The Temporal Void (79 page)

That, along with the casualty figures and violence, was going to bring a colossal amount of political pressure on Cleric Conservator Ethan. Possibly an irresistible amount.

‘She did remarkably well for a complete novice without a single enrichment,’ he commented.

‘I have a scan of the team that helped her.’

Marius examined the file images that arrived in his storage lacuna. Eight figures surrounded by flares of energy, battling it out with appalling savagery. Three of them – two men and a woman – had exceptionally powerful biononics, he noted. His u-shadow began to run identification checks through Accelerator files – which produced some very interesting results.

‘Thank you,’ Marius said. ‘I’ll send some replacements to reinforce you. They should be there in a day. Meanwhile, please don’t forget your objective. Just because she escaped this time doesn’t mean we give up the hunt. You have an advantage now, the welcome team is out of the picture, along with most of our serious opponents.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Marius’s u-shadow opened a secure link to the Cat’s ship. ‘I have a new assignment for you.’

‘Is this before or after I eliminate Troblum for you, and find Inigo?’

‘Troblum is beginning to look irrelevant. And I’m waiting to see if Inigo survived.’

‘Aren’t you the capable one, darling?’

A flicker of annoyance crossed Marius’s features. He disliked the way she irritated him, and that it was all deliberate. ‘Did you access the tussle on Viotia?’

‘Yes. Hardly the clash of Titans.’

‘Actually, it was rather interesting. Living Dream found Araminta. She got away. She was helped by a team of Knights Guardian.’

‘Really? I trust they won the fight.’

He smiled down at the ultradrive starship he was watching. The Cat was remarkably easy to influence. ‘Better yet, it looks like they’re working for an old friend of yours, Oscar Monroe.’

‘Oscar the Martyr? I didn’t even know he’d been re-lifed.’

‘Some time ago, actually. And living the quiet life ever since. Interesting psychology. Who would suspect him of getting involved in events again?’

‘Which makes him ideal for low-visibility operations.’

‘Quite. And there’s a very small number of people he’d do that for. After all, he would only sign on for a worthy cause.’

‘Brilliant deduction, my dear. No one would expect him to be working for Paula.’

‘Please remember our prime concern is to deliver Araminta to Living Dream.’

‘Was that a pun?’

‘Not intentional.’

‘I’m on my way.’

After the link closed, Marius regarded the starship which the Delivery Man had parked on the seamless rock for several minutes. He decided he was wasting his time. The ship was probably a contingency – the Conservatives didn’t know if Aaron and Inigo had survived any more than he did. In which case there were passive sensors he could deploy to watch the ship remotely. He used a coin card to pay his tab, and glided away from the table.

*

Troblum backed out of the compartment, bending as low as he could, yet still managing to knock the back of his head on the malmetal rim as he went through.

‘Ouch!’ He rubbed at the point, though it was hard bending his arm that far back. Every muscle ached. He was sure his calf muscle was about to cramp again from the awkward position he’d maintained while supervising the bots. He’d ignored the growing discomfort last time, and his biononic medical functions had to deal with the sudden flare of pain as his whole leg seized up. Even now it was difficult to put his full weight on it. As a consequence, the
Mellanie’s Redemption
was now operating with a two-thirds internal gravity field. He knew that wasn’t good, that his body shouldn’t grow too accustomed to an easier environment. It was a mistake he’d made a couple of times before on long flights; mistakes which had taken too long to rectify in the medical chamber.

The malmetal door flowed shut. Technically it was the engine bay door, but necessity had required some internal remodelling of the starship’s layout. Two of the midsection cargo holds were now incorporated into the engine bay, along with a small section of companionway. The expanded volume was essential to accommodate the new ultradrive. With the components finally identified, he’d broken open the hyperdrive and grafted the two machines into a single unit. Even with the engineeringbots and low gravity it had been difficult manoeuvring the modules into place. Several bulkheads had been chopped up and dumped out of the airlocks. He’d been worried that the whole new drive system might even intrude in the cabin. But thankfully the ship had been spared that.

