The Temporal Void (ARC)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Aaron's field scan revealed the ice had flattened out in front of the crawler's tracks. Then it ended in another sharp-edged rift. He couldn't pick up anything beyond. 'There's nothing out there.'

  'I think that's the problem.'

  They both suited up to take a look. Inigo said he didn't want to get the crawler too close to the rift until they knew what they were dealing with. Aaron shrugged and went with it. He didn't like wearing the surface suit - his biononics could produce a good defence against Hanko's foul environment - but it added an extra layer of protection, which his instinct insisted was tin-right thing in a situation with so many unknowns.

  The two of them kept close to the headlight beams, leaning into the wind. As they shuffled closer to the edge, Aaron's field scan still couldn't detect anything beyond.

  'Where the hell's the ground gone?' he demanded. His field scan probed the ice beneath his feet. There were a few centimetres of crisp snow, then clear ice down as far as the scan could reach. It was as though they were on the top of some giant frozen wave.

  'Must be a gully of some description,' Inigo replied. 'If the pressure is right the ice can fissure instead of throwing up a ridge.'

  'Great.'

  'It should close up soon. I've never seen an ice fissure over five hundred metres long. You check that way. And don't go too near the edge.'

  'Right.' Aaron started to walk parallel to the edge, keeping a good three or four metres between him and the drop. He soon came to a flat triangular prominence jabbing out from the verge, which he shuffled along cautiously, feeling the slight stirrings of vertigo. If anywhere would allow him a decent look into the gulf below, it would be here.

  He extended his field scan to its maximum, sweeping it through the heavy swirl of snow. Even at full resolution he couldn't detect the other side of the rough fissure. Nor was there any sign of a bottom. He was standing on the brink of some massive abyss. Instinct kicked in, firing up his misgivings. Something Nerina said back at the camp registered. 'Hey, are we—' His scan showed him Inigo's field function was switching, reformatting energy currents. His own biononics responded instantaneously, strengthening his integral force field, shielding him from any damage Inigo's outdated systems could possibly inflict. Accelerants rode his nerve paths ready to implement his response. Tactical routines rose out of macrocellular clusters, fusing effortlessly with his thoughts, analysing his situation. That was when he realized just how badly he'd screwed up by trusting Inigo. 'Shiiiit,'

  Inigo fired the biggest disruptor pulse his biononics could produce. It slammed into the ice a couple of metres short of Aaron's feet. For a moment, the whole prominence fluoresced an elegant jade. As the light faded, a single giant crack appeared with incredible speed, splitting the prominence off the edge of the Asiatic glacier.

  Aaron stared in shock at the ruptured ice. Tactics programs rushed to find a counter—

  'Sorry,' Inigo said simply. The thoughts leaking out of his pa ill motes even proved he meant it. 'But sometimes to do what's right…'

  The entire prominence split away cleanly. To Aaron's accelerated nervous system it appeared to hang there for some terrible eternity. Then gravity pulled the colossal chunk of ice straight down with Aaron standing at the centre. It began to twist as the edges screeched down the cliff. His force field reconfigured, extending into a twin swept-petal shape—wings that could glide him away. Not good in the midst of this snowstorm, but better than anything else. That was when the vast cataract of avalanching snow triggered by Inigo's shot thundered into him, engulfing the tumbling prominence and him with it.

  The whole mass continued to plummet down the mile-high cliff, taking a long time to reach the bottom.

  Silverbird arrowed through the Gulf, the immense expanse of ruined stars and tattered ion storms which lay between the dense halo of ancient globular clusters that comprised the Wall stars, and the boundary of the Void itself. Justine was receiving the hysradar and quantum scanner images direct, surrounding herself with the mass structure of the real universe translated into scarlet and turquoise mists. Tiny points of emerald light shone within the shifting cosmic oceans, showing her the supermassive stars which had so far retained their integrity during their long spiral into oblivion. Less than a hundred lightyears ahead of her was the frosty glow of the loop, an orbiting band of supercharged matter ten lightyears across which emitted a galaxy-spanning blaze of X-rays. Beyond that was the awesome black surface of the Void boundary. She watched its topology fluctuate, marvel ling at how ocean-like the waves were, with peaks and troughs ripping about chaotically, stirred by incomprehensible internal storm-forces. Quite often she would see an undulation swell out to reach the elongated plume of a disintegrating star that was still lightmonths away. Phenomenal gravity sucked the matter down into the event horizon with a last devastating flare of ultra-hard radiation, the kind which had powered the loop for a billion years. Even that siren call would end soon. At its current expansion rate the Void would engulf the loop in another week. Then it would just be the Wall and the Raiel DF defences that stood between the boundary and the rest of the galaxy.

