The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1)

by Sicoe, Veronica

  The MD disables the restraining field, heaves me off the stretcher and plops me into a medical alcove. Its immobilization field comes on and turns me limp again from the neck down.

  "Get the medroid working," he tells Curly, and shoves the stretcher aside. Then frowns at the alcove console.

  People have gathered at the door to rubberneck, all dressed in colonial-khaki jumpsuits and overalls. They're workers and mechanics, faces I don't know and have no interest in knowing.

  Curly pushes a booting medical android next to my alcove. Leaves me to stare at the waking mechanical beast while he shoos the gawkers away. Then he scurries to the medbay's central bulkhead to use the intercom.

  The medroid is a mute metal gorilla with dozens of spindly limbs. Some of them are nothing but elongated flexi-drills, others are injectors and saws, scanners and pliers, skin-cell sprays and nervewire weavers—weapons welded to an unfeeling machine with x-ray eyes. It hums to life, and its cooling system crackles underneath the alloy hide like tired bones snapping to life. It gives off a faint smell of ozone and motor oil. My lip curls.

  "Miss Harber." Preston. "What the hell happened?"

  I wish the tranquilizers had worked.

  "How did you get back here?" He pushes the medroid aside to sit on the edge of my alcove. "Did they drop you off? How? Where's their ship? What did you learn?"

  "Miss Harber is stable, no severe injuries." The MD pushes the medroid back into place. "But she needs rest. Why don't you come back later, doc?"

  "Right." Preston remains seated. He even leans a bit closer, staring me in the eyes, as if he's trying to determine I'm really me. Then he lays his wrinkled hand on mine.

  He hasn't cut his fingernails in weeks, and the creases around his knuckles look like dehydrated suction cups. I want to pull my hand away so bad it burns, but I can't move. I want to yell at the MD to drop the field, but if I speak, Preston will know I'm coherent, and I don't want to talk to him. I've nothing to report on his ally making mission other that we might have a new enemy now. And I'm not even sure about that. I'm not sure about anything anymore, except that I'm no bit closer to my goal of landing a fatal blow against the TMC.

  Preston leans back with a frown. "At least you're alive. We'll talk about the rest later."

  "Perfect," the MD says, and steps aside, making way for Preston to leave.

  Preston takes the cue and stands up, taking his hand off mine. My skin starts prickling like a bag of ants.

  "Fix her. Fast," Preston orders, heading for the door.

  Bray stands there, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, face darkened by a frown. He throws me a spiteful look, then follows Preston out into the corridor like a dog.

  "Well, let's get you 'fixed' then, shall we?" The MD smiles at me. He pulls a plug out of the medroid's shoulder and sticks it into my nacom. "You having hallucinations? Glitches in your visual cortex?"

  "No glitches." There's no synet left to cause them anymore, but I'm not going to tell him that. He'll figure it out on his own soon enough.

  Shit. No synet means I can't pilot anything, which means I'm stuck here. Unless Preston has me re-implanted, I'm useless. And I don't want his hackware. He'll likely want to reconstruct my memories like the Ticks did. He'll trace back what happened on the alien ship, and find out about— No. No way in hell. I need a clean synet before he gets wind of my no-tech state, one I can tweak myself.

  "I don't understand this," the MD says. "There's no feedback from your nacom. Must be damaged, or maybe the nervewire's interrupted somewhere. I'll have the medroid do a deep scan."

  "No." I shake my head vigorously.

  "It's standard procedure. Nothing to worry about." He smiles like I'm a kid throwing a tantrum.

  "What's your name?" I divert him, trying desperately to move inside the field.

  "I'm Dr. Galatas." His smile softens. "Call me Aaron."

  A trickle of sweat runs down the side of my forehead. "Aaron, could you please leave the deep scan for later? I'd rather talk. Eat something. I've been out there so long. The aliens don't cook, you know. I'm starving."

  His eyes widen with late realization. He looks at the medroid standing by, ready to drill into my skin, and nods. "Alright. We'll see about that deep scan later. Hey, Chuck, get the lady some food from the mess hall."

  Curly mumbles something on his way out.

