“Impressive flight time,” Cheriton said dryly. “I’ve never been in an ultradrive ship before.”
Oscar ignored the jibe. Tomansio had never asked who was employing Oscar, but the ship was a huge give-away. “Tomansio, how do we go about infiltrating the Living Dream operation there?”
“Direct insertion. We’ll hack their smartcore’s personnel files and assign Cheriton into the search operation. He’s savvy enough to pass as a Dream Master, right?”
“No problem,” Cheriton said. He sighed. “Reprofiling for me, then.” He ran a hand along one of his skull ridges.
“I’ll make you look almost human,” Beckia assured him.
Cheriton blew her a kiss. “Living Dream have been altering confluence nests all across the General Commonwealth to try and get a fix on his location,” he said. “It must be costing them a fortune, which is a good indicator of how desperate they are. It’s not a terribly accurate method, but once they narrow it down to a single nest, they’ll know the district at least.”
“How does that help?” Beckia asked. “A nest’s gaiafield can cover a big area. If it’s in a city it can include millions.”
“If it were me, I’d surround the area with specialist nests and Dream Masters, and try and triangulate the dream’s origin.”
“So we can be in the general area just like them,” Oscar said. “Then it’s all down to speed.”
“The Factions will be running similar snatch operations,” Tomansio said. “We’ll be up against their agents as well as Living Dream.”
Oscar picked up on how enthused the Knights Guardians were by that prospect. “The Faction agents will have biononics weapon enrichments, won’t they?”
“I hope so,” Tomansio said.
“You can match that?” Oscar asked nervously.
“Only one way to find out.”
***
It was a gentle valley carpeted by long dark grass which rippled in giant waves as the breeze from the mountains gusted down. There was a house nestled in a shallow dip in the ground; a lovely old place whose walls were all crumbling stone quarried out of the nearby hills. An overhanging thatch roof gave it a delightful unity with nature. Its interior was a technology completely at odds with its outward appearance, with replicators providing him with any physical requirement. T-sphere interstices provided his family with an interesting internal topology, and any extra space they might want.
He stood facing it, holding his bamboo staff vertically in front of him. Torso bare to the air; legs clad in simple black cotton dirukku pants. Shutting down biononic field functions, attuning his perception to sight, sound, and sensation alone. Feeling his surroundings. Nesting cobra: the foundation of self. He moved into sharp eagle. Then twisted fast, assuming jumping cheetah. A breath. Opponent moving behind. Bring the bamboo down and sweep, the tiger’s claw. Spin jump as a coiled dragon. One arm bent into spartan shield. Lunge: striking angel. Drop the staff and pull both curving daggers from their sheathes. Bend at the knees into woken phoenix.
A vibration in the air. Heavy feet crushing tender stalks of grass. He raised his head to see a line of black armoured figures marching towards him. Long flames billowed from vents in their helmets as they roared their battle call. His breathing quickened as he tightened his grip on the daggers. The smell of charred meat rolled across the grassland. Aaron gagged on the terrible stench. Coughing violently, he sat up on the couch in the ground crawler’s cabin.
“Shit,” he spluttered, then coughed again, fighting for breath. Doubling up. Exovision medical displays showed him his biononics assuming command of his lungs and airway, overriding his body’s struggling autonomic functions. He wheezed down a long breath and shook his head as the artificial organelles stabilized him.
Corrie-Lyn was gazing at him from her couch on the other side of the cabin. She’d drawn her knees up under her chin, a blanket wrapped round her shoulders. For some reason she made him feel guilty. “What?” he snapped, all caffeine-deprived bad temper.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Those warriors represent being trapped, I think. But they came to you outside your home. You were unable to escape what you are, what you had grown into.”
“Oh give me a break,” he growled, and tried to swing his feet off the couch. His blanket was wrapped round his legs. He pulled it off in an angry jerk.
Corrie-Lyn responded with a hurt scowl. “They could also be a representation of paranoia,” she said with brittle dignity.
“Fuck off.” He told the culinary unit to brew some herbal tea. To purge the soul. “Look,” he said with a sigh. “Someone has seriously screwed with my brain. I’m bound to have nightmares. Just leave it, okay.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“I am what I am. And I like it.”
