“Devil whore,” Tomansio sent. “When this is over, I will find you.”
The Cat laughed. “Better than you have tried. But I’m curious. Exactly what is ‘this’? It’s all very exciting, this gathering of yours. I’d like to be a part of it.”
“Go FTL,” Aaron said sharply. “We have to get a head start. She will find out.”
“Yes,” the Cat agreed. “Leave him. Leave him with me. All alone. We’ll have such a party together.”
“Go,” Cheriton said. “Just go. It will be over quickly. I won’t survive what she’s done to me.”
“Oh, now, my dear, that’s just a big bad lie. I have a medical capsule, and I’m not afraid to use it. The two of us will spend what seems like an eternity together. I might even make you Aaron’s replacement. How lucky can you get?”
“Never.”
“How lovely. You believe you are strong.”
The gifting was suddenly flooded by a sharply defined image surging up out of Cheriton’s memories. A startled Cheriton found himself seven years old and sitting at the table eating a meal with his parents and two sisters. It was a pleasant time, with his mother and father talking to their children, interested in their day, encouraging questions. A delightful period of his life, suffused by happiness.
Then his father stood up. “Come here,” he beckoned to Cheriton. As the young boy got to his feet, his father activated several weapons enrichments.
“No!” Cheriton’s frantic thoughts pleaded. “No, no, this is me, this is my life.”
“It was boring, my dear. It makes you weak, and that’s no use to me. I’m going to make it so much more interesting and a little bit dirtier.”
“Stop this,” Aaron said.
“Or what?” the Cat asked over the sound of young Cheriton’s distraught sobbing. The sizzle of weapons fire was deafening, blotting out the screams of his sisters. The stench made Oscar want to throw up.
“Now they don’t exist anymore, so let’s edit them out of the rest of your life, shall we,” the Cat said. “And while I’m doing that, I’ll have a think about what I can replace them all with. Something yummy, I feel. Something that is going to make you love me.”
“They are real,” Tomansio sent with a surge of conviction. “Believe it, Cheriton. Know the truth. They did not die like that.”
The gifting degenerated into a chaotic swirl of images and sounds and sensations. Flashes of Cheriton’s family slipped past them, draining to gray nothingness.
“Bring them back!” Cheriton wailed.
“Troblum,” Tomansio said. “Get us out of here.”
Troblum only tightened his hold around Catriona. “It’s me she wants. She’ll never stop, not ever. She never does. I know her. I studied what she is. Ask him.” He pointed at Aaron.
“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “This is what was done to me.”
“Bring who back?” the Cat asked lightly, her mind radiating gentle concern. “Who, my dear?”
“What?” Cheriton’s thoughts were confused.
“If she does want you, there’s only one place you can go to be safe,” Oscar said urgently to Troblum, worried by how distraught the big man seemed to be. He clearly wasn’t thinking logically. “Take us there,” he urged.
“Oh, look,” the Cat said enthusiastically.
Another memory was jerked out of Cheriton’s brain. This time Oscar found himself on a picnic by a small stream; now Cheriton was the father. His wife and small son were with him.
A deep disquiet bubbled up into Cheriton’s thoughts. This was a lovely time, yet he instinctively knew something was wrong.
“Stop this,” Tomansio said. “You can extract what you need easily enough.”
“But this way I get to play first,” the Cat said. “If my Cheriton is to belong to me, he can’t have affections for anyone else, now, can he?”
“Don’t!”
“Troblum,” Aaron said with a menacing insistence. “Get us out of here.”
“Please,” Araminta-two whispered. Her emotional output was rising to a fearsome level as she responded to Cheriton’s terrible degradation. Oscar found the tears welling up in his own eyes at her distress.
“Like father, like son,” the Cat said.
Cheriton looked down to find himself holding a pump-action shotgun. “No!” he screamed. “No no no no. Stop her; in Ozzie’s name, don’t let her do this.”
“We can’t leave him,” Corrie-Lyn sobbed. “Not with her. Nobody can face this alone. It’s inhuman.”
