The Evolutionary Void (10 page)

The woman-thing walking calmly out of the shadows on the other side of
the desk disturbed his sensibilities. “I believe you’re expecting me,” she
said. She was naked, which only intensified Ethan’s censure; her body possessed
no sexual characteristics. Her skin was some kind of artificial covering that
produced a gray layer whose exact boundary was indeterminable. Far worse than
that was her figure. It was as though her internal organs were too small for
her frame, leaving the skin to curve in between the ribs. And her eyes didn’t
help, little patches of pink moonlight that never revealed exactly what she was
looking at. There was a gold circle just below her neck from which sprouted two
long streamers of dark scarlet cloth. The fabric was draped across her
shoulders to float horizontally through the air for several meters behind her.
It rippled with the sluggish fluidity of an embryo sac.

Five armored guards burst in through the main doors, their fat weapons
raised. The Higher woman cocked her head to one side while the gaiafield
revealed a steely politeness in her mind.

Ethan held up a finger. “Hold,” he instructed the guards. “Did Marius send
you?”

A narrow mouth opened to reveal shiny metal teeth. “Marius has been moved
to other duties. I am Valean, his replacement. I am here to help sort out our
mutual problem with the ANA starship orbiting above you.”

Ethan waved the guards out, suspecting they wouldn’t have lasted long
against her. “What do you want?”

She walked toward him, the scarlet streamers wavering sinuously behind
her. Ethan saw that her heels ended in long tapering cones, as if her feet had
grown their own stilettos. “I require access to the Agra wormhole generator.
Please inform the operations staff I am to be given full cooperation.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Prevent the ANA agent from retrieving any more fragments.”

“I can’t afford any kind of conflict with ANA. Some in the Senate are
eager for the flimsiest legal grounds to authorize navy intervention.”

“We are expecting that any such concerns will soon be irrelevant. Rest
assured, Cleric Conservator, there will be no physical clash here.”

“Very well. I will see that you have full clearance.”

“Thank you.” She inclined her head and turned for the main doors.

“Please tell your faction leaders I would prefer to deal with Marius,” he
said.

Valean didn’t even turn around. “I will certainly tell them.” There was
no trace of irony in her thoughts; the facade of politeness remained intact.

The doors shut behind her. Ethan let out a long breath of apprehension;
he felt as if he’d finally been shown what awaited the lost souls who fell to
Honious.

Preliminary sensor analysis of the debris cloud indicated there were one
thousand three hundred twelve critical fragments, defined as anything over five
centimeters across. When Chatfield’s starship exploded, over a third of them
had been thrown down toward Ellezelin on trajectories that would see them
burning up in the atmosphere within half an hour. The rest were whirling
rapidly along wildly different orbital tracks. Recovery would be a bitch.

Digby was quietly pleased at the way the
Columbia505
’s
smartcore was handling the collection operation. Modified ingrav drive
emissions were pulling fragments out of their terminal trajectories; sensors
had identified several particles that had exotic matter constituents and were
tracking them constantly. The sleek ultradrive ship was darting about, drawing
the first chunks into the midhold, where they were embedded in a stabilizer
field. ANA:Governance had assured him a forensic team would be arriving within
ten hours. Digby hoped so. Stabilizer fields weren’t designed to preserve
exotic matter; a lot of it was decaying right in front of him, and there was
nothing he could do about it.

His exovision suddenly threw up warnings he never expected to see. A very
large wormhole was intruding into space not three kilometers from the
Columbia505
.

“What the hell?”

The smartcore tracked several chunks of wreckage tumbling down the
wormhole’s throat. Then the wormhole shifted exit coordinates, reappearing five
kilometers away. More junk was sucked down. Exoimage displays showed him it was
the wormhole that normally linked Ellezelin to Agra. Somebody was redirecting
it with unnerving skill, scooping up precious evidence. His u-shadow connected
him directly into the planetary cybersphere and tried to access the generator
net. “It’s been isolated,” the u-shadow reported. “I can’t even gain access to
the building net. Whoever’s in there, they’ve sealed themselves in tight.”

Columbia505
’s sensors swept across the
generator complex on the outskirts of Riasi, seven thousand kilometers away
around the curvature of the planet. A force field was protecting the whole
area. “Crap.” Digby ordered the smartcore to distort the wormhole’s pseudo
structure. Negative energy fluxes reached out from the starship’s drive,
attempting to destabilize the wormhole’s integrity. But the planetary
generators had too much power available compared with the starship. It was a
struggle Digby was doomed to lose.

“Take us down,” he ordered the smartcore. “Fast.” As the starship dived
down into the atmosphere, he called ANA:Governance and explained what was
happening.

“I will call the Cleric Conservator,” ANA:Governance said. “He must be
made to understand that he cannot act against us with impunity.”

Digby was pretty sure the Cleric Conservator knew that but held his
counsel. It was long gone midnight in Makkathran2, which meant that Riasi was
just slipping across the terminator line into daylight.
Columbia505
was decelerating at fifteen gees when it hit the stratosphere above the Sinkang
continent, upon whose northern coast the ex-capital city was sited. The ship
scorched its way down through the lower atmosphere like a splinter carved from
a star’s corona. It braked to a halt five hundred meters directly above the
Agra wormhole generator’s force field. The hypersonic shock wave of its passage
slammed past it, shattering all unprotected panes of glass within a
three-kilometer radius. Nearby regrav capsules tumbled through the air like
leaves in a blizzard as their smartnets used emergency power to try to right
them. Local traffic control was screaming warnings at Digby on every frequency.
Metropolitan police cruisers curved around to intercept. He sent out a blanket
broadcast to be picked up by every cybersphere node and macrocellular cluster
surrounding the force field.

