The Evolutionary Void v-3

by Peter Hamilton

  There were no planets, an idiosyncrasy that sorely puzzled the Commonwealth astronomers. The star was too old for the rings to be categorized as any kind of accretion disc. Most wrote it off as a quirk caused by the Spike, but that had been in place only for at the most fifty thousand years; in astrological time that was nothing. Unless of course it had obliterated the planets when it arrived, which would make it a weapon of extraordinary stature. Again highly unlikely.

  From their position poised above the system, Aaron asked for approach and docking permission. It was granted by the Spike’s AI, and they slipped back into hyperspace for the short flight in.

  The Spike was in the middle of the Hot Ring. It was an alien artifact whose main structure was a slim triangle that curved gently around its long axis, which measured eleven thousand kilometers from the top to an indeterminate base. There was no way to determine the exact position of the base because that part of the Spike was still buried within some dimensional twist. To the navy exploration vessel that had found it in 3072, it was as if a planet-sized starship had tried to erupt out of hyperspace with only partial success, the nose slicing out cleanly into spacetime while the tail section was still lost amid the intricate folds of the universe’s underlying quantum fields. The only thing that ruined that big-aerodynamic-starship image was the sheer size of the brute. On top of the triangle was a five-kilometer-diameter spire that was a further two thousand kilometers in length-function unknown.

  Contrary to all natural orbital mechanics, the Spike remained oriented in one direction, with the tip pointing straight out of the Hot Ring ecliptic. Its concave curve also tracked the star as it traveled along its perfectly circular orbit like some heliotactic sail-shaped flower always following the light. Thus, the anchoring twist that held its base amid the whirling rocky particles was obviously active, although its mechanism was somewhere within the unreachable base. Few people still believed it was a ship, though the notion remained among the romantically inclined elements of the Commonwealth’s scientific community and the more excitable Raiel/Void conspiracy theorists.

  Contact with the fourteen known alien species living inside, which was remarkably easy, didn’t advance the exploration starship’s understanding of the Spike’s origin or purpose one byte. All the species who’d found a home among the myriad habitation chambers had arrived there relatively recently, the Chikoya longest ago at four and a half thousand years. They, along with all those who had found a home in the Spike over the millennia, had made their adaptations and alterations to the basic structure to a point where it was difficult to know what was original anymore.

  When the Lindau emerged from hyperspace again, they were eight hundred kilometers sunward and level with the top of the Spike, so that the massive spire stabbed up into the southern starfield above them. The smartcore accelerated them in, matching the massive structure’s errant velocity vector. Ahead of them the curved inner surface was segmented by crystalline chambers like a skin of bubbles. The smallest extended over a hundred kilometers wide, while the largest, an Ilodi settlement, stretched out to a full three hundred kilometers in diameter. Eight tubes wove around and through the chambers, each of them a convoluted loop with a diameter of thirty kilometers, acting as the Spike’s internal transport routes. Seven of them had an H-congruous oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere; the eighth supported a high-temperature methane/nitrogen environment.

  Aaron directed them into a metal mushroom sprouting from one of the H-congruous tubes. There were hundreds of similar landing pads scattered randomly along all the tubes. Some of them were crude, little more than slabs of metal with a basic airlock tunnel fused onto the tube. When the Lindau settled on it, a localized artificial gravity field took over, holding the starship down at about a tenth of a gee.

  Inigo and Corrie-Lyn were standing behind Aaron in the starship’s small bridge compartment, images of the Spike projecting out of a half dozen portals all around them. They could see a lot of movement on the surface. A huge variety of drones were crawling, rolling, sliding, skating, and hopping along the tubes and chambers, performing various repair and maintenance functions. All of them were operated by the controlling AI, itself a patchwork of processor cores that had been grafted onto the original management network by the residents who had come and gone over the millennia.

