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His staff and guards stood transfixed in the surreal wash of color that visually drenched them all. They stagger-stepped to their posts, displaying the same disorientation that Flattery himself felt.
“Current Control turned the kelp in sector eight loose,” Marta reported, “then it turned loose all the kelp worldwide. Sensors now indicate that everything’s intact. The kelp appears to be online again. High suspicion for Gridmaster failure.”
“Brood’s mission?”
“No news. HoloVision covered the launch site incident with a Newsbreak report on the deaths of the Tatoosh field crew ‘at the hands of Shadow extremists.’”
The colors that dazzled the room remained as bright but their swirl slowed to a less dizzying rate. Flattery thought he detected a woman’s voice, faint in the distance, somehow familiar. Almost as though she called his name.
“Continued fighting in food distribution centers,” Marta said. “Too many looters to shoot. The usual ‘we’re hungry now!’ crowd. Some of our people opened warehouses. All stores outside our perimeter have been breached.”
That’s thousands of shuttleloads of food, he bristled. That’s my contingency, my lifetime Voidship supply.
“Dried grains to feed three thousand for ten years,” he said. “Dried fish enough to feed fifty thousand. Add water, pat together and cook. Instant wine—add a package to a liter of plain water and stir. Bread and fish for the multitudes, water into wine … if this Voidship could time-travel I could be Jesus Christ himself. Shit.”
Chapter 59
Consciousness, the gift of the serpent.
—Raja Lon Flattery, number five model, Shiprecords
A lean-faced security, armed with both stunstick and lasgun, blocked MacIntosh at the hatchway to Current Control.
“Halt!”
He motioned Mack and his men to stop, and gripped a handhold to keep his bearing.
“Obiter Command,” Mack said, “who the hell are you?”
“Security,” the man said, and emphasized his point with his lasgun. “Captain Brood has the details. We are under the Director’s orders to secure Current Control.”
MacIntosh pushed off from the bulkhead behind him and sprang the gap. A push to the shoulder and a spin to the wrist later, MacIntosh had both the stunstick and lasgun. The sputtering security was pinned head down against the passageway bulkhead by two of Mack’s firefighters.
“You’ll get the hang of it in a day or two,” MacIntosh said, and smiled, “if you live that long. Whether you live that long depends on how much you tell me, right now.”
“That’s all I know,” he said, his voice edging a whine.
“Airlock time,” Mack said. His men tumbled the security down the passageway to the freight airlock adjacent to Current Control.
“No, no, don’t do this,” the security pleaded. “That’s all I know, that’s really all I know.”
“How many in your squad?”
“Sixteen.”
Mack opened the inner hatchway to the airlock.
“My information says different—how many came up on this load, and are there more already aboard?”
“It’s just us, Commander. Sixteen troops and sixteen techs.”
“Where are they?”
Silence.
“Airlock time, gentlemen,” Mack said. “Let’s decompress slow. Anything you might think of to tell us, you can tell us from inside the lock. We’ll stop decompressing when we’ve heard the whole song.”
As Mack spun the hatchdog closed behind the security, he saw a half-dozen more of his men step off the elevator in full gear. Mack twisted the dial that sent air hissing audibly from the lock.
His prisoner immediately became hysterical.
“Shuttle crew is ours,” he said. “Two troops, three crew stayed aboard. Holo crew was two troops, three techs. OMC crew was three troops, two techs. Current Control, four troops, four techs, counting myself and Captain Brood. The rest secured the Voidship. Please, don’t let the air out. Don’t put me out.”
“Keep him inside in case I change my mind,” Mack ordered. “We can add to our collection here as things develop. We need Brood so we can find out what Flattery’s up to. Hooking up the OMC, taking over Current Control and the Voidship … sounds like things are going worse for the Director than he lets on. Maybe he’s getting ready to take the Voidship for a little spin around the system.”
The intruder code, a tone-and-light warning, flashed at all corridor intersections. It was a drill that Mack had never taken seriously, now he wished he had.
“Rat, you and your people take the shuttle. Barb, you work the Voidship and know it better than anybody here. Take Willis and his engineers. Remember, no lasguns. You have your vacuum suits on, use them. The rest of us will handle this little nest here. If Flattery doesn’t trust us anymore, let’s make it worth his while.”
