The Abyss Beyond Dreams (2 page)

‘Hell’s teeth.’ Red pain stars joined the confusing blur of shapes. She twisted over to throw up again.

‘Easy there,’ a voice told her.

Hands gripped her shoulders, supporting her as she retched. A plastic bowl was held up, which caught most of the revolting liquid.

‘Any more?’

‘What?’ Laura groaned.

‘Are you going to puke again?’

Laura just snarled at him, too miserable even to know the answer. Every part of her body was forcefully telling her how wretched it felt.

‘Take some deep breaths,’ the voice told her.

‘Oh for . . .’

It was an effort just to breathe at all with the way her body was shuddering, never mind going for some kind of yoga-master inhalations. Stupid voice –

‘You’re doing great. The revive drugs will kick in any minute now.’

Laura swallowed – disgusting acid taste burning her throat – but it was fractionally easier to breathe. She hadn’t felt this bad for centuries. It wasn’t a good thought,
but at least it was a coherent one.
Why aren’t my biononics helping?
The tiny molecular machines enriching every cell should be aiding her body to stabilize. She tried to squint the
lights into focus, knowing some of them would be her exovision icons. It was all just too much effort.

‘Tank yank’s a bitch, huh?’

Laura finally recognized the voice. Andy Granfore, one of the
Vermillion
’s medical staff – decent enough man; they’d met at a few pre-flight parties. She shuddered
down a long breath. ‘What’s happened? Why have you brought me out like this?’

‘Captain wants you out and up. And we don’t have much time. Sorry.’

Laura’s eyes managed to focus on Andy’s face, seeing the familiar bulbous nose, dark bags under pale brown eyes, and greying hair that was all stick-out tufts. Such an old, worn face
was unusual in the Commonwealth, where everyone used cosmetic gene-sequencing to look flawless. Laura always thought that humanity these days was like a race of youthful supermodels – which
wasn’t necessarily an improvement. Anything less than perfection was either a fashion statement or a genuine individualistic
screw you
to conformity.

‘Is
Vermillion
damaged?’

‘No.’ He gave her an anxious grin. ‘Not exactly. Just lost.’

‘Lost?’ It was possibly an even more worrying answer. How could you get lost flying to a star cluster that measured twenty thousand lightyears in diameter? It wasn’t as if you
could lose sight of something of that magnitude. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘The captain will explain. Let’s get you to the bridge.’

Laura silently asked her u-shadow for a general status review. The ubiquitous semi-sentient utility routine running in her macrocellular clusters responded immediately by unfolding a basic array
of mental icons, slender lines of blue fairy light that superimposed themselves within her wobbly vision. She frowned. If she was reading their efficiency modes correctly, her biononics had
suffered some kind of serious glitch. The only reason she could imagine for that level of decay was simple ageing. Her heart gave a jump as she wondered how long she’d been in suspension. She
checked the digits of her time display. Which was even more puzzling.

‘Two thousand two hundred and thirty-one days?’

‘What?’ Andy asked.

‘We’ve been underway for two thousand two hundred and thirty-one days? Where the hell are we?’ Travelling for that long at ultradrive speeds would have taken them almost three
million lightyears from Earth, a long,
long
way outside the Milky Way.

His old face amplified how disconcerted he was. ‘It might have been that long. We’re not too sure about relativistic time compression in here.’

‘Whaa—’

‘Just . . . Let’s get you to the bridge, okay? The captain will give you a proper briefing. I’m not the best person to explain this. Trust me.’

‘Okay.’

He helped her swing her legs off the padding. Dizziness hit her hard as she stood up, and she almost crumpled. Andy was ready for it and held her tight for a long moment while she steadied
herself.

The suspension bay looked intact to her: a long cave of metal ribs containing a thousand large sarcophagi-like suspension chambers. Lots of reassuring green monitor lights shining on every unit,
as far as she could make out. She gave a satisfied nod. ‘All right. Let me freshen up and we’ll go. Have the bathrooms been switched on?’ For some reason she was having trouble
interfacing directly with the ship’s network.

‘No time,’ Andy said. ‘The transport pod is this way.’

Laura managed to coordinate her facial muscles enough to give him a piqued expression before she allowed herself to be guided along the decking to the end of the bay. A set of malmetal
quad-doors peeled open. The pod on the other side was a simple circular room with a bench seat running round it.

