The Dreaming Void (8 page)

The Delivery Man took a last wistful look down at the mist-draped city, feeling guilt swell to a nearly painful level. But he could never tell Lizzie what he actually did; she wanted stability for their gorgeous little family, and rightly so.

Not that there was any risk involved, he told himself as each assignment began. Really. At least, not much. And if anything ever did go wrong, his faction probably could re-life him in a new body and return him home before she grew suspicious.

He turned away from London and made his way across the reception center's deserted floor to one of the transit tubes opposite it. It sucked him in like an old vacuum hose, propelling him toward the center of Eagles Haven, where the interstellar wormhole terminus was located. The scarcity of travelers surprised him. He had expected to find more Highers on their inward migration to ANA. Living Dream certainly was stirring things up politically among the External worlds. The Central worlds regarded the whole Pilgrimage affair with their usual disdain. Even so, their political councils were worried, as demonstrated by the number of people joining them to offer their opinion.

It was a fact that with Ethan's ascension to Cleric Conservator, the ANA factions were going to be maneuvering frantically for advantage, trying to shape the Greater Commonwealth to their own visions. He couldn't work out which of them was going to benefit most from the recent election; there were so many, and their internal allegiances were all so fluid, not to mention deceitful. It was an old saying that there were as many factions as there were ex-physical humans inside ANA, and he never had encountered any convincing evidence to the contrary. That resulted in groupings that ranged from those who wanted to isolate and ignore the physical humans (some antianimal extremists wanted them exterminated altogether) to those who sought to elevate every human, ANA or physical, to a transcendent state.

The Delivery Man took his assignments from a broad alliance that was fundamentally conservative, following a philosophy that was keen to see things keep running along as they were, although opinions on how that should be achieved were subject to a constant and vigorous internal debate. He did it because it was a view he shared. When he eventually downloaded, in another couple of centuries or so, that would be the faction with which he would associate himself. In the meantime he was one of its unofficial representatives to the physical Commonwealth.

The station terminus was a simple spherical chamber containing a globe fifty meters in diameter whose surface glowed with the lambent violet of Cherenkov radiation emanating from the exotic matter used to maintain the wormhole's stability. He slipped through the bland sheet of photons and immediately was emerging from the exterior of a corresponding globe on St. Lincoln. The old industrial planet was still a major manufacturing base for the Central worlds and had maintained its status as a hub for the local wormhole network. He took a transit tube to the wormhole for Lytham, which was one of the Central worlds farthest from Earth; its wormhole terminus was secured at the main starport. Only the Central worlds were linked by a long-established wormhole network. The External worlds valued their cultural and economic independence too much to be connected to the Central worlds in such a direct fashion; with just a few exceptions travel between them was by starship.

A two-seater capsule ferried the Delivery Man out to the craft to which he'd been assigned. He glided between two long rows of pads where starships were parked. They ranged in size from sleek needle-like pleasure cruisers to hundred-meter passenger liners capable of flying commercial routes as far as a hundred light-years. There were no cargo ships; Lytham was a Higher planet and did not manufacture or import consumer items.

The
Artful Dodger
was parked toward the end of the row. It was a surprisingly squat chrome-purple ovoid, twenty-five meters high, standing on five tumorlike bulbs that held its wide base three meters off the concrete. The fuselage surface was smooth and featureless, with no hint of what lay underneath. It looked like a typical private hyperdrive ship belonging to some wealthy External world individual or company or to a Higher council with a diplomatic prerogative. An ungainly metal umbilical tower stood at the rear of the pad, with two slim hoses plugged into the ship's utility port, filling the synthesis tanks with baseline chemicals.

The Delivery Man sent the capsule back to the rank in the reception building and walked underneath the starship. His u-shadow called the ship's smartcore and confirmed his identity, a complex process of code and DNA verification, before the smartcore finally acknowledged he had the authority to take command. An airlock opened at the center of the ship's base, a dint that distended upward into a tunnel of darkness. Gravity eased off around him and then slowly inverted, pulling him up inside. He emerged into the single midsection cabin. Inert, it was a low hemisphere of dark fabric that felt spongy to the touch. Slim ribs on the upper surface glowed a dull blue, allowing him to see. The airlock sealed below his feet. He smiled as he looked around at the blank cabin, sensing the power contained behind the bulkheads. The starship plugged into him at some animal level, circumventing all the wisdom and cool of Higher behavior. He relished the power that was available, the freedom to fly across the galaxy. This was liberation in the extreme.

How the girls would love to ride in it.

“Give me something to sit on,” he told the smartcore. “Turn the lights up and activate flight control functions.”

An acceleration couch bloomed up from the floor as the ribs brightened, revealing a complex pattern of black lines etched on the cabin walls. The Delivery Man sat down. Exoimages flipped up, showing him the ship's status. His u-shadow cleared him for flight with the spaceport governor, and he designated a flight path to Ellezelin, two hundred fifteen light-years away. The umbilical cables withdrew into their tower.

“Let's go,” he told the smartcore.

Compensator generators maintained level gravity inside the cabin as the
Artful Dodger
rose on regrav. At fifty kilometers altitude, the limit of regrav, the smartcore switched to ingrav, and the starship continued to accelerate away from the planet. The Delivery Man began to experiment with the internal layout, expanding walls and furniture out of the cabin bulkheads. The dark lines flowed and bloomed into a great variety of combinations, allowing up to six passengers to have tiny independent sleeping quarters that included a bathroom formation, but for all its malleability, the cabin was basically variations on a lounge. If you were traveling with anyone, he decided, let alone five others, you'd need to be very good friends.

