We wanted to get out of the building and go toward the ocean end of the tarmac where the Invidi ships stood. Hopefully they’d expect us to head the other way, to the barrier gates. We reached the exit at the end of the building without incident.
“Keep going,” said Murdoch through gritted teeth behind me. We slipped outside.
Evening had closed in early and a thin rain fell from the dark gray sky. On our right, tendrils of steam stirred at the heat of the explosion site. Ahead, the tall, rounded shapes of the Invidi ships lay in shadow. Lights flooded the main area to the left and behind us, but fortunately this made our area darker. Beyond the faint hiss of rain rose the sound of voices and the rumble of engines. A sentry on the far corner of the building looked out at the lights. As we watched he talked into his collar, shook his head, and paced a little. The air had a wet, metallic smell.
Our shoes became soaked immediately and squelched on the wet asphalt. I looked back. The sentry had turned and was walking to the door. How long before the alarm sounded?
Five Invidi ships in all. Three lozenge-shaped shuttles, any of which we could probably manage, and two single-pilot yachts. The shuttles might not carry a jump drive, so the yachts were a better bet. The closest one towered at least twenty meters over us on the longer axis of its elongated, bulbous diamond shape.
We crouched in the shadow of one of the shuttles beside the yacht. Hope they don’t have proximity alarms.
“What are you going to do if they’re inside?” Murdoch murmured in my ear.
His body radiated warmth against my shoulder and hip, welcome after the cold rain.
“I think one or the other yacht will be empty. We know An Serat was the leader of the expedition. He should have his own ship. And he’s probably still over at the main building.”
“And if he’s not?”
“We can ask him to come out and talk to us, then run past him. We can threaten him with the gun...”
“This,”—he shook the weapon—“is not going to frighten him.”
“All right, so we ask him to come out and talk. But I still think they’re empty.”
Murdoch’s voice hardened. “Let’s get on with it. Which one?”
I pointed to the closer one.
He shrugged and took up a position farther down the shuttle’s side, from which he would be able to see anybody coming from the buildings.
No lights glowed on the ship, either outside or inside. I stubbed my toe without injury on spongy material that spread in a doughnut shape around the base. I would have to clamber onto it to get close to the ship. Where was the entry hatch? Which part presented to an airlock?
Cold rain spattered against my face. The outer hull of the ship felt cool to the touch, but not as cold as a metal surface would have been, nor was it smooth. It was scored with myriad tiny trails.
I edged quickly all the way around the ship, running my hands up and down as I went. No levers, switches, handles, or even joins, other than the strange pattern. I was soaked and shivering and my hands were so numb I probably couldn’t have opened a hatch anyway.
“What’s wrong?” Murdoch loomed out of the dark.
“W... won’t open,” I said, teeth chattering. “Nothing on the surface.”
“Bloody hell.” His voice sounded as if he was looking the other way.
I looked back too, and saw more light than before streaming around and under the Invidi shuttles. Floodlights around the building now, not just on the tarmac. The sound of engines and shouting. They’d found out we were gone.
I ran to the other yacht, tripping over the spongy base and nearly falling flat. Murdoch followed more carefully.
Again I felt the surface of this next yacht, the tiny trails in a material that felt more like stone than metal. But this one had a different texture, harder. Or perhaps it was my numb fingers.
Not far away, a shrill whistle blew and dogs barked. I pounded on the ship’s hull, not caring now if there was an Invidi inside or not. The men who set the bomb that killed Will and the men pursuing us with guns seemed far more alien.
“Let us in! Please.”
The hull shuddered under my palms. Surely I didn’t have the strength to shift it? Its surface crawled—all the patterns moved, as though a trillion threadlike worms wriggled against my hands. I jerked back.
“What is it?” Murdoch’s voice by my ear.
“It moved. Like...”
