by Timothy Zahn
“It wasn’t exactly an invitation,” Jeff said grimly. “I was snatched straight out of my computer repair shop. Plato was pulled off a construction site.”
“Everyone has their own story of how they got here,” Allyce said. “But don’t worry. We’re well treated, and there’s plenty to keep us busy. You’ll get used to it.”
“No, I don’t think so,” McNair said stiffly. “I don’t know why I’m even here when all you wanted was her. Fine. Send me back and we’ll call it even.”
Plato spoke, shaking his head. “I’m afraid we can’t.”
McNair’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, you can’t?” he demanded. “Of course you can. Just turn this thing around, or crank up whatever machine you used to bring us here. Whatever it takes.”
Plato spoke. “The Fyrantha will not allow it. But don’t worry. As Allyce said, there’ll be plenty of useful work for another doctor—”
“The ship won’t allow it?” McNair drowned out the rest of Plato’s words. “The ship? Who the hell’s in charge here, you or it? You get on that machine and you send me the hell home.”
Plato shook his head and said a single, flat word. “No.”
McNair’s face darkened. “Listen. I don’t know who you are, or who made you king of this little—”
Plato bit out something in a tone that all by itself made McNair stop in midsentence. “Enough,” the translation came.
Once again, the room went quiet. Plato continued in the same ominous tone—“We don’t raise our voices here, Sam,” he continued. “We don’t threaten each other, and we absolutely don’t fight. We settle any and all differences in a polite, civilized manner. Is that clear?”
“And if I don’t feel like being a sheep today?”
Plato spoke—“Then try harder. The ship doesn’t like it when we fight.”
McNair threw Nicole a disbelieving look. “The ship doesn’t like it?”
Plato was talking again—“And you don’t want to make the ship unhappy. You don’t want the food dispenser to suddenly dry up. You don’t want the lights to go out. You don’t want your room’s temperature to drop to forty below zero.”
“You’d really do that to us?” McNair demanded.
Plato spoke—“We don’t run the Fyrantha, Sam. It’s not up to us. So. No fighting or arguing. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” McNair said between stiff lips.
Plato shifted his gaze to Bungie and spoke again. “Clear?”
Bungie snorted. “Buncha cowards,” he bit out. “None of you ever been hungry or cold before?”
Plato spoke—“You’ve never been hungry or cold like this. Clear?”
Bungie looked at McNair. The doctor looked back at him.
And with a sudden tightening of her stomach, Nicole saw the flash of understanding between them. Bungie was a street thug and kidnapper. McNair was a high-class doctor and kidnapping victim.
But neither wanted to be here. And both were prepared to do whatever was necessary to get home.
Even if it meant working together.
“Fine,” Bungie said. “Clear.”
Plato nodded and spoke again. “Now, eat your breakfasts, both of you, and we’ll sort out your duties.” He looked back at Nicole as he continued. “You, of course, already have your assigned task. When you’re finished, you’ll be taken to your work area and Allyce will instruct you.”
Nicole looked down at her tray. If Plato was telling the truth, she’d been kidnapped because of the voices she’d been hearing all these years. Voices that were supposed to tell her how to do things.
Only they weren’t doing that. They never had. Aside from that one moment of clarity when the butterfly person had been holding her in the darkness, she’d never even heard a complete sentence out of them.
Should she tell Plato that? If it really was the only reason she was here, maybe that would persuade him to send them all home.
Only Plato had already said that wasn’t going to happen.
Which meant Nicole had to stall somehow until she could figure out what else to do. She had to stall like crazy. “All right,” she said, picking up the spoon again. The first part of that stalling, she decided, would be to eat very, very slowly.
And hope that whatever Bungie and Sam came up with, they would come up with it fast.
three
Nicole had perfected the art of slow eating back in third grade when she’d decided she hated school. She’d gotten pretty good at it, too, sometimes pushing her breakfast long enough to miss the entire first half hour of the class day.
Eventually, her grandmother had figured it out and called her bluff. After that, Nicole was given a rock-solid specific time to be finished eating, after which the cold leftovers would be taken away to form the basis of that night’s dinner.
Now, that self-training was once again coming in handy. But there were only so many times even Nicole could chew a given bite, or pretend to get something caught between her teeth, or fake a sip of water going down the wrong way. Especially when Jeff and Allyce were sitting there, patiently watching her every move. Even more especially when Bungie and Sam finished their meals long before she did and left with Plato.
She could only hope that whatever plan they were cooking up could be set into motion quickly. Finishing the last of her own meal, she reluctantly announced herself ready to go.
From the way Plato had talked she’d assumed it would just be her and Allyce who would be heading off to the job site he’d mentioned. To her surprise, it turned out that the whole group of blue-jumpsuited men at the other table was also going with her.
Including the big marble monster, whose name was lost in all the rest of the weird stuff that had been thrown at her in the past hour. Not that she would probably be talking much to him anyway.
That resolve apparently also worked the other way. Not only did the marble monster not talk to her as they all walked down the gray corridors, but neither did the rest of the group. A couple of the men at the front kept up a quiet conversation between them along the way, but most of the rest didn’t talk at all. Not to each other, and certainly not to Nicole. Even Allyce, who’d been chatty enough an hour ago, seemed to have run out of things to talk about.
