The Evolutionary Void (43 page)

“You don’t leave me,” she whispered silkily into his ear.

He struggled, writhing frantically against her grip as the pain was slowly
replaced by an even more frightening cold. “Nobody leaves me,” she said.

“I do!” he yelled with a raw throat. “I don’t want this.” Away along the
fringe of darkness, more garish colored lights exploded. He heaved against her
iron grip—

—and fell out of the cot to land painfully on the cabin floor. A weird
ebony fog occluded his vision as he tried to focus on the
Lindau
’s
bulkhead. It pulsed in a heartbeat rhythm with strange distensions bulging out,
as if something were attempting to break out of his nightmare. He groaned as he
squeezed his eyes shut, attempting to banish the creepy intrusion. The pain was
real still, throbbing behind his temple like the Devil’s own migraine. Then he
remembered a crown of slim silver needles contracting around his head,
puncturing the skin, slipping effortlessly through the bone to penetrate his
brain, and terrible red light shone into his thoughts, exposing every miserable
segment of himself. “Do it,” he yelled into the nothingness. “Just do it now.”
Sharp merciless claws reached in and started to rip out the most vital
segments. And now his screams were silent, going on and on and on as his mind
was shredded until finally, thankfully, there was nothing left. No thought
remained, so he ceased to think—

—Aaron woke up with his cheek squashed uncomfortably on the deck, his
neck at a bad angle. It was as if he were regaining consciousness from a
knockout blow. His skin was cold; he shivered as much from shock as anything.
“Oh, crap, this has just got to stop,” he moaned as he slowly pushed himself up
into a sitting position.

The captain’s cabin was still a mess. He hadn’t bothered to organize a
servicebot to clean up yet. Personal environment wasn’t a priority for him,
unlike the other two, who seemed quite fastidious about their small shared
cabin. He ordered a fast biononic field scan to check on his captives and
relaxed fractionally when exovision displays showed them in the main cabin. Now
that their status was confirmed, he followed it up with a review of the
Lindau
’s systems. Plenty of components were operating on
the edge of their safety margins thanks to the damage they’d received back on
Hanko. But they were still functioning, still in hyperspace and on course for
the Spike.

Aaron took a moment to wipe himself down with a towel soaked in
travel-clean before pulling on some clothes he’d found in the cabin’s locker.
The
Lindau
’s captain had been almost the same size
as he, so the bots needed to make only a few adjustments before he could wear
the conservatively styled shirts and trousers. Dressed in fawn-colored
two-thirds-length shorts and a mauve sleeveless sweatshirt, he joined the other
two for breakfast.

Corrie-Lyn gave him a sullen glance as he entered the main cabin, then
returned to her bowl of yogurt and cereal. Aaron didn’t need to run any kind of
scan to know she was hungover. He’d given up trying to stop the one remaining
culinary unit from producing alcohol for her; its electronics were in a bad
way, and the last thing it needed was a software war raging inside its
circuitry.

“Good morning,” he said politely to Inigo. At least the ex-Dreamer gave
him a brief acknowledgment, glancing up from his plate of toast and marmalade.
Aaron ordered up a toasted bagel with poached egg on smoked salmon, orange
juice, and a pot of tea.

“Why do you smell of bleach?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“Do I?”

“You’ve used travel-fresh,” she accused. “There is a working shower, you
know.”

The culinary unit pinged, and Aaron opened its stainless-steel door. His
breakfast was inside. He hesitated at the slightly odd smell before
transferring it all to a tray. The remaining chair at the table had broken as
it was trying to retract, leaving a gray lump protruding from the floor with an
upper hollow that wasn’t quite wide or deep enough for sitting in. Aaron
squirmed his way down into it. “The shower is in your room,” he pointed out.

“And you rate our privacy above your hygiene? Since when?”

Inigo stopped chewing and glanced silently up at the ceiling.

“Corrie-Lyn, we’re going to be on board together for a while,” Aaron
said. “As you may have noticed, this ship is on the wrong side of tiny, and
there ain’t a whole lot of it working too good. Now, I don’t expect you to be
gushing with mighty gratitude, but it’s my belief that basic civility will get
us all through this without me ripping too many of your fucking limbs off. You
clear on this?”