My voice trailed away. Above us yawned a round, dark break in the hull surface. I reached up and felt the lower rim, level with the top of my head. The edge was smooth. I couldn’t feel anything in the space beyond, although the air seemed warmer.
“Give me a leg up.” I stuck one heel back at Murdoch.
Nothing for a moment, then his warm, firm grip closed on my ankle. He put his shoulder under my knee and heaved. Behind us the growl of engines grew louder. Jeeps.
I levered myself into the Invidi ship and rolled over onto a hard surface that sloped slightly downward. It was warm inside, and dry. The surface was faintly warm under my hand. Then a dim golden light grew, seeming to come from within the walls, floor, and ceiling of a small cabin. It gave me a curious feeling of being exposed.
The Invidi owner couldn’t have been comfortable in here, there was barely five meters breadth or height.
Murdoch’s head appeared suddenly as he jumped, then hung with his elbows over the rim inside. “You okay?”
“There’s nobody here. Get in.”
His head disappeared, his knuckles on the rim whitened with strain, then he shot upward and his upper body wriggled into the cabin. I heaved the back of his trousers and he swung his legs inside.
The only thing that looked faintly familiar was a chest-high band of indentations and lines on one wall. Otherwise, all the surfaces were the same rubbery, slightly porous material as the base outside, but warm to the touch. A welcome warmth, after the cold and wet.
“There’s nothing here,” panted Murdoch. He looked around the narrow space.
There was a shout outside, too close.
“Halley, they’re nearly here.”
I turned quickly to the band of indentations. I laid my palm on one after the other, searching for initialization confirmation. At the third try, the lighted surfaces pulsed slowly. Brighter patches and flecks flickered over the walls and ledges. At the edges of hearing, a hum began. The place where my hand had just been glowed in the shape of my palm. I touched it again and snatched my hand away with a cry.
The surface had prickled like an electric shock, but that was not what surprised me; with the physical contact came another kind of touch. I’d felt something travel up my arm, dissipate, then stroke the inside of my head. Not an invasive voice like the Seouras or the dreamlike state of Henoit’s presence. It was more a question:
Hello? Are you ready?
“What the...” Murdoch swore as the floor bucked upward and deposited us in a huddle against the wall where the control panel pulsed.
“I think it’s activated.” My voice was muffled against his shoulder. I pushed him off me and found that the floor was now a wall and the hatch had disappeared. The band of indentations had flattened down and out from the wall to form an obvious consolelike surface at a little less than waist height.
We couldn’t hear anything from outside; the hum settled into an uneven murmur that reminded me of a cat’s purring. The surface beneath us vibrated finely.
Murdoch stood up gingerly and patted the wall. “Where’s the hatch?”
We both sprawled headlong as the cabin lurched again.
“What the hell is this thing?” He held my elbow as I got to my knees in front of the “console.”
My handprint now glowed by my face. “Put your hand here.”
“Here?” The glow disappeared under his wide palm.
“Do you feel anything?”
“Sort of a buzz. Look, we don’t have time to play...Oh.” He’d realized the incongruity of a human handprint on an Inv
idi ship.
“It appeared when I touched the console a second ago.” Now that I looked properly, the pattern of indentations on the console seemed familiar. The rhythm of lights was regular, small blue ones intermingled with larger orange flashes. I’d seen flashes like that on a console somewhere, but not recently. It wasn’t a good sign, I seemed to remember.
“Stabilize internal inertial compensation,” I said loudly. Nothing changed.
“No audio,” said Murdoch. “Aren’t these ships supposed to be customized to the pilots?”
“They are in our time, but these are a century older. We wouldn’t get inside an Invidi ship in our time, because they only open to the owner. Maybe Invidi cloning techniques aren’t so advanced at this stage.”
“Is that what they do?” Murdoch looked faintly ill. “I thought they just put character markers in the ship’s interface.”
I shook my head. “As far as I know, they start with the same basic genetic material as themselves. You know, like we’re closer genetically to an Earth tree than we are to any alien humanoid.”
