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“No,” she said, “that’s too risky. It won’t hurt the OMC but I’ve seen people panic when their oxygen gets low. We want to keep these guys calm, they might just start shooting up everything in sight.”
“You’re right,” Hubbard said. “Shorty, tell Cronin to whip up some of his chemical magic. We want this guy down and out in a blink, and anybody else that’s with him. We want that OMC and the tech in operating condition when this is over, got it?”
“Check, Boss.”
“Listen up, everybody,” Hubbard said. “Set all your headsets to voice-activated fireground frequency three-three-one.” He made the proper settings in her equipment, then explained to Beatriz, “That way we talk and he can’t listen, and we don’t have to go through the intercom.”
Beatriz noted the tools in Hubbard’s jumpkit.
“Let me see what you’ve got there,” she said. “I may be able to activate some of the sensors in the chamber through the intercom box. It would help to have eyes and ears.”
She slid back the cover and a faint glow pulsed from inside the box. It was not an electrical glow, the cherry-red simmer of bare wires or the blue-white snap of a short-circuit. This glow was pale, cool, with a slight pulse that intensified as she watched.
Hubbard’s hand moved reflexively to a small canister at his belt, but Beatriz stopped him.
“It must be luciferase,” she said, “from the kelp leads that we fed in here last year.” She selected a current detector from Hubbard’s kit and applied it to one of the fistful of unconventional kelp leads.
“Kelp leads?” Hubbard asked. “What the hell was he stringing … ?”
“Circuits made with kelp don’t overload, and they have a built-in memory, among other features. We’ve done some experimentation with it at HoloVision … OK, there’s something here,” she said, watching the instrument’s flutter in her hand. “I wouldn’t call it a current, exactly. More of an excitation.”
When the bare back of her hand brushed the bundle of kelp fibers, Beatriz had a sudden unexpected look at the inside of the OMC chamber. The young guard stood across the lab from her, lasgun at the ready, his eyes wide and clearly frightened. Beatriz watched the scene from two vantage points. One was halfway up the bulkhead behind the OMC, probably the outlet connecting with the hookups she held. The other was from about waist-height, facing the security, and she realized she was watching this scene from inside Alyssa Marsh’s brain. The kid kept flicking the arm-disarm switch on his lasgun.
“Get inside,” she whispered to Hubbard. “Get someone inside. He’s going to panic and kill them all.”
She gripped the bundle of kelp fibers tight in her fist and dimly heard Hubbard snap out orders to his crew. She felt herself drawn both ways through the fibers, as though she were seeing with several pairs of eyes at once. The sense of herself diminished as she flowed out the fibers, so she gripped a handhold on the bulkhead and forced the flow to come to her.
I can’t let this go on, she thought. It has to stop. Oh, Ben, you were so right!
The experience was nearly more than she could bear, but magnetizing as well. She knew she could let go the fibers, stop the headlong tumble down a tunnel of light, but her reporter instinct told her to hang on for the duration of the ride. She raced through the hookups aboard the Orbiter and the Voidship, then felt herself launched toward the surface of Pandora. She tightened her grip and wondered who was moaning in the background, then realized that the moans were her own.
She was a convection center for the kelp. The pale-faced young security with the huge ears and filed teeth stood barely a meter from her eyes.
Alyssa’s eyes, she thought, and repressed a shudder. I’ve become Alyssa’s eyes.
The tech’s hands trembled as they worked, and with each new fiber glued in place the eerie glow increased.
“Brood didn’t say this was supposed to happen,” the kid said, more nervous than ever. “Is this normal?”
“I don’t know,” the tech said.
Beatriz heard the fear in her near-whisper. “You want me to stop?”
The kid rubbed his forehead, keeping his gaze on the OMC. Beatriz knew that he saw Alyssa Marsh’s brain being wired to some tangle of kelp-grown neurons, but it was Beatriz who looked back at him. Perspiration dampened his hair and spread dark circles from his underarms.
Fear of the situation? she wondered. Or is he afraid of the OMC?
He was Islander extraction, there might be some superstition but physical abnormality itself would not scare him. A Merman would have a harder time facing a living brain, something an Islander would shrug off.
