The Dreaming Void (29 page)

“Yes,” the guide said, returning to equilibrium. “Yes, it is. This is where he began his training as an astrophysicist, the first step on the path that took him to Centurion Station. As an environment, its significance cannot be overstated.”

“Gosh,” Corrie-Lyn cooed.

Aaron was impressed that she kept a straight face.

“What was that all about?” Corrie-Lyn asked when they were in a taxi capsule and heading back for the spaceport hotel.

“You didn't think it was odd?”

“So two horny teenagers decided to have a kid. It's not unheard of.”

“Yes, it is. They were both still at school. Then Erik vanishes a few months after the birth. Plus you tell me Inigo had an aunt who has been very effectively written out of his family. And you claim Inigo is Higher, which must have happened either at birth or early in his life, that is, prior to his Centurion mission.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because as you said, he took extreme care to hide it from his followers; it's not logical to assume he'd acquire biononics after he began Living Dream.”

“Granted, but where does all this theorizing get you?”

“It tells me just what a load of bullshit his official past is,” Aaron said, waving a hand back at the museum. “That farce is a perfect way of covering up his true history; it provides a flawless alternative version with just enough true points touching verifiable reality as to go unquestioned. Unless of course you're like us and happen to know some awkward facts which don't fit. If he was born Higher, then one of his parents had to be Higher. Sabine almost certainly wasn't, and Erik conveniently walks out on his child a few months after the birth.”

“It was too much for the boy, that's all. If Inigo's birth was an accident like you think, that's hardly surprising.”

“No. That's not it. I don't think it was an accident. Quite the opposite.” He told his u-shadow to review local events for the year prior to Inigo's birth, using non–Living Dream archives. They'd almost reached the hotel when the answer came back. “Aha, this is it.” He shared the file with her. “Local news company archive. They were bought out by an intersolar two hundred years ago and the town office downgraded to closure, which is why the files were deep cached. The art block in Kuhmo's college burned down eight and a half months before Inigo was born.”

“It says the block was the center of a gang fight,” Corrie-Lyn said as she speed reviewed. “A bunch of hothead kids duking out a turf war.”

“Yeah, right. Now launch a search for Kuhmo gang culture, specifically for incidents with weapons use. Go ahead. I'll give you thousand-to-one odds there aren't any other files, not for fifty years either side of that date. Look at the history of this place before Inigo built his monstrosity. There was nothing here
worth
fighting over, not even for kids on the bottom of the pile. The council switched between three parties, and they were all virtually indistinguishable. Their policies were certainly the same: low taxes, cut back on official wastage, attract business investment, and make sure the parks look pretty. Hell, they didn't even manage to get rid of the arcology by themselves. That thing stood there for nearly nine hundred years. Nine
hundred,
for Ozzie's sake! And they couldn't get their act together for all that time. Kuhmo is the ultimate middle-class dead end, drifting along in the same rut for a thousand years. Bad boys don't want a part of that purgatory; it's like a suspension sentence but with sensory torture thrown in. They just want to leave.”

“All right,
all right,
I submit. Inigo has a dodgy family history. What's your point?”

“My theory is a radical infiltration; it's about the right time period. And that certainly won't be on any news file, deep cached or otherwise.”

“So how do we find out what really happened?”

“Only one way. We have to ask the Protectorate.”

Corrie-Lyn groaned in dismay, dropping her head into her hands.

The maintenance hangar was on the edge of Daroca's spaceport, one of twenty-three identical black-sheen cubes in a row, the last row in a block of ten. There were eighteen blocks in total. It was a big spaceport, much larger than the navy compound on the other side of the city. Daroca's residents were a heavily starfaring folk, and the Air project had added considerably to the numbers of spaceships in recent centuries. Without any connection to the unisphere's guidance function, a person could wander around the area all day and not be able to distinguish among any of the hangars. A subtle modification to the spaceport net management software provided a nearly identical disorientation function to any uninvited person who was using electronic navigation to find Troblum's hangar. While the other structures were always opening their doors to receive or disgorge starships, Troblum's was kept resolutely shut except for his very rare flights. When the doors did iris back, a security shield prevented any visual or electronic observation of the interior. Even the small workforce that loyally turned up day after day parked their capsules outside and used a little side door to enter. They then had to pass through another three shielded doors to enter the hangar's central section. Nearly two-thirds of the big building was taken up by extremely sophisticated synthesis and fabrication machinery. All the systems were custom-built; the current layout had taken Troblum over fifteen years to refine. That was why he needed other people to help him. Neumann cybernetics and biononic extrusion were magnificent systems for everyday life, but for anything beyond the ordinary one first had to design the machinery to build the machines that fabricated the devices.

Troblum had no trouble producing the modified exotic matter theory behind an Anomine planet-shifting FTL engine and even describing the basic generator technology he wanted. But turning those abstractions into physical reality was tough. For a start, he needed information on novabomb technology, and even after nearly twelve hundred years the navy kept details of that horrendously powerful weapon classified. That was where Emily Alm came in.

It was Marius who had put the two of them in touch. Emily once had worked for the navy weapons division on Augusta. After three hundred years she had simply grown bored.

“There's no point to it anymore,” she had told Troblum at their first meeting. “We haven't made any truly new weapons for centuries. All the lab does is refine the systems we have. Any remotely new concept we come up with is closed down almost immediately by the top brass.”

“You mean ANA: Governance?” he had asked.

“Who knows where the orders originate from? All I know is that they come down from Admiral Kazimir's office, and we jump fast and high every time. It's crazy. I don't know why we bother having a weapons research division. As far as I know, the deterrence fleet hasn't changed ships or armaments for five hundred years.”

