Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

“But. You. The. Oh, shit! Tell me the navy has seen the Anomine mechanism; tell me you know it’s on their homeworld.”

“The navy exploration parties that did manage to get through communicated with the old-style Anomine left on the planet. They had legends of their ancestral cousins leaving. The legends are quite specific about that; they departed the homeworld itself. QED, that’s where the mechanism must be.”

“You don’t know ! I trusted you! Ozziedamnit. I could be making progress; I could have opened the Sol barrier by now.”

“Son, Marius would have shredded you like a puppy stuffed into a food blender if I’d let you go off after him. You’re good at what you do, delivering stuff to my agents and the odd bit of observation work. That’s why I recruited you, because everyone knows you’re basically harmless, which puts you above suspicion. Face it, you’ve just not got the killer instinct.”

“My family is trapped back there. I would do anything-”

“Which has made you angry, yes, which is driving you on. But that’s bad for you. It would mean there comes a point where you hesitate or get a nasty dose of doubt and remorse and decency when you were sawing off Marius’s fingers and making him eat them.”

The Delivery Man wrinkled his nose up in revulsion. “I wasn’t going to-”

“Son, you just said you’d do anything. And that would be the least of it. These people don’t roll over because you ask them nice. You’d have to strap Marius down on the dungeon table and make him tell you how to take down the barrier. And I’ll lay you good odds the only person who can actually deactivate the barrier is Ilanthe, and she’s not available. No. The only way for you to achieve anything right now is by helping me. So will you please stop the fuck whining and let me work out how to find the mechanism.”

“Crap!” The Delivery Man slumped back down, furious at being taken in again and even more furious that Gore was right. Somewhere in his mind was an image of himself threatening Marius, maybe firing a jelly gun close to his head, which would make anyone capitulate. Right? He shook his head, feeling foolish. Then he gave Gore a sharp look. “Wait a minute. You said the ones that got through.”

“What?” Gore paid him little attention. His eyes were closed as he lounged back in his orange shell chair, analyzing the smartcore’s data.

“The navy exploration ships that came here. You said some got through?” There was no reply. The Delivery Man requested the raw sensor data, building up a coherent image of what they were approaching. The star’s cometary halo seemed to have active stations of some kind drifting through it, large stations with force fields protecting them from a detailed scan.

“Oh, yeah, them,” Gore said eventually. “The borderguards are a good security team. They’re left over from the last of the high-technology-era Anomine, and they don’t like anyone contaminating the old homeworld.”

“The whats?” It didn’t sound good, not at all. But Gore never had time to answer him. That was when the Last Throw dropped out of ultradrive, and the smartcore was showing him an image of the borderguard not a kilometer away. It measured over five kilometers across, though most of it was empty space. The primary structure was of curving strands arranged in a broad ellipsoid, but they bent around sharply in the thick central section, forming three twisting cavities that intersected in the middle. Each strand appeared to be transparent, filled with a thick gas that hosted a multitude of dazzling green sparks. They swarmed along the strands as if there were a gale blowing inside. Floating in the heart of the cavities was a shape identical to the one formed by the green strands; this one was barely a tenth of the size, filled with a sapphire gas complete with swift sparks. At its center was a crimson shape; inside that was a yellow version that had a lavender speck nestled within. Passive sensors couldn’t make out if there was another miniature version contained by its haze, and a strong force field prevented any active examination.

“Now what?” the Delivery Man whispered.

“We talk very fucking quietly in case they’re listening in,” Gore snapped back.

The Delivery Man actually cringed from the look of contempt Gore gave him. He cleared his throat. “All right. Is it going to shoot at us?”

“I hope not.”

“So what do we do?”

“We ask permission to go through.”

“And if it says no?”

“Pray it doesn’t. We’ll have to kill all seventeen thousand of them.”

“Can this ship actually-” He broke off and kept silent. The smartcore shot a simple communication pulse at the borderguard. Sensors showed another five of the gigantic stations appearing out of odd spatial distortions a few thousand kilometers away.

“Why are you here?” the borderguard asked.

“We are representatives from the human race; two of us are on board.”

“What type?”

“Higher. You have dealt with us before and were favorable. I ask for that consideration to be shown again.”

“Your species has withdrawn all information valid to you from those who stayed behind.”

“I understand. We seek data on those who left. We are a subsect of our species which believes we should try to evolve as the final Anomine did. We seek information on their society.”

“You carry weapons; they are of a sophisticated nature. Those of your species who came before did not carry weapons.”

“There is an active conflict among our species and the Ocisen Empire. Other species are emerging who are hostile. Interstellar travel is a dangerous endeavor right now. We reserve the right to protect ourselves.”

“We have detected no conflict.”

“It is coming. The Void underwent a small expansion recently. Species across the galaxy are becoming alarmed by its behavior.”

“We detected the Void expansion.”

“In which case we would ask that you grant us permission to try and emulate the ultimate success of your species.”

“You may have access to those items left behind by the final Anomine. You may examine them with any means except physical alteration or destruction. You may not remove any item from our ancestral world. All items must be left in place when you leave.”

“We thank you for the generosity you show us.”

The Last Throw fell back into hyperspace and raced in for the Anomine homeworld. The Delivery Man observed its course display with some curiosity as they performed a wide arc around the G3 star. The starship started to drop the confluence nest satellites one at a time. They finished up spaced equidistantly in an orbit two hundred million kilometers out from the primary. Last Throw headed in for the Anomine homeworld.

There was a lot of junk in high orbit out beyond the geosynchronous halo. All of it was ancient, inactive: vast spaceship docks and habitation stations that had slowly been battered by micrometeorites and larger particles, subjected to solar radiation for millennia coincident with thermal extremes. Consequently, they were no more than brittle tissue-thin hulls now, drifting into highly elliptical orbits as their atmosphere leaked out and tanks ruptured. Chunks had broken off, tumbling away into their own orbit, bashing into one another, fracturing again and again. Now millions of them formed a thick gritty gray toroid around the old world.

The Last Throw darted gracefully through the astronautical graveyard and flew down to a standard thousand-kilometer parking orbit above the equator. From there, the starship’s optical sensors showed a planet similar to any H-congruous world, with deep blue oceans and continents graded with green and brown land, depending on the climate. Huge white cloud formations drifted through the clear air, their fat twisted peaks greater than any of the mountain ranges they blanketed.