by Victor Koman
“No. I am scanning polar areas where solar panels could receive continuous light. I will alert you when I have detected something.”
A piece of slag drifted onto the control panel inside the fighter as the section of glasteel gave way. It sizzled for a moment, then crystallized. Grabbing the coolest edge of the piece, Baker pulled it aside and left it floating nearby. He peered inside.
The corpse peered back at him.
Its eyes gazed straight forward, unglazed, clear. Every few seconds a pair of tiny tubes expelled a mist that spread over the sclera and either evaporated or was absorbed. Baker could not tell which.
It was his first indication, however, that the ship still functioned. He maneuvered inside. “Did you know the ship was still running?” he asked.
“Yes. All its battle systems are inoperative, though, and it has lost all conning capability; in fact, the only functional system is the one surrounding the corpse, which takes up very little volume and is separate from the other ship systems.”
I can feel the death pulsating inside that thing. All those tubes like long, fat worms hanging from his neck and thighs. Pumping something gray and thick through its gray body. Out of his dead head staring so clear-I didn’t used to think like this. What’s happening to me?
“Have you found it yet?” he asked.
“Negative. Pan left-I want to look at those contact bundles.”
Baker turned his head.
The eyes of the corpse moved to follow.
They returned to their forward stare as Baker shifted back to examine the body more closely.
A line of drool appeared at the corner of the corpse’s mouth and slowly accumulated until it broke free, a tiny sphere that drifted until it adhered to Baker’s pressure suit.
“There are a series of electrodes,” the computer said, “terminating in the frontal lobes, the parietal and occipital lobes, at the temporal lobes, the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata.”
Baker nodded. “Brain wave sensors for a dead man?”
“The hookups seem to be for remote control of the body.”
Baker frowned. “Remote from where? You said there was no communication equipment. Somewhere in the ship, maybe? An autonomous onboard computer?”
The corpse inhaled.
The dry, wheezing sound rasped in Baker’s headphones. He threw his arms back, crying out when they thudded against the confines of the tiny cockpit.
“Jesus! Did you hear that?” It’s still alive!
“Registered. The corpse has no need to breathe. It is kept alive-about as alive as the irreversibly comatose-by the life support tubing.”
Life support, hell. That thing is dead, yet it’s groaning and rattling like some great shuddering air sack-
“Kinney,” the corpse wheezed in a dry, creaking monotone.
Kinney! It’s always Kinney. Now the dead have come back and they call him instead of me and I don’t want to go but they’ll take me because I’m in his body…
Calm. Calm down. It’s only a talking corpse…
“Virgil Grissom Kinney.”
Just a dead body that’s controlled from somewhere…
Baker switched on his suit’s outer speakers and said, “This is… Kinney.”
“I’ve heard your computer’s half of the conversation over its speaker.” The eyes slowly turned toward the vidcam. The corpse’s s lips did not move when it spoke. Baker looked below the body’s chin to see a small speaker grill protruding from above the trachea. Its mouth hung open partway, another droplet of saliva accumulating near the tip of its brown, immobile tongue. “It’s nice to hear you, too.” Its speech sounded normal enough, though artificial.
“Who are you?” the computer asked.
“You let the machine ask questions?” the dead man said, turning his eyes to stare at Baker.
“Answer it,” Baker said. He sat on the control console with his legs floating on either side of the seated body. He let them float closer to the sides of the chair. “Who are you?”
“Well,” the voice said, “I’m certainly not this hunk of meat you’re staring at. I’m currently sitting in the war room at- well, never mind. It’s in trans-Plutonian space, though, and that’s all you need to know.”
“What’s your name?”
The corpse blinked. Slowly. A nice touch, Baker thought. “Lev Pokoynik. Call me Lee. And you’re Virgil Gri-”
“Jord Baker. Test pilot for the Brennen Trust.”
The corpse said nothing. It blinked again.
