The Hunt
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Table Of Contents
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The HuntCover
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Behind the door of "Man Also Rises", Raoul Talbot shifts his feet, scuffing the deck overlooking the ocean. Wanr squats at the railing, peering over into the water, waves reflected in its dark crystal eyes. Finally it looks up to follow Talbot's feet.
"In way how this is lk cage?"
Talbot stops and glares perplexity. "Cage?"
"Yu r exhbtng repeted behavior of lng trained in cage."
"Repeated behavior." He turns and leans back against the rail. "I suppose it feels like a cage. What's next? That's what I want to know, and that's what the Director won't tell me. m'Ilu Ram says it's going to be a military matter, and we'll be leaving. I can't blame the Director." He squints into the simulated sun. "There's no money to be made here. But what are we going to do?"
Gillian Reed leans in the doorway, her hair stranded by the breeze, face glowing with the sunset light like the panes of glass beside her. "Looks like we're going on an adventure. Setting up a trade mission. And maybe helping to start an alliance."
Talbot sighs. "You think we'll really stand long enough against those planet eaters to be able to need an alliance."
Reed's smile hesitates and then slips quickly to a guarded neutrality. "I can't think about that right now."
There is suddenly a surprising number of beings at the brow, their garments rustling, and their speech sibilants whispering from the walls. The gate slides back, revealing the connecting corridor, Talbot, and the rest of his core team.
The Lipu mollusc rolls forward in its cart, gentle sprays of salt water on its shell. The shell opens and a rack of blue eyes extend, followed by the glistening tentacle of its manipulator.
"Wellcommm, Raoul Talbot. Command access key. Of all future harmonies that which you may organize with the key will be the most blended." The metal tab passes from tentacle to hand.
"Thanks, Supervisor. I am cooled by your trust in my song." He bends down to place his eyes only centimeters from the Lipu's. He can smell the salt. He waits, and finally the eyes snap into the shell. He stands and smiles. The eyes reemerge, rocking up and down in acceptance.
There is a round of applause from the humans.
Sherril's pulsar winks periodically from the displays, spilling its energy into the orbiting crystals.
The flight deck door slips back, and Talbot steps through with a recurring sense of awe.
The Norton's flight deck is an office, softly paneled with displays and smooth expanses of wall. The consoles are holographic spheres, spaced evenly across the floor, and their operators are seated or standing within them, swivelling, gesturing the programming of control in the symbolism each prefers, muttering meta commands to ensure the proper interpretation of gestures. There is no sense of the outside, or of travel. But in some of the holographic spheres, Talbot can see representations of the stars. It is as close as he may ever come to piloting a full-scale starship.
He steps into the pit and wanders between the posts, to where he can watch the maintenance pilot, as he always does. The pilot, xxxRTneya, is a whipcord creature of greyish gristle, trilaterally symmetric. Black bulbs hung by wire from bony ridges shield its triad of eyes from the UV brightness of the dimly lit room. Its extended fingers rise, fall, and swirl as it composes and tests.
Talbot is envious. He barely understands the systems, though his hours during the last few days have been crowded with charts, graphs, text, and animations. The gestural languages are still beyond him, though he can use some of the more basic positions to access food and transport. His eyes rove the room and he lets his breath free.
As a child on Mars, he had watched programs about star pilots, and he had played endless games in his home to mimic what he saw. When he became older and more rootless, he had turned back to his childhood for the strength to apply for training.
How many places I've been since then...
He remembers Mimas, and then his first trip out. Govault. His head turns away involuntarily.
xxxRTneya swivels in a near copy of the motion.
"Better watch out," Talbot grins. "Crash us all."
The bony tapered head, two eyes on this side facing, cants at a slight angle and then returns to the vertical.
"Copying me," Talbot finishes. xxxRTneya wriggles its fingers in the safe zone, expressing laughter.
I'm actually communicating tersely with it. I think.
xxxRTneya gestures, and its own sphere swings up the stars, the remnant, and the glowing fractal trajectories of the crystal stations.
In the deep rooms of the Norton Latimer, Jane Sherril, and a team of company mathematicians try to resolve two disparate coordinate systems so that a curvespace transition to Prometheus will be possible. Hallison stands in a corner of the room, looking on. His translator is making noises, but it might as well be an alien language for all he understands. Still, he watches, and listens.
"I think a lower operator transform on delta tri epsilon, with a total division under the sigma..."
One of the Tereniades starts laughing raucously. "Look where that ends up!"
Latimer turns a blind metal gaze on the chart display. "Of course." He pauses in a laughable mimic of a thoughtful pose. Then he points at an equation on the panel, and in moments they are again deep in discussion. Hallison sighs and wanders out.
"Our society is even more highly individual than you're used to, if you'll pardon my saying so," Latimer states proudly. Jane Sherril smothers a smile behind her hand. "This means in general that any oddities of your various societies will be ignored."
Sherril swivels her chair away from the video wall. Her face is painted pale white today, with a black diamond centered on her left eye. A tall ponytail rises from the top of her head and spills down her shoulders. "Doesn't mean we don't have a shared core philosophy. We do. Everyone in Prometheus chose, or came from someone who chose to come there. Our rep brought flyers from every kind of oppression. Which means we don't think much of authoritarians. But we tend to behave under the law out of respect for each other. It could be confusing, I suppose."
Reed mocks, "What could be confusing about a population of law-abiding anarchists?"
"Strictly speaking, we are not anarchists," Latimer replies. "We have a government. Just not much of one. After all, there isn't that much for it to do."
Talbot smiles thinly. Worried.
Talbot sits under the desk lamp, the room shadowed around him. One wall reflects the estimated image of the space outside the curve, stars shifting very slowly. The panels ranged before him show much more; shifting scenes from a 2D translation of a Promethean entertainment program, a page of text describing cultural trends.
I'm not a trade guy, he thinks. For that matter, he feels completely lost. I've barely got a light knowledge of my own culture, much less trying to understand this.
He pauses the program, leans back and sighs, hands rough on his neck and shoulders.
I should call Hallison. Maybe he could help.
But some sort of stubborn impulse pushes his hand to flip and gesture the recording to proceed.
"Can you do listhes next week?" the character asks, lounging on a windowsill that overlooks a strangely curved landscape...
Hallison crosses his legs. "Entertainment doesn't travel well, Raoul. Too many implicit concepts, too much fashion. Oh, we can make something of it on novelty, and one of the subsidiaries can try to develop a market for it wherever, but science and tech are the real opportunities."
Talbot shifts uncomfortably in the doorway. "Steve, I need to understand this stuff. How am I going to talk to them? I'm drowning in charts and tables and flows, but somehow I'm missing it."
Hallison picks up a small glass object from the table beside him. " What we're really missing is what the hell is going to happen to home by the time we get back." He pauses, as if wondering whether to broach the subject. "Talked to Jill, lately?"
"No. I told you, I've been studying. You?"
"Yeah. She's doing her job. She's not real happy. But then, she wasn't before we left Illyrion, either. Maybe you remember."
Talbot flinches.
"Well, I don't see why not. Everything was fine. We can't do everything, can we? Hell, we did more than anyone can expect to be in and live. Aren't you just happy to be sitting here right now?"
"I don't know, chief. I've got some bad dreams. I look around corridors a lot more before I go in or out." Beyond simulated windows, the simulated sun slips behind simulated clouds for a moment, dimming the room to a grey tone.
"Those things wouldn't even notice the beam deflection when they vaporized us. That stuff is for the military to deal with."
"Hmm, funny, I seem to recall riding with some hard ass pilot diving after a meteor. Thought I was going to die. Must have been someone else."
Talbot slaps the doorframe. "Let's give it a rest. We nearly all cracked back there. Let's take the job we have, for a change, and do what we can. If we do this right, and get Prometheus to help, maybe we can be contributing. Right now, I need to get my hands around this one problem that maybe I can handle. And I need you to give me a hand. Listen, let's get together tomorrow and watch this thing. Work on it. See if you can tell me why it's funny.
They break out of curve on the boundary of the system's Oort cloud remnant. The star glints against the wall of a gently fluorescing nebula a half light year beyond. As Talbot gestures increased magnification, the star grows brighter, but not larger. The companion star begins to resolve at its side. Then the trail slides into visibility, ripped tidally from the main star's outer atmosphere into a vast equatorial spiral by the companion's gravity, spreading out through the system toward the Norton.
The Norton moves slowly into the system from above the ecliptic, watching for comets, asteroids, and small planets. Talbot is resentful, watching xxxRTneya gesture the vehicle through the outer system. Far ahead, the spark of Jane Sherril's vehicle glints as it moves effortlessly through the complexities of the outer system.
Close in to the sun, swimming in the currents of turbulent hydrogen, a more complex object catches the light. It swells slowly into a shape that is very difficult to recognize.
Think of a string of very irregular dark pearls piled on the top of a dresser, strands overlapping, rotating slowly against the starfield. Pearls which resolve into multi-hundred mile diameter planetoids, linked by massive segmented metal collars fifty miles across.
The first step through the airlock is shocking for space-born or for planet-bound. The path beyond is cunningly set stone, lined with hedges and trees. The ground swirls up on all sides like a vast gentle valley, but it never stops. Eventually, the eye follows fields, roads, and towns up the curve of the world to lose sight of it in the haze behind the fusion tube. The tube sheds light on half the world - the other half is darkened by a slowly expanding shadow swath.
A vehicle is waiting a little way down the wooded path. It is sleek and gleaming with crisp and tasteful colors, and canopied with carefully formed clear plastics. Talbot thinks of how far he has come, to a place no one he knows has ever seen, and how mundane to admire this lovely object of technology in such a context.
The porch overlooks a vast curving ocean. Sails shift ever so slowly on the distant rising wall of the world, and there is the cry of seabirds. Distant clouds are forming under the perpetual noon.
The statuesque woman is grey-haired, with a profile that would be classic if it were not slightly gaunt. She smokes a slim cigar. Her chair is drawn back into the shadows of the porch and its vines. Smoke spirals slowly from shadow to sun and back again.
"This is my ancestor, Clu," Jane Sherril remarks. Talbot glances between them, and he can see it. The old woman turns slowly, and the light slices suddenly across her face, cruelly etching the seams of what was once a face lovely with youth.
Talbot stares at her, his mouth shifting slowly. Finally he speaks quietly. "I'm sorry, but didn't you say that she established the crystals several hundred years ago?"
Jane Sherril turns to the old woman for the answer. "Well, gran, what was it, four hundred?"
"Oh, Jane, you know I don't keep track like that." The older woman's voice is surprisingly melodious, and her brows kink in a normal way as she retrieves the recollection. "Let's see, it was back in 249, wasn't it, so that would make it, oh, four hundred and... seven., or eight, I guess." She takes a smooth draw on the cigar and breathes it out into the gentle breeze. She stands and stretches out a hand to Talbot in a gesture current among humans for millennia. "Hi, I'm Clu Sherril. And you are?"
"Raoul Talbot."
"Jill Reed."
"Wanr." Wanr accepts the hand with small furry fingers, though his custom is a hug.
"I've never met anyone like you, Wanr, " Clu replies. "Where are you from?"
"I don't know your referents, Clu Sherril. I come from a red giant system a little further in toward the core, born on the colonized third planet."
"A cold planet?" She asks, squatting down to match his height, eyeing his fur.
"Yes, sometimes."
She smiles. "I think Atlantis is running winter right now, perhaps you'd enjoy that."
"Atlantis?" Talbot asks.
Clu looks up at him. "One of our worlds. Planetoids, you might say. I think Jane has been using that word, am I right? They each have names. I'm from Next Haven, one of the original two, although I wasn't born there."
"Gran, I'm afraid we won't have too much time for travel. These people are here to establish a trade deal, and maybe an alliance."
Clu stands with a sudden rush, and eyes them suspiciously. "Not a military alliance, is that what you're saying, Jane?"
"Can't we wait for the formal session on this? It's not exactly courteous to be having this conversation when our guests have only just arrived."
Clu frowns slowly. "Of course." She draws on the cigar. Her exhalation travels out over the edge of the deck as she looks away to the curving horizon.
The world of Rand's Hope is largely ragged conifer forest and mountains, just beginning to be developed with scattered roads and settlements. Through the distant opening to the next world, the fusion tube is scaffolded and dark. There is a cool wind gusting from that opening, streaking the clouds into fine feathery cirrus in the blue haze above.
