The wreckage of the Artful Dodger tumbled out of the hurricane to smash into the ruins of the base.
Aaron’s contact with the starship was lost as soon as the Hawking m-sink penetrated the hull, when every microcircuit and kube physically distorted and ruptured.
A couple of Kajaani’s sensors had caught the last moments of the star which had bolted out of the churning naked sky.
Its speed was such that human eyes registered it as a single line of light, like a perfectly straight lightning bolt. Radiation monitor records showed a swift peak which went off the scale.
“What the hell just happened?” Corrie-Lyn demanded.
Aaron was too stunned to reply immediately. His u-shadow confirmed the beacon relay now ended two kilometres short of the base’s perimeter.
“They fired on the base,” Inigo said quietly. “Lady, they were completely unarmed.” He glared at Aaron. “Was that one of the Factions?”
“Could be. It might even have been the Cleric Conservator making sure of his tenure.”
“There’s a place in the depths of Honious reserved for your kind. I hope you reach it quickly.”
“Where?” Aaron asked.
Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave him an identical snort of disgust.
“We’d better get back up to the shelter,” Inigo said. “I expect they’ll want to get to Kajaani right away. We are one of the closest camps.”
***
As soon as they came through the cramped suit room, Ericilla pointed an accusing finger at Aaron. “That was you,” she yelled in fury. “You’re responsible. You told them to get clear. You knew who that was. You brought them here.”
“I didn’t bring them here. Those people were going to catch up with us eventually. The location was… unfortunate.”
“Un-fucking-fortunate?” Vilitar spat. “There were nearly two hundred people there. We don’t know how many of them are still alive, but even if some of them survived the attack they’ll be dying from the radiation. My friends. Slaughtered.”
“They’ll be re-lifed,” Aaron said impassively.
“You bastard,” Cytus stepped forwards, his fist raised.
“Enough,” Inigo said. “This won’t help.”
Cytus paused for a moment, then turned away, his face contorted with disgust and anger.
“You knew, Earl,” Nerina said. “You warned Ansan as well. What the hell is going on? Do you know these people?”
“I’m the one they’re looking for. I didn’t know about the attack.”
The rest of the team started at each other in mute bewilderment. “We’re going to Kajaani,” Ericilla said. “We can help recover the bodies before the winds blow them too far.”
“How long before your organization sends another ship?” Aaron asked.
“Like you care!”
“How long? Please.”
“Too long,” Nerina said. “Hanko isn’t part of the Unisphere. We can’t just yell for help. Our only link to the Commonwealth was the hyperspace link in the starship, which was connected to our headquarters back on Anagaska. Without that we’re completely cut off. Anagaska will assume there was some kind of equipment failure; then after we haven’t repaired it in a week, they’ll probably investigate. If I remember right, we’re due a scheduled flight in a fortnight anyway. They’ll probably wait until then. Budget considerations.” She snapped it out in contempt.
“By which time radiation poisoning will have killed everyone exposed to the atmosphere,” Vilitar said. “We don’t have enough medical facilities to help them all. Congratulations.” He stared challengingly at Aaron.
“We need to get moving,” Ericilla said. “The medical systems on our ground crawlers can help a couple of them, maybe more. She pushed her way past Aaron, not looking at him. Cytus managed to knock Aaron’s elbow as he went into the suit room.
“You coming, Earl?” Nerina asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’ve done enough already,” Vilitar said. “Whoever the fuck you really are. I thought—” He snarled incoherently and hurried into the suit room.
“We’ll come with you,” Corrie-Lyn said. “We can help.”
“The Asiatic glacier is half a day from here,” Nerina said. “The far end has mile high cliffs. Why don’t you help us by driving off them.” She went into the suit room and closed the door.
“Then there were three,” Aaron said.
“We’d better get going,” Inigo said. He faced Aaron. “You know they’ll probably close the Restoration project down because of this.”
“Do you think the next galaxy along will mount a Restoration project for all the species which the Void devourment phase exterminates?”
For a moment Aaron thought Inigo might actually activate his biononics in an aggressor mode. “You know nothing,” the lost messiah whispered.
“I hope something, though.”
“What?”
“That you have a starship stashed away. Preferably close by.”
“I don’t.”
“Really? I find that mighty curious. You took all this trouble to stay lost. Yet you have no escape route if someone came along to expose you.”
“Obviously not, otherwise I wouldn’t have been here waiting for you.”
“You wouldn’t have been waiting around here if it had just been me,” Aaron said. He gestured at Corrie-Lyn. “But her? That’s different. Seventy years is a long time to be alone. She stayed in love for that long. Did you?”
Corrie-Lyn moved up close to Inigo. “Did you?” she asked in a quiet voice.
A mournful smile flickered over his lips. “I’m glad it was you. Is that enough?”
“Yeah,” she rested her head on his shoulder.
“No ship,” Inigo told Aaron. “And the only way I go anywhere with you, is in a bag as small lumps of charcoal.”
