Jaydium (29 page)

You don't have to tell me that.
Kithri slipped the autoprobes into place on her temples, feeling the gel contacts cool and familiar. She turned around in the seat. “You ready, Raerquel? This is your last chance to back out.”

“There is still much work to do, and little time. As friend-Eril has stated, what is the advantage of delay? Proceed now. Please.”

She wet her lips. “I'll make the first part of the meld...” She sank into synch with shipbrain's inhumanly steady rhythms. Her vision doubled as her mind began to make the usual adjustments. She blinked, searching for the visual focus that would tell her the first part of the meld was accomplished. It seemed to take much longer than usual. As she waited, her thoughts, like disobedient children, wandered to the last time she flew
duo
and how much had happened since that morning in Port Ludlow.

How angry she'd been at Hank's defection, which now seemed no more than a forgotten annoyance. How jealous of that raven-haired beauty he'd taken up with. How suspicious of Eril.

Eril...

“All right, Raerquel, here we go.” Her voice sounded abrasive to her ears, as if it could scour away the demanding, sensual memory of that first
duo
flight across the Cerrano Plain. Belatedly, she realized that Raerquel couldn't see her translator panel. It didn't matter.

Slowly she shifted modes to bring the gastropoid into the
duo
meld.

What if I have the same response to Raerquel as I did to Eril?
She stifled the thought.
It's not possible, Raerquel's too alien. I'll be lucky if I can understand anything I get from its mind. And besides it would be automatic, a physiological reflex, nothing more. Just as...what happened with Father was.

For the first long moments she thought the contact had failed, that there was nothing coming through the mechano-neuronal pathways. Then she sensed something, faint and far away from the usual human frequency. Leaving shipbrain's base pattern as an anchor, she began searching “upwards” and “downwards” along the frequency range.

“Upwards” felt open and empty. Nothing to be gained there.

It would help if I knew exactly what I was looking for. C'mon, Raerquel, where are you?

She shifted her attention “downwards”. It was like slogging through molasses, thick and syrupy. The ambient mental energy resisted her with exactly the same amount of force she used against it. The harder she pushed, the harder it pushed back. In all her years of flying, both
duo
and
singlo
, she'd never experienced anything like it.

Frustrated, Kithri decided to follow Eril's advice and “get the hell out of there.” To her surprise, she couldn't reverse her “downward” movement, couldn't even change her speed. She could go neither backwards towards “normal”, nor sideways, but only further “down”. Not only that, something was actively drawing her deeper and deeper, sucking greedily at her.

What's happening? What kind of comet-crazy thing is this?

Kithri struggled to think things through logically. There must be some rational explanation for what was happening. If she could only find it, she might be able to counteract it. People didn't get trapped in
duo
! It was designed to be foolproof. Yet something had gone wrong, terribly wrong.

What? Had the equipment modification failed? Or was the linkage between human and gastropoid impossible in the first place? Was the fault in her, or in the technology, or in Raerquel...

Raerquel!

Kithri reached out as far as she dared, but got no impression of the gastropoid's mind within the heavy, sucking darkness. But if Raerquel, like herself, were trapped here, then it was her responsibility to get both of them out.
She
was the one who had suggested this crazy experiment in the first place.
She
was the one who'd altered the apparatus.
She
was the experienced
duo
pilot...

No, she was only a novice, and now a man's bulky shoulders rose to blot out her view of the bleak terrain that stretched out beyond the scrubjet nose. She swayed in her seat, confused. She shouldn't be here, she
wasn't
here... Then the man turned around and leered at her with yellowed teeth.

Dowdell!

One dust-streaked hand reached for her, fingers splayed wide to grab her breast...and passed right through her. Like the space ghost, only this time
she
was the ghost, drifting...

It isn't real!
came a thin wail at the back of her mind, weaving through the whine of a badly-tuned jaydium cutter. She looked down at her hands and they were covered with blood and she knew her nose was broken...

Not real! It's not real... I have to...abort...linkage...

