The Evolutionary Void (74 page)

“Ha!” Corrie-Lyn said.

“All right, so Troblum, how many of us can your starship hold?” Cheriton
asked. “And does it really have wings?”

“Life support will sustain fifteen people, but that’s cramped. And
they’re thermal dissipater fins,” Troblum said.

“There’s only ten of us,” Oscar said. “We can all fit in easy, then.”

Ozzie cleared his throat. “You’re still not thinking. How long did it
take Justine to reach the fake Far Away?”

“Oh, crap,” Aaron said. “Void time.”

“That’s right, man. So your actual question is, How many medical chambers
has Troblum got on board? Because you’re going to need suspension once you make
it past the boundary.”

“One,” said Troblum.

“There are five in the
Elvin’s Payback
,” Oscar
said. “They were installed in case we got simultaneous casualties.”

“You always did lack real faith in us.” Tomansio grinned. “We need four
more, then. Are any available in this compartment, Ozzie?”

“Not right now,” Ozzie said in a suspiciously neutral voice. “They’re all
very busy for the first time in decades. Don’t worry. My replicator can put
some together for you.” He raised his voice. “Is that right,
me-brain-in-a-jar?”

“Already started,” the house smartcores replied.

“I suppose our replicator can produce them as well,” Oscar said. “That
should shrink our departure time.”

Troblum still wouldn’t take his armor suit off. Oscar didn’t quite know
what to make of that. Paula’s u-shadow had sent him a largish file on the
ex-Accelerator agent, but that just kicked up a whole load of additional
questions.

Tomansio had been right to question Aaron, but Oscar was a lot more
concerned about the strange big man with enough personality flaws to fill
entire psychology texts.
And an FTL system big enough to
shift entire planets? Gas giant planets? Come on
.

Then again, it was all past worrying about. They were committed now. If
everything worked and Aaron’s unknown boss got to talk with the Heart, the
entire Void/Pilgrimage nightmare could be over within a week.

Yeah, that’s going to happen
.

Ozzie was right, though. That was all they had left. So he sat at the
kitchen table without complaining or analyzing, eating some of the bagels and
salmon Ozzie’s culinary unit had provided for their brunch. It would have been
nice to chat with Ozzie, he reflected; not that they’d ever been close, but
they certainly had a lot of shared history. It wasn’t to be. Ozzie and Inigo
seemed to spend the entire time arguing with each other. And in the short
intervals when they had to take a breath, Tomansio was busy interrogating
Aaron.

The house smartcores (and that was pretty weird even by Ozzie standards)
and Liatris said the new medical chambers would be fabricated within the hour.
That just left installing them on the
Mellanie’s Redemption
.
Another blast-from-the-past name Oscar could have done without.
But then, when you’re as old as me, I guess everything is
connected
.

“I hope you never restart mindspace,” Inigo said heatedly. The voice was
getting loud; they all had to drop their conversations and listen in. “It’s the
end of humanity, sending the mind down a rotten branch of evolution.”

“Psychology is an evolutionary trend?” Ozzie grunted back. “Gimme a
break.”

“You’re compelling it upon every sentient. At least the gaiafield had a
provision for individuals to withdraw. This doesn’t. Its mental fascism, and
the worst of it is you think it’s benevolent, for our own good. Blanket the
galaxy with mindspace and you’ll turn us into the kind of society I found in
the Last Dream. Don’t you get it? Utopia is boring; ennui is our true enemy.
You and the Void both have to be stopped. You were wrong about sharing thoughts
just like Edeard in his dark phase. Both of you were seduced by the Heart’s
version of perfection, which is nothing more than taming and enslaving the
human soul.”

Aaron sat down next to Oscar, holding a plate of waffles. Oscar leaned
over and whispered. “Liatris says the replicator will be finished in eighteen
minutes.”

“Maybe there’s something to be said for the Void’s time acceleration,
after all,” Aaron muttered back.

“Have they been like this all the time?”

“Five days, nonstop. I encouraged them to explore options.”

“So what do you make of our big silent friend?” Oscar nodded gently at
the hulking armor suit.

“Neutral for the moment. I can accept his concern about the Cat. If he
keeps it on inside his own starship, then I’ll have to make some decisions.”

