The Temporal Void (ARC)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The airlock's inner door unfurled as her weight began to build up.

  'Hold her,' Aaron instructed curtly as he let go of Corrie-Lyn's arm and lurched his way into the ship against the rapidly increasing acceleration.

  Inigo quickly lowered her on to the floor of the short corridor. 'Don't move your neck,' he said urgently. 'Keep your spine level. I don't know how bad this is going to get.' The decking seemed to be made from a grey plyplastic. It wasn't comfortable, but with the gee force approaching five she was grateful to be lying prone. Medical symbols warned her what the acceleration was doing to her broken arm, which might have accounted for her mounting nausea.

  'What's happening?' she grunted to Inigo. 'Where's the crew?' Her body was still shivering from the icy air outside.

  He kept his head steady as he replied. 'We're going straight up to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible. I don't know about the crew.' His gaiafield emission was tinged with worry.

  'I can't access the ship's net.'

  'Me neither.'

  After a couple of minutes the acceleration suddenly sunk back to a stable one gee. Inigo lifted himself to a sitting position. Worry was still leaking out of his gaiamotes.

  Corrie-Lyn winced as she slowly sat up. Her ankle was throbbing, and the medication she'd taken for her arm was doing strange things to her vision. Or maybe it was just her balance that made her feel weirdly light. Or perhaps the ship's drives were acting oddly. Something in the air smelt funny. She hiccupped, hoping it wasn't a precursor to being sick. For some reason the situation didn't bother her as much as she knew it ought. The crew, though. That was bad. She knew it at a deep instinctive level. Didn't want to consciously examine the obvious. Too much. Way too much all at once.

  'We're still alive then,' she said with a sigh.

  Inigo gave her a troubled glance. 'Yes.' He clambered to his feet. One of the light strips on the ceiling was flickering. Its case had cracks. He frowned at that. 'My field scan is revealing a lot of damage in the structure around us. Uh, I can't find the crew on board.'

  'What do you mean?'

  A thick plyplastic door curtained open, and Aaron stepped out into the corridor. His gaiamotes were closed, but even in her medicated state Corrie-Lyn didn't need them to tell how angry he was. He glared at Inigo. 'Don't you ever pull a stunt like that glacier again.'

  Inigo gave him a disdainful glance. 'Almost got you, though, didn't it? And me a simple amateur.'

  Aaron produced a tight smile. Took a step forward.

  Corrie-Lyn screamed at the pain as his foot came down on her ankle.

  Inigo lunged forward, hitting Aaron with a rugby-style tackle. It barely moved him. For emphasis, Aaron held the position for another few seconds before slowly and deliberately taking his foot off and stepping back.

  Corrie-Lyn whimpered, and gripped her ankle where the hot pain was still firing into her flesh. There were tears in her eyes. 'Don't,' she whispered fearfully.

  'The medical chamber is in the main cabin,' Aaron said, and held his hand out.

  'Where's the crew?' she asked.

  'They stepped out for a moment.' Aaron paused, thinking. 'They might be some time.'

  Corrie-Lyn ignored his hand. Inigo helped her up. They hobbled after Aaron through the door into the main cabin.

  'Oh Lady!' Corrie-Lyn's free hand came up to cup her mouth. She really felt the bile rising in her gullet at the sight which greeted her.

  The starship's main cabin was a circular room about seven metres across. Several items of furniture were extruded from the plyplastic walls and floor. Some had twisted and locked into strange shapes. A lot of the equipment modules sunk flush with the walls were damaged. Most had suffered some kind of physical impact, leaving their casings buckled and broken. Others were melted along with the wall around them, leaving soot marks scarring the ceiling. That wasn't what drew her eye. There was blood on the floor. Big puddles of the grisly fluid that had been sloshing around in the starship's erratic acceleration. Now it was congealing. There was blood on the walls; broad splash patterns radiating out from the burn scars. There was blood on the ceiling in long splatter trails.

  'Monster!' she groaned though clenched teeth.

  'Let's get one thing quite clear,' Aaron said as he ordered the smartcore to activate the one surviving medical cabinet. 'I am not a good man. I am not a bad man. I am simply a man with a job to do. I will complete that job. Nothing must prevent that. Nothing.'

