The Dreaming Void (55 page)

“Can you access the main memory?” he asked his u-shadow.

“Not possible for me. I will need high-order assistance.”

The Delivery Man cursed and opened an ultrasecure link to the Conservative Faction. There was a small risk it could be intercepted by another faction or, more likely, ANA: Governance itself, but in light of what he had stumbled across, he considered it necessary. “I need help to gain access to Troblum's smartcore. It should tell us what he's been building with this machine.”

“Very well,” the Conservative Faction replied. With his u-shadow providing a link, the Delivery Man could almost feel the faction's presence shift into the hangar. It began to infiltrate the smartcore. While it was doing that, he began to look through the mundane files in the hangar's net to try to find delivery schedules. The individual components of the machine had to have come from somewhere, and the EMAs to obtain them went far beyond an individual's resources. There was no court the Conservatives could use to confront the Accelerators with even if he established a data trail back to their representatives, but if he could find the proxy supplying Troblum with additional EMAs, there was a chance he could find other illicit EMA transfers from the same source. A whole level of Accelerator operations would be uncovered.

“There is only one design stored in the smartcore,” the Conservative Faction announced. “It would appear to be an FTL engine capable of transporting a planet.”

The Delivery Man swung around to stare at the dark machine looming above him, his gaze drawn to the circular extrusion mechanism in the center. “A whole planet?”

“Yes.”

“Would it work?”

“The design is an ingenious reworking of exotic matter theory. It could work if applied correctly.”

“And this built it?” he said, still staring at the machine.

“There have been two attempts at producing the engine. The first was aborted. The second appears to have been successful.”

“Why do they want to fly a planet at FTL speeds? And which planet?”

“We don't know. Please destroy the machine and the smartcore.”

The Delivery Man put his hands on his hips to give the machine an appalled look. “What technology level can I go up to here?”

“Unlimited. Nobody must know it ever existed, least of all Highers.”

“Okay. Your call.”

The Conservative Faction ended the link, leaving the Delivery Man feeling unusually alone. Now that he knew the purpose of the machine, the silent hangar had the feel of some ancient murder scene. It was not a pleasant place to be, putting him on edge.

He called the
Jomo
's smartcore and told it to fly over. The hangar's main doors were open when it arrived, and it nosed through the security screen to settle on the cradles inside. Its nose almost touched the wall of Neumann cybernetics.

The Delivery Man made sure the hangar security screen was at its highest rating before he stood underneath the
Jomo
's open airlock to be drawn up by an inverted gravity effect. Once inside, he used a tricertificate authorization to activate the Hawking m-sink stored in one of the forward holds. The little device was contained inside a high-powered regrav sled, which slipped out to hover in front of the Neumann cybernetics. With that in place, the Delivery Man aimed a narrow disrupter effect at the machine, just above the Hawking m-sink. A half-meter section of equipment vaporized, producing a horizontal fountain of hot ionized gas. It bent slightly in midair to pour into the Hawking m-sink, which absorbed every molecule. The Delivery Man tracked the disrupter effect along the front of the machine, with the Hawking m-sink following.

It took forty minutes to vaporize the entire machine. When it was over, the quantum black hole at the center of the Hawking m-sink had absorbed three hundred twenty-seven tons of matter, putting the regrav sled close to its weight lift limit as it edged back into the starship's hold. The Delivery Man requested flight clearance from the starport, and the
Jomo
lifted into Arevalo's warm summer skies.

Justine watched it go from the safety of her own ship, which was parked on a pad eight hangars down the row.

Twilight was bathing Hawksbill Bay with a rich gold hue that was so mild that strange constellations could twinkle merrily across the cloudless sky. The only sound around the pavilion's swimming pool came from the waves breaking around the rocks of the headland below.

“An FTL engine that shifts planets,” Nelson said. “Got to admire them. They don't think small.”

“They don't think, period,” Gore grunted. “ANA is embedded in the local quantum fields. You can't just rip it out and fling it across the galaxy on a blind date with the Void.”

“They obviously believe it. Troblum's EMA came through one of their front committees. He built the engine for the Accelerators.”

“Don't believe it,” Gore said, shaking his head. “He even made a presentation to the navy about the Anomine using something like this to haul the Dyson barrier generators into place. Asked Kazimir to fund a fucking search for them, for Christ's sake. Why would Ilanthe allow him to go public with the idea? They'd atomize him before he even put in a call for a meeting with the navy. No, we haven't got enough information yet.”

“Makes sense if it's a diversion,” Nelson said reluctantly. “They wouldn't build anything so critical to their plans on a Higher world. We don't.”

