The Abyss Beyond Dreams (65 page)

Kysandra glanced down at her chest, sighed, and began buttoning up her blouse. ‘What did you call this thing?’

‘The plunge push-up, more commonly known as a Wonder-bra,’ Nigel said. ‘Invented by a man, I believe.’

‘No kidding.’

‘They started making them before even I was born. Imagine that, thousands of years old, yet still popular the galaxy over.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t quite understand how it does it. I’m not actually this . . . big.’ She shook her head in irritation, knowing
her cheeks would be red.

‘You can get rid of it as soon as we reach home.’

‘Yes. Right. I’ll probably do that, then.’ Kysandra narrowed her eyes in suspicion and scowled at Nigel’s horribly smug grin.

*

Two days’ travel brought them back to Blair Farm. They put Proval in the medical capsule as soon as they arrived. It repaired his hand to a degree, cauterizing the flesh
and repairing the two remaining fingers. Growing replacements for the ones he’d lost would have taken at least a fortnight, even if that had been possible in the Void. Nigel didn’t care
to find out.

Kysandra looked down at the bandit/rapist/murderer she’d captured, his body half covered in the silver tendrils the capsule extruded, like weird restraints. The kind of thing you’d
use to hold down a monster.

‘So?’ Nigel asked her.

She glanced at him over the capsule. ‘You’re really asking for my approval?’

‘It would be nice.’

‘Do it,’ she said firmly. Bienvenido would be a better place without Proval. No matter how squeamish she was about what they were doing, that was unarguable.

Nigel gave the medical cabinet a series of instructions. More silver tendrils snaked out around Proval’s head and began to infiltrate his skull.

‘Just like the egg,’ she muttered.

‘Disturbingly so,’ he agreed, and ordered the capsule’s surface to close. The malmetal contracted shut.

Kysandra didn’t bother to use her ex-sense to see what was happening inside it. She knew. Personality erasure was an old Commonwealth ability, though rarely employed by the courts in
recent times, Nigel assured her.

The medical chamber would infiltrate Proval’s brain, its active biononic filaments seeking out the neurones that contained his memory. Slowly and inexorably, with chemical manipulation,
narcomeme subversion and direct physical neurone penetration, his memories would be exorcized. With that, his identity would evaporate. Proval, as a distinct entity, would cease to be. The process
would leave nothing but a collection of organs and bones orchestrated by autonomic reflex. A living corpse.

*

One day later, the naked insensate body stood beside the Faller egg in Barn Seven, an eerie replay of Demitri’s disastrous attempt at being eggsumed. Indeed, it was
Demitri who stood beside the body, his ’path feeding continual instructions into the empty brain, activating the correct muscles to allow the body to stand.

He opened the cage and mentally puppeted the body through the door. The brass key was turned in the Ysdom lock. Following ’pathed instructions, the body turned slowly to face the curving
surface of the egg. Its feet shuffled apart, and it held its arms up to assume a spread-eagle pose. Demitri allowed the ankles to hinge forward, and it hit the surface of the egg – torso,
arms, thighs immediately sticking fast.

Up on the walkway rim between the two pits, Kysandra shuddered exactly as she had last time. It took the egg forty minutes to fully absorb the body. Sensors followed as much of the process as
they could, ultrasound and density scans tracking the body’s simultaneous disintegration and mimicked reassembly. Ex-sight gleaned a few extra facts – the way the yolk swirled and
mutated, how the Faller’s thoughts coalesced out of the wisps of awareness which permeated the yolk.

Five hours after Proval’s body sank into the egg, the shell began to lose cohesion. It sagged and began to split. Yolk fluid poured out of the fissures as they tore open. A gooey wave
sloshed out across the metal basin, and the final shreds of the flaccid shell split apart around the solid core that now stood upright in the centre.

A perfect replica of Proval’s body glistened in the fluid, and drew a deep loud breath. Its psychic shell was strong and resolute, concealing whatever thoughts were flowing within its
duplicated brain. Eyes opened. A hand with two fingers wiped the thick fluid away from its face. The head turned slowly, following the probing fan of ex-sight it generated, sweeping round the pit.
Then it focused on Nigel and Kysandra and the two ANAdroids standing above.