  Corrie-Lyn gave Inigo a broken look. She could see how scared he was; an expression she'd never seen on his face before. Not Inigo. Not the man who was going to lead them all to a chance at a beautiful life.

  'What job?' Inigo asked, with considerable dignity.

  A small muscle flexed in Aaron's jaw. 'I apologize. I'm not sure.'

  'Not sure!'

  Aaron gave Corrie-Lyn a modest shrug. 'You know how it is.'

  'He's not a man,' she growled out. 'He's a biological killing machine. And he's so pitiful he doesn't even know why.'

  'So there you have it,' Aaron said. He looked over at the medical cabinet which had rolled out of the wall. It did have a scorch mark on its silver casing, but the malmetal lid split open, and the management system reported full functionality even if some systems were running on back-up.

  'I'm not getting in that,' Corrie-Lyn yelped.

  'You are,' Aaron said. 'One way or another. Of course Inigo's u-shadow will have complete control of your treatment. But I need you intact and healthy. As well as your physical injuries, you picked up a bad dose of radiation back there.'

  She glanced at Inigo, who shrugged.

  'You need her healthy?' Inigo said. 'Why?'

  'She's my leverage,' Aaron said bluntly. 'She guarantees your good behaviour.'

  'Shoot me,' Corrie-Lyn implored Inigo. 'Use your biononics like a weapon again. Please. He can't be allowed to succeed.'

  Inigo stared at her for a long moment. He bowed his head.

  'Now we have that out of the way, please get in,' Aaron said with a polite gesture at the medical cabinet.

  Corrie-Lyn limped over to it and sat on the edge. Inigo helped her to remove her clothes, then eased her back. The lid slid over her. She was sobbing as she lost consciousness.

  * * * *

  According to Corrie-Lyn's secondary thought routines the medical cabinet took four hours to reset and bind her arm in a toughened dermal layer, de-stress the bad sprain around her ankle, and decontaminate her skin and blood. Inigo had also got it to issue some kind of anti-depressant sedative. She lay there in the warm dry darkness for several minutes after she woke, reluctant to get out and see how much worse their lives had become. Eventually, she sighed and told her u-shadow to open the lid.

  Inigo was there, leaning over with his face showing a gentle concern.

  'How do you feel?' he asked.

  'Like the Waterwalker on top of the mountain after Salrana's death.'

  Inigo stroked her hair tenderly. 'Nothing we face is ever going to be that bad.'

  'Ha,' she said indignantly. 'That bastard's not human, although he's got the psychopath trait nailed pretty good.' She sat up to see Aaron on the other side of the cabin, smiling modestly. 'Are your dreams still punishing you?' she growled at him as she crossed her arms over her bare breasts. 'Hope so. One day you'll drown in all that shit sloshing round in your head.'

  'Well, well, it is true,' Aaron grinned. 'You can take the girl out of Sampalok, but you can't take Sampalok out of the girl.'

  'What the crap do you know about the Waterwalker's life you subsentient biobot fuckhead.'

  'Welcome back, Corrie-Lyn. This party just wouldn't be the same without you.'

  Inigo handed her a robe that was several sizes too big. Corrie-Lyn wrapped herself in it with angry motions, then swung her feet out of the cabinet. She drew back abruptly, remembering what had been on the floor as she went in.

  The blood had gone. She gave the cabin a careful examination. Apart from the bent
equipment and misshapen furniture, it was relatively clean.

  'Some of the servicebots still work,' Inigo said. 'I've had them cleaning things up.'

  'Huh,' she grunted and climbed out. 'So, going to start threatening me?'

  Aaron scratched behind his ear. 'No.'

  'Why not? I thought you said I was your leverage. Go ahead, get your kicks slicing bits off. I won't disappoint. I promise I'll scream lots.' The bravado was making her legs shake.

  'Damn, and you think my brain's damaged.'

  'Fuck you.'

  Aaron gave Inigo a genuinely curious look. 'Whatever did you two have back in the day?'

  'Love.' Inigo's arm went round her shoulder. 'I doubt that's in your memories.'

  'No. I have to admit it ain't dinging any bells. But I understand the principles. And who knows, if I eat my greens and stay out of trouble maybe I'll find a nice girl who'll like me for what I am. Just like this one does you.'