The problem he had outlined to her was interesting enough for her to postpone downloading into ANA. After Emily, others had joined his motley team: Dan Massell, whose expertise in functional molecular configuration was unrivaled; Ami Cowee, who helped with exotic matter formatting. Several technicians had come and gone over the years, contributing to the Neumann cybernetics array and then leaving as their appliance constructed its required successor. But those three had stuck with him since the early years. Their age and Higher-derived patience meant they were probably the only ones who could tolerate him for so long, that and their shared interest in the nature of the project.

When Troblum's aging capsule landed on the pad outside the hangar, he was puzzled to see just Emily's and Massell's capsules sitting on the concrete beside the glossy black wall. He had been expecting Ami as well.

Then, as soon as he was through the second little office, he knew something was wrong. There was no quiet vibration of machinery. As soon as the shield over the third door cut off, his low-level field could detect no electronic activity beyond it. The hangar had been divided in half, with
Mellanie's Redemption
parked at one end, a dark bulky presence very much in the shade of the assembly section. Troblum stood under the prow of the ship and looked around uncomprehendingly. The Neumann cybernetic modules in front of him were bigger than a house, joined into a lattice cube of what looked like translucent glass slabs the size of commercial capsules, each one glowing with its individual primary light. It was as if a rainbow had shattered only to be scooped up and shoved into a transparent box. At the center, three meters above Troblum's head, was a scarlet and black cone, the ejector mechanism of the terminal extruder. It should have been wrapped in a fiercely complex web of quantum fields, intersecting feeder pressors, electron positioners, and molecular lock injectors. He could not detect a glimmer of power. If all had gone well over the last few days, the planet-shift engine would have been two-thirds complete, assembled atom by atom in a stable matrix of superdense matter held together by its own integral coherent bonding field. By this time the cylinder would be visible within the extruder, glimmering from realigned exotic radiation as if it contained its own galaxy.

Instead, Emily and Massell were sitting on a boxlike atomic D-K phase junction casing at the base of the cybernetics, drinking tea. Both silent with mournful faces, they flashed him a guilty glance as he came in.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“Some kind of instability,” Emily said. “I'm sorry, Troblum. The bonding field format wasn't right. Ami had to shut it down.”

“And she didn't tell me!”

“Couldn't face you,” Massell said. “She knew how disappointed you'd be. Said she didn't want to be responsible for breaking your heart.”

“That's not—arrrgh.” He groaned. Biononics released a flood of neural inhibitors as they detected his thoughts growing more and more agitated. He shivered as if he had been caught by a blast of arctic air, but his focus was perfectly clear. A list of social priorities flipped up into his exovision. “Thank you for waiting to tell me in person,” he said. “I'll call Ami and tell her it wasn't her fault.”

Emily and Massell exchanged a blank look. “That's kind of you,” she said.

“How big an instability?”

Massell winced. “Not good. We need to reexamine the whole effect, I think.”

“Can we just strengthen it?”

“I hope so, but even that will be a domino on the internal structure.”

“Maybe not,” Emily said with weak confidence. “We included some big operating margins. There's a lot of flexibility within the basic parameters.”

Troblum fell silent with a dismay that even the inhibitors could not overcome. If Emily was wrong, if they needed a complete redesign, then the Neumann cybernetics would need to be rebuilt. It would take years. Again. And this drive generator had been his true hope; he genuinely had thought he would have a functional device by the end of the week. It was the only way to get people to agree with his theory. Marius would see that the navy never backed a search; he was sure of that. This was all that was left to him, his remaining shred of proof.

“You can get the resource allocation, can't you?” Massell said in an encouraging voice. “I mean, you've managed to push your theory to this level.” His gesture took in the silent hulk of Neumann cybernetics. “You've got to have some powerful political allies on the committees. And this wasn't a setback as such; only one thing was out of alignment.”

Troblum deliberately avoided looking in Emily's direction. Massell had not been one of Marius's candidates. “Yes, I can probably get the EMA for a rebuild.”

“Okay, then! Do you want to get on it right away or leave it a few days.”

“Give it a few days,” Troblum said, reading from his social priority list. “We'll all need a while to recharge after this. I'll start going over the telemetry and give you a call when I think I know what the new bonding field format should be.”

“Okay.” Massell gave him an encouraging smile as he slid off the casing. “There's a certain Air technician I've been promising a resort time-out with. I'll let her know I'm free.” He gave Emily a blank gaze, then left.

“Will there be the resources to carry on?” she asked.

“I don't know. Maybe not from our mutual friend.” At the back of his mind was a nasty little thought that this had been the result that benefited Marius best. Just how far would the Accelerator Faction's representative go to achieve that? “But I'll carry on one way or another. I still have some personal EMAs left.”

Her expression grew skeptical as she looked around the huge assemblage of ultrasophisticated equipment. “All right. If you need any help reviewing the data, let me know.”

“Thanks,” he said.

Troblum's office wasn't much, just a corner in one of the annex rooms big enough for a large wingback chair in the middle of a high-capacity solido projection array. He slumped down into the worn cushioning and stared through the narrow window into the hangar's assembly section. Now that he was alone and the neural chemicals were wearing off, he did not have the heart to begin a diagnostic review. The drive engine should have slid smoothly out of the extruder and into the modified forward cargo hold of
Mellanie's Redemption.
He would have been ready to show the Commonwealth he was right by the end of the week, to open up a whole new chapter in galactic history. Highers were not supposed to become frustrated, but right now he wanted to kick the shit out of the Neumann cybernetics.