The Temporal Void

by Peter F. Hamilton

  She walked up the short wooden steps to the porch platform formed from a miniature tree crafted to a flat mushroom shape. Donald Chatfield greeted her at the wonderfully old-fashioned green-painted front door. A tall youthful-looking man with an easy smile. His neat dark hair was starting to grey in contrast to firm features and a healthy tan. She couldn’t work out if those light strands were a fashion statement or an imperative genetic quirk his biononics couldn’t adjust. He was three hundred and fifty years old, after all.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ she said as he led her into the sitting room. Three big circles had been sawn out of the bulging walls, to be filled with perfectly clear crystal that overlooked his back garden. No attempt had been made to paint or cover the bare wood, though walls and ceiling had been polished to show off the dark timber’s turquoise grain flecks. Even the furniture was carved from large sections of tree trunks, softened by a few scattered cushions.

  ‘Your reputation precedes you, Investigator,’ he said as he waved her into one of the big chairs. ‘I didn’t even have to consult a reference file. But then I have served on ships around Dyson Alpha. It was a long time ago, but the crews tend to assimilate the War period’s history in more detail than the average citizen, it helps us understand the mission.’

  ‘Interesting,’ she said as she settled back. ‘That’s actually why I’m here.’

  He raised an eyebrow in an almost dismissive expression. ‘Good heavens. Even I’m history in that respect.’

  ‘Not quite. I’d like to ask you about your third mission there, you captained the Poix.’

  ‘Yes. What’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem. I need some information on one of your crew: Kent Vernon.’

  ‘Oh him.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  Donald gave her a roguish grin. ‘Navy service sounds very grand, but I was actually in the Exploration Division. We fly science missions, not combat. That allows a – ’ he paused ‘ – broader range of characters than the regular Navy. Vernon might have been helpful analysing the generator lattice shells, but he certainly wouldn’t have been any use in a regular Navy position. He wasn’t the most popular person on board the dear old Poix.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. He performed some valuable work. However, his social skills were somewhat lacking. Quite surprisingly so given he was Higher. It rather shocked some of the crew, they weren’t used to making allowances like that.’

  ‘If he was that disruptive how did he get a commission?’

  ‘It was a science commission, he wasn’t strictly Navy at all. Specialists are given temporary commissions for the duration of their missions. I was warned about his nature while the mission was drawn up.’

  ‘Yet you allowed him to take part.’

  ‘The captain has some discretion. I accessed his file and thought he could make a valid contribution; he was very highly qualified in his field. That had to be balanced against any personal disruption he would make. Ultimately, I agreed to him joining us because it doesn’t hurt to shake things up every now and then.’

  ‘Strange attitude,’ she observed. ‘You’re on a difficult and important mission a long way from home in what is still technically a war zone, and you choose to take along a potentially disruptive influence.’

  ‘It was a judgement call. I made it because we’d had two previous missions at Dyson Alpha; my crew knew the routine. It was never a physical danger having him on board. Worst case scenario, which we always had to plan for, was the barrier collapsing while we were there. Vernon would just be shoved in his cabin and told to stay there while we did what we could to prevent Prime ships from escaping. Even then, the Poix would be assigned a third-line defence position. To this day the Navy maintains some serious firepower outside the Dyson Pair. Ozzie help the Primes if they ever do crack out and make a break for it.’

  ‘So did you make the right judgement?’ Paula asked.

  Donald gave an expansive shrug. ‘There is no right answer to this. The mission gathered a lot of data, but I wouldn’t necessarily want him on board again. In a strange way it helped crew morale afterwards. In my final two missions there was always a lot of talk about how difficult that mission was.’

  ‘Bonding in the face of adversity?’

  ‘Something like that. Though I wouldn’t want to make out it was some terrible trip into hardship. It wasn’t. He’s just different from the rest of Highers, which isn’t a crime. So what’s your interest in Vernon after all this time?’

  ‘He wasn’t quite who he claimed to be.’

  Donald gave her a long stare. ‘In what possible way?’

