“I imagine that if bits of me start to fall off, I will …” He stopped, the humor fading from his face.
“Suicide?” Inigo supplied.
Aaron was staring at a point on the bulkhead, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. “No,” he said. “I’d never do such an unrighteous thing. I’m not that weak.” Then he frowned and glanced over at Corrie-Lyn. “What?”
“Oh, Lady,” Inigo grunted.
Corrie-Lyn was fascinated, suspecting that the real Aaron had surfaced, if only for a moment. “You’re not going to make it,” she said flatly.
“We’ve got barely two days to go until we reach the Spike,” Aaron said. “I can hold myself together for that kind of time scale. Trust and believe me on that.”
“Nonetheless, it would be prudent for you to load some kind of emergency routine into the smartcore,” Inigo suggested.
“I can match that; in fact, I can top it in a big way on the survival stakes. I would strongly suggest, now that you’ve figured out I’m not on the side of harming you and that you and the great Ozzie are going to be best buddies standing before the tsunami of evil, you think about how to stop the Void.”
“It can’t be stopped,” Inigo said. “It simply is. This I know. I have observed it from Centurion Station, and I have personally felt the thoughts emanating within. Out of all of humanity, I know this. So believe me when I tell you that if you want to exist in the same universe, you have to find a way around it. Our best bet would be to turn around and ask the High Angel to take us to another galaxy.”
Aaron drank some of his coffee. “Someone thinks differently,” he said, unperturbed. “Someone still believes in you, Dreamer; someone believes you can truly lead us to salvation. How about that? Your real following is down to one: me. And for now I’m the only one that counts.”
They began to feel the Spike’s wierd mental interference while they were still a day and a half out. At first it was nothing but a mild sensation of euphoria, which was why they didn’t notice at first. Corrie-Lyn had cut down on her drinking, but there were still some seriously good bottles cluttering up the crew’s personal stores. Be a shame to waste them. A couple-the Bodlian white and the Guxley Mountain green-were reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. Definitely a shame. Especially as there was nothing else to do on board ship.
So in the afternoon she’d gotten a bot to make up, or rather unmake, a semiorganic shirt so that just a couple of buttons held the front together. Satisfied the end product was suitably naughty, she stripped off and stepped into the ablution alcove. While she was in the shower, the bot also remade a thick wool sweater into a long robe; it was scratchy on her arms, but what the Honious.
She’d left Inigo in the lounge reviewing astronomical data on the Void. Now he hurried to their cabin when she called him, saying something important had happened.
“What is it?” he asked as the door parted. Then he stopped, surprised and then intrigued by the low lighting and the three candles flickering on nearly horizontal surfaces. The culinary unit might be rubbish at food, but it could still manage wax easily enough.
Corrie-Lyn gave him a sultry look and ordered the door to close behind him. He saw the bottle of Bodlian and the two long-stemmed glasses she was holding in one hand.
“Ah.” His gaiamotes emitted a simultaneous burst of nerves and interest.
“I found this,” she told him in the huskiest voice she could manage without giggling. “Shame to waste it.”
“Classic,” he said, and took the proffered bottle. She kissed him before he’d even gotten the cap off, then began to nuzzle his face. He smiled and pressed himself up against her while she toned up the mood her gaiamotes were leaking out. Together they undid the belt of the crude robe. “Oh, dear Lady, yes,” he rumbled as the wool slipped down to reveal what remained of the shirt.
Corrie-Lyn kissed him again, the tip of her tongue licking playfully. “Remember Franlee?” she asked. “Those long winter nights they spent together in Plax.”
“I always preferred Jessile.”
“Oh, yes.” She sipped some of the wine. “She was a bad girl.”
“So are you.” He poured his own glass and ran one hand down her throat, stroking her skin softly until he came to the top button. His finger hooked around it, pulling lightly to measure the strain.
“I can be if you ask properly,” she promised.
