Outlanders closing the c.., p.9
Outlanders Closing the Cosmic Eye, page 9
"There may be some degree of inbreeding involved, here, too," Hays said. "There's thirty-one of the inhabitants in here by my count, including ankle biters."
"If they had ankles," Reichert said.
"Even allowing some of them off doing duties in other parts of the station, and the five we dropped, that's what, fifty? Not much of a breeding population. As it is, I'm a little surprised they don't all have fifteen fingers."
"Some of them do have extras," Joe Weaver said softly. The others looked at him. He had moved to a table by a bulkhead and rested against it. "They display both polydactyl and syndactyl traits, if you look timely."
"And in English those mean...?" Grant prompted. "Extra digits, as he said, and fused digits," Brigid answered.
"I'm curious about the mercenaries," Weaver said. "Specifically, those thick metal bands around the backs of their skulls. I checked a couple out—they seem to be clamped to the bone itself, right through the scalp."
"That can't be what it's for," Robison said.
"It's a SQUID controller," Brigid said suddenly.
The others looked at her. Robison's expression went studiedly blank.
"It's not a term of derogation for a SEAL, frogman," Hays said. "Means Superconducting Quantum Interphase Device. SQUID, squid."
"Erica van Sloan used a variation of such a system to control her Chinese security troops in the Xian Pyramid," Brigid said. "Those were implants, though, I believe." "Erica van Nasty," Domi said with venom. She was not appreciative of the mutual interest between the newcomer to Cerberus—their former bitter foe—and her paramour, Lakesh. Not that any of her companions harbored very congenial thoughts toward the cold, calculating woman. "You mean Bates was controlling these dudes?" Reichert asked, voice getting a bit shrill at question's end. "Jesus. I almost feel sorry for 'em now."
"Be glad," Weaver said with a gravelly chuckle and sardonic grin, "he didn't decide to do it to us."
"These guys were just generic coldhearts," Grant said. "He wanted you guys for your initiative, not just to be remote-control drones."
"Why, Grant, that's the nicest thing you ever said about us," Robison said.
"Look how well it turned out for him," Domi said with a wicked grin.
Kane shrugged with his eyebrows. "Look at it this way—it shows us once again that Bates, smart as he is, can make mistakes. Big ones."
"Are you becoming an optimist, Kane?" Brigid asked.
Kane grunted. "Probably a touch of space sickness, like the kid's here," he said. "It'll pass."
"My friends," Teal said. They turned to see him hovering a few yards from them, holding almost negligently to a cable with two fingers. "We have come to a decision." Kane felt the tension wind up in all of them, as if they were bound by the same tightening wire. He let his right hand drift to the butt of his holstered handblaster.
"We have discerned our duty," the spud leader said, "and it is to serve you as the true foreseen ones. Our home and our services are at your disposal."
Chapter 11
"Doesn't look like much," Reichert said, pressing his nose to the armaglass viewport in the command center in the core of the hub. Outside lay the universe, the stars diamond chips in ultimate blackness, untwinkling and visible despite the lights within.
"What are you talking about?" Larry Robison demanded. "It's the whole Milky Way in all its splendor! Like no view you could ever get from inside Earth's atmosphere." Reichert shrugged. "But you can't see the planets," he complained. "Or at least they don't look any different from all the other little white lights. No big white-and-yellow Jupiter with a red eye, no Saturn with all gaudy gold rings." "In other words," Hays said, "you're upset because you don't see the solar system the way the Wright woman did, back at Cerberus."
Reichert turned to look at him. "Well, yeah."
"Scaling problem," Robison said. "The planets are too small to see from here. And if you could see several of them at once—for all I know you can—they'd be way too small to see any detail."
"How'd she do it, then?"
Robison shrugged. "I don't know how remote viewing works."
"If it does," Hays said "Maybe it was just a lucky guess." Kane floated between them and a central console where Brigid and Teal had their heads down peering at a screen. Off to another side Marina chirped with delight as she pointed out the faint fuzzy patches of nebulae and distant galaxies to Domi, who hung beside her nodding indulgently. Kane was inordinately amused to see the albino, whom he thought of as little more than a girl herself even though she had to have ten years on the Atshuara, playing the knowing adult.
