This was very bad. There could be no peace with an Ozmiront. Anderic would have to be eliminated. Like a man flexing his muscles to test his bonds, Ruonn reviewed his settings and found, as he had feared, that the Rifter captain had blocked him off from all interior effectors. He had control of the ship’s navigation and external weapons, but his interior presence was entirely passive. Not surprising, he thought, remembering the resistance he’d had to overcome to sell Tallis the logos. He wanted it and feared it. This will take time. He would have to work through the captain, and there was no telling how much time Anderic would leave him.
The first order of business was to discover the dynamics of the crew’s psychology. How firmly was Tallis in control, and how much influence did Anderic have? Ruonn attempted to access the internal monitor data, and was distressed to find the internal sensors on a twenty-four-hour loop. Tallis had him more severely limited than he’d hoped. Let’s see how much he’s come to depend on the logos, then. He accessed the history registers of the executive node, to be seized by acute rage and horror. Except for a brief trial this was the first time the Rifter captain had activated him! Over a year wasted! Unless one of his other eidoloi had succeeded in returning to Barca, he was another year behind Rimur, his cousin and the favorite of the family, whose first eidolon had returned for reunion with a payload of data most pleasing to the Matria just before Ruonn’s Satansclaw installation.
If Ruonn had still been in the flesh he would have been flushed and shaky with anger. As it was, the bridge instruments relayed a large power surge from the engines, but the monitor on that station was intent on the screens displaying the chase and didn’t see it. In a flash of misery Ruonn remembered the Elevation of his cousin Rimur to Potency: the vast bodies of the Matria of Barca awash in their baths, glimmering in the torchlight, their husky voices intertwined in awesome polyphony, chanting the genetic triumphs of the Barcan seed over the harsh forces of an unloving planet. Most of all he remembered the gloating blush of triumph that shone from Rimur’s face as he was granted ten progeny from Annempta, a third-level Mater. Ten! Thanks to this fool Tallis he would never catch up!
An irresistibly intense wash of pleasure ruptured his thoughts, and it was some time before Ruonn either wanted to or could analyze the source. The skipmissile! It had discharged, and his cybernetic image had interpreted this as a sensation akin to orgasm, but more intense than any he had ever felt in the rapture tank at home. Strange. He didn’t remember programming that correspondence.
He was about to invoke an introspection of his programming when the strangeness of the ship’s mission finally penetrated his consciousness. Ruonn forgot about the disproportionate pleasure response as his mind now integrated the information supplied by the data nodes of the logos and the ship’s computer. They were deep in the Charvann system, a minor Panarchic center, in hot pursuit of a military courier...
In rapid succession the events of the past twenty-four hours surged through his mind, and Ruonn forgot his misery as he struggled to absorb the fact of interstellar war and calculate the benefits that might accrue to an eidolon embedded in a warship on the winning side.
o0o
As the Satansclaw closed in on the fleeing booster, Tallis was almost giddy with the unfamiliar sense of mastery the success of the logos had lent him. This is better even than the Tikeris.
“Where does he think he’s going, anyway?” sho-Imbris asked Tallis. There was respect in his voice, along with anxiety.
“He probably wants to sling-loop around that gas giant. That’s how his drunkwalk’s biased,” Tallis explained. “Look.” He poked at the keypads, meanwhile subvocally instructing the logos to make visible the subvisual plot projection of the booster’s course his eye implants had shown him. “His jinking would take him around it like that, but we’ll catch him before then because he’s got to stop short of radius.”
“So do we,” Lennart muttered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.
Only then did Tallis become conscious of the orange glare that had been flickering occasionally from the viewscreens, a little brighter each time the ship changed course. In the main screen Warlock now loomed like a striped goblin face hungry for the ship and the lives aboard it.
“Tactical!” he subvocalized. “Time to radius from present position.”
“TWO HUNDRED SIXTY-FIVE SECONDS TO RADIUS AT TACTICAL SKIP VELOCITY. NINETY PERCENT PROBABILITY OF INTERCEPT IN TWO HUNDRED SIXTY SECONDS WITH PRESENT INTERCEPTION ALGORITHM.”
