The Dreaming Void

  ‘Makes sense if it’s a diversion,’ Nelson said reluctantly. ‘They wouldn’t build anything so critical to their plans on a Higher world. We don’t.’

  ‘And he’s taken years to get it built, on a fairly pitiful budget. Wrong priority level. We really need to find Troblum and ask nicely what he’s really been doing for the Accelerators.’

  ‘He left Arevalo a while back. Filed a flight plan to Lutain. Never showed up there, or any other Commonwealth World, Central or External.’

  ‘We need to find him,’ Gore repeated firmly.

  ‘That’s not going to happen. Either the Accelerators have him, or he’s hiding, or more likely he’s plain and simple dead.’

  ‘Then we find out which one it is.’

  *

  Justine stood in the middle of the weirdly empty hangar and called Paula.

  ‘There’s something seriously wrong here.’

  ‘In what way?’ Paula asked.

  ‘I think the Delivery Man just cleared the whole place out.’ Justine slowly looked round the big empty space, opening her optical vision to Paula. ‘See that? There was something in here. My field scan shows those power cables were cut by a disruption effect, same goes for the support girders. Whatever it was, it was sizeable and used up a great deal of power. But the Jomo is no bigger than my ship. Which only leaves one option how he did it.’

  ‘I thought the Hawking m-sink was even more secure than ultradrive technology. It would seem I’m wrong, which is disturbing.’

  ‘Kazimir will have to be told,’ Justine said. ‘If there are starships flying round the Commonwealth equipped with that kind of weapon the Navy should know about it. The Factions don’t use the most principled people as their representatives.’

  ‘I’ll leave that to you.’

  ‘Great. Thank you. He’s still human enough to blame the messenger.’

  ‘He’s a professional. You’ll be all right. Do you know where the Delivery Man is heading?’

  ‘His direction indicated Earth when he left my sensor range. I imagine he’ll want to dump the mass stored in the Hawking m-sink first, and he’ll do that deep in interstellar space. Expelling it will produce a colossal gamma burst.’

  ‘Leave him alone for now. The focus is shifting back to Living Dream.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Our sources in the movement are reporting an alarming development,’ Paula said. ‘Living Dream is readying all the civil security forces on all the core worlds of the Free Market Zone. Leave has been cancelled and they’re undergoing martial law enforcement training.’

  ‘Martial law? Where is that applied in the Free Market Zone?’

  ‘It isn’t. Yet. But if they were to annex Viotia they would probably need that many police troopers to keep the populace under control.’

  ‘Jesus! Are they planning that?’

  ‘Ethan is becoming desperate to gain control over the Second Dreamer. He’s the one person who could still stop this whole Pilgrimage in its tracks.’

  ‘And everyone believes he’s on Viotia,’ Justine said, appalled. ‘Dear heavens, an interstellar invasion. In this day and age, it’s unthinkable, it’s left over from the Starflyer War.’

  ‘Start thinking it. I made a mistake not giving this a higher priority. We really need to offer ANA:Governance’s protection to the Second Dreamer. That way no one will be able to pressure him into either helping or hindering the Pilgrimage.’

  ‘But first we have to find him. How long before you can get your agent working on this?’

  ‘Very soon now. I’m on my way to see him with one slight detour.’

  Justine eyed the hangar’s inner office suspiciously. There was an empty space which three communications conduits led into, their ends cut off clean. ‘Whatever they were building here was clearly important, and the Delivery Man took quite a risk covering it up. I don’t think we have a lot of time left.’

  ‘The Pilgrimage ships won’t be ready to fly until September.’

  ‘And the Ocisen Empire fleet will be here in late August, that’s less than three months away. I’d like to suggest a lead no one else seems to be following.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Inigo started to dream when he was at Centurion Station. Did anyone else?’

  ‘If they did, we’d know about it.’

  ‘That’s the point: would we? Suppose the contact was a weak one that was never fully established. Or the recipient didn’t want any part of Inigo’s religion. A reluctant person just like the Second Dreamer has turned out to be.’

  ‘I think I see where you’re going with this, or rather intend to go.’