“Fascist bastard.”

“Is it true Ethan kept you on the Cleric Council because you were his
private whore?”

“Fuck you!” Corrie-Lyn stood up fast, glaring at Aaron.

“See?” Aaron said mildly. “It’s a two-way street. And you can’t rip my
limbs off.”

She stomped out of the main cabin. Inigo watched her go, then carried on
eating his toast. Aaron took a drink of his orange juice, then cut into the
egg. It tasted like rotten fish. “What the hell …”

“My toast tastes like cold lamb,” Inigo admitted. “The fatty bits. I used
biononics to change my taste receptor impulses. It helps a bit.”

“Good idea.” Aaron’s u-shadow was interrogating the culinary unit to try
to identify the problem. The result wasn’t promising. “The texture memory files
are corrupted, and it doesn’t look like there are any backups left on board; a
whole batch of kubes got physically smashed up. It’ll be producing this kind of
crud all the way to the Spike.”

“Corrie-Lyn doesn’t have biononics. She can’t make it taste better.”

“That’ll make her a bucketful of fun for sure. We’ll have to inventory
the prepacked supplies, see if there’s enough to last her.”

“Or you could simply connect to the unisphere with a TD channel and
download some new files.”

Aaron looked at him over the rim of the orange juice, which tasted okay.
“Not going to happen. I can’t risk an infiltration. The smartcore’s in the same
condition as the rest of the ship.”

“That was a bad dream you had last night,” Inigo said quietly. “You need
to watch out for aspects leaking into your genuine personality.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow. “My
genuine
personality?”

“All right, then, the one that keeps you up and functional. I’m getting
concerned about the Mr. Paranoia who won’t risk downloading a food synthesis
file.”

“Okay, for future reference, this very same personality has kept me alive
through all my missions and helped me snatch you. And that barely took a couple
of weeks after I’d been assigned to you, whereas everyone else in the
Commonwealth had spent seventy years on the hunt for you. So you might want to
rethink your poor estimation of my operational capabilities.”

Inigo’s hands fluttered in a modest gesture of acquiescence. “As you
wish. But you have to understand I am curious about your composition. I’ve
never encountered a mind quite like yours before. You have absences, and I
don’t just mean memory. Whole emotional fibers seem to have been suppressed.
That’s not good for you. The emotions you have permitted yourself are
abnormally large; you’re out of balance as a result.”

“So Corrie-Lyn keeps telling me.” He tasted his egg again. His biononics
had changed his taste receptors. This time the yoke had a mushroom flavor. It
was weird, but he could live with it, he decided.

“You’ve been unkind to her,” Inigo said accusingly. “Small wonder she
hates you.”

“I found you for her. She’s just ungrateful, that’s all. That or she
doesn’t want to admit to herself how willing she was to pay the price.”

“What price is that?”

“Betrayal. That’s what it took to trace you.”

“Hmm. Interesting analysis. All of which brings us back to our current
situation. So you’re taking me to the Spike to see Ozzie. What then?”

“Don’t know.”

“Your unknown employer must have given you some hint, some rough outline.
To be an effective field agent you have to constantly reevaluate your
alternatives. What if the
Lindau
was knocked out by
the opposition, whoever they are? What if I’m taken away?”

Aaron smiled. “Then I kill you.”

The cabin Corrie-Lyn and Inigo were sharing was small. It was meant for
five crew members but in theory the navy duty rota they followed should mean
that only two would ever be using it at the same time, with changeovers every
few hours. Inigo reckoned they’d all have to be very intimate with one another.
The bunks were both fully extended, locked at a ten-degree angle with the edges
curling up as if they were heat-damaged. All of which left little space to edge
along between them. And they were useless for sleeping in. Instead, Inigo had
just piled all the quilts onto the floor to make a cozy nest.

When he came back in after breakfast, Corrie-Lyn was sitting cross-legged
in the middle of the crumpled fabric, drinking a mug of black coffee. An empty
ready-pak was on the floor beside her.

“Taste good?” he asked.

She held up the foil ready-pak. “The deSavoel estate’s finest mountain
bean. It doesn’t come much better.”