“Your image matches-”
“Plastic surgery,” Baker said, trying to keep a straight face. I wonder how much he’ll swallow. “I took his place on the flight.”
“You…” the croaking voice hesitated. After a moment, it resumed. “We have a Jord Baker listed as dead shortly before Kinney was trained for piloting the Valliardi Transfer.”
“A trick. We switched places. Kinney couldn’t handle the transfer. He flipped out.”
The corpse’s eyebrows wrinkled unevenly. “In the case report of the psychtech in charge, Kinney is listed as having survived…”
“I’m Jord Baker. I can see you can’t read minds, at least not my mind. What does it matter, anyway?”
“Can’t you see?” Some of the mist from the eye moisturizers clung to its lids like tears.
Baker edged closer to the chair. “See what?”
“Can’t you see what we’ve been forced to do simply to use the Valliardi Transfer? The only way to control a ship across lightspeed distances is to link it telepathically with a living being. We tried human pilots-they went crazy and killed themselves. We tried autonomous robot drones-they couldn’t think well enough. So we wire up dead bodies to keep them functioning as remote receptors and pilots, and psychlink them to sensitives here at the base.
“It allowed us to attack your spacecraft. We first estimated your projected flameout point. We narrowed it down to a space one light second or so in radius. We matched our velocities to what we guessed yours would be and transferred out. I had to wait five hours. When the fighter reached normal space, my recontact with it-and my communication-was instantaneous.
“The way I knew the instant of your flameout was through the use of my sensitivity. No, I can’t read minds, but I could tell what you were aware of and vaguely what you felt. This also enabled me and my attack wing to close in on you so tightly.
“You lasered us on re-emergence. That was a good move on your part. I stayed linked to the ship to see if I could transfer back. No such deal. I went off shift, but got called away from a good meal when we lost the fighter from our screens. Do you know how hard it is to re-establish contact with a psych-fighter?”
“No. You want me badly, don’t you?”
“We want to know how you can survive the transfer.”
“I don’t know how or why. I don’t think I want to know. And I have no reason to let you vivisect me to make your war more efficient.”
The voice rose until the little speaker distorted its sounds. “Do you think we’d use it for something as stupid as war? Idiot! The Valliardi Transfer is humanity’s only doorway to the stars. It’s cheap, subjectively instantaneous-”
“Almost.”
“-and so close to freeing us to settle the rest of the galaxy that it’d be a crime against all mankind if you escaped from us.”
The computer interrupted. “Twenty-four ships have just appeared beyond the flak halo. They’re accelerating toward us and will be within laser range in-”
“Get us out! They’re already in Valli range!” Baker’s last word choked in his mouth as everything twisted around him.
Make it stop. I can’t go on with the shrinking and the shoving through into that place of light and the door that never opens for me though I want it to and pray it to. They want me for Kinney. Kill Kinney and I won’t have to die and die and die…
“Hang on,” the computer said. “Deceleration!”
Baker’s legs wrapped tightly
around the corpse’s chair, pulling forward to grasp it with his arms. The engine array thundered into power. Metal crushed against metal; the fighter slammed against the rear bulkhead to crash partially through the plating. The force of the fall threw Baker loose. His fingers dragged at the tubes and wires connected to the dead pilot, tearing them free. The body slammed atop him in the corner of the fighter; gray fluid spattered across his goggles. They had not fallen far, but the acceleration made it feel worse.
“Status!” he cried into the mouthpiece, pushing the stiff corpse away and trying to get his bearings.
“We transferred to five kilometers above the surface of Mercury. We are rising tangentially and decelerating under gravitational attraction.”
“The other ships?” Baker stole a glance at the corpse. Its mouth hung crooked, something black and thick draining from its throat and nose. One of its eyes had burst against the console and oozed gray. Did Lee feel that?
“They had not matched velocities to ours and would be in peril if they transferred down before adjustment. In the meantime, I have plotted a course for the cryonic preservation unit at the south pole and will land us there.”
