The Evolutionary Void Read online

  Peter F. Hamilton

  THE EVOLUTIONARY VOID

  PART THREE OF THE VOID TRILOGY

  MACMILLAN

  Contents

  1

  Justine: Year Three Reset

  2

  Inigo’s Sixteenth Dream

  3

  Inigo’s Twenty-First Dream

  4

  Inigo’s Twenty-Sixth Dream

  5

  Inigo’s Twenty-Ninth Dream

  6

  Inigo’s Thirty-Third Dream

  7

  Inigo’s Forty-Seventh Dream: The Waterwalker’s Triumph

  8

  Inigo’s Last Dream

  9

  Justine: Year Forty-Five

  10

  Justine: Year Forty-Five, Day Thirty-One

  11

  12

  1

  The starship had no name; it didn’t have a serial number, nor even a marque. Only one of its kind had ever been built. As no more would ever be required, no designation was needed, it was simply the ship.

  It streaked through the substructure of spacetime at fifty-nine lightyears an hour, the fastest anything built by humans had ever travelled. Navigation at that awesome velocity was by quantum interstice similarity interpretation, which determined the relative location of mass in the real universe beyond. This alleviated the use of crude hysradar, or any other sensor that might possibly be detected. The extremely sophisticated ultradrive which powered it along might have reached even greater speeds if a considerable fraction of its phenomenal energy wasn’t used for fluctuation suppression. That meant there was no tell-tale distortion amid the quantum fields to betray its position to other starships that might wish to hunt it.

  As well as its formidable stealth ability the ship was big; a fat ovoid over six hundred metres long, and two hundred metres across at the centre. But its real advantage came from its armaments; there were weapons on board that could knock out half a dozen Commonwealth Navy Capital-class ships whilst barely stirring out of standby mode. Weapons which had only been verified once. The ship had flown over ten thousand lightyears from the Greater Commonwealth to test them so as to avoid detection. For millennia to come, primitive alien civilizations in that section of the galaxy would worship as gods the colourful nebulas expanding across the interstellar wastes.

  Even now, sitting in the ship’s clean hemispherical cabin with the flight-path imagery playing quietly in her exovision, Neskia remembered the stars splitting asunder with a little shiver of excitement, and apprehension. It had been one thing to run the clandestine fabrication station for the Accelerator Faction, dispatching ships and equipment to various agents and representatives. That was easy: cold machinery that functioned with a precision she could take pride in. But seeing the weapons active was slightly different. She’d felt a level of perturbation she hadn’t known in over two centuries, ever since she became Higher and began her inward migration. Not that she questioned her belief in the Accelerators, it was just the sheer potency of the weapons which struck her at some primitive level that could never be fully exorcised from the human psyche. She was awed by the power of what she alone commanded.

  Other elements of her animal past had been quietly and effectively erased. First with biononics and acceptance of Higher cultural philosophy, culminating in her embrace of Accelerator Faction tenets. Then she committed to a subtle rejection of her existing body form, as if to emphasize her new beliefs. Her skin now was a shimmering metallic-grey, the epidermal cells imbued with a contemporary semi-organic fibre that established itself in perfect symbiosis. The face that had caused many a man to turn in admiration when she was younger was now a more efficient flatter profile; with big saucer eyes biononically modified to look across a multitude of spectra. Her neck also had been stretched, its increased flexibility allowing her head a much greater manoeuvrability. Underneath the gently shimmering skin her muscles had been strengthened to a level which would allow her to keep up with a terrestrial panther on its kill run, and that was before biononic augmentation kicked in.

  However, it was her mind which had undergone the greatest evolution. She’d stopped short of bioneural profiling simply because she didn’t need any genetic reinforcement to her beliefs. Worship was a crude term for thought processes, but she was certainly devoted to her cause. She had dedicated herself completely to the Accelerators at a fully emotional level. The old human concerns and biological imperatives simply didn’t affect her any more: her intellect was involved solely with the Faction and its goal. For the past fifty years their projects and plans were all that triggered her satisfaction and suffering. Her integration was total; she was the epitome of Accelerator values. Which was why she’d been chosen to fly the ship by the Faction leader, Ilanthe, on this mission. That, and that alone, made her content.

