"You must return to Nobelanin."
Kriahm glares at him.
"You must also refrain from contacting anyone while on your way," Amharr adds quickly. "The organisms are a high risk to all Raimerian technology as far as we know, and must be treated with caution. Since you are unable to counteract the infestation on the Kaluvian, you are a liability to any other vessel you come in contact with. Including mine, as we speak."
"No," Kriahm thunders. "I refuse to leave in the middle of an assessment. On the eve of a containment!"
"I have not asked for your opinion. Return to Nobelanin at once and deliver the Kaluvian to adequate investigation. These organisms represent a far greater threat than the humans."
"Even so, you believe you're equipped to deal with a containment by yourself?"
"I will delay the containment until you return."
Kriahm's duplicate is silent while its owner considers. "That may take a considerable amount of time. I will need to take detours around the patrolled sections to avoid contact with other vessels."
"I will use the time to retrieve more information."
"You seem to already have adequate information to warrant the containment. Why study the neophytes further?"
"That is none of your concern."
"Why so nervous?" Kriahm asks. "You act strangely. What is your interest in all this?"
"I will not explain my decisions to you."
"Why not? Am I not here to learn? Is there something you don't want me to know?"
The stinging in Amharr's palms is beyond painful. He must get rid of Kriahm as quickly as possible. He can barely stand.
"Consider this a matter of different priorities," Amharr says, struggling to appear composed. "I value a thorough understanding of alien species, while all you value is quick action."
"Understanding without action is worthless."
"And action without understanding is an insult to the evolution of our race," Amharr bellows. "Follow my order and return to Nobelanin. Remove yourself from my presence and disengage the Kaluvian, before you contaminate my vessel as well."
Kriahm bristles, and nods stiffly. The features of his duplicate's face become smooth, then indistinct as the incarnation melts. The floor reabsorbs the segregating streams of klaar and samyth as the Onryss emerges as quickly as it descended. The rotation of its reformation slows, and the sphere returns to its place above Amharr's console.
Amharr shudders violently and covers his face. He presses the burning radices of his palms against his eyes, then rubs his neck, wishing he could stifle the constant itch by sheer will.
He looks to Gra'Ylgam, and instantly hates the Kolsamal's worried expression. He has not yet become so weak that his own slaves must pity him!
"Kriahm will not forgive my failure to act," Amharr says.
"You made the right decision to send him away."
"Do not patronize me, Siaaw."
"My intention was to soothe," Gra'Ylgam says, and bares his face in an appeasing gesture.
"I do not need your soothing." Amharr straightens his back and exhales slowly. "What I need is for this synaptic excrement to be purged from my mind. I need to regain control."
Gra'Ylgam repopulates his face with the green autotrophs. "In time, Dominant."
"Time is as important to me as it is insufficient. Kriahm will not hesitate to strike if he returns and finds me debilitated."
"Then you must make sure you are in full strength when he returns. I will assist you in anything you need. You have my word."
Amharr considers the Kolsamal's readiness to help, and finds it sufficiently plausible. Gra'Ylgam has a lot to gain if Amharr becomes indebted to him, and nothing to lose. Amharr might even need his help before they're done.
-
The cool, sterile air in Amharr's personal chamber is a welcome relief. He touches the outer wall to render the samyth transparent, then has one of the inner walls rearrange to form a nest for him to rest in. He climbs inside the curvature, bends his powerful hindlegs back up behind his back, and brings his slender forelegs together in front of him in a loose clasp. He leans back against the wall, rests his hands in his lap, and gazes out into the vastness of space.
Millions of stars glow before him, radiating in the entire spectrum like tiny flares prickling through the expanse. Like the millions of nerve-endings that are constantly aglow inside his body since the link with the human. Hopefully, the distance from her and a careful investigation of the disarray she left behind will put him at ease.
