“It’s all right, son,” a new, soothing voice chimed in. “Let me help you.”

A soft irresistible force closed around his body, solidifying, immobilizing him. He stopped gagging for breath as bright red laser fans swept across the darkness, quickly arranging themselves into a spiral web with his head in the center. They contracted sharply, sending light pouring into his brain. Pain soared to unbelievable heights-

“Yech!” Corrie-Lyn shook her head violently, closing off her gaiamotes. The sickening sensations vanished. Now she heard a sound, a muffled yell from the captain’s cabin on the opposite side of the narrow companionway. “Sweet Lady,” she grunted. No mind could survive that kind of psychological torment for long, not and remain sane and functional. She stared at the cabin door, fearful he would come bursting through, his weapon enrichments activated. But he didn’t. There were another couple of defiant cries and then some whimpering like an animal being soothed before silence claimed the starship again.

Corrie-Lyn let out a long breath, seriously alarmed by how great the threat of him going completely insane had become. Her skin was coated in cold sweat. She pulled the tangle of quilts off herself and wriggled over to the ablution alcove. Taking care to be quiet so she didn’t wake Inigo, she slowly sponged herself down with a mild-scented soap. It cooled her skin, leaving her feeling a little better. Nothing she could do about the sensations crawling along the inside of her skin-the residual shock of the dream.

If that’s what it is.

It was all a little too coherent for comfort. Not a brain naturally discharging its accumulated experiences orchestrated by the peaks of lingering emotion, the way humans were designed to cope with everyday experiences. These were like broken memories pushing up from whatever dark zone of the psyche they’d been imprisoned in. “What in Honious did they do to you?” she murmured into the gloomy cabin.

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.