"We're always trying to keep two worlds ahead of the development. We have to have wild places where no one can go easily. We need mountains and forests and waterfalls that no one's ever seen. There's a big market for the new world when the old one starts getting full." Sherril pauses to smile at him. "This seems a little odd to you."
"I've never imagined anything like this place," Talbot replies. "How old is it?"
Sherril relaxes. It is the right kind of question. "Over eight hundred years. No one's sure, really. The first two planetoids were found already built, derelict. That was before Clu came. They were heroes back in those days. Ice cold atmosphere, what there was of it. No life. Hard to believe how much we've built on that." Her dark hair swirls with the breeze of a cold new world. "But Rand's Hope is a lot younger than that."
The ornithopter backwings gently, pinions swirling dust and dead leaves from the pad as it settles in the yard of the Sherril home.
Talbot finds his legs still weak as he steps from glossy streamlined cabin to stable ground. Powered wing travel had been beyond his experience until today. Now he has experienced it twice. Reed looks on as he joins her.
"I'm OK," he replies to her unanswered question. "I just never did this before."
She shrugs, flippant. "So who has?"
They walk away together into an arbor of tall woody funnel plants that leads to the house. The sound of the ornithopter engines whines into muffled silence behind them.
"What do you think?" Reed asks, eyes ahead.
"What do I think? Hardly matters. What's Steve think, that's what I want to know. He's more qualified to judge this than a pilot is."
"Raoul," she cautions, shortening the vowel to Rawl, as she always does when she is warning him.
He looks around, but he knows the action is meaningless. These people have a technology that makes eavesdropping undetectable.
"It's a little scary," he replies, finally. "This place. Well, you saw everything I did. They might be able to help."
"Yeah."
"But?"
"But the place looks like a resort. These people don't look like warriors to me."
"Remember the Constable? Maybe he made the same mistake. I don't think we should."
There is only the sound of their feet on the glossy stone of the path.
Dinner is in a large wood and glass walled room that looks back into the forest. They file in quietly, taken with the view and the strange smells of food.
The table is low to the floor, accommodating almost any species. It is oval, ensuring the absence of precedence conflicts. The hosts are asymmetrically spaced, offering no clue as to relationship. But they both smile and stand, almost like sisters, close to the grace of dancers.
"Is the table suitable, Raoul?" Clu asks in her slightly raspy tones. Behind her, a poster plays a long vid of strange streamlined creatures wheeling and distancing in the texture of a recent supernova remnant. "Wanr?"
Talbot nods. Wanr bows deeply. "It is more than acceptable, it is home."
"You do us great honor," Jane responds quickly. "Keep us in your eyes."
Talbot is unnerved by a sudden shudder that reminds him of how much they know about the Geodesic. They have been watching us for a long time and in great detail. But from where? By what means?
Hallison takes the lead, asking, "Do you have any special structure to your meals? Any practices we should observe?" He has seen no sign they are deeply ritualized in this society. They seem to take on characters and forms like actors wear roles. He is uneasy, as he often is with sophisticated societies.
"Eating everything unless you don't like it?" Jane replies impishly.
"Good thing you're human," Hallison replies, trying to ride the spirit of the thing. "Otherwise I might have to ask if you meant it."
Hallison knocks softly on the door. Talbot thrashes violently in his bed at the sound, dreams leaping from silence to horrifying lucidity. The door opens a crack letting flow soft warm light across the floor and painting the walls beyond. Talbot starts up; his blankets slip away to the floor. His eyes are wide and white in the dimness. Hallison is silent, waiting for Talbot to fully awaken.
"You okay, Raoul?" he asks, quiet. His eyes are sleepy, but his mouth is alert.
"What do you mean?" Talbot complains. "Of course. Or at least, I was until you woke me up. Damn, what a nightmare."
"I could hear you through the wall. What the hell are you dreaming about?"
Talbot shakes his head, eyes heavy lidded with regret. "Same stuff. Atrenn's lost in some ship, I'm hunting for him, the planet killers are on their way. I find him, he's dead." He rubs his eyes. They feel hot and tired. His arms and legs feel unsteady, as if they are shaking to a tiny but violent rhythm he cannot hear. "Oh, Steve, I'm sick of this."
Hallison squats beside the bed. The door slides softly almost closed. "What are you sick of?"
"You know if the Geodesic is still there? Tlnou?"
Hallison glances down at the floor for a moment, and then back up. "Do you suppose you're the only one who wonders, chief? I never told you, but Jill's been having me call over fold every twelve hours, relay through the Norton. Making sure everything's still there."
Talbot feels less trembling, but it is not gone. His throat is tight, and he wishes he could cry. "And is it, Steve? Is it?"
"Yeah, it's still there, for now. Let's hope we get this negotiation right tomorrow so that's still going to be true, chief. What do you think?"
Talbot wipes an eye with the back of his hand. "I don't know. You're the cultural guy. What the hell I'm doing being point for this, I just don't know. Can we get a military alliance with these people? We're not even negotiating with their government, if they have one."
"Oh, they have one." Hallison sits back on the floor, eyeing Talbot.
"What's it like?"
"Loose, federated. Multi-layer. There's a Promethian government, which doesn't do much except mediate legal issues between the worlds, and set up a uniform external policy that the members have to follow. The world governments have responsibility for the relations between the urbs, and the urbs do most of their lawmaking with reference to the common code for the world they're in. But, I'll tell you, there isn't much law, no matter how you look at it. No regulation. It's all retributive. The retributions are damn harsh, though, chief."
"Who does self-defense?"
"I can't tell. They all seem to be involved in self-defense. There are weapons everywhere."
"What are we going to do?" Talbot groans.
Hallison stands awkwardly, and lays a hand on Talbot's arm. "Take what we've got, and let's see how far we can get it to go. Look, the Geodesic sends in government people to negotiate, and believe me, they will be planning that if they have time, and these people are going to recoil. They do not want to deal with authorities. We have their trust. Let's make the most of that, and see if they'll accept us by that route."
"It'd help if I knew who I was going to negotiate with."
"They aren't getting explicit with it yet, so let's not push that. We'll find out soon enough. Tomorrow. Or is it today?"
Talbot glances at the wall clock. "Today," he sighs. "OK, Steve."
Talbot isn't sure, but when he steps into the hallway, it seems that the layout has changed. Then he realizes. Hallison's room had been across the hall. But where the door had been, the wall is blank wood. He raises an eyebrow in surprise. Then a door down the hall slides back.
"I could have sworn that was a swing door", Hallison mutters.
"I could have sworn you were across from me," Talbot replies.
"I was."
Their eyes meet, but there is nothing safe to say.
They eventually find the breakfast room. Wanr is already gnawing on something where he sits cross-legged by the wall of windows. He glances up and waves a set of fingers in a gesture of negation. He hasn't seen their hosts.
A variety of foods are on a waist high buffet opposite the window, human food carefully separated from that which Wanr prefers. Talbot wanders past, looking over the breakfast. "Hmm," Gillian Reed is suddenly looking over his shoulder. Very close.
"Hi Jill," Talbot is surprised. She seems relaxed and comfortable. Her smell is clean and he wonders if she has been able to bathe here somehow.
"Ready for the day's work?" she asks.
He sighs and looks back along the table. "Yeah. Sure. You?"
"You bet."
He recognizes her enthusiasm.
"Good," he replies. "I need you to handle as much as you can."
Her eyes are level and she isn't smiling any more. "I know. You'll do fine. Just stick with me. Here, try some of this, it's wonderful."
The platform is at the edge of the cliff that overlooks the ocean. Its glossy squares reflect the lowering clouds, and click or whisper with their footsteps. They take seats, and unfold small tables from the side of the comfortable chairs.
Finally, Clu and Jane arrive down the path from the house. They take chairs and Jane smiles at the group. "Hope you won't mind our informal negotiation style. I know it's a little different from your society's 'table dominated' way of negotiating, but we find this to be very productive."
"It's not a problem, Jane," Talbot replies. Reed glances encouragement at him, her face unreadable to anyone else.
"OK. Well, first, I will be negotiating for Sherril Extraworld; Clu is here as a representative of Prometheus level of government to make sure we meet the legalities required by that law."
Talbot relaxes.
"Also, I'm required to ask if you would have any problem with recording or broadcast of this session."
Talbot glances at Hallison, thinking, So much for relaxation. "Any comments, Steve?"
"Normally we consider negotiations to be private, so that all views can be aired, and mistakes made."
Jane nods. "We prefer to negotiate in public so that people say what they mean, and so that everyone's careful. What do you think?"
Talbot thinks they have just been placed in an extremely difficult position. But, at the same time, he is feeling some of the same bravado that powered him diving toward the planet destroyer in the wake of a meteor.
"I don't see why not," he replies. Jill and Steve are both trying to be stonefaced, but he can feel the pressure.
"But," he continues, "what can you offer me in return?"
There is a pause. Clu Sherril raises a hand. "Perhaps before we begin to negotiate, you would like to allow your systems to complete their negotiations with ours, in case we need to record any agreements."
Talbot glances at Reed, who nods. Hallison transmits with a private code to verify, but Talbot knows well enough that there may be no secure transmission mode anywhere. He nods. "We have our private net."
Reed continues. "And the gateway seems to be working properly. We can start."
Jane continues. "So what can we offer you in return for what should be a normal negotiating process."
Talbot glances at the others, but they are blank faced. "Rights to the recording. After all, there will be some amount of interest in the Geodesic, and this might be one of the few entertainments you have that can be an immediate export. What do you say?"
Jane glances up from her tablet, frowning. "You split Geodesic royalties with us."
"Deal, if you split yours with us."
Jane taps her pad with a stylus. Talbot watches the contract appear from the gateway onto his pad. He forwards it to Wanr, who is holding watch on the Norton, working on the legal equivalency database. "I'll have my legal staff look it over."
"Do you want to wait?"
Steve shakes his head, and leans over to Talbot. "Let's take it as an agreement in principle, and if there's any negotiation, we can take it up later. I think they admire directness and willingness to work on faith within limits."
"We'll hash out the details later," Talbot replies to Jane.
He worries again that he has to negotiate. His training is incomplete. He has no real experience. But he is trusted to do a First Contact negotiation. Reed had outlined it earlier. "They trust you already. Changing trust in midstream is not a good idea. You have plenty of experienced backup to help keep you in line. The Director knows that. Remember, its her career if you screw up. Don't screw up."
Her career! he thinks.
His hands are feeling a little unsteady, but he grips the pad a little more tightly and presses the hand more firmly into the top of his leg. It's a beautiful day, I'm having an adventure, and a lot of responsibility. I can handle it.
Talbot stands at the mirror wall, dressing formally. As his hands seal the seams of the complex dark garment, he is looking at his own eyes. His hands draw the depilator across his jaw, but he is still looking occasionally for some mark, or wrinkle, or narrowing, or color change.
But everything seems to be the same.
He stands back, turns to the side, and considers the profile of the suit. He pins a gold insignia to his lapel.
Everything fine, dressed in a suit, civilization being destroyed... just another night in the far reaches of the galaxy. What am I doing?
The door closes behind him. Unfortunately, the layout of the house has changed again.
Talbot waits at the ornithopter pad, looking out over the vast core of the world as night sweeps toward him. The lights of cities and towns glitter into grids of stars on the leading edge of the shadow. A strange illusion, but a saving one, providing a diurnal schedule, but on its own time scale.
"Talbot, come on, are you ready?" The voice is Jill's. He holds up a hand but doesn't turn to look. "I want to see the sunset," he replies.
There is a breeze, and in a moment, the clouds are etched with a sienna flash. Then it is twilight, as the shadow races on, closing away the last sunlit band on the wall of the world. Above, the cities are the stars. There is a touch on his arm, and he turns to see a woman he doesn't recognize.
Her face is limned with the dying sienna and the faint light of the distant wall, mixed with the cool blue emitted by the shadow shield. Eyes might be blue, and there are certainly suggestions of freckles. Her hair is an indeterminate color, but not as dark as brown. She is smiling quietly. It is the smile that triggers his memory and connects this face with Gillian Reed.
But she is dressed in a soft black dress that clings carefully to every contour, ending on her midthigh. A small diamond glitters on her forehead, its light changing with every breath, and every expression.
"Come on, chief, we're going to be late!" Hallison shouts from the door to the ornithopter. The engines start spinning up.