“Land us? Are you crazy? This is a spaceship!” He struggled to his feet and grabbed for the hole in the ship’s viewing port.
“Warning-delta v.” The vernier rockets blazed, knocking Baker to the side. They cut off and he resumed his climb out to discover that the top of the fighter had wedged against the bent bulkhead, leaving only a narrow space between the two.
“I’m stuck here! Keep conning the ship. I’ll try to get to Con One or Two.”
“I had no intention of giving up. We are heading south in a forced low altitude orbit.”
“We can’t land something this big!” He snaked his arms out of the hole in the hatchway.
“The skirting on the engine array is high enough to protect the engines, the gravity is low enough, the planet has no atmosphere, we are in a hurry-I can synthesize no simpler solution.”
“Than landing it on your ass? You’ll shear the skirting and we’ll fall over!”
“In the time it took you to say that, I rechecked all the data seventy-eight times. We can do it.”
Baker ground his teeth against the mouthpiece until it squeaked like scratched slate. “All right. It’s your fuselage. I’m going to Con Two.”
His body ached from bruises and the weight of acceleration. Sliding out of the fighter, he turned around just long enough to say, “Lee-If you can still hear me-we’ll be transferring to another star after this. I don’t think you’ll want to wait around for a dozen years or more to reestablish contact with your psychfighter-we’d be long gone before your reinforcements arrived.”
The corpse twitched once, and a black slime foamed around the edges of its speaker grill.
Baker looked away, then across the bulkhead. It had bent aftward into the next compartment. He squeezed forward on his belly, wriggling back and forth to avoid a jagged piece of metal from a broken sensor array.
He’s in control, that damned machine. Doesn’t need me. He heard air escaping slowly somewhere. He placed one foot against the array and pushed forward.
“Why’re you doing all this? Why didn’t you just transfer to deep space? It would have been safer.”
The computer said nothing for a moment, during which Baker pulled through the narrowest part of the gantlet-between the fighter’s laser cannon and a portion of the bulkhead that had bent outward. When the machine spoke again, it was with a tentative tone Baker had never heard before.
“The woman Delia Trine seems to be important to both you and Virgil for some reason; vital to your continued operation of Circus. I am willing to take acceptable risks to recover her if she is still alive.”
Baker squirmed free from under the fighter and moved on his hands and knees toward an exit hatch. He stood and opened the seals. Between heavy breaths, he said, “The moment we land, Lee in there’ll call his friends out on us. Or they’ll spot us from orbit. Matching velocities isn’t necessary to hit us with Valli pellets. They’re even more deadly when moving.”
“I am depressurizing the bay to cause cell rupture in the corpse. My sensors have greater range than those of the fighters. So do my lasers. We shall be safe until the deep thrust fighter that is coming around the sun arrives.”
“What?”
“We shall be finished by then, I estimate.”
He ran the rest of the way to the Con Two lift.
The surface of Mercury whipped past them, a blur of blackness shimmering here and there under the glowing ionized gases left in the wake of Circus’s engines. Baker stared, eyes unblinking. The spacecraft maintained a bow-down attitude because of the forced orbit-were the engines to shut off, the ship would climb to a higher orbit rather than fall to the planet. The effect of constantly falling toward the world transfixed Baker. He watched the horizon, fighting the persistent feeling of disorientation. The back of his conning chair was down, the viewing port of Con Two up, and the horizon of the planet well above his head. He watched a hazy glow appear around the edge of the planet.
“Approaching south polar area. Stand by for skew flip turn and deceleration for landing.” Baker tightened his grip on the seat. The computer broke into its rapid speaking mode, commenting on all major systems function. Suddenly, the vernier rockets fired up with full force. The horizon dropped away and Baker’s stomach with it. His neck ached against the braces that held his head immobile. An instant later, the lower limb of Mercury dropped down across the port and hung there, the mountains and craters speeding over its limb out of sight.
