The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) (10 page)

"Then you must make sure you are in full strength
when he returns. I will assist you in anything you need. You have my
word."

Amharr considers the Kolsamal's readiness to help, and
finds it sufficiently plausible. Gra'Ylgam has a lot to gain if Amharr becomes
indebted to him, and nothing to lose. Amharr might even need his help before
they're done.

-

The cool, sterile air in Amharr's personal chamber is a
welcome relief. He touches the outer wall to render the
samyth
transparent, then has one of the inner walls rearrange to form a nest for him
to rest in. He climbs inside the curvature, bends his powerful hindlegs back up
behind his back, and brings his slender forelegs together in front of him in a
loose clasp. He leans back against the wall, rests his hands in his lap, and
gazes out into the vastness of space.

Millions of stars glow before him, radiating in the entire
spectrum like tiny flares prickling through the expanse. Like the millions of
nerve-endings that are constantly aglow inside his body since the link with the
human. Hopefully, the distance from her and a careful investigation of the
disarray she left behind will put him at ease.

The
Kaluvian
is still preparing for its departure
and Kriahm is abusing the preparation time to make all sorts of inquiries to
the
Undawan
in hopes of finding out the nature of Amharr's interest in
the humans. Luckily, the fifty Emranti in duty aboard the
Undawan
are
not aware there has even been an inquiry of a human, only a capture and
analysis of a human ship, and the Kolsamal elder will not speak to anyone about
it. Kriahm will find out little, but he won't find sufficient reason to trust Amharr's
decisions either. He should just leave. And hopefully fail to return. He most
definitely won't be missed.

Amharr closes his eyes, makes himself as comfortable as
possible, and reduces his vital functions to a minimum.

He has to start somewhere, and from what he's seen so far,
each point is as good as any other as they all fail to make sense. So he picks
the first snippet of memory he comes across and does his best to isolate it.

In his mind's replay of the selected episode, the human is
clutching another human's back, breathing heavily into a synthetic mask, while
she is carried through a snow storm up the dark and steep side of a mountain.
She seems smaller, frailer, and unable to make much sense of the things going
on around her. Is she ill or crippled? No, she is a nestling, carried by an
adult. For what purpose? And why is she so content not knowing anything about
it?

Amharr finds the odd perspective of the human's memory
very difficult to adjust to, almost claustrophobic. He gives up and breaks off—gets
out of his nest to pace a bit around the room, and walk off the tension
building in his nerves again.

If it would have been another Emranti instead of an alien
he'd have just flushed his Phylra cells out of his nervous system, convalesced
for a day or two, and been done with it. But the human left no cells to be
flushed. There's no comprehensible structure to her memories, no quick way to
corral and dispose of them. The jumble of erratic sensations and images trapped
in his brain gnaws constantly at his consciousness, pushing him back and forth
in a grotesque, primeval dance.

Amharr sits back down in his nest, and closes his eyes. A
few deep breaths, and he's right back hanging from an adult human's back,
trudging through a night-time blizzard up a ragged mountain.

The cold wind whips around him—around
her
—with
torrents of sharp, icy needles. It clings to the glassy surface of the mask on
her face. The air she breathes is cold and thin, barely enough to keep her
conscious. The adult carrying her is advancing carefully, feeling along the
black side of the mountain. The depth on their left is inscrutable, seeming to
her like a bottomless cleft. She tightens her grip around the adult's neck,
fearful she might fall to her death.

"Careful, honey, you're choking me," the adult
says. A human male, familiar and protective... her parent, it seems.
"You've been riding those Protectors too much lately, my neck isn't as
strong as theirs. No need to hold so tightly, Taryn. I'm not going to drop you."

She loosens her grip, gaze still lost in the abyss. As
they climb the narrow path, she imagines herself falling into the swirls of ice
and snow, and spiraling down into the darkness a thousand times over.

What a curious thought to entertain, especially for a
child safely tended to by an adult. Maybe it was a meditative rehearsal, a
ritual to control her nerves before an ominous event, a way to prepare for
death. It's the only explanation that makes sense to Amharr. But then—why would
she feel secure, if the adult is taking her to her death?

Amharr finds it painfully frustrating to relive the
human's experience, not knowing for certain if his interpretation is correct.

They continue their senseless climb up the mountain
despite the perilous weather and poor sight. The human's limited vision hardly
picks up anything, and all Amharr's mind-eyes see is a constantly twirling
twilight. The flurries become more rarefied as they gain altitude, and the
sharp howl of the storm dies out. Now they walk through thick clouds, ice crackling
rhythmically underfoot.