The ornithopter flaps slowly above the towns and cities. It is not much different from being in space, except for the faint signs of a ground illuminated with the bluish light of the night shield, and the obvious geometry of the world shown by the way the lines of buildings and roads line its cylinder.
The wall of the ornithopter is glass, looking from dimness to darkness. Talbot watches the flow of the clouds, the ground, and the vast structure of the fusion tube, somehow never tiring of the scene. Wanr sits beside him, conversing with Hallison across the aisle about some point of legality.
The wings form into a gliding configuration, and the ornithopter descends toward the distant clouds and the ground beyond.
There is a brief rain shower as they step to the platform. But the drops only deliver their sound to the travellers. In a plaza studded with sculptures representing the physical optimum of many species, ringed with trees and sleek buildings, they walk with Jane and Clu to a large low table.
The chef is a mass of bluish tentacles moving with a startling swiftness and stopping into an equally startling rigidity. Its kitchen looks like a fantasy of some kind of foundry, with spurting flames and hissing oils.
They are perched on the wall of a cup fifteen miles across, a vast indentation in the fabric of the world, and a sign of the sophistication of Promethean gravitational engineering. The cavity opens before them, above the thinning clouds into the world, and the cities beyond are even more an illusion of stars. A breeze stirs trees around the plaza. Talbot can feel the cool moisture.
The food, though strange, is excellent, a combination of various unfamiliar meats and vegetables quick seared in the flames on wooden rods. As each course arrives, Wanr's assistant, a lean D*azar, leans its blind metallic snout over the food, and manipulates a sensor over its radome to determine its safety for each species' metabolism. So far, only Wanr has had to reject food. A single spear with bluish cabbage-like vegetables was unsafe for it.
A small circle of musicians play unfamiliar instruments in complex intertwined melodies. The sounds are strangely attractive, though sometimes they seem to be no more than a windy, chaotic noise. Talbot finds himself tapping his fingers in time to the odd time signatures. And his eyes keep finding Jill across the table. Her eyes catch the candlelight and reflect it back toward him, whenever she glances up, which is not often.
"This is great, Jane," Hallison comments. She smiles. Clu is half swivelled in her chair watching the band, smoking an after-dinner cigar. She glances over with an unreadable expression, then returns her attention to the players.
"By the way, Jane," Talbot asks, "I've been wondering about Latimer."
She is surprised, and she leans away from the table to gesture at the band. "Didn't you see him?" she replies.
His eyes follow her gesture, and then he notices the metallic figure playing a wood breath instrument, swaying with the surge of the music in a counterhythm. "Latimer," he whispers. "So where's he been?"
"He's been away from the band for months, and he knew we'd ask them to play this party, so he wanted to be able to rehearse a little first."
The current music sweeps into a devastating silence, and then Clu and Jane slap their fingers on the edge of the table. Applause, Talbot realizes, joining in. It hurts a little.
Then Latimer is gesturing, and Clu is standing, and the band is applauding. The percussionist, a blue tentacled sphere of the same species as the chef, rattles its drum, and a young human male appears with a large, glossy white stringed instrument. A cello, Talbot remembers. The woman takes the cello and bow from the boy and lowers her head to him. He nods in return, and backs away.
There is silence as she takes a stool at the front of the band. The silence is utter, except for the distant sound of the rain. She raises the bow, and the light of the cooking fires flickers against her as she attacks the instrument. Sudden, urgent sounds echo from the distant hills with a vast time delay of miles. The other musicians sway, but resist the tug of the music for as long as they can. But finally they all join the thread of the theme.
Jane laughs. "They're improvising. She loves doing it to them."
Talbot stares, shocked. "You mean, their making it up? Right now?"
"Yeah!"
He laughs. "As if I could tell, of course."
"You don't have music?"
"Not like this."
"Come on, you dance?"
"No," he replies, shocked.
"Good," and she reaches over the table and grabs his hand, tugging him around to the plaza.
The dinner winds down, and they walk back to the ornithopter. Talbot is sipping at an invigorating drink in a slim crystal glass when Reed touches his arm. A little of the drink skitters out of the glass and falls to the ground.
Talbot looks to her, and he sees that she is angry. He wonders why. But it is only a moment before he finds out.
"This is taking too long. When are you going to get to the military aspects? They know we need it. They have to. Every day we play around here getting to know each other, is one more day for that thing to get closer to Tlnou and the rest of everything."
"Jill, these people hardly know us. We need their trust. Not just Jane and Clu, but all of the worlds, here. We're asking these people to fight alongside us. Why should they fight and die for people they don't know? Or care about."
"So when are you going to ask?"
"Why the hell are you riding me? What the hell is it you hate so much? Is it that I have this team? That I took off to Tlnou? What?"
"You used to run by the seat of your pants. Now you're timid. You're spending time dancing with that damn woman when three million people are dead and more are on the butcher block. That's what I can't deal with." She reaches up toward his face, open hand, and he flinches, thinking she's about to slap him, but her hand stops, and gently runs over his cheek. "You'll never figure me out, flyboy." She steps past him into the ornithopter, and takes a seat beside the pilot.
Talbot stares past the window wall at the wind-shivering trees beyond, waiting. A breeze drifts through the screen. He reaches out and presses a hand on the glass beside the chair. Sun from the endless noon pools on the porch beyond, dappled by the shadow of leaves. Finally, Clu Sherril replies.
"Raoul, I can tell you that I'm impressed to see the Geodesic businesspeople asking for an alliance. It shows you have spirit and self-reliance. I like that."
He shifts to sit forward, hands awkward on his knees. "I won't lie to you, Clu. I might want to, but I can't. One reason is that we're not entirely sure our government will back us up. There's some evidence that our government may actually be dealing with the xenophobes for reasons of their own."
Her expression becomes still and silent. "I see."
Finally she continues. "No promise of cooperation, and they might fight us."
Now it is Talbot's turn to weigh a response. He elects to stick with the truth. Trust is going to be important. But he feels a sinking in his chest as he answers. "Yeah."
"Or are you trying to get us involved in your civil war?"
"I hope not," Talbot replies.
"This should be dealt with in public." She sighs. "We'll have to do all this again out on the platform, you know." Her face creases at the corners of the eyes, and her lips purse as if slightly dry. "You need to understand how we do defense here. It's not so much a function of Prometheus. There are three companies that compete to provide defense to Prometheus under contract. They handle deployment. They're the experts. But every world has its own militias." She takes a draw from her cigar and exhales the aromatic smoke into the sunlight where it wheels and disperses. "Now, when some people talk about defense, they're just making a euphemism for war - but here, we take the meaning of words to be what they are. And we only do defense. The idea that we might deploy in your systems, that we might attack, I'm afraid, is misguided."
His smile is bitter. "I think I'm misguided more and more often."
"We have strict export controls. And for good reason. It's why we never lose when we're attacked."
"I'm afraid you're not going to have that luxury this time," Talbot mutters. He stands. "You'd better think it over. And talk to Jane. I would have thought she would have told you what we've seen."
The meeting on the platform is under lowering clouds. There is a distant sound of a transport jet like the sound of a long drawn out scratch against the sky.
Clu's place is taken by something like a stump with three large stalked eyes. The tips of its roots lash occasionally, as if driven by some demon. "I extend explanation," it speaks in a resonant baritone, "but Clu Sherril is not attending. I have been briefed sufficient to the day."
Talbot smiles over at Steve. Promethean translation technology is better, but the semantic problems are still sufficient as well. He glances at Reed, but she is stony faced. "At least you asked," she whispers. He shrugs. "Today's when it counts. Besides, she said no."
"Try again. We have to get them to agree."
So he begins the argument again. Jane listens, stony faced, and the alien is unreadable.
Wanr meets them on the walkway, pelt fluffed with fear, posture straight with worry. "There's been a failure in the link to Tlnou." he whispers to the translator.
"Fold collapse?" Reed asks past Talbot's shoulder.
"Pinched to reflect," Wanr replies. Its eyes glint and flicker as they shift rapidly from side to side. "Completely."
"What does that mean?" Talbot asks.
Wanr pushes his head uncomfortably close to Talbot's face. "It means that the receiver has been destroyed."
"So what does this mean," Talbot shouts, confronting Jane Sherril in the garden. Jane strips off the gloves and looks regretfully down at her plants. Her eyes are slightly metallic with reflections, and Talbot wonders if it is just a trick of the light, or some effect from lenses.
"I have no idea," she replies. She looks off toward the distant curvature of the world, eyes narrowed with the distance. "Remember, my grandmother's out there, too."
"Yeah, I noticed she wasn't here. What's she doing?"
"Checking out our story."
He wants to cry, but a sigh is the best his exhaustion can manage. "Well, maybe she found out we were telling the truth. But a little late. Are you in touch with her? Can you call her?"
Jane rubs her forearm, once. "Yeah." She looks up at the house. "We have a signal rendezvous this evening. I'll come get you when it's time."
He nods and turns back to the house. He doesn't see how Jane's eyes follow him up the path.
"We're about a light day outside the system now, and we're going into curve at the slightest sign of aggression from them."
The room is a darkened basement room walled with screens. One is a window on Clu Sherril, sprawling on a recliner, her face aged by the oblique lighting in her control center. Another is a plot of a solar system, neon lines and unreadable symbols against the dark. Last is a crisp curve telescope view of the inner system.
Jane whispers at his side and he smells a faint fresh perfume. "She's talking about Tlnou."
He looks over to her. His voice shakes a little. "You didn't tell me she was going there."
Jane frowns apologetically in the dimness. "It's the only place we knew how to go."
Reed is standing with Wanr by the screen, peering at the pixels that show the Tlnou system. She looks back at the others. "Am I right? There are things that shouldn't be there, near the Oort ring."
Apparently, Clu can hear her. "Yeah, you can see better, this way, but it's a little blurrier." She lights a cigar and the image of the system grows more magnified in the other window. A set of specks appear on the schematic, orange. In the image window, there are blurry faint tiny spheres against the images of stars and nebulae. Their motion, if any, is so small as to be invisible.
"We're seeing some gravitational effects already, disruptions in the comet reservoir. It'll be centuries though, before anybody insystem sees any of that. We're getting ready to trip fold a probe into the formation, with a double link to you and to us, in case anything does go wrong. Have you folks met :Listarof: ?"
A suited figure with a bug-like helmet leans into the image and waves.
":Listarof:, check your damn methane vent, will you, all we need is my cigar setting that stuff on fire. Anyway, :Listarof: is programming the probe right now for me, its the best there is for that. We should know more soon."
Reed stands in front of the screen facing Clu. Her hands are on her hips and her eyes reflect Clu's image. "What more is there to know? How many more have to die for you to make up your mind?"
Hallison is looking away, slumped, leaning on the wall beside the door.
"My mind's made up, honey, but you're just a little impatient for me. I'm not the only one you have to convince. There are four hundred million people in Prometheus, and you have to convince every one of them, not just me. And so do I. Give me the chance."
Wanr steps up beside Reed and takes her arm. "I want to give you the time, Clu Sherril," he announces. "But hurry yu mst."
A voice makes a strange sound in the background. Clu smiles. "That's :Listarof:, the probe's away, folks. :Listarof:'s translator doesn't do Cospuk yet, so I'll have to do the intermediate stuff for you for now."
A fourth window lights with distorted images from the speeding probe.
Talbot stirs uncomfortably. The images remind him of his own flight into the depth of the fleet. He has a night feeling about the probe. He doesn't want to see what it is about to show. He doesn't want to be standing in this room amidst the scent of Jane Sherril, the odd must of Wanr, with the sweaty fear of Hallison at his back. The immobility is suddenly terrifying, as if the xenophobes could race down the link to where he waits so silently.
Gradually, the blurred specks are resolving at the end of the tunnel. They are taking on dimension and shadow. And they are, finally, walls like planets, fragmentary atmospheres from ancient leakages clinging in the cold dawn of their approach to Tlnou. Strange symbols and bumps contour their vast sides. Energy lances out from them, randomly disintegrating thinly swarming condensations in the Oort ring as the probe begins its flyby.
Windows light all along the basement walls to display the images in various wavelengths and modalities. The radio noise of the fleet is played in various soft fractal melodies, whose voices are subtly menacing.