“That should help the hangover.” He perched awkwardly on the edge of a
bunk, feeling it give slightly beneath him. It shouldn’t have done that.

“It does,” she grunted.

“I wonder if we can find a bean to help with the attitude.”

“Don’t start.”

“What in Honious happened to you?”

Corrie-Lyn’s dainty freckled face abruptly turned livid. “Somebody left.
Not just me; they left the whole fucking movement. They got up and walked out
without a hint of why they were going. Everything I loved, everything I
believed in, was gone, ripped away from me. I’d given decades of my life to you
and the dream you promised us. And as if that wasn’t enough,
I didn’t know!
I didn’t know why you’d left. Ladyfuckit, I
didn’t even know if you were alive. I didn’t know if you’d given up on us, if
it was all wrong, if you’d lost hope. I. Didn’t. Know! Nothing, that’s what you
left me with. From everything—a fabulous life with hope and happiness and
love—to nothing in a single second. Do you have any idea what that’s like? You
don’t, clearly you don’t, because you wouldn’t be sitting there asking the
stupidest question in the universe if you did. What happened? Bastard. You can
go straight to Honious for all I care.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, crestfallen. “It’s … that final dream I had. It was
too much. We weren’t leading anyone to salvation. Makkathran, Edeard; that
whole civilization was a fluke, a glorious one-off that I caught at just the
right time. It can never be repeated, not now, not now that we know the Void’s
ability. The Raiel were right; the Void is a monster. It should be destroyed.”

“Why?” she implored. “What is that Last Dream?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “It showed that even dreams all turn to dust in
the end.”

“Then why didn’t—”

“I tell you?”

“Yes!”

“Because something that big, that powerful as Living Dream can’t be
finished overnight. There were over ten billion followers when I left. Ten
billion!
I can’t just turn around to them and say: Oops,
sorry, I was wrong. Go home and get on with your lives, forget all about the
Waterwalker and Querencia.”

“The Inigo I knew would have done that,” she said through gritted teeth.
“The Inigo I knew had courage and integrity.”

“I let it die, or so I thought. It was the kindest thing. Ethan was the
finest example of that, a politician, not a follower. After him would have come
dozens of similar leaders, all of them concerned with position and maintaining
the ancient blind dogma. Living Dream would have turned into an old-style
religion, always preaching the promise of salvation yet never producing the
realization. Not without me. I was the one who might have been able to pass
through the barrier. You know I was going to try, really I was. Go out there in
a fast starship and see if I could make it, just like the original old ship
did. That was before we knew about the warrior Raiel, of course. But once I had
that dream, I knew the ideal was over. Ethan and all the others who should have
come after him would have killed off Living Dream in a couple of centuries.”

“Then along came the Second Dreamer,” she said.

“Yeah. I guess I should have realized the Void would never let us alone.
It feeds off minds like ours. Once it had that first taste, it was bound to
find another way of pulling us in.”

“You mean it’s evil?” she asked in surprise.

“No. That kind of term doesn’t apply. It has purpose, that’s all.
Unfortunately, that purpose will bring untold damage to the galaxy.”

“Then”—she glanced at the closed door—“what are we going to do about it?”

“We?”

She nodded modestly. “I believe in you; I always have. If you say we have
to stop the Void, then I’ll follow you into Honious itself to bring that off.”

Inigo smiled as he looked down at her. She was wearing a crewman’s shirt
several sizes too large, which made it kind of sexy as it shifted around,
tracing the shape of her body. He’d watched her yesterday with considerable
physical interest, the simple sight of her teasing out a great many pleasurable
memories of the time they had spent as lovers. But she’d been drunk and
spitting venom about Aaron and their situation and who was to blame for the
state of the universe. Now, though, as he slipped off the bunk to kneel beside
her, there was a look of hope kindled in her eyes. “Really?” he asked
uncertainly. “After all I’ve put you through?”

“It would be a start to your penance,” she replied.

“True.”

“But …” She waved a hand at the door. “What about him? We don’t know if
his masters want you to help the Pilgrimage or ruin it.”

“First off, he’s undoubtedly listening to every word we’re saying.”