“Yeah. And you really don’t know what’s going to happen once we reach
Makkathran?”

“No. But I like your optimism.”

Oscar gave him another look. He liked to think he could tell. But Aaron
had this human shell wrapped over something very odd indeed—almost a void in
itself. He mimicked personality rather than possessing one of his own. And
Corrie-Lyn hadn’t been subtle about the near breakdowns.

“Individuality cannot stand as it has always done,” Ozzie protested. “The
human race has to become collective. For fuck’s sake, we have novabombs,
M-sinks, quantumbusters, enough weapons to smash the galaxy to shit without the
Void even having to wake up. That power has to be restrained. Ask the Mutineer
over there. Don’t you ever stop and think what’ll happen if someone like the
Cat gets hold of them and goes on a rampage? For fun! There has to be an
inbuilt protection mechanism in a society as technologically sophisticated as
ours. And that is
trust
, man. It’s all it ever can
be. Mindspace will make trust inevitable. You really will be able to love your
neighbor.”

“Mindspace is exactly the same as giving a psychopath a Commonwealth Navy
warship. There are aliens out there who have thought processes so utterly
different from ours, they’ll think you’re trying to take them over or
evangelize and alter their culture.”

“That is a serious bunch of crap. What do you know about—”

A red exovision tactical warning sprang up over Ozzie and Inigo;
secondary thought routines supplied Oscar’s mind with a definition of the
problem. A T-sphere was establishing itself all around Ozzie’s house. “Shit!”

His integral force field came on. As it did, he saw Troblum’s suit
blacken to deepest night.
Son of a bitch, that’s Sol
barrier technology
.

Full field function scan showed seventeen Chikoya teleporting onto the
grassy slope just above the lakeshore. A quick follow-up scan revealed they
were heavily armored, weapons active.

“Liatris, come get us. Now.”

“On my way,” Liatris replied.

Another twenty-three Chikoya teleported in, completing their encirclement
of the house. A six-strong squad charged forward across the front lawn. Oscar
was about to ask Tomansio what attack formation he wanted to use when his field
scan reported something very odd happening to Ozzie’s quantum structure.
Accelerant-flooded nerves reacted fast, spinning him around, and targeting
graphics swept across the abnormality zone, focusing on Ozzie, who was already
becoming transparent as his body’s molecules
changed
,
attenuating. There was just enough of him left to reveal an apologetic
expression on his spectral face. He raised a hand in a halfhearted wave.

“Wait!” Oscar yelled. “You’re leaving?” It came out as sheer disbelief.

“This kinda thing really isn’t me anymore,” Ozzie replied faintly.

“Yes, it is! You’re Ozzie. Help us.”

“You dudes have it pretty much covered. But hey, one day I might join in
again. Don’t hold your breath.” And with that his outline vanished. Some kind
of disturbance stirred the underlying quantum fields, something way beyond
Oscar’s field function scan to analyze.

“Fuck me!” Beckia gasped. “Where’s he gone?”

“Irrelevant,” Tomansio said. “Mutineer, you safeguard the Dreamers.
Everyone else, let’s meet and greet. Compass point deployment, beat them back
from the house.”

Oscar crunched his way straight through the kitchen wall and leaped from
the veranda, flying a good fifteen meters over the dark grass. He landed on the
lawn that sloped down to the lake. Tomansio was on his right, heading for the
spinney that bordered the garden. Beckia was on his left, where the land
started to curve upward before breaking into rough terrain. Oscar was gratified
to see how well he fit into the team, knowing at an automatic level how to
position himself.

He’d never seen a Chikoya before, never mind six at once. It was a shock,
but all he was concerned about was a tactical analysis of the armor, weapons,
and maneuverability. A small traitor section of his mind wondered what Dushiku
or Jesaral would make of something that big in knobbly black armor rampaging
toward them with husky weapons swinging around to shoot. All he saw was the exovision
targeting structure, with secondary routines coordinating fire control for his
enrichments. Electronic warfare emissions hammered the Chikoya suit circuits,
hashing and confusing their sensors. Energy beams and distortion pulses blasted
through the air. Two Chikoya went tumbling backward, their armor smoldering,
spraying jets of dark purple blood from gaping wounds. The others went for
cover, firing as they went.

