His attention remained riveted to the deadly robots, wary of their next move. But it soon became clear that hostilities were over and that he was no longer a target. The pups retracted the barrels of Higgs cutters and mag projectile weaponry back into their compact bodies and floated serenely out of the natatorium.
He turned to LeaMarsa, still trying to process what happened. “You did that?”
She nodded. Although her eyes were alert and gazing directly at him, he had the impression her mind was in another place, somewhere far away.
“You need to go,” she said. “You have very little time left.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I transmitted the pertinent information to Jonomy. It will be simpler to let him explain.”
As if on cue, the lytic’s voice filled his helmet. “Captain, the Sentinel has driven the invader out of the network. But we are about to experience a calamity. A deluge of new data, originating from what the Alchemon can only describe as an unknown source, has clarified the creature’s scheme.”
Ericho instinctively knew that LeaMarsa was the “unknown source” to which Jonomy referred.
“The invader’s modifications to the Big Three during its incursion, in conjunction with the rerouting of the output power modules, leaves us facing a dire situation.”
“Get to the point.”
“We are about to be chronojacked.”
“What!” He shook his head in disbelief, gazed at LeaMarsa.
“It’s true,” she said.
“But you can stop it.”
“No. Not this.”
“Captain, these modifications cannot be undone, not within such a limited time frame.”
“How limited?”
LeaMarsa and Jonomy answered in tandem. Their words, slightly out of sync, echoed weirdly in Ericho’s helmet.
“Less than four minutes.”
“There must be something we can do.”
Jonomy was adamant. “We would have difficulty even reaching the Big Three nexus. Those repair pups are blockading the entrance portal. Their com systems were sabotaged, making them independent and uncontrollable, even by superluminal energies. They likely are following the invader’s last programmed instructions.”
“What about the Sentinel? The warrior pups?”
“Even if the pups were to blast through the blockade, there would not be enough time.”
Ericho gazed in awe at LeaMarsa, knowing she was responsible. What has she become?
“You need to go,” she repeated, this time more insistently. “The creature set this plan in motion. It cannot be altered.”
“All right. Jonomy, we’re on our way to the bridge. Get the others up there too. And tell June to prepare loopy doses for everyone.”
“She is administering the injections now.”
He gestured to LeaMarsa. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not coming with you.”
“If we’re about to be chronojacked, the bridge is the safest place to be.”
“I’m needed elsewhere.”
Ericho’s first inclination was to grab hold of her and drag her to safety. But recalling the power she’d unleashed the last time they’d physically touched, he thought better of it
“Good luck.” He couldn’t stop turning to stare at her as he rushed for the exit.
CHAPTER 43
LeaMarsa knew what she needed to do. Clarity of purpose had come upon her in those moments when the warrior pups were destroying the Rigel incarnation of the Diar-Fahn.
She turned back to the pool. Its surface again grew wildly agitated, bubbling and pulsating. The level began to drop, and for a moment she wondered if the creature was somehow responsible. But then she realized that the ship’s natural systems had come back online and were draining away the polluted mess.
The basin was quickly emptied, revealing the creature squirming on the bottom, still in its Rigel guise. Already it had reassembled much of itself, crudely fusing together head, torso and appendages in a manner that suggested some ancient Frankenstein monster. For the first time she sensed its driving emotion, a deep and intolerant rage, directed not only against her but against all intelligent lifeforms. She still couldn’t fathom the reason behind such anger, only that it was the foundation of a desire for destruction.
But at the moment, such things didn’t matter. And although she and the Diar-Fahn drew superluminal energies from the same source, LeaMarsa was now the stronger entity.
Eons ago, the survivors of the stick city civilization had done what was necessary to capture and imprison the creature, a threat they’d brought upon themselves by reengineering their DNA to develop a quadpartite consciousness. A lone individual from their species, its most gifted psionic, had made a supreme sacrifice. Nanamistyne had become an organic prison, the jailer, a willing martyr to protect the survivors of her own species and other civilizations.
It was time for a new martyr to take up the cause.
CHAPTER 44
Ericho rushed onto the bridge just as June and Faye arrived through the other airseal. The women were pushing and pulling the disabled autobed with the unconscious Alexei.
“How long?” Ericho demanded, before realizing the lytic’s chair was empty. The disconnected umbilical snaked across the floor.
Jonomy came over the intercom. “Two minutes, nine seconds, captain. You will need to be strapped down. Firsthand accounts by chronojackers confirm that the moment of transit can create unusual turbulence.”
“Where are you?”
“On my way to the starboard lander hold. I have already prepped the lander for departure.”
Before Ericho could ask why, June appeared at his side, her gloved hand clutching a tubular inhaler.
“Take off your helmet!” she ordered. “I injected Loopaline B4 into the rest of us but two minutes isn’t enough time for a shot to work. You need to snort it. Hurry!”
Ericho removed the helmet. Before he could utter a word, she rammed the inhaler up his left nostril and squeezed.
The inoculation burned and had a vile smell that made him gag. An overwhelming vertigo took hold and he nearly collapsed. June helped him to his chair.