In the brief duration of the skew flip, Circus rose to triple its former altitude. Baker noticed the extended field of vision this gave him.
Ass backward into the unknown. He switched on a rear vidcam and added sun filters until the scrim showed more than a white glare.
“I hope you know where you’re going,” he said, moving the cam controls to take in the slightly curving edge of the planet.
“Five kps, twenty km,” the computer said, followed by, “Four kps at eighteen. Under escape v. Rotate for landing.” The vernier rockets firmly turned the spacecraft aftward to the surface.
The viewing port darkened. Baker watched a zone of brilliant light flow from the bow across the ellipsoidal prow and head aftward. All of the ship lay bathed in light from the horizon facing the ship’s topside. Judging by the position of the shadows cast by the conning tower, he could estimate just where the sun should be burning more than six times brighter than on Earth, with no atmosphere to shield him.
The weight of deceleration lightened. He no longer saw the planet through the viewing port. Darkness suddenly spread across the spaceship, followed shortly by a sharp decrease in the whining of the engines.
“Engine shutdown,” the computer said calmly. The ship settled against the mercurial plain, then listed slowly to port until a vernier rocket fired to steady the mass.
“Status,” Baker said, undoing his harness.
“We are twenty kilometers away from the south pole, on the dark side of the terminator. The redoubt’s solar energy power station consists of a low ring of solar panels disguised into the outer rim of a crater. Heat exchange elements extend from the center of the ring to a radius of twenty five kilometers. Eighteen of the thirty-six heat sinks are always on the night side and radiating infra-red. The cryonic preservation unit is most likely buried at the center of the crater.”
Baker climbed down toward the lift. The computer’s voice followed him in his earphones.
“Use lifeboat four,” the computer suggested. “The port shuttle was damaged when the psychfighter shifted during the skew flip.”
“Where’s that?”
“Ring One Level Two Section Three O’Clock. Use axial tube three.”
“Right.” Baker climbed out of the lift and up to the center of the ring. He ran down the man-high axial tube. “What about the other ships?” he asked between breat
hs.
“Three have so far crossed the horizon in orbit. I am keeping their sensors defeated by laser until they enter my kill radius. I destroyed five ships that transferred in before they could get bearings on us. I think we have very little time, as the deep thrust fighter is in deceleration for orbit.”
“It’ll take time for the troops to get out of their acceleration baths.”
“They can outfight us with lasers, Jord.”
“They won’t, if they think they might harm me. Wait till they slow to a constant velocity, then transfer one of the anti-matter pods into their mid-section.”
The computer considered the plan for several microseconds. “At the south pole, you would have some measure of protection from heavy particles, but I should transfer it at distance so the other particles-”
“Just do it. I can take care of myself on the surface.”
“You will need a more protective suit.”
Baker looked at his thin Späflex outfit and shook his head. “I’ll fly close to the ground and keep screens up while I’m in the boat. The shadow from the crater rim should protect me while I’m looking for an entrance. There’s little enough time as it is.”
“You will be out of contact with me when you go beyond line of sight.”
“That’s a blessing, motormouth.” Baker paused, then shook his head and cycled the airlock. You can’t hurt a computer’s feelings. He switched the breathing apparatus from tanks to rebreather and climbed into the lifeboat as soon as the airlock opened.
The lifeboat was designed for use in the event of a total power failure in the larger ship. The airlock could be manually cycled or blown open. After that, nothing need be done to escape Circus Galacticus.
Baker climbed into the cockpit and dropped all twenty sun filters across the glasteel hatch. He hit full power and shot out of the ship’s hull like a bullet. He corrected for the almost immediate drop to ground level and sped across the shattered terrain, bow high, engine at an angle that rocketed him forward while compensating for Mercury’s feeble acceleration of gravity.
“Hot tail!” he cried, then whooped as he steered the craft toward the brightest part of the horizon.