The Evolutionary Void (6 page)

“And your point is?”

“Interesting that you’ve researched yourself.”

“Know your enemies.”

“Ah, now that actually does make sense. Especially with the number you
have by now.”

“Whereas you live in a happy universe.”

Oscar gave her a lopsided grin. “It has you in it.”

“Ouch. That was personal, darling.”

“Of course it was personal. After what happened on the plane between us,
how could it be anything else? Oh, wait, you don’t have that memory.”

The Cat actually looked quite startled. “You have to be kidding, darling.
You don’t even like girls.”

“No. But as you said, you like me, and racing toward almost certain death
triggers some reflexes no matter what. I just had to work with what was
available.”

“Now you’re being insulting.”

Oscar kept his face perfectly blank. “No, I’m still being personal. After
all, whose kid did you go and have after the Starflyer crash?”

“Kid?”
the Cat spluttered. “Me? With you?”

“What is wrong with you people!” Tandra screamed. “Just go, all of you.
Go and leave us alone.”

Oscar held a finger up to the distraught woman, then ignored her. “If you
didn’t research that bit, ask the Knights Guardian here you
created
. Was there a gap in your history around then?”

The Cat glanced at Tomansio, who was still holding back Martyn.
“Actually, there is a chunk of your time line missing following the crash,” he
said slowly. “Nobody knows what you were doing then.”

“Fuck off,” the Cat snapped at him. “And you”—she glared at Oscar—“you
don’t know, either. You were a memorycell dangling on Paula’s chain for a
thousand years.”

“The kid visited me after I was re-lifed. Told me the whole story.”

“Stop it. Now.”

“Okay,” he said reasonably. “Did you have time to ask these good people
anything?”

“You cannot screw with my mind.”

Oscar winked. “Already done the body.” He turned to Tandra. “Did she ask
you about Araminta?”

Tandra stretched her arms out toward the couch, where the twins were
still squirming ineffectually. “Please?”

Oscar extended his arm. A red laser shone through the skin on his
forefinger, splashing a dot onto Freddy’s forehead. Everyone froze. Freddy
started wailing, curling up tighter against the Cat, believing she would
protect him.
If only you knew how wrong that instinct is
,
Oscar thought miserably. “Did she?”

“You won’t,” the Cat said; she gave Tandra a brisk smile. “He’s the good
guy; he’s not going to shoot children. That’s what I do. And I’m very good at
it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t shoot ours,” Oscar said with a cheerful tone. He rather
enjoyed the venomous expression on the Cat’s face. “What happened before I got
here?”

“Nothing!” Martyn bellowed. “In Ozzie’s name, stop this, please. Please!
They’re just children.”

Oscar looked straight at the Cat, unflinching. His target laser switched
off. “We’re going to share the knowledge, and then we’re both going to leave.”

“How very weak of you,” the Cat said.

“How very tactical,” Oscar said. “If you resist, the three of us will
turn on you. Some of us may suffer bodyloss, but ANA will have us re-lifed in
half a day. You, on the other hand, will certainly die. The information will
die with you, unused. The Accelerators will not recover Araminta, and you … Oh,
yes, what was it now? Message from Paula. She paid a visit to the ice moon
Accelerator station. There were several of you in suspension there. There
aren’t anymore.”

The Cat gave the crying twins a pointed glance.

“Possible end of the galaxy against two lives,” Oscar said. “No contest.
Remember, I was a serving navy officer. I’m used to this situation. Necessity
always outweighs sentiment. I blew up Hanko’s sun, which killed an entire
planet.”

“Actually, darling, I killed Hanko, but let’s not go into that right
now.”

“You don’t get to go into anything. You have one choice—walk away or die.
And think about this: If Living Dream or the Accelerators win, your real body
will never come out of suspension. The Earth will have been converted to pure
energy by the Void’s boundary to fuel some idiot’s daydream long before that
scheduled day comes.”

