The Temporal Void (ARC)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  'Ouch!' He rubbed at the point, though it was hard bending his arm that far back. Every muscle ached. He was sure his call muscle was about to cramp again from the awkward position he'd maintained while supervising the bots. He'd ignored the growing discomfort last time, and his biononic medical functions had to deal with the sudden flare of pain as his whole leg seized up. Even now it was difficult to put his full weight on it. As a consequence, the Mellanie's Redemption was now operating with a two-thirds internal gravity field. He knew that wasn't good, that his body shouldn't grow too accustomed to an easier environment. It was a mistake he'd made a couple of times before on long flights; mistakes which had taken too long to rectify in the medical chamber.

  The malmetal door flowed shut. Technically it was the engine bay door, but necessity had required some internal remodelling of the starship's layout. Two of the midsection cargo holds were now incorporated into the engine bay, along with a small section of companionway. The expanded volume was essential to accommodate the new ultradrive. With the components finally identified, he'd broken open the hyperdrive and grafted the two machines into a single unit. Even with the engineeringbots and low gravity it had been difficult manoeuvring the modules into place. Several bulkheads had been chopped up and dumped out of the airlocks. He'd been worried that the whole new drive system might even intrude in the cabin. But thankfully the ship had been spared that.

  'There you are,' Catriona Saleeb chided in her deep voice as he returned to the main cabin. She was pacing about, dressed in silky shorts that came down to her knees and some kind of loose top with gossamer-thin shoulder straps.

  'We've been worried,' Trisha agreed from the galley section, where she was bending over to sniff some of the dishes the culinary unit had produced. White bikini bottoms stretched tight over her buttocks, the navy-blue T-shirt she wore above them was equally snug. Troblum always enjoyed how powerful she looked in constricting clothes.

  'It's not easy,' he said as he slumped down into a chair. A servicebot brought the first set of plates over.

  'Have you finished?' Trisha asked. She walked alongside the bot to sit on the floor beside his chair. Her hand stroked Troblum's cheek as the OCtattoos on her face glowed faintly, creating an alluring shading. A phantom perception shivered pleasurably down his nerves as the I-sentient personality meshed with his sensory enrichments.

  'Not yet,' he admitted. 'There's another hundred components to integrate. But they're peripherals. The bots can handle that now they're catalogued. I've assembled the principal modules. Initial system functionality check was positive.'

  'Well done you,' Catriona purred.

  Troblum started on the pile of salmon flakes marinated in sweetened soy sauce and rice wine on a bed of brown galie rice. Premium-strength Dutch lager washed them down well. Now he was relaxing into the chair he felt supremely tired. He had spent days assembling the ultradrive, and biononics had kept him awake for every hour of it. Now he badly needed to rest.

  Catriona knelt beside Trisha. 'You should get to sleep, but first you have to turn the gravity back up.'

  'In a minute,' he assured her.

  Catriona put her arm round Trisha, slipping her hand up inside the tight T-shirt. Her nose nuzzled Troblum's neck, almost tickling. 'Why don't you watch us?' she murmured. 'That'll help you relax.'

  'I don't need help,' he said as the servicebot produced a big lasagne garnished with garlic butter dough balls. 'But you two keep going.'

  Trisha grinned, and turned to kiss Catriona. The two of them became more ardent as Troblum chomped away contentedly. He watched them, but shut down any sensory reception from the I-sentient personalities until he'd finished tasting the food. The two together weren't a good mix - something else he knew from experience. Once again he regretted losing Howard Liang. Without the male I-sentient personality to twin his sensorium with he'd have to work out how to fully appreciate the two girls making love. Twinning with a female body unnerved him somehow. He didn't handle out-of-the-ordinary well. Though his social acceptance monitor program kept informing him he should make an effort to be more accepting, and try new things. This was something he'd have to solve before his flight to the Drasix cluster.

  He was half way through the slab of lasagne when he told the smartcore to establish a TD link to the Unisphere, using an ultra secure onetime node. Even if the Accelerators had located his u-shadow's monitor emplacements there was no way they could track his physical location though the link.

