The Void Read Free

began, “tell me what you remember.”
    She looked at him and waited. He thought for a second but didn't remember much of anything.
    “The last thing you remember.”
    It came to him suddenly and he didn't like it. He breathed in deep and started to lie, but as he glanced up at her, he got the feeling she had an ear for bullshit. So instead, he just sighed.
    “Angela,” he said finally.
    “Angela?” He could tell by the expression on her face that the name was not in whatever folder she had been perusing. “Your wife?”
    He chuckled for the first time since he had woken up. “No. No, my girlfriend. My ex-girlfriend. It was the last conversation we had before . . .”
    He looked up at her with a start that had to tell her he had remembered.
    “. . .before I left on my last run.”
    “On the Vespa .”
    “Yes,” he said, “the Vespa .”
    It was coming back to him in flashes, images and fragments of spoken conversations. He remembered that night on the beach, when Angela had asked him to give it up—to never fly another route or if he did to only do local runs. The nightmares had become too much for her. The nightmares that were but shadows, echoes of the dream. If only she could see what was in his head . . . Well, it might have driven her as mad as he sometimes thought he was.
    But he couldn't leave. It was a good job. The best someone like him could ever hope to have. He tried to explain that, to convince her that staying on with the Merchant Marine was as good for her as it was for him. But she wouldn't hear his arguments and she left the beach behind, her crying and him confused and angry. Yes, he remembered that. He remembered everything before it. It was what followed that was hard, and he knew that was the most important thing of all.
    “I'm sorry,” he said, sensing her impatience. “I'm doing the best I can. I really am.”
    “Well,” she said, “let's start from what we know. We found you in the trans-Neptunian void, at the edge of the warp zone. We had just dropped out of hyperspace and there you were. In fact, it appears that your escape pod had traveled some distance after the . . . incident.” He didn't like the way she paused. “You had been in there six weeks from what we can tell.”
    “Six weeks!” She stared at him for a second before nodding. In truth, he had known it would be something like that, but it still shocked him to hear it.
    “Six weeks. Your computer recognized you were injured, of course, and kept you in stasis. It's the only reason you are still alive.”
    “Thank God for modern miracles,” he murmured.
    “Yes . . . In any event, that means the accident happened beyond Pluto. And that's where we have a problem, Mr. Connor.”
    If it weren't for everything that had happened, this would all make sense. If he were in his right mind, he would know what she was implying, instead of lying there stupidly, Charlotte the spider the only being in the room not locked in some bizarre melodrama. Suddenly, through his fog-shrouded mind, he understood.
    “We shouldn't have been there.”
    “No,” she said simply, “you shouldn't have. Non-warp, trans-stellar travel is of course forbidden beyond the solar sheath, for obvious reasons. If a ship in warp were to—”
    “Yes, yes,” he said dully. It was one of the first things he had learned in flight school. “If a ship at warp speed were to intersect with one in normal space, the result would be catastrophic.”
    “Absolutely.”
    “So is that what happened to the Vespa ?” he asked, knowing the answer as he spoke the words.
    “No. If it were, you wouldn't be here, Mr. Connor. And besides, we have analyzed the debris field and there's only enough there for one ship.”
    Aidan sighed deeply; now there was no denying it. “So she's gone.”
    “Yes, she is. And then there is the matter of this.”
    She waved her hand and an image appeared in mid-air. Aidan found himself looking into his own eyes, and there was a bit of