In the distance is a sound of Cospuk, distorted and noisy. "ighter 697, ice freighter 697 declaring emergency .... ostile ... fire" Then the transmission is silent. A window overlays another, showing a blurry slow motion replay of the destruction of a far outsystem ice freighter by a directed energy beam from the fleet.
"It looks like some kind of automatic response," Clu is saying.
"So how much attention do they have to pay to get rid of a tiny thing like that?" Hallison speaks up. "It's like killing a mite. But they won't stop there."
A sibilant sound. ":Listarof: reports activity is not entirely random, but there is no complete pattern. Not all items are being interdicted. Damage is being done to the fleet by comet impact."
Jane turns to Talbot and lays a hand on his arm. "It's going to be hours before anything changes. Maybe you folks want some rest." She glances at Reed and Wanr. "Or a ride back to the Norton? We can relay the transmission and also bring you up to date with the recordings we've been making."
"We should go back," Reed insists. "Who knows what's going on with the team?"
Talbot is torn. The data is addictive. There will be negotiations in seven hours. Everyone in the room is distressed, and no one on the Norton has the slightest idea about this new data. But the negotiations.
"Clu, what's going to happen? Are you coming back for tomorrow?"
A brief lag as the signal passes the fold. Clu stirs and draws on her cigar. "Yeah," she replies. "I'm coming back in time."
The car sweeps down the road with a soft rubbery sound faint in the cabin. The trees and crisp glowing images of signs and billboards, mostly incomprehensible, grow, slide, and flash past. Talbot leans his head against the clear dome, feeling its coolness on his temple. The darkness rests his eyes. But his heart is pounding helplessly, and he feels as if his lungs are exhausted, taking the merest sips of air.
Jill stirs, half asleep, on the seat beside him, leaning against the far window. In the front, Wanr and Jane keep up a quiet conversation, but he finds himself unable to muster the attention to follow their words.
At the end of the curve, they move quietly to a stop under a circle of lights. The airlock admits them into the hallway, and Talbot waves tiredly at Jane. He can't stop the recurring images of Clu watching Tlnou.
Sleep is difficult, wrestling with the fear and the pressure to actually do something. So he shakes and writhes and sweats with anger. And the images crowd his mind, until he is finally dreaming, but the dream is a nightmare of energy boiling a city away into vapor, the ground glowing away into whispers of screams in vacuum. Then he is awake again, hand hammered briefly against the wall.
After a dreamless silent period, Talbot suddenly awakens. For a few moments he wonders why. Then, he hears the sound of things being broken, some shouting from the other side of the door.
In an instant, he is on his feet and standing by the door, listening. There are strange, untranslated words and screams. He steps quickly back to the bed and unholsters his laser. He slaps the power pack into place at his waist, and watches the quick self-test complete to blue. Then he is at the door again, weapon raised as it slips aside.
He is in the hallway and the noise is louder there, but in the complex light and shade, there is nothing but volume to tell the direction of the source. He turns right and races down the narrow hall.
At the turn, he can see the melee spilling out of a room into the hall. Security beings are tight against the walls, out of the line of sight of the door, through which objects are being thrown. Hallison notices Talbot, and gestures Talbot's weapon down before walking over.
"It's not that kind of problem," he states. "Wanr's lost it in there. It's breaking up its room."
"What?"
Hallison nods. "Yeah, chief, it's a ritual with them. When death is near, they destroy their possessions."
"Wanr's dying?" Talbot asks, shocked.
"No, no. It's the situation. It's lost hope we can solve the problem."
"Damn it, it's spent too much time with m'Ilu Ram."
Hallison is looking back at the room, but Talbot's comment catches his attention. "Oh. Yeah, the fatalism thing. No, this is Pangalin."
"But bad security."
"Bad security?"
"Will it talk to me?"
Hallison shrugs. "Maybe."
Talbot steps to the door, and instantly flinches as a flying object flies just past his face. "Wanr," he yells. "Come on, it's me!"
The furry creature stands at the far side of the room, by a case of elaborate fiber and glass. To Talbot, its expression is completely blank and alien. Suddenly, it whirls like a dervish, and slams itself into the wall. Frightened of Wanr's unknown manic strength, he still forces himself to walk forward to where the Pangalin is standing straight, legs slightly buckled, face to the wall, huge eyes lidded under thin fur. He can see the chest rippling with oddly distributed breaths. And then his hands are moving slowly out, in a human comforting gesture, to clasp the upper section of Wanr's arm. He almost stops. Then he touches the fever hot fur and his fingers close. He feels a muscle twitch under his fingers. "Wanr, please. It's not over yet. Don't let go too soon. Stay with me on this. I need your help."
Wanr speaks softly and the translator informs Talbot. "I am like you and doomed. What to believe in is left? Prometheus will not help, Tlnou will be gone in days, and the rest of our homes, our traditions, our ... everything." Its voice trails into a faint gasp.
Talbot sighs. He wants to not think about these issues, because considering them will only cloud any chance of surmounting them. "I hear you," he whispers. "I know. It's true. Maybe we should give up. We thought we killed them with ideas, but the physical threat... I don't know what we're going to do. No one is ready for this. Not me, not you, not Jane, not Jill, not Clu. But we haven't even started yet, and I know you have good ideas. Ideas we'll need if we're going to win." He pauses. Wanr never moves. Talbot tugs at his arm. "Come on, we need to do some brainstorming. Steve's waiting for us." Wanr allows the pressure to shift him stiffly from the wall. Its eyes open and their surface ripples as they focus and regain hard reflectivity. Wanr's white lips stretch and curl down at the corners. So he is strengthening, Talbot remembers.
Outside the door, Hallison, gestures the security staff away, and then takes a cocky stance across the hall.
"Can't leave during ritual. No additional hope given can be, must complete." Wanr's eyelids seem to be flickering in pulses down over its eye crystals. "What hope when everything dies in the end?"
Talbot stops, hands in mid gesture. Finally, he finds words. "Wanr, I don't have all of the answers. But I know giving up is wrong. Being alive is not giving up. Everything's trying to kill you. The gravity, the germs, the air, the vacuum, the entropy. The second you give up, you die. And if you give up this time, everything's going to die. Everything you care about. What are you going to do, stand in the ruins and complain that there was nothing you could do about it? Or if it comes to that, are you going to be able to say - 'at least I tried'?"
Wanr whirls, first one way, then another. Then it looks up at Talbot's hard eyes. "I want to, Raoul. If I could. I cann't, no, can I? How?"
Talbot leans forward, earnest. "Come with me," he replies, slowly. "Come with me, and help me brainstorm. Work with me and help me figure out what we can do."
"Yu wll nt mind. Yu will ttrust me still?"
Talbot smiles carefully. "Of course. Come on, let's get to the conference room."
As they walk out, Hallison steps next to Talbot and whispers. "Good job chief. But don't touch them when they're depressed. You almost blew the whole thing."
Talbot shakes his head. "Thanks, Steve. I can see we're going to have spend more time together. You suppose we could work out a deal on a cross-brain transplant?"
He slips quietly into his bed. The darkness seems close and comforting. And though the tug and play of ideas had not led to a closure, he knows that Wanr is reengaged.
They step back into Prometheus, and it is raining under a cold grey sky. Reed touches Talbot's arm. "Where are they?"
There are vehicles, parked, drops glistening as they run down the glossy bright surfaces. But Jane Sherril is nowhere to be seen.
There is a distant sound of thunder. The rain falls with slightly greater intensity.
Talbot steps to the kiosk beside the door. "Jane Sherril," he requests. The hoop lights with an image, distorted in angle, looking toward Jane, who is pacing in the cellar room at her home. She wheels toward them.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Raoul. I've been trying to reach Clu, we've had a communications fault. I'll send someone out for you right away."
Latimer steps out into the slackening rain. "So good to see you all."
Hallison laughs. "Hey, metal bod." Latimer smiles a thin steely smile.
The shafts of sun slip into the room through a side window as they sneak past the edges of shifting cloud. The surfaces of the walls are still dark, except for processions of numbers, and Jane is slumped in a wide chair, staring, until, at a sound, she turns and sees the group of them silhouetted in the doorway.
"No luck?" Talbot asks.
"Nothing yet," she replies, quietly. "We're just retrying. It's probably the gravitational distortion caused by those things." Her eyes are heavy lidded, as if she hasn't slept.
Latimer steps past them, and the scene through the door is reflected softly on its back. It holds out a hand. "Jane, let's walk in the garden. Raoul can watch the displays for a while."
Talbot leans in the doorway and watches the metal man and the woman walking slowly in the new sun of the garden. Reed steps to his side, her light dress making a soft sound of movement.
"A strange pair," she remarks. He glances over, and then back out.
"I'm not sure how you can say that," he replies. "They seem good friends to me."
"To each other or to you?" she asks.
He makes a musing face. "Both, I guess." He looks up toward the screen walls. Except for the retry traces, they remain blank. "Damn old Clu. What's happened?"
"I think waiting's part of the trial," Reed mutters bitterly.
Talbot watches her face below his carefully. As always, her hair is tied off severely, and her pale skin seems even paler by the side light from the axis, extending down into the soft hollows of her throat, and then disappearing beneath the collar of her dress. He finds himself wanting to run a hand down that smooth shape, but his hands are unmoving. He finds himself sensing the shape beneath her dress, but his thoughts are still. He realizes that her eyes are on his, and he is afraid she will see his feeling. But she looks only a little more intently, and then her eyes are gone as she steps beside him to the door, to where the light can pour down over her shoulders. Then, he is sure that his heart has hammered - hard - once. The small pressure of her hand had crawled into his, now enfolds it. She looks carefully at him, telling him she knows exactly what she has done. After a moment she glances down and releases. Her gaze follows Latimer and Jane in the garden. Finally, she says, "We should go back to Tlnou, and get Clu."
"I know," he replies. He pushes away from the door to join her in the light. He looks at her carefully, telling her he knows exactly what he is about to do. "We've been in debt to them long enough. Let's talk to Jane."
Jane stands silent in the basement room, staring at the screens, watching the continual retry. Finally she sighs, picks up her duffel, and as she turns to leave, the lights wink out behind her. The door closes and locks, leaving only a faint whisper of a hundred years of cigar smoke.
The flight deck is its usual pre-departure chaos. "Are we synching?" he asks the pilot. Whispers at various frequencies fill the room. "No, not yet," it replies, lenses glittering with the movement.
Talbot frowns impatiently. "I thought we had this down. Jane? Jane? What's the problem? We can't run support if we can't synch the protocols."
"System's decided to use a different frequency for some reason. I'm working on it. But if I can't get it done, you'll just have to stay behind."
"Don't try that crap with me, Sherril. Fix the problem, or I'm going with or without you in ten minutes." He grins over at the chunky Tereniade systems manager, meaning it their way. It frowns back at him, knowing the bluff.
Talbot leans toward the pilot. "Can you direct fold for Clu's last position, if Jane runs on us?"
It spirals three tentacles. Talbot thinks that means yes.
"Protocl joyn," the systems manager announces.
"OK, let's go." He is relieved. If she cooperates this time, the next will be easier.
He doesn't notice Jill Reed standing at the back of the room, watching.
He stands and steps back from the panels into the darkened room. His eyes are teary from exhaustion. Wanr enters through the door at his back, carrying refreshments. The room is Wanr's, and it is cold, so Talbot's coffee steams into the air. For a moment he finds himself wishing for a spliff. He chuckles, thinking of how long it has been since he has even thought of that, and knowing how tired he must be for it to break through the guard of the constant stress.
"So let's go through it again."
Wanr whimpers and steps past him to consider the display. Talbot sips the coffee and makes a face at the bitterness. "Remind me to make the coffee next time," he mutters.
Wanr's stubby fingers flare at the panel. "This contingency, here. Acceptable probability is lower. But if this course, and fleet deplys energy weapons, only concealment past limb is sufficient to ablate. But time under reaction drive sufficient not is."
Talbot gestures, hand cupped toward the ceiling. "Come on, what about the edge of the moon. If their beam spread is this, then the edge of the moon reflects an interference pattern into the energy stream. The program says it attenuates." He waves the cup slightly, and a faint slip of coffee moistens the rim and his hand.
"Program insufficient is. Observe ignorance of albedo of atmosphere of gas giant given range of daltons? Try value in plug of yours, OK, try these from extrapolation of gravity mixing from masses of fleet, and reflection is different, moon is elsewhere." Wanr's white lips form unheard sounds, and stop moving before the sentences end.