  ‘I want to check out the confluence nest on Centurion Station, see if it has any memory of Void dreams, or fragments of them. Maybe the Second Dreamer started his connection with the Skylord when he was there, just like Inigo.’

  ‘You’re right, no one else has covered that angle.’

  ‘If I leave now, my ship can get me there in five hundred hours.’

  ‘You’re going to fly there? Why not use the Navy’s relay link?’

  ‘Too much chance of it being intercepted.’

  ‘If you do find anything it’ll take you another five hundred hours to get back. It’ll probably all be over by then.’

  ‘If I find anything important, I’ll use the relay link to send you the name in the heaviest encryption we have.’

  ‘Okay. Good luck.’

  *

  Troblum woke up slumped in the chair he’d sat in all day reviewing various schematics. His exovision displays had paused at the point where he’d fallen asleep. Colourful profiles of exotic mass density modulators floated like mechanical ghosts around him, each one beleaguered by shoals of blue and green analytical displays. Supposedly these components would perform their designated function without any trouble; the designers had simply scaled up from existing ultradrives. Except, nobody had ever built them this size before, which left Troblum with a mountain of problems when it came to the kind of precise power control they needed. And they hadn’t even got to the fabrication stage yet.

  He stretched as best his thick limbs would allow and tried to get out of the chair. After two attempts which made him look like a overturned glagwi struggling to right itself his u-shadow ordered the station to reduce the local gravity field. Now when he pushed with his legs and back he gave his body an impetus which propelled him right out of the clingy cushions. Gravity returned slowly, giving him time to straighten his legs before his feet touched the decking. He let out a wet belch as the falling sensation ended. His stomach was still churning, and his legs felt weak and stiff. He had a headache, too. The medical display in his exovision showed him his sugar levels were all over the place. There was a load of crap about toxins and blood oxygen levels too, which he cancelled just as the nutrition and exercise recommendations came up. Stupid anachronism in the age of biononics.

  He set off to the saloon which the ultradrive team used as their social and business centre. It also had the best culinary units on the station. When he arrived several of the tables along the curving wall were occupied by groups of people discussing various aspects of the project. He saw Neskia with a couple of technicians he recognized from the team handling the drive’s hyperspace fluidity systems. They all stared at him as he sat down in the spare seat, wincing as his knees creaked. Both technicians registered mild disapproval. Neskia’s long metallized neck curved sinuously so her flat face was aligned perfectly on him. ‘Thank you,’ she said to the technicians. ‘We’ll go with that.’

  They nodded thanks and left.

  ‘Was there something you wanted?’ she asked Troblum in a level voice.

  ‘I need to change the design for the mass density modulator,’ he said. A maidbot slid over with a tray of food his u-shadow had ordered from the culinary units. He started unloading the plates.

  Neskia’s face tipped down; her large circular eyes regarded the food without any trace of emotion. ‘I see. Do you ha
ve the proposed new design?’

  ‘No,’ he mumbled round a mouthful of spaghetti. ‘I want you to okay the change before I waste a week on it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the existing modulator?’

  ‘It’s a pile of crap. Doesn’t work. Your idiots didn’t take the power control requirements into account.’

  ‘Do you have an analysis of the problem?’

  Troblum could only nod as he chewed his hot floratts bread with mozzarella and herbs. His u-shadow sent the file over.

  ‘Thank you. The review team will examine this. You will have a reply in an hour. That is the procedure.’

  ‘Sure. Good.’ He sighed. Great that the tech problem was sorted, but the spaghetti with its balls of jolmeat and attrato sauce could have done with more black pepper. He reached for his tankard, only to find Neskia’s hand on top of his, preventing him from lifting the beer. Her skin shimmered between white and silver. He couldn’t sense any temperature from her fingers, hot or cold. ‘What?’

  Her eyes blinked slowly, turning the irises from black to deep indigo. ‘In future. In public. While you are here in my station. Please ensure your social interaction program is running, and that you follow its advice.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ He dipped his head towards the tankard.

  ‘Thank you, Troblum.’ She lifted her hand away. ‘Was there anything else? The project seems to be absorbing most of your time.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s interesting. I might get some crossover into one of my own projects. Ultradrive is a fascinating reworking of quantum dimensional theory. Who came up with it?’

