The Temporal Void (15 page)

*

In the middle of a desert of dry mud was a house, an igloo of baked sand. It had a wooden door that years ago had been painted dark green. Harsh sunlight and dusty winds had abraded it down to the bare wood, though some flecks of green still persevered in the cracks between the oak boards.

He knew that door. Knew it well. Knew what lay behind.

The sun hung at the apex of the world’s sapphire sky, bleaching all colour out of the desert. It was always thus.

He dismounted from the huge Charlemagne just short of the igloo, his plain white robes flowing around him. The deep hood protected his face from the sun’s penetrating rays. Somehow, those few steps to the door took forever. His limbs were fighting an unknown force that resisted every movement. He kept asking himself if he wanted to do this because he eventually realized that the force fighting him was fear. Fear of what waited for him on the other side of the door. He carried on anyway, because in this, as always, he had no choice, no will, no independence. The effort left him trembling from exertion, but eventually the door was in front of him. He raised his hand, placing it palm down on the warm wood, feeling the familiar sand-smoothed grain. Pushed.

The door opened, and darkness spilled out, contaminating the sunlight. It built round him like a fog, and his dread spiked upwards. But the door was open. There was nothing now between him and the person living in the house. Something moved in the shadows, a presence that was reaching out.

‘You and your father both had the courage to make the right choice in the end,’ a voice told him. ‘Not that my opinion counts for anything. But I’m glad. I figure I owe you this second chance.’

‘My father?’ He lurched forwards—

—the ground crawler lurched again as the front tracks cleared another ice ridge, and the wedge nose tipped down sharply. Aaron shook himself as the real world claimed him back from bedlam, gripping the chair arms, staring out of the slit windscreen. It was profoundly dark outside, midnight beneath clouds that towered five kilometres into the screaming hurricane sky. Headlight beams were clotted by driving snow. The small glimpse of the ground they did allow revealed ice boulders half the size of the ground crawler. Regular bursts of lightning showed the wicked, sharp-edged boulders scattered across the frozen land in all directions without end. Narrow gaps between them were becoming fewer, and had been for the last hour. It was a nightmare geography out there. Their progress was pitiful, and getting worse.

He checked the vehicle’s inertial navigation system. In the last two hours they’d travelled a grand total of seven and a quarter kilometres, and very little of that was in a nice straight line forwards. Over a day now since the unknown starship fired a Hawking m-sink into Hanko. He was beginning to wish he had the math to work out an accurate timetable for how long it would take the weapon to digest the planet from within. But knowing the exact moment when the continents would implode wasn’t going to make the ground crawler go any faster. His early rough estimate of three days was realistic enough.

The crawler’s net slowed the tracks, which Aaron perceived first as a change in the constant vibration afflicting the cabin. When he asked it why he was shown a radar sweep. There was a rift in the ground ahead, a vertical drop of over ten metres.

‘Lady!’ Inigo exclaimed as he studied the radar profile; his face was gently shaded by the weak violet light emitted by the two polyphoto strips on the cabin roof. ‘It’s going to take half an hour to cut our way down that.’

‘You’re the expert,’ Aaron muttered sourly.

Inigo gave him a tight smile. ‘I certainly am.’ He gripped the manual control stick, and backed up, then activated the forward power blades. They extended out of the nose and began rotating. The ground crawler edged forwards again, and the spinning blades touched the ice. A wide plume of dirty ice granules shot up into the snowstorm. The screech from the blades resonated round the cabin, and the whole vehicle began to shake as they started to dig themselves a track. Inigo steered them carefully, curving round to run parallel to the rift, always descending. The plume reduced visibility to zero. He was relying on the vehicle’s sensors and his own field effect scan. The lost messiah must have had some sophisticated filter programs, Aaron decided; his own scan revealed little beyond the crawler’s bodywork. The ice they were traversing showed up as a thick unified substance laced with rock and soil, like a haze of interference; yet Inigo was able to discern the structure, knowing when to back off and when to apply pressure.

The noise of the power blades set Aaron’s teeth on edge. Its tone was constantly changing as they hit soil, then back into ice. Then the blades hit some kind of rock, and the rasping was so bad he wanted to hit something. When he glanced back at Corrie-Lyn she was pressing her hands over her ears, her teeth bared in a wild grimace of dismay. Inigo adjusted the stick fractionally, curving them away from the dense strata. Rock and ice gravel spewed out sideways, falling in a long arc down the side of the rift. Inigo drove them into the ice again, gouging a wider cut.