  Justine felt her body shiver again. It was hard to comprehend the scale of the forces outside. She was feeling very small and alone.

  'Dad?'

  'Still here, darling. The relay is holding. Big Bronx cheer for the old Navy techs who put it together.'

  'We left the last known sensor systems behind five minute's ago. The link might not last much longer.'

  'Course it will, angel. This was meant to be.'

  'Yeah, right.'

  'I'm looking at the access figures for the Unisphere. You've got over half of humanity looking over your shoulder right now.'

  'Hi there, half of humanity,' she said brittley.

  'You're doing fine. And I'm in deep shit with ANA for publically admitting there's such a thing as ultradrive.'

  'Ha! You're always in trouble.'

  'True. Without me, lawyers would just wither away and die. They think of me as their messiah. Remember when we got caught planting the Florida estate with alien vines?'

  'Hell yes. The UFN Environmental Commissioners went apeshit with us.'

  'There are banks we own on the External worlds still paying off that fine.'

  Justine barked a laugh. Drew down a juddering breath. She desperately wanted out of her ancient body with all its silly biochemical-derived fright. Anyone would think her personality was genuinely scared. 'Any sign the Second Dreamer accessed your appeal?'

  'Not yet. I expect he'll be talking to the Skylord quite soon now. After all, he'll have to face me if he doesn't start getting his ass in gear. Isn't that right, Second Dreamer?'

  'Now Dad,' she chided.

  'Yeah yeah.'

  'I think I'm going to skim round the loop. That radiation is strong enough to slice through the Silverbird's force fields as if they were tissue paper. Can you believe the figures I'm getting.'

  'You'll be quite safe in hyperspace.'

  'I know, but…'

  'Whatever makes you comfortable, angel.'

  Justine instructed the smartcore to fly to galactic south of the loop. 'That's odd.' The sensors were picking up an artificial signature over forty lightyears behind her. She focused on the origin, which the smartcore displayed as two amber circles. 'Uh, Dad, are you getting this?'

  Gore took a moment to answer. 'Yes.'

  'Whatever they are, they're travelling ftl.'

  'See that.'

  'I didn't know there was anyone else flying round this part of the galaxy.' Tabulated data flowed up into her exovision. 'Christ, they're massive.' A wild thought surfaced. 'Do you think they're Skylords?' she asked eagerly.

  'No, darling, I don't. They're bigger than that. And that's an interception course.'

  'Oh.' Her mood dropped fast. 'The Raiel. And they're fast, too. Faster than Silverbird. Just.' It would be touch and go if she reached the boundary ahead of them. 'I don't suppose they're here to escort me in safely.'


  'I'm calling Qatux right now. He'll sort this out.'

  'Okay, Dad.'

  The external sensor visualization flashed white for a microsecond, as if a lightning bolt had zipped through it. Once it cleared, there was an ominous translucent lavender shell emerging where the Raiel ships were, expanding rapidly. Secondary data streams showed her the anomaly was centred on a mass point the size of Earth's moon that had been curving in towards the Void on a ten million year journey to its death. Had been. It had vanished, converted directly to exotic energy which was now flowing through hyperspace.

  'Oh FUCK,' Justine yelled. Silverbird strengthened every defensive system it had.

  The hyperspace shockwave struck the little ultradrive ship with the force of a wayward dinosaur. Justine screamed as she was flung out of the couch, crashing into the forward bulkhead. Alarms shrieked back at her. A multitude of exovision schematics turned amber and red.