  Corrie-Lyn took a step forward, her hand bunching into a fist. Inigo pulled her back. 'Will you two behave yourselves? And you, this is hardly professional.'

  'I know,' Aaron said. 'Truce?'

  'If I ever get the chance to slit your throat while you're sleeping, I promise I'll cut long and deep.'

  Even Inigo gave her a strange look at that. She remained unrepentant.

  'I did save your lives back there,' Aaron said in a mildly injured tone.

  'We were only in that much trouble because of you.'

  'Really? Think on this. The people following us to find Inigo wanted him dead, very badly dead. They would have found him eventually. Thanks to you and me teaming up, we got here first.'

  'And who is left alive on Hanko to thank you for that?'

  'All right, enough,' Inigo said, squeezing her arm. 'We are still alive, for which I acknowledge our debt. But you have to admit, having you come for me as part of some Faction's ideological wish-fulfilment isn't great for me.'

  'I don't know what's in store for you,' Aaron said. 'But how bad can it be?'

  Inigo said nothing. Corrie-Lyn was disconcerted by the way his gaiamotes had closed off again, isolating his emotions. She was so used to sharing her every feeling with him. Seventy years ago.

  'So who are you taking me to?' Inigo asked.

  Aaron had the grace to look uncomfortable.

  'He doesn't know,' Corrie-Lyn said.

  'Can I at least ask where we're going?'

  'Well,' Aaron drawled. 'I have to admit I'm not too sure any more.'

  'What?'

  'You said you always know what to do next,' Corrie-Lyn protested. 'Your brain is like an old flow chart. Finish one task and the next flips up. Well now you've got the Dreamer, you have to know where to take him.'

  'It's kinda like this: under ordinary circumstances I'd know exactly what to do next.'

  'Ordinary circumstances?'

  'We're on a Navy ship. A, uh, borrowed Navy ship.'

  'And you've broken it,' Inigo said laconically.

  'Broken it?' she asked in alarm. The prospect of the rest of her life, however long or short, condemned to the confines of this ship with the ultimate nut-job Aaron wasn't a comforting thought.

  'I had to fly some rather extreme manoeuvres to locate you,' Aaron explained. 'Let's just say I kinda screwed the warranty. On the plus side, there's a lot of redundancy, and a big inventory of spare parts. The smartcore has drawn up a repair schedule, and the bots are hard at it.'

  'Wait,' Corrie-Lyn said. 'Where are we now?' She'd assumed that after four hours they'd be far outside the Hanko system.

  'A million kilometres from Hanko,' Aaron said. 'And waiting.'

  'For what?'

  'Here's the deal, this is a Navy ship, so they build them tough; we can go ftl in our current state, but I haven't got me a huge urge to do that right now. The bots need some time to get us back up to a minimum function level. Now the way my instinct's pushing it, I don't mind waiting. When we are back up to a halfway decent degree of flight readiness, I'll know what to do.'

  Inigo blinked in astonishment. 'Is it always like this?'

  Corrie-Lyn sighed. 'Yes. Fraid so.'

  There was food on board. The crew each had their own little store of speciality items they just couldn't live without. So Corrie-Lyn and Inigo got to open packets of hot orange chocolate drink made on Luranda, with marshmallows from Epual. The packets were self-heating, which was just as well; the culinary unit was one of the casualties the bots were working on. And half of their basic nutrient liquid had squirted out of a ruptured tank.

  The cabin furniture was a long way down the priority list for repairs, so they wriggled themselves into the strange lumpy curves as comfortably as possible and sipped from metal mugs. Aaron was with them some of the time. He often left to inspect what was being done in various parts of the ship.

  After another argument, Corrie-Lyn got him to open up the ship's net with some heavy access restrictions in place. At least it meant she and Inigo were allowed to review the sensor images.

