The Ascension Factor

by Frank Herbert

  No, she warned herself, hold tight. I can’t help anyone dead. I am the only witness against them.

  She hoped that the console tape survived back there, and that someone sympathetic would find it.

  Who would they show it to that could do anything? she wondered. Flattery?

  Beatriz grunted a laugh at herself, then felt the captain’s grip on her shoulder. It was firm, not painful. It was not gentle. It reminded her of her father’s grip the night he died, and it lightened the same when their engines shut down. This man was the same age as her youngest brother, but there was infinity in his dark eyes. She didn’t see much wisdom.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I have taken hundreds of prisoners, I have been a prisoner. Believe me, I know what you’re thinking.”

  He gestured the guard beside her away and, surprisingly clumsy in zero-gee, moved up to join her. His voice sounded gravelly, strained, as though it had been screaming. He continued speaking, while his men drifted out of earshot, their glances furtive and their conversations spare.

  “We are both in a bad spot, you and I. We both need out of it.”

  She had to agree.

  “Up here it will be all or nothing, we are trapped. There is no escape for either one of us that doesn’t require both of us.”

  To this, too, she had to agree.

  But only for the moment, she assured herself, only until I find Mack.

  Beatriz realized that, much as it disgusted her, her life depended on communicating with this man.

  “You are a military man, an officer. How is it that you walk yourself out the plank like this? You wouldn’t have done it on reflex. This is a plan and we … I simply fall into it …”

  “My God, you’re perceptive,” the words came in a rush, the captain’s eyes aglitter. “We can only win, Flattery is finished. We have the Voidship and Orbiter—enough food stores for years. We control their currents and weather. We have Flattery’s precious Organic Mental Core—shit, we can hook it up to the ship ourselves and fly out of here …”

  She didn’t hear the rest. Her mind focused on what he’d said at the beginning: “enough food stores for years.”

  If he kills everyone aboard the Orbiter.

  “ … He’ll have to throw it in,” the captain was saying. “The rabble will have at him down there, and he doesn’t dare destroy everything that he’s worked for up here. Whoever beats him on the ground then can deal with me.”

  He’s really going to do this, she thought. He’s going to kill everyone aboard.

  He took her hand and she snapped it back with a revulsion that she couldn’t hide.

  “Us,” he said. “I meant they can deal with us. You and me. They’ll believe whatever you tell them, at least for a while.” He leaned closer, whispered, “You don’t want to make another mistake, get more people killed.”

  She propelled herself out of her couch, not caring where the thrust might throw her in the gravity- free cabin. No one pursued her. The first handhold she grabbed stopped her beside a pair of security, younger than the young captain, who were reviewing the basics of holo camera triangulation.

  They really intend to go on the air.

  She looked back at the captain. He had his back to her, briefing several men. The tone of his voice, briskness of his gestures told her that he meant business. It was true, he could do it without her. It was true, that by helping him she might save others. She could not bring herself to speak to him, to go to him in any way. She sighed, and interrupted her two new cameramen.

  “No,” she said, “with that setup the alpha set only gets fifteen degrees of pan. OK if you’re covering a launch, but we’ll be inside, in a small space …”

  As she instructed the two young amateurs she saw Brood watching her. He winked at her once, and she successfully suppressed the shudder that tempted her spine.

  “They’ll want to see this Organic Mental Core in transport, and they’ll want to know something about its—her—background. Let’s start by getting some of that in the can.”

  She passed the two-hour flight instructing her camera operators, two men and a woman, none of whom she recognized from the massacre at the SLS studio. Beatriz preferred their company, even if they did answer to the captain. Whether by accident or design, she did not encounter any of that squad during their flight.

  The Organic Mental Core was a living brain, enclosed in an intricate plasma-glass container that made allowances for the hookups to come. A complex plug would connect the brain with the control system aboard the Voidship. What she didn’t expect horrified her the most.

