“You don’t know! I trusted you! Ozziedamnit. I could be making progress; I could have opened the Sol barrier by now.”
“Son, Marius would have shredded you like a puppy stuffed into a food blender if I’d let you go off after him. You’re good at what you do, delivering stuff to my agents and the odd bit of observation work. That’s why I recruited you, because everyone knows you’re basically harmless, which puts you above suspicion. Face it, you’ve just not got the killer instinct.”
“My family is trapped back there. I would do anything-”
“Which has made you angry, yes, which is driving you on. But that’s bad for you. It would mean there comes a point where you hesitate or get a nasty dose of doubt and remorse and decency when you were sawing off Marius’s fingers and making him eat them.”
The Delivery Man wrinkled his nose up in revulsion. “I wasn’t going to-”
“Son, you just said you’d do anything. And that would be the least of it. These people don’t roll over because you ask them nice. You’d have to strap Marius down on the dungeon table and make him tell you how to take down the barrier. And I’ll lay you good odds the only person who can actually deactivate the barrier is Ilanthe, and she’s not available. No. The only way for you to achieve anything right now is by helping me. So will you please stop the fuck whining and let me work out how to find the mechanism.”
“Crap!” The Delivery Man slumped back down, furious at being taken in again and even more furious that Gore was right. Somewhere in his mind was an image of himself threatening Marius, maybe firing a jelly gun close to his head, which would make anyone capitulate. Right? He shook his head, feeling foolish. Then he gave Gore a sharp look. “Wait a minute. You said the ones that got through.”
“What?” Gore paid him little attention. His eyes were closed as he lounged back in his orange shell chair, analyzing the smartcore’s data.
“The navy exploration ships that came here. You said some got through?” There was no reply. The Delivery Man requested the raw sensor data, building up a coherent image of what they were approaching. The star’s cometary halo seemed to have active stations of some kind drifting through it, large stations with force fields protecting them from a detailed scan.
“Oh, yeah, them,” Gore said eventually. “The borderguards are a good security team. They’re left over from the last of the high-technology-era Anomine, and they don’t like anyone contaminating the old homeworld.”
“The whats?” It didn’t sound good, not at all. But Gore never had time to answer him. That was when the Last Throw dropped out of ultradrive, and the smartcore was showing him an image of the borderguard not a kilometer away. It measured over five kilometers across, though most of it was empty space. The primary structure was of curving strands arranged in a broad ellipsoid, but they bent around sharply in the thick central section, forming three twisting cavities that intersected in the middle. Each strand appeared to be transparent, filled with a thick gas that hosted a multitude of dazzling green sparks. They swarmed along the strands as if there were a gale blowing inside. Floating in the heart of the cavities was a shape identical to the one formed by the green strands; this one was barely a tenth of the size, filled with a sapphire gas complete with swift sparks. At its center was a crimson shape; inside that was a yellow version that had a lavender speck nestled within. Passive sensors couldn’t make out if there was another miniature version contained by its haze, and a strong force field prevented any active examination.
“Now what?” the Delivery Man whispered.
“We talk very fucking quietly in case they’re listening in,” Gore snapped back.
The Delivery Man actually cringed from the look of contempt Gore gave him. He cleared his throat. “All right. Is it going to shoot at us?”
“I hope not.”
“So what do we do?”
“We ask permission to go through.”
“And if it says no?”
“Pray it doesn’t. We’ll have to kill all seventeen thousand of them.”
“Can this ship actually-” He broke off and kept silent. The smartcore shot a simple communication pulse at the borderguard. Sensors showed another five of the gigantic stations appearing out of odd spatial distortions a few thousand kilometers away.
“Why are you here?” the borderguard asked.
“We are representatives from the human race; two of us are on board.”
“What type?”
“Higher. You have dealt with us before and were favorable. I ask for that consideration to be shown again.”
“Your species has withdrawn all information valid to you from those who stayed behind.”
“I understand. We seek data on those who left. We are a subsect of our species which believes we should try to evolve as the final Anomine did. We seek information on their society.”
“You carry weapons; they are of a sophisticated nature. Those of your species who came before did not carry weapons.”
“There is an active conflict among our species and the Ocisen Empire. Other species are emerging who are hostile. Interstellar travel is a dangerous endeavor right now. We reserve the right to protect ourselves.”
“We have detected no conflict.”
“It is coming. The Void underwent a small expansion recently. Species across the galaxy are becoming alarmed by its behavior.”
“We detected the Void expansion.”
“In which case we would ask that you grant us permission to try and emulate the ultimate success of your species.”
“You may have access to those items left behind by the final Anomine. You may examine them with any means except physical alteration or destruction. You may not remove any item from our ancestral world. All items must be left in place when you leave.”
“We thank you for the generosity you show us.”
The Last Throw fell back into hyperspace and raced in for the Anomine homeworld. The Delivery Man observed its course display with some curiosity as they performed a wide arc around the G3 star. The starship started to drop the confluence nest satellites one at a time. They finished up spaced equidistantly in an orbit two hundred million kilometers out from the primary. Last Throw headed in for the Anomine homeworld.
