The Fenris Device

by Brian Stableford

  Keep smiling, the wind’s silent voice said to me, we’re winning. The Cicindel is safe. Alone we did it.

  Can I have my body back now? I asked.

  I know you’re not going to like this, he said, but I don’t think that’s wise. Of course, if you cut up rough, I’ll have to let you have it, but if you want my sincere advice you’ll stay exactly where you are and let me handle this.

  Screw your sincere advice, I said. You always sincerely reckoned you’d be a better me than I am. I want my body back, and you better give me reasons why I shouldn’t have it.

  We’re still in trouble, remember? This ship is heading for God knows where under its own steam, following a program we know nothing about and carrying a cloud of absolute destruction a million miles across. Now, that isn’t funny, and we have to find a way of switching this thing off. I’ve read these labels and I’ve looked at these tapes, and I just don’t know. We need help to sort this out and there’s only one place where the help we need is available right now. That’s the Cicindel. I don’t know how much they know about this ship, but they knew enough to send out a warning, even if they did send it to the wrong places. I can talk to them.

  What about Stylaster? I demanded. He surely knows more than anyone else.

  Stylaster is going to want to know who I am, he pointed out. What do I tell him?

  The truth.

  You know I can’t do that. If any of this bunch find out it’s a human that’s clicking at them they’re apt to slap up their wall of silence. The guy I’ve got now knows something is wrong, but at least he thinks I’m a Gallacellan. On this basis, we can deal. Who knows what might happen if the truth gets out? Let me play it, Grainger, please. You must see that it’s our best chance. Maybe our only chance. If we don’t find out how to control this ship we have no chance whatsoever of getting back down to Johnny and the captain.

  All right, I said—reluctantly, but what choice had I? It’s your baby. But just do me one favor. There’s no point in us playing musical chairs, so I’ll stay put. But contact Nick and Johnny. Let’s at least find out whether they’re alive. And tell them to stay put.

  I can’t, he said.

  What do you mean can’t?

  The caller, he said, it’s jammed. Maslax broke a switch. I can call the Cicindel, but that’s all. I can’t call the Gallacellans on Iniomi. I can’t call the Swan or Pallant or the human base on Iniomi.

  All right, I said. All right. Just go ahead. Don’t mind me. I’ll just sit here and watch. Just get us out of this mess.

  My body turned around, and I found myself looking at Eve. She stood beside Maslax, who was crumpled up like a rag doll, having lost interest in the whole affair. She had the gun in one hand and the small remote-control bomb trigger in the other. She had an air of astonished patience. She had just been watching me do the impossible.

  “It’s OK,” I heard my voice say. “We’re safe, for now. We have time in hand to sort things out.”

  She just went on staring, for a moment. It seemed oddly incredible to me that she didn’t automatically notice that it was someone else using my voice and not me. But how could she possibly suspect?

  “Nobody speaks Gallacellan,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I heard myself say, “nobody speaks Gallacellan. Once we’re out of this, you can wonder how we got out for the rest of your life. For now, let’s just go on doing the impossible quietly, hey?”

  It was a perfect imitation. I had to admit that. My voice, my dryness, my slightly aggressive manner. All just perfect. He was more like me than I am—on an off day.

  My eyes swung back to the instrument panel, and began to scan.

  I clicked furiously. The call circuit clicked back. I knew we were in for a very long session, but I was damned if I was going to sleep. Instead, I reflected on one or two of the wrong conclusions I’d jumped to. There was one hell of a lot packed into a short space of time. Ordinarily, I am a top-class conclusion-jumper, and very accurate. But to err is human, and everybody’s talent lets him down sometimes.

