Текст книги "The Abyss Beyond Dreams"

Автор книги: Peter F. Hamilton

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Текущая страница: 43 (всего у книги 44 страниц)

‘Don’t worry. I’m not a Faller.’

‘A what?’

‘One of the alien-duplicated Ibu and Rojas entities.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked in trepidation.

‘Nigel Sheldon.’

‘What the fuck?’ She could feel Joey’s surprise spilling through the gaiafield to swill round her mind.

‘Turn round.’

Laura froze. Monsters were everywhere. Monsters in the dark. Monsters lurking in places you thought were free of them.

She peeled a wrist stkpad off the grey fuselage, and contracted her already overtaxed abdominal muscles. Shock was like an electric current charging across her skin. A hundred metres away, a triangular-shaped spaceship, smaller than Shuttle Fourteen, was holding station. In her reference, it was the one spinning.

‘Where did you come from?’ she asked.

‘I came into the Void to find you. It’s taken a while; I’m sorry about that. But I’m here now.’

‘Oh, bollocks. The Commonwealth knows we’re here?’

‘The Raiel told me. Look, I’m going EVA to help you, so just don’t panic. Okay?’

‘Okay.’ She saw a small silver-grey figure float away from the spaceship. It was wearing a neater version of the free-manoeuvre harness that the exopods carried. Tiny puffs of vapour squirted from nozzles as it approached.

‘You can tell Joey he’s right. Time is badly screwed up in here.’

‘What?’ Laura said.

Joey’s jolt of incredulity pulsed through the gaiafield.

‘Did he really just say that?’ Joey asked.

The gas jets fired again, seemingly slowing the figure’s rotation. ‘Joey is stuck to the alien sphere; the Rojas and Ibu copies did that to him,’ Nigel told her. ‘It’s drawing him in.’

‘Joey!’ she cried. ‘Joey, no. He’s lying, isn’t he? He’s lying. This is part of their trick.’

‘Sorry,’ Joey told her with a sensation of guilty relief. He expanded their gaiafield union to include Nigel.

‘Joey,’ Nigel said, ‘after you open the hatch, I’m going to extract your secure memory. When you’re re-lifed, you’ll have complete continuity.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What do you mean, open the hatch?’ Laura asked.

‘He’s overridden the safeties,’ Nigel said. ‘He’s going to let you in so you can use the exopod, but he won’t survive. It was a smart move, Joey. You don’t want to be consumed by the alien. It’s a particularly nasty nanotechnology bioweapon.’

‘Cool,’ Joey said. ‘So if you know all this, we’re not travelling backwards, are we? We have to be in a temporal loop, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wow. Shit, how many times?’

‘I’m here now, Joey. This is the last time. I promise.’

‘Okay. Thanks.’

Gas poured out of Nigel’s free-manoeuvre harness. He stopped a metre away from Laura. There was a short tether in his hand. He clipped it to her suit’s utility strip. ‘We’re secure. You can disengage your stkpads now.’

‘Oh, bollocks.’ Laura had just realized what they’d been talking about. A temporal loop. That was the Forest’s peculiar quantum signature. Some weird traitor part of her mind had been hoping this was a trick, that the Rojas and Ibu copies were outsmarting her, big time. Again and again and again . . . But they would never know to create a crazy myth of Nigel Sheldon arriving to save everybody – and if they did, then she had no chance of survival anyway. She twisted the remaining stkpads off and drifted free from Fourteen’s fuselage.

‘Got you,’ Nigel said. And his arms closed round her. Gas jets fired, moving them away from the shuttle. ‘Joey. Whenever you’re ready.’ They began gliding slowly along the shuttle’s long belly.

‘I’m on it. Here we go.’

Laura looked towards the flat trailing edge of the delta wings, just in time to see a massive fountain of gas streaking out into space as the airlock doors peeled back. Shuttle Fourteen began to move, propelled along a weirdly erratic course, the escaping plume of atmosphere exaggerating its original tumble. Nigel’s free-manoeuvring harness fired continuously, trying to match the shuttle’s gyrations, keeping pace with it.

There seemed to be an incredible amount of atmosphere in the EVA hangar. Then the furious vent was finally over. A cloud of twinkling ice crystals swarmed around the end of the whirling shuttle, expanding fast.

