Distant laughter, needle-sharp and cold.
Then she remembered, or thought she did, and moved her hand for the last time. All right, you motherfreakin’ bitch. Get ready, ‘cause I'm coming to get you!
With a silent scream, Stella leaned forward and plunged her hand into a force field.
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* * *
CHAPTER TWELVE
The floor of existence fell and she dropped through.
Into the black maelstrom, whirlpool down falling forever and her seventh birthday, strawberry shortcake and whipped cream sweet gooey in her mouth...down ... her first kiss at twelve like spring fire on her lips ... down and round forever ... her heart falling through her warm feet on sun-baked sand, the delicious crystal cold ocean curling about her toes ... round and round forever down, a soundless roar, falling...
Her first attack of space sickness at seventeen-clutching her stomach, not wanting other crew to laugh...
Falling forever, time a Mobius strip of never-ending thought; a serpent swallowing its own tail; causality wrenched asunder, yesterday following tomorrow.
Straining, she gives birth to her mother.
Hears dirt clumps fall on his coffin as his daughter Stella weeps above...
down down down
The lethal gas descends, swallows her whole as a klaxon shrieks a death knell for all she's ever been.
No no no no no
And she was through, waking to a mystic gestalt of stars whose secret she for a moment knew. Unbuckling her harness, she rose and gazed out the plexiport at space three thousand light-years from where they had jumped.
She had done it!
Laughing in triumph, she wanted to strut and rub the All-Mother's nose in her victory. But then, she didn't really know if the bitch had a nose, did she? Whether she did or not, more urgent matters came first.
The Spaceranger was flanked on opposite sides by vigilants-rugged, twenty-meter guard ships with considerable fire power. Stella assumed that Lee had commed them, told them of her imminent arrival.
There was only one problem: the Slug ship was still moving, heading directly at them.
Quickly, she moved to alter her course. Inserting her hand into a yellow force field, she reached too deep and increased their speed. Thunderheart stirred in the chair beside her as the vigilant on the Spaceranger's port side loomed. How did the alien stop this ship? She tried vainly to remember as they streaked toward the guard ship, seeing it move as the pilot became aware of the danger. Thank God. Maybe they were going to miss it.
They didn't. The Slug ship's force field struck the vigilant's a glancing blow just astern. Feeling the Slug's memory return, Stella pulled back her hand, managing to brake and swing the ship around as the guard ship spun off into space. A rear section spewed debris into the void. Yet the ship itself remained essentially intact. If she could comm them, make clear it was an accident caused by her inexperience....
In silent splendor, the vigilant exploded. For a moment, its death was glorious, a brilliant vermilion flower that unfolded ragged blossoms into space. Then the fireworks winked out, and there was only a graveyard of dark debris.
Through it came the guard ship's companion. In the plexiport, she saw the other vigilant streak directly at them. A spear of plasma fire lashed out, striking their bow. Above, a monitor wailed.
They were being attacked!
The Slug's memory strengthened. Stella accessed the artillery board, which unfolded from the central panel and hovered directly above it. Another barrage struck the ship as the vigilant swept past and rounded upon them. There came another hit. Another.
Stella steered the ship around, centering her hand/mind above a whirling dark vortex on the artillery board. All she had to do was use it, plunge her consciousness as no other human could into its depths, and destroy their attacker.
But she couldn't. She couldn't fire on an Imperial vessel.
Summoning a screen, she gazed at the Spaceranger's bridge, where Lee bent over a comm panel, desperately trying to reason with the surviving guard ship.
“...Repeat, there must have been a malfunction. The destruction of your comrades’ ship was an accident, not an act of aggression! Our pilot has now regained control of the alien ship. Repeat, there's no need...”
The other guard ship wasn't listening. It swerved and swooped, rounding again and again on the Slug ship with blinding bolts of plasma. Superb as her shielding and damage-control system was, it couldn't endlessly absorb such punishment.