“Everyone in the generator complex, switch off the force field and
deactivate the wormhole. You are violating an ANA-sanctioned operation. I am
authorized to use extreme force to end your transgression.”

As he suspected, there was no reply. There never would be, he knew. Every
moment he waited, playing the good guy, was another moment spent eradicating
the precious evidence in orbit. All that left him with was the problem of
knocking out the force field without flattening half the city.

Eight slender atomic distortion beams stabbed out from the starship to
the top of the force field dome, ripping the air molecules apart in a blaze of
incandescence. Monstrous static discharges flared away into the heaving
atmosphere. The force field began to glow a pale purple, as if it were growing
a bruise. A cluster of dump webs skittered down from the
Columbia505
.
They struck the force field, kicking out blooms of dusky ripples. The darkness
around them intensified, expanding rapidly. Under such an assault, overload was
only a matter of time. The force field collapsed amid a deluge of wild energy
flares and superheated shock waves that battered the surrounding buildings.
Columbia505
received a heavy buffeting, which the
smartcore fought to counter and hold stable above the circle of glaring ion
flames that were eating into the generator building. Sensors reported the
wormhole had failed. Digby was worried about how much evidence it had already
cleared away.

Ellezelin Civil Defense Agency force fields were coming on above Riasi, a
series of large interlocking hemispheres protecting the city’s districts. Five
large Ellezelin navy cruisers were racing around the planet, their trajectories
curving sharply to position them above the city.

A starship hurtled up from the buckling generator complex, accelerating
at nearly forty gees. It fired a barrage of energy beams and disrupter pulses
at the
Columbia505
. Digby found himself gripped by
safety webbing as the starship spun helplessly. Planetary atmosphere was an
alien milieu for it; systems designed for combat in the clear vacuum of space
were operating below optimum, fogged by the dense gases. The force field
shimmered a vivid amber, spitting off glittering scintillations while Digby’s
vulnerable inner ears conjured up a wave of nausea. Far below, consecutive
shock waves crashed down across the beleaguered commercial buildings and
warehouses that comprised Riasi’s sprawling interstellar commerce district.

The
Columbia505
leveled out, and the routines
in Digby’s macrocellular clusters neutralized the nausea. Exoimage displays
showed him the other starship streaking up through the troposphere, a huge
ionic contrail shimmering behind it. “Follow it,” Digby ordered the smartcore.
The air above the shaken city howled yet again as the
Columbia505
powered its way up, ignoring the cruisers that were attempting to converge on
it. The other starship slipped into hyperspace.
Columbia505
followed.

“Why?” Paula asked before Digby had even cleared the Ellezelin system.
“Those fragments were vital. We’ll lose most of them now.”

“Forensic analysis was only ever a long shot,” Digby countered. “I
determined the faction ship was a much better lead. They risked a lot to
obstruct my collection operation.”

“Which implies the fragments you were recovering were important.”

“My judgment,” Digby insisted, wishing he didn’t feel quite so small. No
other human—Higher, Advancer, or normal—could ever make him feel so inadequate
and defensive as his great-grandmother.

“Indeed it was, and you’re committed now. How good is the sensor
reading?”

“Holding steady. They’re stealthed, of course, but my smartcore can still
detect some distortion. It’s a good ship they’ve got, equal to Chatfield’s.”

“All right. I’d probably have done the same in your circumstances. You
stay with it and see where that representative is going. The ANA judicial
conclave is beginning now. I’m expecting the entire Accelerator Faction to be
shut down within the next hour or two.”

“Excellent.”

“It has its problems, not least the agents and representatives still at
large, like the one you’re following. I suspect we’re going to be a long time
mopping up.”

“At least we’ll have a complete list of them and their activities.”

“Yes, that should help. Let me know when the ship reaches some kind of
destination.”

“Of course.” Digby scowled as the secure call ended. This whole mission
was proving very unsatisfactory. He was leaving too many unanswered questions
behind him as he tagged along after the latest possible lead. He was also
feeling plenty of stress from the destruction he’d caused and then fled from in
Riasi. There would have been a lot of bodyloss due to his actions.

After a quarter of an hour it was clear the faction ship was heading in
toward the Central worlds. It looked like the destination was Oaktier.

There had been only one judicial conclave in ANA’s history. It had been
called to deal with the Separatist Faction, which had wanted to break ANA up,
leaving them in a section free from any regulation or limit imposed by the base
law control that acted as a universal governor across the entire edifice. The
majority verdict was to disallow any such action. An entity with ANA’s ability
and resources and under the authority of a dogmatic ideology might conceivably
pose a threat to the original ANA, not to mention the rest of the Greater
Commonwealth. The duplicitous method by which the Separatist Faction had sought
to seize command of the quasi-physical mechanism that sustained ANA in order to
achieve the segmentation was verification enough that they couldn’t be trusted
to evolve quietly in some distant corner of the galaxy. A whole host of other
agendas to encourage postphysical ascension were exposed at the conclave.

As before, ANA:Governance produced a spherical assembly arena with an
equivalent diameter half that of Earth itself. Such a size was necessary to
accommodate the manifested forms of every individual mind embedded within the
edifice of ANA. They appeared within seconds of the judicial conclave being
announced, materializing across the vast curving shell, clustering with those
of their own factions or in simple groupings of friends or relatives. Ilanthe,
as the nominated representative of the Accelerator Faction, floated at the
center of the sphere. She had chosen to manifest as her primary representation,
a featureless human female with fluid silver skin. Only her face retained any
characteristics, showing a long jawbone and a small elegant nose. Her eyes were
the absorptive black of an event horizon.