Talbot knows he has been trying to argue Wanr down with no basis available, but he has been learning. "All right, what about Promethean assets?"
"Not very forthcoming, they are. Sherril, we know, her capabilities discussion occurs on some level, unverifiable due to morphics. Two other vehicles, older, perhaps, not using morphic technologies. Latimer with Sherril. Others crew unknown, heads say Ormic Ritcalin Voyjay, and Michael Haggis." It leans back against at stand chair, and waves its hands about. "Still think of age of craft making scans more... informative? Indeed true is. Weaponry of energics and propulsives, compliment detailed... here."
Talbot remembers his conversation with Jane.
..."You know what you've gotten us to do. Now some of us have to take a run at this war of yours." Her voice over the comlink is bitter in the dark...
...and then..."That's why we have to go with them," Talbot insists to the irate Ship's Manager. "They don't need us, but we have to be willing to lay it on the line with them."
"But our function is largely diplomatic, weapons all for show. How cannot the rumination portend the vehicle at risk?" The Lipu molluscan extends eyestalks, and excess water sloshes in its mobile bowl from the sprays.
"We are at risk, Manager. We'll minimize it, but without taking the risk, we won't get their support."...
"OK, Wanr, let's hear it. I don't know how to do this and I shouldn't keep spying over your shoulder."
"Enough, is it not, to have started the motion and to watch? More unattended than this plan, and my staff tactical can help elaboration. As you say."
Talbot shakes his head, but he only feels a slight flush of blood to his face. He remembers when Reed had first inspected his mission, his feelings about her scathing but silent observation. "All right," he replies, finally. "I... yeah. Listen, let me know when you need to talk to Jane. I want to make sure we handle asking for integration as best we can. She seemed a little unwilling to let us link at prelaunch, and we have to get our plans in sync before fold."
Wanr taps hands to its forehead. Talbot raises his cup and then walks out into the warm corridor, a little sad.
Reed turns into the wide dorsal corridor from a doorway far ahead, reading a display as she walks through dappled light.
"Hey, Jill," he calls as she approaches. She looks up and frowns for a moment, then smiles.
"Hi, Raoul." She glances one last time at the display and tucks it under her arm. "Good to see you. I've been helping the Ship's Manager with some pre-fold activities, hope you don't mind." Other beings pass them, hurrying or slowly moving on their own missions.
His eyes narrow slightly. "Of course not. But I'll need you for some planning sessions before we go into fold. We have to work with Jane and her people as soon as we pop out."
She pulls out her display again and manipulates the surface. "We're about twenty seven hours from fold, how about first thing tomorrow?"
He watches her eyes, and she is all-business. But for a moment, at the end of her sentence, her eyes flash out blue from under her thin brows, and even though her mouth only changes a little, he sees a smile. Or did he imagine it, and dream yesterday?
"That would be fine," he replies, pulling out his pad. "... How about conference 16, at nine?"
"Great." She squeezes his arm briefly as she walks past, and, even as he worries about issues of authority, and marks an appointment into his calendar, he feels that strange acceleration.
The morning they fold to Tlnou, Talbot wakes to the sudden darkness out of dream. He swings suddenly to sit, and then bows his head to his hands. The faint light of displays glistens on his sweaty pinkish palm.
He washes carefully and looks at his face in the mirror, water beaded on his forehead and at the edge of his hair. He rubs his cheeks and looks in his eyes, and wonders at the his normal appearance.
He slips his naked legs carefully into his bright blue vacsuit and fits the plumbing. With a quiet gesture, he seals the suit to his throat ring. He picks up his helmet from the table, and reaches over his head to hook it to the ring. Both helmet and suit are blazoned with large symbols that signify his team leadership. He runs a hand along the arm blazon and remembers how it had felt to see that for the first time, when his suit had been delivered from the Illyrion. Today it makes him feel a little afraid, a little excited.
He walks to the flight deck, exhausted by three hours of sleep after endless planning sessions. His step is slow, and he pauses for a moment to rub thick eyes one last time before going in.
If only I could have had more sleep.
The door slips aside to the ordered chaos of the pre-fold control center. Beside the door and along the wall are a variety of refreshment dispensers. The odors of coffee and various other beverages and foods mingle as everyone tries to attain full readiness. A caterer hands him a cup of coffee, knowing his needs from long habit. Talbot realizes he has never asked the young Tereniade's name. "Hey, what do they call you?" he asks. "Gennead," it replies with the tight Tereniade smile. It is a scene being repeated everywhere on the ship.
Reed greets him with a gesture from the management platform. He joins her and settles gratefully into a comfortable chair at the situation table. Behind, above and around are the stars.
Lights are settling to a quiet blue. He sips his coffee and worries about all of the things none of them may have remembered to worry about, while he watches the flight crew taking their places amidst their interfaces. Finally, through his translator contacts, he watches the checklists mounting on the smoked table between the team and the bridge.
"Almost there," he whispers to Reed. She nods, and the stiffness of the movement, the concealment of her eyes, all speak of her tension. He tries to smile. "OK, we're going to do it."
Wanr calls on the link. "Where Hallison is? Late is why?"
Talbot senses the first defect that could unravel everything. Reed shakes her head. "Steve's offline."
He has to decide fast. "Wanr, prep somebody else. Ship Manager, find out where Hallison is, if you have to get search teams out. Make sure all the inner links are running."
"m*Taranad is being slotted for drop consultant on drop 2." Wanr notifies.
The org chart on the table shifts to reflect the change.
"Fold preparations completed," the Ship Manager announces.
"What about Hallison?" Talbot demands.
"No results have been reported to us. Faults not observed in systems entire. Teams are in the corridors looking right now."
"Sherril's folding. Hey, look at that," the sensor op calls out. Sherril's vehicle is changing shape like a silvery balloon wavering in a wind; then the fold winks up around it and it is gone.
"Go, go go!" Talbot yells. The ship shudders briefly and the stars wink away. There is only the faint hum of the fold. He stands and paces, staring at the timer on the table. "An hour," he mutters. Then he looks at the Ship Manager's shell. "Ship Manager, where the hell is Steve Hallison?"
At that exact moment, Hallison is sleeping, lying sprawled on his back across his bed, snoring in the dark. The call alert is sounding bell tones, but he doesn't move.
The door slides away, and the search team steps into the light fan, long shadows slashing across the floor and the low bed. "We found him," a woman reports, leaning over the bed as he stirs. "He's out of it."
"You're buzzed!" Talbot shouts, right next to Hallison's crestfallen face. "Right before we're going on a rescue and you're a drop consultant. You idiot! You're out of the game this round. I'll talk to you later. I don't have time now." He storms from the room.
Reed shakes her head, looking carefully at Hallison with an expression of disappointment.
From the hallway, she hears Talbot "Get him in his suit and make sure he's out of here into the non-participant center in fifteen minutes."
Hallison sits on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. Reed steps into the hallway and then hurries after the receding Talbot. "Hey," she calls. He slows down and stops at an intersection. Almost by itself, it seems, his fist slaps the wall. She catches up to him.
"Listen, Raoul, he hasn't been the same since his team died."
"Don't try to make me soft on this. You know damn well I want to forgive him. I've done worse myself. But I can't right now." His eyes are darkly gleaming in the dappled hall light. "And you wouldn't be, either, if you were in charge."
She frowns.
"Let's go." he orders, and walks away.
The timer winds to zero and the dome blazes with imagery and diagrams. It takes a moment for Talbot to realize where they are. Reed is slightly faster. She leaps to her feet, screaming "Pull out, pull out!"
But the pilot is on it, and the ship is slowing its terminal plunge from fold. Ahead, the wall of the planet destroyer is already too large for comprehension, its features complex yet meaningless, growing too fast.
On the distant horizon, a brief rod of energy lances upward, and something is destroyed.
"Stay in," Talbot orders, "Don't pull away. We must be inside the defense perimeter. Man are we lucky!" he laughs. "Where's Jane?"
"No idea," Reed snaps, dragging things around the situation table. "Maybe she's not out yet. You know how fold is; just 'cause she went in first doesn't mean she's here."
"She's here." Talbot mutters. "Maybe that's what they're shooting at."
"Clu echo detection," the sensor op calls.
"Where?"
"Twenty million sunward." Jane takes up the flow. "I don't think they know she's here."
"Damage?"
"Not that anyone can tell, but this morphic technology is making it difficult."
Talbot is pacing. "So we can't get out of here, can we?"
"Why not?"
"Well, we're inside the defenses, right, so we're not being attacked. If we go out..."
"Well, maybe." Her eyes are alert, and suddenly flick up to the dome, and then back again. "But maybe not. Maybe the defense perimeter only attacks incoming?"
He considers it. "No, remember before, the meteor defenses handle incoming, but the cometary debris is being destroyed; it's not incoming. They check."
Typical brainstorming, but she is disturbed. "Then we're stuck."
"We're not only stuck, but the distortion has changed the fold coordinate system, so we can't even fold out. We're too close."
Unfortunately, everyone is looking and listening. Reed stands and walks around the table. She stands next to him and leans up. "Raoul, that doesn't leave any alternative."
He is furious, but it only shows in a slight stiffening in his face. "There's always an alternative." Things are coming apart around him." All right, can we communicate with Jane? She's got to handle getting Clu, while we figure out how to get out of here." I wanted to come to help; to show how much we could help, now all I'm showing is how serious the problem is, and doing that by getting everyone I know incinerated.
Suddenly Reed grabs his arm. "We can't get out. But we can get in."
"What?"
"We did it before."
"What, crash into the destroyer?"
"Sure! On purpose."
"Then what?"
Intuition runs away and she is suddenly silent. "I don't know," she whispers.
There is a tremendous sound, and some reflex causes Talbot to reach for Jill and pull her helmet over her head. The deck shudders as she stares at him through the glass, and he fumbles with his own. Another sound and there are myriads of bright lights across every panel screaming errors and disaster. And a last sound rips away the other side of the flight deck, and the tens of levels above it. All of the air goes roaring into silence, carrying bodies and consoles and fluttering scraps of unknown fabric out into the sunlight. The railing slams Talbot in the side, and he is clutching Jill by the arm and then the waist as the wind dies to silence. Lights flicker and go out, but gravity is still on, and some of the panels look active. The ship is spinning slowly, and the sun crawls through the vast layered pit in the hull, harsh pools on the floor beside him moving slowly.
Some icy feeling is clutching his skin, not just the cold of space, and he feels as if he is watching from far away. He feels a motion in his arms and it is Jill, but something is strange about her face. Finally, he realizes she is screaming. "Stop it," he yells, but she can't hear him. He pushes his helmet against hers, and the very faint sound comes through. "Stop it!" he yells again. He feels her shudder and then she is crying.
Intersuit com comes up, and then he can hear a cacophony from all over the ship. The problem is too big. He can't think.
Then, a moment later, he remembers, and he tunes his com to local and directional. Now he can hear Jill panting as she recovers. "Are you all right?" he demands. "Jill!"
She gestures assent, and, releasing him, clutches the rail just as the gravity fluctuates. Talbot looks over at the pilot area, but there is no one there, and the imagery is gone. He looks out the vast tear in the hull, and sees the bright surface of the destroyer moving slowly beyond. He senses it is closer, but he cannot be sure. Did the pilot establish a stable orbit?
He starts down to the pilot area, past a strange rusty streak that may once have been the blood of the gaunt grey creature he had joked with not so long ago. The gravity bobbles, and he nearly loses the floor in panic. He flattens himself down on the darkened surface and crawls to the pilot station. Then, he has to stand up. It may not even respond. He knows that. His familiarity with this level of starship guidance is not what it needs to be. He knows that. But he needs information. Cautiously, he stands. The gravity is steady. Swiftly, he switches the system to impersonal. A gesture envelops him in the orbital plot. It is as he was afraid - the orbit was not established and the path is decaying. He begins the struggle to control the chaotic deterioration.
Reed watches from the railing, her breath so loud in her ears that she can hear nothing else. Talbot is moving like a magician, gesturing and tugging at virtual objects that seem to be fighting his will. And in a corner of the room, she sees the suit-shrouded shell of the Ship Manager struggling slowly from some wreckage by the motion of a large and inflexible foot. Finally, a gesture of disgust from Talbot dismisses the piloting globe. He hurries back to her. "I can't get this thing flying, the control runs are only partial, even with the auto reroute. We've got twelve hours, now, that's it. I tried to call Jane, or Clu, but they're on the far side, and fold com doesn't work with the local gravity and no coordinates."
