The Evolutionary Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Mellanie’s Redemption emerged from hyperspace eighty million kilometres from the star, and immediately activated its stealth systems. Inside the overcrowded cabin the mood was bleak. Oscar wasn’t sure he could take many more emotional swings on this kind of scale. Abandoning poor Cheriton to the Cat had been tough on them all, though strangely Araminta-two had been the most affected. Tears had streamed down his face as the starship fled from the Spike. No amount of comforting from Inigo and Corrie-Lyn helped.

  Then both Dreamers had abruptly joined in surprise as Justine’s dream of landing at Makkathran came rushing through whatever tenuous contact they had with the Void.

  ‘She made it,’ Beckia exclaimed in surprise as the Silverbird touched down gently in Golden Park and the dream faded.

  ‘Never expected her to do anything less,’ Oscar said. ‘I remember her from my first life. The Burnellis were a formidable lot.’

  ‘Is she part of your plan?’ Tomansio asked Aaron.

  ‘Not as far as I know. Her voyage certainly doesn’t trigger any alternatives or imperatives. We proceed as agreed.’

  ‘Okay. Troblum, how long does this thing take?’

  Oscar was interested to see that Catriona had gone away during the short flight. Once he was on his own, Troblum hadn’t said ten words to them, and there certainly hadn’t been anything given away from his gaiamotes. In fact, Oscar wasn’t certain Troblum had gaiamotes.

  ‘I’ll bring the device up to active status now,’ Troblum said.

  ‘Great. So how long?’

  ‘The wormhole parameter will have to be reformatted. I was working on that during the flight. Loading it in shouldn’t take more than quarter of an hour. After that, we simply have to launch it into the star.’

  ‘How long, then?’

  ‘That depends on the distance we launch from. The smart-core is reviewing the corona’s radiant output for a definitive safe distance, but I’d say it’ll be about a million kilometres. The device itself will activate when it reaches the upper corona. It only needs a reasonably dense plasma layer to initiate a chain-reaction propagation within the quantum instability. I based that part of it on our standard novabomb.’

  ‘Troblum. How long until the wormhole forms? From right now?’

  Oscar was seriously impressed by Tomansio’s restraint.

  ‘Oh. About twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘Good work,’ Aaron said, obviously amused by Tomansio’s suppressed frustration. ‘And how far will the new wormhole reach?’

  ‘I think, now I’ve got the new profile, twenty-eight thousand lightyears.’

  ‘That’ll put us twelve to fifteen thousand lightyears ahead of the Pilgrimage fleet,’ Araminta-two said. ‘Will that give you enough time?’ she asked Aaron.

  ‘All I know is we have to get to Makkathran.’

  Oscar gave him a considered look. ‘Gore was adamant that Justine go to Makkathran.’

  ‘It’s the one place we know for sure is H-congruous inside the Void.’

  ‘Gore told her that after she landed on the replica Far Away.’

  ‘His actual words were “that’s where humans are centred in the Void”,’ Beckia said. ‘Which is logical. It is where everyone is going.’

  ‘I bet Ilanthe isn’t,’ Corrie-Lyn grunted.

  ‘We don’t know if the replica Far Away is still there,’ Tomansio said. ‘Justine reset the Void to before she dreamed for it.’

  ‘I think you’re all overreacting,’ Inigo said. ‘Or at least reading too much into this. Makkathran as a destination isn’t coincidence, exactly, but there wasn’t a whole lot of choice involved in either case.’

  ‘Do you ever remember meeting Gore?’ Liatris asked Aaron.

  ‘I don’t remember anything.’

  Liatris showed a modicum of unease. ‘He did kill your father.’

  ‘Irrelevant.’

  ‘Bruce McFoster was a Starflyer agent when Gore eliminated him,’ Tomansio said. ‘The actual Bruce was killed years before when he was taken captive by the Starflyer.’

  ‘But you have to admit the coincidences are starting to—’

  ‘Uh oh,’ Araminta-two said.

  Everyone was still as he gifted them the scene in the observation deck of the Lady’s Light, where a determined Ethan was walking towards her. As the confrontation unfolded, Inigo put his arm round Araminta-two’s shoulder. ‘I am here,’ he whispered, pushing his support through the gaiafield union. ‘Show him no weakness. You are the Dreamer now. You are right in your belief. It is the Void which will decide this for all of us.’