‘There you are,’ Catriona Saleeb chided in her deep voice as he returned to the main cabin. She was pacing about, dressed in silky shorts that came down to her knees and some kind of loose top with gossamer-thin shoulder straps.

‘We’ve been worried,’ Trisha agreed from the galley section, where she was bending over to sniff some of the dishes the culinary unit had produced. White bikini bottoms stretched tight over her buttocks, the navy-blue T-shirt she wore above them was equally snug. Troblum always enjoyed how powerful she looked in constricting clothes.

‘It’s not easy,’ he said as he slumped down into a chair. A servicebot brought the first set of plates over.

‘Have you finished?’ Trisha asked. She walked alongside the bot to sit on the floor beside his chair. Her hand stroked Troblum’s cheek as the OCtattoos on her face glowed faintly, creating an alluring shading. A phantom perception shivered pleasurably down his nerves as the I-sentient personality meshed with his sensory enrichments.

‘Not yet,’ he admitted. ‘There’s another hundred components to integrate. But they’re peripherals. The bots can handle that now they’re catalogued. I’ve assembled the principal modules. Initial system functionality check was positive.’

‘Well done you,’ Catriona purred.

Troblum started on the pile of salmon flakes marinated in sweetened soy sauce and rice wine on a bed of brown galie rice. Premium-strength Dutch lager washed them down well. Now he was relaxing into the chair he felt supremely tired. He had spent days assembling the ultradrive, and biononics had kept him awake for every hour of it. Now he badly needed to rest.

Catriona knelt beside Trisha. ‘You should get to sleep, but first you have to turn the gravity back up.’

‘In a minute,’ he assured her.

Catriona put her arm round Trisha, slipping her hand up inside the tight T-shirt. Her nose nuzzled Troblum’s neck, almost tickling. ‘Why don’t you watch us?’ she murmured. ‘That’ll help you relax.’

‘I don’t need help,’ he said as the servicebot produced a big lasagne garnished with garlic butter dough balls. ‘But you two keep going.’

Trisha grinned, and turned to kiss Catriona. The two of them became more ardent as Troblum chomped away contentedly. He watched them, but shut down any sensory reception from the I-sentient personalities until he’d finished tasting the food. The two together weren’t a good mix – something else he knew from experience. Once again he regretted losing Howard Liang. Without the male I-sentient personality to twin his sensorium with he’d have to work out how to fully appreciate the two girls making love. Twinning with a female body unnerved him somehow. He didn’t handle out-of-the-ordinary well. Though his social acceptance monitor program kept informing him he should make an effort to be more accepting, and try new things. This was something he’d have to solve before his flight to the Drasix cluster.

He was halfway through the slab of lasagne when he told the smartcore to establish a TD link to the unisphere, using an ultra secure one-time node. Even if the Accelerators had located his u-shadow’s monitor emplacements, there was no way they could track his physical location though the link.

‘Have you found Paula Myo?’ he asked his u-shadow.

‘No. There are no reported sightings within any of the accredited unisphere news chronicles, nor the gossip journals. The Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate lists her as currently unavailable.’

‘Shit.’
Oh well, I tried. That was the right thing to do.
Still, leaving the Commonwealth with the Cat on the loose didn’t sit right.

He popped four dough balls into his mouth, sucking air down as the hot garlic butter ran across his tongue.
I could just shotgun everything I know about the Accelerators and what they’ve done. Paula would pick that up. But even I don’t know what the swarm was meant to imprison.

He still worried about how the unisphere was compromised. Although he was convinced he was beyond anybody’s reach now.

Shotgunning is probably the right thing
. He just hated drawing so much attention to himself. Although, if he was truly leaving, it didn’t matter.

Trisha let out a startled gasp. Troblum glanced down as Catriona sniggered. Catriona could be impressively kinky at times, and she’d already got Trisha’s little blue T-shirt off. That wasn’t what had astounded Trisha this time. She was sitting up frowning as the green OCtattoos on her face began to glow brighter than ever. Then the seething pattern began to slip down her neck to flow across her chest and along her arms. She held them up in front of her as Catriona backed off fast.

‘What’s happening?’ Troblum asked the smartcore.