Nigel smiled thinly. ‘Welcome to hell,’ he said.

The Faller screeched – an incoherent blast of sound that was too loud for a genuine human throat to produce. It ran at the cage bars, slamming into them. Rebounding. Another screech, and
it gripped the bars, tugging furiously.

Kysandra thought the iron might actually have bent slightly. But no way was she going in for a closer look to confirm that.

Demitri and Fergus jumped down into the pit. The Faller dropped to a half-crouch and watched them intently.

‘Interesting,’ Nigel mused. ‘That’s a very human defence posture. I guess we didn’t vacuum Proval’s subconscious as clean as I wanted.’

Kysandra was barely aware of breathing. She watched fearfully as Demitri unlocked the cage door and swung it open. The Faller walked through it, switching its attention from one ANAdroid to the
other, ready for them to attack.

Fergus raised a fat metal tube, and shot it with a tangle net. The Faller tried to jump aside, its teekay lashing out to deflect the seething dark cloud of cables. Demitri’s teekay was
instantly reaching for it, and the Faller hardened its shell defensively, teekay diverted long enough for the net cable to whip round it with a flurry of whistling air. It tumbled to the ground,
thrashing against the cables which slowly and relentlessly tightened their grip. After a few seconds, it was reduced to an immobile bundle on the slippery floor. But still very conscious. A strong
teekay began to assault the net cables, gnawing at their individual strands.

Demitri stepped up, and slapped a charge-patch on the back of the Faller’s neck. Fifty thousand volts slammed through him. His reaction was extremely human – muscles convulsing,
teeth clenched, air forced from his lungs in a drawn-out groan of pain.

‘Well, that works,’ Nigel said in satisfaction.

Demitri zapped him again. The Faller’s body vibrated, juddering away inside the restrictions of the net, before he finally lost consciousness. His shell vanished. Demitri ’pathed a
neuromeme variant to suppress the Faller’s primary thought routines – providing they were close to a human’s. The body relaxed further.

‘Is he dead?’ Kysandra asked anxiously.

Demitri’s ex-sight scanned through the Faller. ‘No.’

‘Uracus!’

‘We don’t have the time to analyse his biochemistry,’ Nigel said. ‘For a start, getting a blood sample would be hellishly difficult. Then we’d have to experiment to
find an anaesthetic that worked, and what doses to use. It would be like torturing him. This way is quick and clean.’

‘I know, I know.’
Yeah, you’re right again. Well done.

Fergus quickly slipped a helmet over the Faller’s head.

If anything was torture, it was this, Kysandra thought. Nigel hadn’t wanted to put the Faller into
Skylady
’s medical module. Not after Demitri got rejected by the egg. He
was concerned about the Faller’s nanobyte functionality; the sophisticated molecular clusters of its cells might be able to contaminate and corrupt Commonwealth technology, especially here.
So,
Skylady
had synthesized this, a biononic infiltrator, with active filaments almost identical to the ones in the medical module which had invaded Proval’s brain. Except this was a
cruder, stronger, quicker procedure. There was nothing subtle about the way these filament tips breached the skull and penetrated the brain.

The Faller’s body juddered again as the infiltration started, then stilled. His eyelids opened and the eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible.

Kysandra studied her exovision display, watching the infiltration’s progress. A multitude of filaments had made it through the exceptionally hard bone of the skull, to worm their way
through the neurone structure. The brain was noticeably different to a human’s. Synaptic discharges were faster, more precise.

‘More like a bioprocessor matrix than our typically chaotic neural structure,’ Nigel commented. ‘I’m guessing that allows for operating a wider range of thought routines.
The brain looks like one of ours, but it’s actually quite homogeneous. There are no regulatory centres, and certainly no hormonal triggers. Clever, given the Faller mind will have to
acclimatize to whatever animal form they encounter and duplicate. Basic thought routines will be adaptable to manipulate however many limbs they have, as well as interpret the new
sensorium.’

‘That’s a dynamic flexibility range,’ Fergus said.

‘They can’t be the primary form of the origin species, not any more. This is the expanded version.’