Nigel flew them over the lip of the wings, and into the open EVA hangar. Blue emergency lighting cast everything in sharp relief.

‘That worked, then,’ Joey said. ‘But I guess you knew it would, right?’

‘Yes,’ Nigel said.

Laura could feel Joey’s emotions through the gaiafield link, satisfaction and fatalism combined. Also fright. He was allowing that to show for the first time. Pain was starting to colour his thoughts now, a dull ache spreading out from his empty lungs. She detached Nigel’s safety line and grabbed a handhold. As soon as she’d steadied herself, she looked at Joey, knowing what she’d see and willing it not to be. ‘Oh, bollocks, Joey. No, no, no.’

He was stuck to the alien globe. One leg, an arm, and a third of his torso had sunk into it. The side of his head was up against the wrinkled black surface, an ear already absorbed.

Laura used the handholds to propel herself over to him.

‘Don’t touch him,’ Nigel warned.

‘Why didn’t you say? Oh, bollocks, Joey, why?’

Explosive decompression had ruptured capillaries under his skin, turning his flesh scarlet. Blood oozed through his pores and wept out from around his eyeballs. His mouth was open, also emitting a spray of fine scarlet droplets with every heartbeat. ‘Didn’t want you all messed up with sentiment. I was bodylossed the moment the fake Rojas grabbed me. And now Nigel’s here. It’s over before it begins, this time. Everything we did is worthwhile now.’

‘Joey . . .’

‘Say hi to my re-life clone. Remind me how noble I am.’

‘Joey—’

The gaiafield connection faded out. Laura stared at Joey’s awful ruined face as the blood droplets started to vacuum boil. It was only when the swelling scarlet mist started to smear her helmet that she backed away.

‘What now?’ she asked numbly.

‘You get into the other exopod,’ Nigel said. ‘I have to extract his memory store.’ He moved past her, taking a medical pack from his utility belt. As she hauled herself over the second exopod, she glimpsed Nigel applying the pack to the back of Joey’s neck. She concentrated hard on pulling herself into the exopod. Inside, the webbing floated about in a tangle, which she sorted out, clicking the buckles together to hold her in place. Power-up was a simple sequence. She watched the basic displays come alive.

‘Here,’ Nigel said. His head and shoulders had come through the hatch. He held out a small plastic box. There were smears of blood on it.

She took it from him, holding it tight. Then the exopod displays were changing. ‘What—?’

‘I’m loading some navigation data into the pod’s network,’ Nigel said. ‘I don’t want you landing in the middle of a desert. Not this time. That would just be one irony too many. I’m not giving fate the benefit of the doubt.’

‘I thought we were going back to your ship,’ she said.

‘No, I have one last thing to do. You take this exopod down to Bienvenido. Don’t worry; it’s an uneventful trip. If everything goes well, there will be a huge recovery operation in a few weeks. Stay safe till then, okay?’

‘Wait. What?’

‘Trust me.’ He backed out of the exopod.

‘But—’

‘Go. Hurry. We don’t want fake Rojas and fake Ibu to crash this party, not now, do we?’

‘Oh, bollocks.’

The hatch swung shut.

Piloting wasn’t exactly Laura’s talent set, but there were some basic files in her storage lacuna. They ran as secondary routines in her macrocellular clusters, and she managed to steer the little craft out through the open airlock, only scraping the sides twice as she went.

Sensors showed Nigel gliding out behind her. Then he was flying back towards his starship. She realized it was triangular because it had wings. Why?

The exopod’s sensors locked on to the planet one and a half million kilometres away. Laura loaded that fix into the network, which incorporated it into Nigel’s navigation data and began to plot a vector for her. The first burn, lasting three minutes, took her out of the Forest.

As she passed through the edge of the distortion trees, a time symbol flicked up into her exovision. It had been twenty-seven hours thirty-one minutes since Shuttle Fourteen had actually entered the Forest.

