The Dreaming Void (64 page)

“You knew she was missing?”

“Yes. The records of the time aren't perfect, naturally, given the circumstances. But we have a full census, and of course everyone who arrived on Anagaska was fully documented. It's our job to try to determine what happened to those who got lost. We have to handle each case separately. In Aeva's case, we've been searching possible locations for seventy years.”

“You're bullshitting me,” Aaron said.

“I assure you I'm not.”

“Sorry, but seventy years?”

“We start with the route she must have taken, pick the obvious danger points, and seed them with sensor bots. They spread out in a circle, trying to find some trace. Like all our equipment, the bots have improved considerably during the centuries we've been here. The majority are tunnelers, burrowing through the snow and surface soil layers. So much topsoil was displaced during the storms that the continent's whole topology shifted, and now it's all locked into place by the permafrost. Ninety-nine percent of the people we recover these days are buried. It means the bots operate in highly detrimental conditions even for this world. In total, the Restoration project has deployed four hundred and fifty million since it began. There are still eleven million active and searching. They're not fast-moving, but they are thorough.”

“How many people are you still looking for?”

“A third of a million. I don't hold out much hope. Most of them will have been washed into the sea.” He gestured at the wrinkled lump on the table. “Dear Aeva's car was forty-seven kilometers from the road she used, and that was the easy find; she was deep under sediment. Persistence pays off. We still find about twenty or so each year, even now.”

They moved on into DNA sequencing. To Aaron it was just an ordinary office with five large smartcores. Even in ordinary circumstances, human DNA decomposed quickly; after twelve hundred years on Hanko, only the smallest fragments remained. But there were a lot of cells in a body, each with its own fragments. Piecing them together was possible with the right techniques and a vast amount of computing power. Once the main sequences had been established, the project could use family records to fill the gaps. In a lot of cases, there were full DNA records from clinics available. As soon as the body had been identified properly, a clone was grown for re-life.

“But not here,” Purillar said. “Clinics back on Anagaska handle that part. After all, who would want to wake up here? People have enough trouble adjusting to the present—their future—as it is. Most need specialist counseling.”

“Is life that different?”

“Essentially no, and most died hoping for rescue in the form of re-life. It is the amount of time involved which shocks them. None of their immediate family and friends remain. They are very much alone when they wake.”

After DNA there was the memory rehabilitation section, where they tried to reassemble the information read from memorycells. It was a process orders of magnitude more complex than DNA sequencing.

The history archive was for recovered people who could not be identified. It held all of Hanko's civic records and memoirs of families with lost relatives, the logs and recollections of the evacuation teams, lists of people who may have been visiting Hanko when the attack started, and the intersolar missing persons list of the time.

There were laboratories specializing in analysis of molecular structures, identifying Baroque minute clues the bots had discovered as they wormed their way through Hanko's frozen earth, trying to place flakes of paint with individual car models, tying scraps of cloth to specific clothes and from there to manufacturer, to retail outlet, to customer lists, to bank statements. There were items of jewelry and even pets. It was a long register of unknown artifacts, each one potentially leading to another lost corpse.

The case room had files on everyone still known to be missing.

The operations center monitored the sensorbots and the outpost teams that were excavating in terrible conditions.

After two hours, they had met everyone in the building. None reacted to Corrie-Lyn, and nobody tried to avoid her. Aaron quietly scanned all of them. No one was enriched with biononics.

“There are a few other people around,” Purillar said. “You'll probably meet them tonight at the canteen. We tend to eat together.”

“And if he's not there?” Aaron asked.

“Then I'm sorry, but there's not much I can do,” the director said. He gave Corrie-Lyn an uncomfortable glance.

“Can we visit the outposts?” she asked.

“If he is here, he'll know about you by now. He would have used the beacon net to call in. I guess he doesn't want to get back with you.”

“Seeing me in the flesh might be the one thing he can't resist,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Please.” Her outpouring of grief into the gaiafield was disturbing.

The director looked deeply unhappy. “If you want to venture outside, there's nothing I can do to stop you. Technically, this is still a free Commonwealth world. You can go wherever you want. I'd have to advise against it, though.”

“Why?” Aaron asked.

“You've got a good ship, but even that would be hard-pressed to maneuver close to the ground. We can't use capsules here; the winds are too strong, and the atmospheric energy content too high. The two times we tried to use our ship for an emergency rescue nearly ended in disaster. We aborted both and wound up having to re-life the team members.”

“My ship has an excellent force field.”

“I'm sure it does. But expanding the force field doesn't help; you just give the wind a bigger surface area to push at. Down here it actually makes you more susceptible to the storm. The only stability you have in the air is what your drive units can provide.”

Aaron did not like it. The
Artful Dodger
was just about the best protection possible under normal circumstances. He could not forget the way the regrav units had approached their limits while bringing them down to the base's force field dome, and that had been a big target. “How do your teams get about?” he asked.

“Ground crawlers. They weigh three tons apiece and move on tracks. They're not fast, but they are dependable.”

“Can we borrow one? There must be some you're not using. You said there used to be a lot more personnel here at one time. Just an old one will do.”

“Look. Really, he's not here.”

“Whatever release document you want us to certify, we'll do it,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Please. Give me this last chance.”