“The dizziness will pass in a bit.”
Ericho plopped the helmet in his lap, willed the bridge to stop gyrating. Or maybe he was the one twirling like a top and the bridge was motionless.
“LeaMarsa contained the creature,” Jonomy explained. “She is meeting me at the lander. I will be her pilot for our return to Sycamore.”
“What!”
“I cannot fully elucidate the situation in the time remaining. She transmitted a vast amount of data to me through the superluminal conduit she established with the ship via SEN. I recorded everything for your later perusal.”
“Jonomy, get back to the bridge. That’s an order.”
“I cannot. The external telemetry interface is functioning again. I sent the relevant facts of our predicament to the Corporeal as an emergency transmission.”
“Just tell me why you’re doing this. The short version.”
“The lander likely could make it back to Sycamore and navigate through that unstable atmosphere on automatic. But considering her mission’s crucial nature, it’s best to have a skilled pilot aboard as backup.”
“And why’s LeaMarsa returning there in the first place?”
“Please, captain, there’s no time for further explanation.”
Jonomy cut the link.
“Can a lander even make it to Sycamore?” Faye wondered, strapping herself into the lieutenant’s chair.
“Fuel-wise, it’ll be close,” Ericho said. “Once they touch down, I doubt if they’ll be able to take off again.”
“Then both of them will be…”
“Yeah.”
June finished securing Alexei with some additional straps and locked down the autobed. She bolted for the nearest airseal.
“I have an inhaler for Hardy.”
Jonomy beat Ericho to t
he punch in voicing an objection.
“June, that is unwise. I have attempted various means to interrupt Hardy’s dreamlounge fantasy, all to no avail. It is unlikely you can reach him in the limited time remaining.”
“I have to try.”
“No!” Ericho ordered. “You’re staying here.”
She lunged through the door and was gone.
He secured his straps, glanced over at Faye. She looked terrified.
“We’re going to get through this,” he said, trying to sound reassuring.
“What if the loopy doesn’t kick in?” Faye whispered.
“June knows what she’s doing.”
He hoped so. Loopy was impetus-triggered and was supposed to knock them unconscious at the moment of temporal transition. Yet whether injected or snorted, the recommendation was for the inhibitor to be taken fifteen minutes prior to activation of the spatiotemporal coagulators.
At least LeaMarsa had disabled SEN. Once they made the temporal jump, the warrior pups wouldn’t treat them as renegade chronojackers and attack.
Hopefully.
The worst of Ericho’s vertigo passed. He was about to put his helmet back on when a panel snared his attention. A flashing light indicated the egress hatch of the starboard lander hold had opened.
He activated the HOD. Hull cams showed the lander floating away from the Alchemon.
Jonomy ignited the lander’s engines. The craft rocketed away. It would have to get far enough from them to avoid the electromagnetic tides occurring in the wake of a chronojacking, when SCO activated outside the boundaries of a Quiets. Twenty kilometers was the recommended safe distance.
A clock counted down the final moments.
“Fifteen seconds,” Faye uttered, clutching her armrests in a death grip.
Their outlandish predicament presented a new twist. Ericho found himself staring at Faye, overcome by lust. He suddenly wanted her.
She looked appalled. “Captain, I’m so sorry! My secretors! It happens sometimes when I get scared. I can’t control them, and they release.”
He snapped his helmet back on, took deep breaths of suit air uncontaminated by her alluring pheromones. His lust subsided. He was about to offer another homily about remaining strong in the face of adversity when time ran out and spacetime deviated.
His chair seemed to wrench sideways. The sensation was like being whipped twenty feet to the left and brought to an abrupt halt. His stomach danced. He fought an urge to vomit.
Mad streams of color erupted from the HOD, swirled across the bridge. The air mutated into a spectral nirvana of impossibly vivid hues, alien and haunting. Weird sing-song melodies and mystifying odors squeezed into his brain, uprooting sensible thoughts, throttling sanity.
It was too much to process. He pinched his eyes shut but it made no difference. The sensory barrage continued, unrelenting.
And then the universe skipped a beat and blackness overtook him.
CHAPTER 45
LeaMarsa awakened. She was strapped into the lander’s copilot seat beside Jonomy, who was staring ahead at Sycamore. Over the five days they’d been in flight, the planet had grown from the size of a coin to a sphere of churning clouds nearly filling the window.
“How long yet?” she asked.
“We will reach orbit in an hour,” he said, shifting his attention to the small flight-control panel. Landers were relatively simple-minded machines and didn’t require umbilical interfaces.
“Do you have a landing-site preference?” he asked.
“Whatever’s best for you.”
Jonomy would just be a visitor to Sycamore. It made sense for him to choose an area that might be the most conducive to being rescued. She was here for the duration, an abstract length of time. A thousand years? A million?
Eternity?
An answer was impossible to fathom, neither here within the lander nor in neurospace, that other universe where her consciousness existed simultaneously.
She sensed Jonomy turning to her with a concerned look.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Are you certain the creature remains safely contained?”
