The Evolutionary Void (49 page)

“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 almost 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.

“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.