A ruby targeting laser stabbed out of Aaron’s fist. It splashed on the solido projector. “Now!” he hissed.
“Troblum!” Catriona wailed.
Cheriton’s finger pulled the shotgun’s safety off. It produced a nasty snick that echoed around the starship’s cabin.
“It’s not real,” Inigo vowed. “Know this, Cheriton, and remember.”
“Oh, dear Jesus,” Oscar moaned.
“Do it, you motherfucker,” Aaron yelled.
The Mellanie’s Redemption flashed into hyperspace.
Justine Year Forty-five
Justine eased herself up into a sitting position, for once feeling every year of her age. Suspension over such a long time was a killer. Every muscle ached. She swore she could hear her joints creak as she moved them. Hunger pangs battled against nausea.
Secondary routines told her it was fifteen years since she’d last been out of the medical capsule for a brief inspection of the Silverbird. Exovision displays and secondary routines gave her a fast review of the starship’s current status. Most onboard systems were functioning within acceptable parameters, though the degradation over the last forty years was noticeable.
Her u-shadow ordered the culinary unit to produce a banana-based protein drink. She grabbed the plastic cup with her third hand and hauled it across the cabin. A couple of minutes after she finished the gooey stuff, she actually began to feel a bit better. Her muscles still ached, but with biononic support it was relatively easy to clamber out of the chamber. She wobbled her way over to the bathroom cubicle and ordered the cabin to extrude a shower compartment. Not a spore shower but a decent original deluge of hot water that she could stand under and feel pounding on her skin. The heat soaked into her flesh, defeating the toxic stiffness that had built up during suspension. Then she rubbed on the gel, relishing the cleansing sensation, as if she really were washing away lethargy. Her skin began to tingle pleasurably. It was only after a while that she realized she was probably broadcasting the whole soaped-up-girl-in-a-shower scene to most of the human race. Through Dad!
“Aw crap!”
A quick sluice of cold water promptly blew away any possible sense of erotica. She stepped out and picked up a thick towel. This whole sharing the body thing was going to take some getting used to. Not that she was particularly prudish, but still, every sensation …
Dried and dressed in a decent semiorganic blouse and trouser set, she settled back into her favorite chair and reviewed the external sensor images. They were still traveling at point nine lightspeed, streaking through a star system. Two light-hours ahead of them was the unnaturally vivid blue and white speck of an H-congruous world. She began to smile as the sensors found the desert planet Nikran, orbiting thirty million miles closer to the star, while Gicon’s Bracelet was almost on the opposite side of the star, showing as a bright cluster of light points. No doubt about it; the Skylord was taking her directly toward Querencia.
Across the surrounding starfield the nebulae familiar from so many of Inigo’s dreams were visible: the spectacular blue and green smear of Odin’s Sea, crowned by its scarlet reefs; Buluku, the twisting river of violet stardust beset with impossible lightning storms up to half a light-year long; and of course the glowing entwined folds of topaz and crimson that were Honious in all its dire glory.
Now that she was actually there, Justine experienced something weirdly close to déjà vu. It was as if she had suddenly found out that a childhood fable was true
and the colorful monsters she’d read about were finally emerging from the pages of the book. It wasn’t scary but profoundly exciting; this was true pioneering. Or maybe archaeology is closer to it.
Her longtalk reached out for the Skylord. “I thank you for bringing me to this world. My ship can fly and land by itself now.”
“I can take you closer,” it replied magnanimously.
“I would feel happier if my ship landed by itself. I am here now. I am content, for which I thank you.”
“As you wish,” the Skylord said.
Justine braced herself. Not that it did any good. The Silverbird once again was gripped by strange acceleration forces as the Skylord exerted its temporal manipulation ability. The star ahead transformed back to a yellow radiance as they slowed drastically. Redshifted stars behind grew in magnitude and intensity. Querencia’s clouds and ice caps darkened as its oceans fell to a deep sapphire. Iridescent colors swirled around the Silverbird’s fuselage as the Skylord’s vacuum wings swept past it. Then they were separating swiftly.
