The Dreaming Void (80 page)

“Shit,” he sputtered, then coughed again, fighting for breath and 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 had drawn her knees up under her chin and had a blanket wrapped around 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 around 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 an ocean swell. Outside, the weather had not 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 that 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 aluminum door.

Aaron rubbed his face, dismayed by how he had handled the situation. Something in his dreams was eating away at his composure. He hated to think that she was right, that his subconscious somehow had squirreled 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 acknowledgment 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 the previous night, telling her their estimated arrival time. She had seemed interested, though she had laughed at the idea of any of her colleagues being an abandoned lover. “If you knew any of my teammates 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 were 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 had kept her gaiamotes closed 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 favor.”

“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 mind: certainty. He did know what was going to happen afterward. 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 him.”

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 had 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 meters away, and they 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 hit immediately by the wind. Ice fragments swirled around 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 into the suit for when the storms really hit. The suit's main purpose was to protect him from the radiation.

Although there wasn't too much physical effort involved, he wished he had nudged their ground crawler closer to those of the team. It 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, a short woman with a fringe of brown hair flecked with gray, was waiting for them in the closet-size suit room. 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 already had extended his field scan function, probing the whole camp. He had detected four people, including Ericilla. None of them was 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 wary 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 sensorbots 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 that the team's equipment could work without suffering contamination and degradation. Big filter units filled the rest of the entrance kube, maintaining the clean atmosphere. The temperature inside was still cold enough to keep the permafrost frozen. Aaron and Corrie-Lyn kept their helmets on.

Excavationbots 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 around a half-meter extraction tube that buzzed as it propelled grains of frozen mud along to be dumped on a pile half a kilometer 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 meters below ground level. Ericilla explained that they'd cut into a lake bed that had filled with sediment during the postattack monsoons. There were several people from the surrounding area who had never made it to Anagaska.

The passage opened out into a chamber ten meters wide and three high, supported by force fields. Discarded arm-length bots were strewn over the floor with power cables snaking around 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 excavatorbots that 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 off his bubble helmet. His face had a Latin shading rather than Inigo's northern European pallor, and the hair was dark brown rather than ginger. But apart from that, the features had not been altered much. Aaron thought it a particularly inferior disguise, as if he were wearing makeup 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 his chest. “Why did you leave me? Why did you leave us?”

He wiped some of the tears from her cheeks, then leaned forward and kissed her. Corrie-Lyn almost fought against it; then she suddenly 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 gray 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-gray 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 that a call was coming in from Director Ansan Purillar. It had been transferred across the hundreds of desolate kilometers from Kajaani by the small sturdy beacons to enter the camp, where it finally had trickled down into the excavation through a single strand of fiber-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 online 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 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 kilometers high, holding its 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 online. 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 that 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 members who were caught outside screamed and flung themselves down as the impacts battered them. It was over in seconds as the retrapped 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 lay twisted on the pad as the cold storm buffeted it about.