Free The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton Page B

level, circumventing all the wisdom and cool of Higher behavior. He relished the power that was available, the freedom to fly across the galaxy. This was liberation in the extreme.
    How the girls would love to ride in it.
    â€œGive me something to sit on,” he told the smartcore. “Turn the lights up and activate flight control functions.”
    An acceleration couch bloomed up from the floor as the ribs brightened, revealing a complex pattern of black lines etched on the cabin walls. The Delivery Man sat down. Exoimages flipped up, showing him the ship’s status. His u-shadow cleared him for flight with the spaceport governor, and he designated a flight path to Ellezelin, two hundred fifteen light-years away. The umbilical cables withdrew into their tower.
    â€œLet’s go,” he told the smartcore.
    Compensator generators maintained level gravity inside the cabin as the
Artful Dodger
rose on regrav. At fifty kilometers altitude, the limit of regrav, the smartcore switched to ingrav, and the starship continued to accelerate away from the planet. The Delivery Man began to experiment with the internal layout, expanding walls and furniture out of the cabin bulkheads. The dark lines flowed and bloomed into a great variety of combinations, allowing up to six passengers to have tiny independent sleeping quarters that included a bathroom formation, but for all its malleability, the cabin was basically variations on a lounge. If you were traveling with anyone, he decided, let alone five others, you’d need to be very good friends.
    A thousand kilometers above the spaceport, the
Artful Dodger
went FTL, vanishing inside a quantum field interstice with a photonic implosion that pulled in all the stray electromagnetic radiation within a kilometer of its fuselage. There were no differences perceptible to ordinary human senses: he might have been in an underground chamber, the gravity remaining perfectly stable. Sensors provided him with a simplified image of their course as it related to large masses back in spacetime, plotting stars and planets by the way their quantum signatures affected the intersecting fields through which they were flying. Their initial speed was a smooth fifteen light-years per hour, near the limit for hyperdrive, which the sophisticated Lytham planetary spacewatch network could track out to a couple of light-years.
    The Delivery Man waited until they were three light-years beyond the network and told the smartcore to accelerate again. The
Artful Dodger
’s ultradrive pushed them up to a phenomenal fifty-five light-years per hour. It was enough to make the Delivery Man flinch. He had been on an ultradrive ship only twice before; there were not many of them, as ANA had not released the technology to the Central worlds. Exactly how the Conservative Faction had gotten hold of it was something he studiously avoided asking.
    Two hours later he reduced speed back to fifteen light-years an hour and allowed the Ellezelin traffic network to pick up their hyperspatial approach. He used a TransDimensional (TD) channel to the planetary datasphere and requested landing permission for Riasi spaceport.
    Ellezelin’s original capital was situated on the northern coast of Sinkang, with the Camoa River running through it. He looked down on the city as the
Artful Dodger
sank down toward the main spaceport. It had been laid out in a spiderweb grid with the planetary parliament at the heart. The building was still there, a grandiose structure of towers and buttresses made from an attractive mixture of ancient and modern materials. But the planet’s government now was centered in Makkathran2. The senior bureaucrats and their departments had moved with it, leading a migration of commerce and industry. Only the transport sector remained strong in Riasi. The wormholes that linked the planets of the Ellezelin Free Trade Zone together were all here, incorporated into the spaceport, making it the most