  'Have you found Paula Myo?' he asked his u-shadow.

  'No. There are no reported sightings within any of the accredited Unisphere news chronicles, nor the gossip journals. The Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate lists her as currently unavailable.'

  'Shit.' Oh well, I tried. That was the right thing to do. Still, leaving the Commonwealth with the Cat on the loose didn't sit right.

  He popped four dough balls into his mouth, sucking air down as the hot garlic butter ran across his tongue. / could just shotgun everything I know about the Accelerators and what they've done. Paula would pick that up. But even I don't know what the swarm was meant to imprison.

  He still worried about how the Unisphere was compromised. Although he was convinced he was beyond anybody's reach now.

  Shotgunning is probably the right thing. He just hated drawing so much attention to himself. Although, if he was truly leaving, it didn't matter.

  Trisha let out a startled gasp. Troblum glanced down as Catriona sniggered. Catriona could be impressively kinky at times, and she'd already got Trisha's little blue T-shirt off. That wasn't what had astounded Trisha this time. She was sitting up frowning as the green OCtattoos on her face began to glow brighter than ever. Then the seething pattern began to slip down her neck to flow across her chest and along her arms. She held them up in front of her as Catriona backed off fast.

  'What's happening?' Troblum asked the smartcore.

  'Contaminated communication link,' it replied, which fired Troblum right out of his fatigue lethargy.

  'Can you counter it?'

  'I can close the link. The source is within the Unisphere which I do not have the ability to deal with.'

  'Is it trying to contaminate you?'

  'No.'

  'If you detect any such attempt, cut the link immediately.'

  Trisha was now a three dimensional human silhouette of writhing green curlicues. Her features vanished, and the shape shrank rapidly. New colours bled in. Tangerine and turquoise lines wove their way through the thicket of green until there simply was no more green. Hanging in the air directly ahead of a badly startled Troblum, tangerine and turquoise sine waves rushed back towards their vanishing point.

  It triggered a deep memory, not in a storage lacuna but a perfectly natural recollection. 'I know you,' he said.

  'Congratulations,' the eternity pattern said. 'You really do know your history.'

  'The Sentient Intelligence, you abandoned us a long time ago.'

  'I didn't leave, I was declared persona non grata by ANA.'

  'Oh. Everyone thought you'd gone post-physical.' Troblum could barely believe he was talking to the SI. It had grown out of the huge arrays that the first CST commercial wormholes had used. Their programs had been so complex, with so many genetic algorithms they had become self-aware. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie who owned the arrays agreed to provide the newly evolved batch of Sentient Intelligences an independent super-array to operate in. The deal was for the SI to then write stable software which would operate the wormhole generators without any further evolution. The deal also included an independent planet where the super-array would be sited.

  A lot of people in the Commonwealth questioned if the SI counted as truly alive, an old argument that never had an answer. But the SI and the Commonwealth had got along side by side without any problem until ANA came on line. ANA claimed the SI did not qualify as a genuine living entity, and that it was interfering in Commonwealth political affairs; a suspicion which had been given a lot of cr
edence by ANA's exposure of various SI undercover scouts in strategic positions. Contact had been abandoned or cut off depending on which account and conspiracy theory you accessed.

  'No,' the SI said. 'I am still resolutely physical. The systems I operate within would have to be transformed for me to evolve-further.'

  'Can't you do that?'

  'Yes. Are you familiar with the phrase: for everything a season?'

  'Uh, not really. But I understand it.'

  'For the moment I remain content with my current existence. However, like several species, I am concerned by your proposed Pilgrimage into the Void. That threat is enough to upset the status quo between myself and ANA.'

  'Not my Pilgrimage.'

  'You work for the Faction which engineered it.'

  So how the crap did it know that? 'How removed are you from our affairs?'

  'Not as much as ANA would like, nowhere near as much as conspiracy theorists would like to believe. As always, I observe and interpret. That is my function.'