I put my hand on the palm print and shut my eyes, resisting the urge to jerk it away from the initial shock and tingle. Think nice thoughts. Hello, I’m here and I want to go home.
Nothing happened, and I wondered if the first time had been a mistake.
“When you said let’s steal an Invidi ship and go home, I did assume you’d been inside one before,” said Murdoch. “You must have found out something in all those years of tinkering. Didn’t Calypso give you a hint?”
The indentations on the panel re-formed themselves in my mind and I saw that the raised parts between them were what mattered. A seemingly random scattering of triangles. I traced them with my fingers. The orange flashes grew stronger and came closer together. Thruster control, I thought. We want to go up now.
“They’re probably surrounding us,” said Murdoch.
A door opened in my mind and an avalanche of sensations and information in unfamiliar forms swept over me irresistibly and I felt myself drowning but couldn’t do anything to stop it…
Then I was gasping and coughing on the floor of the cabin. Murdoch sat back on his heels, chest heaving. He grabbed my wrist and held his thumb over the pulse.
“This might be... more difficult than... I thought,” I panted, still dazed from an overload of the incredible. For a moment I’d felt... I didn’t know what I’d felt. “What’s wrong with you?”
He stared. “I just gave you mouth to mouth. You choked and stopped breathing for Chrissakes.”
“Oh.” My lips did feel numb. “Thank you.”
I tried to gather my thoughts, but normal associations wouldn’t come. Everything that was me, Halley, floated somewhere just out of reach, and the only thing grounding me was my attachment to the ship. “It’s... some kind of mental link. Helps us use it.” I retrieved my wrist from his grip and got shakily to my knees.
“Bloody hell.” Murdoch leaned back and rubbed his face in despair. “We haven’t got time for this. The army’ll be swarming all over the place out there.”
“I don’t know...” I stood up carefully—for a moment I thought we’d begun to lose gravity, but then realized I was tilting sideways as I stood. The triangular pattern and the lights, where had I seen them before? I’d asked the ship for thruster control.
“We might have left the ground. Maybe the atmosphere, too.”
“What?” He scrambled to his feet and stared at the panel with me. “How do you know?”
“A feeling. When I was, er, connected. And I also have the feeling this is Serat’s ship.”
“Shit.” He stared at nothing for a moment, then began to prowl around the space, touching the walls and snatching his hands away as if worried by what he might set off. “I wish we had a viewscreen.”
“Invidi mightn’t use viewscreens. Plenty of species aren’t as visual as we are.” I stroked the edges of the more obvious triangles. It seemed to be the right thing to do, but I couldn’t think why. Edges give you the basic controls, said a voice inside me, don’t you remember?
Part of the panel glowed in a new pattern. It was like looking at the bones and veins in your own hand held up to a strong light. Little azure pulses of synaptic energy zipped past.
Viewscreen, viewscreen... Up there, on the right-hand side. Leave your hand on the raised section, it will sense you’re there. The voice was that of Jon Heggit, my second in command when I’d been head of the Jocasta reconstruction project. I could hear his husky, spooky voice as he leaned over my shoulder and told me what he’d found in one of the completed center rooms. A Tor control panel. One that worked.
We’ve worked out a couple hundred basic interface commands. Amazing stuff. It learns so quickly what we want. His enthusiasm led him to ignore one of the precautions we’d evolved for dealing with Tor systems—always assume there was a booby trap. And he died.
“Did you do that?” Murdoch stared at an oblong window filled with stars. “You were right, we did leave the atmosphere. Looks like we’ve left orbit, too.” He stomped on the deck. “Gravity field is on.” When I didn’t reply, “Something wrong?”
“Bill, this isn’t an Invidi ship.”
“Whaddaya mean, it’s not an Invidi ship? You said it’s Serat’s ship... No sign of them following us, is there?”