*

Nigel waited until the exopod was clear of the Forest, then targeted Shuttle Fourteen. A burst from an X-ray laser sliced the fuselage apart. Gas and debris belched out of the big rupture, sending the craft spinning chaotically. The port wing snapped off. Nigel fired the X-ray laser again, chopping the fuselage into smaller sections. One pulse struck a fuel tank, and the explosion ripped the remaining structure to tatters. A giant shrapnel cloud spun out.

‘Okay,’ Nigel told the Skylady’s smartcore. ‘Take us to the centre of the Forest.’

The starship’s ingrav drive powered up to nine per cent.

‘Really?’ he asked.

‘Best available given the environment,’ the smartcore told him. ‘It is strange outside.’

Giving the smartcore his own voice was a mistake, he decided. But changing that now was somewhat pointless. ‘And how are we doing with nailing that environment?’

‘Analysis of the quantum signature is progressing effectively.’

‘Or, as we say in plain English . . .’

‘We have enough data to initiate an identical distortion effect for the quantumbuster detonation. However, you were right: the pattern is progressive.’

‘I knew it.’ He couldn’t help the flash of satisfaction. No battle of this nature could remain static. The assault the Forest’s trees mounted against the Void’s structure was constantly in flux as the Void strove to override the damage to itself. As he suspected from examining Laura’s original data, the pattern fed in to the quantumbuster for initiation would have to be real time. Skylady ’s sophisticated sensors had to be linked directly to the warhead. ‘No remote detonation, then?’

‘No.’

He sat back in the chair and looked round the circular cabin. His u-shadow was accessing the hull’s visual sensors, revealing the constellation of glimmering enigmatic distortion trees they were sliding between. Bienvenido’s bright crescent was visible in the distance.

‘She would have loved this, flying through space. Seeing her world from afar.’

‘She will know it. And with you, too.’

‘As long as it’s not with Ozzie.’

‘Jealous?’

‘I just don’t want her hurt out there. That’s why I’m in here doing this. When the Void goes, she’ll meet the real me.’

‘You are real.’

‘Yes, but there can’t be two of me. And I am just a copy, no matter if I’m physically superior to the original. She mustn’t be given a confusing choice. That wouldn’t be fair.’

‘I am sure she will cope. You taught her a lot. You should be proud.’

‘I am. How big is the delay between pattern lock and detonation?’

‘I estimate nine picoseconds.’

‘That’s quite a gap.’

‘Again, best I can do.’

‘It’s hardly a certainty, though, is it?’

‘There are no certainties.’

‘True. So – let’s dump Paula’s fallback package.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Load Joey’s memories into it for safe keeping, and do it. Just in case.’

The sensor feed showed him the package slipping behind Skylady – a sphere curiously similar to a Faller egg. Its ingrav drive powered it away gently. Nigel concentrated inwards. And I mustn’t tell Paula, he thought to himself. She’ll think I’m insecure. Can’t have that.

‘Three minutes to the centre of the Forest,’ the smartcore said.

‘Great. Synth some beer and pizza for me.’

‘Are you regressing?’

‘I think I’m allowed some comfort food at this point.’

The food processor pinged. Nigel went over and smiled fondly at the brown glass bottle and the flat, square cardboard box. ‘Thanks. Damn, I haven’t seen that label in a thousand years.’ The smell triggered memories of long ago. Of student halls and all-night sessions on the physics department hypercube, hour after hour arguing excitedly with Ozzie as they begged, borrowed and stole equipment to build the gateway. His first footprint on Mars.

Nigel took a good long swig from the bottle. ‘That is just how I remember it tasting. Cheap, weak and gassy. Perfect.’

‘We are at the centre of the Forest. Would you like a countdown?’

‘Hell, no. Just do it.’ He bit into the hot pizza slice –

*

Demitri had caught up with them on the afternoon of the day after the launch, riding his horse up the first of the Algory foothills where they’d made camp.

‘Where’s Valeri?’ Kysandra asked.

Demitri dismounted. ‘In Dios, keeping an eye on things.’

‘Nothing on this planet matters any more?’

‘Let’s hope not, eh?’

They built a small fire of logs. Not worried about the blaze being seen. The ge-eagles were still flying high circles around them, alert for any pursuit. There wasn’t another human within twenty miles.

Kysandra insisted on sitting up for most of the night, waiting.