Oscar turned his back on the Cat.
And how many have
done that and lived?
As she didn’t immediately open fire on him, he said
to Tandra: “Tell me about Araminta.”

“She was here,” Martyn blurted. “That bitch. She’s the reason all this
has happened, and she came here! Here in our home.”

“When?”

“The night before the fight in Bodant Park,” Tandra said wearily. “She
said she was frightened of the crowd in Bodant Park and hadn’t got anywhere
else to go. We let her sleep here. On the couch.”

“Did she tell you she was the Second Dreamer?”

“No. I still can’t believe it. She’s just a messed-up girl.”

“She’s a lot more than that. How did she get here?”

“She said she walked.”

“I never believed that,” Martyn grumbled.

“Did you see a trike or a taxi?” Oscar asked him.

“No, but it’s a long way to walk from Bodant Park. And she lied about
everything else.”

“Okay, and when she left?”

“She walked,” Tandra said. “I saw her go. There was no trike or anything.
She was all alone.”

“Where was she going?”

“She didn’t say.” Tandra hesitated. “I thought it might be a man. She
used my makeup, took a long time. She looked great when she left.”

“Ah,” Beckia said. “Did she look like herself?”

“Not really; she changed a lot. Her hair was real dark. Her own color is
better for her.”

“Clever.”

“Okay, then.” Oscar looked back at the Cat. “You got anything else to
ask?”

“Who’s she screwing?” the Cat asked.

“I don’t know,” Tandra said. “I hadn’t seen her for ages. It was a
surprise when she came here.”

“So you’re her best friend? The one she turns to in a crisis?”

Tandra shrugged. “I guess.”

“I’ve heard enough.” The Cat released the twins and stood in one swift
motion. Oscar blinked. She really had moved
fast
.

Must be running accelerants
, he thought.

Tandra and Martyn rushed for their children.

The Cat gave Oscar a wicked grin. “Be seeing you.”

“I’ll tell the grandkids you’re coming. There’s lots of them. It’s been a
thousand years, after all.”

Her chuckle sounded genuine. “You know, maybe it is possible.”

Oscar braced himself. If she was going to do anything, it would be
now
. The moment passed, and the Cat left.

Beckia let out a low whistle as she relaxed.

Tomansio put his hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “You know, you’re almost as
crazy as she is. Er, you and her on the plane. Did that really …”

“A gentleman never tells,” Oscar said solemnly.

“Fuck me.”

“When this is over, I’ll take you up on that. But I think we’d better
leave now.” His field scan showed him the Cat’s stolen capsule rising from the
pad. Once again he tensed up. Would she fly over the house and blast away at
it?

Tandra and Martyn had huddled up protectively, hugging their children
hard. The twins were sobbing in distress.

“Take my advice,” Oscar said to them. “Leave here right now. Go stay with
friends or in a hotel, anywhere, just not here. There will be more like us
coming.”

“Ozzie curse you straight to hell, you bastards,” Martyn hissed
furiously. There were tears running down his face.

“I’ve met Ozzie,” Oscar said quietly. “He’s nothing like everyone today
thinks he is.”

“Just
go
,” Tandra implored.

Oscar led Tomansio and Beckia back to their borrowed capsule. As soon as
they left the little drycoral house behind, he called Paula.

“The Cat’s here.”

“Are you sure?”

Oscar shuddered. “Oh, yeah. We had quite a chat.”

“And you’re still alive. I’m impressed.”

“Yeah, well, I managed to throw in a cosmic-sized distraction. It put her
off her game for a while.”

“Is she joining the hunt for Araminta?”

“Yes.”

“Figures. The Accelerators are desperate to acquire her.”

“I thought we are, too.”

“We are. It has become imperative.”

“I’m doing my best. I’m still hopeful she might just call me. She’s not
quite the superwoman everyone thinks.”

“I never believed she was. What’s your next move?”

“We’re going to visit a Mr. Bovey, Liatris has uncovered some kind of
connection between him and Araminta.”

