The Evolutionary Void v-3

by Peter Hamilton

  “This environment is hostile to my emotion-based routines; it corrodes my rationality. They cannot be permitted.”

  Subject beta: “Oh, shit. Shit, what do we do?”

  Subject alpha: “I don’t know.”

  Alert› T-sphere establishing across Octoron. Emergence of eleven objects-distance fifty meters. Scan› Level eight› Intruders identified: adult tri-stage Chikoya encased in armor. Multiple weapon hardware attached. Force fields active.

  Surrounding sound level increasing-human screaming.

  Subject beta: “Great Lady, what are they?”

  Chikoya one: “You are the human messiah.”

  Analyze: How did they know that and locate subject alpha so quickly? Time elapsed since landing seventeen minutes.

  Subject alpha: “I am Inigo, yes.”

  Situation analysis. Chikoya engaging deployment maneuver. High tactical advantage in successful encirclement.

  Probability of protecting subjects alpha and beta from synchronized Chikoya weapons fire: minimal. Option one: discard subject beta.

  Chikoya one: “You have initiated a devourment phase in the Void.”

  Subject alpha: “I haven’t been in contact with Edeard for over a century and a half.”

  Chikoya one: “You initiated contact. You are responsible. You must stop it.”

  “All Void activity will be ended. We will see to it. Now leave Octoron.”

  Chikoya one: “Messiah, you will come with us. Your threat to the galaxy must be ended. Come now.”

  “Not permissible. Remove yourself and your kind from this place.”

  Chikoya one: “Your messiah comes with us.”

  “Inigo, raise your integral force field to its highest setting.”

  Subject alpha: “What about Corrie-Lyn? Damn you, she’s naked out here.”

  Subject beta: “What’s happening? Inigo, don’t go with those things, please. Aaron, you have to-”

  Alert› Chikoya weapons activation.

  Multiple target acquisition.

  Armed› Disrupter pulse. Sequential fire.

  Armed› Neutron lasers. Sequential fire.

  Electronic countermeasures. Engaged. Full power.

  Armed› Microkinetics. Smart acquisition. Free fire authority.

  Cease fire.

  Scan› Active Chikoya immediate area withdrawal. Redeployment. › Tracking.

  Current tactical situation poor. Move. Subject alpha to accompany.

  Subject alpha holding subject beta, force field extended to protect her.

  “Let go of her.”

  Subject alpha: “Fuck you.”

  Scan.

  Move into Building A. Utilize the cover it provides.

  “Come with me.”

  Moving. Subject alpha, subject beta, accompanying.

  Alert› Multiple target acquisition.

  Greatest tactical location: stand in Building A doorway.

  Armed› Disrupter pulse. Sequential fire.

  Armed› Neutron lasers. Sequential fire.

  Armed› Ion beams. Sequential fire.

  Armed› Microkinetics. Smart acquisition. Free fire authority.

  Armed› Ariel smartseeker stealth mines. Chikoya profile loaded. Dispense.

  Alert› Teleport emergence, eighteen armored Chikoya.

  “We can’t get away. They know you’re here.”

  Cease fire.

  Subject alpha (shouting): “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Exit doorway. Weapons fire impact weakening Building A structure.

  “This way.”

  Enact exit strategy.

  Scan› mapping Building A layout. Exit route confirmed. U-shadow established in local communications net, infiltrating adjacent transport capsules.

  Alert› Chikoya access of Building A.

  Targeting Building B structural load points.

  Armed› Disrupter pulse. Fire.

  Integral force field strengthened to resist partial Building A collapse. Fire outbreak. Scan through smoke. Three Chikoya disabled.

  Subject alpha: “Where do we go?”

  “We must leave the immediate area. Switch off your force field.”

  Subject alpha: “What? In the Lady’s name, you’ve got to be joking.”

  “Negative. They are tracking your presence through the telepathy effect. It is completely pervasive and leaves you exposed wherever you are.”

  Subject alpha: “So?”

  “Switch off your force field. I will render you unconscious. If you are not thinking, your thoughts cannot betray our location.”