The control center was a wedge of space set at what seemed to Kane to be the top of the large central hub, right on the rim. He thought of it as the top because the seats and consoles were fastened to the surface nearest the hub's center, which thereby became the floor. Brigid told him they were actually head down toward the plane ecliptic. Kane noted that the few compartments they'd seen so far tended to feature permanent or semi-permanent attachments—consoles, food-preparation areas, table—placed in an orientation consistent with a certain arbitrary up. More readily transportable items, such as mechanical units moved into a given area for a given task, tended to be anchored with flexible cables in totally random orientations. He guessed from that that the station had been built in such a way as to minimize spatial confusion among its original crew, who after all had been born and raised on Earth. Their descendants, if that's what the spuds were, had no such attachment to up and down.
"It appears Bates has encrypted his files," Brigid said from the console.
"What else did you expect, Baptiste?" Kane asked.
"Nothing," she said coolly. "Still, I had to check. It might be vital to find a record of what he has discovered using his interstellar mat-trans."
"Can't we bust the cipher?" Grant asked. "I am transmitting the encrypted files to Cerberus. Lakesh will be able to devote his full attention to cracking them."
"What happens now?" Kane asked.
"Fortunately, we know from the plans the vent-forms provided us that the interstellar gateway is similar to our own mat-trans units in that it retains the last location transmitted to in memory. We should be able to discover the coordinates of wherever Bates has gone."
"Then what?" Reichert asked. "Do we jump after the son of a...gun?"
"No, Mr. Reichert. That's far too risky. We must discover some way of getting information from the other side first. Perhaps a probe. After we examine the gateway itself we can consult with the redoubt—"
A Klaxon began its rising-falling electric cicada song.
"STATION DESTRUCT SEQUENCE initiated:" the sexless voice that had first challenged the newcomers announced, seemingly from the air all around them in the command center. "Detonation in two hundred seconds."
"You have got to be shitting me," Grant said. The big man sounded more disgusted than anything else. "What?" Reichert demanded. "What did we do?"
Teal's face had looked greenish-gray before. Now it looked like fresh wood ash on a burned log—only a few shades darker than Domi's skin. "It is the station’s mind!"
"Evidently Colonel Williams harbored a strong belief in the possibility hostile aliens might actually enter the system and seize the station," Brigid said. "Unless, of course, he was simply paranoid...."
Kane had already seized the first pack that came to hand and stuffed an one through the strap. The others did likewise. "That's real fine, Baptiste," he said. "Explain all you want. But run while you do it!"
She pushed off from the console toward her own pack, which hung with most of the others in a small alcove out of the way. Kane turned to Teal, who hung staring at the screen with his small round mouth open.
"You got to get your people out of here," he said. "Jump them back to Earth or come with us. Fast."
"But we have nowhere to go!" the spud leader said. "We cannot survive on a planetary surface!"
Kane's eyes met Brigid's. Her green eyes were wide, her cheeks ashen. He shook his head and headed away from the control center.
There wasn't anything to say.
The stellar gateway the spud techs had built lay at the far end of one of the two arms that sprang from the hub's center like an axle. Kane dived into the corridor toward it from the control center. Startled spuds zipped up and down it on their belt air-jets, calling to one another in high, keening voices.
Kane blanked them out. Hard man that he was, he couldn't bear to hear whatever they found to say.
Can't afford distraction, he told himself as he pushed through a hatchway that led to the arm. He knew it was a rationalization, no matter how true.
Arrays of handholds lined the passageway. It was wider than the one through which they had entered, a good four yards. Hatches leading to compartments arranged radially around the passage led into the bulkheads at regular intervals. Of more immediate import, lines of handholds ran longitudinally to the bulkhead with a heavy circular hatch in it that closed the far end.