  ‘I believe he was carrying out his own agenda, possibly on behalf of an ANA Faction.’

  ‘What agenda?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here, to see what you can tell me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but my immediate answer to that is: very little. Even taking his attitude into account it was a perfectly routine mission. We gathered data on the Dark Fortress for eight months and came home.’

  ‘There was no abnormal event? Nothing out of the ordinary?’

  Donald’s eyes flickered as he delved down into memories long ago shunted into a storage lacuna. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘So what exactly was the mission?’

  ‘Monitoring and analysis of the inner two lattice spheres inside the Dark Fortress. Which we accomplished successfully.’

  ‘Were there any breakthroughs or revelations about the Dark Fortress?’

  ‘Not due to us. The damn thing is still an enigma. We don’t understand how it generates a force field large enough to envelop an entire star system; the mechanism is peculiar. Though they are making headway on the field itself these days, I gather. I don’t really stay current.’

  ‘Did Vernon want to take anything further; perhaps some persistence that at the time you wrote off to his personality?’

  ‘He was always on about the factory.’

  ‘Factory?’

  ‘Whatever the Anomine used to build the Dark Fortress itself. He contended that if we could examine that we’d solve the entire generator and its principles. Logically, he was quite right. But that wasn’t our mission.’

  ‘I see. Has there ever been a mission to examine the factory?’

  ‘No. Because we don’t know where the factory is.’

  ‘So did Vernon want to go and search for it?’

  ‘Yes. I wouldn’t mind doing that myself, actually. That would be quite something, wouldn’t it? A structure that builds machines the size of a small gas giant. Finding that would be enough to yank me back out of retirement.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Paula hesitated, not trusting a word he said. ‘Did Kent Vernon modify the observations you were making?’

  ‘Constantly, that’s what the science team are there for. One set of results leads them off to investigate some other aspect. Within the overall mission parameter, the monitoring process is very fluid. We’d just be a simple sensor relay otherwise.’

  ‘What was Vernon’s specific field?’

  ‘Quantum signature. He was there to determine the sub-physical nature of the lattice sphere composition.’

  ‘So in that field did he want to do anything he shouldn’t have done?’

  ‘No. We’ve got a pretty broad leeway when it comes to observations. Just about the only thing the Navy prohibits is trying to take a physical sample of a lattice sphere – not that they are all strictly physical. A stupid restriction if you ask me, but I don’t make the rules.’

  ‘Stupid how?’

  He gave her a curious gaze. ‘You took part in the Starflyer War. Ozzie and Nigel Sheldon set off a couple of quantumbusters inside the Dark Fortress, and it’s still working. That is one extremely tough mother. Shaving a nugget off isn’t going to break it.’

  ‘Good point.’ Paula activated a layer of specific-function biononics on the skin surface of her right palm.

  ‘You have a
good relationship with ANA, you might want to tell it that someday,’ Chatfield said.

  ‘I’m sure it has its reasons.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Paula stood, and held out her right hand. ‘Well, thank you for your time, Captain.’

  ‘Not at all.’ He shook hands warmly. ‘Was I of any use?’

  Her biononics sampled the dead cells of Chatfield’s outer epidermal layer. ‘I’m not sure.’ There was a second when she thought he might activate his combat enrichments. It passed. Even so, old-fashioned instinct made her uncomfortable turning her back on him as he showed her out.

  As soon as she got back into her taxi capsule she opened an ultra-secure link to ANA:Governance. ‘He’s an Accelerator.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ ANA:Governance asked.

  ‘He admitted a possible error and accepted the blame. Standard sympathy-grab manoeuvre. But his real mistake was a fundamental one. When I said Vernon had an agenda for a Faction, Chatfield asked what the agenda was, not which Faction.’ She held up her right hand, turning it to examine the palm. There was nothing visible, but the biononics were already feeding a stream of sequencing data down the link. ‘I’m sending you his DNA. Run it against every file you have. Specifically, people involved with Government and Navy.’

  As before, the speed of the reply was near instantaneous. It impressed Paula exactly how much attention ANA had devoted to the analysis. Her u-shadow would have taken at least a minute to run the comparison.