So they descended in a series of howling bumps and jolts, creating their own ramp. In the end it took over forty-five minutes to reach the base of the rift. The power blades retracted. Aaron gazed out in dismay at the field of ice boulders which the lightning flares revealed. They were larger than the ones at the top of the rift, and closer together.

‘Crap,’ he grunted. ‘We’re never going to get through this. How far does it extend?’ If they didn’t clear the boulder field in the next couple of hours, they would never make it to the ship before the implosion.

‘I don’t know,’ Inigo replied unperturbed. ‘We don’t exactly have survey maps.’ He steered the crawler along the base of the rift, looking for an opening.

‘You must do!’

‘Not recent ones. They’re all a thousand years out of date, and the surface ice does shift. Slowly, admittedly, but the movement throws up a fresh topography every century or so.’

‘Shit!’ Aaron finally did hit something, his fist thudding into the cabin wall. ‘We have
got
to make better time than this.’

‘I know.’

Corrie-Lyn came forward from her seat and slipped her arms around Inigo’s neck. The low cabin lighting made her beautiful features deeply sensual. ‘You’re doing your best, ignore him.’

Aaron growled in frustration, and hit the wall again. Back at the Olhava camp, Inigo had finally admitted he did have a private starship hidden away, for emergencies. Aaron’s elation at the escape route had quickly cooled as the ground crawler got underway. According to Inigo his ship was safe in a tunnelled-out cavern seven hundred kilometres south-east of the camp. Aaron had assumed they would make it with almost a couple of days to spare. Then they drove straight into the ice boulder field.

‘We always trailblaze through this kind of thing,’ Inigo told him as Corrie-Lyn rubbed her cheek adoringly against his. ‘That’s how I got to be so good with the power blades.’

‘Get better or we die,’ Aaron said bluntly.

Inigo flashed him a grin, then turned the ground crawler into a small gap. Razor-sharp shards of ice creaked and snapped against the bodywork as they scraped their way through. Aaron winced, convinced they’d wedge themselves in again. They’d done that once before a few hours back. He and Inigo had to go outside and use their biononic field effect to cut the vehicle free. It had felt good using his weapon functions, even on a minimum setting. He was accomplishing something.

The only benefit of the journey was that Corrie-Lyn hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since they started.

‘So have you any idea who was in that starship?’ Inigo asked.

‘No. I didn’t even realize we were being followed, which is disturbing enough. To track the
Artful Dodger
you’d need something as good if not better. That kind of hardware is mighty difficult to come by, so it was either ANA or a Faction. But ANA wouldn’t use an m-sink like that, and I’m kind of surprised a Faction did.’

‘No honour among thieves, eh?’

‘None,’ Aaron agreed. ‘Using an m-sink has the sure taste of desperation to it.’

‘Hold a mirror up,’ Corrie-Lyn said. ‘It was a ruthless despicable act, slaughtering all those people without warning or reason. The pilot must have been just like you.’

‘There are people in this universe a lot worse than me.’

‘That I don’t believe.’

But it’s true
. He smiled privately.

‘So where were you supposed to coerce me into going?’ Inigo asked.

‘I’ll know when we’re safe on the ship.’

‘Really? That’s . . . interesting.’

‘It’s depraved,’ Corrie-Lyn said.

‘Actually, it’s a simple and safe security measure,’ Aaron told them. ‘If I don’t know, I can’t be forced to reveal it.’

‘But you do know,’ she said. ‘It’s buried somewhere in your subconscious.’

‘Yes, but I can’t get to it unless the circumstances are coming up straight aces.’

‘You’ve damaged your own psyche with so much meddling.’

‘I’ve told you often before, and I’ll enjoy telling you many times again: I like what I am.’

‘Oh Lady, now what!’ Inigo exclaimed as the crawler’s net halted them again. He glanced at the radar screen with its concentric orange bands swirling round like an accelerated orrery. ‘That’s weird.’ His grey eyes narrowed as he squinted through the windscreen. The headlights revealed a white blur of snow, but no boulders. Lightning flashes turned the black night to a leaden smog. There were no discernible shapes ahead of them.

Aaron’s field scan revealed the ice had flattened out in front of the crawler’s tracks. Then it ended in another sharp-edged rift. He couldn’t pick up anything beyond. ‘There’s nothing out there.’

‘I think that’s the problem.’

