The Dreaming Void (51 page)

His arms went around her, hugging tight as if he were the one seeking reassurance. “It's momentous. I remember. So take all the time you need.”

He rode the gigantic horse for hour after hour, his young legs barely stretching over the saddle. In the distance were real mountains, their snowcapped peaks stabbing high into the glorious sapphire sky. He was leaving them behind, riding away from the forests that covered the foothills. It was wild veldt beneath the hooves now, lush tropical vegetation split by streams and small rivers. Trees from a dozen planets grew across the low slopes, their contrasting evolutions providing a marvelous clash of color and shape. Hot air gusted against him, heavy with alien pollen.

His friends rode beside him, the six of them shouting encouragement to one another as they wove around the knolls and ridges. None of them were yet adult, but they were finally old enough to be trusted out on their own. It was days like this, full of freedom and joy, that made sense of his life.

Then the cry went up. “The king eagles; the king eagles are here.”

He scoured the brilliant sky, seeing the black dots above the rumpled horizon. Then he, too, was yelling in welcome, his heart pounding with excitement. The horse ran faster as the noble lords of this world's sky grew larger and larger.

Red lights flashed across the heavens. The king eagles elongated, black lines curving and twisting to form a gray rectangular shape. His horse had vanished, leaving him lying flat on his back. The red lights turned violet-blue and began to retreat as the top of the medical chamber opened. A face slid into view, peering down. He blinked it into focus. It was very pretty and heavily freckled, with a mass of dark red hair tied back.

“You okay?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“Urrgh,” Aaron told her.

“Here, drink this.” A plastic straw was eased into his mouth. He sucked some welcoming cool liquid down his sore throat.

“What?” he mumbled.

“What?”

“What happened?”

“You've been in the ship's medical chamber for a couple of days.”

He winced as he tried to move his arms. His whole left side was stiff, as if the skin had shrunk. “A moment,” he told her. His u-shadow flipped medical records into his exovision. He skipped the details, concentrating on the major repairs. The damage had been more extensive that he had expected. The projectile entry wounds combined with firewire mutilation and toxin contamination meant the medical chamber had had to cut and extract a lot of ruined tissue and bone from his chest. Foreign meat had been inserted, neutral-function cells that could have their preactive DNA switched to mold them into whatever organ, bone, or muscle function they were replacing. He spotted a supplementary file and opened it. The foreign meat stored in the chamber actually was not so foreign. The DNA was his; it also had full-complement biononic organelles.

The repairs had been woven into his body by the chamber and his existing biononics. They were still integrating, and that was why he felt so awful. Estimated time for the biononics to complete the binding and the cells to acclimatize to their new function was a further seventy-two hours.

“Could have been better, could have been worse,” he decided.

“I was worried,” she said. “Your wound was huge. The blood …” Her face paled; even the freckles faded.

Aaron slowly shifted his arms back along the chamber padding, propping himself up, at which point he realized he did not have any clothes on. “Thank you.”

She gave him a blank look.

“I should be thanking you, shouldn't I? What happened? The last thing I remember was you hitting Ruth Stol.”

“That little princess bitch.”

“So? What came next?” Aaron swung his feet over the lip of the capsule; his inner ears seemed to take a lot longer than usual to register the movement. Bulkheads spun around him, then twisted back. The starship's cabin was in its lounge mode, with long couches extending out from the bulkhead walls. He hobbled over to the closest one as the medical chamber withdrew into the floor. Sitting down, he tentatively poked his chest with a forefinger. Half of his torso was a nasty salmon pink, covered with a glistening protective membrane.

“I did what you suggested,” Corrie-Lyn said. “The capsule smashed its way into the reception hall. I just got inside when there was this almighty explosion over the forest. It knocked the capsule around quite a bit, but I was caught by the internal safety field. We zipped over to the administration block. You were … a mess, but I managed to pull you inside. Then we rendezvoused with the
Artful Dodger
outside the clinic, the way you set it up. The starship put its force field around the capsule while we transferred in. Good job. The police were going apeshit with me. They were shooting every weapon they had at us; there were craters all over the place when we took off. I told the smartcore to get us out of the system, but it followed your preloaded flight plan. We're just sitting in some kind of hyperspace hole a light-year out from Anagaska. I can't make a unisphere connection. The smartcore won't obey me.”

“I loaded a few options in,” he said. His u-shadow gave the smartcore an instruction, and a storage locker opened. “Do you think you could get me that robe, please?”

She frowned disapprovingly but pulled the robe out. “I was really worried. I thought I was going to be stuck here forever if you died. It was horrible. The medical chamber would rejuvenate me every fifty years, and I'd just sit in the lounge plugged into the sensory drama library, being drip fed by the culinary unit. That's not how I want to spend eternity, thank you.”

He grinned at her drama queen outrage as he slipped on the robe. “If the chamber could rejuvenate you, it could certainly re-life me.”

“Oh.”

“In any case, if I die, the smartcore allows you full control.”

“Right.”

“But!” He caught hold of her hand. She jerked around, suddenly apprehensive. “None of this would have happened if you'd been ready to pick me up when I told you.”

“I haven't seen any decent clothes in weeks,” she protested. “I just lost track of time, that's all. I didn't
mean
to be late. Besides, I thought you got wounded before the scheduled rendezvous.”

He closed his eyes in despair. “Corrie-Lyn, if you're on a combat mission, you don't call a fucking time-out to go shopping. Understand?”

“You never said combat. A quick raid sneaking into their vault, you said.”

“For future reference, a covert mission in which all sides are armed is a combat situation.”

