The Evolutionary Void (30 page)

“Oh, shit,” Laril moaned. He desperately wanted to ask: How safe, really?
If Paul had really good defenses, why hadn’t he shot the capsules out of the
sky or teleported out or called up his own team of enriched bodyguards? Just …
do something!

Valean walked up to a window. She reached out and touched it with her
index finger. The window turned to liquid and splashed down into the lounge,
running across the floorboards.

Laril sat up straight, his back rigid as fear locked his muscles. Valean
stepped through the open archway, gently pushing the gauzy curtains apart. Her
glowing pink eyes searched around the room.

“Paul Cramley, I believe,” she said with a half smile.

“Correct,” Paul said. “I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave now. Laril
is my guest.”

“He must come with me.”

“No.”

Laril’s exovision showed him those weird quantum spikes again. A pale green
phosphorescent glow enveloped Valean and her team.

“I’m afraid your T-sphere won’t work,” she said. “We’re
counter-programmed.”

Paul cocked his head to one side, long hair flopping down his cheek.
“Really? How about I use irony instead?”

Valean opened her mouth to speak. Then she frowned. Her arms moved. Fast.
They became a blur, her emerald aurora brightening in the wake of the motion,
leaving a broad photonic contrail through the air. Then she turned, which was
also incredibly fast. Laril had to close his eyes as the haze around her grew
dazzling. His biononics threw up retinal filters, allowing him to glance at the
Accelerator team again. They’d turned into cocoons of brilliant lime green. He
could just discern outlines of their bodies thrashing about inside each tiny
illuminated prison, moving hundreds of times faster than normal. Fists were
raised to hammer at the border, striking it at incredible speed and frequency.
It was as if they’d turned to solid smudges of light. Valean’s red streamers
swirled about in agitation as the color drained out of them. They turned black,
then stiffened and began to crumble into small flakes that drifted down like a
drizzle of ash.

Inside the green prisons the team members had stopped moving, making it
easier to see them. He watched Valean as her legs gave way. A fast smear of
green light followed her to the ground. For a second her body remained there on
hands and knees before another flash of light chased her to a prone position.
The green glow faded to an almost invisible coating. Laril watched her odd skin
darken; then its shimmer died to reveal a leatherlike hide. It began to
constrict even further around her skeleton. Cracks split open, and thick juices
oozed out, solidifying into stain puddles on the floorboards.

“Oh, Ozzie!” Laril covered his mouth as he started to gag and looked away
quickly. Each member of the Accelerator team had suffered the same fate. “What
happened?”

“Age,” Paul said. “Gets us all in the end—unless you’re careful, of
course.” He climbed down off the chair and walked over to Valean’s desiccated
corpse. The green hue finally vanished, replaced by a glimmering force field. I
accelerated
her inside an exotic effect zone, like a
miniature wormhole. Normally it’s used to suspend temporal flow, but the
opposite effect is just as easy to engineer; it simply requires a larger energy
input. Sort of like the Void, really.”

Laril almost didn’t want to ask. He couldn’t help thinking what it must
have been like for Valean and her agents, imprisoned inside a tiny envelope of
exotic force, enduring utter solitude for days on end as the outside world
stood still. “How long?”

“About two years. She had very powerful biononics, but even they couldn’t
sustain her indefinitely. Ordinarily the biononic organelles feed off cellular
protein and all the other gunk floating around inside the membrane, which is
constantly resupplied by the body. But in the temporal field she wasn’t getting
any fresh nutrients. Her biononics ran out of cellular molecules eventually. In
the end they were like a supercancer eating her from the inside, enhancing the
starvation and dehydration.”

Laril shuddered. “But her force field is still working.”

“No, my defense systems are generating that. No telling what booby traps
she programmed into herself at the end. Just because she’s dead doesn’t mean
she’s harmless.”

Once again the T-sphere established itself; the corpses were teleported
out of the lounge. Laril didn’t want to know where they’d gone. “What now?” he
asked.

Paul gave him a brisk smile. “You’re my house guest until Araminta calls
you—or doesn’t—and this is all over.”