They both suited up to take a look. Inigo said he didn’t want to get the crawler too close to the rift until they knew what they were dealing with. Aaron shrugged and went with it. He didn’t like wearing the surface suit – his biononics could produce a good defence against Hanko’s foul environment – but it added an extra layer of protection, which his instinct insisted was the right thing in a situation with so many unknowns.

The two of them kept close to the headlight beams, leaning into the wind. As they shuffled closer to the edge, Aaron’s field scan still couldn’t detect anything beyond.

‘Where the hell’s the ground gone?’ he demanded. His field scan probed the ice beneath his feet. There were a few centimetres of crisp snow, then clear ice down as far as the scan could reach. It was as though they were on the top of some giant frozen wave.

‘Must be a gully of some description,’ Inigo replied. ‘If the pressure is right the ice can fissure instead of throwing up a ridge.’

‘Great.’

‘It should close up soon. I’ve never seen an ice fissure over five hundred metres long. You check that way. And don’t go too near the edge.’

‘Right.’ Aaron started to walk parallel to the edge, keeping a good three or four metres between him and the drop. He soon came to a flat triangular prominence jabbing out from the verge, which he shuffled along cautiously, feeling the slight stirrings of vertigo. If anywhere would allow him a decent look into the gulf below, it would be here.

He extended his field scan to its maximum, sweeping it through the heavy swirl of snow. Even at full resolution he couldn’t detect the other side of the rough fissure. Nor was there any sign of a bottom. He was standing on the brink of some massive abyss. Instinct kicked in, firing up his misgivings. Something Nerina said back at the camp registered. ‘Hey, are we—’ His scan showed him Inigo’s field function was switching, reformatting energy currents. His own biononics responded instantaneously, strengthening his integral force field, shielding him from any damage Inigo’s outdated systems could possibly inflict. Accelerants rode his nerve paths ready to implement his response. Tactical routines rose out of macrocellular clusters, fusing effortlessly with his thoughts, analysing his situation. That was when he realized just how badly he’d screwed up by trusting Inigo. ‘
Shiiiit!
’

Inigo fired the biggest disruptor pulse his biononics could produce. It slammed into the ice a couple of metres short of Aaron’s feet. For a moment, the whole prominence fluoresced an elegant jade. As the light faded, a single giant crack appeared with incredible speed, splitting the prominence off the edge of the Asiatic glacier.

Aaron stared in shock at the ruptured ice. Tactics programs rushed to find a counter—

‘Sorry,’ Inigo said simply. The thoughts leaking out of his gaiamotes even proved he meant it. ‘But sometimes to do what’s right . . .’

The entire prominence split away cleanly. To Aaron’s accelerated nervous system it appeared to hang there for some terrible eternity. Then gravity pulled the colossal chunk of ice straight down with Aaron standing at the centre. It began to twist as the edges screeched down the cliff. His force field reconfigured, extending into a twin swept-petal shape – wings that could glide him away. Not good in the midst of this snowstorm, but better than anything else. That was when the vast cataract of avalanching snow triggered by Inigo’s shot thundered into him, engulfing the tumbling prominence and him with it.

The whole mass continued to plummet down the mile-high cliff, taking a long time to reach the bottom.

Silverbird
arrowed through the Gulf, the immense expanse of ruined stars and tattered ion storms which lay between the dense halo of ancient globular clusters that comprised the Wall stars and the boundary of the Void itself. Justine was receiving the hysradar and quantum scanner images direct, surrounding herself with the mass structure of the real universe translated into scarlet and turquoise mists. Tiny points of emerald light shone within the shifting cosmic oceans, showing her the supermassive stars which had so far retained their integrity during their long spiral into oblivion. Less than a hundred lightyears ahead of her was the frosty glow of the loop, an orbiting band of supercharged matter ten lightyears across which emitted a galaxy-spanning blaze of X-rays. Beyond that was the awesome black surface of the Void boundary. She watched its topology fluctuate, marvelling at how ocean-like the waves were, with peaks and troughs ripping about chaotically, stirred by incomprehensible internal storm-forces. Quite often she would see an undulation swell out to reach the elongated plume of a disintegrating star that was still lightmonths away. Phenomenal gravity sucked the matter down into the event horizon with a last devastating flare of ultra-hard radiation, the kind which had powered the loop for a billion years. Even that siren call would end soon. At its current expansion rate the Void would engulf the loop in another week. Then it would just be the Wall and the Raiel DF defences that stood between the boundary and the rest of the galaxy.