“Streets are blocked,” his driver said. “Couldn’t make it back in time to fetch you for dinner.”
His voice sounded sullen to Stella and she suspected from the tightening of his jaw that if there was one thing Alek Dexter did not allow in his presence it was sullenness.
“Then buy one,” he snapped. “Shops are open until curfew, and the market’s only a few blocks away.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “Take it out of petty cash. Change your attitude or change jobs.”
The hatchway behind the driver framed a small street scene capped with a tumultuous sky. Two guards faced the street with their backs to him. A third tilted his head at the sound of three tones that came from the messenger on his belt. He picked it up, spoke into it, then hurried inside. His face seemed to pale more with each of the five steps that brought him to His Honor’s side. Their conversation was brief and whispered, but Stella heard every word.
“Code Brutus standby warning, sir. Do you want to secure here or at the compound?”
“Shit!” Alek Dexter said, and he turned his face away as though he’d been slapped. He, like Mr. Wittle, was a possible successor to the Director. He rubbed his forehead while a trackful of security emptied itself out front. His face was as pale as his guard’s. He watched the security squad fan out from the track and take up positions outside. A half-dozen armed men covered with grime and streaming sweat shouldered by him and stationed themselves about the reception.
“These ours?” he asked his guard.
The guard shrugged, his lasgun gripped white-knuckle tight in his shaking hands. “Don’t know, sir.”
“Humph,” he grunted. “Guess it’s hard to know what side they’re on if we don’t know what side we’re on. Just a warning, you say? Flattery’s not …”
“Yes, sir, a warning. Flattery issued it.”
“We’ll wait here,” Dexter said. “If we’re going to find ourselves stuck somewhere, I’d prefer it to be with this lovely young woman.”
He bowed, took Stella’s hand and kissed it. Then he strolled inside to the hostess and her guests, passing the long table set with an array of the most beautiful fruits and seafoods that Stella had ever seen. The centerpiece was a meter-high chunk of ice carved to represent a leaping porpoise, so rare that some called it Pandora’s unicorn. When released from hybernation, they headed straight for the kelp and essentially disappeared.
The fighting chattered closer, and security quietly closed the double hatch. Stella was more than a little afraid.
Not once had Dexter glanced at her orchids.
Chapter 45
To be conscious, you must surmount illusion.
—Prudence Lon Weygand, M.D., number five, original crew member, Voidship Earthling
The series of explosions dropped by Flattery’s Skyhawks wounded the green kelp in sector eight, killed tens of thousands of fishes, a pod of the fabled bottlenose porpoises and roiled up enough sediment to clog submersible filters for a fifty-click radius. A huge stand of blue kelp neighboring sector eight retracted all of its fronds instinctively and clamped itself as tight around its central lagoon as possible. In this configuration, its leaves were packed so tight that it could barely breathe. Feeding was out of the question.
The blue kelp, when fully deployed, reached a diameter of nearly one hundred kilometers. Its outer fringes bordered domestic kelp projects for nearly 280 degrees of its circumference; the rest faced open ocean and some of it was growing daily at a visible rate. For its own safety, it kept out of contact with the domestic kelps. These slaves to the humans were bound to the electric whip, this much the blue gathered from the dying shards that drifted its way. There would be many such shards soon. Kelp death always followed these explosions. Other deaths followed, too, at times feeding the blue kelp into an incredible spurt of growth.
This day something else drifted in on the currents. Something like an aura, a fragrance, something that kept the kelp from hugging itself too tight, too long. Something stirred this blue kelp deep within itself, setting its genetic memories tingling. Nothing would quite come to the fore. Soon, the blue could no longer help itself and it opened its fronds wide in hopes of a good strong whiff.
Chapter 46
Feed men, then ask of them virtue.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Turbulence from the blasts hadn’t settled yet when the Flying Fish pitched helpless to the surface. Rico’s eyes teared instantly in the sudden glare of afternoon sun that blasted the cockpit. He groped for his shades and tried to blink away the afterglow. To starboard, that long gray line must be the coast. To port, two or three kilometers away, the whole surface seethed with a mean white froth.