  It was all a matter of misunderstanding. The Gallacellan/human wall of silence. The failure to communicate. I knew a bit better now. I could even see why I had been wrong about the Fenris device. The Varsovien was an emigration ship—that much was obvious. Not a warship at all. I had concluded that she would not be armed because I had been thinking of her simply as “Gallacellan.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an enemy to arm her against. A simple enough flaw in reasoning. But this ship dated from the Gallacellan wars, when there were Gallacellans and Gallacellans. This magnificent ship wasn’t the pride and joy of the entire race—it was the ultimate escape route planned and constructed by one side in the war. It hadn’t been used. Either that particular side won, or peace came and the Gallacellans decided to patch up their civilization together. Of course the Varsovien was armed. With the ultimate weapon—the ultimate defensive weapon. The people on the ship couldn’t fire it in anger—it was a faculty built into the reactive mechanism of the ship. The Varsovien was a gigantic cocoon—a generation ship which could look after itself and house a million people—maybe more. If left alone, it would simply have transferred and gone. If attacked, well, it would stick around for a while and let the attackers come. Then, after they’d had their fill, transcee and off we go. Typically Gallacellan, now I came to think about it. A prey species’ ultimate dream. Perfect armor. The predators could do all they wanted—to no avail. The perfect passive resistance. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

  That left just two questions: Why did Stylaster’s Gallacellans want the Varsovien back? And why did the Cicindel contingent want to stop them? But those were questions of purely academic interest. A third question—a much more urgent and important question—dawned on me while I dwelt idly on the first two.

  Prey mentality. Perfect armor. The ultimate defense. The Varsovien would have no switch for turning the Fenris device on. Would it have one for turning it off?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There’s one way, said the wind. Just one way.

  It’s just not one, I told him. There has to be an easy way. Damn it, this thing’s nothing more than a machine. It works with circuits and wires and networks and synapses just like any other machine. All we have to do is break one wire, one synapse. All we need is just one wrench in the right part of the works. Your way is just pure madness. .

  Look, said the wind, without as much patience as I might have shown if the relative positions were reversed—that is to say, normal—this is a big ship. This is a very, very big ship. It may be a machine, but it is a machine on a scale you have never, ever, envisaged in all your life. Yes, it needs only one pair of wire cutters or one wrench. But we just don’t have access to the right wire or the right works. The guys on the Cicindel are good, but hell, they’re a million miles away from a ship they’ve never seen, talking to a linguistic incompetent. Sure, if we had three weeks or a month, we could get enough information to them. They could work things out. They could talk us through it. We could find the tools and the plans and we could do the work with pinpoint accuracy. But, Grainger, this ship is accelerating. In fifty minutes or less it is going to make tachyonic transfer and cut us off from the Cicindel. Maybe forever. Do you want to go to Andromeda? Do you want to take a million-mile bomb to Andromeda?

  But what you’re suggesting, I said, still bewildered, is blowing up the ship.

  I’m proposing to do just what you want, said the wind. Cut the circuit. Stop the machine. Turn the Fenris device off and keep the Varsovien in normal space. As far as the people on the Cicindel—and as far as I myself—can see there is just one way to be sure of doing that in the time available and that is to burn out the brain that’s coordinating the machine. They can tell me exactly how to do that from right here, and they can tell me exactly how much time we have in hand to get out of this room, off of this deck, and deep enough into the bowels of the ship so that we aren’t burned out with it. Now is that or isn’t it t
he only thing we can do?

  What about Johnny? I said. What about the captain? Who’s going to bring them back, if we only have standard ships? Are you going to go down in the Cicindel and get them out? Are you?

  That, of course, was a silly question.

  If necessary, he said, that’s exactly what I’ll do. What good are we going to be to Johnny and Nick if we’re in a flying coffin on our way out of the galaxy? We have to take our problems one at a time, and the one we have at this time is: How do we get out of here? And there’s only one way we know. Just one. Burn the brain and run like hell. As soon as the defense mechanism cuts out the Cicindel will come in and pick us up. They’ll know exactly where we’ll be. Then we can worry about another drop to Mormyr. Maybe Nick can bring the ship up. Maybe we can get the Sister Swan operational in time. Maybe the Gallacellans have a ship we can at least try it in. But first, we’ve got to be free to try it. We have to save ourselves first. You’re arguing with the inevitable.