  Oscar drew a sharp breath as the winged Silfen shimmered within his thoughts. Bradley, he knew, and smiled. Way to go, man. You look great.

  A thwarted Ethan walked away. Everyone in the Mellanie’s Redemption’s cabin burst into spontaneous applause. After a moment, even Troblum joined in.

  So he does have gaiamotes, Oscar thought.

  Araminta-two smiled round sheepishly. ‘Thank you,’ he told Inigo. Corrie-Lyn gave him a swift kiss.

  ‘Troblum,’ Tomansio said, ‘let’s get going.’

  ‘The device is almost at active status. Another five minutes.’

  Aaron smiled encouragement.

  Troblum’s tentative humour faded away. His big round face paled. ‘Oh no,’ he gasped.

  Oscar’s u-shadow was pulling sensor imagery from the star-ship’s smartcore. Troblum had permitted everyone a general-level access.

  A sleek-looking ultradrive ship not too dissimilar to the Elvin’s Payback had emerged ten kilometres away. It opened a communication link. Oscar’s shoulders slumped. He knew.

  ‘Hello, my dears,’ said the Cat.

  A pulse of pure misery swept through the cabin.

  ‘What kind of defences have we got?’ Aaron asked.

  Troblum shook his head. He was close to tears.

  ‘Weapons?’

  Troblum started trembling. His legs gave way, and he sank to his knees. ‘I can’t let her capture me. I can’t.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Oscar asked the Cat. If it was dead, they would’ve been that already.

  ‘That’s a whole load of talent you’ve got on board there with you, Oscar my dear. It’s not often I’m impressed, but just this once I’m going to admit it. You did good.’

  ‘What have you done to Cheriton?’ Corrie-Lyn demanded.

  ‘Don’t interrupt the grownups,’ the Cat said. ‘You’ll get a smack where it hurts most for that.’

  Oscar made a frantic cutting hand signal at Corrie-Lyn. She gave him a disgusted glare.

  ‘You told Ilanthe about us,’ Oscar said.

  ‘Oh I’m sorry. Did that spoil things? I thought you dealt with that little shit Ethan quite beautifully, Araminta.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You know that, Oscar. Same thing as I always do, some fun.’

  ‘We’ll invite you to the victory party.’

  ‘Don’t push your luck. The Void is where this is all going to finish. I need to be a part of that, and you’re going to take me there.’

  ‘What is Ilanthe doing?’ Oscar asked.

  ‘She’s set her little metal heart on something called Fusion.’

  ‘No,’ Araminta-two said. ‘It’s not that. She has become something other.’

  ‘Then you’ll be able to ask her yourself soon enough, won’t you?’

  ‘Can the Cat affect us once we’re inside the Void?’ Aaron asked Inigo.

  ‘You mean apart from blowing us all to shit?’

  ‘Surely your mind is stronger?’

  Inigo gave Araminta-two a worried look. He looked equally alarmed.

  ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘Oscar, my dear, it’s rude to keep a lady waiting,’

  Oscar didn’t know what the hell to do, apart from use the obvious smartarse answer – which in this case might just prove terminal. And nobody was offering any suggestions. Suddenly he was flinching, cowering halfway to the decking. Space outside wa
s ablaze with hard radiation as a range of enormously powerful weapons were fired. His u-shadow reran events, analysing it in millisecond increments. He saw another ultradrive starship materialize directly between the Cat’s ship and Mellanie’s Redemption. It opened fire instantaneously, at the same time its force field expanded, deflecting the Cat’s return salvo away from Mellanie’s Redemption.

  A communication channel opened.

  ‘Oscar, get the hell out of there,’ Paula said. ‘Leave the Cat to me.’

  ‘Go,’ Oscar screamed at Troblum.

  For the second time in an hour, the Mellanie’s Redemption fled into hyperspace.

  ‘You’re going to deal with me?’ the Cat asked. There was a mocking tone in the voice.