“Oh.”

“Cheer up. ‘Here’ is actually quite dimensionally interesting. After all,
you don’t really think I’ve spent the last thousand years cooped up in the same
bungalow, do you?”

“Ah … no. Put like that, I suppose not.”

“Jolly good. So have you had breakfast yet?”

As soon as Paul Cramley transferred her call, Paula’s cabin portal
projected a quaint image of tangerine and turquoise sine waves undulating
backward into a vanishing point. “I might have known you’d be taking an
interest,” she said.

“I always take an interest in human affairs,” the SI said.

“First question: Can you get through the Sol barrier?”

“Sorry, no. If ANA can’t, what hope does an antiquity like me have?”

“Are you trying to engage my
sympathy
?”

“You have some?”

“That was uncalled for. But as it happens, I do. For my own species.”

“Paula, are you cross with me?”

“I shared ANA’s opinion. Your interference in our affairs was
unacceptable.”

“I hardly ever interfered,” the SI protested.

“We unmasked eighteen thousand of your agents. Your network was larger
than the Starflyer’s.”

“I’m hurt by that comparison.”

“Oh, shut up,” Paula snapped. “Why did you order Paul to save Laril?”

“I didn’t order Paul to do anything. Nobody orders Paul around these
days. You know he’s well on his way to becoming postphysical?”

“Well, I didn’t think he was fully human anymore.”

“That old body you saw with Laril is only a tiny aspect of him now. If
you want to worry about nonhuman interference, you should keep a closer eye on
him and the others like him.”

“There are others?”

“Not many,” the SI admitted. “You and Kazimir are the oddities. Everyone
else of your vintage either downloaded or moved off in their own direction like
Paul.”

“So you and he are colleagues? Equals?”

“That’s a very humancentric viewpoint: rate everyone according to their
strength.”

“More an Ocisen one, I feel; perhaps we can include the Prime, too.”

The undulating sine waves quickened. “Okay, all right. Paul and I have a
special relationship. You know, he actually wrote part of the original me. Back
in the day he was a CST corporate drone in their advanced software department
working on artificial intelligence development.”

“Very cozy. So how big an interest have you been taking in the
Pilgrimage?”

“Big. That idiot Ethan really could trigger the end of the galaxy. I’d
have to move.”

“How terrible.”

“Have you ever tried moving a planet?”

Paula gave the sine waves a shrewd stare. “No, but I know a man who
probably can. How about you?”

“Yes,” the SI said. “Troblum is actually trying to get in touch with
you.”

“Sholapur wasn’t exactly invisible. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“No, I mean he was really trying. He knew about the Swarm; he was going
to make a deal.”

“Irrelevant now.”

“Paula, I’ve been in touch with him since Sholapur.”

“Where is he?”

“On his starship somewhere. Last time we spoke, he was still in range of
the unisphere; I have no idea of the location. His smartcore is well protected,
I urged him to get in touch with you.”

“Why?”

“He helped build the Swarm. He might be able to get through the barrier.”

“Did he say that?”

“He was reluctant to help. He claimed there is a code which can switch it
off.”

“Even if there is, it’ll be Ilanthe who holds it,” Paula said. “Damnit,
do you think he will contact me?”

“Troblum is a very paranoid man. A condition exacerbated by Sholapur. He
is afraid of breaking cover. His true fear is that the Cat will find him.
However, he was considering getting in touch with Oscar Monroe.”

“Oscar? Why?”

“I suspect he regards Oscar as the last trustworthy man in the galaxy.”

“I suppose that’s true. I’ll warn Oscar to look out for him.”

“Good.” The SI paused. “What are your intentions, Paula?”

“I’m not quite as liberal as ANA. I believe the Pilgrimage and Ilanthe
must be stopped from entering the Void. That means getting hold of Araminta.”

“Difficult. She’s walking the Silfen paths.”

“They won’t grant her sanctuary. Somewhere, sometime she will have to
come out.”

“You know the safest place she could choose? Earth. How would that be for
irony? If Ilanthe wanted her, the barrier would have to be switched off.”