‘How long?’ she asked as the flames sent sparks high into the night. Overhead, the beautiful nebulas glimmered for what she knew was their last time; Giu and Uracus sat on opposite sides of the sky, facing each other as always. It didn’t matter; soon she would know a night sky filled with stars.

‘It should have taken Skylady approximately twenty-two hours to reach the Forest,’ Fergus said. ‘But don’t forget he had to locate Shuttle Fourteen.’

Kysandra hugged her knees and rocked about. ‘Oh, come on, Nigel!

Marek shook her shoulder, waking her. She looked about in puzzlement. Someone had put a blanket over her. The fire had burnt down to embers. Dawn was lightening the eastern sky, allowing the nebulas to fade away behind the rising azure stain. Poised just above the horizon, the Forest shimmered a pale silver.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Why hasn’t it detonated?’

‘Not much longer,’ Marek assured her. ‘We thought you’d better be awake for this.’

‘Thanks.’ She nodded in gratitude.

Demitri handed her a mug of tea. She sat up, stretching. Her shell tightened. She didn’t want the ANAdroids to know how alarmed she was growing. She’d been expecting the quantumbuster to detonate a long time ago.

She sipped at the reassuringly hot tea, glancing resentfully up at the vile fuzzy patch that was starting to blend into the emergent rays of the sun.

‘Best you don’t look directly at the Forest now,’ Fergus said.

‘Why?’

‘The Skylady masses about three hundred tonnes. When the quantumbuster goes off, it’ll convert that directly to energy to power the effect. Even if ninety per cent is successfully modified into a quantum distortion wave, ten per cent is still a hell of a lot of radiation overspill.’

‘The flash will be brighter than the sun,’ Marek said. ‘And we’ll have no warning.’

She frowned thoughtfully. ‘What about gamma rays? Won’t they be harmful?’

‘The atmosphere should shield us.’

‘Should?’

‘It depends on—’

Marek lied. The quantumbuster detonation wasn’t simply brighter than the sun. It was so intense, so overwhelming, the flare dissolved the whole world into a uniform sheet of silver whiteness. Kysandra yelled in shock as everything vanished into the outpouring of impossible light. She instinctively slapped her hand over her already closed eyes. The whiteness dimmed to bright scarlet. Blood colour.

Her heart was racing exactly as it had while Skylady powered into space. She wanted to risk opening her eyes, but she was too scared.

‘It’s okay,’ Fergus was assuring her. ‘It’s over.’

Now she was simply creeped out by the silence of the devastating light. Something that powerful should surely sound like the planet splitting open. Carefully, she opened one eye. Her vision seemed to be all purple and yellow after-image blotches. She blinked for a long while, trying to clear the contamination away. Secondary routines helped filter her retinas.

The three ANAdroids were standing together, holding hands, their heads tipped back so they could watch the early morning sky.

Kysandra turned to look at the Forest. She drew in a sharp breath, and her lips twitched in the start of a smile. The Forest was still there, but now it was crowned with a halo of vivid emerald light. As she watched, strands of the light chased across space like stellar lightning bolts. One hurtled towards Bienvenido, passing close above the atmosphere, and that entire half of the sky abruptly seethed turquoise. ‘Oh, great Giu,’ she groaned. Space itself was splitting open.

‘Cherenkov radiation,’ Fergus said. ‘It’s working. The Void is breaking up.’

Kysandra laughed in delight as the perfect green ruptures multiplied. ‘He did it. Oh, Giu, he did it!’ The nebulas vanished, their dainty light obliterated by the raw energy of the fissures. Her laughter weakened. Except Uracus. Uracus was still there. The malevolent tangle of fluorescent scarlet and yellow fronds was at the centre of a violent radiation storm. Jade cataracts writhed in torment, rebuffed by Uracus.

The tainted red light of the ominous nebula was growing stronger.

‘It’s growing,’ she moaned. ‘Uracus is growing.’

The cancerous presence, which alongside sweet Giu had dominated the night above Bienvenido her whole life, was flexing energetically, like a spectral serpent wriggling through space. Visibly expanding as it came.

‘That’s impossible,’ Marek said. ‘Nothing that big can move that fast. It’s lightyears across. And lightyears away.’