‘Contaminated communication link,’ it replied, which fired Troblum right out of his fatigue lethargy.

‘Can you counter it?’

‘I can close the link. The source is within the unisphere which I do not have the ability to deal with.’

‘Is it trying to contaminate you?’

‘No.’

‘If you detect any such attempt, cut the link immediately.’

Trisha was now a three-dimensional human silhouette of writhing green curlicues. Her features vanished, and the shape shrank rapidly. New colours bled in. Tangerine and turquoise lines wove their way through the thicket of green until there simply was no more green. Hanging in the air directly ahead of a badly startled Troblum, tangerine and turquoise sine waves rushed back towards their vanishing point.

It triggered a deep memory, not in a storage lacuna but a perfectly natural recollection. ‘I know you,’ he said.

‘Congratulations,’ the eternity pattern said. ‘You really do know your history.’

‘The Sentient Intelligence, you abandoned us a long time ago.’

‘I didn’t leave, I was declared persona non grata by ANA.’

‘Oh. Everyone thought you’d gone post-physical.’ Troblum could barely believe he was talking to the SI. It had grown out of the huge arrays that the first CST commercial wormholes had used. Their programs had been so complex, with so many genetic algorithms they had become self-aware. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie who owned the arrays agreed to provide the newly evolved batch of Sentient Intelligences an independent super-array to operate in. The deal was for the SI to then write stable software which would operate the wormhole generators without any further evolution. The deal also included an independent planet where the super-array would be sited.

A lot of people in the Commonwealth questioned if the SI counted as truly alive, an old argument that never had an answer. But the SI and the Commonwealth had got along side by side without any problem until ANA came on line. ANA claimed the SI did not qualify as a genuine living entity, and that it was interfering in Commonwealth political affairs; a suspicion which had been given a lot of credence by ANA’s exposure of various SI undercover scouts in strategic positions. Contact had been abandoned or cut off depending on which account and conspiracy theory you accessed.

‘No,’ the SI said. ‘I am still resolutely physical. The systems I operate within would have to be transformed for me to evolve further.’

‘Can’t you do that?’

‘Yes. Are you familiar with the phrase: for everything a season?’

‘Uh, not really. But I understand it.’

‘For the moment I remain content with my current existence. However, like several species, I am concerned by your proposed Pilgrimage into the Void. That threat is enough to upset the status quo between myself and ANA.’

‘Not my Pilgrimage.’

‘You work for the Faction which engineered it.’

So how the crap did it know that?
‘How removed are you from our affairs?’

‘Not as much as ANA would like, nowhere near as much as conspiracy theorists would like to believe. As always, I observe and interpret. That is my function.’

‘You’re still in the unisphere, then?’

‘I have some monitoring capacity left. After all, I predate ANA by several centuries. I am not easy to purge from existing systems.’

‘So what do you want with me?’

‘There is a lot of attention focused on you. You wish to contact Paula Myo, your u-shadow has been trying to locate her. Why?’

Troblum wasn’t going to answer that. He didn’t even have proof that he was talking to the SI. It would be easy enough for the Accelerators to pull a stunt like this; and they knew of his interest in the Starflyer War. ‘I have information for her.’

‘Is it relevant to the current situation?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will it prevent the Pilgrimage?’

‘It will weaken the Accelerator Faction. I don’t know how badly that will affect the Pilgrimage.’

‘Very well, I will establish a secure link for you.’

‘No! I want to see her in person.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t trust you.’

‘How very unoriginal.’

‘That’s the way it is.’

‘She is en route to an unregistered star system.’

‘Why, what’s there?’

‘If you are still working for the Accelerators that information will help them.’

‘I’m not. And you contacted me.’

‘I did.’

‘I’m not going to some unregistered system. I don’t know what’s there.’

‘Very well. What about Oscar Monroe?’

‘What about him?’

‘You tried to contact him on Orakum.’

‘Yes, I trust Oscar.’

‘Smart choice. He is on Viotia, in Colwyn City.’

‘Okay. Thank you.’

‘Now you know that will you seek him out?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

*