‘Here,’ Andy said after she slumped down, almost exhausted by the short walk – well, shuffle. He handed her a packet of clothes and some spore wipes.

She gave the wipes a derisory glance. ‘Seriously?’

‘Best I can offer.’

So while he used the pod’s manual control panel to tap in their destination, she cleaned up her face and hands, then stripped off her sleeveless medical gown. Body-modesty was something
most people grew out of when they were in their second century and resequenced like Greek godlings, and she didn’t care about Andy anyway; he was medical.

She saw in dismay that her skin colour was all off. Her second major biononic re-form on her ninetieth birthday had included some sequencing to emphasize her mother’s northern
Mediterranean heritage, darkening her epidermis to an almost African black. It was a shading she’d maintained for the entire three hundred and twenty-six years since. Now, though, she just
looked like a porcelain doll about to shatter from age. Suspension had tainted her skin to an awful dark grey with a multitude of tiny water-immersion wrinkles – except it was paper dry.
Must remember to moisturize
, she told herself. Her hair was a very dark ginger, courtesy of a rather silly admiration for Grissy Gold, the gulam blues singer who’d revelled in an
amazing decade of trans-Commonwealth success – two hundred and thirty-two years ago. That wasn’t too bad, she decided, pulling at badly tangled strands of it, but it was going to take
litres of conditioner to put the gloss back in. Then she peered at the buffed metal wall of the travel pod, which was hardly the best mirror . . . Her normally thin face was horribly puffy, almost
hiding her cheekbones, and her emerald green eyes were all hangover – bloodshot, with bags just as bad as Andy’s. ‘Bollocks,’ she groaned.

As she started pulling on the dreary ship’s one-piece suit she saw how flabby her flesh had become after such a long suspension, especially round the thighs.
Oh, not again!
She
deliberately didn’t look at her bum. It was going to take months of exercise to get back in shape, and Laura no longer cheated by using biononics to sculpt bodyform like most; she believed in
earning her fitness, a primitive body-pride that came from those five years hiding away from the world at a Naturalist faction ashram in the Austrian Alps after a particularly painful relationship
crash.

With the drugs finally banishing the worst of the tank yank, she sealed up the suit and rotated her shoulders as if she was prepping for a big gym session. ‘This had better be good,’
she grunted as the pod slowed. It had taken barely five minutes to travel along the
Vermillion
’s axial spine, past the twenty other suspension bays that made up the giant
starship’s mid-section. And still her u-shadow couldn’t connect to
Vermillion
’s network.

The pod’s quad-door opened to reveal
Vermillion
’s bridge – a somewhat symbolic claim for a chamber in the age of homogenized network architecture. It was more like a
pleasant franchise coffee lounge, with long settees arranged in a conversation circle and giant high-res hologram panes on the walls.

About fifteen people were in there, most of them huddled in small groups on the settees, having intense exchanges. Everybody looked badly stressed. Laura saw several who had clearly just been
tank yanked like her, and recognized them straight away; also like her, they were all from the starship’s science team.

That was when she became aware of a very peculiar sensation right inside her head. It was like the emotional context of a conversation within the gaiafield – except her gaiamotes were
inactive. She’d never really embraced the whole gaiafield concept, which had been developed to give the Commonwealth the capability of direct mind-to-mind communication through an alien
adaptation of quantum entanglement theory. Some people loved the potential for intimate thought sharing it brought, claiming it was the ultimate evolution of intellect, permitting everyone
else’s viewpoint to be appreciated. That way, the argument went, conflict would be banished. Laura thought that was a bunch of crap. To her it was the creepy extreme of voyeurism. Unhealthy,
to put it mildly. She had gaiamotes because it was occasionally a useful communication tool, and even more sporadically helpful for acquiring large quantities of information. But for day-to-day
use, forget it. She stuck with the good old-fashioned and reliable unisphere links.

‘How’s that happening?’ she grunted, frowning. Her u-shadow confirmed that her gaiamotes were inactive. Nobody could connect directly to her neural strata. And yet . . .

