The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

division.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Manby wheezed as he flinched against the pain.
    â€œSo you just put that fucking gun down. You’re already drowning in shit so deep that you’ll never see the universe again.”
    â€œJoin me at the bottom.” Aaron pressed the trigger on the jelly gun, holding it down on continuous-fire mode. He added his own distortion pulse to the barrage. Manby’s force field held out for almost two seconds before collapsing. The jelly gun pulses struck the exposed body. Aaron turned and fired again, overloading Three’s force field.
    Corrie-Lyn threw up as waves of bloody sludge from both ruined corpses cascaded across the ground. She was wailing like a wounded kitten when Aaron hauled her to her feet. “We have to go,” he shouted at her. She shrank back from his hold. “Come on, now! Move!” His u-shadow already was calling down a taxi.
    â€œNo,” she whimpered. “No, no. They didn’t … you just killed them. You killed them.”
    â€œDo you understand what this is?” he growled at her, his voice loud and aggressive; he was using belligerence to keep her off balance. “Do you understand what just happened? Do you? They’re an assassination squad. Ethan wants you dead. Permanently dead. You can’t stay here. They’ll keep coming after you. Corrie-Lyn! I can protect you.”
    â€œMe?” she sobbed. “They wanted me?”
    â€œYes. Now come on; we’re not safe here.”
    â€œOh, sweet Ozzie.”
    He shook her. “Do you understand?”
    â€œYes,” she whispered. By the way she was shaking, Aaron thought she was going into mild shock. “Good.” He started to walk toward the descending taxi, hauling her along, heedless of the way she stumbled to keep up. It was hard not to smile. He could not have delivered a better result to the evening if he had planned it.

Inigo’s First Dream
    When Edeard woke, his dream was already a confused fading memory. The same thing happened every morning. No matter how hard he tried, he never could hold on to the images and sounds afflicting him every night. Akeem said not to worry; his dreams were made from the gentle spillage of other sleeping minds around him. Edeard did not believe that the things he dreamed of came from anywhere like their village; the fragments he occasionally managed to cling to were too strange and fascinating for that.
    Cool predawn light was showing up the cracks in the window’s wooden shutters. Edeard lay still for a while, cozy under the pile of blankets that covered his cot. It was a big room with whitewashed plaster walls and bare floorboards. The rafters of the hammer-beam roof above were ancient martoz wood that had blackened and hardened over the decades until they resembled iron. There was not much by way of furniture; two-thirds of the floor space was completely empty. Edeard had shoved what was left down to the end that had a broad window. At the foot of the cot was a crude chest where he kept his meager collection of clothes; there was a long table covered in his enthusiastic sketches of possible genistar animals, several chairs, and a dresser with a plain white bowl and a pitcher of water. Over in the corner opposite the cot, the fire had burned out sometime in the night, with a few embers left glimmering in the grate. It was difficult to heat such a large volume, especially in winter, and Edeard could see his breath as a fine white mist.
    Technically, he lived in the apprentice dormitory of Ashwell village’s Eggshaper Guild, but he was the only occupant. He had lived there for the last six years, ever since his parents had died when he was eight years old. Master Akeem, the village’s sole remaining shaper, had taken him in after the caravan they had joined to travel through the hills to the east had been attacked by bandits.
    Edeard wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and