  * * * *

  The crowd of anti-invasion protesters down in the park gasped in unison as the Silverbird juddered, then let out a long 'Ohooo,' of wonder and relief. Araminta couldn't help but join in, thankful Justine had survived the third shockwave propagated by the pursuing Raiel warships and was now picking herself up off the cabin floor again. It was a sound which was replicated right across Colwyn City and beyond. A long way beyond.

  She slipped in through the apartment block's underground garage entrance. The door was still open a couple of metres, not wide enough to admit a capsule, but sufficient for her to take her trike out. She'd deactivated the mechanism as she left, opening up the little control box and physically disconnecting the wiring. Now she plugged the coloured cables back into their blocks. The door slid shut behind her, and she hurried through the near-deserted concrete cave to the lifts.

  'You okay?' Gore asked.

  'Bastards!' Justine replied shakily. 'What, this isn't hard enough already?'

  Araminta sank back against the cool metal wall of the lift, feeling the way Justine looked. She'd driven round for an hour on the trike before parking it in a public bay at the Tala mall. Now there was nothing to prove she was at the apartment block - it was the best cover she could think of. The walk back to the Bodant district had taken forty minutes, during which the Raiel warships had started blowing up small moons to try and stop Justine. Everyone accessed that. It made her kind of conspicuous; she was just about the only person moving on Colwyn's streets.

  'You're doing fine,' Gore assured his daughter. 'Just fine.'

  Araminta used her old override code to unlock the door to Danal's apartment. Neither he nor Mareble were in. Presumably I hey were out partying with the occupying army, she thought resentfully. The bare structure of the place had just been finished when Araminta handed it over. Since then, Mareble had moved in a few basic furnishings. Araminta gave the cooker a critical glare, the big metal thing looked ridiculously primitive. It had taken Mr Bovey a long time to find it for her, and installing it had been a nightmare.

  In Araminta's exovision, Justine was climbing back into her chair, which folded protectively around her. 'Main systems are functional. Drive units have reduced capacity. These energy bursts are stressing a lot of components. I guess they're trying to wear me down.'

  Araminta crept over to the balcony windows, and peered out across the park. There were several Ellezelin capsules hanging above the encircling road. They were all stationary; like everyone else their occupants were captivated by the chase thirty thousand lightyears away. Below them, the crowd stared up into the heavens whose stars were smeared by the weather dome. She nodded in satisfaction.

  'They're firing again,' Justine yelped. 'Oh Christ.'

  The Silverbird shuddered violently. Araminta gritted her teeth, feeling the huge tremor of anticipation in the gaiafield. More sections of the ship reported overloads. The speed fell off as the drive reconfigured its energy manipulation functions around degraded components. Justine changed course, streaking into the loop, the shortest distance to the barrier. Both Raiel warships followed unerringly. Closing the gap.

  Araminta pulled a big sky-blue cushion out of a nest pile and into the middle of the living room. She was annoyed to see the ebony-wood parquet had been stripped back to the bare wood. Didn't Mareble understand how difficult it was to get the varnish application correct? The work that had gone into cleaning the little wooden blocks!

  She sat down on the cushion and crossed her legs, banishing such negative thoughts.

  'Good strategy, darling,' Gore said. 'There aren't many planets inside the loop.'

  Araminta retrieved Likan's program from her storage lacuna, feeling her mind finally settle. It was a risk using this apartment, but she wasn't sure how good Living Dream was at tracking people through the gaiafield. The day Danal had moved in he'd confided to her that he was helping with the search for the Second Dreamer, and how the confluence nests were being altered somehow to facilitate that. So she certainly didn't want to be in her own place when she did this, just in case they were accurate enough to fix the exact location. And they might just think Danal's apartment was some kind of false reading. She didn't know anywhere else she could go. Other than to Mr Bovey's house, but that would expose him to the paramilitaries, which she could never do.

  The shadowy spectres of sensation that lurked within her subconscious expanded outwards. She let her attention swim across the myriad thoughts it contained. Drifting. Content in a way the program alone could never kindle.