  'You're still in the Unisphere, then?'

  'I have some monitoring capacity left. After all, I predate ANA by several centuries. I am not easy to purge from existing systems.'

  'So what do you want with me?'

  'There is a lot of attention focused on you. You wish to contact Paula Myo, your u-shadow has been trying to locate her. Why?'

  Troblum wasn't going to answer that. He didn't even have proof that he was talking to the SI. It would be easy enough for the Accelerators to pull a stunt like this; and they knew of his interest in the Starflyer War. 'I have information for her.'

  'Is it relevant to the current situation?'

  'Yes.'

  'Will it prevent the Pilgrimage?'

  'It will weaken the Accelerator Faction. I don't know how badly that will affect the Pilgrimage.'

  'Very well, I will establish a secure link for you.'

  'No! I want to see her in person.'

  'Why?'

  'I don't trust you.'

  'How very unoriginal.'

  'That's the way it is.'

  'She is en route to an unregistered star system.'

  'Why, what's there?'

  'If you are still working for the Accelerators that information will help them.'

  'I'm not. And you contacted me.'

  'I did.'

  'I'm not going to some unregistered system. I don't know what's there.'

  'Very well. What about Oscar Monroe?'

  'What about him?'

  'You tried to contact him on Orakum.'

  'Yes, I trust Oscar.'

  'Smart choice. He is on Viotia, in Colwyn City.'

  'Okay. Thank you.'

  'Now you know that will you seek him out?'

  'I'll think about it.'

  * * * *

  At three hundred and thirty five years old, it always galled Digby that his great-grandmother still thought he wasn't experienced enough to do his job. He suspected it would always be the case. Nonetheless, as soon as he received the shadow assignment he vowed it would be the epitome of professionalism.

  His starship, the Columbia505, helped; a brand-new ultradrive designed and built by ANA in its secure replicator station on Io. Its systems were the most sophisticated in the Commonwealth. Tracking Chatfield's stealthed hyperdrive ship as it left Ganthia was no problem at all.

  Digby followed Chatfield out to an uninhabited star system just inside the loose boundary that defined the Greater Intersolar Commonwealth. A small star whose mildly variable spectrum drifted between orange and yellow in two-hundred-year-cycles. It had been examined by CST's Exploratory division nine hundred years ago, a short visit which soon established there were no H-congruent planets. According to the Columbia505's smart-core there were no subsequent follow up ventures.

  Chatfield's ship rendezvoused with the Trojan point of the biggest gas giant. The only object of any note there was a small ice moon which had been trapped by the gravitational null-zone over a billion years ago. With a diameter of just over two thousand kilometres, its grizzled surface glinted softly in the weak copper sunlight.

  The first thing Digby found as he followed Chatfield in was the elaborate sensor network scanning space and hyperspace out to a hundred million kilometres from the ice moon. His stealth systems allowed him to get within twenty-thousand kilometres before he halted his approach. The on-board sensors had just managed to pick up eleven vehicles of some kind orbiting the moon. They were heavily stealthed, and his ship's registry didn't have anything like them on file. Digby couldn't get any kind of image using passive sensors from such a distance, so the Columbia505 released a flock of miniature drones on a flyby trajectory. The only flaw with that was the flight time. To avoid suspicion about their trajectory and velocity the pebble-sized drones would take nine hours to reach the ice moon and skim past its unknown sentries.

  Chatfield's visit lasted three hours.

  'What do you want me to do?' Digby asked Paula as Chatfield's ship rose away from the frigid surface at five gees. 'Stay here or follow him?'

  'Follow him,' Paula said. 'I'll investigate the base.'

  'My sensor drones will engage in another five and a half hours. They should be able to tell you more about the satellites. If they're as bad as I think they are you'll need a Navy squadron to break in.'

  'We'll see.'

  The Columbia505's sensors watched Chatfield's ship power into hyperspace. Five seconds later Digby followed him out of the unnamed system. Interestingly, they were now heading for

  Ellezelin.