“No,” he said. “No, he said to hook this one up no matter what. I wish he’d answer us.” The kid flicked a switch on his portable messenger and tried again. “Captain, this is Leadbelly, over.” The only answer was a faint hum across the airways.
“Captain, can you read?”
Still no answer. Leadbelly sidestepped to the intercom beside the hatch. The near-weightlessness made it difficult for him to keep his back in contact with the bulkhead as he went.
“What’s the code for Current Control?”
“Two-two-four,” the tech said, never looking up from her work. “It’s voice-activated from there.”
He fingered the three numbers and instantly the glow in the chamber intensified to a near-glare. He armed his lasgun with a metallic sklick-click and Beatriz heard herself shout, “No! No!” just as Shorty propelled herself like a hot charge out of the service vent and onto Leadbelly’s shoulders. The tech shrieked and jumped aside, and Leadbelly shouted a garbled message into the intercom.
His lasgun discharged and for Beatriz the world slipped into slow-motion. She saw the muzzle- flash coming directly at her, homing in on her as though pulled by a thread.
This can’t be, she thought, a lasgun fires at light-speed.
It was such a short distance to the muzzle that the charge hadn’t fully left the barrel yet when it hit the glow around Alyssa Marsh’s brain. Beatriz watched the lasgun sucked dry of power in less than a blink. Leadbelly screamed and struggled to fling the hot weapon from himself, but it had melted to the flesh of his hands. Shorty clung tight to Leadbelly with both hands and feet, spinning them across the center of the chamber. The charge triggered some reaction in the glow, and Beatriz found herself surrounded by it, curiously unafraid.
All was quiet inside this bright sphere. Beatriz hung at the nucleus of something translucent, warm, suspended in yellow light.
This is the sensation that the webworks mimicked, she thought.
Beatriz found comfort in the familiar rush of some great tide in her ears and she felt, more than saw, the presence of light all around her.
The center, she thought. This is the center of … of me!
A hatchway appeared and though she did not have hands or feet she flung it open. There stood her brother when he was eleven, his chest bare and brown and his belt heavy with four big lizards.
“Traded three in the market for coffee,” he said, and thumped a bag down on the table in front of her. “You won your scholarship to the college, but I’ll bet it don’t cover this. Let me know when you need some more.”
She had been sixteen that day, and unable to know how to thank him. He hurried past her out the hatch, the dead lizards flopping wet sounds behind him.
A flicker of hatches raced past, each connected to the artery of years. Some dead-ended at years- that-might-have-been. She opened another, this time an Islander hatch of heavy weatherseal, and found herself inside her family’s first temporary shelter on real land. It was an organic structure, like the islands, but darker and more brittle than those that ran the seas.
Her grandfather was there, hoisting a glass of blossom wine, and all of her family joined him in a toast.
“To our busy Bea, graduate of the Holographic Academy and new floor director for HoloVision Nightly News.”
She remembered that toast. It came on the 475th anniversary of t
he departure of Ship from Pandora. It had become an occasion for somber celebration over the years, with a place left empty at table. Originally this was intended to represent the absence of Ship, but in more recent times the gesture had become a memorial to a family’s dead.
“Ship did us a great favor by leaving,” her grandfather said.
There was much protestation at this remark. She hadn’t remembered hearing this conversation years ago, but it pricked her curiosity now.
“Ship left us the hyb tanks, that’s true,” her grandfather said. “But we went up there and got them down. And we got them down without any help from anyone or anything inside of them. That’s what will raise us up out of our misery—our genius, our tenacity, ourselves. Flattery’s just another spoiled brat looking for a handout. You talk about ascension, Momma. We are the ascension factor and, thanks to Ship, we will rise up one day to greet the dawn and we will keep on rising … that right, little girl?”
The party laughter faded and a single hatch floated like a blue jewel ahead of her, waiting. It was like many of the Orbiter’s hatches, fitted into the deck instead of the bulkhead. Across the shimmering blue of its lightlike surface the hatch cover read: “Present.” She reached for the double-action handle and felt the cool satin of the well-polished steel in her palm. She pulled the hatch wide and dove inside.