The sole exception was Jeff.
“Plato considers all of us to be a single repair crew, but we often end up breaking into two separate groups,” he told Nicole as they walked along. “Most of the time it’s hard to get more than two or three of us working on the same project—just isn’t enough room. Though we’ll probably all work together today—the area we were working before you came along is plenty big. But don’t worry, the Fyrantha probably won’t overload you with details until you’re ready for that.”
“Sure, that makes sense,” Nicole said, not understanding even half of what he’d just said. “Are you the one in charge?”
Jeff snorted. “Hardly,” he said. “No, Carp’s the crew foreman—he’s the balding guy up front. The thin guy he’s talking to is Levi, the assistant foreman. He runs the second crew when we break into two squads.”
“Oh,” Nicole said, memorizing the limited views she could see of the two men’s faces when they turned briefly toward each other as they talked. The first rule of survival in an unfamiliar group, she knew, was to find out who the boss was, figure out his hook, and play to it. That was the best way to keep the rest of the gang at a safe distance.
The problem was that none of the usual rules worked here. If Jeff and Plato were right about the ship giving them free food, then working against hunger was out. If there wasn’t anything to buy, money was out. If there weren’t any jobs to do, and no cops to watch for or distract, everything she’d done for Trake was gone.
So what was left?
Given that Carp was a man, and Allyce seemed to be the only other woman around, there was one other obvious hook. But Nicole had no intention of going that direction unless she absolutely had to. She’d been down that road before, and it w
as nothing but pain and trouble and more pain.
And usually fights. If Plato wasn’t lying about the ship not liking it when people fought, all the more reason to steer clear of that one.
“I don’t know how much Allyce told you,” Jeff continued, “but we’re currently working in the sevko-four part of the ship. Sevko is one of the letters. I guess you’d call them letters. Susan—she’s a Sibyl in one of the other work areas—thinks they’re more like full syllables that the Shipmasters use to label the macro areas of the ship. Everything inside a given macro is then divided into corridors and rooms and labeled with sets of numbers.”
“Sounds complicated,” Nicole murmured, feeling more lost than ever. She was definitely going to have to find a protector here, if only to make sure that if Bungie snapped he didn’t snap in her direction.
Jeff might be good for that. He seemed like the helpful type, and guys like that sometimes also saw themselves as white-knight protectors of young women.
But right now, her main problem was still how to hide the fact that she couldn’t hear the voices the ship was supposed to have. But there might be a simple way to slide that one past them. Plato surely wasn’t going to trust a newcomer like Nicole with giving anyone orders, which meant he would have another Sibyl on the job to make sure Nicole was telling the truth and not just scamming everyone. If she could find a way to trick that other Sibyl into giving the crew the instructions without saying anything about them herself, she might be in the clear, at least for now. “Where’s your other Sibyl?” she asked Jeff.
An instant later she knew that had somehow been the wrong thing to say. To her left she heard a quiet catch in Allyce’s breath, and to her right Jeff stiffened and threw a wary look at her. “What do you mean?” he asked cautiously.
“I just thought someone could explain how this is supposed to work,” she said, the words falling over each other. Was she not supposed to ask about other Sibyls? Jeff had just mentioned one—were the rules different for her? “In case I get something wrong.”
Jeff’s tension disappeared. “Oh,” he said, sounding as lame as she just had. “No, the other Sibyls are off with their own work crews. It’ll just be you.” He pointed ahead down the hallway. “Here we are.”
Nicole looked. Carp and Levi had stopped at a section of corridor that was set back a few inches from the rest of the wall. They did something at the far end, and the panel slid along the floor like a long closet door, disappearing into the section of wall beside it. Behind the door was a shallow room with a few dozen black, multipocket vests hanging from hooks along the back and toolboxes and strange-looking machines arranged neatly on the floor beneath them. “This is the work site?” she asked, staring into the long closet in confusion.
“No, this is where we gear up,” Jeff said. “We keep these closets locked, but the code’s pretty simple—someone will give it to you later. Come on, I’ll get you your vest.”
Nicole had already noted that the vests were equipped with lots of small and medium-sized pockets. What she hadn’t realized was that most of the pockets were already full.
“What is all this?” she asked as she squirmed around, trying to get the garment to rest comfortably on her shoulders. It was a lot heavier than she’d guessed, with some of the bulkier items pushing her arms awkwardly away from her sides.
“Yours is mostly food and water,” Jeff said. “Plus a screwdriver, wrench, and a couple of other general-purpose tools. We’ll be away from the hive most of the day and need to bring our lunch with us.”
“How much are you expecting me to eat?” Nicole asked, peering down at the bulging pockets. Maybe she shouldn’t have taken that second tray at breakfast.
“Oh, you’re carrying our food, too,” Jeff said, as if it were obvious. “Our vests are already loaded with tools and replacement parts. You don’t have any of that, so you carry all the food.”
“Oh.” Nicole hefted the weight on her shoulders. It still seemed like an awful lot of food and water for nine people. Even if one of those people was a big marble-covered monster.