“Watch for my kind; they will be here soon,” Justine sent, receiving a serene flicker of acknowledgment in return.
Justine concentrated on the planet ahead. The Skylord had left her one hundred fifty thousand kilometers out and approaching fast. She ordered the smartcore to produce a vector that would put her into a twenty-degree inclination orbit a thousand kilometers out. From memory, Makkathran had been on the edge of the temperate zone. That orbit should allow her to see it visually. Somehow she couldn’t imagine it had gone. Makkathran was a constant, whatever it was, acting as a refuge for whatever race had the misfortune to stumble into the Void. It had been there for a long time before humans arrived; she was sure it would remain even today.
As soon as the Silverbird began its fifteen-gee deceleration, she switched the confluence nest back on. It wasn’t a memory she loaded in, more a belief, hopefully verging on obsession, that everything on board the starship would work. Even if it’s no more than a pathetic wish, it might be enough to keep the systems functional long enough to give me a proper landing.
With that in mind, she started thinking about practical items she might need after she arrived. The replicator was soon humming away, producing a wide range of clothes for every season. Food followed: fruit preserves and dried or cured meats, half-baked bread in sealed sheaths, basic packaged microbe-free meals that would take a long time to go moldy or putrefy, juices and the odd bottle of wine. To cook it all she had the replicator fabricate a small barbecue grill with bags of charcoal. After that she dragged up truly ancient memories of camping back in high school, when she’d been equipped with relatively simple tools such as compass and fire lighters, pots, plates, cups, cutlery. Washing-up liquid. Soap. Shampoo! Several decent pairs of boots. Knives of various sizes, including the fattest Swiss army type she could pull from the smartcore’s memory that would virtually build her another starship if she could just figure out how to work the gadgets it contained. Rope. An old-fashioned tent. It seemed an endless list, which kept her absorbed right up to the moment when the Silverbird curved around into its designated orbit. After that she sat in the chair watching high-resolution projections of the world as it rolled past below.
The smartcore had done a reasonable job of mapping the planet’s basic geography during the approach phase, capturing about two-thirds of the continental outlines. Despite that, she couldn’t really correlate what she was seeing with any of Edeard’s landscapes. The shorelines, which should have given her the greatest clues, were unfamiliar from an orbital vantage point. It was five orbits before she started to fly over mountains that could well be the Ulfsen range, which Edeard had first traversed with the Barkus caravan on his journey to Makkathran. With Salrana, she thought sadly. Their tragic, doomed romance had never meant much to her before, but now that she was here where it had played out, she felt a surprising emotional resonance stirring her. Stupid meat body, she cursed, and concentrated on the projected image.
No doubt about it, the Donsori Mountains were next. The Iguru plain swept into view, a vast lush green expanse with those strange little volcanic cones. Then there it was, straddling the coastline: Makkathran.
She stared at the big urban circle, marveling at the familiar shapes of its districts as delineated by the dark curving canals. Sunlight glimmered off the crystal wall, revealing it as a thin line encircling the city, dipping down into the sparkling Lyot Sea at the Port district with its distinctive fishtail profile.
Under her direction the smartcore ran a final check on all drive systems. With the exception of the ultradrive, they were all working at above eighty percent efficiency; glitches were minimal.
“Take us down,” Justine told the smartcore. The starship began its final deceleration phase. That left her just one thing to decide, a decision she’d admittedly been putting off since arriving in orbit. Do I take a weapon? She was reasonably confident she could ward off any animal with her third hand, but what if a whole pack of dogs or fastfoxes rushed at her? So much time had passed that the dogs would have lost any trace of domesticity. And it wasn’t just animals. She had no idea who was going to arrive at Makkathran over the next few weeks, or years, or decades—however long she was going to have to spend there before Gore’s plan became apparent.
Files of schematics flowed across her exovision. She chose one and shunted the blueprints into the replicator. Two minutes later out slid a semiautomatic pistol with a guaranteed jam-free mechanism. Next came five replacement magazines and five boxes of bullets, which really should be enough.