  Most of the thoughts she could ignore. Some were intriguing. One had a mental signature she knew, associated with a dark tone that almost made her shy away. Instead, she concentrated.

  'My Lord,' Ethan was pleading. 'Hear us please.'

  He was calling with all his mental strength, amplified by countless confluence nests, directing his appeal outwards into the infinite. Wrong., she mused from her lofty Olympian distance. The Skylord is not beyond us, it is within.

  She drifted further, devoid of urgency.

  'If you don't call them off I will personally rip your fucking arkship apart molecule by molecule with all of you in it,' Gore was yelling. 'You think the Void is a Bad Thing? Do you, huh? You believe that? Because let me tell you: it is your mommy with her titty out for you to suck on compared to me.'

  Araminta couldn't help grinning. Now that's the kind of father I would have liked. Out in the park, people were cheering. A cry taken up across hundreds of planets. The gaiafield filled with determination and support, the raw emotion of billions, swelling the sense of unification to near ecstasy. Go Gore, humanity whooped. Araminta added her blessing, a whisper lost in the multitude.

  'I can do nothing,' Qatux protested. 'They are warrior Raiel. Not our kind, not any longer.'

  'Find a fucking way!'

  Araminta lifted herself away from the turmoil, drifting towards a strand of familiar quiet thought. Opening herself in greeting. The nebulas of the Void emerged from darkness to glimmer spectacularly around her. Half of space was a gauzy splash of aquamarine with a few distant stars shining though. She recognized it as Odin's Sea where a Skylord coasted between two of the scarlet promontories, spikes of whorled gases lightyears long, swelling to buds big enough to contain a globular cluster. And here, the thoughts of what once was mingled with more purposeful notions. An awareness wove through this space, not conscious, but knowing purpose.

  Silverbird burst out of the loop and streaked towards the final implacable barrier. All around it, broken stars sleeted inwards, shedding the glowing husks of the planets they had once birthed as if they were an encumbrance during the final tumultuous plunge to extinction.

  'Oh God, here we go again,' Justine whimpered. Ten lightyears behind her a gas-giant imploded. Hyperluminal quantum distortions burst out from its vanishing point.

  The Silverbird dropped out of hyperspace, flying free in spacetime that no human would recognize. It was a dark universe inside the Wall stars. Thick braids of dust and gas shielded the light of the galactic core behin
d the starship. Ahead, few photons escaped the macrogravity cloak of the Void as suns sank through the event horizon. A lurid vermilion band shimmered across space, the swirl of ion clouds enraged by the loop's fatal discharge, illuminating the fuselage like the devil's own gaze. Radiation alarms howled in fright as the force field started to collapse. The fuselage blistered.

  'One of us comes,' Araminta said. 'See?'

  The distortion shockwave was almost unnoticeable in real space as it flashed past. Dead streamers of atoms were stirred briefly by the unquiet force leaking back out of the quantum interstices. Silverbird powered back into hyperspace, smouldering from radiation burns.

  'You,' Ethan exclaimed.

  The Skylord resonated with interest. 'I still search for you. The nucleus aches with longing.'

  'I know. You must stop that. Please welcome our emissary. She approaches you.'

  'Where? I sense you are so far away.'

  'I am. She is close to you now. Feel for her. She bleeds emotion as do we all. Guide her as you should. Open your boundary.'

  'The Heart will welcome you.'

  The two Raiel warships were closing on the Silverbird. Justine's sensor display showed her another gas giant sized mass barely five lightyears away. If they targeted that it would be the end. The Silverbird's ultradrive was struggling to maintain acceleration now.

  'Hurry. Please,' Araminta implored.

  The Skylord radiated satisfaction as it receded.

  'I thank you,' Gore said. 'Whoever you are.'

  * * * *

  Justine sank back into the couch, her mind fully open to the gaiafield, letting every emotion pour fourth. Hopes. Fears. Everything she was.

  * * * *

  Ahead of the Silverbird, the Void boundary changed. A vast circular wave rippled out, creating a crater ten lightyears across. From its centre a smooth cone of pure blackness rose up towards the starship.