  * * * *

  The Alexis Denken flew into the star system seven hours after the Columbia505 had departed. Its smartcore steered it towards the ice moon in full stealth mode. While it was still ten thousand kilometres out, Paula triggered the sensor drones that were now tumbling away from their brief encounter. All the data they'd amassed downloaded into the smartcore, which immediately set about analysing the information.

  The orbiting sentries were impressive. Very little of their nature had leaked through the stealth effect, but the drones had managed to piece together a few fragments. What they'd glimpsed was some kind of ship over a hundred metres long, with a strange wrinkled teardrop-shape hull that sprouted odd lumps. Power signature leakage confirmed they were heavily armed. Technologically they weren't as advanced as the Alexis Denken (very few ships were, she acknowledged wryly), but their sheer size and power meant they'd be able to overwhelm her starship's force fields if they ever caught it.

  The smartcore took eight minutes to analyse a flaw in their detector scans and configure the Alexis Denken's emissions so that it could pass among them unnoticed. Paula watched the surface of the ice moon grow larger as the Alexis Denken slipped placidly through the big defence sentries. Little attempt had been made to hide the station that sprawled across the fissured ice plain. Electronic and thermal emissions were strong. She saw a broad cross shape of dark metal, with each wing measuring nearly a kilometre long.

  'This might just be the proof you need,' Paula told ANA:Governance. 'We've never been able to find one of their bases before, let alone intact and still functioning.'

  'Now we know it exists do you want Navy support?'

  'No. This is just a reconnaissance trip. If the Navy tries to force its way in here, they'll self-destruct. I want to know what's here that's worth this level of secrecy and defence.'

  The Alexis Denken descended carefully until it was hovering above the craggy icescape a couple of kilometres away from the base itself. Quantum mass signature detectors built up a comprehensive pattern of the base's layout for Paula. It extended over half a kilometre below the top of the ice. The central section was largely empty, which she judged to be the starship docking bays. Around that, the wings had a much higher density average, reflecting the concentration of equipment inside. Whatever the Accelerators were doing in there, it required eight high-output mass energy generators to supply the power they needed.

  Paula directed the
smartcore to extend the ship's t-field, which inflated out to a five kilometre radius. A t-field wasn't exactly standard starship gear, not even for ultradrives; but then the Alexis Denken was pretty extraordinary even by ANA's standards. She waited anxiously for a couple of seconds, but the t-field didn't register with the base defence sensors.

  For over half an hour the Alexis Denken teleported flecks of ice from directly underneath the bottom of the base. One sliver at a time was taken, to rematerialize in crevices and fissures across the surrounding surface, adding to the coat of slush-gravel that covered the small moon. Eventually, Paula had excavated a cavern slightly larger than the Alexis Denken. The starship teleported itself inside.

  The next phase was even more delicate. Paula suited up and went outside, carrying several cases of equipment. She slowly cleared the remaining shell of ice from the bottom of the base, exposing the metal skin. Once that was clean, she applied a segment of molecular nanofilaments which began to worm their way up through the molecular bonds of the metal. The first tips which penetrated scanned round, showing her where to apply the next batch. It took five attempts in total before a set of filaments melded into one of the base's data cables, and gave the ship's smartcore unrestricted access into the network.

  Paula's u-shadow assumed direct control over the basement above her, disabling the alarms and subverting the sensors. After the whole Sholapur incident she wasn't taking any chances with her personal safety. She teleported eight combatbots into the room, then materialized at the centre of them.

  The chamber she emerged into was empty, and looked like it had never been used. A blank metal room with structural ribbing reinforcing the base's external skin, its floor a simple grid suspended above the curving metal. Thick conduit tubes threaded across it. The only door was a malmetal circle in the ceiling. Paula told her u-shadow to open it. Her armour suit's ingrav units lifted her through after the combatbots. The corridor she came out on to was illuminated by thin green lighting strips on their lowest setting. It ran for almost two hundred metres in both directions before ending in pressure bulkheads. Gravity at this level was a standard one gee field.