  I turn my head away, wishing I was somewhere else. But I can only go back down inside my mind, and I'm afraid of what I'll find there.

  "So." Aaron sits carefully next to me. "What were they like? Bray said they were primitive brutes. But I doubt brutes are intelligent enough for the kind of technology it took to get you back here. I mean, by the Mother, did they beam you in here? That would be—" He whistles. His smile broadens with excitement, waiting for me to explain. But all I want to do is claw myself out of this alcove and make a run for it.

  "Ooo-kay," he says after I don't answer. "Wrong tack. I'll give you another dose, let you get some rest, and you can eat after. I'll run the scans while you sleep, alright?"

  He thumbs a small pad above the medroid's injector arm, and the monstrous thing stabs forth toward my neck.

  "No! If that touches me—"

  He raises an eyebrow as the needle goes in. Too late. The injector hisses under my ear and my veins are burning again. As the MD waits for me to pass out I grind my teeth and lurch with all my might. My fingers twitch and my knees buckle. I free a hand, push through the field and grab Aaron by his throat.

  He squirms and grabs my hand with both of his, and pries my fingers open.

  "Fuck!" He stumbles away from me, coughing and clutching his throat.

  I scramble out of the alcove, past the medroid, past the center bulkhead, and bump straight into Chuck and his lunch tray. Aaron catches up and grabs me from behind.

  "Help me," he yells, pulling me back. Chuck grabs my shoulders and I squirm in their grip. "What the hell got into you? How did you—"

  "—Let me go! No more shots! No medroids! And for fuck's sake stop touching me."

  Chuck lets go as if I burned him. But Aaron's not about to quit. "You've been on an alien ship for almost a month." He wrestles me back to the alcove. "You could be contaminated with alien organisms, your synet corrupted with some unknown virus, or suffering from severe trauma." He plants me in the alcove and straddles me, holding me in place with his own weight. "By the way you're acting it's all of the above. Now calm down, stay down, and let me do my job. I promise I'm not gonna hurt you, or do anything without asking you first. Okay?"

  I nod and pretend to relax. My heart is pounding in my ears. I'm panting, sweating, obsessed with escape like a caged beast. Even if I flee from the medbay, I can't get off the station by myself. Not without a synet. Fuck!

  Aaron gets off me, watching me skeptically.

  I grab his wrist. "No tranquilizers. And no field, please. I can't stand being held down anymore after all that happened."

  He nods, then thumbs the medroid into scanning mode.

  -

  I open my eyes after a shallow, nightmare-ridden sleep, and find Bray staring at me, a muscle twitching in his jaw.

  "Hi." I stretch inside my alcove. "What's up?"

  He shakes his head at me, goggle-eyed. He smells of sweat, disinfectant, and hair gel. I lean away a bit.

  "We have to talk."

  I harrumph and sit up. To my surprise, I feel much better. No more dizziness, no fatigue, and all my senses are acute and focused. I look around the medbay for Aaron or his mechanical minion, but we're alone.

  "Do you feel funny?" Bray asks.

  "What?"

  "Do you have any unusual symptoms, like headaches, dizziness, hallucinations?"

  "You mean you're actually here?"

  He rolls his eyes at me. "Did the aliens do anything to you?"

  "Sure, they stuck probes up my ass to look for humanity's secrets."

  "I'm serious." In fact, he really does look serious. "The a
liens are hostile, aren't they?" He's actually worried. How cute.

  "Not as hostile as humans usually are."

  "But they are, right? Preston wants to... He thinks..." He scratches his head, then frowns at me accusingly. "He wants me to fly out to them again."

  To Amharr.

  My stomach tightens. "So? What's that got to do with me?"

  "You're the one who fucked up the contact mission. You should go, not me."

  I sit up. "What do you mean I fucked up?"

  "You crashed the Transiter into the alien ship 'cause you had fire ants up your ass."

  "I made contact," I snap. "My job. What would you have done—wait for the stars to align?"

  "You got us captured."

  "I got myself captured, Bray. You escaped. Quit whining."

  "Listen, you little—" He stops. Breathes. Looms closer. "I don't care what excuses you come up with, but this time it's my call to make."