On the screen, Lee tensed. “They won't listen, ser! I can't make them stop!”
An instant later, after another hit, the screen went dark.
Stella started to reach into a multicolored vortex on her left to reestablish equilibrium among the system's force-field components and reconstruct the comm connection.
No. Better to run, outrace this pesky tormentor and let Lee plead for reason. As she accelerated, the guard ship stung her again and again. In time, she would outrace it easily, but for now, the hull absorbed and shot back dozens of lethal plasma streams into space. Above, the damage monitors shrilled a constant chorus as the shields drained.
Still, damage remained limited: barely thirty percent. Smiling in admiration at the Slug's (her?) defense technology, she missed the bright laser jet as the Spaceranger opened fire on her attacker. Two steady beams, bright as novas, impaled the guard ship's hull.
When she looked up, it was just in time to see the vigilant explode into a trillion pieces.
* * * *
Before she reestablished contact with the Spaceranger, Stella glanced at Thunderheart, who stared in wonder at a display of the black whirlpool as seen from the other side. A readout below it in alien numbers indicated they were well over two hundred thousand kilometers away.
But it was the debris floating in space that was important, and she reflected on the accident's cruel irony. They hadn't been reduced to a bunch of quarks like the one in two thousand that jump through a wormie, but they did take out an Imperial guard ship by accident. Damn it, the chances of that happening were so remote!
Speaking of unexpected catastrophes, what if the All-Mother pounced and invaded her mind again across the vastness of space? But then, there was no need for her to do so, was there? The bitch had said it herself: I will await your arrival....
In the meantime, she struggled to reach Lee, which meant that she had to infiltrate the entire drive and interrelated communications system. Without the limbless alien's memory, it would have been impossible, for the machinery required an intelligence that could adjust the extremely complex, multiple force-field network by sight/thought alone. While she did feel as if she could interface her mind with the system, some vital link was still missing, requiring her to use her synthetic, woefully inefficient hands.
At last Lee's face appeared and he poured out regret at what he'd done. “I hated to do it, ser. But I'd lost you on vid, and they were spraying you at will.” He rubbed his forehead. “There must have been at least six comrades on board that guard ship.”
“Don't worry about it, Lee,” she said. “You did the right thing.” He couldn't have known her shields were still seventy percent intact and the Pregnant Song was in no real danger. She moved quickly to forestall the guilt rising in his eyes. “You had to make a quick decision with little data and it was the right one. Lee, you had to do it.”
“Now they're sure to launch an attack against us,” Carol pointed out. “The vigilant must have radioed Loran Base when you destroyed the other guard ship. Even now they're probably on their way, thinking we're in league with the enemy. When they get here, they're bound to shoot us both to pieces without even comming us first.”
Stella nodded at her weapons officer. “You're right, but we have to deliver the Slug ship to Loran Base.” She pressed her lips together, fighting a wave of almost unbearable frustration. “I know I can do it. I've acquired many of the alien's skills through some kind of memory trans
ference. It's like I'm half Slug myself now.”
Seeing the shock on her officers’ faces, Stella followed with a brief summary of what she had discovered about the Slugs, the All-Mother, and of what it was like to pilot the alien craft. In the process, she was also able to clear up a long-standing mystery.
“So you see,” she concluded, “the reason the Scaleys always troubled us was that they were soulless drones who masked the real enemy beyond them. In a sense, they were never even alive.”
When she was finished, George returned to the statement which had astonished them. “You said you feel you're half Slug. If that's so, isn't it dangerous to continue piloting his ship, Stella? What if the Slug part of you acquires ascendancy and makes you fire at us?”
She suppressed her irritation. As psyche-physician, George was only doing his job in establishing that she was mentally fit to command.
“It's not like that, not mind domination,” she said. “It's more like knowledge and memories that wax and wane, such as how to bring you up on the vid sector of the panel.”
“The enemy never used it to communicate with us,” Lee said. “We never saw their faces or received one word from them.”
