Peter Hamilton - The Evolutionary Void

The next morning the servicebots had finished tailoring some of the fresh clothes as she’d instructed. “Not bad,” Inigo said admiringly as she pulled on the navy tunic with shortened sleeves. She grinned as she wiggled into a pair of tunic trousers. They were tight around her hips. “Not bad at all.”

“I need some breakfast first,” she told him with a grin. The one-and only-advantage of their weird imprisonment was the amount of time alone they could spend catching up.

They held hands as they went into the lounge. Inigo of course used the culinary unit to prepare some scrambled eggs and smoked haddock. She delved into the pile of luxury supplies the crew had stored on board. The only thing the unit made that she could force down was the drinks, and that was pretty much limited to tea and tomato juice, neither of which was a firm favorite. She tucked into a mix of toffee banana cake and dried mortaberries, gulping the tea down quickly so she could convince herself the taste was Earl Grey, albeit with milk and strawberry jam.

Aaron came in and helped himself to his usual poached egg and smoked salmon. Without a word, he shuffled himself into his broken chair almost at the other end of the lounge.

“Who is she?” Corrie-Lyn asked.

“Excuse me?”

“The high priestess or whatever she was. The one with all the blood. The one that scares you utterly shitless.”

Aaron stared at her for a long time. For once, Corrie-Lyn wasn’t intimidated. “Well?” she asked. “You shared last night.”

It wasn’t embarrassment-she suspected he was incapable of that-but he did lower his gaze. “I don’t know,” he said eventually.

“Well, you must-” She stopped, took a breath. “Look, I’m actually not trying to needle you. If you must know, I’m worried.”

“About me? Don’t be.”

“Nobody can take that kind of punishment night after night and not have it affect them. I don’t care what you’ve got enriched and improved and sequenced into every cell. That kind of crap is toxic.”

“And yet here I am each morning, functioning perfectly.”

“Seventeen hours ago,” Inigo said.

“What?”

“You were supposed to be on the bridge monitoring the ship. You actually slipped into the reverie. I felt it.”

“My operational ability is unimpaired.”

“It’s being undermined,” Corrie-Lyn said. “Can’t you see that? Or is it that you just can’t admit it?”

“I can help,” Inigo said.

“No.”

“You have instructions for just about every eventuality,” Inigo said. “Is there one for your own breakdown?”

“There is nothing wrong with me a bit of hush in the morning won’t fix. A man likes to break his fast in goodly contemplative silence.”

“Contemplate this: If you go gaga, how are we going to reach Ozzie?”

Aaron grinned contentedly. “You want to?”

“Yes,” Inigo said with great seriousness. “I don’t know who programmed you, but I think they might be right about getting the two of us together.”

“Now, ain’t that something; progress at last.”

“The only thing that can stop us reaching the Spike now is you,” Corrie-Lyn said.

“I imagine that if bits of me start to fall off, I will …” He stopped, the humor fading from his face.

“Suicide?” Inigo supplied.

Aaron was staring at a point on the bulkhead, his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. “No,” he said. “I’d never do such an unrighteous thing. I’m not that weak.” Then he frowned and glanced over at Corrie-Lyn. “What?”

“Oh, Lady,” Inigo grunted.

Corrie-Lyn was fascinated, suspecting that the real Aaron had surfaced, if only for a moment. “You’re not going to make it,” she said flatly.

“We’ve got barely two days to go until we reach the Spike,” Aaron said. “I can hold myself together for that kind of time scale. Trust and believe me on that.”

“Nonetheless, it would be prudent for you to load some kind of emergency routine into the smartcore,” Inigo suggested.

“I can match that; in fact, I can top it in a big way on the survival stakes. I would strongly suggest, now that you’ve figured out I’m not on the side of harming you and that you and the great Ozzie are going to be best buddies standing before the tsunami of evil, you think about how to stop the Void.”

“It can’t be stopped,” Inigo said. “It simply is . This I know. I have observed it from Centurion Station, and I have personally felt the thoughts emanating within. Out of all of humanity, I know this. So believe me when I tell you that if you want to exist in the same universe, you have to find a way around it. Our best bet would be to turn around and ask the High Angel to take us to another galaxy.”

Aaron drank some of his coffee. “Someone thinks differently,” he said, unperturbed. “Someone still believes in you, Dreamer; someone believes you can truly lead us to salvation. How about that? Your real following is down to one: me. And for now I’m the only one that counts.”

They began to feel the Spike’s wierd mental interference while they were still a day and a half out. At first it was nothing but a mild sensation of euphoria, which was why they didn’t notice at first. Corrie-Lyn had cut down on her drinking, but there were still some seriously good bottles cluttering up the crew’s personal stores. Be a shame to waste them. A couple-the Bodlian white and the Guxley Mountain green-were reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. Definitely a shame. Especially as there was nothing else to do on board ship.

So in the afternoon she’d gotten a bot to make up, or rather unmake, a semiorganic shirt so that just a couple of buttons held the front together. Satisfied the end product was suitably naughty, she stripped off and stepped into the ablution alcove. While she was in the shower, the bot also remade a thick wool sweater into a long robe; it was scratchy on her arms, but what the Honious.

She’d left Inigo in the lounge reviewing astronomical data on the Void. Now he hurried to their cabin when she called him, saying something important had happened.

“What is it?” he asked as the door parted. Then he stopped, surprised and then intrigued by the low lighting and the three candles flickering on nearly horizontal surfaces. The culinary unit might be rubbish at food, but it could still manage wax easily enough.

Corrie-Lyn gave him a sultry look and ordered the door to close behind him. He saw the bottle of Bodlian and the two long-stemmed glasses she was holding in one hand.

“Ah.” His gaiamotes emitted a simultaneous burst of nerves and interest.

“I found this,” she told him in the huskiest voice she could manage without giggling. “Shame to waste it.”

“Classic,” he said, and took the proffered bottle. She kissed him before he’d even gotten the cap off, then began to nuzzle his face. He smiled and pressed himself up against her while she toned up the mood her gaiamotes were leaking out. Together they undid the belt of the crude robe. “Oh, dear Lady, yes,” he rumbled as the wool slipped down to reveal what remained of the shirt.

Corrie-Lyn kissed him again, the tip of her tongue licking playfully. “Remember Franlee?” she asked. “Those long winter nights they spent together in Plax.”

“I always preferred Jessile.”

“Oh, yes.” She sipped some of the wine. “She was a bad girl.”

“So are you.” He poured his own glass and ran one hand down her throat, stroking her skin softly until he came to the top button. His finger hooked around it, pulling lightly to measure the strain.

“I can be if you ask properly,” she promised.

Two hours later Aaron fired a disrupter pulse into their locked cabin door. The malmetal shattered instantly, flinging a cloud of glittering dust into the confined space. Corrie-Lyn and Inigo were having a respite, sprawled over the quilts on the floor. Inigo held a glass of the Bodlian in one hand, carefully dripping the wine across Corrie-Lyn’s breasts. Secondary routines in his macrocellular clusters activated his integral force field instantly. Corrie-Lyn screamed, crabbing her way back along the floor until she backed into a bulkhead.