  "I'm not flying back out there, Bray." My throat is dry. "The aliens aren't interested in negotiating relations anyway."

  "What do you know about it?" His eyes narrow. "What happened out there?"

  "Doesn't matter. They're gone now. It's over."

  He tilts his head, scrutinizing me. "Gone?" I nod. "They just took off," he says. "Flew away, just like that?"

  "Yes, damn it."

  "And they said nothing about coming back?"

  "It's not like we had friendly chats over a cup of tea, Bray. He didn't tell me anything, okay?"

  "He?"

  "They! Whatever." My heart is racing. "There's no point in going out there anymore. You can tell Preston I confirmed that. Satisfied?"

  He folds his arms across his chest. "Yes."

  "Perfect."

  His gaze flits up and down my face a few more times, to make sure I'm sticking to my word. Then he turns on his heel and leaves.

  8

  The MD discharged me from the medbay soon after Bray left, and escorted me back to my room. I spent three hours in the sterilizer shower, scrubbing off the sensation of other people's hands until my skin went raw. Didn't make me feel any better. Now I sit on my bed, wearing an oversized khaki jumpsuit, chewing on a protein bar.

  There's only one way out of this mess. I have to break the link to Amharr.

  But how? I don't know how it works; I'm not even sure what it is: some sort of spying mechanism? Is he out there, watching me, watching through me, hovering around the station in his sinister ship?

  Emranti inquire into the neural landscape of their targets to find out what their true motives are. It circumvents lengthy negotiations and eliminates deceit. But it's one-sided; the targets can't control the exchange, and the Emranti aren't forthcoming. Our exchange was definitely not a typical one.

  Gary said no dominated species has ever disrupted an inquiry before. But the link between us isn't just the side effect of an inquiry gone wrong, either. I entered Amharr's mind just like he entered mine, and whatever I stirred up in there carried over. Or back. I don't know.

  Maybe it'll fade away if we never meet again. If we're far enough apart. Just like he hopes.

  I hope so too. But I doubt it.

  I wrap myself in a blanket, and try to focus on my body to ground myself. As the hours melt away, my intercom chimes repeatedly and knuckles rap against my door. I ignore them all. If whoever's trying to reach me can't override my lock, they don't need answering.

  I close my eyes and sigh into my blanket. In the darkness behind my eyelids something starts to writhe and coil and grow. My eyes fly back open. I take a deep breath and pull the blanket tighter around me.

  A pile of clothes and underwear lays sprawled on the table. It looks like a strange creature crouching on the tabletop, a bit smaller than a Dorylini nymph.

  I haven't seen one of those since I was little. I used to sneak out between the yurts and tents of the scientists' families, and flee down the tunnels burrowing deep into the hive. I used to live for the thrill of playing with those magnificent, eight-legged creatures. Sometimes I even rode one of their simple-minded Protectors to the upper levels until my muscles gave in and my lungs hurt from breathing their air.

  The Dorylinae always took care of me whenever I was too weak to get back to camp. After my parents realized where I was going they tried to ground me, then put me under observation, then locked me in their tent. But all to no avail. So they decided to put my adventurousness to good use.

  From there on out I wore recording devices on my trips. Grown-ups, even robots, drones, and androids, were never allowed into the deeper layers of the hive. The Protectors mercilessly tore them apart, human or machine. But apparently a dirt-covered five-year-old playing in their tunnels didn't alarm them.

  That's how I recorded the only footage of Dorylinae nymphs ever made.

  I wouldn't have noticed them against the black of the walls if they hadn't moved. Knee-high even to a child like me, the month-old nymphs stirred in the moist darkness of the tunnel like tiny shadows. They surrounded me—eight of them—curious, almost playful, investigating the novelty of my smell and body-heat.

  Those four and a half minutes of footage became legendary back in camp. I wasted no thought on the meaning of it at the time, though. I was touched and tasted by dozens of antennae, stared at with the hypersensitive heat-sensors that worked as their vision, understood by hyper-electrical brains that could process as much information simultaneously as an AI. Without any effort on my part, I was accepted by these creatures that had never seen any humans before.