  Subject beta: “Inigo! No! He’ll kill us both. He will; it’s what he does.”

  “You are no use to me dead.”

  Alert› Target acquisition: Building C rooftop.

  Armed› Microkinetics suppression barrage. Fire.

  Target eliminated.

  Subject alpha: “But I can’t stop the Void if I’m unconscious.”

  “When I acquire Isaacs, I will insist he switch off the telepathy effect. No one will be able to find you then.”

  Subject alpha: “Oh, sweet Lady.”

  Subject beta: “No no no.”

  Subject alpha: “You look after Corrie-Lyn, too.”

  “I will.”

  Alert› Nine Chikoya deploying in acquisition formation.

  Subject alpha: “Aaron, whatever’s left of the real you in there, I’m holding you to that.”

  Exit capsule approaching. Landing zone designated to u-shadow. Three decoy capsules en route-safety limiters disabled.

  “You can rely on me.”

  Subject alpha: “Very well.”

  Subject beta: “No! Inigo, no, please.”

  Scan confirmation, subject alpha force field deactivated. Targeting.

  Armed› Microkinetics, minimal tissue damage mode selected, neurosedative tip loaded. Fire.

  Subject beta: “No! Oh, Lady, you’ve killed him. Get away from me. Get away, you monster.”

  Subject beta attempting to run.

  Targeting.

  Armed› Microkinetic, minimal tissue damage mode selected, neurosedative tip loaded. Fire.

  Alert› Five Chikoya approaching, open assault formation.

  Multiple target acquisition.

  Armed› Disrupter pulse. Maximum power rating. Sequential fire. U-shadow update: landing exit capsule behind Building D.

  Armed› Neutron lasers. Maximum power rating. Sequential fire.

  U-shadow update: decoy capsules on collision vector. Mach eight. Accelerating.

  Armed› Microkinetics. Enhanced explosive warheads. Free fire authority.

  Armed› Ariel smartseeker stealth mines. Chikoya profile loaded. Dispense.

  Alert› New targets.

  Fire.

  Fire.

  Fire.

  The Delivery Man’s biononics ran a last scan over the weird active-molecular vortex and the way it spun down through the quantum fields. It was an interesting chunk of superphysics technology, certainly. He had no idea what its function might actually be, though he suspected it was an elaborate experiment. Whatever it was, he was fairly sure it wasn’t the elevation mechanism.

  His u-shadow opened a link to Gore. “Washout,” he reported.

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  “I’m coming out.” There was little light in the vast cave, a few cold blue patches up amid the multitude of stalactites eighty meters above his head. The bottom quarter of the cave had been cut smooth and flat, leaving the natural rock formations above. Even two and a half thousand years ago, when the advanced Anomine had set it up, the cave couldn’t have been a terribly practical place. That was the thing with the Anomine; everything had an aesthetic aspect.

  Water dripped out of the deep fissures and off the ends of the stalactites, creating long pungent algal ribbons down the rough walls. Drainage channels had clogged, leaving dank puddles spreading across the floor. The vortex carried on regardless; moisture and murky air were never going
to affect its composition or function.

  As he retraced his steps along the winding passage back out to the surface, the Delivery Man was puzzled by the lack of any communication system connected to the vortex. If it was an experiment, surely they would need to monitor the results; same for a control system. Or maybe I’m missing something, he thought wearily. Maybe there is an ultrasophisticated net covering the whole planet that biononic scans are simply too primitive to discover. He was grasping at straws and knew it. The Last Throw’s sensors were good. They’d detected a hundred twenty-four advanced devices still functional on the planet, of which the vortex was the eleventh they’d examined. If there was some kind of web linking them, Last Throw’s sensors would have revealed it.

  A quarter of an hour later, the Delivery Man walked out into the evening sunlight. Tall cumulonimbus scurried through the darkening sky, splashed a pale rose gold by the vanishing sun. From his position high up a plateau wall, the countryside swept away to the southeast, its farthest fringes already turning to black. Several rivers traced bright silver threads across the mauve and jade vegetation. Then there was the city to the east, larger and more imposing than any of Earth’s cities even at the height of the population boom. A forest of tall towers stretched over a mile into the air; elaborate spiked spheres and curving pyramids filled the ground between the soaring spires like foothills. Lights were still shining through windows and open arches as the service machinery maintained the city in perfect readiness for occupation.