  Hanko was a silver crescent set against an unusually barren starfield. The Lindaus remaining sensors overlaid the visual image with a host of gravitational data. They could actually watch the mass distribution altering as the Hawking m-sink ate the world from within. Great looping gravity waves expanded and contracted around the planet, juddering with the rhythm of a dying heart. Their motions became more erratic as the process began to accelerate towards its terrible ending. The magma core was now being absorbed at a phenomenal rate by the inflating event horizon. Tectonic plates shifted and shattered as the mantle adjusted to internal pressures that changed by the minute. The ice that had grasped every ocean for the last thousand years broke apart into vast crumbling sea-sized bergs that started to skid across the buckling land and collapsing mountain ranges.

  Aaron returned to the cabin. 'It's about to go critical,' he announced solemnly.

  As he spoke, the brilliant white storm clouds began to glow with a tangerine hue, filling the crescent out to a perfect sphere of amber light. Its intensity rose swiftly, and the atmosphere started to expand. Massive hurricanes geysered up above the ionosphere, twirling off into space as the gases burned with nuclear heat.

  'Wish it well, wish it gone,' Aaron sang in a low whisper.

  Below the shredded atmosphere, the mantle detonated. Continent sized rock segments punched outwards amid tattered oceans of superheated lava.

  'The splendour of death, once known, loved beyond reason. Evolution's eternal shore, free at last to wash up what you will.'

  Untied from the constraints of the semi-solid shell, the true light of the runaway m-sink implosion shone out far brighter than the nearby star. Its spectrum chased through a delicate pink to pure white, then accelerated into blue-white as its radiation efflux poured out vast quantities of gamma waves. The event horizon consumed the last of the planet's core. Only the light remained, growing ever brighter as its heart shrank faster and faster.

  'Out of twinkling Stardust all came, into dark matter all will fall. Death mocks us as we laugh defiance at entropy, yet ignorance birthed mortals sail forth upon time's cruel sea.'

  The Lindau began to accelerate at an easy two gees, keeping far ahead of the rock fragments and darkening seas of magma that spewed out from the dazzling implosion nucleus.

  'I don't recognize the verse,' Inigo said.

  Aaron shook himself out of a mild daze to frown at him. 'What verse?'

  Corrie-Lyn rolled her eyes, and poured a shot of hundred-year-old rum into the remains of her hot chocolate. She'd found the bottle of St Lisamne's finest in one of the crew cabins, and immediately appropriated it. 'Never mind. Has your crappy brain come up with anything yet?'

  'I'm considering options. I'm most worried that the Navy knew we were here.'

  'How do you know that?' Inigo asked.

  'The information was in the captain's brain. Admiral Kazimir himself told him about you and me.'

  Corrie-Lyn shuddered and poured s
ome more rum. The chocolate was all gone now. 'In his brain! So they'll come looking when this ship doesn't report in.'

  'I suspect they're already on their way and, given the captain reported the use of an m-sink, it will be considerably more than a simple scout ship that pops out of hyperspace.'

  'So will you suicide or surrender?'

  'Neither. We have about three more hours until primary systems repairs reach an adequate level. The rest can be performed while we're underway, but the drive and power systems must be made reliable first.'

  'That sounds like you know where we're going.'

  'I'm considering options that are opening up.'

  'Opening up,' an intrigued Inigo said. 'Do you mean logically, or are these possibilities inside your own head that are being revealed by your employer?'

  Aaron scratched behind his ear, clearly made uncomfortable by the whole process. 'The options, I guess, are implanted information. Which one I choose is down to me based on the situation on the ground. After all, it's that kind of expertise which bought me the job.'

  'Do any of these options tell you what is to become of me?'

  'It's not like that. You're not relevant to me personally; you're just the package I'm assigned to deliver.'

  'You know, as well as my day job as the Dreamer, I am an accomplished analyst. If you were to open yourself fully to the gaiafield I might be able to uncover the pathways of these foreign memories.'

  'Why would I want you to do that?'

  'So that you know who you are. Where the real you begins and the artificial motivations end.'

  'Suppose they're not artificial motivations? Suppose this is what I am, what I've always been?'

  'You suffer too much for that to be true. Your dreams trouble you. I knew that even before Corrie-Lyn told me.'

  'And yet I'm alive, and you're in my custody. I think we'll settle for that level of functionality for now.'

  'As you wish. Can you at least tell us of the options that have been revealed?'

  'I don't know much in advance. That way, if I'm captured I can't reveal anything to my opponents.'

  'You just said we were in your custody.'