“That was part of their psychological warfare. It's easier to defeat an enemy if they don't know what you look or sound like. The unknown can be terribly demoralizing and frightening. Besides that, there's another reason. The Slugs’ general, the All-Mother, sees us as a vastly inferior species. So why bother to show herself?”
“Why didn't she do it just to get attention?” George broke in. “You said she wants to be adored and venerated by the Slugs and that the Scaley drones also worship her.”
“You're not listening,” Carol said, her habitual animosity toward George hardening her tone. “Stella said that the Scaleys worship the Slugs, not the All-Mother.”
“Yes, that's correct,” Stella said. “It's all line of command. The Scaleys provide the attention and ego-gratification the Slugs need, and the Slugs do the same for the All-Mother.”
“Didn't the Slug disobey the All-Mother by extending his boarding tube?” George asked. “You said he was lonely, bored by being alone so long.”
“Yes, even his imager, the Scaleys, and other amusements wore thin after"-she sifted through the Slug's memories-"three hundred centuries.”
“That long?” Myles said. She watched her security director press his cheek in amazement. “He must have long since been driven mad!”
“A human would be,” she said. “But then, we don't live that long.”
“Let's get back to the All-Mother,” George persisted. “You say her thoughts reached you from far away. How could she have such power?”
Stella sighed. She knew the Slugs, but the All-Mother remained cloudy to her, as she had evidently been even to the Slug. She remembered the Slug saying the All-Mother was blessed. She does not have a heart but is as different from me as I am from you. No image of her appeared in Stella's mind. Didn't the Slug know what his own mother looked like, or had the All-Mother purposely prevented her image from passing to Stella from her son? And if so, why?
What was the secret she'd dimly glimpsed about the All-Mother? Something about ... Yes! It was...
George's words scattered the insight that had been about to form. “Stella, you said there was something the All-Mother didn't want you to know about her. Can you—”
“She already said she couldn't remember,” Carol snapped.
George clenched his teeth. On the alien's screen, Stella could see him trying to be patient. “It's a standard psy device, Carol. You return periodically to a key question in order to jar someone's memory.”
Too bad it just made me LOSE it, Stella thought.
Lee cut short the squabble developing between George and Carol. “Enough, people.” His young face turned to her. “Stella, Sloan told me you wanted a conference to determine just what we know about the aliens. Perhaps now is the time.”
She shook her head, knowing she was the only one who really understood them. “We don't have it, Lee. Loran Base is nearly three days away, and we must get this ship to them as soon as possible.” She leaned closer. “We don't want them to fire on sight when we approach with an alien ship, so here's what we're going to do....”
* * * *
A day later, when what looked like half the Imperial fleet approached, the Slug ship was fully secured in a cradle behind the Spaceranger. Wrapped snugly from bow to stern in virtually unbreakable multifilament lines, the alien vessel, and the Imperial ship that towed her, constituted a standard message. To make sure there was no misunderstanding, Stella also radioed the news. “We have a hostile alien craft in custody. Please provide all available assistance.”
The only question was, would they instead both be blasted to atoms? In the past, Imperial ships had hauled everything from pirate cutters to rebel scuts to justice, but never, never, a vessel of the enemy who had all but conquered them.
As she watched, the guard ships fanned out and surrounded both the Spaceranger and the alien ship, the Pregnant Song. She started counting the vigilants in an effort to relieve her tension, but gave up when she reached twenty.
At least we're alive, she thought. I wonder how long that will last?
On a bridge monitor, Lee turned a dial to just over twenty-seven megahertz. Nothing. She watched him adjust the instrument some more, knowing it would work only if the person in command wanted to establish contact. Whatever the case, Stella kept the Pregnant Song off-line. Better to have them think the enemy ship was captured than to advertise that a cyborg-human had ‘mutated’ enough to fly and control it. The latter possibility was one that would conjure dark dragons of suspicion and fear that the enemy controlled her mind and would use her to attack them.
