Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

Her eyes were red-rimmed even though there hadn’t yet been tears. The thick mass of her curly chestnut hair hung limply, curtaining her heart-shaped face. She gave him such a needy look, he almost swayed away. Unlike everyone else, her emotions were pouring out into the gaiafield, revealing a psyche desperately seeking comfort.

“They can’t get through the barrier,” she said in a cracked voice. “The navy’s been trying for hours. There are science ships there now, trying to analyze its composition.”

“They’ll work something out, I’m sure.”

“What, though? Without ANA we’re lost.”

“Hardly. The Accelerators can’t get into the Void without the Second Dreamer.”

“They’ll get her,” Janine wailed. “Look at what they’ve done already.”

Laril didn’t comment, though it was tempting. He ran a hand over his chin, finding a lot of stubble there. Araminta always used to complain about that. I need a shower and clean clothes . “I’m going out.”

“What? Why?”

“I have to meet someone, an old friend.”

“You are kidding,” she squawked as outrage fought with fright. “Today? Don’t you understand? They’ve imprisoned ANA.”

“The biggest victory they can have is to change our lives. I am going to carry on exactly as before. Anything else is allowing them to win.”

She gave him a confused look, her thoughts in turmoil. More than anything she wanted to believe in him, to know he was right. “I didn’t think of that,” she said meekly.

“That’s all right.” Laril put his hand on the back of her head and kissed her. She responded halfheartedly. “See?” he said gently. “Normality. It’s the best way forward.” The prospect of making contact with a faction agent, of becoming a galactic power player, was making him inordinately randy.

“Yes.” She nodded, her arms going around him. “Yes, that’s what I want. I want a normal life.”

Laril checked the clock function in his exovison display. There was just enough time.

The taxi capsule slid out of the vaulting entrance to the hanger that made up the seventy-fifth floor of Bayview Tower. Laril sat back on the curving cushioning, feeling on top of the world. It doesn’t get any better than this, not ever .

Direct flight time between Bayview Tower and the Jachal Coliseum was a couple of minutes at best. Laril had no intention of flying direct. Until he was absolutely sure of the custodian representative’s authenticity, he wasn’t taking any chances. So they flew to a marina first, then a touchdown mall, the Metropolitan Opera House, the civic museum, a crafts collective house. Twelve locations after leaving the tower, the taxi was finally descending vertically toward the coliseum. From his vantage point it looked like he was sinking down to a small volcano. The outside slope of the elongated cone had been turned to steep parkland, with trees and fields and meandering paths. There were even a couple of streams gurgling down between a series of ponds. Inside the caldera walls were tiers of extensive seating, enough to contain seventy thousand people in perfect comfort. The arena field at the bottom was capable of holding just about any event from concerts to races to display matches and Baroque festivals. Ringing the apex of the coliseum was a broad lip of flat ground that hosted a fence of two-hundred-year-old redka trees, huge trunks with wide boughs smothered in wire-sponge leaves the color of mature claret.

Laril’s taxi capsule dropped onto a public landing pad in the shade of the trees. He immediately examined the area with his biononic field scan function. It was one of the functions he was adept at, and he’d refined the parameters during the taxi flight. When he stepped out, the biononics were already providing him with a low-level force field. He wore a blue-black toga suit with a strong surface shimmer, so there was no visual sign of his protection. The scan function was linked directly to the force field control, so if he detected any kind of threat or unknown activity, the force field would instantaneously switch to its strongest level. It was a smart procedure that, along with his other preparations, provided him with a lot of confidence.

He walked across the lip to the top seating tier. His u-shadow was maintaining secure links to the emergency taxis and the coliseum’s civic sensor net, assuring him that everything was running smoothly. As agreed with Asom, he was the first to arrive. There were no nasty surprises waiting for him.

A steep glidepath took him down the inner slope to the arena field. He kept looking around the huge concrete crater for any sign of movement. Apart from a few bots working their way slowly along the seating rows, there was nothing.

Once he reached the bottom, he expanded his field scan function again. No anomalies and no unusual chunks of technology within five hundred meters. It looked like Asom was obeying his ground rules. Laril smiled in satisfaction; things were going to be just fine.

A slightly odd motion on the opposite side of the field caught his eye. Someone was walking out of the cavernous performers’ tunnel. She was naked, not that such a state was in any way erotic, not for her. Her body was like a skeleton clad in a toga-suit haze. She walked purposefully over the grass toward him; two long ribbons of scarlet fabric wove sinuously in her wake.

“Asom?” Laril asked uncertainly. Suddenly this whole meeting seemed like a bad idea. It got worse. His connection to the unisphere dropped out without warning, which was theoretically impossible. Laril’s force field snapped up to its highest rating. He took a couple of shaky paces backward before turning to run. Files in his storage lacuna were already displaying escape routes to the emergency taxis he’d mapped out earlier. It was fifteen paces to a service hatch, which led to a maze of utility tunnels. The skeletal woman-thing would never be able to track him in there.

Three men appeared in the seating tiers ahead of him; they just shimmered into existence as their one-piece suits discarded their stealth camouflage effect.

Laril froze. “Ozziecrapit,” he groaned. His field scan showed that each of them was enriched with sophisticated weapons. Their force fields were a lot stronger than his. They advanced toward him.

His exovision displays abruptly spiked with incomprehensible quantum fluctuations. He didn’t even have time to open his mouth to scream before the whole universe turned black.

Arranging an entrapment had never been so easy. Valean was almost ashamed by the simplicity. Even before she landed at Darklake City, Accelerator agents had secreted subversion software into the Bayview Tower net. Incredibly, Laril used his own apartment’s node to access the unisphere. She wondered if all his calls to various old colleagues were some kind of subtle misdirection. Surely nobody was so inept. But it appeared to be real. He genuinely thought he was being smart.

So she replied personally to his final call, assuming the Ondra identity. Again, the suggestion of the coliseum as a meeting point was a shocking failure of basic procedure. Its thick walls provided a perfect screen from standard civic and police scrutiny. The Accelerator team members were laughing when they found his “escape” taxis parked suspiciously close to utility tunnel exits. And as for the antiquated monitor software he’d loaded into the coliseum’s network …

Valean waited in the darkness of the performers’ tunnel as he slid down the glidepath. His field function scan probed around, its rudimentary capability finally confirming how woefully naive he was. Her own biononics deflected it easily. As soon as three of her team were in place behind him, she walked out into the morning sunlight. Laril seemed so shocked, he didn’t even attempt any hostile activity. Lucky for him , she thought impassively.