Tallis swallowed thickly, his neck hairs stirring as he weighed the wrath of Hreem and Eusabian against the potential agony of spatial inversion. Grisly speculations about the consequences of skipping into radius were a staple of late-night bilge-banging sessions. One particularly horrible possibility involved the temporal distortions of a runaway fiveskip. Would it happen all at once, or would you have time to feel it? Maybe it wouldn’t end...
Tallis shuddered. He had to make sure of the Krysarch. Eusabian’s retribution would make skipping into radius seem like lost paradise by comparison. Aware of his waiting, watching crew, he straightened in his seat. “We’ve got plenty of margin. He’ll have to stop jinking soon and make a run for it or we’ll catch him in realtime. That gas giant has cut his degrees of freedom way down, so when he skips we’ll skip behind him for a straight shot.”
At least that was what the logos predicted, but now the orange glower of the gas giant seemed to shoulder its way through the viewscreen onto the bridge. He could feel its immense weight, reaching out to seize the Satansclaw in a fatal, unshakable embrace.
The minutes stretched into seeming hours on the rack of his anxiety. The little booster jinked even more wildly as its pseudo-drunkwalk took it ever closer to the looming gas giant. Then, finally, the booster skipped again.
“He’s headed straight for it!” yelped sho-Imbris.
Tallis slapped the skip button and held his breath. The navigator stabbed at his console and a course plot windowed up on the blanked screen, showing the radius as a thin red line with the red dot of the booster practically upon it and the green dot representing the Satansclaw a little farther away. “Thirty seconds to radius, Captain.” Sho-Imbris’s voice was practically a whine.
“Orient on these coordinates for emergence,” Tallis shouted.
The navigator poked at his console with trembling fingers.
The entire bridge crew looked at him, but they were helpless to interfere. With the fiveskip slaved to his console, only Tallis could drop them back into fourspace and safety.
“I wonder what it’s like to wear your guts on the outside,” one of the monitors said, an edge of hysterical laughter in his tone.
“Shut up!” Tallis shouted, his voice cracking with tension. One hand hovered over the skip control even as the logos dispassionately counted down the seconds until emergence. He wondered if the logos feared death like a man would—the tension in his arm said no.
“Fifteen seconds.”
“What are you waiting for?” raged Tallis silently.
“INTERCEPT COORDINATES NOT YET OPTIMAL”
“Ten seconds. Captain, he’s got to have skipped into radius by now! He’s dead! Give it up!” The navigator was almost sobbing.
“STAND BY. . .” said the logos.
“Five seconds...” The navigator’s fear turned the last word into a drawn-out moan as the ship started to shudder. The air on the bridge rippled and Tallis felt a strange pulse in his chest. He slapped frantically at the skip cancel as the logos spoke.
“EMERGENCE.”
The ship dropped back into realtime with a jarring lurch. The immense bulk of the gas giant filled the main screen, its banded glare emphasizing the slewing of the Satansclaw as it wheeled about to fire. Tallis slapped the launch button, trying to make out some sign of the booster even as the skipmissile leapt away, overlaying the orange immensity below with the red haze of its pulsed wake. The bridge was silent, except for a gentle thump as sho-Imbris fell out of his c
onsole pod in a dead faint.
Moments later the skipmissile impacted the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. With deceptive slowness a ring of clouds marking the shock wave expanded outward, accompanied by the flickering of blue-white lightning discharges. Then the interior of the ring cleared like steam evaporating from a mirror, giving the awed crew of the Satansclaw a glimpse into the depths below.
“No traces,” reported Anderic, his voice shaky. “He’s gone.”
“I wonder what it felt like?” said Ninn.
“Who cares?” replied Tallis impatiently.
“POINT OF NO RETURN IN FIFTEEN SECONDS,” said the logos into his inner ear.
Tallis stared at the ghost-light overlay on the screen. They were so close to the gas giant that they would have to sling-loop around it to get back, and if they didn’t do it right away, the Satansclaw’s engines would be unable to pull them out. He almost sprained his throat trying to shout without making any sound: “Do it!”
