The Evolutionary Void (51 page)

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.

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 gave 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.