Yet how wonderful it was to lie back against the flowers, looking up at the powder blue sky. How peaceful to swim in the clear warm water, the water reflecting and amplifying the living light. She could almost touch the softness of the petals, smell the ever-changing fragrances, feel the breezes...

The voice at the back of her mind kept on its annoying chant, weaker now but even more desperate.

Abort command — give shipbrain the abort command! What is it, Kithri? Think!

“It is...” Words formed in her mouth. The sky had gone all brown and she was rushing up into its murky heights. Her stomach growling, but whether with fear or hunger she couldn't tell. Her eyes ached from too little sleep.

“It is...escape...escape speed. No, that's not right.”

The brown went suddenly black and still she flew along, dazedly watching the glassy reflections of a jaydium tube flicker past. Choking darkness filled her mouth and gills, the shallow waters murky, the fluid changing light now blotted out. The shadow of a giant cacharon glided past, leaving the stench of terror in its wake.

Ship — there ought to be a ship around her, a ship she spoke to... But the words, what were the words? Why was it so important she remember?

Escape? Escape speed?

Still she rushed downwards, steeper and steeper, more and more slippery so that she had no way to brake her descent. Between her knees something grew hot, glowing as with atmospheric re-entry.

“Not speed, velocity... Escape something velocity... TERMINAL ESCAPE VELOCITY!”

The words were right. The abort command chosen by her father was unchanged since the day he programmed it into shipbrain. She'd never used it until now, never even whispered it, except in her dreams. But she knew it like the beating of her own heart.

Nothing happened.

She was still surrounded by dense, devouring blackness, and she had now lost all sense of movement and direction. Vaguely she remembered travelling “down”, remembered fighting it with all her strength, but now the word no longer made sense. Up, down, what was the difference?

She felt herself slipping again along currents of mental energy, sliding, plummeting, no longer caring. Pressure squeezed her like a vice, the weight of hundreds of feet of water looming above her. Hunger seized her, hunger and blind terror. Her mind dissolved into primeval fragments, each scrabbling for survival...

And for one agonizing moment she no longer felt herself at all.

The tiny portion of Kithri's mind that clung to consciousness continued to struggle weakly. Around her shone a myriad pinprick lights, swimming in hypnotic arcs of color. She curled in on herself like a drying cinder, like an embryo...

Like an embryo in a body!
Thought flared again. Somewhere — somehow — she
did
have a body...

And that body was sprawled in an hauntingly familiar seat, legs thrust straight out and racked with spasm. Hands seized her shoulders, shaking her as her head lolled from a nerveless neck. Fingers peeled back her eyelids, probed for a pulse, stripped the autoprobes from her head.

“Damn it, Kithri,” said Eril's voice. “I thought we'd lost you.”

Kithri opened her eyes and gasped. Natural sensation flooded through her — the air whistling through her lungs, her heart pounding, the pressure of the floor under her thighs. Eril's fingers gripping her, digging into her shoulders. She lay in his arms just outside
‘Wacker's
open cockpit door. High above them arched a dome of sparkling crystal.

The sensation of incredible relief vanished instantly, replaced with the memory of who she was, where she was, what she'd tried to do.

“Raerquel...” her voice came out in a croak.
“Raerquel?”

“It seems to be stunned, but you — ”

“Never mind about me!” Kithri jerked free and hauled herself to her feet. “I'm fine, see? No aftereffects or anything.”

Her knees suddenly turned to jelly and lost all semblance of structural integrity. Breathing heavily, she caught herself against
‘Wacker's
pitted side.

“You're about as
fine
as a space-sick rookie,” said Eril. “What
happened
to you in there?”

“Forget what happened to me! What have we done to
Raerquel?
” Kithri reached into the cockpit and laid one hand on the gastropoid's silvery skin. There was no response, no change in its cool skin.

She started trembling. It was the coolness more than anything else that reminded her of her father's hand, how she held it through the long night until the last bit of body warmth had seeped away.

“Eril, what if it's...” she couldn't bring herself to say the word
dead.
“It's different from us, how can we tell? Wouldn't the tentacles go slack or something?”