“Okay, keep me informed.”

“What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry; I’m on my way to Viotia.”

“I thought I was doing this so you could keep a low profile.”

“That time is now officially over.”

As he approached the Ocisen fleet, Kazimir maintained a single hyperspace
communication link back to ANA. He knew the ExoProtectorate Council was
expecting him to provide it with a real-time progress review of the engagement,
but that would have given Ilanthe too much information. The Prime ships
traveling with the Ocisen Starslayers would have been warned of his approach.
Not, he admitted, that it would have done them any good against his abilities.
But then, they were never the true threat. Something else would be out there
watching, sending precious information on the nature of the deterrence fleet
back to the Accelerators. He was sure of it.

Kazimir matched velocity with the vast alien armada and began to examine
the ships. With his sensor functions, detection was easy; over two thousand
eight hundred Ocisen ships were racing through interstellar space at four and a
half light-years an hour, including nine hundred Starslayers. His perception
infiltrated the hulls, exposing the weapons they carried, enough quantumbuster
types to wipe out most of the Greater Commonwealth worlds should they ever
reach their destination. But nothing more, no postphysical systems they’d
chanced upon and retro-engineered, which was a relief. He switched his
attention to the thirty-seven Prime ships accompanying them; they used a
sophisticated hyperdrive configured to keep their distortion to an absolute
minimum. Their weapons were considerably more advanced than anything the
Ocisens possessed, effectively equal to a Commonwealth Navy Capital-class ship.
But that was it. They didn’t pose a danger to him. And there were no other
ships, no clandestine ultradrive-powered observers keeping watch, no
unaccounted hyperspace links within a light-year of the Ocisen fleet. Each of
the Prime ships had a hyperspace link opened to some location back around
Commonwealth space; he could sense them, slender threads stretched across the
quantum fields, pulsing with information.

The Prime ships were the observers, he decided. Presumably they wouldn’t
expect him to be able to eliminate all thirty-seven of them simultaneously.
Well, that was their first mistake.

Kazimir manifested extra sensor functions into five of the Prime
starships. In spacetime they were barely the size of a neutron, but they could
receive all the inter-Prime communications with the hulls. Every Prime ship had
a controlling immotile that took the job of a smartcore in human ships,
governing the technology directly; it also instructed the immotiles. The ships
represented a microcosm of Prime society. Pretechnology, the Primes had
communicated by touching their upper-body stalks, allowing nerve impulses to
flow between them. That had been superseded by simple electronic carriers,
allowing immotiles to extend their immediate control over vast distances.

Kazimir began to read the digitized impulses. The Commonwealth had a lot
of experience with inter-Prime communication. The navy had developed a whole
range of disruption routines and electronic warfare techniques. If the Primes
ever escaped the barriers at the Dyson Pair and posed a threat again, they
would find their thoughts literally snuffed out.

The first thing that was apparent was that the Primes in the starships
were simple biological hosts to human thoughts.
So Paula
was right
, Kazimir thought grimly.

“Do you concur with my assessment?” he asked ANA:Governance.

“Yes.”

“Very well.” Within the deluge of the neural directives he was aware of a
datastream being encrypted and sent down the ultrasecure hyperspace link to the
Commonwealth. There was a lot of sensor data, but again, nothing beyond
Capital-class level. “The Accelerators will know I’ve intercepted the fleet
when the signal is severed,” he said. “But I can ensure they don’t know the
nature of the interception.”

“Proceed.”

Kazimir manifested a series of aggressive function inside each Prime
starship and used them to attack the hyperspace communication systems. As the
secure links failed, he switched to breaking the hyperdrives themselves. The
ships fell back into real spacetime within fifty milliseconds of each other.
With their flight ability neutralized, he set about eliminating the onboard
weapon systems. It took a second and a half for his aggressor functions to
break down the hardware. Then he turned his attention to the Ocisens.