Two hours later Aaron fired a disrupter pulse into their locked cabin door. The malmetal shattered instantly, flinging a cloud of glittering dust into the confined space. Corrie-Lyn and Inigo were having a respite, sprawled over the quilts on the floor. Inigo held a glass of the Bodlian in one hand, carefully dripping the wine across Corrie-Lyn’s breasts. Secondary routines in his macrocellular clusters activated his integral force field instantly. Corrie-Lyn screamed, crabbing her way back along the floor until she backed into a bulkhead.
“Turn it off!” Aaron bellowed. His cheeks were flushed as he sucked down air. Jaw muscles worked hard, clamping his teeth together.
Inigo rose to his feet, standing in front of Corrie-Lyn. He expanded the force field to protect her from direct energy shots, knowing it would ultimately be futile against Aaron. “The force field stays on. Now, in the Lady’s name, what’s happened?”
“Not the fucking force field!” Aaron juddered, taking a step back. Weird unpleasant sensations surged out of his gaiamotes, making Inigo flinch. It was a torrent of recall from the strange cathedral with the crystal arches, terrified faces flashing past, weapons fire impossibly loud. Each memory burst triggered a devastating bout of emotion. Even Inigo felt tears trickling down his cheeks as he swung between fright and revulsion, defiance and guilt.
“The mindfuck,” Aaron yelled. “Turn it off or I swear I’ll kill her in front of you.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Inigo yelled back. “What’s happening? What is this?”
Aaron sagged against the side of the ruined door. “Get them out of my head!”
“Deactivate your gaiamotes; that’ll kill the attack.”
“They are off!”
Inigo’s skin turned numb with shock-his own emotion rather than the chaotic barrage coming from Aaron. “They can’t be. I can feel your mind.”
Aaron’s hand punched out, knuckles finishing centimeters from Inigo’s face. Enhancements rippled below his skin, and squat black nozzles slid out of the flesh. “Turn it off.”
“I’m not doing anything!” Inigo yelled back. Ridiculously, he felt exhilarated: This was living, the antithesis of the last few decades. He cursed himself for hiding away rather than facing up to everything the universe could throw at him. Which was stupid …
Four ruby-red laser targeting beams fanned out of Aaron’s enrichments, playing across Inigo’s face. “Switch. It. Off,” the crazed agent growled. Somewhere close by dark wings flapped in pursuit. The edge of the cabin began to shimmer away as if the darkness were claiming it molecule by molecule. Her presence was chilling, seeping through Inigo’s force field to frost his skin.
Aaron flung his head back. “Get away from me, you monster.”
“It’s not me,” Inigo whispered, fearful of whatever stalked them through the gloom that was now busily eating away at the edge of his own vision. He could see her smile now, predatory teeth bared. If she did break through to whatever Aaron believed to be reality, there was no telling what would happen.
The laser beams started to curve through the air, sliding smoothly around Inigo to cage him in red threads. Their tips studded Corrie-Lyn’s naked body.
“I can be as bad as her,” Aaron purred with smooth menace. “After all, she taught me. I can make this last for hours. You will hear Corrie-Lyn plead with you to switch it off. She will beg you to kill her as the only way to stop the pain.”
“Please,” Inigo said. “Listen to me. I’m not doing this to you.”
The arching lasers grew brighter. Corrie-Lyn’s skin sizzled and blackened where the tiny points touched her. She
gritted her teeth against the pricks of pain. “Wait,” she gasped. “Where are we?”
Aaron was shuddering as if someone were shoving an electric current through his body. “Location?”
The darkness surrounding the cabin pulsed with a heart’s rhythm, stirring up a gust of air that pushed against them.
“Yes!” Corrie-Lyn demanded. “Our location. Are we near the Spike?”
“It’s two hundred and seventy light-years away.”
“Is that close enough for the dream? Is that what we’re feeling?”
Aaron cocked his head to one side, though his hand remained steady just centimeters in front of Inigo’s face. A drop of saliva dribbled out of his mouth. “Dream? You think this to be a dream? She’s here. She’s walking through the ship. She’s here for me. She never forgets. Never forgives. For that is weakness and we are strength.”
“Not your dream, you fucking moron,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Ozzie’s dream. The galactic dream he left the Commonwealth to build.”
“Ozzie’s dream?” The curving lasers dimmed slightly. Corrie-Lyn wriggled away from their enclosure.