She is strangely happy to be carried into the unknown. But
for all her eagerness, when they eventually reach the top of the mountain and
the view opens into the depth around and above them, there is nothing
spectacular to be observed except the biting cold of space tugging at her
flimsy suit.

They are standing on the cusp of a mountain, in a cluster
of mountains that break out of the clouds. The peaks grow upward like gigantic
thorns and cragged blades, black and glazed with glinting ice.

The view of the sky is dominated by the crescent of a
gaseous planet. It lies smeared in shades of brown and cream, falsely
interpreted as a twirling ball of foam in Taryn's limited perception.

The adult dislodges a long tubular tool from his side, and
shoots a metal rod down between his feet. It pierces the solid rock and lodges
itself firmly into the ground. He then drops Taryn to her feet and crouches
beside her to hold her in his arms.

They wait, and Amharr waits with them.

Everything looks so close and simple through the human's
eyes, so immediate and yet so utterly disconnected. Amharr finds it difficult
to image an entire lifetime through such a narrow perspective.

Still... it's somewhat comforting to be free of the huge
amount of information that constantly bombards his own senses.

He knows the gas giant looming above her in the memory is
not made of foam, but gas and plasma chasing around an electromagnetic and
gravitational axis at ferocious speeds. He knows the mountain peaks, that seem
to her like towers and temples growing out of the clouds, are in fact a fleet
of Totorkha hives strategically impaling the moon's surface. And yet, despite
knowing the true nature of these things, the human's impressions superimpose
and overwhelm him.

She regards everything with inappropriate excitement, and
imagines things that are unquestionably false. Like the sweet taste of the
cream streaks on the gas giant's surface; or the softness of the snow-covered
ground visible in glimpses between wisps of even softer clouds. Like the
possibility for her to take flight between the cragged peaks without
technological aid, if her father would momentarily release his grasp on her.

Amharr is aware of the absurdity of it all, but at the
same time experiences her excitement. It is intoxicating.

A bright, jagged flash ignites at the top of a mountain
nearby, and a jet blazes down from the gas giant, bridging the distance between
the celestial bodies in a matter of seconds. It sizzles into a blinding streak
of white for an all too brief moment, then dies out.

Another ignites further in the distance, then another, and
soon the atmosphere around the mountains is ablaze with igniting streaks of
light connecting the moon to its planet. Hundreds of arcs form between the
peaks in tandem, oscillating brightly and setting the clouds beneath them
aglow.

Taryn watches in amazement as the mountains seemingly come
to life, thinking in her rapture that the mysterious creatures inside them are
powering up the sky. To her, the Totorkha—the
Dorylinae
—are awe
inspiring, powerful beings who make the stars and planets work, and she is
smitten with the tremendous energy they wield. She almost
reveres
them.

Amharr is appalled by the ghastly misperception. The
insectoids are nothing but vermin, and the lightning bursts not their display
of power but their harvesting of the gas giant's natural charge, throwing it
out of balance. They don't power up the sky, they power it down. They bundle
and suck up all the available energy, wreaking havoc on the natural order of
things. When the energy stored in their hive-ships eventually reaches a
sufficient level, they double their fleet in record speed, hive by hive and
breeder by breeder, and spread out, ripping the moon apart and leaving nothing
but debris behind.

The human is standing atop one of their harvesters,
looking at their destructive power with the naïve and impressionable faith of a
nestling, thinking it a wonderful show. She thinks of her new friend—a Totorkha
nymph she calls Edrissa—and imagines her to be a princess, daughter of kings
and masters of the Universe.

Amharr shudders and brings himself back to his own
reality, profoundly disgusted by the human's fallacy.

He knows of several instances where the Totorkha have
ripped life-bearing moons apart, some of which carried exceptionally rare
ecosystems the Ascendancy sought to preserve. They even brought primitive
civilizations to collapse with their consuming presence. Amharr had not been
directly involved in the Totorkha containment hundreds of cycles ago, but
witnessing their parasitism through the human's eyes he strongly wishes he had
been.

The grim truth is that, for the humans to coexist with the
Totorkha, they'd have to be deconstructive as well. Like so many other species
Amharr's learned of. Like so many others he's contained himself. He'll likely
have to do the same with the humans: decimate them and limit their possibility
to recover, and see that they never interact with other technologically
advanced species again until enough generations have passed under supervision
to guarantee a submissive nature.

Perhaps his attempt to comprehend the chaotic memories he
extracted from the human female was not entirely futile after all. At least
it's clear to him what he must do. Even if it fills him with unprecedented
dread.

In a couple of hours we'll take off to San Gabriel. My
stomach is already a pit of snakes. Apart from all the unknowns about Preston's
plans for me, I'm dying to find out if the distance affects the
link
.
Amharr is always present in the back of my mind, in the marrow of my
spine—stronger, not weaker. With every passing minute my fear grows that this
might not have a quick solution. Or
any
solution at all.