Paula gave the knot of sine waves an approving look. She had known the
Silfen paths reached through the Dyson Alpha barrier; Ozzie himself had told
her. The idiot had actually visited Morning-LightMountain’s world after the
Starflyer War was over. She supposed it was inevitable that the SI would know,
as it had a long history with Ozzie. “Clever,” she said, “I wonder if we could
get a message to her. Are you in contact with the Silfen Motherholme?”

“No. It doesn’t associate with the likes of me. I’m just a
mechanical-based intelligence. I don’t have a living soul.”

“So we’d need a Silfen Friend.”

The SI’s projected knot of wiggling lines brightened slightly. “There
aren’t many, and they tend to be elusive.”

“Cressida; she’s related to Araminta. They both have Mellanie as their
ancestor.”

“That connection is tenuous even for desperate times.”

“Yes. And Cressida has dropped from sight. But I’d forgotten Silfen paths
can reach through this kind of barrier. The one on Earth is supposed to start
outside Oxford somewhere. I wonder if ANA can use it to get some kind of
message out.”

“If it can, it will.”

“Yeah, and in the meantime … Do you have any weapons stashed away that
can tackle the inversion core?”

“I don’t have any weapons,” the SI said in a stiff tone. “Stashed or
otherwise.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Of course you do. You forget I am information. I operate within what
could be classed a physical network, but that does not govern me.”

“There are a lot of human personalities downloaded into you. That must
influence your standpoint.”

“There are a lot of human memories stored inside me,” the SI said.
“There’s a difference.”

“Okay, so do you at least know what the inversion core is?”

“I managed to access sensors in the Sol system for a very short period
between it emerging and the barrier going up. ANA still regards such actions as
extreme trespass. I can’t tell you much other than it has an exotic nature. The
quantum structure was effectively unreadable, it was so unusual.”

“So we don’t know what would kill it?”

“The deterrence fleet or the warrior Raiel might be able to. I can’t
conceive anything else working. But Paula, that ship it left in was extremely
powerful and fast.”

“I know. If Araminta calls Laril—”

“Paul and I will include you in the conversation,” the SI assured her.

“Thank you. And let me have a code for you, please.”

“As you wish.”

Paula watched the sine waves shrink to nothing as a new communication
icon appeared in her exovision. A quick check with the smartcore showed the SI
hadn’t attempted to infiltrate any of the ship’s systems. She hadn’t expected
it to, but …

Her u-shadow opened a secure link to the
High Angel
.

“Paula,” said Qatux. “Our situation is not improving.”

“I understand the President has asked you to attempt to get through the
Sol barrier.”

“He did. I don’t believe it is possible; however, I shall oblige his
request. To do nothing for you at this point would be morally irresponsible. We
will fly to Sol shortly.”

“The Raiel taking part in galactic events again? I thought that went
completely against your ethos.”

“This is a very specific event, the one we have dreaded for eons. Our
involvement is mandatory.”

“I believe the Sol barrier is based on the force field around the Dyson
Pair. The Accelerators have been studying the Dark Fortress for a long time.”

“We suspected that was so. If true, the
High Angel
will be unable to breach the barrier.”

“What about a warrior Raiel ship?”

“I don’t believe it would fare any better, though there may have been new
developments I am unaware of. The generator you call the Dark Fortress
represents the pinnacle of our race’s ingenuity.”

Paula experienced a strange little frisson of relief at the statement. A
very old puzzle finally solved. “Did the Raiel build the Dark Fortress? We
always thought they were the same as the DF spheres at Centurion Station.”

“Yes. It is a unit from our Galactic Core garrison. They have several
functions; the force field is only one.”

“You told us the Anomine imprisoned the Dyson Pair.”

“They did. We loaned them the units. We produced legions of them after
our invasion of the Void failed. As your species correctly postulated, they are
the galaxy’s final line of defense against a catastrophic expansion phase.”

“So the Raiel can stop an expansion phase?”

“That is something we will not know until the moment arises. The scheme
was the best we could produce, but it remains untested.”

“Then it really is vital that Araminta doesn’t lead the Pilgrimage into
the Void?”