  The ship began to slow as it approached the coordinate Neskia had supplied the smartcore with. Speed ebbed away until it hung inertly in transdimensional suspension while her navigation display showed the Sol system twenty-three lightyears away. The distance was comfortable. They were outside the comprehensive sensor mesh surrounding humanity’s birthworld, yet she could be there in less than thirty minutes.

  Neskia ordered the smartcore to run a passive scan. Other than interstellar dust and the odd frozen comet, there was no detectable mass within three lightyears. Certainly there were no ships. However, the scan picked up a tiny specific anomaly, which caused her to smile in tight satisfaction. All around the ship ultradrives were holding themselves in transdimensional suspension, undetectable except for that one deliberate signal. You had to know what to search for to find it, and nobody would be looking for anything out here, let alone ultradrives. The ship confirmed there were eight thousand of the machines holding position as they awaited instruction. Neskia established a communication link to them, and ran a swift function check. The Swarm was ready.

  She settled down to wait for Ilanthe’s next call.

  *

  The ExoProtectorate Council meeting ended and Kazimir cancelled the link to the perceptual conference room. He was alone in his office atop Pentagon II, with nowhere to go. The deterrence fleet had to be launched – there was no question of that now. Nothing else could deal with the approaching Ocisen Empire armada without an unacceptable loss of life on both sides. And if news that the Ocisens were backed up by Prime warships leaked out . . . And it would. Ilanthe would see to that.

  No choice.

  He straightened the recalcitrant silver braid collar on his dress uniform one last time as he walked over to the sweeping window, and looked down on the lush parkland of Babuyan Atoll. A gentle radiance was shining down on it, emitted from the crystal dome curving overhead. Even so, he could still see Icalanise’s misty crescent through the ersatz dawn. The sight was one he’d seen countless times during his tenure. He’d always taken it for granted. Now he wondered if he’d ever see it again. For a true military man the thought wasn’t unusual, in fact it had quite a proud pedigree.

  His u-shadow opened a link to Paula. ‘We’re deploying the deterrence fleet against the Ocisens,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh dear. I take it the last capture mission didn’t work then?’

  ‘No. The Prime ship exploded when we took it out of hyperspace.’

  ‘Damn. Suicide isn’t part of the Prime’s psychological makeup.’

  ‘You know that and I know that. ANA:Governance knows that, too, of course, but as always it needs proof, not circumstantial evidence.’

  ‘Are you going with the fleet?’

  Kazimir couldn’t help but smile at the question. If only you knew. ‘Yes. I’m going with the fleet.’

  ‘Good luck. I want you to try and turn this again
st her. They’ll be out there watching, any chance you can detect them first?’

  ‘We’ll certainly try.’ He squinted at the industrial stations circling round High Angel, a slim sparkling silver bracelet against the starfield. ‘I heard about Ellezelin.’

  ‘Yeah. Digby didn’t have any options. ANA is sending a forensic team. If they can work out what Chatfield was carrying, we might be able to haul the Accelerators into court before you reach the Ocisens.’

  ‘I don’t think so. But I have some news for you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The Lindau has left the Hanko system.’

  ‘Where is it heading?’

  ‘That’s the interesting thing. As far as I can make out, they’re flying to the Spike.’

  ‘The Spike? Are you sure?’

  ‘That’s a projection of their current course. It’s held steady for seven hours now.’

  ‘But that . . . No.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kazimir asked, obscurely amused by the Investigator’s reaction.

  ‘I simply don’t believe that Ozzie would intervene in the Commonwealth again, not like this. And he’d certainly never employ someone like Aaron.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll grant you that one. But there are other humans in the Spike.’

  ‘Yes, there are. Care to name one?’

  Kazimir gave up. ‘So what’s Ozzie’s connection?’