A puddle of seawater widened into a pool beneath Elvira’s command couch. Her nosebleed was slowing and she shook her head, trying to clear the concussion that had hit her with the first of the depth-charges.
Anybody but Elvira would’ve been scrat bait out there, Rico thought.
Somehow she’d made it back into the engine-room airlock by herself, though stunned and quivering from the blast. Many other blasts followed, too many to count.
“That goddamn Flattery’s answer to everything is to blow it up,” he grumbled.
Kelp lights winked out all around them as the sea glutted with shredded fronds and torn vines.
“Sister Kelp,” Elvira said, following his gaze across the tumultuous surface, “she retracts, saves herself.”
“Elvira, I don’t want to hear that ‘Sister Kelp’ crap. I want to get us out of here.”
“Overflights!” she warned, and pointed to two specks at ten o’clock off the port cabin. Her hands automatically worked the dive sequence, but the engines remained still.
“Jammed,” she said, her face impassive and dazed. “Silt and … kelp in the ‘niters.”
“Don’t sweat it, Elvira,” Rico said. He patted her arm. “They’re the ones who dropped the charges. If they carried all that payload, they’re short on fuel. At least we’re not dealing with a bunch of mines out here.”
Rico unharnessed himself and got Elvira a towel out of one of the lockers.
“Here,” he said. “Dry yourself off, change into a new dive suit. We might be here awhile and there’s no sense you getting sick.”
She took the towel and stood up on the rocking deck, getting her senses back.
“Flattery can track a one-seater coracle from port to port with the Orbiter, anyway,” he said. “These guys can’t set down out here, and they don’t dare blow up Crista Galli. Meanwhile, we’ve got to get her and Ben to some big medicine, and fast.”
Two sonic booms rocked them harder as the overflights dove in on them and pulled out. Rico could make out the pilots’ faces as the tiny aircraft flashed past.
“They’re young, Elvira, did you see that? With their whole lives ahead of them they chain themselves to Flattery.” He punched the arm of his couch and grumbled, “Why do they do that? They should be out cuddling some young thing in a hatchway somewhere. Didn’t their mothers teach them any better?”
“Their mothers are hungry, Rico, and they’re hungry now.”
Rico glanced at Elvira with surprise. He was accustomed to speaking to her but getting nothing but grunts for reply. She was fighting the toss of the foil, making her way to the aft lockers.
“You’re not going out there again,” he said. “The seas are a mess, nothing can get through here.”
“You will calm down,” she said, and it sounded like an order. Elvira peeled off her dive suit and toweled off her finely toned musculature with the candor typical of Mermen. “Care for the others. I will clean out the filters.”
As she slipped into a fresh suit, Rico realized he’d been aroused at the sight of Elvira’s pale body. Even her thumb-sized nipples seemed muscular in the chill. He would never approach Elvira, both of them knew that, but the surprise of his arousal reminded Rico of Snej, and how much he’d missed her.
Elvira’s plan was the lo
gical thing, he knew. He ticked off a list of priorities.
Ben and Crista, he thought. Keep them breathing. Monitor the radio, prepare for surprises by Vashon security.
Elvira swept past him to the hatch without so much as a glance. Rico fought the pitch and roll of the foil to the lockers and pulled out three more dive suits. He worked himself along by handholds in the bulkhead back to the galley. On his way, he listened to the crackle of the radio and the report from the overflights.
“Skywatch leader to base. Charges away. We have your fish, over.”
“Roger, Skywatch. We mark your position. Our bird is launched. ETA thirty minutes. Status report.”
Thirty minutes! Rico thought. Their bird must be a foil, and a fast one.
Not room for a lot of hardware or a lot of bodies—good. We might have a few surprises for them.
The radio continued to chatter about the condition of the Flying Fish and speculation on the occupants, but they were quickly out of range.