Reed grabs his shoulder. "Then we have to abandon ship. And there's only one place to go. The destroyer."
Talbot feels a wave of hopelessness. Everyone will think they have been destroyed. There may be no rescue. They may all die. But there is no time for that fear. "I'll try to raise Wanr, get him to shift agenda from drop to evac. See if anyone's left here. Twelve hours, we get enough on the job, maybe we can get everyone off. If the destroyer doesn't decide to swat us again..."
Talbot pulls the hatch shut. The sounds and smells of half a hundred beings are sealed within. Seals hiss closed and they are on their own. Should they have spent the time on trying to jury rig control systems for the Norton? Could there have been any other solution? He pushes his way through the crowd toward the flight deck. The new yet familiar door slides back and then he is in the hushed darkness and light that is his first and still favorite home.
"Hi, Jill," he slides into the left seat.
"Hi, Raoul, we're on time."
The scent of a new flight deck envelops him, and his eyes travel the window wall for an idea of where she stands. The checklists are almost complete. He nods in the dimness, and announces to all compartments, "All personnel to acceleration stations. Five minutes to departure."
Except for the sound of the machines, it is silent, even though the Norton has been rocked by occasional fire from the destroyer for the past ten and a half hours. Talbot punches through a few independent checks for his side of the board. Finally, Reed looks over, and her eyes glint with the displays. "We're ready."
Talbot's throat tightens. They are abandoning the Norton. In a moment, they will be a very threatened lifeboat, and he doesn't like it.
Reed touches his arm. "I don't like this either."
He frowns. "Yeah, let's do it."
He final announces and they are at the launch time. The stars flash into presence as the Norton slips behind, and then the destroyer is below and ahead. Talbot yaws the vehicle and the slowly rolling carcass of the Norton swings into view. Both he and Reed gasp at the sight. Hideous gaping holes have shattered the hull, and various structural elements are ripped out and drifting with it. The venting of various gases and atmosphere has formed continuous faint clouds, some of which are already crackling with distant tiny flames.
As the Norton recedes against the vast landscape of the destroyer, and its sky of stars, he can see the other vehicles following. Talbot can hear the tinny chatter of the other pilots over the links.
"Look at that."
"Man oh man, that is bad. We're lucky."
"Plasma fires near the fold room are, back. What's going to happen when that goes, I see do not want to."
"So where are we going, then?" a close voice wakens him from reverie.
"There's only one way to be sure of getting in," he replies grimly.
"Impact?"
"Impact."
The Norton slowly gets ahead of them, and drops below their course. The flames are more violent now, and their venting is causing the hulk to spin in unpredictable ways. They can still see the other vehicles in the sunlight, but the terminator is not far ahead, and the others are hundreds of kilometers away to each side. A bolt from the horizon strikes the Norton, and it reels with the explosion of an entire side. Then the destroyer is silent for a long time.
Until one of the boats turns upward as if trying to depart, and they are never to know if it was some secret consensus or a malfunction, because a sword of energy disintegrates it a thousand kilometers above.
Talbot and Reed trade glances. They are too numb to feel anything for those who just died. "Maybe later," Talbot mutters.
Just then, near the horizon, the Norton smashes into the destroyer.
There is a small initial reaction. The light spreads slowly, and then there is a fountain of gases that bursts into flames. A moment later, the Norton's fold generator implodes and the entire explosion is first sucked back to invisibility in a strange inverted reaction, and then the window wall dims to near black to contain the brilliance of the release. Ten minutes later, the shock gases roil past below at hundreds of kilometers an hour.
Talbot is watching, heart pounding, as the heavy energy facilities of the destroyer begin firing on the rising plume. They may be doing additional damage to the site, but it is hard to tell. The worst part is that his craft and the others are sailing relentlessly toward the damaged area. And the blasts. As they must.
Talbot sips at his coffee in the darkened left seat. He offers the cup to Jill. She shakes her head and resumes staring out at the surface, now much closer.
As they approach the terminator, they can see the glowing edges of the Norton's grave just beyond. The plume has long since escaped into space, and the weapons are quiescent.
"We're getting close," Talbot mutters into the com. "Remember, stick with us until we find a safe zone. Inside."
"This is crazy, Talbot. What about the radiation? And the crew? And the weapons? I mean..."
"You see a choice for us?" he snaps. "Head for high orbit, and you'll be roasted. This is the chance we've got. Pass, and we're dead." He shakes his head and turns to Jill. "They spend too much damn time flying taxi service. Take it for granted. Idiots! Looking to die."
"They're just afraid," she replies gently, staring out to the horizon.
"Yeah, well so am I." He feels his voice spiralling out of control. She looks over. "Please Raoul, we need your expertise, or we're all dead. Stay with it."
He knows that if he unleashes his fear, he may never come back. So he reins it in tightly. "All right, let's get to work. We need a systems check, get everyone back into helmets, and figure we have... ten more minutes before we start braking."
She nods grimly.
They are falling past endless scorched and broken levels like a ship sinking into an oceanic trench. Talbot stares downward in awe at the depth of the destruction. He scratches absently at his arm, thinking of the billions of tons of material that had vanished in the flash that ended the Norton.
The slanting light vanishes as the terminator sweeps over the last of the blast canyon. Then only the sensors show the walls, limned with radiation remnants.
A grandmother and her granddaughter meet in the linkway between liquid metal ships, clothed in liquid metal. Beyond the walkway, Clu's ship has lost some of its fluidity, where the energy of the destroyer has crisped the morphic substance.
The two embrace in their smooth metal suits, faces hidden behind their hoods, and their love is in the extra pressure and its nuances. Clu is alone, and they walk embraced to where Latimer waits in the opening.
"Thanks for coming," Clu says to the metal man.
"I couldn't stay behind. What about :Listarof:?"
Clu shakes her head. "The ship looks a lot better than it is, inside."
Latimer nods. "Morphics heal better than flesh."
Her face is invisible, but a shudder is not.
They step inside and the hull heals behind them.
As they walk through the hollow interior, the women strip off their hoods. "Anything else from the Norton?" Jane asks.
Latimer's face is cold and its expression doesn't change. "Nothing since the explosion on the far side. It's possible they unfolded too close. We won't know unless we go over there. I wouldn't advise it."
"Who's the Norton?" Clu asks, slipping a cigar from a seam in her suit.
"The Geodesic team insisted on coming. They wanted to help, but..."
"Oh, no..." Clu turns the cigar over and over in her hand as if she is unable to recognize it.
There are cold blue lights, hot with ultraviolet.
There are endless hexagonal rooms, separated by more or less open spaces. The dust is thick and there are places where strange vermin have died in heaps. Talbot pokes at them with the toe of his boot.
There is atmosphere here, past the first intact airbreak, but it is the wrong type for humans, so Talbot wears his suit.
He walks slowly through a place where no human foot has ever trod. He can almost feel the knowledge of billions of dead like a cold moisture. The ranks of cells diminish into the distance without a clue as to their content.
There is nothing here to see; nowhere to go. And he is again afraid. The air in their small craft will not last forever, nor will the power. Yet there is nowhere within the destroyer for sanctuary, and he realizes how desperate he had been. The vehicle is the size of a planet, and even this monotonous floorscape can be seen to run for miles toward the curvature.
He turns and starts back to the portaseal that membranes over the hole in the airbreak.
Hallison is waiting for him.
"Be nice to find a control room or something, eh, chief?"
"I'd be satisfied with some plain nitrogen/oxygen mix, frankly." Talbot sighs, looking at Hallison carefully. "You feeling all right?"
Hallison's eyes close for a moment. "Yeah. Sorry."
"Yeah." Talbot still feels bitter.
Hallison looks around. "You know, this thing is too enormous. We're not likely to find anything momentous."
"I'd settle for interesting. Any ideas?"
"I reviewed the sensor logs."
"And?"
Hallison gestures helplessly. "There's not much to work with. But the upper levels are out. There's too much radiation from the fold expulsion, and even if there weren't, with the attitude they seem to have about repairs, the outer surface has probably been holed a million times. If we head along the ecliptic, that leads toward the hollow. Now that probably represents the focus of whatever they use to destroy planets. Likely to be mostly machinery, and who knows how much residual radiation of who knows what kind."
"So, the other way? North?"
"Down. To the center."
"Sure! The same as we put our control rooms at the center of our ships to avoid damage." Suddenly there's something to do.
"Raoul, it's possible they don't do anything like us. Or there might be other design constraints. This might not mean anything. And, don't forget, this pit doesn't go all the way."
"Steve, if we go out the way we came in, the weapons will wipe us out. We still have a couple of days of resources. There's nothing better to try."
He steps through the membrane.
In the light cast by the ship, a million shadows move like ants across the base of the pit. Repair systems like nothing they have ever seen, bulking large and hideous in their alien movement. Robots and other autonomous things, crudely shaped, reforming walls, laying conduit. But the lifeboats are ignored. For now.
"Within new repairs, trapped we be can," Wanr offers. Jill, leaning over Talbot's shoulder, nods. Talbot shrugs. The other craft are a mile above, safe at least from the current repairs. "We have to find out," he replies, though he knows he is unsure of exactly what he is looking for.
Reed sighs and turns away. She looks over her shoulder, then, at the back of his chair. "I should go."
Wearily, Talbot pushes himself from his seat. "I can't leave these people without a pilot. And I have to have Steve, and R*Zanaril, if I'm going to make any sense out of what's down there."
"Of course," she replies, bitterness quiet, harnessed to a hopeless fear.
He pushes past her into the hallway, and she finally follows him, past the doorways open on crowded cabins. She stops him at the tiny galley. The light from above casts shadows to hood his eyes, but she can see the corners netted with blood, and the faint stubble filming his chin. Worst though, are the eyelids, slow to respond to his eye movements, as if they are thick and sluggish. "I can't have any more coffee," he mutters.
"Why don't you get some sleep?" she replies. For a moment, her anger is stilled. "There's time."
He tries to shake his head, but he moves clumsily and almost staggers. "Yeah, I guess..." As he walks away, his head is low, and his gait shuffles. But Reed smiles after him.
She falls endlessly toward the busy machines.
Her private channel opens. "Jill," comes Talbot's hissing whisper. "What are you doing?"
"Steve, R*Zaranil, and I are investigating. I decided you needed your rest. Besides," her voice cracks a bit, "it's easier to go yourself than send someone else, isn't it? Well, it's your turn to see how that feels. You be the pilot. That's your job. Or at least the one you really like, isn't it?"
Her personal music is soft in her helmet, but it is comforting in the digital silence.
"All right, Jill. I suppose you told them I wanted this? Or did you tell them you knocked me on the head and tied me up and would they please join you for a quick recon?"
She sighs. "I told them you needed to sleep. Funny, they believed me."
His chuckle is warmer for being so close to her ear. "Good thing I slept, or I'd be so stressed I'd be yelling. The problem is, I have no idea what you're going into, and I don't like the idea of sitting up here waiting."
"Yeah, well, remember Tlnou," she snaps.
More silence underlined with soft music as the floor and its busy hordes grow closer.
"I remember," he finally replies.
"Then get out of my ear and let me do my job."
More silence. Then, "OK."
The gravity at the center of a massive body is near to zero, as the mass above and below tugs equally. But there are gravity generators here, and the team hits the floor running. And from a corner, they peer out onto the activity, like children watching the inexplicable activities of adults.
There are machines of every size, but mostly large. Extruding, manipulating, gradually creating a ceiling. Reed tries to restrain her feeling of slowly being trapped.
The world is creaking and moaning in silence, but the sense of the stresses is transmitted as vibration into their suits. Every once in a while, there is a shuddering, like an earthquake, which could be from anything - perhaps the disintegration of the structure, perhaps nothing more than the complaining of buttresses that support the mass of an injured planet.
Below their feet, the surface is more complex than a flat floor. It slopes in various directions, with sharp angles and curves. The machines carry harsh lights of various wavelengths, which cast wildly shifting shadows of chaotic color.
Hallison and R*Zanaril are recording the scene in their accessible spectra, but Reed collects them with a gesture. "Let's go."
They hasten down a vast corridor, its roof a mile above them, with a variety of vast machines lined up and moving past on wheels and jointed legs. The team stays close to the walls, afraid to be crushed, afraid to be noticed.