  ‘I believe it was ANA:Governance. Is it important?’

  ‘No.’ He pushed the spaghetti plate aside, and started on the rack of lamb.

  Neskia still hadn’t stopped looking at him. She was about to speak again when two people came over to stand beside their table. Troblum finished chewing before he glanced up – he knew that was the kind of thing the social program counselled. Marius was looking down at him with his usual rarefied contempt. But it was his companion who turned Troblum immobile. His limbs wouldn’t move. Thankfully, neither did his mouth, which stopped him from opening his jaw and grunting in shock. He couldn’t breathe either as something like frost ripped down through his lungs.

  ‘I’d introduce you,’ Marius said coldly. ‘But of all the people on this station, Troblum, you are the one who doesn’t need it. Now do you?’

  ‘Really,’ the Cat said, and grinned. ‘Why’s that?’

  Troblum’s very dark fascination kept his muscles locked up tight. She wasn’t easy to recognize, she didn’t have that trademark spiked hair out of all her history files. It was still short and dark, but today she wore it in a smooth swept-back style with a pair of slim copper shades perched up above her forehead. She was dressed in a chic modern suit rather than the leather trousers and tight vest she used to favour. But that darkish complexion and wide amused grin veering on the crazy … There was no mistake. She was so much smaller than he imagined, it was confusing, she barely came up to his shoulder height, yet he’d always visualized her as an Amazon.

  ‘Troblum has a penchant for history,’ Marius said. ‘He knows all sorts of odd facts.’

  ‘What’s my favourite food?’ the Cat asked.

  ‘Lemon risotto with asparagus,’ Troblum stammered. ‘It was the specialty dish at the restaurant you waitressed in when you were fifteen.’

  The Cat’s grin sharpened. ‘What the fuck is he?’ She turned to Marius for an explanation.

  ‘An idiot savant with a fetish about the Starflyer War. He’s useful to us.’

  ‘Whatever turns you on.’

  ‘You’re in suspension,’ Troblum said flatly; he couldn’t help the words coming out even though he was afraid of her. ‘It was a five-thousand-year sentence.’

  ‘Aww. He’s quite sweet, actually,’ the Cat told Marius. She gave Troblum a lewd wink. ‘I’ll finish it one day. Promise.’

  ‘If you have a moment, please,’ Marius asked Neskia. ‘We need to sort a proper ship out for our guest.’

  ‘Of course.’ She stood up.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Marius added, as though it were of no consequence. ‘Is Troblum behaving himself?’

  Neskia looked from Marius to Troblum. ‘So far so good. He’s been quite helpful.’

  ‘Keep it up,’ Marius said. He wasn’t smiling.

  Troblum bowed his head, unable to look at any of them. Too many people. Too close. Too intrusive. And one of them is the Cat! He wasn’t prepared for that kind of encounter today. Nor any day. But she was out of suspension – somehow, walking around. She’s in this station!

  His medical display flashed up blue symbols down the side of his exovision, telling him his biononics were engaging, re-animating his chest muscles, calming them into a steady rhythm. It hadn’t registered with him the way he’d started to suck his breath down as if his throat was constricted. A small cocktail of drugs were flushed out of macrocellular glands, bringing down his heart rate.

  Troblum risked a glance up, his face pulled into a horrendously guilty expression. The three of them were gone, out of sight, out of the saloon. He was gathering an excessive number of curious looks from his colleagues who were still seated. He wanted to tell them, to shout: It’s not me you should be staring at.

  Instead, he felt the trembling start deep in his torso. He stood up fast. Which made his head spin. Biononics reinforced his leg muscles, allowing him to hurry out of the saloon. In the corridor, his u-shadow diverted a trolly-bot for him sit on. It carried him all the way back to his quarters, where he flopped on to the bed. He loaded a nine-level certificate into the lock even though he knew how useless that was.

  The Cat!

