Ozzie could be extremely quirky, and those memories were a couple of centuries out of date. “All right, then. Ozzie isn’t essential. Inigo is, and Araminta-two. I have to go. So how many more can your starship hold, Troblum?”

  “Hey!” Corrie-Lyn snapped.

  “I’m dealing in practicalities,” Aaron explained patiently. “There are minimum requirements for mission success. The Dreamer and Second Dreamer are the absolute priority for this flight.”

  “Who the fuck put you in charge?” Tomansio asked.

  “Do you have a viable plan for shutting down the Void? I’m sure we’d all like to hear it if you do.”

  “By all accounts, you haven’t got much of one yourself. You know more about who you are than what you’re doing.”

  “But I do have a plan. And I’m the Mutineer, remember? The one Knight Guardian you can rely on above all the others. Even yourself.”

  “You might have been the Mutineer, but I’m damned if I know what you are now. And you certainly don’t.”

  They all turned to look at Ozzie, who was laughing boisterously.

  “What?” Tomansio asked.

  “Seriously? Have you dudes even been listening to yourselves? The Dreamer. The Martyr. The Second Dreamer. The Mutineer. Jesus H, all you need is masks and some spandex capes and we’d have us a regular superhero convention going. At least Troblum’s got himself a costume already. Good one, too, big man, by the way.”

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t go?” Tomansio asked.

  “By all the rules of probability and statistics you shouldn’t even have made it this far, not any of you, because you are seriously fucking clueless. But you have gotten here, and someone knows what they’re doing loading whatever plan they have into the Mutineer’s brain. So grab this. As far as I can make out, you guys are the last chance we’ve got to stop Ilanthe and the Void itself. I don’t know what Aaron’s boss has got in mind for when you get to Makkathran, but … Tomansio, he’s right; unless you’ve got an idea, then this is the one you bust your balls to make sure it works. Tell the kids how it is, Oscar. You and I have gone face-to-face against odds like this once before. You know when something is real.”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said grudgingly. “Ozzie’s right. This is looking like our one shot. Both Dreamers together? If anyone can stop this, it’s going to be them. Somehow.”

  Tomansio shrugged. “Okay. I’m just saying we don’t know which side the Mutineer is on.”

  “Logically, it’s a faction opposing the Accelerators,” Inigo said. “I’ve been through all this. I actually do trust him.”

  “Ha!” Corrie-Lyn said.

  “All right, so Troblum, how many of us can your starship hold?” Cheriton asked. “And does it really have wings?”

  “Life support will sustain fifteen people, but that’s cramped. And they’re thermal dissipater fins,” Troblum said.

  “There’s only ten of us,” Oscar said. “We can all fit in easy, then.”

  Ozzie cleared his throat. “You’re still not thinking. How long did it take Justine to reach the fake Far Away?”

  “Oh, crap,” Aaron said. “Void time.”

  “That’s right, man. So your actual question is, How many medical chambers has Troblum got on board? Because you’re going to need suspension once you make it past the boundary.”

  “One,” said Troblum.

  “There are five in the Elvin’s Payback,” Oscar said. “They were installed in case we got simultaneous casualties.”

  “You always did lack real faith in us.” Tomansio grinned. “We need four more, then. Are any available in this compartment, Ozzie?”

  “Not right now,” Ozzie said in a suspiciously neutral voice. “They’re all very busy for the first time in decades. Don’t worry. My replicator can put some together for you.” He raised his voice. “Is that right, me-brain-in-a-jar?”

  “Already started,” the house smartcores replied.

  “I suppose our replicator can produce them as w
ell,” Oscar said. “That should shrink our departure time.”

  Troblum still wouldn’t take his armor suit off. Oscar didn’t quite know what to make of that. Paula’s u-shadow had sent him a largish file on the ex-Accelerator agent, but that just kicked up a whole load of additional questions.

  Tomansio had been right to question Aaron, but Oscar was a lot more concerned about the strange big man with enough personality flaws to fill entire psychology texts. And an FTL system big enough to shift entire planets? Gas giant planets? Come on.

  Then again, it was all past worrying about. They were committed now. If everything worked and Aaron’s unknown boss got to talk with the Heart, the entire Void/Pilgrimage nightmare could be over within a week.

  Yeah, that’s going to happen.

