Partnership (38 page)

Let's see, now — she reasoned. IfTm mad, then it's safe to look up the symptoms and decide that I'm mad, except that presumably I won't accept the evidence. And ifTm not mad, I daren't check memory to prove it. So we'd better accept the working hypothesis that lam sane, and go on from there. The dry humor of the syllogism did something to restore her emotional balance. Although how long I will remain sane, urtder these circumstances...

Better not to think about that. Better, too, not to remember Caleb's first partner, who had gone into irreversible coma rather than face the emptiness that surrounded him after the synaptic connections between his shell and the outside world had been destroyed. As a matter of sanity, as well as survival, Nancia decided, she would make the assumption that somebody had done this to her, and concentrate on solving the puzzle of who had done it and how they could be stopped.

300

Anne McCaffrey fcf Margaret Ball

PARTNERSHIP

301

A natural first step would be to reopen just one sensor, to examine the bursts of energy that had come so dose to disrupting her nervous system.... I can't! the child within her shrieked in near-panic. You can't make me, I won't, I won't, fUstay safe in here forever.

That's not an option, Nancia told herself firmly. She wanted to say it aloud, to reassure herself with the sound of her own voice; but she was mute as well as deaf and blind and without sensation, floating in an absolute blackness. Somehow she had to conquer that panic within herself.

Poetry sometimes helped. That Old Earth dramatist Sev and Fassa were so fond of quoting; she had plenty of his speeches stored in her memory banks. On such a night as this . . . Nancia reached unthinking for memory, stopped the impulse just in time. She didn't know that speech; she had stored it in memory. Quite a different thing. Try something else, then. Icouid be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that 1

have bad dreams.... Not a good choice, under the circumstances. Maybe ... did she know anything else?

What was she, without her memory banks, her sensors, her powerful thrusting engines? Did she even existatall?

That way lies madness. Of course she existed.

Deliberately Nancia filled herself with her own true memories. Scooting around the Laboratory Schools corridors, playing Stall and Power-Seek with her friends. Acing the math finals, from Lobachevski Geometry up through Decomposition Topology, playing again, with all the wonderful space of numbers and planes and points to wander in. Voice training with Ser Vospatrian, the Lab Schools' drama teacher, who'd taught them to modulate their speaker-produced vocalizations through the full range of human speech with all its emotional overtones. That first day they'd all been shy and nervous, hating the recorded playbacks of their own tinny artificial voices; Vospatrian had made them recite limericks and nonsense poems until they broke down in giggles and forgot to be self-conscious. Goodness, she could still remember those silly poems with which he'd started off every session....

And quite without thinking or calling on her artificially augmented memory banks, Nancia was oft jjtfc

!$• The farmer's daughter had soft brown hair,

? ? Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese,

' 1 And I met with a poem, I can't say where, Which wholly consisted of lines like these...."

There was a young brainshxp of Vega.... "

"Fhairson swore a feud against the clan MTavish; Marched into their land to murder and to rafish, for he did resolve to extirpate the vipers Withfour-and-twenty men andftue-and-thirty thirty pipers..."

Nancia went through Ser Vospatrian's entire reper-toire until she was giggling internally and floating on the natural high of laughter-produced endorphins.

Then, floating quite calmly in her blackness, she set about testing her sensor connections one by one.

She got the mental equivalent of burned fingers and light-blinded eyes more than once during the testing process, but it wasn't as bad as she had feared. The lower-deck sensors were completely useless, as were her navigation computer and the new mathematics and graphics co-processors she'd just invested in.

Everything, in fact, that contains hyperchipsfrom Shemati...

and with that deduction, Nancia knew just who was striking at her and why.

She opened the upper deck sensors one by one, first taking in the sleeping bodies tumbled in the pas-302

Anne McCaffrey & Margaret BaU

sageway and cabins. Sev, slumped over the isometric spring set in the exercise room with his hands and feet still in the springholders; Alpha, strapped in her cabin-Blaize, floating just above the passageway deck, with an angelic expression on his sleeping face and a nasty bruise coming up on his chin.