“But you don’t know who you are.”
“I told you: drop this.” He settled into one of the two forward seats, and stared out of the thick windscreen slit. The ground crawler was lumbering forward, rocking about as if they were riding a ocean swell. Outside, the weather hadn’t changed for the whole trip, a thin drizzle of ice particles blown along at high speed. High overhead, the dark underbelly of the cloud blanket seethed relentlessly, flickering with sheet lightning. They were traversing a drab landscape, where flood streams had gouged out deep sharp gullies. Broad headlight beams slithered over the dunes of filthy snow which migrated across the permafrost. Occasionally the surface of iron-hard soil was distended by some ruins, or stumps. Otherwise there was nothing to break the monotony.
Corrie-Lyn climbed off the couch without a word and went back to the little washroom compartment at the rear of the oblong cabin. She managed to slam the worn aluminium door.
Aaron rubbed his face, dismayed by how he’d handled the situation. Something in his dreams was eating away at his composure. He hated to think she was right, that his subconscious had somehow squirrelled away a few precious true memories. The personality he had now was simple and straightforward, uncluttered by extraneous attachments or sentimentality. He didn’t want to lose that, not ever.
By way of apology, he started entering a whole load of instructions into the culinary unit. Thirty minutes later, when Corrie-Lyn emerged her breakfast was waiting for her on a small table. She pouted at it.
“The crawler’s net reckons we’re about ninety minutes from the camp,” he said. “I thought you’d want to fortify yourself before we reached them.”
Corrie-Lyn was silent for a moment, then nodded in acknowledgement at the peace offering, and sat at the table. “Has anyone been in contact?”
“From the camp? No.” They’d talked to someone called Ericilla last night, telling her their estimated arrival time. She’d seemed interested, though she laughed at the idea of any of her colleagues being an abandoned lover. ‘If you knew any of my team mates you’d know you’re wasting your time. Romantic they’re not.’ ”
“We’re still connected to the beacon network,” Aaron said sipping another herbal tea. “Nobody is owning up, yet.”
“What do we do if he’s not there?”
Aaron resisted the impulse to look her up and down again. When she came out of the washroom she’d changed into a pair of black trousers and a light green sweater with a V-neck. Her hair was washed and springy. No cosmetic scales on her face, but her complexion glowed. Clearly she was ready for her chance to reignite some of the old passion should he be there. She’d kept her gaiamotes closed up fairly tight since leaving Kajaani, but the occasional lapse had allowed Aaron to sense a lot of anticipation fermenting in her mind.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Time isn’t in our favour.”
“And if he is there? What if he doesn’t want to be hauled back to Ellezelin?”
Just for an instant something stirred Aaron’s his mind. Certainty. He did know what was going to happen afterwards. The knowledge was all there waiting for him. Ready for the moment. “I’ll just tell him what I have to. After that, it’ll be up to hi
m.”
Corrie-Lyn gave him a mildly doubtful stare before tucking in to her first bacon sandwich.
***
Camp, Aaron decided, was a rather grand description for the place where the team working in the Olhava province has set themselves up. A couple of ground crawlers were parked next to each other in the lee of some rugged foothills. Malmetal shelters had expanded out of their rear sections to provide the team with larger accommodation. But that was all.
Aaron parked a few metres away, and they both pulled on their bulky surface suits. Once his bubble helmet had sealed, Aaron went into the tiny airlock, and waited for the outside door to slide aside. He was immediately hit by the wind. Ice fragments swirled round him. He walked carefully down the ramp, holding the handrail tight. The wind was squally, but he could stand upright. There were enhancer systems built in to the suit for when the storms really hit. Its main purpose was to protect him from the radiation.
Although there wasn’t too much physical effort involved, he wished he’d nudged their ground crawler closer to those of the team. He took nearly three minutes to cover the small gap and clamber into a decontamination airlock on the side of one of the shelters. Corrie-Lyn was grunting and cursing her way along behind him.
Ericilla was waiting for them in the closet-sized suit room. A short woman with a frizz of brown hair flecked with grey. She smirked as Corrie-Lyn wriggled out of her surface suit, licking her lips in merriment. “No man is worth this,” she announced.