  ‘That instinct of yours is quite something,’ ANA:Governance said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There is a twenty-point spread marker similarity with a Captain Evanston.’

  ‘Not identical, so it’s either family, or . . .

  ‘Or he had a DNA resequence for that assignment.’

  ‘That’s very deep cover. So is he Evanston or Chatfield?’

  ‘I’d say Chatfield. Evanston was a serving officer twenty-five years ago. But Chatfield’s current DNA is almost a match for Captain Chatfield’s registered Navy file a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Almost a match?’

  ‘The variance is small but noticeable. If we weren’t considering a period spent resequenced it would be within acceptable error.’

  ‘So, if he’s going for resequencing, why keep the twenty-point similarity? Complete resequencing used to be quite a popular option among the criminal classes of late first era and early second era Commonwealth. The perfect way to avoid court-verified identification. A lot of them literally got away with murder.’

  ‘That’s a simple answer: his brain. He wanted to maintain his thought routines as they are. If you alter neural structure and neurochemicals you alter how you think, your very personality. He wanted to keep on being him.’

  ‘That makes sense. So give me his file.’ She observed it enter her macrocellular clusters. Secondary thought routines picked the data apart, highlighting the relevant sections. One long entry leapt out at her. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she muttered.

  ‘Quite,’ ANA:Governance said. ‘And in connection with today’s events, extremely significant.’

  ‘Overwhelmingly significant,’ she retorted. ‘Evanston was second in command of the development-restrictions monitoring station on Elan.’

  ‘I always considered it quite an irony that the Commonwealth allowed the surviving Prime invasion forces to continue living on the worlds they conquered.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ she said. ‘Just on the five Lost23 that we didn’t completely nuke into oblivion. Some of those surviving immotiles got smart.’

  ‘You mean they got human.’

  ‘They accessed the memories of human lawyers and promptly surrendered. They even quoted our own basic rights laws back at us. I’d say that was quite smart. Evolutionary even. Adapt to and then accept the ethics of an alien species that you were trying to wipe out in order to survive yourself. It was the only reason Admiral Columbia allowed them to live, he considered it an indication that Primes were capable of social progression – as humans see it.’

  ‘They’ve kept their side of the agreement until now.’

  ‘I don’t think this can be blamed on them.’ Paula hadn’t felt this angry for quite some time. Centuries. But for the Accelerators to use the Prime to bolster the Ocisen Empire . . . It took a lot to shock her, but this had done it. Don’t they understand the danger? But of course they did. It’s me who is only just starting to grasp the stakes they’re playing for, the ends to which they’ll go.

  ‘That is also our conclusion,’ ANA:Governance said.

  ‘It’s treason.’

  ‘If provable. So far we only have circumstantial evidence.’

  Paula resisted the temptation to glance back over her shoulder. The capsule was already clear of the city’s elegant greenways. Now it was soaring gracefully over the mountain peaks towards the starport on the inland plain beyond. She toyed with the idea of going back and arresting Chatfield. ‘A memory read will provide the evidence.’

  ‘Do you think Chatfield will allow that to happen?’

  ‘No,’ she admitted regretfully. ‘If he’s an Accelerator agent at the level we believe him to be, then capture is not an option. He’ll just auto-bodyloss and they’ll re-life him inside a day with a safe body. We’ll have to keep him under observation and see where he takes us.’

  ‘I have placed him under electronic scrutiny.’

  ‘Thank you. That should do until I can get a colleague here to shadow him. If Chatfield is part of the project which allied the Primes to the Ocisen Empire, he’ll probably be aware of the hardware Troblum has helped them build. I’m wondering if it was those starships accompanying the Ocisen fleet.’

  ‘According to Gore, Ilanthe said the Accelerators can protect the sol system from any Void expansion. I have no idea what that might translate into in practice.’

  ‘Two illegal hardware construction projects? They really are committed to their ideology, aren’t they? We’re going to have to keep a very sharp watch on Chatfield.’

  ‘Who will you use?’

