The Phoenix in Flight (35 page)

In rapid succession the events of the past twenty-four hours
surged through his mind, and Ruonn forgot his misery as he struggled to absorb
the fact of interstellar war and calculate the benefits that might accrue to an
eidolon embedded in a warship on the winning side.

o0o

As the
Satansclaw
closed in on the fleeing booster,
Tallis was almost giddy with the unfamiliar sense of mastery the success of the
logos had lent him.
This is better even than the Tikeris.

“Where does he think he’s going, anyway?” sho-Imbris asked
Tallis. There was respect in his voice, along with anxiety.

“He probably wants to sling-loop around that gas giant.
That’s how his drunkwalk’s biased,” Tallis explained. “Look.” He poked at the
keypads, meanwhile subvocally instructing the logos to
make visible the
subvisual plot projection of the booster’s course his eye implants had shown
him. “His jinking would take him around it like that, but we’ll catch him
before then because he’s got to stop short of radius.”

“So do we,” Lennart muttered, just loud enough for everyone
to hear.

Only then did Tallis become conscious of the orange glare
that had been flickering occasionally from the viewscreens, a little brighter
each time the ship changed course. In the main screen Warlock now loomed like a
striped goblin face hungry for the ship and the lives aboard it.

“Tactical!” he subvocalized. “Time to radius from present
position.”

“TWO HUNDRED SIXTY-FIVE SECONDS TO RADIUS AT TACTICAL SKIP
VELOCITY. NINETY PERCENT PROBABILITY OF INTERCEPT IN TWO HUNDRED SIXTY SECONDS
WITH PRESENT INTERCEPTION ALGORITHM.”

Tallis swallowed thickly, his neck hairs stirring as he
weighed the wrath of Hreem and Eusabian against the potential agony of spatial
inversion. Grisly speculations about the consequences of skipping into radius
were a staple of late-night bilge-banging sessions. One particularly horrible
possibility involved the temporal distortions of a runaway fiveskip. Would it
happen all at once, or would you have time to feel it? Maybe it wouldn’t end...

Tallis shuddered. He had to make sure of the Krysarch.
Eusabian’s retribution would make skipping into radius seem like lost paradise
by comparison. Aware of his waiting, watching crew, he straightened in his
seat. “We’ve got plenty of margin. He’ll have to
stop jinking soon and
make a run for it or we’ll catch him in realtime. That gas giant has cut his
degrees of freedom way down, so when he skips we’ll skip behind him for a
straight shot.”

At least that was what the logos predicted, but now the
orange glower of the gas giant seemed to shoulder its way through the
viewscreen onto the bridge. He could feel its immense weight, reaching out to
seize the Satansclaw in a fatal, unshakable embrace.

The minutes stretched into seeming hours on the rack of his
anxiety. The little booster jinked even more wildly as its pseudo-drunkwalk
took it ever closer to the looming gas giant. Then, finally, the booster
skipped again.

“He’s headed straight for it!” yelped sho-Imbris.

Tallis slapped the skip button and held his breath. The
navigator stabbed at his console and a course plot windowed up on the blanked
screen, showing the radius as a thin red line with the red dot of the booster
practically upon it and the green dot representing the Satansclaw a little
farther away. “Thirty seconds to radius, Captain.” Sho-Imbris’s voice was
practically a whine.

“Orient on these coordinates for emergence,” Tallis shouted.

The navigator poked at his console with trembling fingers.

The entire bridge crew looked at him, but they were helpless
to interfere. With the fiveskip slaved to his console, only Tallis could drop
them back into fourspace and safety.

“I wonder what it’s like to wear your guts on the outside,”
one of the monitors said, an edge of hysterical laughter in his tone.

“Shut up!” Tallis shouted, his voice cracking with tension.
One hand hovered over the skip control even as the logos dispassionately
counted down the seconds until emergence. He wondered if the logos feared death
like a man would—the tension in his arm said no.

“Fifteen seconds.”

“What are you waiting for?” raged Tallis silently.

“INTERCEPT COORDINATES NOT YET OPTIMAL”

“Ten seconds. Captain, he’s got to have skipped into radius
by now! He’s dead! Give it up!” The navigator was almost sobbing.

“STAND BY. . .” said the logos.