  ‘I can’t think.’

  ‘The Lindau isn’t flying as fast as it’s capable of. It probably got damaged on Hanko. You could easily get to the Spike ahead of them, or even intercept.’

  ‘Tempting, but I’m not going to risk it. I’ve wasted far too long on my personal obsession already, I can’t risk another wild-goose chase at this point.’

  ‘All right, well I’m going to be occupied for the next few days. If it’s a real emergency you can contact me.’

  ‘Thank you. My priority now has got to be securing the Second Dreamer.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘And you, Kazimir. Godspeed.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He remained by the window for several seconds after he’d closed the link to Paula, then activated his biononic field interface function, which meshed with the Navy’s T-sphere. He teleported to the wormhole terminus orbiting outside the gigantic alien arkship, and through that emerged into the Kerensk terminus. One more teleport jump, and he was inside Hevelius Island, one of Earth’s T-sphere stations, floating seventy kilometres above the South Pacific.

  ‘Ready,’ he told ANA:Governance.

  ANA opened the restricted wormhole to Proxima Centauri, four point three lightyears away, and Kazimir stepped through. The Alpha Centauri system had been a big disappointment when Ozzie and Nigel opened their very first long-range wormhole there in 2053. Given the binary composed G and K class stars and planets had already been detected by standard astronomical procedures, everyone was fervently hoping to find a Human-congruent world. There weren’t any. But given they’d now successfully proved wormholes could be established across interstellar distances, Ozzie and Nigel went on to secure additional funding for the company which would rapidly evolve into Compression Space Transport and establish the Commonwealth. Nobody ever went back to Alpha Centauri; and nobody had ever even been to Proxima Centauri, with its small M-class star it was never going to have an H-congruent planet. That made it the perfect location for ANA to construct and base the ‘deterrence fleet’.

  Kazimir materialized at the centre of a simple transparent dome, measuring two kilometres across at the base. It was a tiny blister on the surface of a barren, airless planet, orbiting fifty million kilometres out from the diminutive red dwarf. Gravity was about two-thirds standard. Low hills all around created a rumpled horizon, the grey-brown regolith splashed a dreary maroon by Proxima’s ineffectual radiance.

  His feet were standing on what appeared to be a dull grey metal. Except, when he tried to focus on the featureless surface, it twisted away, as if there was something separating his boot soles from the physical structure. His biononic field scan function revealed massive forces starting to stir around him, rising up out of the strange floor.

  ‘Are you ready?’ ANA:Governance asked.

  Kazimir gritted his teeth. ‘Do it.’

  As Kazimir had assured both Gore and Paula, the deterrence fleet was no bluff. It represented the peak of ANA’s technological ability, and was at least a match to the ships of the warrior Raiel. However, he did concede that calling it a fleet was a slight exaggeration.

  The problem, inevitably, was who to trust with such an enormous array of firepower. The more crew involved, the greater the chance of misuse, or leakage to a Faction. Ironically, the technology itself provided the answer. It only required a single controlling consciousness. ANA declined to assume command on ethical grounds, refusing to ascend to essential omnipotence. Therefore the task always fell upon the Chief Admiral.

  The forces within the base swarmed round him, rushing in like a tidal wave; reading him at a quantum level then converting the memory. Kazimir transformed: his purely physical structure shifting to an equivalent energy function encapsulated within a single point that intruded into spacetime. His ‘bulk’, the energy signature he had become, was folded deep within the quantum fields, utilizing a similar construction principle to ANA itself. It contained his mind and memories, along with some basic manipulator and sensory abilities, and unlike ANA it wasn’t a fixed point.

  Kazimir used his new sensory inputs to examine the intra-spatial lattice immediately surrounding him, reviewing the waiting array of transformed functions stored inside the dome’s complex exotic matter mechanisms. He started to select the ones he might need for the mission, incorporating them into his own signature; a process he always equated to some primitive soldier walking through an armoury, pulling weapons and shields off the shelves.