  They’re supported by … bodies!

  She had done a report on such a thing several years ago. Scientists had connected a brain from a crushed body to a healthy body that had suffered a massive head injury. Each kept the other alive, though there had been no way to communicate with the healthy brain. At that time it was simply trapped in there, cut off from all sensation, alive and dreaming. She took a deep breath and let the reporter in her take over.

  The medtech in charge had a number of active facial tics and each of her questions seemed to accelerate them. Beatriz learned nothing about the principle that she hadn’t already learned through research or through Dwarf MacIntosh.

  “… As you well know, it was because of a failure in the OMCs that we wound up on Pandora.”

  “I understand that the OMCs were traditionally taken from infants with fatal birth defects. This OMC is from an adult human. How will the performance differ?”

  “Twofold,” the tech replied. “First, this person was dying at the time of conversion, therefore it—she—should be thankful for an extension of her life in a useful, indeed noble, role. Second, this person survived the longest hybernation known to humankind and woke to life on Pandora. She knows that if humans are to survive, it must be elsewhere. She can take comfort in being the instrument of that survival.”

  “Does she know any of this?”

  The tech looked perplexed. “Much of this was included in her early training. The rest we extrapolate from the evidence.”

  “What was she like as a person?”

  “What do you mean?” The tech’s tics accelerated rapidly to a very distracting crescendo.

  “You’re saying, essentially, that she will accept this duty because of love for humanity. Did she have love in her life? A man? Children?”

  Her camera crew was warming to the task. They had not brought a monitor into the tiny space, and now she wished they had. It might be an OK piece, after all.

  While staring at this brain behind glass, Beatriz knew that it was alive, a person. She also realized that the tech was surrounded by the squad that had murdered her crew and he probably hadn’t the slightest inkling of what had happened.

  No one will know if I don’t tell them, Beatriz thought. I’m like this brain, cut off but alive inside. I wonder what she dreams?

  “I know very little about the person,” he said. “It’s in the record. I do know that she had a child that was given up for adoption so that she could continue her studies in the kelp outposts.”

  “Dr. MacIntosh stated two years ago that Organic Mental Cores were crude, cruel, inefficient and unnecessary,” she said. “Do you have a comment on that?”

  The tech cleared his throat.

  “I respect Dr. MacIntosh. He, along with the Director and this OMC, is one of the last survivors of the original flight of the old Earthling—‘Ship,’ if you prefer. Yes, it’s true that there were failures, and this required some compensation, but those bugs have been worked out.”

  “For some of our viewers, your term ‘compensation’ might seem a little cold. The ‘compensation’ you refer to was the first known creation of an artificial intelligence—one that turned out to be smarter than its creators, one that many believe is the personality ‘Ship,’ one that most Pandorans still revere as a god. Why did your department pursue the failed course of OMCs, severed living brains, rather than pick
up on the artificial intelligence?”

  “We were instructed to take this course.”

  “You were ordered to take this course,” she corrected. “Why? Why is the Director more comfortable with failure than with the success that saved his life … and hers?”

  Beatriz pointed to the OMC, wired into her box, deaf, blind and dumb beside her warm, dead host.

  “That’s enough!”

  The captain’s voice behind her froze her spine and started her hands trembling. She was stunned silent again while the tech and her crew inspected the deck and their shoes.

  “I’ll speak with you in the cabin.”

  She followed him out of the shuttle storage lockers and into the dimly lit passenger cabin.

  “I had to stop you,” he said. “It is expected of me, no matter what my opinion. Soon there will be no need for deception. Prepare for docking. There will be briefing materials for the next Newsbreak when we get aboard.”

  Three Orbiter security lounged at the docking bay as the hatch opened from the shuttle. They were ready for the press, for the HoloVision cameras, but they weren’t ready for Captain Brood. The captain remained inside the hatchway, with Beatriz beside him.