In the Spaceranger's bridge, images abruptly appeared above a holovid. To Stella's surprise, the view was not that of a vigilant cockpit but of a neat office. Behind a desk sat a small, tight-lipped woman dressed in a starched, much-bemedaled uniform.
“This is First Officer Lee Song of the Imperial cruiser Spaceranger,” Lee said. “Commander McMasters and our crew have captured a Scaley vessel and request permission for both ships to dock.”
Three seconds elapsed before the reply came, indicating a distance of nearly one million kilometers. “I'm General Gage, commander of Loran Base, First Officer. Please report about the guard ships patrolling the singularity Charybdis. One was reported destroyed by a Scaley ship; the other's status is unknown to us. Can you explain this matter, First Officer?”
“Regrettably, I can, General Gage,” Lee said, not missing a beat. “Commander McMasters ordered me to proceed down the singularity first in order to prepare the guards for her emergence in the enemy craft. Unfortunately, her ship was ejected in a vector that impacted one of the guard ships. In the confusion that followed, with Commander McMasters relentlessly fired upon, I was compelled to take action.”
General Gage stared grimly at him. “You destroyed the vigilant?”
Lee swallowed, his face working. “Yes, ser, and our comrades upon it.”
General Gage was silent for several seconds, her eyes unblinking. “So you claim you have captured a Scaley ship.”
“Affirmative, ser. Commander McMasters presently occupies the ship directly astern of us.” Stella noticed that he did not say she ‘pilots’ the ship. “We have killed and thoroughly destroyed the Slug-uh, Scaleys, General, and I assure you that everything is fully under our control.”
A voice urged General Gage to be cautious. Stella saw a hawk-nosed man with Colonel's wings on his shoulders step forward and stoop to speak urgently into her ear.
“First Officer Lee,” Gage said. “Colonel Powers would like to know how you managed to neutralize the Scaleys. This has never been done before.”
Lee responded with the prearranged story. A fierce battle in space, malfunction on the Scaley ship, their enemy's docking bay opening to Imperial soldiers who board and manage to defeat the enemy
. During his summary, Lee said nothing about the enemy's extended boarding tube, the Slug commander, and, most importantly, nothing about his mind-meld with Stella.
When Lee was finished, Stella watched Gage chew it over.
“How did Commander McMasters learn to control the enemy craft?” she asked. “Equally important, why is she flying it and not you? After all you are the chief navigations officer.”
Daunting questions, but ones which Stella and her officers had anticipated. As the Spaceranger hovered in space, Lee spun out a rehearsed web of circumstance. Commander McMasters did have previous bridge and navigational experience aboard the Imperial Star and the S.S. Kolanera. Besides that, she had displayed a surprising intuitive grasp of the drive apparatus of the Scaley vessel. She had consequently deemed it wise to pilot it herself.
Watching, Stella saw that the story held together, but barely. Gage leaned forward on her desk.
“If that is so, why isn't Commander McMasters herself addressing us from the enemy ship? Why are you serving as intermediary?”
Lee answered smoothly, his youthful, sincere manner commanding belief. “Commander McMasters felt it might be alarming if she commed you herself,” Lee said, giving Gage a boyish smile. “After all, it is a Scaley ship.”
A voice near Gage but off-screen purred agreement. Stella saw the general's expression soften.
A moment later someone entered Gage's office and delivered a sotto voce message to her. Head turned away, she listened to it. When she swung back, her eyes were flint.
“First Officer Song, you are to stay where you are. Our files show that Sloan Williams, not you, is first officer of the Spaceranger.”
“First Officer Sloan lost his life in the confrontation, General.”
“On the Scaley ship? I find that highly unlikely. Why would a first officer risk boarding an enemy vessel?”
“He didn't board, ser,” Lee answered promptly. “A laser barrage just aft of the bow made him fall and strike his head. He died instantly.”
Beyond Those Distant Stars Page 13