Mutiny. And somebody released sleepgas. But which side}

She opened the control cabin sensors slowly, cautiously. The port side sensors wavered and gave an erratic display. Somehow Polyon's hyperchips must be working to contaminate the entire computer system. 2 don't have much time....

Even less time than she'd thought, Nancia realized as she took in the standoff in the control room.

General Questar-Benn disabled — of course, the hyperchips in her prostheses — and Darnell holding her needier on a defiant Forister while Polyon sat in the pilot's chair and played his commands on the computer console. That, at least, she could do something about. Nancia struck back, sending her own commands to the computer, disabling the console section by section, garbling Polyon's commands as they came in. He tapped out a sequence she did not know; she traced it to its source and with shock recognized her own access code. The musical tones were already sounding in the cabin. But the accompanying syllables weren't stored in the same location.... They have to be somewhere, though. In some part of memory not accessible to my conscious probe. Otherwise my shell wouldn't recognvze and open to them. Nancia felt proud of herself for figuring that out, then cold and sick as she wondered how long it would take Polyon to make the same deduction.

And if the syllables aren't where lean consciously retrieve them, how can I block Polyon against doing so ?

She felt queasy from the repeated looping through four decomposition spaces, but there was no safe way to leave the loop until she regained full computing and PARTNERSHIP

303

navigational facility, first, let's repair the damage..,. Nancia worked furiously, permanently disabling the sections of her computer system that had been contaminated by the Shemali hyperchips, finding alternative routings to access the processors that remained untouched. At the same time the worm program unleashed by Polyon squirmed deeper into her system, changing and mutat-ing code as it went, erasing its own tracks so that she could only tell where it had been by the sudden flares of disorienting sense input or the garbled mathematics where it had been. She had to find and stop that code before she could do anything else.

Deep in the intricacies of her own system, Nancia agonized as Darnell struck down Forister.

Don't listen. Don't think about that. She would need all her concentration to disable Polyon's rogue code, more concentration than she'd ever brought to bear on the comparatively trivial problems of subspace navigation. Nancia remembered Sev Bryley's training in relaxation and deliberately, slowly calmed herself, drawing energy away from her extremities and center-ing her consciousness on the internal core of light where she existed independent of computer and shell and ship. With some remote part of her awareness she sensed the failure of gravitational systems and the dimming of lights, the shock and concern of her passengers, but she could not afford to divert consciousness to those semi-automatic functions now.

The automatic datacording routines Nancia had set up continued to operate as Polyon began Micaya's torture. Nancia could not counter his commands without breaking her trance; she could not even restore gravity and lights to reassure Forister. Ignoring Micaya's pain was the hardest thing she had ever done. For the moment, Micaya does not exist. Nothing exists outside this place, this moment, this center. There was the rogue code; she annihilated it in a blaze of energy, destroying deep 304

Anne McCaffrey fcf Margaret BaU

memory in the process; like an amputation, she thought, the shaft of pain and the nagging ache afterwards. Now to restore lost functions... Ruthlessly she cutback on the frills and luxuries of her programming, reducing the power that normally fed her autonomic functions. Lights dimmed even further in the control cabin, and the softpersons made comments about an acrid smell in the air. They would just have to put up with it; she needed that processing power to restore her crippled nav programs. Three of the four major math coprocessors were lost; the graphics processor could double for one of them. No time to think about the others. Naritia erased unnecessary programs and dumped others to datahedron, making space in what little remained of her memory for the processes she had to have. Would that be enough? No chance for tests, no time for second thoughts. She struck back, once, with everything she had; felt hyperchips shriveling to blank bits of permalloy, felt inactive sensors and processors become dead weights instead ofliving systems.

Some animals will gnaw off their own limbs to get out of a trap....

