The Ascension Factor: Pandora Sequence

by Frank Herbert

  Unrestrained, Rico was flung like a toy about the cabin. The foil tumbled down the cliff face as the hylighter deflated and collapsed on top of it. When the foil came to rest Rico lay dazed across the plazglas windshield of the cabin. All he could see under the shadow of the hylighter’s canopy was an immense cloud of blue dust. He flexed his arms and legs, coughed to test his ribs. Bruised, but nothing broken.

  “Great!” Rico told himself. “‘Keep her away from the kelp,’ they said. Here we are, smothering in the stuff.”

  He tried calming himself, but a few deep breaths did not still the shaking in his hands. He hoped the foil had slid all the way to the beach. He didn’t relish being perched halfway up a cliff.

  The afternoon downpour washed over the canopy and their foil. Rico thought of Elvira, caught in open water in the squall, and assessed her chances. They summed up close to zero. She might now be one with her sister kelp.

  “At least there’s not much hydrogen left in that monster,” he muttered. He switched on the cabin lights and radio. A couple of the lights worked, but the radio was gone.

  He took a deep breath of the kelp-laced air before heading aft to check on Ben and Crista.

  Chapter 47

  If you think that vision is greater than action, why do you enjoin upon me the terrible action of war?

  —from Zavatan Conversations with the Avata, Queets Twisp, elder

  Mack was awaiting a call-back from security when suddenly his instruments showed random explosive damage to the kelp in sector eight.

  He didn’t wait, Mack thought. Flattery wants whatever’s in there in a bad way.

  Mack was sure that the “something” included Crista Galli. Instrumentation showed merging patterns between the wounded domestic kelp and the massive neighboring stand of wild blue. Mack and Alyssa Marsh had done peripheral studies of that particular stand of blue, the largest wild kelp bed in the world.

  It learned to hide from us, to convolute itself so it could grow inside a ring of domestic kelps and outmass them without detection.

  Now that it had broken through, he suspected that it could wreak havoc with Current Control. If it was as big as the Gridmaster said it was, then the blue kelp could possibly be Current Control.

  If this kelp’s on our side, then Flattery’s surrounded, he thought. But what if it’s not on our side?

  Beatriz was his big worry now. She always checked in from the docking bay, but this time he had heard nothing. When she was incommunicado inside her studio he suspected trouble. It wasn’t like her at all. Just a blink after Spud left, a spinjet jockey reported seeing a body expelled from the shuttle airlock. Nobody was answering his calls in security or inside the studio.

  “Dammit!”

  Now the Gridmaster was getting a response from the kelp, an incredibly healthy and powerful response. This stand that the depth charges had stunned back into mere reflex reawakened immediately—with a corresponding shift in frequency.

  This is the new kelp, he thought. It’s absorbed the memories of our domestics and taken them over.

  All of the hardware from the domestic kelp was intact, but instead of dozens of frequencies dancing the screens, there was now only one kelp frequency on the Gridmaster.

  Mack’s screen showed the grid reforming, except for an unresponsive area in the northwestern corner. He hoped that wasn’t pruned back too far.

  “Well,” he muttered, “so far it seems to like us.” He had planned to use Current Control to turn the kelps against Flattery. He’d groomed as many sentient stands as he could muster for one last try, for the time that Flattery went too far. MacIntosh saw war as a drug, an extremely addicting drug, and he didn’t want Pandorans to start using it.

  “I want that sector on visual,” he told the sector monitor. “We should be able to spot them.”

  All he got on visual was the gray-black whirl of afternoon squall that obliterated his view of the entire sector. Ozette, LaPush and Galli were under there somewhere. He hoped against hope that the depth charges didn’t turn them all into soup.

  Com-line’s still down to the studio, he thought. If Spud doesn’t get in there, we’ll have to get their attention somehow.