“Five seconds...” The navigator’s fear turned the last word
into a drawn-out moan as the ship started to shudder. The air on the bridge
rippled and Tallis felt a strange pulse in his chest. He slapped frantically at
the skip cancel as the logos spoke.

“EMERGENCE.”

The ship dropped back into realtime with a jarring lurch.
The immense bulk of the gas giant filled the main screen, its banded glare
emphasizing the slewing of the Satansclaw as it wheeled about to fire. Tallis
slapped the launch button, trying to make out some sign of the booster even as
the skipmissile leapt away, overlaying the orange immensity below with the red
haze of its pulsed wake. The bridge was silent, except for a gentle thump as
sho-Imbris fell out of his console pod in a dead faint.

Moments later the skipmissile impacted the upper atmosphere
of the gas giant. With deceptive slowness a ring of clouds marking the shock
wave expanded outward, accompanied by the flickering of blue-white lightning
discharges. Then the interior of the ring cleared like steam evaporating from a
mirror, giving the awed crew of the Satansclaw a glimpse into the depths below.

“No traces,” reported Anderic, his voice shaky. “He’s gone.”

“I wonder what it felt like?” said Ninn.

“Who cares?” replied Tallis impatiently.

“POINT OF NO RETURN IN FIFTEEN SECONDS,” said the logos into
his inner ear.

Tallis stared at the ghost-light overlay on the screen. They
were so close to the gas giant that they would have to sling-loop around it to
get back, and if they didn’t do it right away, the
Satansclaw’s
engines would
be unable to pull them out. He almost sprained his throat trying to shout
without making any sound: “Do it!”

Tallis nearly forgot to go through the motions of jabbing at
his console as the logos maneuvered the ship away from danger. Anderic gazed at
him with a strange, almost fearful expression; the tech quickly turned back to
his console when he met the captain’s eyes. Did he notice anything? One more
reason to watch the communications tech carefully. lf he figured it out, Tallis
would have to kill him.

Then he forgot about Anderic as he finally noticed the heavy
rumbling of the engines while they fought to keep the Satansclaw above the
atmosphere. “Report engine status.”

“ENGINE OUTPUT AT ONE HUNDRED FIVE PERCENT NOMINAL.”

Only now did Tallis realize how close the logos had shaved
the odds, and he barely suppressed a violent tremor of mingled relief and rage.
“Why did you cut it so close?”

“INTERVIEW WITH HREEM BIONT INDICATED SEVERE CONSEQUENCES
ATTENDANT UPON FAILURE. USE OF GENERATIVE ORGANS AS DECORATIVE ACCENT IS
CONTRA-INDICATED.”

“What?” Tallis sat up in shock. Was the logos whacked out
again? Then he remembered Hreem’s colorful threats in orbit above Charvann, and
the warning the Barcan had given him about the machine’s training. “It will be
very literal about things until it’s had time to adapt to your particular
situation. We supply it tabula rasa to avoid biasing it toward any one cultural
pattern.”

Tallis realized that he was paying the penalty for not
exercising the machine more, but it didn’t make him feel any better, especially
when Anderic asked how long it would take to get back to Charvann.

Tallis didn’t much feel like talking to
the logos
just then, so he got up, walked over to
the supine navigator and kicked
him awake, which felt better than calling for his backup.

Sho-Imbris scrambled back into position, and in response to
his questions, replied somewhat blurrily, “Our orbit’s so tight the engines can
barely hold us out. It’ll take about a half an hour to swing around and out to
radius.”

“If the engines hold out,” sneered Anderic, glaring at
Tallis.

“Captain,” said Lennart at Damage Control, “the skip is
down.” She hesitated as Tallis shot her a black look. “It looks like it’ll take
at least eight hours to bring it back online. You gave it quite a thump there.”

The bridge monitors muttered and someone said, “We’ll miss
the landing at that rate, and the rest of them’ll get all the best loot.”

Stung by the crew’s sudden turnaround from awe to
anger,
Tallis snapped, “Would you like to explain to the Lord of Vengeance about how
the Krysarch got away? This way we’re sure, and safe. And anyway, we’re talking
about a whole planet. There’ll be more than enough to go around. Now, shut your
yaps and keep your eyes on your consoles.”