Mack knew that he had the edge over Brood as long as they met in the near-zero gravity in Current Control. Brood’s techs might figure out the old hardware that ran Current Control, but the new organic hookups throughout the Orbiter and ship, grown by Islanders specifically for MacIntosh, might be a surprise. These kelp fibers bent light and encoded messages chemoelectrically within cell nuclei. This enabled kelp to bring light to the ocean depths and messages to the Orbiter. The switching speed and capacity of kelp hookups far outstripped any hardware that Pandorans had developed.
Too late, Raj, Mack thought. Current Control will never be the same.
Brood could only fail. In the time it would take his techs to figure out Mack’s secret system they would all be grandparents.
Chapter 60
The is is holy and the Void is home.
—Huston Smith
Hot suns melted through the thick, post-squall mist to scorch the albino nose and exposed arms of Crista Galli. When an offshore gust caught the mist in a whirl it freshened her hot skin like silk. She had felt the whump of breakers in the surf beyond the fog and now she could see just how close the waves really came.
“Tide’s shifted again,” Ben told her.
He held her right hand but his voice sounded empty with distance, thick-tongued. He blinked a lot, and his motions were slow, exaggerated.
Dusted, she thought. I wonder how it feels.
She was convinced now that the dust had returned her to reality, rather than removed her from it. It was her personal antidote, an antiamnesiac that spun valves and opened the stream of memory.
She remembered Zentz, too. He had been a mere captain when he came into the lab at the Preserve that made up her home. He took away the researcher who was talking with her at the time, a young Islander woman who taught social psychiatry at TaoLini College. Once a week Addie came to question Crista about her dreams and always spent the afternoon with her in the solarium over tea. Crista had awakened in that lab a twenty-year-old female human without a single memory.
The psychiatrist, Addie Cloudshadow, tried to get those memories back. In the process she became Crista’s first friend. Because of Zentz, Crista hadn’t dared another friend until Ben. Zentz had walked into the lab that day with his weapon drawn, said simply, “Come with me,” and shot Addie just outside Crista’s hatch. Crista was sedated through her hysteria, and Flattery promised to take care of Zentz. Four years later Zentz surfaced as Flattery’s Chief of Security and Crista vowed to escape the Preserve.
Today the mist kept her from seeing either up or down the beach. That glimpse of Zentz would have terrified her a day ago, but today she was not afraid. Something in the flash of kelp-memory warned her of Nevi, the other shadow in the mist, but it also illuminated a tension between the two that she knew would work to their favor.
The kelp had replayed for her Nevi’s refueling incident, and she’d even forayed briefly into Zentz’s mind. She had never seen anything so filled with horror and fear. She
felt hate there, too, but it had long ago given way to a fear of Flattery that, itself, became an intense personal fear of Spider Nevi.
Divided they fall, she thought.
Flattery’s world was coming apart, fighting itself, dying a thrashing death faster than it could inflict death on others. This was what Zentz had seen when the kelp grabbed him, and only Crista knew the strength of his resolve not to die at Flattery’s feet or at Nevi’s hand.
Crista had one open view from where she stood in the rocks, over the boil of breakers and out to sea. Though the tidelands wallowed in their salty fog, the sea itself glistened out to meet the sky somewhere in the distance. As far as the eye could sea, huge fronds of kelp rose lazily from the sea and splashed lazily back. Crista found comfort in the play of the kelp and the infinity of the horizon.
“What a time to be dusted,” Ben mumbled, and shook his head.
“Rico has a plan,” Crista whispered, “and he’s ready to start it right … now.”
Crista Galli felt her hair prickle when Rico’s electric dance of light crackled up like a shield around her. The high suns roiled fog off the wet beach and coated her skin with a fine grit of salt. The mist enhanced the surreal quality of Rico’s lifesize hologram. From the back side it was like looking through a fogged mirror that refused her reflection. Crista watched the barest shadows of Nevi and the others as they ghosted the boundaries of the holo image that erased herself and Ben from the visible landscape.
Nevi and Zentz positioned themselves behind the light curtain, calling out strategy codes to each other.
“Flank sweep, left,” Nevi said. His voice was unhurried, precise. “Cover high. I’ll take point and ground.”
“But they … they disappeared!”
“It’s a trick,” Nevi said, “a camera trick. They’re in there and can’t get out. Position?”
“Secure. Ten meters, left flank. I can’t see shit in this soup.”