  “The effect’s no stronger here than when it first hit us. It must be uniform,” Corrie-Lyn said wonderingly as she tried to sort through the multitude of foreign sensations that Ozzie’s telepathy effect were allowing to impact on her mind. She could feel Inigo’s mind as before and the odd unemotional threads buzzing through Aaron’s brain, but beyond them was a sensory aurora not too dissimilar to the gaiafield. Human minds were present, though she wasn’t sure how many, probably no more than a few thousand. Alien minds were also intruding that were intriguingly weird, possessing a different intensity and emotions that were subtly different.

  “What I’m feeling can’t represent everyone on the Spike,” Inigo said, perceiving her interest. “For a start, there’s over a million of the Ba’rine-sect Chikoya, who settled here after they got kicked off their homeworld. They’re aggressive in their beliefs and not afraid to show it. That level of animosity is absent. Then there’s the Flam-gi and their whole nasty little speciesism superiority-they’re definitely not sharing. And Honious alone knows who or what’s in some of the sealed chambers.”

  “So they’re not all part of Ozzie’s dream, then?”

  “It would seem not.”

  “Why?” Even as she asked it, she could sense his dismissal.

  “I don’t know. We’ll just have to ask him. Aaron, do you know where he is?”

  “No.” The agent’s head didn’t move; he was studying a projection of the Spike’s entire inner surface. Some kind of mapping program was active, sending flashes of color across sections and down tubes. “The controlling AI has no information on him. U-shadow-based data retrieval routines do not function effectively in the network, and some compartment sections are blocked; I cannot check the data with any accuracy.”

  “Reasonable enough,” Inigo said. “There’s no overall government as such. From what I remember, you just turn up and find somewhere that supports your biochemistry and move in.”

  “So what now?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

  “We will visit the largest human settlement and ask them for Isaacs’s location.”

  “And if they don’t know?” Inigo asked.

  “He is renowned. Someone will know.”

  “But he already knows we’re here,” Inigo said.

  Aaron turned to stare at him. “Have you signaled him?”

  “No. But this telepathy effect exposes everything to everybody. That’s what he came here to do. Therefore, he is aware of our arrival.”

  “Can you determine the source of the effect?”

  “No.”

  “Very well. Come with me now.” Aaron walked out into the companionway.

  Inigo gave Corrie-Lyn a bemused shrug, and the two of them followed meekly behind Aaron as he went into the scoutship’s main airlock.

  The landing pad had extruded a malmetal cylinder that was compatible with the starship’s seal. The outer door expanded, showing the cylinder curving down. Aaron stepped through and glided forward in the low gravity. The cylinder bent in a sharp double curve to take them through the tube wall. They passed through a translucent pressure curtain that shivered around them, and then they were inside a small blue metal building with open archways. The temperature and humidity rose sharply to subtropical levels. They walked through the arches onto a broad paved area. The tube’s inner surface was covered in lush pink-tinged grasses and long meandering gray-blue forests. Fifteen kilometers above their heads, a sliver of dazzling white light ran along the axis of the tube, shining through the thick smears of helical cloud that drifted along the interior. As soon as they’d stepped through the pressure curtain, Corrie-Lyn had felt the gravity rise to about two-thirds Earth standard, which gav
e her the visual impression of standing at the bottom of a cylinder where anything moving on the solid roof above her should fall straight down, though intellectually she knew damn well that every point of the landscape arching above her had the same gravity.

  She puffed her cheeks out, partly from the heat and partly from the improbability of the vista. “And this is just the transport route?”

  “One of them,” Aaron replied. “There are short-length wormholes and some T-spheres operational within the structure. However, they are under the control of the species which installed them. The tubes provide a general connection between chambers.”

  “We walk?” she asked incredulously.

  “No.” Aaron looked up.

  Corrie-Lyn followed his gaze, seeing a dark triangle descending out of the glaring light straight toward them. As it grew closer, she could see it was some kind of aircraft, maybe twenty meters long and quite fat given its otherwise streamlined appearance. Human lettering was stenciled on the narrow swept tail fin, registration codes that made no sense. Landing legs unfolded neatly fore and aft, and it settled on the tough wiry grass. A door swung open halfway along its bulging belly. No malmetal, then, she mused. She couldn’t see any jet intakes, either. Whatever propelled it had to be similar to ingrav.