  “Three men out there,” he said to her in a gentle voice. His eyes held her with that same wild glitter. She tried not to look at his face. “Choose one for yourself. One to … entertain yourself.”

  She was stunned at the question and his calm, disarming manner. She felt a something rise at the back of her neck, something that she’d felt tingling there before the killing started groundside.

  “You want none of them?” he answered for her. “How fickle.”

  He pulled her aside and signaled the men behind them to fire. In seconds nearly a quarter of the Orbiter’s token security force lay dead on the deck.

  “Dispose of them through the shuttle airlock,” he told his men. “If you kill one in a room, kill all in the room. I don’t want to see any bodies. Beatriz will announce that there is a revolt in progress aboard the Orbiter and the Voidship. We’ve been sent to stop it.”

  “Why do you do this to me?” Beatriz hissed. “Why do you tell me I have a choice when I don’t? You were going to kill them anyway, but you have to include me …”

  He waved his hand, a dismissal gesture that she’d long associated with Flattery.

  “A diversion,” he said. “Part of a game … but see, you are stronger for it already. It amuses me, and it strengthens you.”

  “It’s torture to me,” she said. “I don’t want to get stronger. I don’t want people to die.”

  “Everybody dies,” he said, motioning his men aboard. “What a waste when they don’t die for someone’s convenience.”

  Chapter 27

  Anyone who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it.

  —Machiavelli, The Prince

  Spider Nevi’s favorite color was green, he found it peaceful. He jockeyed Flattery’s private foil across the green-tinged seas and allowed the plush command couch to soothe the tension out of his back and shoulders. Green was the color of new-growth kelp, and tens of thousands of square kilometers of it stretched out around them as far as the eye could see.

  Some sunny days Nevi spun a foil out of moorage just to drift a kelp bed, enjoying the smell of salt water and iodine, the calm of all that green. He didn’t like red, it reminded him of work and always seemed so angry. The interior of Flattery’s foil was finished in red, upholstered in red. The coffee cup that Zentz handed him was also red.

  “What’s so special about this Tatoosh woman,” Zentz gurgled, “the Director got the hots for her?”

  Nevi ignored the question, partly because he wasn’t listening, partly because he didn’t care. He was about to have his first sip of coffee for the day when the Navcom warning light flicked on. He almost didn’t notice it because the light, like everything else, was red. An abrasive warning tone blatted from the console and he started, spilling hot coffee into the lap of his jumpsuit. He doubted that he would have missed that tone if he were comatose. Their foil slowed automatically with the warning.

  “Go ahead,” he told Zentz, “let’s hear it.”

  Zentz turned up the volume on the Navcom system. Nevi couldn’t stand the radio chatter while he was trying to relax, so he’d had Zentz shut it down when they hit open water.

  “… you are approaching a ‘no entry’ area. Sector eight is disrupted, kelpways not secure. Code your destination and alternate routes will appear on your screen. Be prepared to take on survivors. Repeat—warning, ‘code red,’ you are …”

  Nevi took the foil down off its step and kept the engines idling. “Fools!” Nevi muttered. “They were warned to keep her away from the kelp.”

  “Do you think they’re in there? Maybe they made it through before …” Zentz cut himself off when he saw the anger in Nevi’s eyes.

  “Get a display up,” Nevi ordered, “I want to get a look at this ‘disruption.’“

  He coded in the private carrier code for Flattery’s quarters. The waters around the foil had already gone from choppy to rough, and in the offshore distance Nevi could make out portions of a large sub train bobbing the surface.

  “Yes?” It was a female voice, curt.

  “Nevi here, get me the Director.”

  The display that Zentz had been working on spread across their screen. It reminded Nevi of a weather picture of a hurricane—everything on the outside swirling toward the center. But this was kelp, not clouds, and it was happening undersea, almost within sight of their point. He was not happy with the delay from Flattery’s office.

  The woman’s voice came back as curt as the first time.