“I've got over twenty teams out there. Half of them aren't even on this continent. We use the polar caps as a bridge to get to the other landmasses. It would take you a year to get around them all.”

“At least we can make a start. If Yigo hears we're going around to everyone, he'll know he'll have to face me eventually. That might make him get in contact.”

Purillar rubbed agitated fingers across his forehead. “It will have to be the mother of all legal release claims. I can't have any comeback against the project.”

“I understand. And thank you.”

After dinner Aaron and Corrie-Lyn made their way to the second block to inspect the ground crawler Purillar was reluctantly allowing them to use. Overhead the airborne lights were dimming to a gentle twilight. The effect was spoiled by constant flares of lightning outside the force field.

“He wasn't at the canteen, then?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“No. I've scanned everyone in the base now. None of them have biononics, though quite a few have some interesting enrichments. It can't be as tame here as the good director claims.”

“You always judge people, don't you?”

“Quite the opposite. I don't care what they do to each other in the privacy of their own cottage. I just need to make a threat assessment.”

The malmetal door of garage eleven rolled apart to show them the ground crawler. It was a simple wedge shape of metal on four low caterpillar tracks. With the bodywork painted bright orange, its slit windows made empty black gashes in the sides. Force field projectors were lumpy bulbs on the upper edges, along with crablike maintenancebots that clung to the surface like marsupial babies. When Aaron queried the vehicle's net, he found it had a large self-repair function. A third of the cargo compartments were filled with spares.

“We should be all right in this,” he told her. “The net will drive it. All we have to do is tell it where we want to go.”

“And that is, exactly? You know, Purillar was right. If Inigo is here, then he knows I'm here looking for him. He would have contacted us. Me, at least.”

“Would he?”

“Oh, don't,” she said, her face furrowed in disgust. “Just don't.”

“He obviously doesn't miss you as much as you miss him. He left, remember.”

“Screw you!” she screamed.

“Don't hide from this. Not now. I need you functional.”

“Functional.” She sneered. “Well, I'm not. And if we find him, the first thing I'll tell him is not to help you, you psychofuck misfit.”

“I never expected anything else from you.”

She glowered but didn't walk away. Aaron smiled behind her back.

“If he's here, the Pilgrimage will be long gone before we find him,” she said sulkily.

“Not quite. Remember, we have an advantage that lets us reduce the search field. We know he's Higher.”

“How does that help?” There was disdain in her voice still, but it was warring with curiosity now.

“The field scan effect would be very useful out there, helping to track down bodies buried in the ground. I can use it to detect anomalies several hundred meters away. It's a little more difficult through a solid mass, but the pervasive function is still capable of reaching a reasonable distance.”

“If he's here, he'll have a better success rate than the others,” she said.

“There are other factors, such as getting the location of a lost person reasonably accurate, which all depends on how well an individual case has been researched. But yes, it's a reasonable assumption to say the team with the best success rate will be Inigo's.”

“Is there one?”

“Yep. My u-shadow didn't even have to hack any files. They're all open to review. The team with the current highest recovery rate is working up at Olhava province. That's on this continent, nine hundred kilometers southwest. If we start first thing tomorrow morning, we'll be there in forty-eight hours.”

Oscar Monroe had fallen in love with the house the first moment he saw it. It was a plain circle with a high glass wall separating floor and ceiling that stood five meters off the ground on a central pillar that contained a spiral staircase. Both the base and the roof were made of a smooth artificial rock similar to white granite, and it shone like mountaintop snow in Orakum's blue-tinged sunlight. The sprawling grounds outside resembled grand historical parkland that had fallen into disuse, with woolly grass overgrowing paths, lines of ornamental trees, and a couple of lakes with a little waterfall between them. There were even some brick Hellenic structures resting in deep nooks, swamped by moss and flowering creepers to add to the image of great age. That image was one that several dozen gardening bots worked hard at achieving.

He had lived there for nineteen years now. It was a wonderful home to return to every time his pilot shift was over, devoid of stress and the kind of bullshit politics that went in tandem with any corporate job. Oscar flew commercial starships for Orakum's thriving national spaceline, which had routes to over twenty External planets. Piloting was the only job he had sought since he had been re-lifed.

Waking up in the clinic had been one hell of a surprise. The last thing he remembered was crashing his hyperglider into an identical one piloted by Anna Kime. Saving the Commonwealth—good. Killing the wife of his best friend—not so hot. Without Anna to wreck their flight, Wilson Kime should have managed to fly unimpeded on a mission that was pivotal in the Starflyer War. Oscar could remember the instant before the collision, a moment of complete serenity. He had not expected anyone to recover his memorycell, not after his confession that in his youth he had been involved in an act of politically motivated terrorism that had killed four hundred eight people, a third of them without memorycells, mostly children too young for the inserts. The fact that he'd never intended it, that the deaths had been a mistake, that they had missed their actual target—that should not have counted in his favor. But it seemed as though his service to the Commonwealth and his ultimate sacrifice had meant something to the judge. He wanted to think Wilson maybe had paid for a decent lawyer. They had been good friends.

“I guess this means we won, then,” were his first words. It even sounded like his own voice.

Above him, a youthful doctor's face smiled. “Welcome back, Mr. Yaohui,” he said.