“You’ll also need this,” Allyce said, holding out her hand.
Nicole frowned. Lying across the other woman’s palm was something that looked like a half-melted version of the small plastic squirt gun she’d had as a child, with a metal cylinder wedged into one end. “What’s that?”
“Your inhaler,” Allyce said. “It has the drug you’ll need to hear the ship.”
Nicole’s first reaction was a flood of quiet relief. So she wasn’t supposed to be hearing the voices yet? That was a huge weight off her shoulders.
Her second thought was more like a slap across the face. They were expecting her to put unknown drugs into her body?
That scared her. She’d done everything she could through her nineteen years to avoid drugs. She’d tried weed only once, and it had made her sick to her stomach and determined never to try it again. Cocaine, heroin, and meth were straight out—she’d seen what those did to kids in her neighborhood, not to mention some of Trake’s group, and there was no way she was going to let that stuff anywhere near her. Designer drugs were a total crapshoot, and could kill you faster than an angry dealer with a new gun to play with. And every single one of the hallucinogens terrified the hell out of her. Alcohol, especially a good whiskey, was the only thing she’d never been able to turn down or control, and that was more than enough of a load across her neck.
“Go ahead,” Allyce urged. “Take it.”
Gingerly, Nicole picked up the inhaler. It wasn’t much heavier than her old squirt gun, either. “What’s in it?” she asked.
“As I said, the drug that allows you to listen to the Fyrantha,” Allyce said. “It’s in powder form, rather like asthma medicine. I gather you never had asthma?”
“One of the kids at school had it,” Nicole said, turning the inhaler over in her hand. “What kind of drug is it?”
“It’s magic pixie dust,” Carp growled as he worked the fasteners on his vest. “Who cares what it is?”
“I care,” Nicole said firmly. It was risky to stand up to the boss, she knew, especially a boss who might be the key to her survival until she could get out of here. But this was something she needed to get straight right from the beginning. “I want to know if it’s going to make me dizzy or throw up or something. Or get hooked.”
“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” Allyce assured her. “It lets you hear the Fyrantha for about three minutes, that’s all. None of the other Sibyls has ever complained of any side effects.”
At the edge of Nicole’s vision, she saw Jeff shift from one foot to the other. Was he uncomfortable about something?
But uncomfortable about what? Was this some kind of con game? A practical joke?
Or was it something worse? Was Allyce pulling something nasty?
But Allyce’s face held nothing but pure sincerity. And Nicole really couldn’t see what a con game would gain anyone. Maybe Jeff was just impatient to get going. “Okay,” Nicole said, still not happy with any of this but knowing there was nothing she could do about it. They could hold her down and stuff the dust down her throat if they really wanted to. “How do I work it?”
“We’ll tell you when we’re at the job site,” Carp said impatiently. “Come on—we’re already running late.”
A sudden bird trilling filled the corridor. Nicole jumped, then remembered that was how the marble monster talked. “But how can we know where the job site is until she tells us?” the confused-sounding translation came.
“Gee, let me think,” Carp said sarcastically. “Our last job was in sevko-four-nineteen-five. Before that we were in sevko-four-nineteen-four, and before that we were in sevko-four-nineteen-three. You want to take a wild guess where we’re probably working today?”
For a long moment the marble monster just stared at him. Longer, Nicole suspected, than it took for the question to translate.
At least one other person in the group apparently thought so, to
o. “It’s okay, Kahkitah,” Jeff said soothingly. “Come on, Carp, lay off him, will you?”
“No, I want to hear his answer,” Carp said, his eyes still on the marble monster. “Come on, Fishface, shake those brain cells into action—”
He broke off as Kahkitah suddenly warbled. “We’re going to work in sevko-four-nineteen-six!” the big Ghorf said excitedly.
Carp shook his head in mock amazement. “Whatever would we do without you?” he said. “Grab your kits and let’s go. Kahkitah, you get the sealer.”
Reaching into the closet, he grabbed the handle of one of the boxes and strode away. Levi and the other men each took another of the boxes and marched off behind him. Kahkitah stood still another moment, probably waiting for the translation to finish, then went to the closet and dragged one of the larger machines into the hallway. He worked a lever, and the machine extended wheels from its underside and a loop from its top. Wrapping one hand around the loop, he headed off after the others, rolling the machine behind him.
“Come on,” Jeff said to Nicole, picking up a kit of his own and sliding the closet door closed. “As you may have noticed, Carp hates waiting.”
Two minutes later, they caught up to Carp and the rest of the crew standing beside a wall in another of the hallways, this one longer and wider than the others Nicole had seen.
A plain hallway, with no sign of open cabinets or warning signs or even holes in the wall or floors. “This is the work site?” she asked Jeff, looking around in confusion.
“It will be in a second,” Carp said, beckoning as Kahkitah came up to him. “Come on, get it open.”
Kahkitah apparently didn’t need this one translated. Parking his machine beside Carp, he crossed to the wall on the far side of the hallway. Crouching down, he took hold of a handgrip Nicole hadn’t noticed before, and with a convulsive surge that seemed to start at his ankles and ripple up all the way to his head, he reared up and backward.