The Kaluvian is still preparing for its departure and Kriahm is abusing the preparation time to make all sorts of inquiries to the Undawan in hopes of finding out the nature of Amharr's interest in the humans. Luckily, the fifty Emranti in duty aboard the Undawan are not aware there has even been an inquiry of a human, only a capture and analysis of a human ship, and the Kolsamal elder will not speak to anyone about it. Kriahm will find out little, but he won't find sufficient reason to trust Amharr's decisions either. He should just leave. And hopefully fail to return. He most definitely won't be missed.
Amharr closes his eyes, makes himself as comfortable as possible, and reduces his vital functions to a minimum.
He has to start somewhere, and from what he's seen so far, each point is as good as any other as they all fail to make sense. So he picks the first snippet of memory he comes across and does his best to isolate it.
In his mind's replay of the selected episode, the human is clutching another human's back, breathing heavily into a synthetic mask, while she is carried through a snow storm up the dark and steep side of a mountain. She seems smaller, frailer, and unable to make much sense of the things going on around her. Is she ill or crippled? No, she is a nestling, carried by an adult. For what purpose? And why is she so content not knowing anything about it?
Amharr finds the odd perspective of the human's memory very difficult to adjust to, almost claustrophobic. He gives up and breaks off—gets out of his nest to pace a bit around the room, and walk off the tension building in his nerves again.
If it would have been another Emranti instead of an alien he'd have just flushed his Phylra cells out of his nervous system, convalesced for a day or two, and been done with it. But the human left no cells to be flushed. There's no comprehensible structure to her memories, no quick way to corral and dispose of them. The jumble of erratic sensations and images trapped in his brain gnaws constantly at his consciousness, pushing him back and forth in a grotesque, primeval dance.
Amharr sits back down in his nest, and closes his eyes. A few deep breaths, and he's right back hanging from an adult human's back, trudging through a night-time blizzard up a ragged mountain.
The cold wind whips around him—around her—with torrents of sharp, icy needles. It clings to the glassy surface of the mask on her face. The air she breathes is cold and thin, barely enough to keep her conscious. The adult carrying her is advancing carefully, feeling along the black side of the mountain. The depth on their left is inscrutable, seeming to her like a bottomless cleft. She tightens her grip around the adult's neck, fearful she might fall to her death.
"Careful, honey, you're choking me," the adult says. A human male, familiar and protective... her parent, it seems. "You've been riding those Protectors too much lately, my neck isn't as strong as theirs. No need to hold so tightly, Taryn. I'm not going to drop you."
She loosens her grip, gaze still lost in the abyss. As they climb the narrow path, she imagines herself falling into the swirls of ice and snow, and spiraling down into the darkness a thousand times over.
What a curious thought to entertain, especially for a child safely tended to by an adult. Maybe it was a meditative rehearsal, a ritual to control her nerves before an ominous event, a way to prepare for death. It's the only explanation that makes sense to Amharr. But then—why would she feel secure, if the adult is taking her to her death?
Amharr finds it painfully frustrating to relive the human's experience, not knowi
ng for certain if his interpretation is correct.
They continue their senseless climb up the mountain despite the perilous weather and poor sight. The human's limited vision hardly picks up anything, and all Amharr's mind-eyes see is a constantly twirling twilight. The flurries become more rarefied as they gain altitude, and the sharp howl of the storm dies out. Now they walk through thick clouds, ice crackling rhythmically underfoot.
She is strangely happy to be carried into the unknown. But for all her eagerness, when they eventually reach the top of the mountain and the view opens into the depth around and above them, there is nothing spectacular to be observed except the biting cold of space tugging at her flimsy suit.
They are standing on the cusp of a mountain, in a cluster of mountains that break out of the clouds. The peaks grow upward like gigantic thorns and cragged blades, black and glazed with glinting ice.
The view of the sky is dominated by the crescent of a gaseous planet. It lies smeared in shades of brown and cream, falsely interpreted as a twirling ball of foam in Taryn's limited perception.