"OK, let's get out of this area, and see what we can find. If we can just find someplace where the crew lives, or works."
"Machns, unls," R*Zaranil offers. "Crew no."
"That's what Raoul always thought," Hallison offers. "Maybe he's right. Look at this stuff." He shakes his head as he stares up the flank of a slowly moving machine the size of a cliff. "Can people really manage this?"
"Some variant, paradigm of decentralized authority, may pay."
They seek quieter and quieter byways, avoiding the smaller robotics that are still racing toward the damage.
Until they arrive at an airbreak that walls off the corridor from the rest of the core.
"Is a new construct," R*Zaranil announces. "Within hours." Its translator is at its best setting for this critical mission, so its rich baritone is a crisp sound to the humans.
"So," Reed finishes, "it must be between us and some work area of importance. Some place that requires an atmosphere."
"Maybe," Hallison replies, standing beside the wall. He slips out a pad of membrane and smooths it over the oddly textured metal. When he is satisfied, he shines a laser through it, and a pinprick hole appears behind the membrane. R*Zaranil produces a fiber, and Hallison slips it through the center of the membrane and into the hole. Then, R*Zaranil clamps a lead to it, and an image leaps onto a screen at its feet. R*Zaranil listens to the screen's radar broadcast, head tilted to the side.
Talbot suddenly awakens from a nightmare in the left seat of the boat. The young D*Azar is leaning over him, concerned, perhaps, or perhaps just checking, and at the sight of the metallically scaled visage, Talbot's heart thuds quickly and then resumes its normal operation.
The nightmare floods back - Latimer throwing a spear that knocks Gillian Reed to the ground in a gout of blood and a welter of screaming that Talbot now recognizes as his own.
"I'm all right," he gasps. He punches up a channel to the team, and watches the repairs below on the window wall as he waits for the answer.
"What is it?" Reed snaps irritably from the other end.
"I... how are... well, what's going on? Are you finding anything?"
"Steve's just getting an optic through the wall. We'll call you in a little while."
"All right." He sighs and stares ruefully at the closed connection icon.
"Nothing," R*Zaranil comments.
"Not nothing," Hallison disagrees. "No one, but not nothing."
"Can we get in, then?" Jill demands.
"Let's try," Hallison replies. "What's the chief got to say?"
"He's waiting on us. Let's get to work."
Reed stares at the tiny display, suspicious. "I think... it's something that lives there, but..."
"But not civilized, or perhaps sentient," R*Zaranil remarks.
Hallison has been sealing a membrane to the wall, but stops at their comment. "What have you got?"
R*Zaranil bobs its head. The sightless muzzle points at Hallison. "Hrd to say."
Hallison grimaces behind his faceplate and then turns back to finish his work.
R*Zaranil places a suited hand beside his. "My attention. Structural mttrs my domn. You consdr disply of next rm sentnce."
Hallison squats beside Reed and looks at the vague images of movement. "Terrible imaging," he remarks. She twists a hand in the air. "It's dim. There's not enough IR to use for feature enhancement. And the aperture is too narrow for good radar."
He shrugs. "Well, about all I can tell from this is that they don't care much about orientation, and they move at moderate speeds, and they have limbs. But you probably figured that out."
"Well maybe we'll see more inside." She packs the display, just as R*Zaranil begins with the laser.
As they step through the membrane, the half-seen creatures scatter into the webwork of girders, but the radar band gets a good view. "Tripedal, heavy skeletal, partly endo, partly exo. No visible metallic tools. That's about it, " Hallison reports.
"Atmosphere's like the higher levels, about the same temperature and pressure," Reed comments. The frustration hits her like a wave. "This place is too damn big. We don't have time for a survey."
R*Zaranil is dropping its heavy pack, and unlimbering some device from within it. It uprates its translator with a gesture. "I thought we might need this."
"What the hell is it?" Hallison asks, peering nervously at the ceiling, watching for the hidden residents.
"Radar inducer," R*Zaranil replies, the voice coming more slowly. "It induces the material within a radius to emit radar, depending on properties. It will make the area appear more transparent at my wavelengths."
"What are you looking for?" Reed asks.
"A conduit. You see, we are near the center of the ship. The control conduits, ventilation systems, everything, still has to reach here, especially if there is a control center. So we look for one, and follow it."
Reed is shaking her head. "Brilliant. But I'm afraid I've lost contact with Raoul, so make it fast. I'm going to step out and let him know what we're trying."
Hallison grabs her arm. "Tell him to wait. He's got to wait."
She carefully uncurls his fingers from her suit. "He'll wait, Steve. What else is there to do?"
"That damage is incredible," Jane Sherril mutters.
Latimer steps up beside her, staring at the enormous view. "It's more than the damage that's incredible. It's incredible that the object has remained intact this long."
"This long?" Jane asks.
"It's collapsing. Slowly, but in a few days, it will be debris, unless their repair capabilities are far in excess of what we've seen. Look at what I've been able to measure of the stresses. The support members radiating outward and forming these polygonal volumes depend on whole structure integrity, like an arch. We would never use this in Prometheus, because of how precarious the construction environment would be... still, there may be some innovations available. This is orders of magnitude larger than the largest thing we've ever built. Anyway, look at the critical stresses. These supports have already moved two miles from their normal location. They are making some kind of repairs, I think, but they are not acting quickly enough."
"What about the Norton?"
"They could not have survived the impact. The curve generator ruptured, and the damage was done. Most likely, they folded into congruence with some part of that thing, and that was the end."
Clu sits in her chair at the far side of the bridge, staring up at the spectacle, and a wisp of smoke trails from her thin cigar.
The segment of a vehicle drifts tumbling amidst the confetti of shredded metal, optics, and crystallized liquids. Clu gestures.
"I wonder how you missed that, Latimer," she muses.
"I don't know," he replies, neutrally, standing away across the flight deck.
"It's not a piece of the Norton. It's one of their sub-vehicles. The volatiles, of course, wouldn't be here if this was debris from the fold explosion. I doubt even the piece would be. Am I right?"
Jane grins at her. "Always." Her expression is muted at a thought. "But they did escape, so where are they?"
Latimer examines the displays carefully. Tendrils lash out from his wrists into sockets in the panels. "They could have been destroyed by the point defense. Scarring on the hull indicates energy weapons. If this was the only vehicle..."
Jane is looking over his shoulder. "Let's assume it wasn't. Where could they be?"
Reed, R*Zaranil, and Hallison are standing on the darkened edge of a pit a half mile across that falls away into intricate dimness away from their light. A stream of warm atmosphere that they are not allowed to feel is whistling softly upward over the intertwined piping and supports.
"To the left, another, three miles."
The floor shivers, and there is an odd tug of gravity, like a sudden sea change.
"Behind us, six miles, open to space."
"Never mind," Reed snaps, staring unnerved into the hideously complex opening below. Hallison leans against a support and stares uncomfortably away. Finally, Reed looks over at R*Zaranil.
"One of us can get out from here. But anyone who goes down there... might need help. Two go down, one waits. And not for too long," her eyes rove the ceiling, "or the place is going to shake out around us."
Hallison turns to look at her. "I'll go," he whispers, but his voice nearly cracks.
"No, Steve, I'm going. I need you here to watch our back - and maybe you'll have to negotiate with the things in the rafters. I need R*Zaranil's radar with me. OK, snoutface?"
R*Zaranil bows its sinister blank helmet.
Talbot stalks the corridor. From flight deck to galley, to stern, he paces his shadow down the narrow hall, and the refugees watch him. For once, he feels as powerless as they.
They climb carefully down into the wind.
"How long have we been in here?" she asks.
"We lft shp apx five hours."
She hangs from a bar and watches the graceful movements of R*Zaranil.
"No wonder I'm starving."
They descend mile after mile into the core of the ship, and Hallison stares down from far above at the tiny points representing their beacons.
Suddenly, the points are gone.
Jill Reed leaves a beacon and drifts free past the lip into a dimly lit vastness, walled with conduits and beams. Thousands of chittering beings wandering along the surfaces of the core pause to stare as she rises higher and higher in the weightlessness. R*Zaranil follows as slowly.
Other apertures let into the core, and the flow of the air tugs Reed and R*Zaranil slowly along the length.
R*Zaranil analyzes the movements of the creatures and can find no organization to it. Yet it is aware that analysis of purpose requires more information than may yet be available. It senses the flow of power and data through conduits as humans sense light. Yet there is no special concentration of those below around concentrations where conduits join nodes. This is difficult to understand if the core is a control center, and the signs of signals received and distributed are unmistakable.
Reed has used a series of complex body motions to bleed momentum until she hangs in the air. R*Zaranil executes a similar series of movements and comes nearly to rest. "We must look at a control node. Can you identify the location I am indicating?"
"Yeah," she replies. She fires off a thruster and they descend to the wall of the core. The creatures scuttle away, staring with gleaming eyes behind each pipe and box.
"They can see," Reed remarks.
"Is that so?" R*Zaranil asks, curious. "Human wavelengths?"
"I don't know. But they have visible eyes, reflective. But why are there no indicators on the node? In fact, there are no signs of interface at all."
R*Zaranil bends down beside the box. "This is newer than the rest. It actually appears to be a different design." It swivels its blind helmet toward her. "It seems to be morphic."
Reed looks around. "The conduits, feeders, the substrate - all of that is more primitive than the controller. Design? Convention? Optimization?"
"Possibly. However, solutions can wait. Check stress sensors, and observe the controller activity."
She looks around and muses over the heads-up on her visor. "Connectivity is deteriorating and stress is increasing."
"This vehicle is suffering from multiple cascading failures - physical and control. We should leave. Now."
There is an enormous bell-like clang that Hallison can hear even though the suit. Thousands of tons of debris cascade down the conduit, drifting and tangling slowly toward the core. A strut is swatted by the flow, and smashes chaos across the floor a half mile away.
"It's getting worse," Talbot mutters, sitting uncomfortably at the front of the seat. He looks around, but there is no one to answer him.
"See that?" Jane points to the highly magnified display of the tear in the distant destroyer surface. There is a small speck against the dim and distorted shelves of the tens of thousands of floors.
"It could be anything," Latimer mutters. Clu leans hands down on the console and watches the sensor profiles.
"But it isn't debris, and it is different from every repair system in the damage." She sighs and paces. Finally she stops, still turned. "The active defenses are getting more and more inaccurate. There's going to be a window during which it will be safe before the collapse of the ship." She turns and points at Latimer. "Get me that window. Jane, I want my dinner."
"Something's wrong with Latimer," Clu says quietly over the sound of fork on plate in the glossy room.
Jane settles down at the low table with a plate and stares at the wall-sized image of the destroyer. "Wrong?"
"He's balky. Moody. I don't know." Clu's eyes are clear, but the corners are webbed with tiny wrinkles. "It's almost like he knows something he's not telling us. Listen to me, Jane, I know him better than anyone. You know how many years its been."
"Decades, grandma? Centuries? More." she replies gently.
"Keep an eye on him when I'm not looking." Clu pauses for a moment as if thinking about adding more, but then she returns her attention to the meal.
A vagrant breeze starts to tug at their suits as they lift above the surface, heading for the beaconed conduit. Vast banging and popping sounds echo with distant reverberation from the far side of the core. Their external audio pickups hear the thin sounds of wailing, screaming, and fear from the hidden population below.
Then the wind becomes a gale.
A hidden thousand feet above them, a structural member disconnects from its massive socket, and the stress which it had contained is freed to run madly through all of the floors below. The first level below the gash, newly laid, tears apart piece by piece, and the trapped atmosphere below begins to react with the icy cold of the void. The temperature changes, and the materials react to the differential with fractures that split even wider - until the flow of air from the core begins to blow away the plates and the repair machinery.
Talbot stares at the debris flowing slowly up toward him. The radar systems indicate the mass and the density of the objects, and they are dangerous. He knows he should move the vehicle. There are people in the back who are depending on him. But Reed and Hallison and R*Zanaril are also depending on him.
If he fails...
He looks down at his chest and hands, suited and glistening. It is the illusion of an exoskeleton - an armor. But those machines drifting up toward him will smash that armor, and him, to bloody frozen ruin as easily as they can crumple the skin of the vehicle.
But they could just as well be the markers of the destruction for his friends.
He checks the comlink indicators - they are still zeroed. No information.
He waits, tapping his thumb hard on the seat rest.