  It was completely devoid of anyone, which he found strangely sad; it reminded him of a spurned lover. The remaining Anomine chose to live in their farm villages out in the open land. He could even see several of their little settlements amid the darkening land, flickering orange lights growing as the nightly fires were lit. He never did get that philosophy, living in the shadow of a past civilization, knowing that at any time they could simply move into the giant towers and live a life of unrivaled luxury, challenge their minds once again. Yet instead, they rejected any form of technology beyond labor-animal carts and plows, and filled their days tilling the fields and building huts.

  The Last Throw came streaking in over the mountains behind him to finish up hovering a few centimeters above the succulent spiral grass-equivalent. He drifted up into the airlock.

  “This is getting us nowhere fast,” Gore grumbled as the Delivery Man arrived in the main cabin.

  “It’s your procedure. What else have we got? There’re not too many of these things to examine.”

  “They’re all small scale. We have to look big.”

  “We don’t know that, remember,” the Delivery Man chided as he settled in a broad leather-cushioned scoop chair. “We simply don’t know what it is. That vortex I just examined. It had to be linked with the elevation mechanism.”

  “How?” Gore snapped.

  “I think it was some kind of experiment, probing the local quantum structure. That kind of knowledge could only help contribute to going postphysical, surely.”

  “Don’t call me Shirley.”

  “What?”

  Gore ran a hand over his forehead. “Yeah. Right. Whatever.”

  The Delivery Man was mildly puzzled by Gore’s lack of focus. It wasn’t like him at all. “All right. So what I was thinking is that there has to be some kind of web and database in the cities.”

  “There is. You can’t access it.”

  “Why not?”

  “The AIs are sentient. They won’t allow any information retrieval.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “From our point of view, yes, but they’re the same as the borderguards: They maintain the homeworld’s sanctity; the AIs keep the Anomine’s information safe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what the Anomine do; that’s what they are. They’re entitled to protect what they’ve built, same as anyone.”

  “But we’re not damag-”

  “I know!” Gore snarled. “I fucking know that, all right. We have to work around this. And listening to you sitting there whining twenty-four seven is no fucking help at all. Jezus, I should have lived a fucking normal twenty-first-century life and died properly. Why the hell do I fucking bother to help you moron supermen? Certainly not the gratitude.”

  The Delivery Man only just stopped himself from opening his jaw to gawp at the gold-skinned man sitting in his antique orange shell chair. He was about to ask what the problem was, then realized. “She’ll be out of suspension soon,” he said sympathetically.

  Gore grunted, shoving himself farther back in his chair’s cushioning. “She should’ve been there by now.”

  “We don’t know. In the Void we just don’t know. Time flow there isn’t uniform.”

  “Maybe.”

  “The confluence nests are functioning. She will dream Makkathran for you; she’ll be there.”

  “It’ll mean crap if we don’t find the mechanism.”

  “I know. And we’ve still got Marius to deal with when we do.” The Delivery Man had been perturbed when the sensors showed them that Marius had gotten past the borderguard stations. The Accelerator agent’s ship had immediately dropped back into stealth mode once it was inside the cometary belt. Currently it was lurking amid the orbital debris cloud above the Anomine homeworld, watching them zip over the planet. It wouldn’t take much to work out what they were doing.

  “Ha. That dick. We can take him whenever we want.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “It takes smarter and tougher than him to catch me with my ass hanging out.”

  The Delivery Man shook his head. He couldn’t decide if the machismo was worse than the insecurity. “Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “Oh, yeah. Wishful thinking; that’s what keeps the universe ticking.”

  The Delivery Man groaned and gave up.

  Gore’s golden lips parted in a small smile. “The navy teams didn’t exactly push the AIs.”

  “Uh huh,” the Delivery Man said warily.