Torak, the
Vermillion
’s chief xenobiology officer, gave her a lopsided grin. ‘If you think that’s weird, how about this?’ A tall plastic mug of tea floated
through the air towards him, trailing wisps of steam. Torak stared at it in concentration, holding out his hand. The mug sailed into his palm, and he closed his fingers round it with a smug
grin.

Laura gave the bridge ceiling a puzzled look, her ever-practical mind immediately reviewing the parameters of ingrav field projector systems. Theoretically it would be possible to manipulate the
ship’s gravity field to move objects around like that, but it would be a ridiculous amount of effort and machinery for a simple conjuring trick. ‘What kind of gravity manipulation was
that?’

‘It’s not.’ Torak’s lips hadn’t moved. Yet the voice was clear in her head, along with enough emotional overspill to confirm it was him ‘speaking’.

‘How did you . . .?’

‘I can show you what we’ve learned, if you’ll let me,’ Torak said.

She gave him an apprehensive nod. Then something like a memory was bubbling up into her mind like a cold fizzy liquid, a memory that wasn’t hers. So similar to a gaiafield emission, but at
the same time definitely not. She had no control over it, no way of regulating the images and voices. That scared her.

Then the knowledge was rippling out inside her brain, settling down, becoming instinct.

‘Telepathy?’ she squeaked as she
knew
. And at the same time, she could sense her thoughts broadcasting the astonished question across the bridge. Several of the crew
flinched at the strength of it impinging on their own thoughts.

‘In the purest sense,’ Torak responded. ‘And telekinesis, too.’ He let go of the tea mug, which hung in mid-air.

Laura stared at it in a kind of numb fascination. In her head, new insights showed her how to perform the fantasy ability. She shaped her thoughts
just so
, reaching for the mug. Somehow
feeling it; the weight impinged on her consciousness.

Torak released his hold on it, and the mug wobbled about, dropping ten centimetres. Laura reinforced her mental grip on the physical object, and it continued to hang in mid-air. She gave a
twitchy laugh before carefully lowering it to the floor. ‘That is some serious bollocks,’ she murmured.

‘We have ESP, too,’ Torak said. ‘You might want to close your thoughts up. They’re kind of . . . available.’

Laura gave him a startled glance, then blushed as she hurriedly tried to apply the knowledge of how to shield her thoughts – intimate, painfully private thoughts – from the scrutiny
of everyone on the bridge. ‘All right; enough. Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on? How are we doing this? What’s happened?’

Captain Cornelius Brandt stood up. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, and worry made him appear stooped. Laura could tell just how worn down and anxious he was; despite his efforts to keep
his thoughts opaque and calm, alarm was leaking out of him like ethereal pheromones. ‘We believe we’re in the Void,’ he said.

‘That’s impossible,’ Laura said automatically. The Void was the core of the galaxy. Up until 2560, when the
Endeavour
, a ship from the Commonwealth Navy Exploration
fleet, completed the first circumnavigation of the galaxy, astronomers had assumed it was the same kind of supermassive black hole that most galaxies had at their centre. It was massive. And it did
have an event horizon, just like an ordinary black hole. But this one was different. It wasn’t natural.

As the
Endeavour
soon learned, the Raiel – an alien race more technologically advanced than the Commonwealth – had been guarding the boundary for over a million years. In
fact, they’d declared war on the Void. From the moment their first crude starships encountered it, they’d carefully observed the event horizon undergoing unnatural expansion phases.
Incredibly for anything that large on a cosmological scale, it appeared to be an artefact. Purpose unknown. But, given the severity and unpredictability of its expansion phases, it would eventually
inflate out to consume the entire galaxy long before any natural black hole would have done.

So the Raiel invaded. Thousands upon thousands of the greatest warships ever built tore open the Void’s boundary and streaked inside.

None returned. The entire armada had no apparent effect on the Void or its atypical, inexorable expansion. That was a million years ago. They’d been guarding the boundary ever since.

Wilson Kime, who captained the
Endeavour
, was politely but firmly ordered to turn back and fly outside the Wall stars which formed a thick band around the Void. After that, the Raiel
invited the Commonwealth to join the multi-species science mission that kept a constant watch on the Void. It was a mission which had lasted since the Raiel armada invaded, and in those million
years had added precisely nothing to the knowledge of what lurked on the other side of the event horizon boundary.