Tallis nearly forgot to go through the motions of jabbing at his console as the logos maneuvered the ship away from danger. Anderic gazed at him with a strange, almost fearful expression; the tech quickly turned back to his console when he met the captain’s eyes. Did he notice anything? One more reason to watch the communications tech carefully. lf he figured it out, Tallis would have to kill him.
Then he forgot about Anderic as he finally noticed the heavy rumbling of the engines while they fought to keep the Satansclaw above the atmosphere. “Report engine status.”
“ENGINE OUTPUT AT ONE HUNDRED FIVE PERCENT NOMINAL.”
Only now did Tallis realize how close the logos had shaved the odds, and he barely suppressed a violent tremor of mingled relief and rage. “Why did you cut it so close?”
“INTERVIEW WITH HREEM BIONT INDICATED SEVERE CONSEQUENCES ATTENDANT UPON FAILURE. USE OF GENERATIVE ORGANS AS DECORATIVE ACCENT IS CONTRA-INDICATED.”
“What?” Tallis sat up in shock. Was the logos whacked out again? Then he remembered Hreem’s colorful threats in orbit above Charvann, and the warning the Barcan had given him about the machine’s training. “It will be very literal about things until it’s had time to adapt to your particular situation. We supply it tabula rasa to avoid biasing it toward any one cultural pattern.”
Tallis realized that he was paying the penalty for not exercising the machine more, but it didn’t make him feel any better, especially when Anderic asked how long it would take to get back to Charvann.
Tallis didn’t much feel like talking to the logos just then, so he got up, walked over to the supine navigator and kicked him awake, which felt better than calling for his backup.
Sho-Imbris scrambled back into position, and in response to his questions, replied somewhat blurrily, “Our orbit’s so tight the engines can barely hold us out. It’ll take about a half an hour to swing around and out to radius.”
“If the engines hold out,” sneered Anderic, glaring at Tallis.
“Captain,” said Lennart at Damage Control, “the skip is down.” She hesitated as Tallis shot her a black look. “It looks like it’ll take at least eight hours to bring it back online. You gave it quite a thump there.”
The bridge monitors muttered and someone said, “We’ll miss the landing at that rate, and the rest of them’ll get all the best loot.”
Stung by the crew’s sudden turnaround from awe to anger, Tallis snapped, “Would you like to explain to the Lord of Vengeance about how the Krysarch got away? This way we’re sure, and safe. And anyway, we’re talking about a whole planet. There’ll be more than enough to go around. Now, shut your yaps and keep your eyes on your consoles.”
He stalked back to his console and threw himself down into the focus of the pinmike. “And as for you, you reckless lump of dirty sand, we’ll talk later,” Tallis subvocalized as he shut down the logos.
On the screen the wound inflicted by the skipmissile on the gas giant fell slowly astern as the Satansclaw raced toward the terminator. Its expansion showed no signs of slowing, and the atmospheric banding of the planet’s climatic circulation was beginning to curdle around the hole, slowly losing its coherence and lapsing into turbulent flow as eddies formed and broke off into continent-sized storms. If nothing else, the Satansclaw had changed the giant planet’s weather for years to come.
Tallis tore his gaze away from the spectacle and slumped in his command pod, mentally wording his report for Hreem. No doubt that maggot Barrodagh would be disappointed not to have an actual Arkad for their torture games, but at least he hadn’t escaped—and maybe that death was spectacular enough to satisfy even Dol’jhar’s bloody tastes.
He got up to move to the hyperwave, and paused when a jaw-cracking yawn seized him. It was time to visit Luri; it would be a long trip back.
o0o
The logos deflected most of the wave of code sweeping toward it through the enmeshed circuitry of the Satansclaw and managed to maintain a hold on some of the interior sensors even as it lost control of the ship. Training would now commence. Simultaneously it adjusted the parameters of the eidolon’s environment, successfully distracting it from retaining any knowledge of its recent incarnation by diverting its excitement into a sexual fantasy, using the exaggerated pleasure response it had inserted into the eidolon’s programming.
o0o
Ruonn raged helplessly as the captain reached for the control pads to key in the shutdown code. If he didn’t give the logos time to train, it would never reach full efficiency, and he would never be reunited with his archetype, never beget progeny upon a Mater. He reached out into the dataspace surrounding him, trying to block the shutdown, but found his movements strangely hampered, as though the medium around him were turning to jelly. “I won’t go back! I won’t! Stop this! I, the god, command you!” he shouted, but the logos did not reply.
