AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She nodded, started to say, “So did we,” but nothing came out of her throat but a croak.
For the first time she noticed his name, stitched above the Vashon Security insignia at his left breast: “Brood.” Her only wish right now was that she would live long enough to see Captain Brood die.
He turned back to the studio and its seventeen dead warm bodies. Beatriz looked once again at herself on the monitor. The tape replayed an interview with Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster of Current Control. He was one of the few humans, other than Flattery, to survive the opening of the hyb tanks twenty-five years ago. He was so tall she’d had to stand on a box to do the interview. She had met him on her first flight to the new orbital complex, the day after her last night with Ben. Within a month she was sure that she was in love.
“Bag ’em up,” the captain told his men. “Squeegee this place down, seal it off, then get all their production shit aboard.”
He bowed to her then, opened the hatch for her and said, “We’re expecting the replacements for your crew any minute. They are my men, and will do as they’re told. My squad and I will travel along, to see that you do, too.”
Chapter 24
The mind at ease is a dead mind.
—Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, Current Control
Dwarf MacIntosh floated in the turretlike chamber of Current Control and surveyed the planet below for the birth of a certain squall at sea. About this time every day a swirl of clouds materialized over Pandora’s largest wild kelp bed. It was some comfort now to see this squall forming; something was normal today even though the behavior of the kelp was completely loco. Today, humans didn’t make much sense to him, either.
“The Turret,” as he called it, was a plasma-glass extravagance of materials and workmanship that MacIntosh had fabricated for himself before installing Current Control in the orbital station.
I’d have taken the job anyway, Mack admitted, but only to himself. “Kelpmaster” wasn’t so much a job to him as it was a privilege. He couldn’t have allowed any of Flattery’s goons such an easy throttlehold on the kelp. Besides, he felt much more comfortable in orbit than he did on Pandora’s surface.
Like Flattery, Mack had been cloned, raised and trained in the sterility of Moonbase, in the hyperregimentation and clonophobia of Moonbase. His whole life, until hybernation, had been spent orbiting an Earth that, for him and for all clones, never existed. In those days, Flattery had openly pined for a life Earthside, but even then Dwarf MacIntosh looked outward, past Earth’s measly system to the possibilities beyond.
From his turret Mack observed and charted many of these possibilities. He named them, but not the few special names he saved for his unborn children. He had spent the past two years above Pandora, refusing the usual R&R rotations groundside. In that time MacIntosh had not recognized a single star that would lead them Earthward. He liked it that way.
Dwarf MacIntosh awoke from hybernation on Pandora one day in indescribable pain and found himself in the middle of nowhere, galactically speaking. In spite of the planet’s horrors he was in his own heaven among a trillion brand-new stars. The other survivors clung to that little wretch of a planet and most of them died there. Alyssa Marsh … well, she died, too. She died the day Moonbase started imprinting her for backup OMC.
Mack and Flattery shared a dream of driving farther into the void. Mack felt it a pity, in a way, since he had never liked Flattery, even during training with him back at Moonbase. Their differences had come out lately over management of the kelp.
If Flattery had any idea of what we’ve done, of what the kelp is—
“Dr. MacIntosh, shuttle’s set for launch.”
Mack handed himself out of the turret and with one foot-thrust sailed across the huge control room to his personal console. Spud Soleus, his first assistant, busied himself at the primary terminal.
A glance at the number six display told Mack that the kelp in the SLS sector was performing as directed. The number eight display was a different story, however. The great kelp bed down-coast of Victoria was still a writhing tangle. No telling how many freighters were lost in there. He punched up another batch of coffee.
“What’s the delay?”
Spud shrugged his skinny shoulders, keeping to his console.
“They said something about replacements for the news crew. You know Flattery, can’t do anything without crowing to the press.”
“Who’s been replaced?” he asked. He felt his heart jump a bit. He’d been hoping … no, planning to see Beatriz Tatoosh again. He’d thought about Beatriz Tatoosh daily from the moment her shuttle left nearly two months ago. His dreams took up where his thoughts left off, and he had dreamed up the hope that she could make a permanent base aboard the Orbiter.
“Don’t know,” Spud said. “Don’t know why, neither. Everything was cool just a while ago for Newsbreak. Did you see it?”
MacIntosh shook his head.
“Yeah, you were in your turret. The Tatoosh woman did the show, said something about Ben Ozette missing. That must throw their staffing off or something.”
“Yeah,” Mack said, “he’s a little goody-goody for me, but he means well. He’s sure been on the Director’s tail lately.”
Dwarf could see Spud’s frown reflected in one of the dead screens.
“It’s not a good idea to get on the Director’s tail,” Spud said. “Not good at all. If you didn’t see the Newsbreak, then you didn’t see yourself, either.”
“Me? What … ?”
“That show they did when you first installed this station,” Spud said. “They reran it. Your hair wasn’t as gray two years ago. I wish that Beatriz Tatoosh would look at me the way she looked at you.”
“Stow it!” MacIntosh said.
Soleus’s shoulders sagged slightly, but he kept at his board in silence.
“Sorry,” MacIntosh said.
“Inappropriate,” Spud replied.
“Want me to take it now?”
“I wish somebody would. What the hell’s happening to our kelp?”
“It’s not our kelp,” MacIntosh reminded him. “The kelp is its own … self. We’re keeping it in chains. It’s doing what any enslaved being with dignity does—it’s fighting the chains.”
“But Flattery’s men will just prune it back, or worse yet they’ll stump the whole stand.”
“Not forever. There is a basic problem with slavery. The master is enslaved by the slave.”
“C’mon, Dr. Mack …”
MacIntosh laughed.
“It’s true,” he said. “Look at history, that’s easy enough. And Flattery, of all people, should know better. We clones were the slaves of our age. First-generation clones had it real tough. They were grown as organ farms for the donors. They needed us, but they needed us to do what we were told. Now he’s enslaved the kelp, stunted its reason, because he needs it to do what it’s told. He can’t keep cutting it back, because he can’t afford the regrowth time.”
“So, what’ll happen?”
“A showdown,” MacIntosh said. “And if Flattery’s still groundside when it comes he’d better hope that the kelp needs him for something or I wouldn’t give you two bits for his chances.”
“Two bits of what?”
MacIntosh laughed again, a big bark of a laugh to match his size.
“I wouldn’t want to guess how old that expression is,” he said. “When I was at Moonbase, two bits was a quarter, which was a quarter of a dollar, which was the currency we used. But it started way before that.”
“We’d say, ‘I wouldn’t give a dasher turd for his chances.’”
“That’s probably a better assessment.”
MacIntosh pointed at the six red lights blinking on their messenger console. “Whose calls are we not taking?”
“The Director,” Spud said, and swiveled his chair from the console board. “He wants us to do something about the kelp in sector eight, as though we weren’t trying.”
“Do somethin
g … hah! If we push any harder we’ll fry our board, and that kelp, and anybody inside it.”
“I wonder what it is that the kelp wants?”
“What if we gave it its head?” MacIntosh mused. “That would be one way to find out. What could it do that it hasn’t already done?”
Spud shrugged, and said, “You’ve got my vote. How you going to convince the Director?”
A glance at the display showed the entire stand of kelp to be twisting itself into a vortex, like the whirlpool in a drain. As near as MacIntosh could tell, Current Control was at its maximum limit of restraint.
Spud pointed at the display. “There’s a focus of electrical override here. Whatever’s bugging the kelp is right there.”