  A feeling stranger than his weightlessness flipped through his stomach. He shook it off, as he had shaken off the chill that slipped into the air after her shuttle docked. He wondered how many had come up on that flight. The shuttle could carry thirty to forty, depending on equipment. Then there was OMC life-support, and the techs. Everyone aboard would have to know what happened.

  He didn’t like thinking about the OMC, where it came from, what Flattery had done to it. She had been Alyssa, not “it,” but he found “it” a lot easier to handle at the moment. Life-support was Mack’s responsibility, as it had been aboard the Earthling. He did not relish the notion of that job.

  “Well,” he muttered to himself, “before we get that far I might have a few surprises for Flattery.”

  A soft tone went off near the turret, alerting him that something was forming up on the kelp’s private holo stage. MacIntosh had built the thing after consulting Beatriz on holography. He had routed it through the Gridmaster in hopes of getting images from the kelp. In the two months of experimentation, results had far exceeded his dreams.

  The kelp had been frustrated for a long time, and it had a lot to say. So far it was all images, flashing lights and odd sounds. The images were clear—usually solid information about real things in real time. The sounds and lights seemed to be “talk,” or inflection, or philosophizing. MacIntosh had not yet been able to interpret anything but the more obvious images.

  He launched himself across the small office toward his new setup at the base of the turret. He didn’t care much for the near-zero-gee environment this close to the axis, but it was the most practical location for an observation station. At first, he had liked the immediate access to the shuttle port.

  To get the near-normal gravity rimside he would have to put up with the annoying two-minute spin of the Orbiter that made visualization of anything nearly impossible. His body was lanky enough that it got in the way more often than not. Since he’d become acquainted with Beatriz Tatoosh, he had come to like the immediate access to the HoloVision studio, too.

  His experimental holo stage lit up with the image of a giant hylighter dragging its ballast across the wavetops. This projection was the best quality he’d ever seen. It was a perfect miniaturization and the collating data identified this as the source of the disruption within the kelp. A metallic glint off the ballast drew his attention closer to the tiny three-D scene in front of him.

  “That’s not ballast!”

  The miniature holo played out the incident with the Flying Fish and the hylighter. He watched from the hylighter’s view as they bore down on the cliff. They came in fast, and when MacIntosh realized that they wouldn’t clear the top he caught himself pulling his feet up. Then the hylighter burst, and the screen went blank.

  “There’s an Oracle somewhere near there,” he muttered. “Maybe we can muster up a rescue team.”

  He handed himself back to his command console and paged Spud on the intercom. Then all hell broke loose from the klaxons.

  The four-klaxon alarm meant a fully involved fire somewhere in the forward axis section, his section. His greatest fear was for the shuttle docking station and its spare fuel stores.

  With a four-klaxon alarm the fire could be in Current Control, the studio area or the shuttle docking bay. All areas sealed off automatically. Warning lights winked on in all axis quarters and the Orbiter intercom repeated calmly, “Vacuum suits mandatory in all sealed areas. In case of fire, vacuum will be installed. Vacuum will be installed. Vacuum suits mandatory in all sealed areas …”

  MacIntosh typed out the “area clear, visual” code for Current Control on his console. If the area sensors detected no fire danger, then Current Control would not be sealed off. He snapped open the hatchside locker and followed the prescribed drill. He seal
ed himself into his pressure suit and activated the communication unit beside the faceplate. He sprung the hatch to the passageway in time to see a groundpounder security slap Spud across the face with a lasgun butt. Spud spun against the studio hatch, and the security grabbed a closer handhold for the leverage to try again.

  MacIntosh hollered, “Hold it!” but the man hit Spud again. Spud floated, unconscious, in midpassageway.

  MacIntosh turned his set on “full.”

  “Hold it!” he yelled. “Stand down, mister.”

  The security was obviously direct from groundside and lacked the skills for maneuvering in the axis area of the Orbiter. He spun around at the voice and let go his handhold. The momentum in near-zero-gee sent him spinning up the passageway toward MacIntosh. The man let go of his lasgun as he flailed for balance and Mack scooped it up as he sailed by.