Eril grabbed her shoulders and told her to sit down until she could think straight. With a sense of grudging relief, she slid to the floor beside the scrubjet's landing gear, as limp as an exhausted child. Eril called the gastropoid's name, shouting it so loud she whimpered and covered her ears with trembling hands. He stopped only when Kithri reminded him it wouldn't do any good. He tried shaking it, at first gently, then slapping it and pulling on its sturdier lower tentacles, all without the slightest response.

“What are you doing?” Kithri asked when he climbed into the pilot's seat and slipped on the autoprobes. As his efforts had gotten more desperate, her own presence of mind returned, although she still felt uncertain, brittle.

“Trying to make contact with it myself,” he said in a ragged-edged voice. “Or, failing that, getting shipbrain to give me some physiological readouts and praying I can make sense out of them.”

Eril's face went blank for a split second and then settled into an expression of intense concentration. Kithri watched him with reluctant admiration. In all her years of flying with her father and then Hank, she'd never seen anyone slip into
duo
so quickly. He was good, very good. But good enough?

After what seemed centuries of waiting, fingers clutched around her knees, scarcely daring to breathe, she saw his eyelids flicker open.

“Damn!” He scowled as he pulled the headset off.

“What happened?”

“Not a ratshit thing, that's what! The whole system's gone neutral, as if it had never been activated. That moronic shipbrain of yours not only couldn't contact Raerquel, it didn't even know it had been in
duo!
”

“If there was a mistake, it was your morphoplex rerouting,” Kithri snarled. “
‘Wacker
would never — ”

“Stuff it!” He jumped out of the cockpit. “The reroute was good. You checked it yourself.”

Kithri bit her lip. It wouldn't help to argue whose fault it was. “So what's next?”

“Let's get Raerquel out of there. Lay it flat. Maybe we'll see something we can't from here. Or maybe just getting it out will help.”

Kithri wrenched off the gastropoid's autoprobes. The sensor pads came free with tiny, sickening pops. Raerquel didn't respond. Its head and neck sections had completely retracted into its body so that neither the coppery eye discs nor the neck slits were visible.

Eril climbed back into the pilot's seat, facing backwards, and managed to get a good enough traction on the far side of Raerquel's body so that he could push while Kithri pulled. It was a long, exhausting business, very much like trying to shift several hundred pounds of muscle-bounded, boneless protoplasm.

Once they got enough of Raerquel's amorphous bulk out of the door, gravity took over and the extending curve of its body hit the glassy floor with a
plomp!
From that point it was relatively simple to ease the rest of the body out of the scrubjet. There was no visible change in the gastropoid's condition, nor could they see any sign of a wound or other damage. It lay on the floor, an inert lump. Kithri and Eril sat down beside it, sweating and breathing freely, wondering what their next move would be.

As if on cue, Brianna chose that moment to make an entrance. She burst into the laboratory dome, accompanied by one of Raerquel's assistants. Kithri thought it was Bhevon, but in her dazed state she couldn't be sure. She got to her feet, aware that Eril did the same.

Brianna rushed to the massive silvery lump that was Raerquel. “What's happened?” She glared at Kithri, her face contorted with emotion. “What have you done to it?”

Kithri's voice came in a stunned whisper. “I don't know...”

“Leave her alone!” Eril grabbed Brianna's shoulder and spun her around. “She's been through enough!”

Without waiting for her response, he turned to the gastropoid behind her. “Bhevon — it is Bhevon, isn't it? We need your help. There's been a terrible accident. We don't know what's wrong with Raerquel. It seems to be unconscious, won't respond to anything we do and I can't find its pulse. I don't even know if it has one.”

Bhevon extended a quartet of antenna-like appendages towards its clan-superior. The humans drew back to let it work. “We are possessing heartbeats like other large invertebrates,” it commented without pausing in its scanning activities. “Bodies exceeding a certain minimum bulk are requiring the forceful pumping of nutrient and waste transport media. Human science is ignorant of this basic principle?”