“He is,” Corrie-Lyn assured her.
Aaron had already extended his field scan function, probing the whole camp. He’d detected four people including Ericilla. None of them were Higher.
Ericilla beckoned. “Come and meet the boys.”
Vilitar and Cytus were waiting for them, standing in the middle of the shelter’s cluttered lounge like an army of two on detention parade. Nerina, Vilitar’s husband gave Corrie-Lyn a weary look.
“Oh shit,” Corrie-Lyn said despondently.
Nerina poked Vilitar in the chest. “Well that lets you off…”
The two men relaxed, grinning sheepishly. Aaron sensed the tension drain away. Suddenly everyone was smiling and happy to see them.
“I thought there were five in your team,” Aaron said.
“Earl is down in the dig,” Ericilla said. “The sensor bots picked up a promising signal last night. He said that was more important than, well—” The way she left it hanging told them she was on Earl’s side.
“I’d like to see him, please,” Corrie-Lyn said.
“Why not?” Ericilla said. “You’ve come this far.”
It was another trip outside. The entrance to the dig was on the other side of the shelters. A simple metal cube housing a small fusion generator and several power cells. An angled force field protected it from Hanko’s venomous elements. There was a decontamination airlock to keep the radioactive air out so the team’s equipment could work without suffering contamination and degradation. Big filter units filled the rest of the entrance cube, maintaining the clean atmosphere. The temperature inside was still cold enough to keep the permafrost frozen. Aaron and Corrie-Lyn kept their helmets on inside.
Excavation bots had dug a passage down at forty-five degrees, hacking crude steps into the rocky ground. Thick blue air hoses were strung along the roof, clustered round a half-metre extraction tube that buzzed as it propelled grains of frozen mud along to be dumped on a pile half a kilometre away. Polyphoto strips hanging off the cables cast a slightly greenish glow. Aaron trod carefully as they went down. The solid ground around him blocked any detailed field scan.
The bottom of the crude stairs must have been seven metres below ground level. Ericilla explained they’d cut into a lakebed which had filled with sediment during the post-attack monsoons. There were several people from the surrounding area who had never made it to Anagaska.
The passage opened out into a chamber ten metres wide, and three high, supported by force fields. Discarded arm-length bots were strewn over the floor with power cables snaking round them. A couple of hologram projectors filled it with a pervasive sparkly monochrome light. Ice crystals glinted in the sediment contained behind the force field.
There was an opening on the far side. Aaron’s field scan showed him another cavern, with a great deal of electronic activity inside. Someone was in there. Someone who could shield his body from the scan.
“Holy Ozzie,” Aaron breathed.
Corrie-Lyn gave him a curious look and strode into the second chamber. It was larger than the first, a third of its wall surface was covered with excavator bots. They looked like a mass of giant maggots slowly wiggling their way forward into the gelid sediment. A huge lacework of tiny pipes emerging from their tails led back to the start of the extraction tube. Silver sensor discs floated through the air, bobbing about to take readings. Silhouetted by the retinue of cybernetic activity was a lone figure wearing a dark-green surface suit. Corrie-Lyn took a couple of hesitant steps forward.
The man turned, lifting his bubble helmet off. His face had a Latin shading rather than Inigo’s North European pallor, and the hair was dark brown rather than ginger. But apart from that, the features hadn’t been altered much. Aaron thought it a particularly inferior disguise, as if he was just wearing make up and a bad wig.
“Inigo!” Corrie-Lyn whispered.
“Of all the Restoration projects on all the dead worlds in the galaxy, you had to walk into mine.”
Corrie-Lyn sank to her knees, sobbing helplessly.
“Hey girl,” Inigo said sympathetically. He knelt down beside her, and flipped the outer seals on her helmet.
“Where’ve you been, you bastard!” she screamed. Her fist smacked into her chest. “Why did you leave me? Why did you leave us?”
He wiped some of the tears from her cheeks, then leant forward and kissed her. Corrie-Lyn almost fought against it, then suddenly she was wrapping her arms around him, kissing furiously. The fabric of their suits made scratching noises as they rubbed together.