  Paula allowed herself a slight smile. ‘Digby has been wanting an assignment at this level for some time. It’s only fair I give him the opportunity.’

  ‘He is fully qualified, and has the necessary experience.’

  She laughed outright. ‘That’s a very tactful way of accusing me of nepotism.’

  ‘He is four generations removed.’

  ‘But still my descendant. After all, who else is crazy enough to do this kind of work?’

  ‘I find him highly capable.’

  ‘He’s too young, and too eager. But if anything is going to cure that, it’ll be this assignment. I’ll call him.’

  Marius was half a kilometre away when Paula’s taxi capsule left Chatfield’s house. He found the Investigator’s presence at this exact time to be unnerving. It meant she was making a lot of connections he’d assumed would stay hidden, at least until it was too late. When her capsule had left the city greenways he walked unhurriedly to Chatfield’s house. That approach at least would eliminate some observation protocols which he knew would be enacted following her visit. In confirmation, his u-shadow informed him of extremely sophisticated scrutineers slipping into the local cybersphere nodes.

  For a moment he considered simply abandoning Chatfield. But advancing to the next stage was an acceptable risk. If Paula Myo had any real understanding of the Accelerator strategy she would have taken Chatfield into custody. So he sent his u-shadow into the homes of Chatfield’s neighbours, and examined various files, siphoning out inconsequential personal details and preferences. As he walked down the greenway the data was absorbed by his biononics, enabling them to change his appearance and electronic emissions. His shimmering toga suit transformed to a bland swaddle of amethyst cloth, with ginger boots just visible below the shifting folds. Confident in his amalgamated persona he crossed the shaggy front lawn and triggered the house sensors.

  Chatfield showed no surprise when
he opened his glossy front door to someone who resembled Fardel from four houses down, even though the man wore Jalliete’s style of clothing. It was the green eyes which gave him away. ‘You saw Myo leave?’ Chatfield asked as they went into the living room where they were surrounded by a privacy shield.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ve discovered Troblum was on the Poix.’

  ‘Shit. I will take a great deal of pleasure ridding this universe of that failed embarrassment of a Higher. Does Myo know why he was there?’

  ‘No. I threw her the line about him focusing on the Anomine factory.’

  ‘Good. That ties nicely into his obsession with the planet-shifting ftl. It might divert them for a while.’

  ‘I’ll be under observation.’ He looked straight at Marius. ‘Are you here to bodyloss me?’

  ‘No. We’re moving to the next stage a little early. That should remove you from their view for a while, and when you do reappear it won’t matter.’

  ‘I see.’ Chatfield gave the bulbous wooden room a regretful stare. ‘I’ll miss this. Ganthia has been an enjoyable place to live. Its politics are quite progressive in some respects.’

  ‘Irrelevant now. I have a ship waiting at the spaceport. Go directly to our Frost station and collect your equipment.’

  ‘Understood. And then on to Ellezelin?’

  ‘Yes, but stand off until I authorize your landing. Living Dream is expecting you to join the Pilgrimage, but I don’t want you there early. Even if our policy is successful, there may be rogue ANA agents left over who could cause trouble.’

  ‘Like Myo?’

  ‘Among others. We have contingencies, don’t worry.’

  ‘I’ll leave right away.’

  *

  Babuyan Atoll was undergoing an approximation of night. The dome’s internal illumination was off, but the crystal remained perfectly transparent. Icalanise’s jaundiced crescent was rising above the lip of the parkland to shine a jaded light across the forests and towers. Admiral Kazimir saw it through his office window as he made some niggling final adjustments to his dress uniform. Over on Aldaho, the Senate Executive Security Commission was convening for an emergency session, where he was due to present the really bad news about the Ocisen Empire’s new allies. It was looking like the deterrent fleet would have to be used, a prospect which both thrilled and horrified him in equal amounts. For nearly seven hundred years the mere threat of its existence had been enough to deter the more belligerent species in the galaxy from any aggression against the Commonwealth. Now the bluff was going to be called, and those who thought it was a bluff were about to get a very nasty surprise.