The adult dislodges a long tubular tool from his side, and shoots a metal rod down between his feet. It pierces the solid rock and lodges itself firmly into the ground. He then drops Taryn to her feet and crouches beside her to hold her in his arms.
They wait, and Amharr waits with them.
Everything looks so close and simple through the human's eyes, so immediate and yet so utterly disconnected. Amharr finds it difficult to image an entire lifetime through such a narrow perspective.
Still... it's somewhat comforting to be free of the huge amount of information that constantly bombards his own senses.
He knows the gas giant looming above her in the memory is not made of foam, but gas and plasma chasing around an electromagnetic and gravitational axis at ferocious speeds. He knows the mountain peaks, that seem to her like towers and temples growing out of the clouds, are in fact a fleet of Totorkha hives strategically impaling the moon's surface. And yet, despite knowing the true nature of these things, the human's impressions superimpose and overwhelm him.
She regards everything with inappropriate excitement, and imagines things that are unquestionably false. Like the sweet taste of the cream streaks on the gas giant's surface; or the softness of the snow-covered ground visible in glimpses between wisps of even softer clouds. Like the possibility for her to take flight between the cragged peaks without technological aid, if her father would momentarily release his grasp on her.
Amharr is aware of the absurdity of it all, but at the same time experiences her excitement. It is intoxicating.
A bright, jagged flash ignites at the top of a mountain nearby, and a jet blazes down from the gas giant, bridging the distance between the celestial bodies in a matter of seconds. It sizzles into a blinding streak of white for an all too brief moment, then dies out.
Another ignites further in the distance, then another, and soon the atmosphere around the mountains is ablaze with igniting streaks of light connecting the moon to its planet. Hundreds of arcs form between the peaks in tandem, oscillating brightly and setting the clouds beneath them aglow.
Taryn watches in amazement as the mountains seemingly come to life, thinking in her rapture that the mysterious creatures inside them are powering up the sky. To her, the Totorkha—the Dorylinae—are awe inspiring, powerful beings who make the stars and planets work, and she is smitten with the tremendous energy they wield. She almost reveres them.
Amharr is appalled by the ghastly misperception. The insectoids are nothing but vermin, and the lightning bursts not their display of power but their harvesting of the gas giant's natural charge, throwing it out of balance. They don't power up the sky, they power it down. They bundle and suck up all the available energy, wreaking havoc on the natural order of things. When the energy stored in their hive-ships eventually reaches a sufficient level, they double their fleet in record speed, hive by hive and breeder by breeder, and spread out, ripping the moon apart and leaving nothing but debris behind.
The human is standing atop one of their harvesters, looking at their destructive power with the naïve and impressionable faith of a nestling, thinking it a wonderful show. She thinks of her new friend—a Totorkha nymph she calls Edrissa—and imagines her to be a princess, daughter of kings and masters of the Universe.
Amharr shudders and brings himself back to his own reality, profoundly disgusted by the human's fallacy.
He knows of several instances where the Totorkha have ripped life-bearing moons apart, some of which carried exceptionally rare ecosystems the Ascendancy sought to preserve. They even brought primitive civilizations to collapse with their consuming presence. Amharr had not been directly involved in the Totorkha containment hundreds of cycles ago, but witnessing their parasitism through the human's eyes he strongly wishes he had been.
The grim truth is that, for the humans to coexist with the Totorkha, they'd have to be deconstructive as well. Like so many other species Amharr's learned of. Like so many others he's contained himself. He'll likely have to do the same with the humans: decimate them and limit their possibility to recover, and see that they never interact with other technologically advanced species again until enough generations have passed under supervision to guarantee a submissive nature.
Perhaps his attempt to comprehend the chaotic memories he extracted from the human female was not entirely futile after all. At least it's clear to him what he must do. Even if it fills him with unprecedented dread.
14
In a couple of hours we'll take off to San Gabriel. My stomach is already a pit of snakes. Apart from all the unknowns about Preston's plans for me, I'm dying to find out if the distance affects the link. Amharr is always present in the back of my mind, in the marrow of my spine—stronger, not weaker. With every passing minute my fear grows that this might not have a quick solution. Or any solution at all.