“That’s right,” Inigo cried. “This effect is like an emotion amplifier. I knew the sex was good, but …”
Corrie-Lyn stopped rubbing her burns. “Hey!”
“Don’t you see?” Inigo urged. “He’s heightened our emotional responses through the gaiafield. But with your screwed-up psyche that’s simply helped with the destabilization. Whatever controls your masters installed are starting to crack under the pressure.”
The blackness pulsed again. Inigo swore he could feel the pressure increase on his inner ears.
“My gaiamotes are closed,” Inigo hissed.
“They can’t be! I’m witnessing your dreams.”
“He’s right,” Corrie-Lyn said. “My gaiamotes are shut, too, but this fucking nightmare is terrorizing us all. It’s not the gaiamotes.”
Aaron’s targeting beams snapped off. “What, then?” he demanded. His knees nearly buckled. “I cannot risk my mission failing in this fashion. It leaves you open to capture. We will have to die.” His hand moved to clamp his fingers over Inigo’s face. Inigo’s exovision was suddenly swamped by warning symbols as his force field began to glow a weak violet. “Your memorycell, too,” Aaron said. “Nothing of you must survive to fall into the hands of the enemy, especially her.”
“He’s circumvented it,” Inigo said, trying to keep calm. Violence wasn’t the solution to this; he had to break through Aaron’s neuroses. “This is Ozzie’s dream; it doesn’t need the gaiafield anymore. He’s propagated the feelings through spacetime itself.”
“This is an attack,” Aaron vowed.
“It’s not. I promise. He’s a genius, an authentic off-the-scale live genius. The gaiafield was just a warm-up for him. Don’t you see? He’s created real telepathy. Ozzie has made something that can make mind speak directly to mind just like he always wanted. It’s internal. Do you understand? Your instability is coming from within.”
“No.” Aaron fell to his knees, gasping for breath, pulling Inigo down with him.
“You are the cause of the mission failure. The damage is coming from your own subconscious.”
“No.”
“It is.”
“Make it stop. She can’t get me. I can’t allow that. Not again.”
“There is nobody there. She is just a memory, a screwed-up memory you don’t know how to contain, there’s so much fear embedded with the experience.”
Aaron suddenly let go of Inigo, stumbling around to face the broken door in a martial arts pose. “She’s here.”
“Aaron, listen to me. Ozzie’s dream is corroding your rationality because it was never designed to deal with circumstances like these. You have to let them go; you have to let the real you out of those constraints your boss imposed. You must come forward. This artificial personality can’t cope.”
“Not good enough?”
“The real you is more than adequate. Come out. Come on, it’s the only way you can beat this.”
“Damage control …” Aaron slowly sank to his knees, and then his back curled as he dropped his head between his legs. His breathing started to calm. The eerie semihallucinations around the periphery of the cabin began to melt away.
Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other an anxious look. “Do you think?” she asked.
“The Lady alone knows,” he murmured back.
They stood up. Corrie-Lyn hurriedly pulled her woolen robe back on, then they both approached the crouched figure cautiously. Inigo reached out tentatively but didn’t quite have the courage to touch Aaron. He wondered if that was the dream field-or whatever-amplifying the worry. But it seemed sensible enough. Surely an emotional enhancer would boost his sympathy correspondingly. Maybe that was the way it worked, everything raised equally so that everything stayed in the same balance as before-no alteration to personality, just a greater perception or empathy.
Aaron’s head came up; his biononics performed a thorough field scan of the starship. He stood up and looked at Inigo and Corrie-Lyn. His weapon enrichments sank back down into his hand; ripples of skin closed over them.
“Hello?” Corrie-Lyn said hopefully. “Aaron, is that really you now?”
Inigo wasn’t so sure. There wasn’t a trace of emotion coming from the man. In fact …
“I am Aaron,” he said.
“That’s good,” Corrie-Lyn said hesitantly. “Have the disturbances gone?”
“There are no disturbances in my head. My thought routines have been reduced to minimum functionality requirement. This mission will be completed now. Arrival at the Spike is in eighteen hours. Inigo will accompany me to Oswald Fernandez Isaacs. You will then both be given further instructions.” He turned and walked out the door.