‘So . . . it started doing this years ago?’ Kysandra asked uncertainly.

‘I don’t think so,’ Fergus said.

Kysandra took a small step backwards. Uracus now took up a quarter of the sky. The thrashing aquamarine clefts of the quantum distortion were in retreat before it. ‘Uh . . .’ she breathed. ‘Is it coming towards us?’

‘Oh, dear,’ Demitri murmured.

‘The Void knows,’ Marek said. ‘It can sense the internal damage the quantumbuster is inflicting. This could be its response mechanism.’

‘But Uracus is where the bad souls are sent,’ Kysandra groaned. ‘It’s what the Commonwealth legends call hell. Nigel told me.’

‘We’re not going to hell, Kysandra.’ Fergus said quickly.

Kysandra didn’t believe him.

Uracus filled the entire sky now, its tangled web of topaz and scarlet plasma strands flexing ominously as it rushed towards Bienvenido. Golden sparks emerged around the central gash, to slither around and between the individual strands as if they were flocks of frenzied shooting stars.

‘It’s going to hit us!’ Kysandra cried. ‘It’s going to smash into Bienvenido!’

Uracus engulfed them. The sun vanished behind its tattered swirls of phosphorescence – an eclipse that dropped the planet back into night. Faint, cold moiré light was all that illuminated the landscape now. A fissure of utter blackness split apart down the centre of the nebula. Long tenuous strands of pulsing cerise and saffron stardust curved back in great cataracts, a million effervescent waterfalls falling out of the universe. Deeper and deeper they plunged down the infinite lightless abyss as it opened still wider.

Then Bienvenido was falling beside the phenomenal cascades. Uracus closed behind it.

*

Nigel Sheldon woke up with a start, the ANAdroids’ dream of the terrible abyss still chilling his mind. He opened his eyes.

Torux was watching him from the other side of the private chamber on board Olokkural.

‘What just happened?’ Nigel demanded. ‘I can’t dream them any more. Where the hell did they go?’

EPILOGUE

Beyond the Abyss

Kysandra heard the planes of the Air Defence Force droning overhead as she walked across the gardens at the back of the manor house. She wasn’t surprised; there had been a Fall alert on the radio that afternoon. The big radars of the Space Vigilance Office had picked up a batch of eggs on their way down to Bienvenido from the Ring. They estimated the Fall zone to be west of Port Chana, close to the Sansone mountains; impact would be five o’clock in the morning.

Without her retinas switched to infra-red, she couldn’t see the planes against the jet-black night sky. But everybody knew and cheered that distinctive sound now; it was the twin engine IA-505s above her. They were stationed down at the aerodrome of the county’s fledgling squadron, just outside the city. Five IA-505s had been delivered to Port Chana so far, with another three expected before the end of the year. They were a veritable miracle of manufacture for Bienvenido’s primitive industrial base, the first planes able to lift the heavy-calibre Gatling guns that could penetrate the shell of a Faller egg. The radio was always full of praise for the valiant workers on the big new factory lines, transforming Laura Brandt’s designs into solid metal.

Kysandra had to admire Laura for that. She was dealing with engineers who had grown up with steam engines. Supercharged V12 engines were something they just about comprehended. Bienvenido’s foundries didn’t require too much modernization to fabricate the components. Production was starting to increase. The skies would be safer.

The large observatory building was a simple circular stone wall with a dome roof, whose wooden petals could be cranked apart to give the telescope access to the sky. There wasn’t another building like it in the region, which sooner or later was going to cause problems. Kysandra still hadn’t decided if they should dismantle the structures they’d built to contain and operate all the systems Nigel had removed from Skylady before his final flight. Or if she and the ANAdroids should simply move. A life spent constantly on the run didn’t really appeal. But now the medical module had finished enriching her body with biononics, she didn’t actually need it any more. The semiorganic synthesizers, though – they were a different matter. She didn’t want to abandon them. They could produce a great many useful Commonwealth items.

For six months they’d been busy extruding sophisticated components for Demitri’s telescope. With its array of flawless mirrors and electronic focal sensors, it could scour the empty skies like nothing else on Bienvenido. Demitri spent every night in the observatory, looking for . . . well, anything.