  “The Director is busy, Mr. Nevi, we are in full alert here. Someone blew up one of the outer offices, a security detachment has attacked the Kalaloch power plant and there is some problem with the kelp in sector eight …”

  “I’m in sector eight right now,” he said, his voice as even as he could make it. “If he can’t talk, get me a direct line to Current Control.”

  “Current Control has been incommunicado for nearly an hour,” she said. “We are attempting to find out the meaning of—”

  “I’ll keep this frequency open,” Nevi snapped. “Get him on the air now!”

  Her only response was to close the circuit. Nevi pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment, staving off one of his headaches.

  “You should’ve kept her on,” Zentz said. “What did she mean, ‘A security detachment has attacked the Kalaloch power plant’? We defend the Kalaloch power plant.”

  “We need to figure out where the Galli woman is and we need to get our hands on her fast,” Nevi interrupted. “She’s our bargaining chip no matter what’s going on.” He tapped their Navcom screen with a well-manicured finger and traced the spiral pathway that wound from edge to center.

  “I’m guessing she’s in there somewhere,” he mused, “and anything in there is heading for the center. There isn’t time to bring in any hardware. We’ll have to chase them down or intercept.”

  “You mean … follow them in there?” Zentz asked. “What about the attack on the power plant? Something’s coming down in the ranks and my men—”

  “Your men seem to be undecided about their loyalties,” Nevi said. “They can work that out among themselves. But I’ll put you out here and radio for a pickup if you’d prefer.”

  Zentz’s massive face paled, then flushed.

  “I’m no coward,” he said, puffing himself up. “There’s just something going down at the Preserve, where I …”

  Flattery’s carrier frequency sounded its tone and his voice crackled in their speakers.

  “Mr. Nevi, we’re having some urgent problems here that need our full attention. What do you want?”

  “I want a direct line to Current Control. The kelp out here is going berserk, and if you want the Galli woman we need to straighten it out or knock it down.”r />
  “I’m monitoring their actions,” Flattery said. “They’ve applied full power to that sector and the subs have all surfaced. Things here are getting sticky. A bomb went off in my outer quarters about a half hour ago. Killed my staff girl, Rachel, and that guard, Ellison. Looks like he brought the damned thing inside. Mop up out there as soon as you can and get back here. We may go Code Brutus on this one. Our Chief of Security has some answering to do.”

  The connection was broken at Flattery’s end.

  Code Brutus, Nevi thought. So, it’s starting already. At least out here, right now, we don’t have to choose sides.

  He had no doubt which side Zentz would ally with. For Zentz, a return to Flattery meant sure execution. Too many errors, too little strategy.

  Maybe he’s already in on it, he thought.

  Zentz was on the radio to his command center at the Preserve, chewing out some major. If this was a coup from the security side, he didn’t believe Zentz was in on it.

  Nevi kept his attention on the screen, where the kelp configuration didn’t seem to change.

  Would it be worth it, going in after them?

  He thought it probably would. The different factions of Pandora only needed a symbol to bring them together, and Nevi knew Crista Galli was ready-made for the job. Better his hands on her than Shadowbox. Besides, he’d maneuvered around troublesome kelp in the past and never had problems that he couldn’t handle. And if a coup did come down, Nevi could be seen as rescuing Crista Galli, along with the very popular Ozette. That would get the media on his side.

  Either way, that LaPush has to go, he thought. That one’s been too much trouble for too damned long.

  Nevi didn’t want to be the one to rule Pandora, if that was what all of this came to. He was happy being the shadow, being the arranger of possibilities. His distaste for Flattery and his style grew more unbearable by the year, but he had no desire for the hot seat himself.

  Code Brutus, he thought. A coup attempt from within.

  Nevi didn’t think that Zentz was capable of carrying off a coup, though he had to admit that he was in the middle of the perfect alibi—at sea with the Director’s highest-ranking assistant, a known and effective assassin.