"What's up with you again?" Jade asks, stuffing
his few belongings into a backpack.

I pull the straps on mine, and tuck my most prized
possession—a data crystal with pictures of my parents and some of my expedition
footage—into an inside pocket. "Might get rough tonight."

Jade whistles. "Oh, I like the sound of that."

"I mean the fugue, bonehead."

"Don't worry, I won't let you hurt yourself."

"I might hurt
you
."

"I'll take the risk. Maybe I'll get some
blackmail-worthy footage too. Never know when that might come in handy."
He chuckles, and when I don't react he snaps his fingers, beckoning me to look
at him.

I sigh wearily, and nod my thanks. He lets me off, concern
still etched on his face.

Not everyone on Spiron is flying out to Epsilon Eridani.
Some of them will stay behind with the main bulk of the station in case the
aliens decide to contact it after all. Preston's team—'we'—and an old married
couple of scientists that everybody calls Bob & Rob, will take our stuff
and gather in an appendix of the station that's been upgraded and converted
into a 'ship': a pile of scrap metal welded to an FTL-capable drive.

Jade and I carry our backpacks down to the ship section.
The station buzzes with voices, clicks, thunks, and rolls, people and
maintenance bots hurrying to and fro, technicians arguing about instruments and
calibrations, and scientists arguing about storage space. A blond man with a
short-cropped haircut passes me by in a hurry, pushing an anti-grav stretcher
laden with crates. He scowls at me, about to say something, then hurries past.
I try not to imagine what was burning on his tongue.

The 'ship' is hardly bigger than an inter-continental
shuttle, and patched together out of old Terran orbital stations. We squeeze
past crates and storage units anchored to the floor of its corridor on our way
to the passenger area. Several modules have been attached to the corridor walls
and converted to rooms. One of them—no idea which—contains the engine.

There are only six small rooms for passengers, and being
the last to arrive, we find them all occupied except for the smallest of the bunch.
We store our backpacks away and stretch out on the lower bed.

"Oh, cheer up," Jade says, nudging my shoulder.
"We'll have a great time on San Gabriel. There's all sorts of clubs and VR
joints. We'll have an adventure that will—"

"I don't have a synet, Jade. I can't plug into a
virtual reality suite."

"Oh, well, it's old fashioned fun for us then. We'll
get totally hammered and pick up random people to play pranks on. Who knows,
maybe we'll even get laid."

"We've got other things to worry about."

He groans and starts to say something, but Franky sticks
his head into the room, rescuing me from further pestering. "Sorry guys,
but have you seen Bray anywhere?"

"Can't track him down?" Jade asks.

"Nope."

"Can't you call him over the nacom?" I ask.

"Tried. He won't answer."

"Captain Bray don't answer to no one," Jade
mocks his voice. Franky groans and leaves again.

"Why do you hate Bray?" I ask.

"I don't hate him. It's just that he's such an
inconsiderate asshole sometimes."

"You're an asshole sometimes too."

"But I'm a
lovable
asshole," he says with
a wink.

I shake my head at him and smile. We lie there silently,
staring at the underside of the top bunk, until the hustle outside quiets down
and people retreat.

The pilot initiates take-off procedures, and orders
everyone to prepare for FTL. It'll take about a hundred and forty-six hours.
Jade powers up my containment field first, then gets into his own bed.

My pulse quickens with each moment that passes. What if I
go mad from the fugue and never recover? What if I kill myself in a fit of
insanity? What if I kill Jade? With no synet to keep my brain from flaring up
like a Christmas tree, and no field to protect me from myself, it's a real
possibility.

My spine tingles and stings as if a light current runs
through me. I can move, even with the field turned to max. It scares the shit
out of me.

The last request for safety measures comes through the
intercom speakers. The ship hums as the docking clamps release and the exhaust
engines push us away from the rest of the station.

I claw at the blanket and clench my fists as the makeshift
ship gains speed and the inertial dampening field powers up in full, feigning a
smooth glide through the radiation-filled void.

"Ten minutes to FTL," the pilot announces, and
my jaw locks.

"Try to relax," Jade says from the bunkbed above
mine. "You're gonna be fine, trust me."

There's a series of beeps on the intercom, followed by a
countdown. Then everything aboard is rendered immaterial, and all my worries
and my nightmares along with it.

-

We're reshaped at the target coordinates on the cusp of
another star system. Thrown out of the unintelligible FTL state into real
spacetime with subtle but devastating force.