Aaron waited a diplomatic minute, then unsealed his own helmet. The air was bitingly cold, and held the strangest smell of rancid mint. His breath emerged in grey streamers. “You’re a hard man to find.”
Inigo and Corrie-Lyn broke apart.
“Don’t listen to him,” Corrie-Lyn said urgently. “Whatever he wants, refuse. He’s insane. He’s killed hundreds of people to find you.”
“Slight exaggeration,” Aaron said. “No more than twenty, surely.”
Inigo’s steel-grey eyes narrowed. “I can sense what you are. Who do you represent?”
“Ah,” Aaron gave a weak smile. “I’m not sure.” But we’re about to find out. He could feel the knowledge stirring in his mind again. He was about to know what to do next.
“I won’t go back,” Inigo said simply.
“What happened?” Corrie-Lyn pleaded.
Aaron’s u-shadow reported a call was coming in from Director Ansan Purillar. Transferred across the hundreds of desolate kilometres from Kajaani by the small sturdy beacons to enter the camp where it finally trickled down into the excavation through a single strand of fibre optic cable.
“Yes, Director?” Aaron said.
Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other a puzzled glance, then looked at Aaron.
“Do you have some colleagues following you?” Ansan Purillar asked.
“No.”
“Well there’s a ship coming through the atmosphere above us, and it won’t respond to any of our signals.”
Aaron felt his blood chill. His combat routines came on line as he instinctively shielded himself with the strongest force field his biononics could produce. “Get out.”
“What?”
“Get out of the base. Everyone out. Now!”
“I think you’d better explain just exactly what is going on.”
“Shit!” His u-shadow used the tenuous link to the base to establish a tiny channel to the Artful Dodger’s smartcore. “Tell them,”
he yelled at Corrie-Lyn.
She flinched. “Director, please leave. We haven’t been honest with you.” She turned to Inigo. “Please?” she hissed.
He gave a reluctant sigh. “Ansan, this is Earl. Do as Aaron says. Get as many as you can into the starship. Everyone else will have to use the ground cruisers.”
“But—”
The Artful Dodger’s smartcore scanned the sky above Kajaani. Its sweep was hampered considerably by the protective force field over the base. But it showed Aaron a small mass thirty kilometres high, holding position above the thick outer cloud blanket. “Come and get us,” he told the smartcore. “Fast.” His exovision showed him the starship powering up. Flight systems took barely a second to come on line. Its force field hardened. Directly overhead, an enormously powerful gamma-ray laser struck the base’s force field. A scarlet corona flared around the puncture point, and the beam sliced into the generator building.
Complete force field failure was an emergency situation which had been incorporated into the base’s design. Secondary force fields snapped on over the cottages and science blocks, almost in time to protect them from the first awesome pressure surge. Several sheets of ice crystals hammered against the walls, drilling holes in the grass. Staff caught outside screamed and flung themselves down as the impacts battered them. It was over in seconds as the re-trapped air stilled. When they looked up they could see the parkland being scoured of grass and bushes by the victorious wind. Their starship had been cut in two by the gamma-laser strike, uneven sections lying twisted on the pad as the cold storm buffeted it about.
Beside it, the Artful Dodger rose into the maelstrom of radioactive destruction which cascaded across the base the instant the main force field vanished. Sensors showed it a pinprick of dazzling white light searing its way downward, accelerating at fifty gees. The ship’s smartcore blasted away at the weapon with neutron lasers and quantum distortion pulses. Nothing happened. The smartcore started to change course. It wasn’t fast enough. The lightpoint struck the Artful Dodger amidships, unaffected by the force field. Enormous tidal forces tore at the ship’s structure, destroying its integrity. Even spars reinforced by bonding fields were ripped out of alignment. Ordinary components were mangled beyond recognition. The entire hull buckled and imploded to a third of its original size. Then the Hawking m-sink punched through the other side of the ship and streaked onwards into the ground. Its intense spark of light vanished. The surrounding ground heaved as if Kajaani had been hit by a massive earthquake, annihilating the remaining buildings and structures. All the secondary force fields died, leaving the collapsing cottages and science blocks exposed to the planet’s malignant atmosphere.
The Dreaming Page 64