  Paula was frantically reviewing the Alexis Denken’s defence status. The force fields were struggling under the energy impact of their first weapons exchange. Whatever the Cat’s ship was equipped with, it was stronger than she had expected. The beam weapons were somehow transferring some of their energy through hyperspace, circumventing the force fields. Local gravity was doing strange things, its twists exerting unnatural stresses throughout the Alexis Denken which the on-board compensators weren’t designed to cope with.

  ‘Always do,’ Paula sent back. On her instruction, the smartcore fired a couple of quantumbusters. They shot away, accelerating at two hundred gees. ‘And this is the last time.’ The quantumbusters went active. Eighty kilometres away, the small chunk of asteroidal rubble they targeted was less than thirty metres in diameter. The entire mass was converted directly into energy in the form of ultra-hard radiation. For a microsecond its output rivalled that of the nearby star.

  Exovision warnings leapt up as the force fields strained to deflect the appalling radiation torrent. Paula sent the starship back into hyperspace and flashed towards the gas giant. The Cat came after her. Neither was making any attempt at stealth.

  Fifty thousand kilometres above the seething pink and grey cloudscape, Paula stopped, and the Alexis Denken hung in transdimensional suspension while the force-field generators began to stabilize.

  One of the gas giant’s large outer moons exploded. A quantum-buster had converted a couple of its more substantial craters directly into energy, a detonation big enough to fracture the moon down to its core. The entire globe ruptured, with vast segments moving ponderously apart, while a billion rock fragments came tumbling out of the expanding fissures into the outburst of raw energy. The physical damage was an irrelevancy. The quantum-buster had a diverted energy function, shunting a high percentage of the explosion’s power into hyperspace.

  Paula went flying painfully across the cabin as the colossal exotic energy wave smashed into the starship. Alexis Denken fell back into spacetime as its overstressed ultradrive failed. Outside, the remnants of the moon were creating a giant translucent shocksphere twenty thousand kilometres across that glowed an ominous spectral blue as it inflated at half lightspeed. The Cat’s ship came streaking out of the garish aurora, force fields glimmering a malevolent crimson as it headed straight for the Alexis Denken. Dark missiles punched forwards at a hundred gees.

  The smartcore identified them as Hawking M-sinks. Force fields wouldn’t protect Paula from those.

  Another moon exploded. Sequential ripples of exotic energy swept outwards, blocking any return to hyperspace. Paula powered the Alexis Denken straight down towards the gas giant, accelerating at fifty gees. Internal gravity compensators could only shield her from about thirty of those. Biononics had to support her body physically as the punishing force tried to crush her into a puddle of flesh across the decking. Even with that enrichment it was tremendously difficult to breathe. She’d got her left leg at a slight angle; it made a bad sound as it flattened out.

  One of the small inner moons was below her, a cratered rock two hundred kilometres in diameter, three thousand kilometres further along its orbital track from her vertical vector, and moving sedately away. She fired a quantumbuster at it, modifying the effect field format. When the weapon activated it converted a quarter cubic kilometre of rock right at the moon’s core. The moon shattered instantly. Millions of rocky shrapnel fangs detonated outward from the micro-nova in a lethal super-velocity cloud. The particles vaporized as they went, blowing off expanding flares of indigo and topaz ions like primeval comets. Space was filled with a dense clutter of energized mass. The Hawking M-sinks flew into it and began to absorb the deluge of lively atoms. Vapour or rock shards, it made no difference; the event horizons sucked everything down. In doing so their courses wobbled slightly. As the drives attempted to compensate, their efficiency fell off due to the near-exponential increase in mass they were now propelling.

  The Alexis Denken raced away from the underside of the hellish fireball, hurtling straight for the agitated stormscape below.

  Mellanie’s Redemption flicked back into space one and a quarter million kilometres above the yellow star. She hung there for a couple of seconds while the forward cargo bay opened and the fuselage force field started to fizz with violet stress patterns. The planetary ftl device shot out, and Troblum took the starship straight back into transdimensional suspension.

  ‘How long?’ Aaron demanded.

  ‘Ten minutes to initiation,’ Troblum said. Catriona was back at his side, her beautiful face tragic with concern. ‘Establishment will take longer. And no, I don’t have a fucking clue how long. Nothing more I can do, we just sit and wait now.’