  Ozzie was right, though. That was all they had left. So he sat at the kitchen table without complaining or analyzing, eating some of the bagels and salmon Ozzie’s culinary unit had provided for their brunch. It would have been nice to chat with Ozzie, he reflected; not that they’d ever been close, but they certainly had a lot of shared history. It wasn’t to be. Ozzie and Inigo seemed to spend the entire time arguing with each other. And in the short intervals when they had to take a breath, Tomansio was busy interrogating Aaron.

  The house smartcores (and that was pretty weird even by Ozzie standards) and Liatris said the new medical chambers would be fabricated within the hour. That just left installing them on the Mellanie’s Redemption. Another blast-from-the-past name Oscar could have done without. But then, when you’re as old as me, I guess everything is connected.

  “I hope you never restart mindspace,” Inigo said heatedly. The voice was getting loud; they all had to drop their conversations and listen in. “It’s the end of humanity, sending the mind down a rotten branch of evolution.”

  “Psychology is an evolutionary trend?” Ozzie grunted back. “Gimme a break.”

  “You’re compelling it upon every sentient. At least the gaiafield had a provision for individuals to withdraw. This doesn’t. Its mental fascism, and the worst of it is you think it’s benevolent, for our own good. Blanket the galaxy with mindspace and you’ll turn us into the kind of society I found in the Last Dream. Don’t you get it? Utopia is boring; ennui is our true enemy. You and the Void both have to be stopped. You were wrong about sharing thoughts just like Edeard in his dark phase. Both of you were seduced by the Heart’s version of perfection, which is nothing more than taming and enslaving the human soul.”

  Aaron sat down next to Oscar, holding a plate of waffles. Oscar leaned over and whispered. “Liatris says the replicator will be finished in eighteen minutes.”

  “Maybe there’s something to be said for the Void’s time acceleration, after all,” Aaron muttered back.

  “Have they been like this all the time?”

  “Five days, nonstop. I encouraged them to explore options.”

  “So what do you make of our big silent friend?” Oscar nodded gently at the hulking armor suit.

  “Neutral for the moment. I can accept his concern about the Cat. If he keeps it on inside his own starship, then I’ll have to make some decisions.”

  “Yeah. And you really don’t know what’s going to happen once we reach Makkathran?”

  “No. But I like your optimism.”

  Oscar gave him another look. He liked to think he could tell. But Aaron had this human shell wrapped over something very odd indeed—almost a void in itself. He mimicked personality rather than possessing one of his own. And Corrie-Lyn hadn’t been subtle about the near breakdowns.

  “Individuality cannot stand as it has always done,” Ozzie protested. “The human race has to become collective. For fuck’s sake, we have novabombs, M-sinks, quantumbusters, enough weapons to smash the galaxy to shit without the Void even having to wake up. That power has to be restrained. Ask the Mutineer over there. Don’t you ever stop and think what’ll happen if someone like the Cat gets hold of them and goes on a rampage? For fun! There has to be an inbuilt protection mechanism in a society as technologically sophisticated as ours. And that is trust, man. It’s all it ever can be. Mindspace will make trust inevitable. You really will be able to love your neighbor.”

  “Mindspace is exactly the same as giving a psychopath a Commonwealth Navy warship. There are aliens out there who have thought processes so utterly different from ours, they’ll think you’re trying to take them over or evangelize and alter their culture.”

  “That is a serious bunch of crap. What do you know about—”

  A red exovision tactical warning sprang up over Ozzie and Inigo; secondary thought routines supplied Oscar’s mind with a definition of the problem. A T-sphere was establishing itself all around Ozzie’s house. “Shit!”

  His integral force field came on. As it did, he saw Troblum’s suit blacken to deepest night. Son of a bitch, that’s Sol barrier technology.

  Full field function scan showed seventeen Chikoya teleporting onto the grassy slope just above the lakeshore. A quick follow-up scan revealed they were heavily armored, weapons active.

  “Liatris, come get us. Now.”

  “On my way,” Liatris replied.

  Another twenty-three Chikoya teleported in, completing their encirclement of the house. A six-strong squad charged forward across the front lawn. Oscar was about to ask Tomansio what attack formation he wanted to use when his field scan reported something very odd happening to Ozzie’s quantum structure. Accelerant-flooded nerves reacted fast, spinning him around, and targeting graphics swept across the abnormality zone, focusing on Ozzie, who was already becoming transparent as his body’s molecules changed, attenuating. There was just enough of him left to reveal an apologetic expression on his spectral face. He raised a hand in a halfhearted wave.

