'You can lose yourself. Lose what is. Lose what you have done. Your life will never have existed. Sometimes I wish I could offer that to myself.
Then the enemy started to close in. He saw them all around, little flickers of motion darting through the undergrowth. They were waiting for him. He knew it. It was an ambush.
He yelled defiance at them. His biononics unleashed a terrible burst of energy. Clumps of undergrowth disintegrated into kinetic maelstroms. He was thrown from side to side by the sharp leaf and stone fragments swatting against him. Vision reduced, but still it was all white: in front, on both sides, above, below. White. White. White.
Through it all crept the enemy — malicious, determined, lethal. He blasted away at them. Seeing them burn. Powerful white flame consumed them, sending torrents of white smoke into the sky.
Shot after shot was fired into the suffocating uniform whiteness. It began to constrict about him. No matter how violent his energy discharges they couldn't penetrate it.
'Help me, he cried out to the voice. 'Take me out of this. I choose. I choose! I remember I chose. I wanted not to happen.
He could no longer tell which way was up, and tumbled through the whiteness. His own screams were loud in his ears as the whiteness slipped and banged against his suit visor. Then he hit something which stopped his headlong rush with a suddenness that knocked the wind from him. There at last was another colour, red sparkles of pain danced across his vision as he drew a desperate breath. He closed his eyes, squeezing the lids shut then blinking them open.
Shards of grey-black rock lay sizzling against the ice, slowly sinking in through the puddles they were creating.
'Shit, Aaron groaned gloomily. He forced himself on to all fours, then slowly staggered upright.
The whiteout had got to him, providing an insidious outlet for the demons churning around his subconscious.
What the hell is inside me? What did I try and cast away?
He shook his head, running a full status check through his biononic systems, and reviewed the routines in his macrocellular clusters as well. Cooler air blew into his helmet, allowing him to take some sobering breaths. Looking around he saw he'd left the field of ice boulders behind. The wind had dropped, leaving just a few flurries of snow skipping through the air. Steam was pushing up out of a dozen craters where his energy shots had vaporized the ice. He could see the serrated crystalline boulders lining the horizon behind him. Exovision superimposed his route, sketching it with simple lines of glowing orange. The ground crawler had been easy to follow through the field, scraping past boulders to leave crumbled shards on the ground, or where Inigo had simply carved his way through the smaller gaps. Now they were out on the open top of the glacier it was hard to tell.
Aaron trotted away from the area he'd devastated, circling round. There was no indication of the ground crawler at all. The thin dusting of ice shifted continually, completely eradicating any sign of the tracks. As he stood and watched, his own footprints were smeared away behind him almost as soon as he made them. There was no residual heat signature. It had been at least six hours since Inigo and Corrie-Lyn had driven out of the boulder field. On this frozen world, their infrared traces would have vanished within twenty minutes.
He had absolutely no way of telling which way they'd gone.
'Fuck it. There were no options left. His inertial guidance mapped a route back to Jajaani, via the Olhava camp, the only route he was sure didn't have glacier cliffs or other obstacles. Not that he'd ever get there before the planet imploded, he reflected; but if any rescue attempt was going to happen, that would be where the starship landed. It was all he had left. Simply lying down and waiting for the end wasn't him. Whoever me is.
He started to run again. His biononic energy currents reconfigured to scream a distress signal into the eternal storm.
The local star's azure spectrum shone brightly on the hull of the Mellanie's Redemption as it dropped out of hyperspace five hundred kilometres above Orakum. Troblum accessed the external sensors, seeing a planet that was essentially the same as every human-settled world in the Greater Commonwealth. Blue oceans swathed in puffy white cloud, brown land masses with a fuzz of green. Its electromagnetic emissions were a lot lower than a Central world, reflecting the relatively small population of Advancers and naturals. The kind of world that provided an ideal quiet life. Knowing what he did about Oscar Monroe, Troblum wasn't at all surprised that the old War hero had chosen this place to settle
He ordered the starship's smartcore to enter the atmosphere in full stealth mode. His muscles ached from the crouch position he'd been compressed into for the last ten hours. Even now that he'd finally made some headway into cataloguing and arranging the components into distinct piles, the starboard midsection hold was still badly cramped. He was beginning to worry about the assembly process, which was going to require a decent volume to work in. Not that he was anywhere close to starting that yet.
When Mellanie's Redemption passed through the ionosphere he went back into the cabin and took a quick spore shower. There were still sore patches on his skin where the medical module had repaired the damage he'd received at Florae's villa.
'You should put some cream on those, Catriona told him. The beautiful girl's curly hair bobbed about as she tilted her head to one side, registering deep concern.
'It doesn't matter, he grunted back.
'It matters to us, Trisha cooed.
Troblum pulled his shabby purple toga suit on, somehow strangely concerned about his dignity in front of the two girls. Having them see him naked was oddly disquieting. Back at the Arevalo apartment they never did, the daily routines were all perfectly established. He was comfortable with those. But here in the starship's cabin there was little privacy, and the projectors could throw the images just about everywhere. 'Thank you, he said, hoping it would shut them up — he didn't want to load in program restrictions, not now he'd constructed their personalities so perfectly. 'I'm all right. The last seam on the suit fastened up, and he straightened himself without wincing.
'What are you going to ask him? Tricia asked as the starship sank down through the clouds. Far below the fuselage the sensors had already picked out the white circle of the house set in its rambling grounds on the edge of a vast prairie of native vegetation.
'I just want five minutes of his time, that's all. Then this will all be over.
Troblum switched the stealth effect off when they were below five hundred metres. The starship settled on the big patch of level grass where two capsules were already parked in the shade of tall reddish-brown trees. He walked down the airlock stairs, sniffing the faint alien pollen in the air. Two figures were already hurrying down the spiral stair that was wrapped round the house's central pillar. Although he normally hated the countryside, Troblum had to admit the raised house in this bucolic setting was fabulous.
His u-shadow reported pings being aimed at him by the men walking towards him. He responded courteously enough with his identity certificate, praying they wouldn't send too many queries about him into the Unisphere. The Accelerators would be waiting for any giveaway, though even if they confirmed his location he should be relatively safe from Marius here.
'I'm Dushiku, the first man said. 'Can we help you?
'Is that really your starship? the second one asked. He was younger, definitely a first lifer, everything about him leaked eagerness and an endearing naivety, not just his gaiafield presence. 'It looks fantastic'