  And I was, of course. There was no way of turning the Fenris device off—not just like that. In the time we had available, there was only one method—outright brutality. We bad to cripple the whole damn ship. I had my suspicions about the helpful people aboard the Cicindel—they hadn’t wanted the ship lifted, maybe they had a vested interest in her being destroyed. Maybe they were holding out on us. Maybe there was an easy way, apart from just cutting loose and blasting. But how could we know? We were in their hands. At their mercy. They were calling the shots. We had no alternative but to do as they told us, and wait in some cubby-hole a mile or two downstairs for them to come in and pick us up. And suppose it didn’t work? Suppose the Fenris device didn’t cut out? For our next trick....

  But it was pointless worrying about that. It was pointless worrying at all. We had to do what we had to do.

  I felt my body begin to get back into my suit, and I heard my voice tell Eve to do the same. Then I heard me tell Maslax that he could either come with us under his own steam or not at all, because Eve and I would have enough to do carrying Ecdyon. Dragging Ecdyon, more like.

  Maslax made no reply, and the wind wasn’t wasting any time waiting for him to show some signs of interest. My body was already back at the console, clicking away into the speaker.

  We turned away abruptly.

  “Right,” said my voice. “Let’s get Ecdyon into the perambulating cubicle.”

  Eve and my body took an arm each, and began to heave. I supposed that if the wind was finished clicking now I could ask to take over again, but I knew he wouldn’t see it that way. This was his show—it was a maneuver he’d initiated—he had some right to see it through. I had to concede him that, like it or not.

  We managed to bundle Ecdyon through the door into the smaller chamber. He stirred, and made some awkward noises that might have been the Gallacellan equivalent of cries of pain, but he didn’t show any signs of being aware of what was going on, despite the fact that all four of his eyes were still open.

  I felt my body hesitate for just a moment, then I found thyself kneeling over Maslax, doing up his suit. I didn’t bother fastening his helmet—just hauled him up by the scruff of the neck, threw him into the elevator with Eve and the Gallacellan, and then threw the helmet in after him.

  “Throw me the gun,” said my voice, to Eve.

  She complied, and the wind let go a few last clicks at the caller. Then we backed up into the doorway, he took careful aim, adjusted the beam, and launched a needle-like ray into the wall just below the console.

  Then there was more waiting, while the needle ate its way through the wall, and the chamber filled with smoke. An alarm bell went off close at hand, and we jumped spasmodically. But the wind lost the aim for only a fraction of a second. Then white fire began gouting out of the hole in the wall, and electric sparks, and a series of sharp, crackly explosions. I felt my left hand grip the door and my body poise itself to jump. I felt my eyes get hot, and vision was lost in a dazzling glare.

  Then we leaped backward, slammed the door, slammed the door of the elevator, and punched a button. We didn’t need to pause to wonder which button. The wind was really on his toes.

  For one terrible moment I thought we weren’t going to move, and then I felt the gentle tug of sidewise acceleration as we began our retreat, amid the ever-increasing clamor of alarm bells. I was listening for a big bang, not knowing whether to hope or expect to hear it immediately or when we were well away from the hot spot. Without my sense of time, the waiting was horribly distorted. We seemed to be stuck inside a single moment, moving inside a tiny, featureless cylinder, while all around us a machine as big as a world went mad. If the Gray Goose had been an ant attacking a whale, then what were we, inside the whale? Not Jonah, for sure. Bacteria, maybe. Perhaps not even that. Allergens setting off a vast chain reaction affecting the whole body. Tiny molecules sending the Varsovien into anaphylactic shock.

  We transferred from the horizontal conveyor to the vertical. Again, we took Ecdyon through first, and again we had to go back to carry Maslax. He was absolutely inert—not dead, not even unconscious. Completely comatose.

  Down we went.