  “We’ve got another hundred or so of these tech high spots left to examine, right? So that’s not going to take more than four or five days if we hustle.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Then we do it. If we draw a blank, we go to plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  “Did you know I actually knew Ozzie?”

  “I didn’t, but it doesn’t surprise me. You were contemporaries.”

  “He pulled off two of the greatest thefts in human history.”

  “Two? I knew there was some dispute with Nigel about taking the Charybdis.”

  “Dispute? Jesus, do they even teach you people history these days? Nigel nearly killed him, and that’s not a metaphor.”

  The Delivery Man ignored the “you people” crack. After two weeks cooped up in the Last Throw’s cabin with Gore, it was almost a compliment. “So what was the first crime?”

  Gore grinned. “The great wormhole heist. The smart-ass bastard cleaned out the Vegas casinos, and nobody ever knew it was him. Not until after the war and Orion let it slip. Can you imagine that?”

  “No, I truly cannot.”

  “Well, sonny, you and I are going to steal the knowledge of an entire species. If that’s what it takes to find this goddamn mechanism, then that’s what we’re going to do. Nobody will remember Ozzie’s legend then, so screw him.”

  I didn’t know it anyway, the Delivery Man complained silently. He had no idea how Gore was planning to circumvent the Anomine AIs, but he suspected it wouldn’t be a quiet method.

  Inigo’s Thirty-third Dream

  “We can visit any place on your world where we sense those who are fulfilled gathering in readiness for our guidance to the Heart,” the Skylord had said in answer to Edeard’s question.

  “So the towers of this city where you have come today play no part in guidance?”

  “Those who inhabited this world before you built them to bid their kind farewell. They a
re where we came before; therefore, they are where we come now. You use them as they did.”

  “Then we can call you to gather us from anywhere?”

  “Of course. My kindred welcome all those who have reached fulfillment. It is our purpose.”

  Edeard kept dreaming that single crucial event over and over. It was one of the few natural dreams he ever had. Though even that faded after a few years in his personal time scale.

  The two Skylords had been visible on the horizon every morning for eight days, moving slowly across the pantheon of the Void’s nebulae as they approached Querencia. Edeard stood on the highest balcony in the Orchard Palace, staring up into the pale sky as a cool breeze wafted in off the Lyot Sea. If he really stretched his farsight, he could just sense the placid thoughts of the massive creatures.

  Two, where every time before it has been four. Why? Why should that be? The whole city is a unified society. I have made sure we’ve achieved contentment within ourselves this time. That makes us better people. So why have only two come?

  He didn’t like how much that disturbed him. Even on the occasion two times past, when Oberford’s Great Tower of Guidance was being built and the whole economy was falling apart as if Honious were establishing its very own kingdom of bedlam across Querencia, four Skylords had come. It was the start of autumn on the fifth year after Finitan’s death. One of the few constants linking his attempts to change the world for the better.

  Ladydamnit, four always come now!

  The breeze played over his bare skin, and he rubbed his arms absently at the chill. Those two gauzy stars were still too far away for him to talk with them directly. But when they were within his range, he would be asking. Yes, indeed.

  High above the compact streets and pointed roofs of Jeavons, a couple of ge-eagles were floating lazily on the updrafts. They weren’t any he was familiar with, and their long circling flight meant that one of them was always turned toward the palace. He scowled up at them but resisted hauling them down out of the sky. Someone was interested in him. Hardly news. Though none of the independent provinces were a direct threat to Makkathran. That I know of. Perhaps they’re just running scared and want to spy on me to satisfy their paranoia. Knowing the provinces and the trouble they’d caused this time around, it wouldn’t surprise him. But still, the brazenness: watching the Waterwalker, the absolute Mayor of Makkathran, in his own city. That took some gall. That in itself narrowed it down to three provinces-or, rather, their governors: Mallux in Obershire, Kiborne in Plaxshire, or more likely Devroul in Licshills. Yes, any one of them would dare; they were all busy establishing their claims as unifiers to rival him. Each was fierce in his independence, greedy in his desire to absorb his neighbor. Exactly the opposite of what the world should be, what he was trying to make it.