She pulled a face. “ ‘Nothing they have will be a match for my biononics.' ”

“I never said that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I …” He let out a breath and made an effort to stay calm.
Yoga. She always made us do yoga. It was fucking stupid.

Corrie-Lyn was frowning at him. “You okay? You need to get back in the chamber?”

“I'm fine. Look, thank you for picking me up. I know this kind of thing is not what your life is about.”

“You're welcome,” she said gruffly.

“Please tell me we still have the memorycell.”

Corrie-Lyn produced a minx smile and held up the little plastic kube. “We still have the memorycell.”

“Thank Ozzie for that.” His u-shadow told the smartcore to show him the ship's log; he wanted to check how much effort had been made to try to track them. Since they had left Anagaska in a hurry, several starships had run sophisticated hysradar scans out to several light-years, but nobody could spot an ultradrive ship in transdimensional suspension. The log also recorded that Corrie-Lyn had managed to circumvent the lockout he had placed on the culinary unit to prevent it from making alcoholic drinks. This really wasn't the time to make an issue of it.

“Okay,” he told her. “I don't think anyone's spotted us, though there were some mighty interesting comings and goings just after our raid. Several ships with unusual quantum signatures popped out of hyperspace above Anagaska; the smartcore thinks they might be ultradrives in disguise.”

“Who would they be?”

“Don't know and don't intend to hang around to ask. Let's get going.”

“Finally.”

He held his hand out, carefully maintaining a neutral expression.

Corrie-Lyn gave the kube a sentimental look and took awhile to drop it into his palm. “I'm not sure I like the idea of you reading Inigo's mind.”

“I'm not going to. Memory assimilation isn't like accessing a sensory drama off the unisphere or accepting experiences through the gaiafield. A genuine memory takes a long time to absorb; you can compress it down from real time, but still this kube contains nearly forty years of his life. That would take months to shunt into a human brain; it's one of the governing factors in creating re-life clones. If we're going to find him before the Pilgrimage, we don't have that much time to spare.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Take it to someone who can absorb it a lot quicker than I can and ask nicely.”

“You just said human brains can't absorb stored memories that quickly.”

“So I did, which is why we're setting course for the
High Angel.
”

Corrie-Lyn looked shocked. “The Raiel starship?”

“Yes.”

“Why would the Raiel help you?”

He smiled at the kube. “Let's just say that we now have an excellent bargaining chip.”

Corrie-Lyn did not have the kind of patience for extensive research. Aaron had to fill in the decades and centuries she skipped through when she started to access the files her u-shadow trawled up on the Raiel. Humans had discovered the
High Angel
back in 2163, he explained, when a wormhole was opened in its star system to search for any H-congruous planets. CST's exploratory division quickly confirmed that there was no world that humans could live on, but the astronomers did notice a microwave signal coming from the orbit of the gas giant Icalanise.

“What's that got to do with angels?” she asked. “Were they all religious?”

“Not astronomers, no.”

When they focused their sensors on the microwave source, they saw a moonlet sixty-three kilometers long with what looked like wings of hazy pearl light: the wings of an angel.

“Sounds like they were religious to me if that's the first thing they think of.”

Aaron groaned. With more sensors urgently brought online, the true nature of the artifact was revealed: a core of rock sprouting twelve stems that supported vast domes, five of which had transparent cupolas. Cities and parkland were visible inside.

It was a starship, a living creature or a machine that had evolved into sentience. Origin unknown, and it wasn't telling. Several species lived in the domes. Only the Raiel consented to talk to humanity, and they did not say very much.

Several of the biggest astroengineering companies negotiated a lease on three of the domes, and the
High Angel
became a dormitory town for an archipelago of microgravity factory stations producing some of the Commonwealth's most advanced and profitable technology. The workforce and their families soon grew large enough to declare autonomy (with
High Angel
's approval) and qualify for a seat in the Senate.

With the outbreak of the Starflyer War,
High Angel
became the Commonwealth's premier navy base while the astroengineering companies turned their industrial stations over to warship production. More domes were grown, or extruded, or magically manifested into existence to accommodate the navy personnel. Even today nobody understood the
High Angel
's technology.

“Do we know more about it now?” she asked.

“Not really. ANA might; the Central worlds can duplicate some functions with biononics, but the External worlds haven't managed to produce anything like it.”

Humans, he told her, had to wait for two hundred years after the war before the massive alien starship's history became a little clearer. Wilson Kime's epic voyage in the
Endeavor
to circumnavigate the galaxy revealed the existence of the Void to the Commonwealth, complete with Centurion Station and Raiel defense systems maintaining the Wall stars. Other navy exploration ships discovered more
High Angel
–class ships; the one species common to all of them was the Raiel.

Confronted with that evidence, the Raiel finally explained that they had created the
High Angel
class of ships over a million years earlier while their species had been at its apex. It was a golden age during which the Raiel civilization spread across thousands of planets; they mixed with hundreds of other sentients, guided and observed as dozens of species transcended to a postphysical state. They even knew the Silfen before their Motherholme dreamed its paths into existence.

Then the Void underwent one of its periodic expansion phases. Nothing the Raiel could do stopped the barrier from engulfing entire star clusters. Gravity shifted around the galactic core as stars were torn down into the event horizon. The effect on civilizations just outside the Wall stars was catastrophic. Stars shifted position as the core gravity field fluctuated; their planets changed orbits. Thousands of unique biospheres were lost before evolution had any chance to flourish. Whole societies had to be evacuated before storm fronts of ultra-hard radiation that measured thousands of light-years across came streaming out into the base of the galaxy's spiral arms.