  Oscar was keeping track of the hysradar return. He winced when one of the gas giant moons broke apart within a bloom of exotic energy. That was one hell of a fight, as bad as Justine and the warrior Raiel. Oh crap! ‘Hey!’

  Everyone looked at him. In the packed cabin that was quite intimidating.

  ‘You didn’t think this ship could survive anything the Cat threw at it,’ he said to Troblum. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it couldn’t,’ Troblum replied. Catriona was directing an aggressive stare Oscar’s way, which he ignored.

  ‘But you have the Sol-barrier technology. That can withstand any Commonwealth weapon.’

  ‘Mellanie’s Redemption doesn’t have that kind of protection,’ Troblum said.

  ‘But . . . your armour does.’ So I assumed the ship would as well. Shit!

  ‘Yes. I just built my armour. But before now I couldn’t ever use the design the Accelerators developed from the Dark Fortress. That would have revealed what we’d got.’

  Oscar wanted to grab the front of Troblum’s toga suit and give the huge man a shake. ‘But if we haven’t got that kind of force field, how the hell do you think we’ll get past the warrior Raiel?’

  ‘They’ll let us past. Won’t they?’ Troblum said in a puzzled tone that verged on hurt. ‘When we explain that we’re on a mission to shut down the Void.’

  ‘Shit,’ Tomansio grunted.

  For once even Aaron was startled.

  ‘Troblum,’ Oscar said very firmly. ‘Give me full access to your TD linkage. Now.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Inigo asked.

  ‘Calling the one person who might be able to help.’ He grimaced as another of the gas giant’s moons was blasted into a tsunami of exotic energy. ‘If she’s still alive.’

  The Alexis Denken hit the upper atmosphere at fifty kilometres a second. Paula ordered an immediate deceleration as they plunged towards the first truculent cloud layer. It didn’t seem to make much difference. Disintegrating gases gouged a five-hundred-kilometre tail of incandescence in their wake, a giant pointer for the Cat’s sensors. The juddering was phenomenal; as an indicator of how much punishment the starship was encountering it was badly worrying. Acceleration forces were still crushing her down on to the decking.

  Far above, the first flaming debris from the small rock moon was following her down. Dazzling points of light churned through the atmosphere, jetting out vast plumes of black smoke. The terrible buffeting broke them apart into hundreds of smaller chunks, which then shattered again and again. A vast plane
of electrical fire sank down towards the clouds. The basic energy which the impact was spinning off created enormous lightning discharges that flared for thousands of kilometres through the higher atmospheric bands.

  It made sensor coverage difficult. But just before she sank into the second cloud layer, hysradar located the Cat’s ship chasing her down.

  Paula hurriedly changed her direction, angling the regrav units’ propulsive effect sharply to try and flatten out her trajectory, but still heading down.

  ‘I see you,’ the Cat called through an interference-saturated link.

  ‘If you stop now and rendezvous with your force fields down I will simply place you in suspension with your original self,’ Paula replied. ‘Any other course of action will result in your termination.’

  ‘Darling Paula, this is what I love about you. That psycho-neural profiling is actually the installation of blind stupidity. Come to me, I can remove it for you.’

  The Alexis Denken’s sensors detected another M-sink being fired. Now the entire gas giant was doomed – though its final destruction would be weeks away. Paula suspected the Cat had done that to make sure there would never be any hiding place beneath the gas giant’s furious storms. Paula fired a quantum-buster, then she angled the Alexis Denken down through the fourth and final cloud layer. Below that was a zone of perfectly clear hydrogen extending for several hundred kilometres. Huge vertical pillars of lightning snapped on and off within the gap. At their base, a smog of hydrocarbons eddied uneasily atop the pressure boundary where the atmospheric compounds were finally compressed into a liquid. The sight vanished in a blaze of white light as the quantumbuster activated.

  ‘Naughty, darling,’ the Cat taunted. ‘My turn.’

  The hysradar showed Paula two missiles curving up from the Cat’s ship, arching through the clouds where the density was reduced. And of course they could accelerate far faster than the poor Alexis Denken, which was tunnelling through the compacted hydrogen.