Masers slashed across Oscar’s integral force field, which deflected them
easily. Then his macrocellular clusters warned him of a targeting scan, and he
jumped again as an electron laser detonated the ground where he’d been standing
half a second before. He somersaulted at the top of his jump trajectory,
twisting left, landing at a crouch and sending a massive distortion pulse at
the Chikoya who was hefting the enormous beam gun.

On either side of him the Knights Guardian were hopping between cover
points, their speed amplified by accelerants and biononic muscle reinforcement.
A range of suppression fire lashed out, forcing the Chikoya back from the
house.

Oscar was sprinting along the scorched grass as one of the aliens
followed his movement with some kind of neutron beam that was gouging through
the soil and stone, creating a fantail of lava and flame in his wake. He
dispensed a hail of micromissiles at the origin. Something exploded. The shock
wave buffeted him. There was no more neutron beam.

“Anyone know what they want?” Beckia asked as she rolled over a clump of
boulders. A flight of smartmines arched out to bombard the Chikoya squad
slithering through the boulders on the slope above her.

“The Dreamer,” Aaron told her.

“Why?” Oscar asked. Two Chikoya were charging right at him, masers and
machine guns firing enhanced explosive grenades, pummeling the ground and air
all around as he dodged along a narrow drainage gully that led down to the
lake. He sprang up and got a clean electron laser shot at the magazine on an
opponent’s underbelly. The explosion shredded most of the alien. Steaming lumps
of gore and fragments of armor rained down.

“Never quite got that far into the conversation,” Aaron said.

A tactical display showed Oscar how the Knights Guardian were pressing
the Chikoya away from the house in a rough expanding circle. However, some were
still close to the other side of the house, creeping forward. Cheriton was
having a hard time prizing them free from their cover on the steep forested
slope. “Liatris, where are you?”

“Two minutes,” Liatris promised.

The Chikoya were starting to regroup along the shoreline ahead of Oscar.
Several of them splashed through the shallows. Oscar began to designate targets
for his smartseeker munitions. Then his field scan showed him Myraian dancing
across the smoking remains of the lawn toward them. He risked sticking his head
out from the gully to watch her. She was skipping and twirling as if she were
in some elaborate ballet performance. Her gauzy blouse with its wing sleeves
spun around her as she waved her arms, creating serpentine loops in the air.
Chikoya targeting lasers converged on her.

“What the fuck—” Oscar grunted. His field scan couldn’t detect any kind
of integral force field. “Get down!” he screamed at her. The crazy woman must
be doped up on something; she seemed totally unaware of what was going on.

Myraian sang as she danced, the kind of warbling verse Oscar would’ve
expected to hear from a Silfen, not a human. The ground around her feet rippled
as tatters of loam and gravel were churned up by the storm of kinetic
projectiles missing her. And they kept on missing her. The Chikoya simply
couldn’t get anything to hit. The armored aliens began to fall back as she
approached. Their weapons fire stopped. Myraian finished her madcap dance
directly in front of one of the massive aliens. She giggled and swept her arms
out wide to bow gracefully, bodylight glowing an exotic orange through her
flimsy clothes. The Chikoya didn’t move; its extended suit sensors tracked her
carefully. Then she raised herself on her tiptoes, looking pitifully small and
weak compared with the armored monster towering above her. She kissed the alien
on the tip of its helmet.

The Chikoya collapsed on the ground. Dead.

Myraian pirouetted away as the rest of the Chikoya squad opened fire.
Again they couldn’t get a fix. She was almost invisible behind a blaze cloud of
grenade detonations and stark purple ionization contrails.

Oscar realized he needed to breathe again.

“Let’s give her some support,” Tomansio ordered.

A cascade of smart weapons fell on the Chikoya squad. They broke and ran,
leaving the shore strewn with fatalities. Myraian skipped gaily through the
shallows, following them like some demented pixie storm trooper, kicking at the
spume as she went. Her fluffy plimsolls were stained gray-blue with alien
blood.

Oscar jumped up out of the long drainage gully and stared in disbelief.
Two of the Chikoya being chased by Myraian teleported out. “Holy crap,” he
murmured.
What is she?
Exact definitions didn’t
really concern him at that moment; he was just relieved she was on their side.