No one's quite sure what causes FTL fugue. The best theory
is that on reconstitution, every memory and physical sensation and every
abstract thought and self-regulating impulse is equally strong and equally
conscious. It causes a sort of overload from which only our most powerful
impulse or memory can surface. Temporary insanity and loss of self-control
follows. At least on that last point we all agree.

Countless credits, years, and brilliant minds have been
invested into figuring out how to prevent fugue, but so far no one's done it.
They've only been able to limit the disastrous effects to temporary
dysfunctions. And repeated exposure to the fugue has remained one of the
greatest problems of interstellar society. Sometimes I think it's the only
thing keeping the Ticks from turning the Confederacy into an expansionist
Empire.

My nightmare begins as it always does. I'm standing in the
middle of a hive tunnel, looking for somebody, crying, and my hands and feet
are stiff with cold. I call out but no sound escapes my mouth.

A loud rumble shakes the walls, dislodging tiny pebbles
and fragments from the tunnel ceiling. My knees shake and my vision blurs with
tears. I want to run and find my parents, but I can't move.

Then the ceiling comes tumbling down on me and knocks me
to the ground.

I see my father run toward me. He stumbles and falls.
There are soldiers behind him in the tunnel, pointing guns at us. I try to
scream, to warn him, but my mouth is filled with rubble and dust and I'm stuck.
A soldier throws a grenade at my father, and he explodes in a spray of flesh
and bone that pelts down on me. I'm drenched in his blood.

I can't turn, but in the nightmare I can see my mother:
she cowers in a crevice in the wall, eyes flared open in shock, hands and face
all bloody. I scream and crawl, broken, toward her. A bunch of soldiers blast
through the wall beside her and shoot her in the head.

I can hear the Dorylinae screech and rumble through the
hive, fighting for their lives and their home, dying by the thousands. My
parents are dead. They're nothing but shards of bone and minced flesh that will
never leave this tunnel again, and I... I'm a tightening knot of fear, despair,
and hatred.

Every time I Jump through space, I land right back at
square one, reliving that nightmare, losing everything I love again.

But this time my fugue is changing.

I'm twirling and tumbling through black, acrid smoke. Then
I drop to the ground on the edge of a copper-colored grassland. My toes dig
into warm, gray sand.

I'm holding someone's hand: the iridescent creature that
knows me inside-out, that feels as I feel and thinks as I think. My
brother—Amharr's twin.

We step into the sand circle and death conquers everything
again. We're fighting each other. Hurting each other. Turning into monsters.

I'm killing my twin
!

I stagger backward from his corpse, and my back hits a
solid wall. A cold, metal wall. A ship wall. I'm on a ship again—a human ship.
Back inside my room on Preston's flying dumpster. And I brought Amharr along
with me.

I have to escape him
.

I tear the cubbyholes open and throw everything I find to
the ground. The sound of falling things echoes in my head, lighting my thoughts
on fire.

I brought him with me. He's locked inside my head. I
need to get out of my head
!

I chuckle maniacally and claw at my head.

"Get out of me!" I scream. "What the fuck
do you want?"

Something moves behind me.

I snap around in horror. My vision is blurred and I can't
focus. I crouch and grab the first thing at my feet. It's a heavy, rigid
object.
Perfect
.

It comes closer now, breathing heavily. A tall, dark
shadow tottering toward me.

"Get away from me! Leave me the hell alone."

The shadow laughs hoarsely, then sings, "I swallowed
knives, my guts are sliced—my tummy's full of deadly lies!" It throws
itself at me.

I dodge it, and hit back with my makeshift weapon as hard
as I can. There's a loud
thunk
and a groan. Something kicks me in the
stomach and knocks me down. I struggle to get back up, but a powerful vibration
runs through the floor and I freeze.

He's here. He's come to kill me
.

Sickness bubbles up inside of me and my stomach heaves.
Everything swirls around me, muffled and damp, and it feels like I'm
suffocating.

I can make out a shape before me. A person, too small to
be Amharr, too slow and indecisive... Jade?

I wake with a start, and lash out violently.

"Hey, it's okay. It's okay," Jade says. He grabs
my hands and pins me to the mattress with all his weight.

"Get off me! I need to get out of here. He's here, he
found me,
Amharr found me
!"

"No one's here, Taryn. Shh, it's okay." He ties
my hands to the railing of the bunk bed.

"You don't get it. He's
inside
me."

"Nothing's inside you." He rubs my shoulders,
strokes my hair. "Try to rest."

"I can't... I can
feel
him..." I struggle
against the restraints and start crying.

"It's okay, Taryn." He wipes the sweat from my
forehead. "We'll get you help soon. Get you a real nice, brand new synet.
It's gonna be alright, try to get some sleep. I'll be here when you wake up.
I'm right here."