“And he's taken years to get it built on a fairly pitiful budget. Wrong priority level. We need to find Troblum and ask nicely what he's really been doing for the Accelerators.”

“He left Arevalo a while back. Filed a flight plan to Lutain. Never showed up there or any other Commonwealth world, Central or External.”

“We need to find him,” Gore repeated firmly.

“That's not going to happen. Either the Accelerators have him or he's hiding, or more likely he's plain and simple dead.”

“Then we find out which one it is.”

Justine stood in the middle of the weirdly empty hangar and called Paula.

“There's something seriously wrong here.”

“In what way?” Paula asked.

“I think the Delivery Man just cleared the whole place out.” Justine slowly looked around the big empty space, opening her optical vision to Paula. “See that? There was something in here. My field scan shows those power cables were cut by a disruption effect; same goes for the support girders. Whatever it was, it was sizable and used up a great deal of power. But the
Jomo
is no bigger than my ship. Which only leaves one option for how he did it.”

“I thought the Hawking m-sink was even more secure than ultradrive technology. It would seem I'm wrong, which is disturbing.”

“Kazimir will have to be told,” Justine said. “If there are starships flying around the Commonwealth equipped with that kind of weapon, the navy should know about it. The factions don't use the most principled people as their representatives.”

“I'll leave that to you.”

“Great. Thank you. He's still human enough to blame the messenger.”

“He's a professional. You'll be all right. Do you know where the Delivery Man is heading?”

“His direction indicated Earth when he left my sensor range. I imagine he'll want to dump the mass stored in the Hawking m-sink first, and he'll do that deep in interstellar space. Expelling it will produce a colossal gamma burst.”

“Leave him alone for now. The focus is shifting back to Living Dream.”

“Why?”

“Our sources in the movement are reporting an alarming development,” Paula said. “Living Dream is readying all the civil security forces on all the core worlds of the Free Market Zone. Leave has been canceled, and they're undergoing martial law enforcement training.”

“Martial law? Where is that applied in the Free Market Zone?”

“It isn't—yet. But if they were to annex Viotia, they would probably need that many police troopers to keep the populace under control.”

“Jesus! Are they planning that?”

“Ethan is becoming desperate to gain control over the Second Dreamer. Whoever that is, he's the one person who could still stop this whole Pilgrimage in its tracks.”

“And everyone believes he's on Viotia,” Justine said, appalled. “Dear heavens, an interstellar invasion. In this day and age it's unthinkable. It's left over from the Starflyer War.”

“Start thinking it. I made a mistake not giving this a higher priority. We really need to offer ANA: Governance's protection to the Second Dreamer. That way no one will be able to pressure him into either helping or hindering the Pilgrimage.”

“But first we have to find him. How long before you can get your agent working on this?”

“Very soon now. I'm on my way to see him with one slight detour.”

Justine eyed the hangar's inner office suspiciously. There was an empty space that three communications conduits led into, their ends cut off clean. “Whatever they were building here was clearly important, and the Delivery Man took quite a risk covering it up. I don't think we have a lot of time left.”

“The Pilgrimage ships won't be ready to fly until September.”

“And the Ocisen Empire fleet will be here in late August, which is less than three months away. I'd like to suggest a lead no one else seems to be following.”

“What's that?”

“Inigo started to dream when he was at Centurion Station. Did anyone else?”

“If they did, we'd know about it.”

“That's the point: Would we? Suppose the contact was a weak one that was never fully established. Or the recipient didn't want any part of Inigo's religion. A reluctant person just like the Second Dreamer has turned out to be.”

“I think I see where you're going with this or, rather, intend to go.”

“I want to check out the confluence nest on Centurion Station, see if it has any memory of Void dreams or fragments of them. Maybe the Second Dreamer started his connection with the Skylord when he was there, just like Inigo.”

“You're right. No one else has covered that angle.”

“If I leave now, my ship can get me there in five hundred hours.”

“You're going to fly there? Why not use the navy's relay link?”

“Too much chance of it being intercepted.”

“If you do find anything, it'll take you another five hundred hours to get back. It'll probably all be over by then.”

“If I find anything important, I'll use the relay link to send you the name in the heaviest encryption we have.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

Troblum woke up slumped in the chair he had sat in reviewing various schematics all day. His exovision displays had paused at the point where he had fallen asleep. Colorful profiles of exotic mass density modulators floated like mechanical ghosts around him, each one beleaguered by shoals of blue and green analytical displays. Supposedly, those components would perform their designated function without any trouble; the designers simply had scaled up from existing ultradrives. Except nobody had ever built them that size before, which left Troblum with a mountain of problems when it came to the kind of precise power control they needed. And they hadn't even gotten to the fabrication stage yet.