  The cabin interior was basic and somehow primitive to anyone accustomed to the Commonwealth’s ubiquitous capsules. She sank into a chair that could have been designed only for a human body. The hull wasn’t transparent, either, which disappointed her. Inigo picked up on the feeling. “There’s a sensor feed,” he told her, and gave her u-shadow a little access routine that wasn’t like any program she was familiar with.

  “How do you know that?” she asked as the aircraft’s camera views unfolded in her exovision. They were already lifting fast, not that the acceleration was apparent.

  “I’m monitoring Aaron’s datatraffic,” he replied levelly.

  After it rose above the thick winding clouds, the aircraft shot forward. The speed made Corrie-Lyn blink. “Wow,” she murmured.

  “As best I can make out, we’re doing about Mach twenty,” Inigo said. “Even with the way this tube bends about, you can probably get from one end of the Spike to the other in a couple of hours.”

  “So what’s the place we’re going to?”

  “The chamber has been named Octoron,” Aaron said curtly.

  “How far?”

  “Flight duration approximately three minutes.”

  She rolled her eyes, hoping her mind wasn’t showing just how unnerving she found this machinelike version of Aaron, though presumably he no longer had the thought routines that bothered about such emotional trivia. When she concentrated on the few thought impulses inside his head, they were all calm and cool, so much so that it was hard to sense them at all.

  Their little plane looped casually halfway around the axial light, then slowed quickly to begin its vertical decent. They landed close to a broad low dome of some silver-gray fabric that had wide arches around the base. It was obviously a transport hub; several other planes were landing and taking off. People came and went from the cathedral-sized dome, dressed like any citizens of the Outer Commonwealth worlds in a mix of styles from ultramodern toga suits down to the whimsy of centuries past.

  Sitting right at the center of the airy dome was a gold-mirrored sphere whose lower quarter was hidden belowground. People were walking in and out of it, pushing through the surface as if it were less substantial than mist. As she walked toward it, Corrie-Lyn was conscious of the suspicion and curiosity starting to emanate from the minds around her. Her consternation that Inigo at least would be recognized was acting as positive feedback. Several people stopped to stare. She felt their astonishment as recognition dawned. It was swiftly tinged by anger and resentment.

  Just before they reached the gold surface, Aaron took Inigo’s hand. “Do not attempt to evade me,” he warned.

  “I have no intention to,” Inigo told him.

  Aaron was still holding him as they all went through the sphere wall. Corrie-Lyn felt the surface flow around her like a pressure curtain. Then she was falling slowly as gravity shrank away again. It was gloomy inside. Her macrocellular clusters ran vision-amplifying routines, enabling her to see the wide shaft she was dropping down. It was a variant on a null-grav chute, about three hundred meters long. Aaron and Inigo were a couple of meters ahead of her.

  The descent took barely a minute. Whatever gravity distortion was gripping her, it began to flip her around so that she wound up rising to the far end of the chute. It was covered by a murky barrier identical to the one at the other end of the chute. Her skin tingled as she passed through.

  Emergence location: plaza.

  Active› Grade three integral force field

  Active› Level two biononic field scan. Scan summation: plaza one hundred seventy-eight point three meters major diameter. Three main access roads, five secondary streets. Immediate population eighty-seven adult humans, subdivision fifty-three Higher; nineteen children under twelve. No alien life-forms. Surrounding buildings average height twenty-five meters, facade composition high-purity iron. Domestic power supply one hundred twenty volts; high rate communication net. Visible transport: bicycles. Gravatonic fluctuation indicates seven ingrav drive units operational within three kilometers.

  Preliminary assessment: secure environment. No threat to subject alpha. Subject alpha restrained by physical grip; maintain restraint condition.

  Primary mission commencement: Determine location of Oswald Fernandez Isaacs.

  Four options.