  Mack reached Spud as he started coming around.

  “I heard them say they’d kill her,” Spud said, through a mouthful of blood. “I pulled the alarm because I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Good thinking, Spud,” he said. “Get a suit on in case we break vacuum.”

  The arriving volunteer fire squad crowded the passageway as Spud suited up, and close behind them the usual throng was forming. In spite of their bulky suits the squad moved with a grace that MacIntosh envied. He looked around for the owner of the lasgun, but the man had disappeared. The hatch to the studio remained sealed.

  MacIntosh plugged his communicator directly into Spud’s headset.

  “Beatriz knows the drill,” he said. “She’ll suit up.”

  “Does she know the visual ‘all clear’ code?”

  MacIntosh nodded.

  “She knows it, but I’ll bet she knows better than to use it.”

  Two things prevented a sealed-off fire area from being committed to vacuum: an automatic sensor signal “all clear” to the Orbiter computer, and a coded visual “all clear” signal to the computer. Since the sensors in the studio undoubtedly reported no sign of fire, the computer awaited the visual code indicating that a human had inspected the scene and declared it clear. Meanwhile, the suspect area remained sealed off, accessible only by fire personnel.

  The intercom warned: “Attention axis deck, yellow sectors eight through sixteen. Vacuum instillation in three minutes. Vacuum in three minutes. Full pressure suit mandatory in these areas …”

  The electronic device that the fire squad used to enter sealed hatches didn’t work on the first try, or the second. MacIntosh plugged his set into the bulkhead receptacle and tried direct contact with the studio.

  Spud plugged into MacIntosh.

  “Anything?” he asked. MacIntosh shook his head. “Static. They’re just not …”

  On the third try the hatch sprang aside. The fire squad rushed in and MacIntosh shouldered himself behind them, hiding the lasgun as best he could. He was glad he did.

  Beatriz was the only one who had managed to don a suit. She stood to the side of the hatch and grabbed MacIntosh as he raced through. The momentum spun him into the bulkhead beside her, but she had a good grip on a handhold so they both stayed put.

  The others fumbled with the seals of their suits, surprised at the suddenness of the fire squad’s entry. One of the newcomers made a clumsy dive for the back of the studio, but he was grabbed in flight by a firefighter and his partner who wrestled him to a handhold and restrained him. MacIntosh made sure the rest of them saw his lasgun and they stayed put.

  Mack’s squad finished their sweep of the room in less than a minute and one of them sent the “all clear, visual” signal back to the computer. The intercom announced “all clear,” and MacIntosh unfastened his headgear. Beatriz beat him to it.

  “They killed my crew,” she shouted. “They killed your security squad and they have weapons back there in the lockers.”

  One of the firelighters sailed to the back of the studio to search out the weapons cache.

  “Hold these men,” MacIntosh ordered, “and hand out whatever weapons they have, we’re likely to need them.”

  The firefighters used various lines and straps from their pockets to truss up Leon and his two men. All three were confounded and helpless in zero-gee. The fire squad lived and worked in it every day, but MacIntosh still had to admire their ease of movement, even with three struggling captives in tow.

  Beatriz hugged him tight and kissed him. Even through the added bulk of the vacuum suit, she felt good to him.

  “I was hoping we could do that under other circumstances,” he said. He felt her trembling and held her close.

  “There are more of them,” she said, “I counted thirty-two altogether. My guess is that their leader, Captain Brood, is with the OMC.”

  “Spud, you heard?”

  “Yes, Dr. Mack.”

  “All this action’s going to bring somebody down here. Seal off axis sector yellow, code admission only. We might seal a few of them in here with us, but it’ll give us time to deal with the rest of them.”

  Spud activated the nearest console and completed the order in a blink.

  MacIntosh motioned to the firefighter with the white headgear. “There’s a big storage locker across the passageway that’s empty. Seal these men in there and then meet me in the teaching lab next to Current Control. If you can find any weapons from our own security, bring them. I want your best tunnel rats, as many as you can muster.”