Rico bent over Ben and saw that he was immobile, his chest was not rising and falling, but his color wasn’t bad. He put his cheek to Ben’s mouth and detected the slightest breath. Checking the pulse at Ben’s neck, he noted that his partner’s heart was beating, but only a few beats per minute, His eyes were open, but still. They looked dry, so Rico opened and closed the lids a few times to lubricate them, then left them closed.
He unhooked the restraints and struggled to get Ben into one of the dive suits.
“We’re topside,” he said, hoping Ben could hear. “They threw some charges at the kelp, but I think it’s just surface damage. Elvira’s out there unclogging the intakes. Flattery’s people have a foil on our tail, they’ll be here in no time. We may have to go over the rail.”
He heard a groan from Crista Galli, and saw that she was trying to sit up against her restraints.
“Your girlfriend’s coming around,” he said. “I’ll get her into a suit, then get into the code book and let Operations know what’s going on. Everybody else seems to know where we are.”
He sealed Ben’s suit and inflated the collar, just in case. When Rico turned to Crista Galli, he saw that she was crying. Her red-rimmed, swollen eyes stared at Ben’s deathlike form on the galley deck. She seemed to be conscious and aware.
“Can you understand me?” Rico asked. In spite of her restraints, he remained well out of reach.
She nodded.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had this reaction before?”
“Yes.” Her voice was slurred. “Once. Before shots. I spit out pills.”
“What will happen next?”
She tried a shrug. “More same. Maybe seizure. Takes … while.” She added, in a slurred whisper, “Ben made me feel human being.”
Rico noticed that the pupils of her eyes dilated and constricted wildly. Must be some potent drugs, he mused. Damn that Flattery.
“We are in the open,” he explained, “and helpless. You need to have a dive suit on in case we go into the water.”
It flashed on him then what Flattery must’ve realized all along, what Operations warned in their instructions: “Do not let her into the water. Do not let her contact the kelp.” This was speculation, precaution. If Vashon security showed up, they’d have no other choice.
No point worrying about it.
“I can help you with it if you can’t do it yourself. I’m sorry to say this, but I’d rather not touch you,”
He held the suit out to her at arm’s length.
“Can’t get out harness,” she said.
Rico tapped the quick-release mechanism and she was free. He recoiled from her, partly as a reflex, partly because the foil pitched his way.
At this, she cringed away from him, her face even more pale and her jaw set. Some coordination was coming back.
“And what do you think I am?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
“I know that I don’t think … I can’t think that I do this …” She gestured limply at Ben. “It can’t be me!”
“It’s the drugs,” Rico said.
He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She needed reassurance, not another enemy.
“Remember, the drugs are Flattery’s doing, not yours.”
Her tears, the way she looked at Ben seemed like the genuine article.
But look at what happened to Ben, he cautioned himself.
“Get your suit on,” Rico said. “We don’t have much time.”
Crista had to slip out of her dress to don the dive suit. Rico knelt beside Ben, a hand on his forehead. He moved a little, and Rico took it for a good sign. His breathing was much stronger.
Crista did not seem modest at all, nor did she look like a monster. Probably spent so much time as a lab animal she didn’t have a chance to get shy.
Rico, like Ben, had been raised among Islanders, a generally shy lot. Rico admitted to himself that Crista had the best-looking legs he’d ever seen. Again, he thought of Snej back at Operations, and sighed. He planned to send a message to her, too, along with whatever he’d think of to say to Operations. He turned back to Crista Galli.
A little pale, he thought, even for her.
She seemed very weak, and struggled just to pull her suit on and fasten the seals. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Her forehead beaded sweat and her eyes were doing their dilation trick again.
“Can you get back into your harness?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said, her voice weaker now.
“It’s starting …”
She was drifting out again. She slumped down on her couch, eyes still open.
“Are you still with us?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she said, almost a sigh. “Yes.”