  Initiate option one: ask.

  “You.”

  Octoron citizen one: male, height one point seven two centimeters; biononic functionality moderate: “Yes?”

  “Where is Oswald Fernandez Isaacs?”

  Octoron citizen one: “Who? Hey, aren’t you Inigo?”

  Subject alpha: “Yeah, ’fraid so.”

  Octoron citizen one: “You bastard. You stupid selfish bastard. What are you doing here?”

  Subject alpha: “Look, I’m sorry. This is complicated. Please answer his question. We need to find Ozzie.”

  Octoron citizen one: “Hey, why can’t I sense your thoughts?”

  “Irrelevant. Do you know where Isaacs is?”

  Octoron citizen one: “You’re with Inigo? Go screw yourself.”

  Scan› Octoron citizen one altering biononic field functions. Skin temperature rising, heart rate increasing, muscle contraction, elevated adrenaline. Analysis: possible aggression.

  Threat.

  Response.

  Activate› Biononic weapons field.

  Armed› Disrupter pulse. Target: midsection Octoron citizen one. Fire.

  External sound level increasing. Human screaming.

  Subject beta: “Oh, great Lady! You killed him.”

  “I neutralized the threat.”

  “Threat? What fucking threat, you monster?”

  Primary mission: option one failure. Go to option two.

  “You.”

  Octoron citizen two: female, one point five eight centimeters, zero biononics, full Advancer macrocellular sequence. Running.

  Capture.

  “You.”

  Octoron citizen two: “What? I haven’t done anything. Let me go. Help! Help!”

  Subject beta: “Put her down, you bastard.”

  “Is Oswald Fernandez Isaacs resident in the Spike?”

  Octoron citizen two, no response.

  Option two, second level.

  Octoron citizen two: incoherent scream.

  “Is Oswald Fernandez Isaacs resident in the Spike?”

  Octoron citizen two: “Yes, yes, he’s here. Oh, shit, that hurts. Stop it, please. Please.”

  Subject beta: “Let her go.”

  Subject alpha: “Stop this now.”

  Scan summation: twenty-three Higher humans activating high-level biononic fields.

  Approaching. Interperson data exchanges increasing
.

  Threat imminent.

  Response grade one to hostile enclosure situation.

  “Halt now or I will kill her.”

  Subject beta: “Stay back. Back. The maniac means it. Please, stay back.”

  “Where is Oswald Fernandez Isaacs?”

  Octoron citizen two: “I don’t know. Please.”

  “Who knows where Isaacs is?”

  Three Octoron citizens, simultaneously: “Let her go.”

  Scan reception› Eight target sensors locking on.

  “I will kill her unless he is brought to me.”

  Subject alpha: “Stop this. Let me talk to them.”

  “No.”

  Enclosure threat elevated to grade five.

  Response. Random target selection twelve citizens, three buildings.

  Armed› Disrupter pulse. Sequential fire pattern.

  Armed› Ion beam. Sequential fire pattern.

  Scan› Level five› Successful penetration of debris cloud and atmospheric ionization.

  Zero immediate threat.

  Surrounding sound level high.

  Humans in plaza retreating. Casualties fifteen. Fatalities five.

  Octoron citizen two struggling. Uncooperative.

  Primary mission: option two failure. Go to option three.

  U-shadow download general broadcast into local communication net.

  “This is an open message for Oswald Fernandez Isaacs. I mean you no harm. It is imperative that you contact me. I have Inigo with me. Together you can resolve the Void catastrophe.”

  Subject beta: “Oh, that should do it, you moron dickhead. I’d be rushing to call you if it was me.” Voice level raised/condition hysterical.

  “Be silent.”

  Subject alpha: “Aaron, this has to stop. Do you understand? You are wrecking your own mission.”

  Analysis.

  Claim refuted.

  “I know what I have to do. Don’t interfere.”

  Subject alpha: “You don’t know. You’re dealing with humans; you need an emotional component in your reasoning. And you don’t have that anymore.”