"Use these grips!" he shouted, grabbing the first and propelling himself toward one set about four yards up the circular tunnel. "Don't—"
Domi did what he was about to tell them not to do: she gathered her strong slender legs and pushed off hard from the vestibule. She streaked past him, her bare head a white comet with her shadow-suit-armored body a small black tail. He swam grimly after. He saw her strike the far bulkhead. A moment later her shrill yip of pain reached his ears. Spud faces, bloated, big pored and fearful, poked out of opened hatches at him. Their mouths formed questions he would not permit himself to hear.
Had he believed in a benign god, he would have suggested prayer.
Domi thrashed in air a couple yards shy of the bulkhead like a speared catfish, clutching her right shoulder with her left hand. The odd angle of her right arm told him at once she had dislocated her shoulder. Continuing to use the handholds to keep his velocity down, he pushed off five yards short of the hatch, turned his body, touched down with the flexible shadow suit soles beneath his feet slapping the metal.
His legs flexed, absorbing his momentum. He had not quite adequately allowed for the mass of his pack; it peeled itself off his left shoulder, giving it a good wrench in the process, bounced down the backs of his thighs and slammed into the bulkhead with a crunch of impact. Hope nothing too vital broke, he thought.
“Sixty-five seconds to detonation. One minute..." Unacknowledged in the depths of his skull and his gut, he had harbored the dread that the entry to the jump chamber would be electronically locked and either require a password they didn't have, unless Baptiste's magic word worked again, or was simply locked against them by the destruct routine.
But from halfway down the passageway he had seen the hatch opened with a wheel. The bulkhead itself seemed a recent addition: he could see rough beads of weld along the juncture of the metal panel and the tubular passage, fancied he could smell the metallic tang that fingers in air when metal is heated to softening. Leaving Domi to twist, he grabbed the wheel and turned.
It didn't budge. His heart plummeted like a Deathbird in a power dive. Moaning with frustration, he tensed his every muscle and heaved.
The wheel now spun no readily only his grip on its cool surface kept him from launching himself into the passage wall. His legs flew out behind him and waved like banners in a brisk wind.
The others came swarming up like hybrids of fish and monkeys as he got his feet back on the bulkhead and hauled the hatch open. So adrenalized was he that he had to jump clear at the last moment to avoid being crushed by the heavy vault door. It clanged against the bulkhead so hard it seemed to make the passageway ring around them. Kane's escape leap fired him back up the corridor. To his astonishment Sean Reichert jackknifed and double- kicked him in the hip as he passed. Kane angled toward the far side of the passageway, where Major Mike Hays threaded one arm through a steel handhold and snagged Kane by the hood of his shadow suit with his free hand. Kane bounced off the curved wall.
"Wrong way, big guy," Hays told him, stepping all over Reichert's shouted apology for his rough treatment. "Damn," Kane said. He had given his forehead another nasty crack and had fireflies behind his eyes. He shook his head to clear it and followed his companions through the hatch he had opened.
The jump chamber stood on a platform braced on what appeared to be longitudinal structural members of the arm itself. It was set at a right angle to the arm's long was; when Kane swam into the larger-diameter compartment that contained it, he was upside down in relation to it. It looked much like the other mat-trans chambers he had known if not loved. The main difference was that instead of being walled in metal and armaglass it was enclosed by panels of what seemed to be translucent plastic, capped top and bottom with metal.
Grant was up by a wall holding a stanchion with one hand and Domi, thrashing and squalling like an injured cat, clamped to his chest by one arm. Brigid floated by the control console.
"Forty seconds," the voice tolled the time until doom. "Go, go, go!" Kane shouted. "Get inside now!"
Larry Robison put a hand on the small of Marina's back and launched her through the chamber's open door. She yelped in surprise. The Phoenix four followed with speed, one at a time to avoid getting hung up in the entry with their bulky packs. Grant and Domi came right behind.
Brigid still fidgeted at her control panel, trying to figure out what other coordinates Bates had jumped or sent things to before the last transmission. Kane just grabbed her around the waist, twisted his feet to brace against the panel and jumped.
Before Brigid could finish her outraged demand to let her go, they sailed through the open door of the interstellar mat-trans.