Bienvenido was slowly turning Port Chana towards dawn, a motion which had brought Aqueous above the horizon, a strong point of blue light, shining by itself in the absolute night. Seventeen million kilometres distant along the same orbit, their neighbouring water world was too far away to show as a crescent to the naked eye. Unlike Valatare, the gas giant that orbited their new star only ten million kilometres further out. Its pink disc dominated the sky when they were in conjunction, creating tides that plagued the coastal cities and producing a season of storms to lash the lands.

The heavy throbbing noise of the V12 engines had faded into the west when she opened the observatory’s door and went inside. Demitri was sitting on a stool, wearing a thick sweater against the cool night air. The shelf bench beside him held a couple of processor modules that controlled the telescope, with an old-style hologram portal on top of one. The big multi-mirror telescope itself filled most of the observatory. Tonight it was angled to point into the south-west.

He looked round as she came in. ‘How did the trial go?’

‘Oh.’ She waved a hand airily, feigning a lack of interest. It was still odd not having an ex-sight, or teekay for that matter. Even now, five years on from the Great Transition, she frequently tried to perceive the emotional content of minds of everyone she encountered – not that she’d ever been able to read the ANAdroids back in the Void. ‘What we expected.’ The short-wave radio signal from the capital had drifted in and out annoyingly all night, but the result of the show trial was never going to be in doubt. ‘Bethaneve was found guilty of sedition. Apparently she was plotting against Democratic Unity with other anti-revolutionary forces.’

‘Oh, dear. It’s always tough being married to a paranoid dictator. I did warn her.’

‘She got sentenced to twenty years in the Pidrui mines. Apparently our great and glorious Prime Minister Slvasta asked the court to show no leniency. He wanted to make it clear that we’re all equal now. No exceptions.’

‘If it gets any worse, we’ll have to assassinate him.’

‘We can’t afford a social upheaval. Not right now. There are too many Falls from the Ring. Bienvenido has to have some kind of cohesive response force, or we’ll be overwhelmed.’

‘I bet that’s what Captain Cornelius used to say.’

‘Probably,’ she admitted. ‘What did you want to show me?’

He tugged another stool out from under the bench. Kysandra sat on it, and the hologram portal came on. A small circular smudge of light hung in its centre, like a glittery hurricane swirl.

‘This,’ he said cheerfully.

She regarded it with interest. It wasn’t one of the nine other planets they shared the lonely sun with in this strange dark universe Uracus had thrown them into. Nor a tree from the Ring that circled fifty-three thousand kilometres above Bienvenido; wrong shape.

‘A Skylord?’ she asked cautiously.

‘No,’ Demitri said. ‘It’s a galaxy.’

‘Crud!’

‘Quite.’

‘How far away?’

‘Optically, it’s extremely faint. My preliminary estimate is about three and a half million lightyears.’

‘How did it get there?’

‘Wrong question. What we should now ask is: how did we get here? This is undoubtedly our universe, so I think I know what happened in the Great Transition. Consider this: both planets in the Void knew of the Heart, that it was the place where the fulfilled go. And both of you also knew of the other place as well; that consistency is highly significant. On Querencia, they called it Honious. To Bienvenido, it was Uracus. The gateway to hell – or worse. And we’re on the other side of it now. This is where the Void’s rejects and badasses are banished. And the Void doesn’t do anything by halves; it’s flung us somewhere deep into intergalactic space. So far away we cannot possibly pose a danger to it ever again.’

Kysandra stared, entranced at the innocuous phosphorescent blob. ‘Is that our galaxy? The one with the Commonwealth?’

‘No. But now I know what I’m looking for, I can write the appropriate search algorithms for the telescope. We can locate other galaxies and start to assemble a map. Galactic supercluster distribution is a known quantity; we have them in Skylady’s duplicate files. Once we start plotting them, we can work out where we actually are in the universe.’

Kysandra gazed at the telescope, trying not to let too much optimism bloom. ‘So do you think you can find our galaxy?’

‘In time, yes.’

‘And then we can fly there? We can go home?’

‘Yes. It might take a while.’

THE END . . .

. . . of The Abyss Beyond Dreams.

Bienvenido’s story will be concluded in: Night Without Stars