“What in Honious was that?” a startled Corrie-Lyn asked.
“The last fallback mode by the sound of it; probably installed in case his brain got damaged in a firefight. He’s running on minimum neural activity. Whoever rebuilt him must have had a real fetish about redundancy.”
She shivered, clutching at the robe. “He’s even less human than before, isn’t he? And he was never much to begin with.”
“Yeah. Ladydamnit, I thought this was our chance to break his conditioning.”
“Crap.”
“But at least we know I don’t get shot before we meet Ozzie.”
“Oswald? I never knew that was his name.”
“No, me neither.”
She let out a long breath, then narrowed her eyes to stare at him. “The sex wasn’t that good naturally?”
“Ah. I had to say something that would shock him.”
“Really?” She glanced around the cabin. Tiny shards of sharp metal debris glinted on every surface. “Honious, this is a mess.”
“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”
“I’m not worried.”
“Yes, you are. I can sense it.”
“What? Oh!” Her eyes widened as she realized she could sense his mind as clearly as if they were fully sharing within the gaiafield.
He smiled weakly. “That Ozzie, he’s really something. Over two hundred and fifty light-years away, and it already affects us. Whatever it really is.”
“Do you think it can be used to connect everyone with the Void?”
“I have no idea. But I suspect we’re going to find out. Maybe that’s why Aaron’s controllers want me there. I have proven access to thoughts from the Void; maybe they want to see if I can connect directly to the Heart.”
“So what can this effect do?” she mused.
– -
They spent the next few hours experimenting. The effect was remarkably like the longtalk they knew so well from the Void. When one of them carefully formed words or phrases, the other could perceive it, though they never worked out anything like the directed longtalk available to the residents of Querencia. But it was the constant awareness of emotion that was the most disquie
ting. If they hadn’t already been so intimate and adept at using the gaiamotes to connect emotionally, Corrie-Lyn thought they would have had real trouble with guilt and resentment at such openness. As it was, the effect took a long time to accept at an intellectual level. Being so exposed and having no choice in the matter made her apprehensive. She was all right with Inigo, but knowing the machinelike Aaron could perceive her every sentiment was unpleasant at the very least, and as for the prospect of every alien on the Spike being able to see into her mind … She wasn’t sure she could cope with that.
The one time she gave a bottle of Rindhas a longing look, she immediately knew of Inigo’s disapproval, which triggered her own shame to new heights. No wonder the cranky old Aaron had broken down under the mental stress. It was a weird kind of human who could cope with having his heart on his sleeve the entire time.
And yet, she told herself, that’s what we were all wishing to undergo in the Void. Especially the all-inclusive telepathy as it was in the Thirty-seventh Dream. Perhaps it’s just people who are at fault. If I didn’t have so much to hide, I wouldn’t fear this as much. My fault I’m like this.
They went to sleep a few hours later, with Inigo using a low-level field scan to monitor Aaron just in case. They woke in time for a quick breakfast before they reached the Spike.
The Lindau dropped out of hyperspace fifty AUs above the blue-white A-class star’s south pole. The emergence location allowed it an unparalleled view of the star’s extensive ring system. Visual sensors swiftly picked out the Hot Ring with its innermost edge two AUs out from the star and a diameter of half an AU. A hoop of heavy metallic rocks glittering brightly in the harsh light as they tumbled around their timeless orbit. Three AUs farther out, the Dark Ring was a stark contrast, a slender band of carbonaceous particles inclined five degrees out of the ecliptic, so dark that it seemed to suck light out of space. The angle allowed it to produce a faint umbra on the so-called Smog, the third ring, composed of pale silicate dust and light particles combined with a few larger asteroids that created oddly elegant curls and whorls within the bland ocher-tinted haze. Beyond that, at seventeen AUs, was the Band Ring, a thin, very dense loop fixed in place by over a hundred shepherd moonlets. After that there was only the Ice Bracelet, which began at twenty-five AUs and blended into the Oort cloud at the system’s edge.
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