"Wanr," he calls.
"Tlbt."
"I'm going lower to try to retrieve the team. I can't leave them. But the rest of you have to be ready to get out. Move up toward the rim. When things really start to break down, you can get out, no matter what happens."
"Yr passngrs?"
"Yeah, I know, but I'm not leaving anyone."
"Nt understood."
"I know they could be killed and so could I. But I'm not leaving Jill. Do you hear me? You understand now, damn it?"
A long pause. "Understood. Stay safe, or I will sing your song at the Fields."
Talbot punches out of the circuit and triggers alert status. Then he drops the nose of the vehicle and slowly descends toward the shifting metal below.
Hallison stands by the membrane as more material shakes free of the conduit and spills clanging across the floor. The noises are louder and he senses worse damage is occurring elsewhere. If Reed and R*Zaranil are in the conduit, he will stay. But he feels achingly hot and sweating, as if he is fevered. Sick, he thinks. Maybe I am.
The wind does not allow them to reach the beaconed conduit. They are torn across the sky at a swift pace, and the turbulence near the conduit that leads to the break smashes them unforgivingly across machines, pipes, and cabling. Reed's hands clutch helplessly at each possibility, and occasionally catch for a moment, but the unaided strength of her muscles cannot hold. For a moment she sees R*Zaranil being bounced along behind her, illuminated for an interval by her helmet light, in the chaos of machines and dying, screaming creatures. She knows she should be afraid, but the forces that are pulling at her are so strong that all she can do is huddle within herself, and wait.
Then she is sucked over the edge, and blown out toward space.
Hallison nearly jumps at the sound of the hailing chime.
"Raoul! Raoul! I'm here!" he cries whirling nearly off his feet to face the membrane.
The transmission is distorted, but he can hear Talbot's voice.
"... your location. ... n't get too close, Steve. But I only get you... Jill? R*Zaranil."
"They went down into the core," Hallison shouts. "They're in the damn core somewhere."
"Get out on the floor, and try to use thrusts... get up here.... get them out if we can."
"But what if they come up here?"
"... out now, you can't wait.. The place is coming apart."
Hallison pushes through the membrane, and he starts to tumble in his haste, but the suit stabilizes, and he is flying swiftly through the maze of shifting machinery. He stops at the edge of the broken ceiling and stares upward at objects slowly receding toward the distant stars. There are tiny flashing lights an indeterminate distance above. He knows it is Talbot, and he feels a sudden, shaming stream of relief. He can leave. No one will blame him. Talbot wants him to leave.
"Any sign of them, yet, Chief?" he calls.
"A couple of signals that might have been beacons, but transient."
"I want to come back, Raoul. I do. But I can't. I won't leave them." He can feel his cheeks are wet, his voice is ragged and almost seems to belong to someone else. Someone out of control.
He turns and steps back under the roof, heading for the membrane.
A silently tumbling object coasts slowly upward into a gravity gradient. At its edge, a suited hand. Then another, and a helmet. The woman's face within is pale, and her eyes are rolling slightly, involuntarily following the motion of her surroundings. Her thrusts are spasming, not realising the tumbling is a property of the object, but she clings to the object desperately, afraid of the other shards and blocks of metal.
"R*Zaranil," she gasps, clutching at a sloping knob, trying to work her way to a more stable position.
"Almost arrived I am," it replies.
R*Zaranil drifts upward toward the object and latches the edge. It can sense Reed dimly through the material.
"Jill!" Talbot calls. "Can you hear me?"
"Raoul, I'm here. We're on a machine. It's broken free... heading up. For now. Where in space are you, damn it?"
"I'm not far. You stay there, you understand? I'm on my way. It's going to take a few minutes, though."
Reed's thrusts, with the addition of R*Zaranil's, have damped the rotation of the object to near stillness. She amplifies the stickiness of her suit and crawls toward the edge. Down into the dizzying pit, she stares at an avalanche of material vomited toward space. But the objects are tiny with extended distance, and slow with relative velocity. Not far from her, R*Zaranil crawls slowly over an edge, a dark outline against the only slightly brighter backdrop of thousands of shattered floors and hundreds of free-falling objects.
She swivels her head carefully, waiting for Talbot.
It is like flying a tight asteroid cluster. Some of the blizzard of particles are nothing to disturb the skin of the vehicle. Others are sections of machines or deckplates sufficient in mass or kinetics to puncture the hull. It is all approaching, and Talbot has no choice but to set a course that allows it to approach him at a potentially dangerous speed.
It is not enough to be engaged by this - he also is terrified by the thought of what may be happening to Hallison. Talbot knows that the destroyer will not cease disintegrating.
But Hallison is out of reach now, and Talbot is entering the debris.
She watches the vehicle descend slowly from above, its edges glinting as the visibility lights flash. It is almost time to jump.
Hallison stares in horror as the supports crumple like paper above him. The pain is sudden and complete.
"OK, use the jack, come on, it's not that far."
"We need a brace."
"This to push, to lever."
The cacophony of voices and movement returns to haunt his agony.
"Cutter. Use the strut; shorter."
Hallison is screaming with pain, but it is silent.
"Oh no!" someone gasps.
Then he can't see or feel, no matter how hard he tries.
The flight of small vehicles flees the heart of destruction, thousands of miles unreeling invisibly. Behind them, in a sudden bifurcation of catastrophe, the vast ship is crumpling into a final debris.
An intricate morphic object accomplishes a sudden fold to the brink of the canyon. In a moment, Talbot recognizes what he hopes it must be. Sherril.
As the vehicles pop out, the point defenses are firing randomly into the debris, their energy beams flickering as the power sources die. The energy casts a shattering light through the flight deck. Reed, eyes opaque behind darkened contacts, smiles with a fierce competence. "Gonna make it Raoul. Gonna make it if that's who I think it is."
"We'll make it," he snaps. But there are thousands of miles to go.
Fissures are crawling slowly outward from the canyon behind them, venting plasma, volatiles, and flames.
There is a sudden light which slaps them in the back. They are tumbling, and the systems are crashing and restarting and crashing again. The morphic vehicle ahead lurches closer and expands like a parasol to envelop the tiny ships and then winks a billion miles in a second. The lights snap back on and the systems come back awake, checking to determine what has happened while they were sleeping. Talbot leans back in the seat, choking on a sudden breeze of smoke.
The death of the destroyer plays its way out on the walls of Promethean vehicle's flight deck. The fifty seven remaining crew of the Norton, excepting Hallison, stand in silence as the quiet event occurs. The vast destroyer shreds its mass into space with barely visible flashes of energy. Point defenses still fire randomly at the debris, but the quantity of fire is decreasing.
Hallison lies without pain or sensation; silent, unmoving, eyes narrowed to slits. R*Zaranil steps into the dim room, and crosses the pool of golden light and shadow cast by the bedside lamp. Hallison feels its presence.
"Zar'," he mutters, eyes shifting under the lids. Miniscule robots creep up to his neck and tap it gently with their tentacles. His skin is clouded with vacuum burns and bruises. He twitches at the movement of a rib. "They do medicine a little differently here..." he whispers.
"Innn whaaat way, diffrent iss?"
Hallison's eyes squeeze shut, and a tear slips from between the lids. "They have machines. Tiny. They insert them into the body." He gasps as he feels his lung expand and reattach behind the rib. "You can't feel them. Much. You can't even see some of them." Carefully, tiredly, he raises an arm, and his bloodshot eyes peer at it. "They're there, on the skin, working; under the skin, cleaning the bruises. I don't know if I like it. But I don't have much choice. It was the only facility they had." The arm falls away. "I think there's even some in my eyes." He brushes weakly at the blanket. "Sometimes they crawl out and... I don't know... die, I suppose."
"I cannn sense themn." R*Zanaril replies. "Soon you wll be bttr? There are things of many to dissscusss. Whaaat we saww at the core is needing analysisss."
Hallison is coughing suddenly, and a streamer of silvery specks boils swiftly from his mouth, running away into the covers and vanishing. He smiles, wanly. "Yeah, soon."
"I ammm... with youuu. You arrre my associate. I will stayyy."
Reed wanders the long looping hallways of Promethean ship, wondering where Talbot might be. Her joints are stiff from the aftermath of their ejection through the conduit, but some painkillers from the ship's pharmacopoeia loosen her step. She nibbles on a food bar as she looks around.
The corridors are lined with paintings and animations. She pauses to look at one, chewing slowly as she tries, and fails, to make sense of it. Finally, she gives up and moves on, tucking the wrapper into a pocket.
There are doors at odd intervals, many of them open on rooms, revealing difficult to understand systems and objects. Some of the rooms seem slightly messy, with tiny robots laboriously collaborating to shift large objects slowly across the room to proper receptacles.
She pauses at a junction, and glancing around, sees a dark limb hanging over the edge of recliner in a nearby room. She walks quietly to the door.
Talbot lies asleep in the dimly lit room. His entire body has loosened its normal tension to a complete relaxation. She assesses the gentle movement of his eyes beneath their lids, the occasional twitch of a finger, and concludes that he is dreaming. His vulnerability reaches her for a moment with an unusual impulse to protect. Her hand moves slowly and traces a line in the air just above his arm. She turns to leave and then she hears him stir and mutter in a throaty whisper: "Jill?"
He is looking at her, and his eyes are still exhausted, but he sees her clearly. She smiles. "Hi."
"Oh," he says, as if suddenly everything has rushed back into his mind. He reaches out and catches at her hand. "I'm so glad you're here." He straightens, without letting go. She smiles down at him, uncomfortable at the directness of his gaze. "I'm glad you're all right."
He releases her hand and pushes forward on the chair. He rubs his face and looks up at her. The barriers are suddenly close to normal. "I had to get some rest. I didn't really sleep while you guys were in there. But there's a lot to do, isn't there?"
She leans against the doorframe. "There's a lot to do. But Steve's still recovering, R*Zaranil is with him, and you need a little recovery yourself."
"What about you?"
"I slept. I had something to eat. I'm in no rush right now; the crisis, I think, is a little further away than that."
"I'm glad." He pushes to a stand. "But there's some things to hear about, and start thinking about - isn't there?"
"I know some things. Remember, I can give you some idea of what I saw, and what it might mean, but R*Zaranil and Steve will have better perspectives. I'll tell you, Raoul, I wish Steve had been at the core with me. I'm not incompetent at cultural analysis, but it's not my field, and there was a lot there that needs interpretation."
Talbot gestures at the wall. "I was watching some of it. The things that were living there. All dead now, I suppose."
"Am I getting callous?" she asks, staring at the blank surface. "They were people, I suppose, in some way."
Talbot frowns. "I suppose. But there was nothing we could do."
"No. There wasn't. You know, on the upper levels, we thought they were vermin, but toward the core, they seemed at home in a different way. Like they worked there, or belonged there. I don't know how else to put it." Her hands shift in an ambiguous pattern.
He paces the room and turns toward her. "You think they were crew?"
She considers. "I think they might have been crew... once. A long time ago. I think they forgot how to run things. Everything seemed automated." She steps forward and pulls his head down toward her to whisper, but he misinterprets the gesture and kisses her. She is surprised, but there is a hidden reason that she doesn't release. Their lips press and move in a sensation that seems almost alien and yet impossibly desirable to her. And Talbot feels a sudden outpouring of his feelings for her, feelings that clamor to be closed away before something irrevocable occurs. They separate, and he sees her looking at him with new eyes. He doesn't realize the tears of relief in his own eyes, and he doesn't yet admit that the irrevocable occurred long ago.
"I...." But she holds up a hand to his lips.
"Listen," she says. She pulls his ear down next to her, and whispers. "The controllers were morphic." Then, as if in apology for the business, she kisses just in front of his ear. "You keep quiet about this, OK?" Her voice is almost silent.
He looks worried for a moment. "The controllers.. or..."
"Both," she snaps. She squeezes his hand. "...both, OK. For now."
"OK." He squeezes back and a host of unaccustomed emotions fight for his face. "Let's go see how Steve's doing."
Talbot sits by the door and watches the robots come and go from his friend. R*Zaranil squats immobile in a corner. The soft glow of the door gleams from his scales and casts a faint reflected light on the walls.
"I sense some vehicles coming upsystem," Latimer notes from its position reclined at the head of the flight deck. "Inertialess drives of about eighty three percent."
"They were bound to notice," Clu replies. "Good thing they have something to