No time to mourn, either. With the "death" of the hyperchips within Nancia's system, the transmissions that tortured Micaya's cyborgans ceased. The sound of her amplified heartbeat ended between one drum beat and the next. Forister groaned. He thmks fm dead. He would be reassured in a moment Nancia activated full artificial gravity; Darnell fell to the deck from his wall perch, Fassa went to her knees. Polyon staggered but remained standing. Nancia beamed commands to the tanglefield wires, Darnell, Polyon and Fassa were frozen in place, nets of moving lights encompassing the tanglefield keys at their wrists and ankles and necks. Finally, Nancia spared a tittle power to bring up the cabin lights and freshen the air.

"FN-935 reporting for duty," she said. "I apologize for any temporary inconvenience...."

PARTNERSHIP

305

"Nanda!" Forister sounded dose to tears.

"General Questar-Benn, can you take the pilot's seat?" Nancia requested, "I may need a little help to navigate us out of Singularity."

"Do my best" Micaya's breathing was still ragged, and she leaned heavily on the chair beside her, but she limped to the pilot's seat without help, the prostheses once again responding to her own brain's electrical impulses. "What can I do?"

"I am operating with only one mathematics coprocessor," Nancia told her, "and my navigation units are nonfunctional When I start the drives, we will move out of this transition loop and into the expansion of whatever subspace we happen to be in. I'll try to maintain a steady path through the subspace options, but I may need you to aid in the navigation. Since the graphics processor is undamaged, I will throw up images of the approaching subspaces. Rest your hand on the palmpad and give me a direction at each branch."

"Do my best," Micaya said again, but Nancia noticed it was the prosthetic hand she rested on the palmpad; the other hand was still an ugly purple color, with blackened moons on the swollen fingertips. She remembered what Polyon had said about gangrene.

How much had his hyperchips accelerated Micaya's metabolic processes? Get her to a medic., .but I can't do that, unless somebody helps me surf out of Singularity... and we daren't waitfor the paravenm to wear offfbrister....

. Then Nancia had no more energy to spare for wor-

. rying about Micaya or anything else but the waves of transformations that broke over her head, tossed and tumbled her gasping through subspaces that j,deformed her body and everyone within, streams of

[calculations that escaped her processors. Lost and choking, she sensed a firm hand guiding her up-

| wards... out... She crunched the last numbers into a tractable series of equations and broke through the 306

Anne McCaffrey &? Margaret Ball

chaos of uncountably infinite subspaces into the blessed normalcy of RealSpace.

Before she had rime to thank Micaya, a tightbeam communication assaulted her weakened comm center.

"Back so soon, FN? What's the matter? I thought you were headed for Central."

It was Simeon, the Vega Base managing brain. "We had a small virus problem," Nancia beamed back.

"Returned for... repairs."

The rest of the story could wait until she had absolute privacy. There was no need to alert the galaxy to the fact that an unknown number of their computer systems were contaminated by Shemali hyperchips.

"Is everything under control now?"

"You could say that," Nancia replied dryly, turning up her remaining sensors and looking over her internal condition. Half her processors burned out, sleeping bodies littering the passenger quarters, three High Families brats secured in tanglefield and mad as hell, Forister twitching with the pins-and-needles of paravenin recovery, and a crippled general bringing them safe into RealSpace —

"Yes," she told Simeon. "Everything's under control."

• CHAPTERMGHTEEN

In the days of repair work drat followed, Nancia began to understand just how much Caleb must have hated being grounded on Summerlands while she went on with a new brawn to complete the task they had begun.

Now she, too, was "convalescent" and temporarily out of the action. To protect herself from the insidious effects of Polyon's hyperchips she had, in effect, crippled herself^

rendering large parts of her own system inoperable; to keep the worm program he had implanted from contacting other hyperchips once they got out of Singularity and could make Net contact again, she had slashed through her own memory, ruthlessly excising whole sections of memory banks and operating code.

"It's a miracle you made it back here in one piece,"

Simeon of Vega Base told her, "and you're not leaving Base until you've had a very thorough overhaul and repair. Those aren't my orders, they're a beam from CS. So no argument!"