  I knew it would be much farther down than across, that the descent would take far longer. But I still couldn’t feel the waiting. I was still isolated from the sequence of events, suspended like a fly in amber in a little shell of nothing that owned neither time nor space. I was nowhere. And yet I existed. I was a part of it all, if not a participant. I was there.

  My body kicked Maslax a few times—quite without malice—trying to remind him that life was still going on. Eve was busy looking at Ecdyon, trying to find signs of life.

  The alarm bells went on and on, as if the whole ship was filled with nothing but alarm bells, and still the big bang had not happened. Still we were dropping. I was conscious of movements—my own and Eve’s, but I was taking little notice. The movements seemed meaningless. A few words floated past, but I didn’t hear them. I had determined previously that I was going to listen and remember every single word that the wind used my voice to say, but that seemed unimportant now.

  Then we stopped again, and I felt my arm reach out to grip the door handle. I felt my brain register something that made my hand hesitate. The handle which had begun to turn stopped, and my grip on it became suddenly intense. I tried to regain a temporal integration with events, just some connection, so that I would know what was happening, and what was wrong.

  I heard my voice say: “There’s no air out there.”

  It made no immediate impact. I was suited. I had my helmet on. I was breathing my own air, from my own backpack. What did it matter what was in the corridor or the other chamber?

  Then I remembered Ecdyon. His suit was holed.

  I needed all of that timeless instant then. Time stopped dead while I isolated myself from it and tried to see. I could feel the tightness of my hand’s grip against the door—a grip the wind would not relax. I knew that the decision he was making would take less than a second. He had no more time. We had to get to a place of safety before the bang and the cut-out of the ship’s functions. We had to get into an airlock, from which the Cicindel could rescue us. If the power cut out and the lift fell...they’d never find us. We’d be dead.

  I could almost feel the thoughts jumbled into that split second—almost pick them up one by one and read them. Ecdyon: seven feet tall. No other suit. No patch. Ecdyon: dead.

  My hand turned the handle, and opened the lock.

  “Open the other door!” my voice howled at Eve.

  My body dived to Ecdyon’s side, took a firm hold, and even while Eve was still opening the door we were pulling him through. Eve went back for Maslax. She’d already put his helmet back on during the descent. He was all right.

  I think, if she hadn’t gone back, the wind would have left him. I think the wind would have opted to save those extra few seconds by shutting the airlock door as quickly as possible and flooding the place with air from the pressure-syste
m just that fraction sooner. But Eve went back, seconds wasted while she was clumsily pushing him through the lock. She had neither the strength nor the speed for a smooth operation. But we got him through, we got the door shut, and we threw the air-valve open.

  And nothing happened. The tank was empty. One of the missiles from the Gray Goose had cracked the supply system, and the air had gone out through the outer skin. Including the air from the lock.

  Ecdyon died there, on the floor of the chamber.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  People do die. It’s one of the facts of—ha, ha—life. A lot of people died in the Halcyon Drift, including Alachakh, who was my friend. A couple of guys got plugged on Rhapsody, for no very good reason. Men died on Pharos. If the chances had turned out a little different on Chao Phrya, people could have been killed there, too. Ferrier was dead, and his girl. The crew of the Gray Goose was dead.

  By all this, I remained relatively unaffected.

  But to have a man die beside me—to have him die as a direct consequence of my own actions—that was different. In a way, I was even responsible for the fact that his suit was holed in the first place. If I’d chosen to warn Maslax about the orientation of the artificial gravity field, the gun need never have gone off.

  I still held that gun. I still had it in my hand. Throughout the entire sequence—opening doors, pulling bodies about, pressing buttons—I had never let go of that gun, as if my life depended on my hand sticking to it, never letting it go.

  So maybe it was the wind. What difference did that make?

  None at all.

  I don’t like people dying. I don’t even like people getting hurt. If it happens close at hand, it makes me sick. I felt a little sick then. Nothing comparable had happened to me since the Javelin went down, since I failed to save the ship, since I failed to flip the ship, and since the crash had killed Micheal Lapthorn, who was also—I guess—my friend.