There was a lot of junk in high orbit out beyond the geosynchronous halo. All of it was ancient, inactive: vast spaceship docks and habitation stations that had slowly been battered by micrometeorites and larger particles, subjected to solar radiation for millennia coincident with thermal extremes. Consequently, they were no more than brittle tissue-thin hulls now, drifting into highly elliptical orbits as their atmosphere leaked out and tanks ruptured. Chunks had broken off, tumbling away into their own orbit, bashing into one another, fracturing again and again. Now millions of them formed a thick gritty gray toroid around the old world.
The Last Throw darted gracefully through the astronautical graveyard and flew down to a standard thousand-kilometer parking orbit above the equator. From there, the starship’s optical sensors showed a planet similar to any H-congruous world, with deep blue oceans and continents graded with green and brown land, depending on the climate. Huge white cloud formations drifted through the clear air, their fat twisted peaks greater than any of the mountain ranges they blanketed.
“So now what?” the Delivery Man asked.
“Find a haystack, then start searching for its needle.”
The Delivery Man deliberately didn’t glare at the gold-faced man sitting in the shell chair opposite him. There was no point. “This planet is bigger than Earth,” he read from his exovision displays. “Surface area nearly eighty million square miles. That’s a lot of land to search with any degree of thoroughness.”
“What makes you think it’s on land?”
“Okay, what makes you think it’s even here? Was that in the summary? The Anomine had settled in eight other star systems that we know of.”
“And they’re all deserted. That’s a goddamn fact. They came back here
, every type of them. Another dumbass pilgrimage. This is where they elevated from.”
“Oh, Great Ozzie,” the Delivery Man moaned. “You don’t know, do you? You’ve no bloody idea. You’re hoping. That’s all. Hoping there’s an answer here.”
“I’m applying logic.”
The Delivery Man wanted to beat his fists on the chair. But it wouldn’t be any use, not even as emotional therapy. He’d been committed from the moment he left Gore’s asteroid. “All right. But you must have some idea how to find the damn thing, right?”
“Again, we’re going to apply logic. First we perform a complete low-orbit mapping flight and scan every inch of the place for exotic activity or gravity fluctuations, power generation, quantum anomalies-anything out of the ordinary.”
“But that’ll take …”
“Several days, yes.”
“And if we don’t find anything?”
“Go down and talk to the natives, see what they can tell us.”
“But they’re an agrarian civilization, human equivalent to the mid-nineteenth century. They’re not going to know about machines that can turn you into an angel.”
“They have legends; we know that. They’re proud of their history. The navy cultural anthropology team did some good work. We can even talk to them direct. And they’re more advanced than our nineteenth century-that I do remember from the files. Not that the comparison is entirely valid.”
“Okay. Whatever.”
Gore gave the briefest of nods and issued orders to the smartcore.
“Why did you bring me?” the Delivery Man asked. “You and the ship can handle this.”
“Backup,” Gore said flatly. “I might need help at some point. Who knows?”
“Great.”
“Get yourself some rest, son. You’ve been wired tight for days now.”
The Delivery Man admitted he was too tired and edgy to argue. He went over to his private cubicle and rolled onto the small but luxurious cot that expanded out of the bulkhead. He didn’t expect to sleep. He was still wound up tight about Lizzie and the children. The ship’s TD link to the unisphere remained connected, so he could access all the news from back home.
High Angel had arrived at the Sol system. After six hours Qatux had diplomatically announced to the President that there was nothing the huge arkship could do. The force field the Accelerators’ Swarm had deployed was too strong to break with any weapon they had.
After switching through several ill-informed news shows, the Delivery Man fell into a troubled sleep.
Corrie-Lyn woke up with a start, disoriented and unsure what had hauled her up out of such a deep sleep. She glanced around the small darkened cabin, listening intently, but there was nothing. Sometimes the Lindau’s poor battered systems would produce odd sounds. Pipes gurgled and bubbled, and the servicebots hammered away as they worked through their repair schedule; then there was that one time when she swore she’d heard the hull itself creak. But tonight it was silent aside from the constant hum of power, which was vaguely reassuring even though it shouldn’t be that loud. At least they still had power.
Inigo stirred briefly beside her, and she smiled down gently at him. It was so good to have him back, physically as well as emotionally. Even though he wasn’t quite the messiah of yore, he was still her Inigo, concerned about different things now but still as determined and focused as before. She felt so much happier now that he was here to help, despite still being unable to escape Aaron.
The name acted like some kind of recognition key. He was why she’d woken. Her mind was abruptly aware of the turmoil bubbling out from the agent’s gaiamotes. There were images her own brain instinctively tried to shut out, repulsive sensations of pain-not direct impulses but memories of suffering that verged on nauseous, but worst of all were the emotions of guilt and fear that bridged the gap between them, plunging her into his nightmare of darkness and torment. She was suffocating in some giant cathedral where men and women were being sacrificed on a crude pagan altar. She was standing behind the high priest as the curved dagger was raised again. Screams blasted out from those awaiting an identical fate as the blade flashed down, then rose again, dripping with blood. The figure in the white robe turned, and it wasn’t a male priest. She smiled gleefully, the front of her robe soaked in scarlet blood, making the fabric cling obscenely to her body, emphasizing breasts and hips.