  “Aye, Commander,” he said, then added, “these men are groundsiders, sir. You saw how clumsy they are. Our best weapons here are zero-gee and vacuum.”

  “You’re right,” MacIntosh said, taking Beatriz’s hand, “and strategy. Let’s move.”

  Chapter 48

  While the fat and flesh cleaving to the flame are devoured by it, you who cleave to it are yet alive.

  —Zohar: The Book of Splendor

  Spider Nevi hoped that Flattery was getting a humbling at the hands of the rabble, because Nevi was certainly getting a humbling out here at the hands of the kelp. He’d spotted Zentz floating on his back, only the whites of his eyes visible, the mouthpiece to his breathing apparatus discarded. A long strand of kelp wrapped his middle, and it reeled him steadily toward the edge of the lagoon.

  Lucky for Zentz that he’d had the presence of mind to inflate the collar of the suit. It kept his head and shoulders on the surface, though fat as he was his body floated nicely enough without it. Lucky, too, that Nevi had hit the vine quickly and on the first shot. He had Zentz all the way back to the foil before he felt the seethe of kelp anger on his heels. Zentz appeared to be breathing.

  It would’ve been so much easier if he had drowned, Nevi thought. But might still need him. A live body is a lot more useful than a dead one.

  Nevi knew one thing for sure, he was getting out of reach of the kelp. One zombie on the crew was enough. The foil started a slow spin, and Nevi swore under his breath.

  It’s channeling us into its reach.

  He managed to secure Zentz’s collar with a line from the aft hatchway and pulled him aboard the foil. He used a boathook to brush off pieces of kelp frond that clung to the unconscious Zentz.

  The whole situation had passed beyond the ridiculous for Nevi, now it was simply comic. It didn’t matter to him whether Flattery stayed in power or not. Whoever was up there would need Spider Nevi and his services, and Nevi enjoyed that position. It was like having three or four good chess moves already set while the opponent was in check. Well, it was time Flattery learned his worth.

  Send me out here, will he?

  Zentz had been kelped, and the automatics in his dive suit kept him from swimming off to who-knows-where. They didn’t keep him from struggling blindly against rescue. At sixty-five kilos, Nevi struggled for a while to wrestle the nearly one hundred kilos of Zentz inside the foil and harness him into his couch. He didn’t know why he bothered, except that it would give Flattery something to play with if they didn’t come back with Crista Galli and Ozette.

  Ne
vi quickly maneuvered the foil to the center of the lagoon and prepared for vertical takeoff. Vertical would eat up more fuel than he liked, but it would cut his odds of getting grabbed by that kelp stand.

  He punched in the automatic VTO sequence and all of the power of the foil kicked him right in the seat of the pants. It swayed like a bug on a blade of grass until they were a safe hundred meters above the lagoon. He set the controls for straight-and-level and turned the foil loose. A routine ten-minute refueling had turned into nearly an hour’s delay, and Nevi couldn’t afford to waste another blink.

  He listened to the radio and couldn’t make heads or tails of the situation back at the Preserve. He’d tried to raise Flattery on their dedicated channel, but no one keyed him in at the other end. One fragment of transmission from an overflight came through and he shook his head in wonder.

  What idiot talked Flattery into depth-charging the foil we’re hunting?

  He snapped off the radio and relaxed his grip on the controls. The afternoon turbulence didn’t sit well on his stomach, so he flipped off the autopilot. He needed something to do besides listen to Zentz snore through his drool. He kept the yellow arrow on his viewscreen pointed toward the green coordinates set down by the overflights.

  Zentz squirmed in the copilot’s couch.

  Our Chief of Security might be coming around.

  Nevi sneered at the mere thought of Zentz as chief of anything. Chief Breach of Security, he thought. Chief of Insecurity.

  Nevi had to admit that Zentz had held a difficult line against the increasing hostility of the villagers for nearly a year. A mob of villagers was one thing—this Crista Galli and her Shadow playmates were quite another.