Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

His exovision suddenly threw up warnings he never expected to see. A very large wormhole was intruding into space not three kilometers from the Columbia505 .

“What the hell?”

The smartcore tracked several chunks of wreckage tumbling down the wormhole’s throat. Then the wormhole shifted exit coordinates, reappearing five kilometers away. More junk was sucked down. Exoimage displays showed him it was the wormhole that normally linked Ellezelin to Agra. Somebody was redirecting it with unnerving skill, scooping up precious evidence. His u-shadow connected him directly into the planetary cybersphere and tried to access the generator net. “It’s been isolated,” the u-shadow reported. “I can’t even gain access to the building net. Whoever’s in there, they’ve sealed themselves in tight.”

Columbia505 ’s sensors swept across the generator complex on the outskirts of Riasi, seven thousand kilometers away around the curvature of the planet. A force field was protecting the whole area. “Crap.” Digby ordered the smartcore to distort the wormhole’s pseudo structure. Negative energy fluxes reached out from the starship’s drive, attempting to destabilize the wormhole’s integrity. But the planetary generators had too much power available compared with the starship. It was a struggle Digby was doomed to lose.

“Take us down,” he ordered the smartcore. “Fast.” As the starship dived down into the atmosphere, he called ANA:Governance and explained what was happening.

“I will call the Cleric Conservator,” ANA:Governance said. “He must be made to understand that he cannot act against us with impunity.”

Digby was pretty sure the Cleric Conservator knew that but held his counsel. It was long gone midnight in Makkathran2, which meant that Riasi was just slipping across the terminator line into daylight. Columbia505 was decelerating at fifteen gees when it hit the stratosphere above the Sinkang continent, upon whose northern coast the ex-capital city was sited. The ship scorched its way down through the lower atmosphere like a splinter carved from a star’s corona. It braked to a halt five hundred meters directly above the Agra wormhole generator’s force field. The hypersonic shock wave of its passage slammed past it, shattering all unprotected panes of glass within a three-kilometer radius. Nearby regrav capsules tumbled through the air like leaves in a blizzard as their smartnets used emergency power to try to right them. Local traffic control was screaming warnings at Digby on every frequency. Metropolitan police cruisers curved around to intercept. He sent out a blanket broadcast to be picked up by every cybersphere node and macrocellular cluster surrounding the force field.

“Everyone in the generator complex, switch off the force field and deactivate the wormhole. You are violating an ANA-sanctioned operation. I am authorized to use extreme force to end your transgression.”

As he suspected, there was no reply. There never would be, he knew. Every moment he waited, playing the good guy, was another moment spent eradicating the precious evidence in orbit. All that left him with was the problem of knocking out the force field without flattening half the city.

Eight slender atomic distortion beams stabbed out from the starship to the top of the force field dome, ripping the air molecules apart in a blaze of incandescence. Monstrous static discharges flared away into the heaving atmosphere. The force field began to glow a pale purple, as if it were growing a bruise. A cluster of dump webs skittered down from the Columbia505 . They struck the force field, kicking out blooms of dusky ripples. The darkness around them intensified, expanding rapidly. Under such an assault, overload was only a matter of time. The force field collapsed amid a deluge of wild energy flares and superheated shock waves that battered the surrounding buildings. Columbia505 received a heavy buffeting, which the smartcore fought to counter and hold stable above the circle of glaring ion flames that were eating into the generator building. Sensors reported the wormhole had failed. Digby was worried about how much evidence it had already cleared away.

Ellezelin Civil Defense Agency force fields were coming on above Riasi, a series of large interlocking hemispheres protecting the city’s districts. Five large Ellezelin navy cruisers were racing around the planet, their trajectories curving sharply to position them above the city.

A starship hurtled up from the buckling generator complex, accelerating at nearly forty gees. It fired a barrage of energy beams and disrupter pulses at the Columbia505 . Digby found himself gripped by safety webbing as the starship spun helplessly. Planetary atmosphere was an alien milieu for it; systems designed for combat in the clear vacuum of space were operating below optimum, fogged by the dense gases. The force field shimmered a vivid amber, spitting off glittering scintillations while Digby’s vulnerable inner ears conjured up a wave of nausea. Far below, consecutive shock waves crashed down across the beleaguered commercial buildings and warehouses that comprised Riasi’s sprawling interstellar commerce district.

The Columbia505 leveled out, and the routines in Digby’s macrocellular clusters neutralized the nausea. Exoimage displays showed him the other starship streaking up through the troposphere, a huge ionic contrail shimmering behind it. “Follow it,” Digby ordered the smartcore. The air above the shaken city howled yet again as the Columbia505 powered its way up, ignoring the cruisers that were attempting to converge on it. The other starship slipped into hyperspace. Columbia505 followed.

“Why?” Paula asked before Digby had even cleared the Ellezelin system. “Those fragments were vital. We’ll lose most of them now.”

“Forensic analysis was only ever a long shot,” Digby countered. “I determined the faction ship was a much better lead. They risked a lot to obstruct my collection operation.”

“Which implies the fragments you were recovering were important.”

“My judgment,” Digby insisted, wishing he didn’t feel quite so small. No other human-Higher, Advancer, or normal-could ever make him feel so inadequate and defensive as his great-grandmother.

“Indeed it was, and you’re committed now. How good is the sensor reading?”

“Holding steady. They’re stealthed, of course, but my smartcore can still detect some distortion. It’s a good ship they’ve got, equal to Chatfield’s.”

“All right. I’d probably have done the same in your circumstances. You stay with it and see where that representative is going. The ANA judicial conclave is beginning now. I’m expecting the entire Accelerator Faction to be shut down within the next hour or two.”

“Excellent.”

“It has its problems, not least the agents and representatives still at large, like the one you’re following. I suspect we’re going to be a long time mopping up.”

“At least we’ll have a complete list of them and their activities.”

“Yes, that should help. Let me know when the ship reaches some kind of destination.”

“Of course.” Digby scowled as the secure call ended. This whole mission was proving very unsatisfactory. He was leaving too many unanswered questions behind him as he tagged along after the latest possible lead. He was also feeling plenty of stress from the destruction he’d caused and then fled from in Riasi. There would have been a lot of bodyloss due to his actions.

After a quarter of an hour it was clear the faction ship was heading in toward the Central worlds. It looked like the destination was Oaktier.

There had been only one judicial conclave in ANA’s history. It had been called to deal with the Separatist Faction, which had wanted to break ANA up, leaving them in a section free from any regulation or limit imposed by the base law control that acted as a universal governor across the entire edifice. The majority verdict was to disallow any such action. An entity with ANA’s ability and resources and under the authority of a dogmatic ideology might conceivably pose a threat to the original ANA, not to mention the rest of the Greater Commonwealth. The duplicitous method by which the Separatist Faction had sought to seize command of the quasi-physical mechanism that sustained ANA in order to achieve the segmentation was verification enough that they couldn’t be trusted to evolve quietly in some distant corner of the galaxy. A whole host of other agendas to encourage postphysical ascension were exposed at the conclave.