  One of them remained my friend long after its group reached adulthood and spread throughout the hive. I called her Edrissa. She had a tiny defect in her left mandible. It had a hole in one of the barbs, and air hissed through it when she snapped her mandibles together. She was very curious about me, about humans in general. She followed me every time we met, for as long as she could. We started playing together: hide-and-seek, hunt and catch. As I grew older and she grew stronger, we even ventured out into the Mazan storms together.

  I close my eyes and hide my face under the blanket.

  I miss her. I miss my home. It's all lost to me now, part of another universe.

  Spiron's heating system breathes through the pipelines under-deck like an exhausted giant, her gravity amplifiers buzzing softly through the floors. The monotonous croon of the station's life support systems is strangely soothing, and I finally allow myself to relax.

  It's quiet now, and dark. I'm floating on my own exhaustion, wrapped in the scent of soap and fresh linen. Before I know it, I slide into the inscrutable depths of another world.

  I rub my feet against each other, and a trickle of cold water slips between my toes. My foot trails over the sheet, sending lazy ripples across the liquid coolness.

  Gravity begins to shift, and I'm no longer resting on my back, but standing up to my ankles in a crystal-clear pond. I feel the chill of tides lapping at my legs, and marvel at the slivers of sunlight dancing on the water. Beyond it, rich fields of swaying copper grass expand toward the horizon, a turquoise sky shimmering in the afternoon heat.

  I never knew such a beautiful world exists beyond our crowded, stuffy domes and frozen moons. I wish I could stand here forever, lose myself in the scent of blooming grass...

  Something rushes past me. It hooks me by the hand, and pulls me along in a playful chase.

  We run in swift, long leaps across the shimmering grassland. My legs propel me tirelessly through the scented air, meters at a time, as if I'm a great, weightless grasshopper. A slender creature with iridescent skin and silky black hair runs alongside me, holding my hand. We're both four-legged and long-limbed, elegant, fast. We are identical, and inhuman.

  We stop at the end of the field, where the grassland nips at a stretch of gray sand. I look at the creature beside me, staring back at me with huge black eyes. I'm not me anymore. I'm an Emranti child, a nestling, and the beautiful creature holding my hand is my identical twin.

  I realize
I'm reliving one of Amharr's memories, but I can't stop. I inhabit his body and mind, yet am still aware of myself—I'm still Taryn Harber, asleep in a bunkbed aboard a human station. But my heart now beats in Amharr's youthful chest.

  We stand at the edge of the grassland, my twin and I, our toes wedged into hot sand. I know what this is, and yet, I don't entirely understand its meaning.

  We're on the traditional planetside trip that all High Emranti nestlings must make. With neurological maturity comes the voyage to the Emranti homeworld to pass the rite of adulthood, and return to the ships to take our place within society.

  My birth twin and I know each other better than anything else. Deeplinked, we are the same—a single being split between two bodies, thinking together, feeling together. United by the Phylra particles that flood our nervous systems, resonating with each other through space and time, perfectly attuned.

  We step into the circle together, and something starts to change inside us.

  The grains of sand beneath our feet begin to tremble. Tiny vibrations run up through our nerves, setting numerous, infinitesimal chain reactions in motion. We let go of each other's hands.

  I crouch and stick my hands into the sand. It trickles between my fingers like metal filings. And the vibrations grow stronger, making us tremble. An intense disquiet takes hold of me. It's an unbearable rush, a primeval instinct that floods me and alters my perception, letting me recognize what's really going on.

  The grass isn't copper and lush. It's not even grass—it's a sea of fibroid creatures, all dead and scorched by some horrible disaster. The sand is made of billions of nanites all coming alive as they suck out our energy. The crystalline pond is a pool of klaar that transported us down into this open grave.

  This isn't our homeworld. It's the site of our parents' latest assignment—of their latest containment.

  Something ignites inside of me. I look at my twin, and he looks back at me. In an instant we lunge at each other with a beastly desire to kill.

  My palms crack open and thousands of tendrils shoot out of my skin and latch onto his face. We tumble into the quaking mass of nanites and tear ourselves open in a blood-gushing carnage.