The door shut behind them. The space-twisting effect caught them in midflight. Kane was turned inside out and he felt his soul and hers poured out among stars like sugar spilled on a vast black plain....
Chapter 12
On the main screen in the Cerberus command center, a new star flared white.
The screen showed real-time feed from a Keyhole satellite tasked to watch, not the Earth surface scrolling endlessly beneath it, but an object so distant from the planet that it showed only as hints of dull gray-metal gleam and occluded blurs of distant stars.
And now it was gone. A nova flamed in its place. As the duty crew in the command center watched, too stunned even to gasp, it cooled perceptibly to yellow.
The watchers released their held breath in a low collective moan. "Data transmission from the Starwatch extra-ecliptic orbital facility has been cut off," Donald Bry said from the main panel. His usually pale expanse of forehead was as white as polished marble, and sweat beading his withdrawn hairline sparkled in the uneasy light of the fluorescent tubes overhead. He had never been particularly friendly to the redoubt's star operatives, but his voice trembled with the announcement.
He turned to stare at Lakesh, who stood just behind his chair looking up at the screen. The scientist's own dark face had gone the hue of wood ash.
"There's no doubt," Bry said. "They're gone." As he spoke the new star on-screen faded from view.
Without a word Lakesh turned and strode from the room.
A TINY BLUE SUN SANK toward mountains fringing a vast red plain like the teeth of a barracuda's jaw, casting orange- edged shadows across sand and stone.
Crushing weight pinned Kane facedown in warm sand. It smelled dry but otherwise strange, like some kind of exotic spice with a faint metallic tang. Only by rolling his eyes up in his head was he able to see the sunset.
He realized then that what was squatting like a troll on his shoulders was his own mass. A mere few hours under virtual weightlessness in Starwatch had gotten his body unused to gravity. "Hell, I don't even know what the gravity is on this world. Or whatever the fuck thing I'm lying on. "Isn't that kind of harsh language to greet a brave new world with?" a voice asked. Kane swiveled his eyeballs in sockets that seemed lined with broken glass. Larry Robison was sitting a few yards away. The slanting sunshine was as garish as a spotlight on his bearded face.
Kane realized he'd spoken his thoughts aloud. He tried to push himself up off the ground. A seismic wave of nausea rolled over him, soles to crown. All he managed to do was roll over with a loud moan.
"Look on the bright side," Sean Reichert's voice said from somewhere out of view. Kane felt an overwhelming desire to smash that plump olive-skinned face with his fist. Or he would have if an earnest desire to throw his guts up wasn't overriding all other sensation right then. "We didn't blow up." "That's the bright side?" Kane heard Grant say. He sounded the way Kane felt. Kane felt a certain sympathy for his partner. Although Grant was markedly less psychically sensitive than Kane, and so suffered less from certain disturbing jump phenomena, he had a more violent physical reaction to the unnatural stresses of the jumps. Reichert sniffed loudly. "There's air!" he said brightly. "You did not just quote Flesh Gordon," Hays said from somewhere out of Kane's field of vision. "Oh, crap. I've sure felt better."
"Nothing like a trip through the mix-master of misery to give you perspective,"
Larry Robison said. "How's Domi?"
"Hurt, you prick!" something like a panther screech responded to him. "Arm all jacked outta socket! Lemme pull yours loose, see how you feel! Pull something else loose for you, had tweezers!"
"At least we know Domi’s all right," Reichert said. "Hasn't forgotten how to cuss or anything."
Kane sat up. His head felt as if it were filled with viscous liquid that sloshed toward the front of his skull as he arrested his motion, then rebounded queasily. "Great," he said. "I think my brains are finally pureed."
A scrap of memory floated up into his consciousness, from the soul torment of jump. A face beloved, twisted in torture... "Baptiste!"
"Here, Kane." Her voice rasped slightly. "I'm examining Domi. Or would be if she'd lie still."
Kane looked around. They had landed distributed in a rough circle. Everybody was present and stirring, if not exactly turning handsprings.