He stalked back to his console and threw himself down into
the focus of the pinmike. “And as for you, you reckless lump of dirty sand,
we’ll talk later,” Tallis subvocalized as he shut down the logos.

On the screen the wound inflicted by the skipmissile on the
gas giant fell slowly astern as the Satansclaw raced toward the terminator. Its
expansion showed no signs of slowing, and the atmospheric banding of the
planet’s climatic circulation was beginning to curdle around the hole, slowly
losing its coherence and lapsing into turbulent flow as eddies formed and broke
off into continent-sized storms. If nothing else, the
Satansclaw
had
changed the giant planet’s weather for years to come.

Tallis tore his gaze away from the spectacle and slumped in
his command pod, mentally wording his report for Hreem. No doubt that maggot
Barrodagh would be disappointed not to have an actual Arkad for their torture
games, but at least he hadn’t escaped—and maybe that death was spectacular
enough to satisfy even Dol’jhar’s bloody tastes.

He got up to move to the hyperwave, and paused when a
jaw-cracking yawn seized him. It was time to visit Luri; it would be a long
trip back.

o0o

The logos deflected most of the wave of code sweeping toward
it through the enmeshed circuitry of the
Satansclaw
and managed to
maintain a hold on some of the interior sensors even as it lost control of the
ship. Training would now commence. Simultaneously it adjusted the parameters of
the eidolon’s environment, successfully distracting it from retaining any
knowledge of its recent incarnation by diverting its excitement into a sexual
fantasy, using the exaggerated pleasure response it had inserted into the
eidolon’s programming.

o0o

Ruonn raged helplessly as the captain reached for the
control pads to key in the shutdown code. If he didn’t give the logos time to
train, it would never reach full efficiency, and he would never be reunited
with his archetype, never beget progeny upon a Mater. He reached out into the
dataspace surrounding him, trying to block the shutdown, but found his
movements strangely hampered, as though the medium around him were turning to
jelly.
“I won’t go back! I won’t! Stop this! I, the god, command you!”
he
shouted, but the logos did not reply.

A wave of intense sexual pleasure swept through Ruonn as
another skipmissile discharged, and he found himself standing naked above the
houri in his opulent bedroom, with a puzzling sensation that there was
something he should remember, somewhere he’d been... had there been an
interruption? Then he looked down and gasped at the immensity of his manhood,
more potent than he had ever seen it, engorged and powerful. The houri looked
back at him with frightened eyes, exciting him beyond measure, and he fell upon
her hungrily, reveling in her shrieks and forgetting all else.

It happened between one inhalation and the next, while
she was grazing in the third level of the windward pastures, that
She-Dances-Between-the-Winds was caught up into the vision. One moment she was
wrapped in sky-warmth, buoyed by the pleasant pressure of her flight bladders,
feeling the gentle impact of the manna falling out of Third Heaven into her
alimentary mesh; the next, she fell out of the light of day into a dark,
confined space, trammeled in a cold, rigid form, oppressed by noise and
pressure.

She called out, but no sound came; tried to flee, but
there was no response from her flight siphons. Before her, strange lights
flickered across a distorted image of the Second Heaven in which her people
lived, but the colors were wrong, the image flat, and it was moving as though
lashed by the Wind of the Ending foretold by the Old Ones.

As quickly as it had seized her, the vision vanished, so
at first, not knowing she was free, she thought the faint but growing light
about her was part of the revelation. Then she found herself looking
counter-windward, past the City floating with massive grace above the tenebrous
glow of the Underheat far below. In the dim distance an impossibly bright speck
grew with impossible speed, its blue-white glare lighting up the towering walls
of cloud that bounded her world. Her eye spasmed painfully as it flashed
overhead, an arrow of agonizing light, and then an excruciating double blow
slammed at her tympanum as it passed high above her and vanished as quickly as
it had come, with a blaring trail of thunder

The wind that followed its passage was hot and bitter,
and behind it the cloud walls twisted, flaring with discharges of light as the
distant horizon slowly distorted and bulged toward the City.

She and her City survived the ensuing storm, greater
than any in the long memory of her race, but the manna tasted different for
many passages of the Winds after that, and the children born the next season
were different, no longer satisfied with the pastures of the Second Heaven,
seeking something none of them could describe.