“That’s a shame, because I know what weapon they used to take out my starship and the base.”
“Is that supposed to impress me? I expect you know a great deal about weapons and violence. Men like you always do.”
“It was a Hawking m-sink,” Aaron said. “Do you know what that is? No? They’re new and highly dangerous. Even ANA gets nervous around them. Basically, it’s a very small black hole, but cranked up with an outsize event horizon to help absorption. It starts off as a little core of neutronium about the size of an atomic nucleus.”
Corrie-Lyn caught the emphasis. “Starts off?”
“Yes. Its gravity field is strong enough to pull in any atoms it comes into contact with. They’re then also compressed into neutronium and merge with its core. With each atom, it gets a little bit bigger. Not by much admittedly, not to begin with. But the larger the surface area, the more matter it can absorb. And after it tore through the Artful Dodger it hit the planet. Right now it is sinking through the mantle, eating every atom it encounters. It’ll stop at the centre of the planet. Then it just sits there and grows.”
“How big will it get?” she asked anxiously.
Aaron shot Inigo a look. “Black holes have no theoretical size limit. We used to think that was what the Void was.”
“But… Hanko?”
“It’ll take about a fortnight to devour the entire mass of an H-congruous world. Except we’ll be dead long before that. Hanko will start to disintegrate as it’s consumed from within. The continents will collapse in three or four days’ time. So, once more, with an awful lot of feeling, do you have a starship hidden nearby?”
***
Araminta kissed three of hims as they sat at a table under a gazebo of flowering yisanthal in his garden. “I missed that,” she told the rugged oriental one.
Mr Bovey smiled in unison. Hes raised his glasses. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.” She sipped her white wine.
“So?” asked the one she’d had their first dinner with.
Araminta steeled herself. “If your offer is still open, I’d like to accept.”
She even heard cheering coming from
the big house as well as the racket which the three under the gazebo made.
“You’ve made some old men very happy.”
“Us young ones, too.”
Araminta laughed. “And I have absolutely no idea how to go about this. The first three apartments will be ready in another week. I’ve accepted a deposit on the fourth.”
“Congratulations.”
“But until I’ve completed and the tenants are in, I won’t see a profit. I need money to buy bodies.”
“Not as expensive as you might think. A friend, one of us, runs a clinic expressly for that purpose. She always gives discount to a first-expander.”
“Okay.” She took another drink to calm her shudders. It was momentous, sort of like accepting two proposals at once.
The young Celtic one squeezed her arm. “You all right?” he asked, all full of sympathy.
“I guess so.” She knew she was smiling like an idiot. But this does feel right.
Two of hims came hurrying out of the house. One of them who seemed about seventeen went down on his knee beside her. A slim athletic build, she saw, with a wild stock of blond hair. He proffered a small box which opened to show her an antique diamond engagement ring.
“I bought it just in case,” he told her.
Araminta slipped it onto her finger, then dashed away the tears.
“Oh come here,” the youngster exclaimed.
His arms went round her, hugging tight; and she was laughing through the tears. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“I’m a slavedriver to me.”
She put her palms on his cheeks and kissed him thoroughly. “I would like you to be one of tonight’s.”
“My considerable pleasure.”
“I believe you said I still have several of yous to get to know.”
“Oh trust me, you’ll know all of mes before our wedding day.”
“And I don’t mind, and won’t complain about other women until I have enough bodies to cope. Just… I don’t want to meet them.”
“I’ll try and keep it to a minimum, I promise.”
“Thanks,” she whispered gratefully.
“Now what sort of bodies are you going to go for?”
“Gosh, I hadn’t thought about that,” she admitted. “What do you like?”
“Got to be a tall blonde Amazon type. Always popular.”
“Oh, and very black as well. Let’s cover all the old ethnicities, I have—almost.”
“And one of you has to have huge breasts.”
“More than one!”
She slapped at him, feigning shocked dismay. “You’re appalling. I’m not doing anything like that.”
“That’s not what you usually say in bed.”
Araminta laughed. She really had missed this. I made the right decision.
***
Araminta lay on the big bed, listening to three of hims sleeping. Two on the bed with her, and one on the couch, curled up in a quilt, all breathing softly, not quite in synch. Tonight she’d refused any aerosols, wanting to try out Likan’s program, to make sure it worked with other people, that he hadn’t loaded in a hidden expiry key.
It worked.
And how.
Mr Bovey had been surprised, then very appreciative, at how much more responsive her body had become. As she’d suspected, a night in bed with hims had been a lot better than it had with Likan and the harem. Always nice to have confirmation.
Now she couldn’t sleep. Not that she wasn’t tired, she grinned to herself, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the engagement, and embracing a multiple lifestyle. It was such an upheaval.
Everything was going to change for her. So much so, she was more than a little apprehensive. Her mind was churning over the same questions again and again. Unable to find answers, because she didn’t actually know about being multiple. The only way to truly find out was to become one.