  He lay on the bed with the cabin heating up, feeling the shock slowly ebbing away. Release from the physical symptoms did nothing to alleviate the dread. Of all the megalomaniacs and psychopaths in history, the Accelerators had chosen to bring her back. Troblum lay there in the warm darkness for hours wondering what they were facing which was so terrible they had no choice but to use her. He’d always been behind the whole Accelerator movement because it was such a logical one. They were nurturing an evolutionary lineage which had started with single-cell amoebas and would end with elevation to post-physical status. A necessity that couldn’t be disputed. The other Factions were wrong, it was that obvious. To him. Accelerator philosophy appealed to his physicist nature; because that hurtful vicious bastard Marius was right, there was very little else in the way of personality.

  Forget that. It’s not relevant.

  Because anything that has to use the Cat to make it work can’t be right. It just can’t.

  Inigo’s fifth dream

  ‘—thus because the city is deemed to be a sole entity in its own right no human can “own” their residence in the traditional legal sense. However, in the fifteenth year after Rah’s arrival, the newly formed Upper Council passed the first Act of Registry. Essentially that means that any human can claim a residence within the city wall for their own usage. In order to register you simply have to find a house or maisonette or room which is unoccupied, stay in it for two days and two nights, then register your claim with the Board of Occupancy. This claim once notarized will allow you and your descendants to live there until such time as they choose to relinquish it. As there are no new buildings, and can never be, the most desirable and largest homes were claimed within ten years of Rah opening the first gate. These are now the palaces of our most ancient families, the District Masters, and as such can have up to five generations living in them, all of them first sons waiting to inherit the estate and seat on the Upper Council. The remaining available accommodation in the city today is small and badly configured for human occupation. Although even this is diminishing rapidly. Thus, while districts such as Eyrie are basically uninhabitable—’

  Edeard hoped he hadn’t just groaned out loud from the terrible boredom. He was now as adept as any Makkathran citizen at veiling h
is emotions from casual farsight, but if Master Solarin from the Guild of Lawyers used the word thus one more time … It was a mystery how the old man could talk so long without a break. Rumour at the station was that Master Solarin was over two hundred and fifty years old. Edeard would be surprised if that were true. He certainly didn’t look that young. His white hair had receded so far that the top of his skull was now completely bald, something Edeard had never seen before, though the remaining strands were long enough to reach down over his shoulders. And his limbs were horribly thin and frail, while his fingers had swollen to the point where he had trouble flexing them. His vocal cords, however, suffered no such malaise.

  Along with his fellow probationary constables, Edeard was sitting on a bench in the small hall of the Jeavons station, listening to their weekly lecture on basic Makkathran law. In another two months they’d be facing a batch of exams on the subject, which they had to pass in order to graduate. Like all of them, he found Solarin a sore test of patience. A quick scan round showed Boyd was almost asleep. Macsen’s eyes were unfocused as he longtalked the girls in the dressmaker’s shop at the end of the street. Kanseen appeared to be paying polite attention but Edeard knew her well enough now to see she was as bored as him. Dinlay, though, was sitting up with rapt attention and even taking notes. Somehow Edeard couldn’t quite laugh at that. Poor old Dinlay had so much to prove to his father and uncles he would undoubtedly pass his exams with high grades. That presented the rest of them with the very real danger that once they graduated, Dinlay would be appointed their squad leader. It would be something he took very seriously.

  ‘—thus the precedence was set for the lower ancillary court to hear any application to evict when a civil malfeasance is suspected of taking place within the property itself. In practice a full hearing is unnecessary, and you may request a provisional eviction notice from the duty magistrate who acts as de facto high council to the lower court. And that I’m afraid brings this session to its successful conclusion. We will deal with the criteria for such application next week. In the meantime I’d like you all to read Sampsols Common Law, Volume Three, chapters thirteen through twenty-seven by the time I return. It covers the main parameters of weapons usage within the city wall. I might even enliven our time together with a small test. How exciting that will be, eh? Until then, I thank you for your interest and bid you farewell.’ Solarin gave them a vague smile and removed his gold-rimmed glasses before shutting the big book he’d covered with annotations. His ge-monkey placed it carefully in a leather shoulder bag along with the other books the lawyer used for his lecture.