  “Wait!” Oscar yelled. “You’re leaving?” It came out as sheer disbelief.

  “This kinda thing really isn’t me anymore,” Ozzie replied faintly.

  “Yes, it is! You’re Ozzie. Help us.”

  “You dudes have it pretty much covered. But hey, one day I might join in again. Don’t hold your breath.” And with that his outline vanished. Some kind of disturbance stirred the underlying quantum fields, something way beyond Oscar’s field function scan to analyze.

  “Fuck me!” Beckia gasped. “Where’s he gone?”

  “Irrelevant,” Tomansio said. “Mutineer, you safeguard the Dreamers. Everyone else, let’s meet and greet. Compass point deployment, beat them back from the house.”

  Oscar crunched his way straight through the kitchen wall and leaped from the veranda, flying a good fifteen meters over the dark grass. He landed on the lawn that sloped down to the lake. Tomansio was on his right, heading for the spinney that bordered the garden. Beckia was on his left, where the land started to curve upward before breaking into rough terrain. Oscar was gratified to see how well he fit into the team, knowing at an automatic level how to position himself.

  He’d never seen a Chikoya before, never mind six at once. It was a shock, but all he was concerned about was a tactical analysis of the armor, weapons, and maneuverability. A small traitor section of his mind wondered what Dushiku or Jesaral would make of something that big in knobbly black armor rampaging toward them with husky weapons swinging around to shoot. All he saw was the exovision targeting structure, with secondary routines coordinating fire control for his enrichments. Electronic warfare emissions hammered the Chikoya suit circuits, hashing and confusing their sensors. Energy beams and distortion pulses blasted through the air. Two Chikoya went tumbling backward, their armor smoldering, spraying jets of dark purple blood from gaping wounds. The others went for cover, firing as they went.

  Masers slashed across Oscar’s integral force field, which deflected them easily. Then his macrocellular clusters warned him of a targeting scan, and he jumped again as an electron laser detonated the ground where he’d been standing half a second before. He somersaulted at the top of his jump trajectory, twisting left, landing at a
crouch and sending a massive distortion pulse at the Chikoya who was hefting the enormous beam gun.

  On either side of him the Knights Guardian were hopping between cover points, their speed amplified by accelerants and biononic muscle reinforcement. A range of suppression fire lashed out, forcing the Chikoya back from the house.

  Oscar was sprinting along the scorched grass as one of the aliens followed his movement with some kind of neutron beam that was gouging through the soil and stone, creating a fantail of lava and flame in his wake. He dispensed a hail of micromissiles at the origin. Something exploded. The shock wave buffeted him. There was no more neutron beam.

  “Anyone know what they want?” Beckia asked as she rolled over a clump of boulders. A flight of smartmines arched out to bombard the Chikoya squad slithering through the boulders on the slope above her.

  “The Dreamer,” Aaron told her.

  “Why?” Oscar asked. Two Chikoya were charging right at him, masers and machine guns firing enhanced explosive grenades, pummeling the ground and air all around as he dodged along a narrow drainage gully that led down to the lake. He sprang up and got a clean electron laser shot at the magazine on an opponent’s underbelly. The explosion shredded most of the alien. Steaming lumps of gore and fragments of armor rained down.

  “Never quite got that far into the conversation,” Aaron said.

  A tactical display showed Oscar how the Knights Guardian were pressing the Chikoya away from the house in a rough expanding circle. However, some were still close to the other side of the house, creeping forward. Cheriton was having a hard time prizing them free from their cover on the steep forested slope. “Liatris, where are you?”

  “Two minutes,” Liatris promised.

  The Chikoya were starting to regroup along the shoreline ahead of Oscar. Several of them splashed through the shallows. Oscar began to designate targets for his smartseeker munitions. Then his field scan showed him Myraian dancing across the smoking remains of the lawn toward them. He risked sticking his head out from the gully to watch her. She was skipping and twirling as if she were in some elaborate ballet performance. Her gauzy blouse with its wing sleeves spun around her as she waved her arms, creating serpentine loops in the air. Chikoya targeting lasers converged on her.