  Ultimately he incorporated eight hundred and seventeen functions into his primary signature. Function twenty-seven was an ftl ability, allowing him to shift his entire energy signature through hyperspace. As he no longer retained any mass, the velocity he could achieve was orders of magnitude above an ultradrive.

  Kazimir launched from the unnamed planet, heading for the Ocisen Fleet at a hundred lightyears an hour. Then he accelerated.

  *

  The Delivery Man smiled at the steward who came down the cabin collecting drinks from the passengers as the starship prepared to enter the planet’s atmosphere. It was a job much better suited to a bot, or some inbuilt waste chute. Yet starliner companies always maintained a human crew. The vast majority of humans (non-Higher, anyway) relished that little personal contact during the voyage. Besides, human staff added a touch of refinement, the elegance of a bygone age.

  He accessed the ship’s sensors as the atmosphere built up around them. It was raining on Fanallisto’s second largest southern continent. A huge gunmetal-grey mass of clouds powered their way inland, driven by winds that had built to an alarming velocity across the empty wastes of the Antarctic ocean. Cities were activating their weather-dome force fields, the rain was so heavy. Flood warnings were going out to the burgeoning agricultural zones.

  Fanallisto was in its second century of development. A pleasant enough world, unremarkable in the firmament of External Worlds. It had a population of tens of millions, occupying relatively bland urban zones. Each one of which had a Living Dream thane, and a respectable number of followers. The prospect of Pilgrimage was creating a lot of tension and strife among the population; a situation which hadn’t been helped by recent events on Viotia. Acts of violence against the thanes had increased with each passing day of the crisis.

  In itself that was nothing special. Such conflicts were on the up right across the Greater Commonwealth. However, on Fanallisto, several instances of violence had been countered by people enriched by biononics. The Conservative Faction was keen to discover what was so special about Fanallisto that it needed support and protection from suspected Accelerator agents.

&nb
sp; As he’d made quite clear to the Faction, the Delivery Man didn’t care. However, a Conservative Faction agent was now on Fanallisto, and standard operating procedure for field deployment was to provide independent fall-back support. Which was why the Delivery Man hadn’t gone straight back to London from Purlap spaceport. Instead he’d taken a flight to Trangor and caught the next starship to Fanallisto. At least he wasn’t part of the active operation. The other agent didn’t even know he was here.

  The commercial starship fell through the sodden atmosphere to land at Rapall spaceport. The Delivery Man disembarked along with all the other passengers, then rendezvoused with his luggage in the terminal building. The two medium-sized cases drifted after him on regrav and parked themselves in a cab’s cargo hold. He ordered the cab to the commercial section of town, a short trip in the little regrav capsule as it flitted round beneath the force-field dome. From there he walked round to another cab pad, and flew over to the Foxglove Hotel on the east side of town using a different identity.

  He booked in to room 225, using a third identity certificate and an untraceable cash coin to prepay for a ten-day stay. It took four minutes to infiltrate the room’s cybersphere node, where he installed various routines to make it appear as though the room was occupied. A nice professional touch, he felt. The small culinary unit would produce meals, which the maidbot would then empty down the toilet in the morning when it made the daily housekeeping visit. The spore shower would be used, as would various other gadgets and fittings; the air-conditioning temperature would be changed, the node would place a few calls across the unisphere. Power consumption would vary.

  He slid both cases into the solitary closet just for the sake of appearance, and activated their defence mechanisms. Whatever was inside them, he didn’t want to know, though he guessed at some pretty aggressive hardware. Once he’d confirmed they were operating properly, he left the room and called a cab down to the front of the hotel’s lobby. It wouldn’t be him who came back to collect the cases – that would set a pattern. He was grateful for that operational protocol. Following Justine’s last dream, all he wanted to do was get back to his family. He’d already decided he would be turning down any more Conservative Faction requests over the next couple of weeks, no matter how much warning they gave him, and how politely they asked. Events were building to a climax, and there was only one place a true father should be.

 
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