She turned her head to look at the young red-haired him who was nestled up cosily beside her. He’d help her through the transition, she knew. Mr Bovey loved her. That was enough to take her through the next few months. They hadn’t set a date. He’d said he’d like at least two hers to register the marriage with him. Which was fair enough. She really needed to finish the apartments. Today had made that even more urgent.
Araminta settled back on to the soft mattress and closed her eyes. She used the program to still her whirling thoughts, emptying her mind. Her body started to calm as she found and slowed its natural rhythms, cycling down. Instead of sleep, the emptiness opening within made her aware of the images which lurked just below conscious thought. Not just one, but a whole range, all tasting and feeling very different. They twisted out of the infinite distance, a connection she now finally understood belonged to herself. Instinctively, she knew how to focus on whichever she wanted. Some were Mr Bovey’s dreams, she was familiar enough with him to recognize his mental scent. She sighed fondly as she experienced his presence; part of his mind was so wound up, the poor man, while she also felt his happiness—her own face slithered in and out of his thoughts. One of the connections was completely alien, yet comfortably warm in that way a parent was with a child. Her lips lifted in a serene smile. The Silfen Motherholme. So Cressida had been telling the truth. In which case that oh-so-busy chorus of multicoloured shadows must be the gaiafield.
Araminta embraced the quiet one; the most tenuous connection of all. And found herself gliding through space far from any star. The Void’s nebulas glimmered lush and glorious behind her as she rose to the darkness of the outer regions.
“Hello,” she said.
And the Skylord answered.
***
Justine had expected to feel a lot of excitement as her starship, the Silverbird, descended towards Centurion Station. Five hundred hours alone in a small cabin with no Unisphere connection had left her unexpectedly strung out. Intellectually, she knew it was a nonsense, a quirk of her primitive body’s biochemistry and neurological weakness. But it was still real.
Now here she was, at her destination, and all she could think about was the identical, boring trip back. I must have been crazy to do this.
The Silverbird touched down on the lava field which acted as a spaceport for the human section of the Centurion Station. Five other starships were sitting there, all of them bigger than hers. The smartcore reported several discreet sensor scans probing at the ship. The tall Ethox tower was the worst offender, using quite aggressive quantum signature detectors. More subtle scans came from the dour domes of the Forleene. There was even one quick burst of investigative activity from the observatory facilities in the human section. She smiled at that as her thin spacesuit squeezed up against her body, expelling all the air pockets to form an outer protective skin. She locked the helmet on.
It was a short walk over the sandy lava to the main airlock. Justine needed it for the sense of space and normality it gave her. She couldn’t believe how much she felt reassured by the sight of a planetary horizon, even one as drab as this. When she stopped to look up, angry ion storms fluoresced the sky for lightyears in every direction. Pale mockeries of the nebulas inside the Void.
Director Lehr Trachtenberg was waiting for her in the reception hall beyond the airlock. A formidably-sized man who reminded her of Ramon, one of her old husbands. Standing in front of him, shaking his hand in greeting, and tipping her head back just to see his face was another reminder of how negligible her physical body was. Of course, that Ramon connection did shunt her mind back to the possibility of sex.
“This is a considerable honour,” Lehr Trachtenberg was saying. “ANA has never sent a representative here before.”
“Given the political circumstances back in the Commonwealth, it was deemed appropriate to examine the data from the Void first hand.”
The director licked his lips slowly. “Distance makes no difference to data, Justine. We do send the entire range of our findings directly back to the Navy’s exploration division, and the Raiel.”
&nb
sp; “Nonetheless, I’d like the opportunity to review your operation.”
“I wasn’t about to refuse you anything. Especially not after the trip you’ve just made. To my knowledge no one has ever travelled so far by themselves. How did you stand the isolation?”
She suspected that he suspected the Silverbird had an ultradrive, but chose to gloss over the actual journey time. “With difficulty and a lot of sensory dramas.”
“I can imagine.” He gestured at the five-seater cab which was waiting at the end of the reception hall. “I’ve assigned you a suite in the Mexico accommodation block.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m also throwing a welcome party for you in three hours. Everyone is very keen to meet you.”
“I suppose they are,” she said. “Fine, I’ll be there. I could do with some company after that trip.”
They climbed into the little cab together, which immediately shot into the transport tunnel. “I should warn you that nearly a third of our observation staff are Living Dream followers,” the director said.
“I reviewed personnel files before I came.”
“As long as you know.”
“Is it a problem?”
“Hopefully not. But, as you implied, it’s a volatile situation right now.”
“Don’t worry, I can do diplomatic when I have to.”
Her suite was equal to any luxury hotel she’d stayed in. The only thing missing was human staff, but the number of modern bots more than made up for it. The Navy had clearly spared no effort in making the station as cosy as possible for the scientists. The main room even had a long window looking out over the alien sections of the station. Justine stared at them for a while, then opaqued the glass. Her u-shadow established itself in the room’s net. “No visitors or calls,” she told it.