"What's up with you again?" Jade asks, stuffing his few belongings into a backpack.
I pull the straps on mine, and tuck my most prized possession—a data crystal with pictures of my parents and some of my expedition footage—into an inside pocket. "Might get rough tonight."
Jade whistles. "Oh, I like the sound of that."
"I mean the fugue, bonehead."
"Don't worry, I won't let you hurt yourself."
"I might hurt you."
"I'll take the risk. Maybe I'll get some blackmail-worthy footage too. Never know when that might come in handy." He chuckles, and when I don't react he snaps his fingers, beckoning me to look at him.
I sigh wearily, and nod my thanks. He lets me off, concern still etched on his face.
Not everyone on Spiron is flying out to Epsilon Eridani. Some of them will stay behind with the main bulk of the station in case the aliens decide to contact it after all. Preston's team—'we'—and an old married couple of scientists that everybody calls Bob & Rob, will take our stuff and gather in an appendix of the station that's been upgraded and converted into a 'ship': a pile of scrap metal welded to an FTL-capable drive.
Jade and I carry our backpacks down to the ship section. The station buzzes with voices, clicks, thunks, and rolls, people and maintenance bots hurrying to and fro, technicians arguing about instruments and calibrations, and scientists arguing about storage space. A blond man with a short-cropped haircut passes me by in a hurry, pushing an anti-grav stretcher laden with crates. He scowls at me, about to say something, then hurries past. I try not to imagine what was burning on his tongue.
The 'ship' is hardly bigger than an inter-continental shuttle, and patched together out of old Terran orbital stations. We squeeze past crates and storage units anchored to the floor of its corridor on our way to the passenger area. Several modules have been attached to the corridor walls and converted to rooms. One of them—no idea which—contains the engine.
There are only six small rooms for passengers, and being the last to arrive, we find them all occupied except for the sma
llest of the bunch. We store our backpacks away and stretch out on the lower bed.
"Oh, cheer up," Jade says, nudging my shoulder. "We'll have a great time on San Gabriel. There's all sorts of clubs and VR joints. We'll have an adventure that will—"
"I don't have a synet, Jade. I can't plug into a virtual reality suite."
"Oh, well, it's old fashioned fun for us then. We'll get totally hammered and pick up random people to play pranks on. Who knows, maybe we'll even get laid."
"We've got other things to worry about."
He groans and starts to say something, but Franky sticks his head into the room, rescuing me from further pestering. "Sorry guys, but have you seen Bray anywhere?"
"Can't track him down?" Jade asks.
"Nope."
"Can't you call him over the nacom?" I ask.
"Tried. He won't answer."
"Captain Bray don't answer to no one," Jade mocks his voice. Franky groans and leaves again.
"Why do you hate Bray?" I ask.
"I don't hate him. It's just that he's such an inconsiderate asshole sometimes."
"You're an asshole sometimes too."
"But I'm a lovable asshole," he says with a wink.
I shake my head at him and smile. We lie there silently, staring at the underside of the top bunk, until the hustle outside quiets down and people retreat.
The pilot initiates take-off procedures, and orders everyone to prepare for FTL. It'll take about a hundred and forty-six hours. Jade powers up my containment field first, then gets into his own bed.
My pulse quickens with each moment that passes. What if I go mad from the fugue and never recover? What if I kill myself in a fit of insanity? What if I kill Jade? With no synet to keep my brain from flaring up like a Christmas tree, and no field to protect me from myself, it's a real possibility.
My spine tingles and stings as if a light current runs through me. I can move, even with the field turned to max. It scares the shit out of me.
The last request for safety measures comes through the intercom speakers. The ship hums as the docking clamps release and the exhaust engines push us away from the rest of the station.
The Deep Link (The Ascendancy Trilogy Book 1) Page 10