Ingrav had killed the Silverbird’s orbital velocity, allowing it to drop vertically. The starship hit the upper atmosphere, whose thin molecules started a faint scream from the buffeting impact. A long wavering trail of lambent ions stretched out behind the craft as it fell deeper and deeper.
Amber exovision alerts began to appear, warning Justine the force fields were edging close to overload. She shared her desperate desire that their generators would hold with the confluence nest, willing them to succeed. The amber alerts blinked off.
Regrav took over at fifteen kilometers of altitude, slowing the descent. She began to study the city as the visual images built up. Deeper sensor scans were hazed as they began to probe the surrounding rock, denying her a clear picture of whatever lay beneath Makkathran, though she could just make out the faint threads of several travel tunnels radiating out through the ancient lava field that was the Iguru plain.
So I still don’t know what it is, she thought in mild annoyance. But anything that could manipulate gravity, as it used to do to propel Edeard along the tunnels, had to be a high-technology intruder into this universe. The city’s thoughts had admitted as much to Edeard when it told him about the Void’s reset ability. The night Salrana betrayed him, she remembered, wishing the thwarted lovers didn’t bother her quite so much. Come on, girl, it was thousands of years ago. Their bodies are dust, and their souls are partying in the Heart.
Again, not the most comforting of thoughts. If I die here, I’ll either wither away wandering through space or be absorbed by the Heart. Or Honious.
Cross with herself for showing such weaknesses, she concentrated on the city that was expanding across the projections. A landing site was her priority now. There were so many places she wanted to see. And she would, but they were all in built-up areas. She could make out the larger buildings now, the domes of the Orchard Palace in Anemone, the odd twisting towers of Eyrie standing guard around the Lady’s church. Her eyes darted toward Sampalok, and sure enough, there in the central square was the six-sided building Edeard had created out of the ruins of Bise’s mansion.
“Oh, holy crap,” she muttered. “It is real.”
Fright or determination, she didn’t know which, made her concentrate properly now. The thick band of meadowland between the crystal wall and the outer ring of canals that made up High Moat, Low Moat, Tycho, and Andromeda was a likely candidate, though it was terribly overgrow
n. She could see clumps of trees down there that certainly hadn’t been growing in Edeard’s time. According to the radar sweep and mass scans, what looked like grass from altitude was mostly bushes and vines.
Golden Park, then. The old flat fields within the pristine white pillars were as shaggy as the meadows outside and the original avenues of huge martoz trees had multiplied and grown wild, but radar showed there were plenty of relatively level patches.
Silverbird continued its descent, twisting slightly to align itself over the westernmost part of the park, between the curves of Upper Grove Canal and Champ Canal.
Two warning icons appeared, telling her the regrav units were having to draw extra power to maintain a steady rate of descent. It was as if gravity was increasing, pulling the starship down.
And how do you wish gravity was less?
More warnings began to appear, reporting glitches in secondary systems. She felt a faint vibration starting to build up and ordered her chair to grip her tightly. It responded sluggishly.
“Oh, crap, here we go,” she groaned.
The starship was only a kilometer above the city as its started to pick up speed. Nothing fatal, she told herself. Not yet. The landing legs bulged out of the fuselage. So something wants me to land okay. Velocity was increasing more than she was comfortable with. She sent a series of instructions into the smartcore, composing her own procedures for a Void-style landing.
Five hundred meters and the Silverbird was ass down as it should be, with the nose tracing a slight arc in the sky as it wobbled. The exact landing spot she’d picked received a final radar sweep, confirming it was solid and stable.
Her thoughts slammed into the confluence nest, demanding normality. Power from the reserve D-sinks was channeled into the regrav units, pushing them up to their safety margins. She saw the towers of Eyrie come level with the starship, and beyond them, over in Tosella, the tip of the Blue Tower was now higher than she was.
The Void Trilogy 3-Book Bundle Page 207