A thousand kilometers above the spaceport, the
Artful Dodger
went FTL, vanishing inside a quantum field interstice with a photonic implosion that pulled in all the stray electromagnetic radiation within a kilometer of its fuselage. There were no differences perceptible to ordinary human senses: he might have been in an underground chamber, the gravity remaining perfectly stable. Sensors provided him with a simplified image of their course as it related to large masses back in spacetime, plotting stars and planets by the way their quantum signatures affected the intersecting fields through which they were flying. Their initial speed was a smooth fifteen light-years per hour, near the limit for hyperdrive, which the sophisticated Lytham planetary spacewatch network could track out to a couple of light-years.

The Delivery Man waited until they were three light-years beyond the network and told the smartcore to accelerate again. The
Artful Dodger
's ultradrive pushed them up to a phenomenal fifty-five light-years per hour. It was enough to make the Delivery Man flinch. He had been on an ultradrive ship only twice before; there were not many of them, as ANA had not released the technology to the Central worlds. Exactly how the Conservative Faction had gotten hold of it was something he studiously avoided asking.

Two hours later he reduced speed back to fifteen light-years an hour and allowed the Ellezelin traffic network to pick up their hyperspatial approach. He used a TransDimensional (TD) channel to the planetary datasphere and requested landing permission for Riasi spaceport.

Ellezelin's original capital was situated on the northern coast of Sinkang, with the Camoa River running through it. He looked down on the city as the
Artful Dodger
sank down toward the main spaceport. It had been laid out in a spiderweb grid with the planetary parliament at the heart. The building was still there, a grandiose structure of towers and buttresses made from an attractive mixture of ancient and modern materials. But the planet's government now was centered in Makkathran2. The senior bureaucrats and their departments had moved with it, leading a migration of commerce and industry. Only the transport sector remained strong in Riasi. The wormholes that linked the planets of the Ellezelin Free Trade Zone together were all here, incorporated into the spaceport, making it the most important commercial hub in the sector.

The
Artful Dodger
landed on a pad little different from the one it had departed from barely three hours before. The Delivery Man paid a parking fee for a month in advance with an untraceable credit coin and declined an umbilical connection. His job here was finished. His u-shadow called a taxi capsule to the pad. While he was waiting for it, the Conservative Faction called him.

“Marius has been seen on Ellezelin.”

It was the second time that day the Delivery Man flinched. “I suppose that was inevitable. Do you know why he's here?”

“To support the Cleric Conservator. But as to the exact nature of that support, we remain uncertain.”

“I see. Is he here in the spaceport?” he asked reluctantly. He wasn't a frontline agent, but his biononics had very advanced field functions in case he stumbled into an aggressive situation. They ought to be a match for anything Marius could produce—although any aggression would be most unusual. Faction agents simply did not settle their scores physically. It wasn't done.

“We don't believe so. He visited the Cleric Conservator within an hour of the election. After that he dropped out of sight. We are telling you simply so that you can be careful. It would not do for the Accelerators to know our business any more than they want us to know theirs. Leave as quickly as possible.”

“Understood.”

The taxi capsule took him over to the spaceport's massive passenger terminal. He checked in for the next United Commonwealth Starlines flight back to Akimiski, the closest Central world. All the time he waited in the departure lounge overlooking the huge central concourse, he kept his scan functions running, checking to see whether Marius was in the terminal. When the passengers boarded forty minutes later, there had been no sign of him or any other Higher agent.

The Delivery Man settled into his first-class compartment on the passenger ship with a considerable sense of relief. It was a hyperdrive ship that would take fifteen hours to get to Akimiski. From there he would make a quick trip to Oronsay to maintain his cover. With any luck he'd be back on Earth in less than two days. It would be the weekend, and they'd be able to take the girls to the southern sanctuary park in New Zealand. They would enjoy that.

The Rakas bar occupied the whole third floor of a round tower in Makkathran2's Abad district, just as the same building in Makkathran itself had a bar on the third floor. From what he had seen in Inigo's dreams, Aaron suspected the furniture here was better, along with the lighting, not to mention the lack of the general dirt that seemed so pervasive in the original city. Rakas was patronized by a lot of visiting faithful who perhaps were a little disappointed by how little space the nucleus of their movement took up in comparison to the prodigious metropolises of the Greater Commonwealth.

There was also a much better selection of drinks than the archetype boasted. Aaron presumed that was the reason ex-Councillor the Honorable Corrie-Lyn kept returning there. This was the third night he had sat at a small corner table and watched her knocking back an impressive amount of alcohol at the counter. She wasn't a large woman, though at first glance her slender figure made her seem taller than she was. Ivory skin was stippled by a mass of freckles whose highest density was in a broad swath across her eyes. Her hair was the darkest red he had ever seen: depending on how the light caught her, it varied from shiny ebony to gold-flecked dark auburn. It was cut short, which, given how thick it was, made it curl heavily; the way it framed her dainty features made her appear like a particularly diabolic teenager. In reality she was a three-hundred-seventy-year-old. He knew she wasn't Higher, so she must have a superb Advancer metabolism, which presumably was how she could drink any bad boy under the table.

For the fourth time that evening, one of the faithful but not terribly devout went over to try his luck. After all, the good citizens of Makkathran had very healthy and active sex lives; Inigo showed that. The group of guys he was with, sitting at the big window seat, watched with sly grins and minimal sniggering as their friend claimed the empty stool beside her. Corrie-Lyn was not wearing her Cleric robes; otherwise he never would have dared to go within ten meters. A simple dark purple dress slit under each arm to reveal alluring amounts of skin wound up the lad's courage. She listened without comment to his opening lines, nodded reasonably when he offered to buy a drink, and beckoned the barkeeper over.