I touched another couple of triangles, cautiously now. “I don’t think so.”
“What kind of ship is it, then?”
“It looks like a Tor console.”
“Must be a mistake,” he said flatly. “The Invidi were at war with the Tor for years. That’s how Earth got Jocasta, when the Tor lost.”
“I know that. But I worked on the early stages of Jo-casta, remember? I know what Tor interfaces looked like. And they looked pretty much like this. This,”—I waved my hand over the console in front of us—“responds like a Tor interface would. That’s how I got your viewscreen.”
“What about this mental link thing, then?” He frowned. “Nobody ever mentioned that about Tor systems.”
“No. But sometimes we wondered. Sometimes when we tried to outsmart a trap, it would seem like the system knew what we were thinking. We lost so many people in those first months.”
He stared at me for a moment, then ran his hand over his head helplessly. “Last time we were in a Tor ship, it was holding the Seouras hostage and tried to kill us both.”
“That was different.”
“You hope.”
“It’s An Serat’s ship, Bill, I can feel it. So maybe he’s modified Tor technology for some reason. Maybe this is a special model.”
“Then he’s really going to be pissed off to have to wait for a century to get it back. That is where you’re heading, isn’t it?” he added. “To the jump point?”
“Yes, but I can’t give such specific directions through this console. And I don’t know how to activate the jump drive. Flatspace engines are no problem—I think. But to find the drive connection is another matter. I have to try the link again.”
He swallowed. “Why don’t I give it a try?”
“You did, nothing happened...” The panel tingled under my fingers. Something touched the edges of my mind. Inquisitive, interested.
Murdoch closed his hand over mine, lifting it above the panel.
“Wait. What am I supposed to do if you...” His fingers traced a circle on the inside of my wrist. “Dying’s not good for you.”
He had a point. A sore band was still tight around my chest and tiny bright dots danced around the cabin when I moved my head too fast.
“Watch me, then. See if we can talk while I’m doing it. If it looks like it’s too much, break the link.”
He frowned with frustration but we had no other choice; we had to know how to tell the ship where to go. And quickly, too, before the Invidi either followed us or asked their mothership to intercept us.
Besides, I’d been waiting to get inside an Invidi ship since my first days in the Engineeri
ng Corps, more than half my life. And this was as far inside an Invidi ship as anyone could possibly get. At least, a semi-Invidi ship.
I readied my hand over the panel.
Murdoch nodded.
This time no flood of information overwhelmed me, merely a slow trickle of images and concepts. I was conscious of Murdoch’s presence through a thick haze. He was speaking and his hand shook my shoulder. I felt the movement, but not his touch.
“... hear me?”
My mouth felt clumsy and far away. “I can hear you.”
“Where are we?”
The moment I heard his words I knew the answer.
“We’re waiting. Between where we were and where we want to go.” Nothing as flat as coordinates; I “knew” our exact position in the solar system right down to the chemical composition of the dust outside the ship and the tingle of radiation against its skin.
Murdoch’s voice an insistent buzz. “Can we get home?”
Home. Home was Jocasta. The time—after Murdoch left.
The ship understood immediately. It was as easy as thinking where we wanted to go.
Eighteen
Maybe not that easy.
It hurt. What began as an ache behind my eyes grew and grew until I had to talk to keep concentrating. Half the time talking to myself, or the ship, the rest of the time to Murdoch. The ship didn’t mind, but Murdoch got edgier and edgier.
“It feels like we’ve been in here about an hour.” He fiddled nervously with the viewscreen controls and brought up a succession of images from outside the ship. Four views showed only dark space broken by a few points of light. Another was filled with bright gases. “I hope this thing has decent radiation shielding.”
“It must. The Invidi have been in space long enough to think of something as elementary as that.” I rubbed my neck where the Seouras implant felt tight. It felt like the pain was centered there.
“I meant, shouldn’t we be at the jump point soon? Judging from what I can see of our position.”
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