She felt its presence inside her. She’d shrunk it to the smallest incarnation attainable by her powers, an embryonic organism less than a millimeter in length, about the size it must have been when she and Faye had first set eyes on Bouncy Blue. She could have inserted the embryo into most any bodily orifice for safekeeping but had selected the most logical one: her uterus. There it ideally would remain in stasis, frozen in spacetime, prohibited from maturing into a threat.
“It’s secure.”
Jonomy still looked troubled. During their relatively uneventful flight in the lander, he’d displayed a wider range of expressions than he’d shown during their entire nine months together aboard the Alchemon. She believed it had something to do with being deprived of his umbilical connection. Lytics were said to establish intimate attachments with starships and the other AIs they interfaced with over long periods. When such a relationship ended there were often withdrawal symptoms, one being increased emotional sensitivity.
She prodded him into talking about it.
“I have been experiencing recurrences of the sort of psionic bombardment that forced me into excessive dreamlounge fantasies aboard the Alchemon. Their intensity has been escalating over the past few hours.”
She understood why. “It’s the creature. It knows we’re getting close to Sycamore. Obviously, it doesn’t want to be returned to its old prison.”
She could literally feel the creature raging at the idea that it had a new jailer. In fact, over these past days in the lander, she’d come to realize that anger was its dominant emotion, driving its attempts to destroy intelligent life. Yet beneath that anger lay some deeper emotion, an underlying cause that remained indiscernible.
“Nothing to worry about,” she assured Jonomy. “It’s still able to channel some of its powers through me and is trying to influence you that way. It’s hoping you’ll panic and not land us on Sycamore.”
“Panic is not in my nature,” Jonomy said, sounding relieved by her explanation.
“Once we touch down, I’ll leave the lander and get far away from you. When we’re separated, your urges should go away, or at least lessen.”
“Your air supply will not last long.”
LeaMarsa shrugged. She’d explained as best she could the incredible changes she’d undergone. Still, Jonomy was having difficulty coming to terms with them. Not surprising. At a fundamental level, she too found them hard to grasp.
The energy field now enveloping her was an outgrowth of her ability to exist contemporaneously in both this universe and the dimension of neurospace, the same power possessed by the Diar-Fahn. Breathing and other metabolic processes were mere options for her now, no longer essential for survival. When her air ran out she would simply remove her shieldsuit and keep walking. Perhaps she’d circumnavigate the planet. Possibly several times.
Eventually, she’d likely tire of such aimless wandering. Maybe she’d find a small cave to curl up in or figure out a way to encase herself in rock in the manner of her predecessor, Nanamistyne.
Jonomy’s last transmission from the Alchemon hopefully would be enough of a warning to keep future expeditions at a safe distance from the planet. Still, there was always the possibility of Corporeal profiteers or rogue explorers someday landing on Sycamore and attempting to track her down. Making herself hard to find was the wisest course.
But whether she remained hidden or not, the inevitable process of devolution would set in, as it had with Nanamistyne. Over eons of time, LeaMarsa would physically regress into a more basic lifeform, shedding unused features. Bones, muscles, internal and sensory organs, appendages – all would atrophy, morphing her into a protoplasmic blob. Perhaps in the distant future she’d even earn a nickname as flippant as Bouncy Blue.
Her gradual regression would annihilate self-awareness. There would come a tipping point when she
transitioned from a state of full consciousness to a state where she was barely conscious at all. At that point her unique dual citizenship would expire, and the creature on Sycamore would be contained only by an empty organic vessel. The intelligent being that once had been LeaMarsa de Host in the physical universe would, for all practical purposes, take up sole residency in the realm of luminous dark.
It is a noble sacrifice.
The voice shifted LeaMarsa’s attention from the cramped lander to neurospace, to that endless expanse of stars. One of them emerged from the stellar backdrop, accelerated toward her until it dominated her field of vision.
“Nanamistyne,” LeaMarsa whispered.
There was a sound like gentle laughter as the star coalesced into a tall lean figure with bluish skin. Her hips were draped in frothy culottes, cable-stitch patterned in pleasing shades of green and gold. The projected vision suggested dignified fortitude and grace.
Yet it was more than that. Her presence caused LeaMarsa to recall a long-forgotten dream from childhood, back before her uniqueness had fractured natural connectivity with other humans. She used to fantasize about encountering someone who was her equal, someone with whom she could share her deepest feelings and thoughts. A genuine friend.
We are much alike. Anomalies within our civilizations.
“Blessed and cursed.”
One cannot exist without the other.
The very sound of Nanamistyne’s words induced a strange pleasure. They seemed to wash over her as if she were sand on a summer beach lapped by effervescent waves.
“Is it worth it? This noble sacrifice?”
It is our fate.
“LeaMarsa, are you all right?”
Compared to the soothing impact of Nanamistyne’s speech, Jonomy’s words sounded harsh and hollow, inconsequential. She returned her focus to the lander and to the lytic’s perplexed look.
Starship Alchemon Page 27