“No.” Aaron fell to his knees, gasping for breath, pulling Inigo down with him.

“You are the cause of the mission failure. The damage is coming from your own subconscious.”

“No.”

“It is.”

“Make it stop. She can’t get me. I can’t allow that. Not again.”

“There is nobody there. She is just a memory, a screwed-up memory you don’t know how to contain, there’s so much fear embedded with the experience.”

Aaron suddenly let go of Inigo, stumbling around to face the broken door in a martial arts pose. “She’s here.”

“Aaron, listen to me. Ozzie’s dream is corroding your rationality because it was never designed to deal with circumstances like these. You have to let them go; you have to let the real you out of those constraints your boss imposed. You must come forward. This artificial personality can’t cope.”

“Not good enough?”

“The real you is more than adequate. Come out. Come on, it’s the only way you can beat this.”

“Damage control …” Aaron slowly sank to his knees, and then his back curled as he dropped his head between his legs. His breathing started to calm. The eerie semihallucinations around the periphery of the cabin began to melt away.

Inigo and Corrie-Lyn gave each other an anxious look. “Do you think?” she asked.

“The Lady alone knows,” he murmured back.

They stood up. Corrie-Lyn hurriedly pulled her woolen robe back on, then they both approached the crouched figure cautiously. Inigo reached out tentatively but didn’t quite have the courage to touch Aaron. He wondered if that was the dream field-or whatever-amplifying the worry. But it seemed sensible enough. Surely an emotional enhancer would boost his sympathy correspondingly. Maybe that was the way it worked, everything raised equally so that everything stayed in the same balance as before-no alteration to personality, just a greater perception or empathy.

Aaron’s head came up; his biononics performed a thorough field scan of the starship. He stood up and looked at Inigo and Corrie-Lyn. His weapon enrichments sank back down into his hand; ripples of skin closed over them.

“Hello?” Corrie-Lyn said hopefully. “Aaron, is that really you now?”

Inigo wasn’t so sure. There wasn’t a trace of emotion coming from the man. In fact …

“I am Aaron,” he said.

“That’s good,” Corrie-Lyn said hesitantly. “Have the disturbances gone?”

“There are no disturbances in my head. My thought routines have been reduced to minimum functionality requirement. This mission will be completed now. Arrival at the Spike is in eighteen hours. Inigo will accompany me to Oswald Fernandez Isaacs. You will then both be given further instructions.” He turned and walked out the door.

“What in Honious was that?” a startled Corrie-Lyn asked.

“The last fallback mode by the sound of it; probably installed in case his brain got damaged in a firefight. He’s running on minimum neural activity. Whoever rebuilt him must have had a real fetish about redundancy.”

She shivered, clutching at the robe. “He’s even less human than before, isn’t he? And he was never much to begin with.”

“Yeah. Ladydamnit, I thought this was our chance to break his conditioning.”

“Crap.”

“But at least we know I don’t get shot before we meet Ozzie.”

“Oswald? I never knew that was his name.”

“No, me neither.”

She let out a long breath, then narrowed her eyes to stare at him. “The sex wasn’t that good naturally?”

“Ah. I had to say something that would shock him.”

“Really?” She glanced around the cabin. Tiny shards of sharp metal debris glinted on every surface. “Honious, this is a mess.”

“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll get through this.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Yes, you are. I can sense it.”

“What? Oh!” Her eyes widened as she realized she could sense his mind as clearly as if they were fully sharing within the gaiafield.

He smiled weakly. “That Ozzie, he’s really something. Over two hundred and fifty light-years away, and it already affects us. Whatever it really is.”

“Do you think it can be used to connect everyone with the Void?”

“I have no idea. But I suspect we’re going to find out. Maybe that’s why Aaron’s controllers want me there. I have proven access to thoughts from the Void; maybe they want to see if I can connect directly to the Heart.”

“So what can this effect do?” she mused.

– -

They spent the next few hours experimenting. The effect was remarkably like the longtalk they knew so well from the Void. When one of them carefully formed words or phrases, the other could perceive it, though they never worked out anything like the directed longtalk available to the residents of Querencia. But it was the constant awareness of emotion that was the most disquieting. If they hadn’t already been so intimate and adept at using the gaiamotes to connect emotionally, Corrie-Lyn thought they would have had real trouble with guilt and resentment at such openness. As it was, the effect took a long time to accept at an intellectual level. Being so exposed and having no choice in the matter made her apprehensive. She was all right with Inigo, but knowing the machinelike Aaron could perceive her every sentiment was unpleasant at the very least, and as for the prospect of every alien on the Spike being able to see into her mind … She wasn’t sure she could cope with that.

The one time she gave a bottle of Rindhas a longing look, she immediately knew of Inigo’s disapproval, which triggered her own shame to new heights. No wonder the cranky old Aaron had broken down under the mental stress. It was a weird kind of human who could cope with having his heart on his sleeve the entire time.

And yet, she told herself, that’s what we were all wishing to undergo in the Void. Especially the all-inclusive telepathy as it was in the Thirty-seventh Dream. Perhaps it’s just people who are at fault. If I didn’t have so much to hide, I wouldn’t fear this as much. My fault I’m like this.

They went to sleep a few hours later, with Inigo using a low-level field scan to monitor Aaron just in case. They woke in time for a quick breakfast before they reached the Spike.

The Lindau dropped out of hyperspace fifty AUs above the blue-white A-class star’s south pole. The emergence location allowed it an unparalleled view of the star’s extensive ring system. Visual sensors swiftly picked out the Hot Ring with its innermost edge two AUs out from the star and a diameter of half an AU. A hoop of heavy metallic rocks glittering brightly in the harsh light as they tumbled around their timeless orbit. Three AUs farther out, the Dark Ring was a stark contrast, a slender band of carbonaceous particles inclined five degrees out of the ecliptic, so dark that it seemed to suck light out of space. The angle allowed it to produce a faint umbra on the so-called Smog, the third ring, composed of pale silicate dust and light particles combined with a few larger asteroids that created oddly elegant curls and whorls within the bland ocher-tinted haze. Beyond that, at seventeen AUs, was the Band Ring, a thin, very dense loop fixed in place by over a hundred shepherd moonlets. After that there was only the Ice Bracelet, which began at twenty-five AUs and blended into the Oort cloud at the system’s edge.

There were no planets, an idiosyncrasy that sorely puzzled the Commonwealth astronomers. The star was too old for the rings to be categorized as any kind of accretion disc. Most wrote it off as a quirk caused by the Spike, but that had been in place only for at the most fifty thousand years; in astrological time that was nothing. Unless of course it had obliterated the planets when it arrived, which would make it a weapon of extraordinary stature. Again highly unlikely.

From their position poised above the system, Aaron asked for approach and docking permission. It was granted by the Spike’s AI, and they slipped back into hyperspace for the short flight in.