Rico still didn’t want to touch her. Whatever it was, it had nearly killed Ben and he wasn’t about to let the same thing happen to himself. He reached around her carefully and snicked the harness into place, then snugged it up with a jerk. He pushed the head of the couch back so that she lay flat. By then Crista was unconscious again.
Rico hurried into his own suit and noted that the seas had calmed somewhat. He heard the thump and scrape of Elvira at the hull ports, and hoped that the kelp wouldn’t set her hallucinating as it did some people. She seemed to have been all right before.
“It’d be just our luck,” he muttered to himself. “Best damned pilot in the whole damned world thinking her gauges are grapefruits.”
A very loud scrape, more of a long, slithering rasp across the top of the foil. Then another. It was the same serpentine sound that the kelp had made when it grabbed them. Rico jumped for the cabin, but he was too late.
The whole foil tipped on its side and he was slammed against the port bulkhead so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He saw, through the swarm of black amoebas across his vision, that they were airborne. He was jostled again, not so much this time, and as the bow of the foil tilted upward he saw them being pulled up into a mass of hylighter tentacles.
“Shit!”
He struggled to his knees and crawled the upended bulkhead to the command couch under the plaz. He could flip open a port and get a shot at it with his lasgun …
Then he saw how big this hylighter really was. He guessed it at a hundred meters across, with its two lead tentacles, which gripped the foil, at nearly that length. Even the smallest tentacle was thicker than Rico.
Already they dangled a hundred meters or so in the air, and rising. That pitch back there, he thought, it must’ve dumped a helluva ballast to be able to pick us up. Then he thought of Elvira, and scrambled for a view of the seas below. She was there, dive suit inflated, floating on her back. She must have seen him, but she didn’t wave.
“Damn!”
He couldn’t drop her a flare, he couldn’t try the engines. Either of these might touch off the thousands of cubic meters of hydrogen in the monster hylighter. It tucked the Flying Fish
upside-down against its great orange belly. Rico had never been this close to a hylighter before, but he’d seen them explode. A hylighter considerably smaller than this one had flattened the first tiny settlement at Kalaloch. Six hundred people cooked alive in that firestorm. He and Ben had covered that one, too.
The living were the worst. He remembered that Ben wouldn’t settle for the easy story, the inevitable films of cooked flesh on living bone, shaking chills, vomit and screams.
“Just shoot their eyes,” Ben had told him. “Leave the rest to me.”
Ben asked them about their lives, not about the blast. The dying and near-dying filled eighteen hours of tape before the dashers hit. Rico’s footage of the team fighting for their own lives against a dozen hunts of dashers in a feeding frenzy chilled the holo audience worldwide.
Rico saw that the coast was coming up fast and black weather pushed behind them. He hoped that the weight of the foil wouldn’t pull the hylighter too low to clear the gray bluffs ahead. He worked his way back to the cabin along the ceiling and sat below the command couches. This coliseum of a hylighter had a destination in mind, and that destination was land. If it didn’t bash them to bits against this cliff face it would blow them up inland.
Rico reviewed their odds and didn’t like what he came up with, though he was sure he’d rather clear the cliff than not. He wondered whether Operations had a code provision for this one. He hoped that Operations could beat Flattery’s people to Elvira. Rico refused to mull over the consequences if they didn’t.
Just off the cliff face the daily afternoon squall whipped up. The sky punched down on them without warning, clouds churning in their typical black and lasgun gray.
No lightning, Rico prayed to himself. We don’t need lightning.
They did need the cloud cover, this he knew. With good cover more overflights and Flattery’s spies in the Orbiter would be worthless. The ride got bumpier as the squall moved inland with them. Rico was close enough to the face of the bluff to see the markings on the back of a flatwing when an updraft sank his belly. They almost cleared the top, he saw that clearly, but the stern of the foil caught the lip of the bluff, cartwheeling the bow of their craft deep into the leathery belly of the hylighter.
The Ascension Factor Page 27