“You don’t leave me,” she explained as the smile widened. Lips parted to reveal fangs that grew and grew as the cathedral faded away. There was only darkness and her. The robe was gone now; blood glistened across her skin. The mouth opened wider, then wider still; there was no face anymore, only teeth and blood. “Come back where you belong.”
He wanted to scream, joining the clamor kicked up by the others lost somewhere out there in the impenetrable blackness. But when he opened his mouth, blood poured in, filling his lungs, drowning him. Every muscle shook in the terrible struggle to be free, to be free of her, of what she’d made him do.
“It’s all right, son,” a new, soothing voice chimed in. “Let me help you.”
A soft irresistible force closed around his body, solidifying, immobilizing him. He stopped gagging for breath as bright red laser fans swept across the darkness, quickly arranging themselves into a spiral web with his head in the center. They contracted sharply, sending light pouring into his brain. Pain soared to unbelievable heights-
“Yech!” Corrie-Lyn shook her head violently, closing off her gaiamotes. The sickening sensations vanished. Now she heard a sound, a muffled yell from the captain’s cabin on the opposite side of the narrow companionway. “Sweet Lady,” she grunted. No mind could survive that kind of psychological torment for long, not and remain sane and functional. She stared at the cabin door, fearful he would come bursting through, his weapon enrichments activated. But he didn’t. There were another couple of defiant cries and then some whimpering like an animal being soothed before silence claimed the starship again.
Corrie-Lyn let out a long breath, seriously alarmed by how great the threat of him going completely insane had become. Her skin was coated in cold sweat. She pulled the tangle of quilts off herself and wriggled over to the ablution alcove. Taking care to be quiet so she didn’t wake Inigo, she slowly sponged herself down with a mild-scented soap. It cooled her skin, leaving her feeling a little better. Nothing she could do about the sensations crawling along the inside of her skin-the residual shock of the dream.
If that’s what it is.
It was all a little too coherent for comfort. Not a brain naturally discharging its accumulated experiences orchestrated by the peaks of lingering emotion, the way humans were designed to cope with everyday experiences. These were like broken memories pushing up from whatever dark zone of the psyche they’d been imprisoned in. “What in Honious did they do to you?” she murmured into the gloomy cabin.
The next morning the servicebots had finished tailoring some of the fresh clothes as she’d instructed. “Not bad,” Inigo said admiringly as she pulled on the navy tunic with shortened sleeves. She grinned as she wiggled into a pair of tunic trousers. They were tight around her hips. “Not bad at all.”
“I need some breakfast first,” she told him with a grin. The one-and only-advantage of their weird imprisonment was the amount of time alone they could spend catching up.
They held hands as they went into the lounge. Inigo of course used the culinary unit to prepare some scrambled eggs and smoked haddock. She delved into the pile of luxury supplies the crew had stored on board. The only thing the unit made that she could force down was the drinks, and that was pretty much limited to tea and tomato juice, neither of which was a firm favorite. She tucked into a mix of toffee banana cake and dried mortaberries, gulping the tea down quickly so she could convince herself the taste was Earl Grey, albeit with milk and strawberry jam.
Aaron came in and helped himself to his usual poached egg and smoked salmon. Without a word, he shuffled himself into his broken chair a
lmost at the other end of the lounge.
“Who is she?” Corrie-Lyn asked.
“Excuse me?”
“The high priestess or whatever she was. The one with all the blood. The one that scares you utterly shitless.”
Aaron stared at her for a long time. For once, Corrie-Lyn wasn’t intimidated. “Well?” she asked. “You shared last night.”
It wasn’t embarrassment-she suspected he was incapable of that-but he did lower his gaze. “I don’t know,” he said eventually.
“Well, you must-” She stopped, took a breath. “Look, I’m actually not trying to needle you. If you must know, I’m worried.”
“About me? Don’t be.”
“Nobody can take that kind of punishment night after night and not have it affect them. I don’t care what you’ve got enriched and improved and sequenced into every cell. That kind of crap is toxic.”
“And yet here I am each morning, functioning perfectly.”
“Seventeen hours ago,” Inigo said.
“What?”
“You were supposed to be on the bridge monitoring the ship. You actually slipped into the reverie. I felt it.”
“My operational ability is unimpaired.”
“It’s being undermined,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Can’t you see that? Or is it that you just can’t admit it?”
“I can help,” Inigo said.
“No.”
“You have instructions for just about every eventuality,” Inigo said. “Is there one for your own breakdown?”
“There is nothing wrong with me a bit of hush in the morning won’t fix. A man likes to break his fast in goodly contemplative silence.”
“Contemplate this: If you go gaga, how are we going to reach Ozzie?”
Aaron grinned contentedly. “You want to?”
“Yes,” Inigo said with great seriousness. “I don’t know who programmed you, but I think they might be right about getting the two of us together.”
“Now, ain’t that something; progress at last.”
“The only thing that can stop us reaching the Spike now is you,” Corrie-Lyn said.
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