‘Just like us,’ Kysandra said. She gave Nigel a small smile. ‘You said I was an Advancer. Clue’s in the name. My genome has been changed from the one my ancestors
carried. Improved, supposedly.’

‘I was talking about their mentality, but yes,’ Nigel said approvingly. ‘Nobody goes voyaging across the galaxy without modifying themselves to some degree. It’s a bit of
a prerequisite among progressive sentient species.’

Demitri coughed. ‘The Ocisens.’

‘I did say: progressive,’ Nigel replied equably.

It took two hours to complete the first sequence of the infiltration procedure, deploying the filaments. Their positioning was guided directly by
Skylady
’s
smartcore, which had to probe and examine the duplicated neural structure they were invading. Ultimately, the filaments were as evenly distributed as the brain’s regimented neural pathways.
Unlike the procedure they’d used on Proval, chemical intervention was impossible. They had to rely on neuromemes and subversive thought routines. Over the next six hours, the smartcore began
to decipher the Faller’s major thought patterns, distinguishing between active reasoning routines and the deeper incorporated memories that were infused within them, loosely equivalent to a
human subconscious.

With the brain’s network profiled, the smartcore constructed a digital simulation, and began downloading the Faller’s thoughts into it.

*

The Faller didn’t have memories in the human sense – the recollection of sights, sounds and sensation with all their associated clutter of emotion; this was more an
awareness of being, of purpose. It understood itself thanks to a history that had become the biological imperative of its species, in every branch.

They originated somewhere in the Milky Way. It didn’t know where the birth star lay, nor even when its species began to venture out across interstellar space, though there was an echo of
immense distance and time within its identity.

In one form, the species became their own starships, carrying their essence across the gulf of space. Vast creatures that drew energy from spacetime itself, twisting gravitational fields to
propel themselves along at a good fraction of lightspeed. Expansion was their destiny now, the very purpose of life.

When they arrived at the bright new stars they’d pursued, they found the biosphere of many planets to be incompatible with their original body chemistry. Rather than tackling the immense
task of changing these inimical planets, they pushed fusion with their liberating nanotech further, their bodies becoming even more malleable, adapting easily to their new environments. Morphing
into direct rivals to the existing lifeforms who struggled against their conquests.

Innumerable conflicts arose from their implacable colonization, instigating more change, more deviation from their original physical identity. The mimicry ability was born, the pinnacle of their
nano-derived evolution, allowing a more aggressive and insidious incursion across fresh worlds. Starships orbited high above the newfound planets, dropping swarms of eggs, which would absorb the
form of the natives and give birth to a generation of changelings. When they became dominant, eradicating their indigenous rivals, subsequent generations reverted as close to their true form as
planetary conditions permitted and lived their lives as masters of their new domain.

Somewhere amid the expansion wave, a flock of starships was taken into the Void. Adaptation here was difficult, but continued anyway, driven by fear, for the Fallers soon understood the
Void’s purpose. As they had merged with and eradicated countless species across the stars, so the Void would absorb them, and in doing so quicken their development to an elevated state
suitable for subsumption into its Heart.

Some Fallers adapted as best their nature would allow. They sought out a niche in this new and strange meta-ecology, assuming a symbiotic role for the Heart, guiding worthy entities to
fulfilment, assisting newcomers to compatible sections of the Void: these guides were the Skylords.

Others simply carried on as before, deluging the other luckless biological captives with their eggs, devouring lives and cultures until they could emerge as themselves once more. Living out
their lives under the Void’s constant pressure to fulfil themselves and contribute their essence to its heart.

One faction of Faller starships struggled against their incarceration. They used their innate ability to warp local spacetime for flight to try and change the nature of the Void, to claw their
way out by force. It didn’t seem to work.

‘The Forest,’ Kysandra said softly. She’d joined Nigel out on the veranda. It was close to dawn, and the silver haze of the Forest was visible above the horizon. Nigel was
gazing up at it, a brandy in one hand. ‘The Forest is the Faller starships that tried to escape, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So it is true,’ she said. ‘Nobody can get out. If they can’t do it with all their power . . .’