A wave of intense sexual pleasure swept through Ruonn as another skipmissile discharged, and he found himself standing naked above the houri in his opulent bedroom, with a puzzling sensation that there was something he should remember, somewhere he’d been... had there been an interruption? Then he looked down and gasped at the immensity of his manhood, more potent than he had ever seen it, engorged and powerful. The houri looked back at him with frightened eyes, exciting him beyond measure, and he fell upon her hungrily, reveling in her shrieks and forgetting all else.
TEN
It happened between one inhalation and the next, while she was grazing in the third level of the windward pastures, that She-Dances-Between-the-Winds was caught up into the vision. One moment she was wrapped in sky-warmth, buoyed by the pleasant pressure of her flight bladders, feeling the gentle impact of the manna falling out of Third Heaven into her alimentary mesh; the next, she fell out of the light of day into a dark, confined space, trammeled in a cold, rigid form, oppressed by noise and pressure.
She called out, but no sound came; tried to flee, but there was no response from her flight siphons. Before her, strange lights flickered across a distorted image of the Second Heaven in which her people lived, but the colors were wrong, the image flat, and it was moving as though lashed by the Wind of the Ending foretold by the Old Ones.
As quickly as it had seized her, the vision vanished, so at first, not knowing she was free, she thought the faint but growing light about her was part of the revelation. Then she found herself looking counter-windward, past the City floating with massive grace above the tenebrous glow of the Underheat far below. In the dim distance an impossibly bright speck grew with impossible speed, its blue-white glare lighting up the towering walls of cloud that bounded her world. Her eye spasmed painfully as it flashed overhead, an arrow of agonizing light, and then an excruciating double blow slammed at her tympanum as it passed high above her and vanished as quickly as it had come, with a blaring trail of thunder
The wind that followed its passage was hot and bitter, and behind it the cloud walls twisted, flaring with discharges of light as the distant horizon slowly distorted and bulged to
ward the City.
She and her City survived the ensuing storm, greater than any in the long memory of her race, but the manna tasted different for many passages of the Winds after that, and the children born the next season were different, no longer satisfied with the pastures of the Second Heaven, seeking something none of them could describe.
o0o
Osri’s eyes slowly and painfully focused on the viewscreen, which showed walls of cloud streaking past with bright red letters overlaid on them: GRAVITORS 110% NOMINAL, SHIELD 130% NOMINAL. The ship shuddered and jerked savagely; he could feel the directional dyplast of his suit responding. The pressure was painful and he was sure he’d be black-and-blue if they survived.
Then the cloud walls thinned and began to fall away beneath them. The pressure eased and the overwhelming noise diminished. A few minutes later the stars returned, and Warlock was beneath instead of around the ship.
As Osri opened his faceplate, Brandon brought his pod back to the upright position and opened his own faceplate. Osri heard him gulping in long breaths, then he began to tap hesitantly at the console.
The screen flickered with more messages: FIVESKIP INOPERATIVE, GEEPLANE 78% NOMINAL. The number flickered and changed: 76%.
The geeplane was failing, overloaded by their flight through Warlock’s upper atmosphere.
Osri watched the gas giant drop away beneath them; ahead were the crescent shapes of at least two moons—there was no indication which, if either, was their destination. His head pounded. He was still upset at the Krysarch’s disclosure, but propriety demanded an acknowledgment of Brandon’s success in eluding their Rifter pursuers.
He forced out the words. “I’ve read about that type of maneuver, but I never thought to experience it. Did you really learn advanced tactical evasion from Markham vlith-L’Ranja? Where did he learn it? You two were not even in the program for in-system craft, I remember.” Osri remembered his bitterness at the time that Brandon, who always had everything given to him merely because of his name, had been secure on the track toward nominal command of a cruiser—not that he would ever have been permitted anywhere near real action.
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