The Cyborg from Earth Page 8

  That was all right. Neither did Jeff. Space sounders were supposed to be found only in the neighborhood of reefs, but the Lizard Reef was far ahead and here was a sounder, out in open space and closing in on the Aurora. The sounders were known to have some strange attraction for the gemstones known as Cauthen starfires, but unless a ship had a starfire on board the sounders were supposed to be harmless. The Aurora had no starfire on board—but there was no doubt that the sounder's attention was on the ship.

  The distance between the two was closing steadily. From his position Jeff had a view of the sounder's long, tapering body, kilometers of near-perfect blackness occulting the pale glow of the Messina Dust Cloud. The octagonal shape at the front had become a great maw, surrounded by its eight blue-white tendrils. According to navy files, that maw could stretch wide enough to engulf a full battle cruiser—a ship fifty times the size of the Aurora. There were stories of vessels swallowed whole, their crews carried off to nowhere so fast that the final desperate messages were redshifted to a small fraction of their original signal frequencies. They were traveling at some large fraction of light speed—and still alive, not crushed by the monstrous and near-instantaneous acceleration. No Sol scientist had any explanation as to how that could happen.

  The sounder filled a quarter of the sky ahead when the captain's next scream reached the observation bubble. It sounded to Jeff as though he was calling, "Emergency stations! Emergency stations!" but his voice was overlaid with a scream of interference, a deafening shreep-shreep-shreep that set teeth on edge. It was the call of the sounder itself, filling space with high-energy radio signals. Against that background, Jeff could hardly hear Dufferin's frantic instructions.

  The emergency stations were amidships, in the main body of the ship where the pinnace was located. It was tiny compared with the main ship, but if the Aurora ever had to be abandoned the pinnace had the power and supplies to carry the crew to safety.

  He stood up to stow the folding seat away, so that he would be able to lift the hatch and start back along the narrow shaft that led to the main hull. His hand was on the seat back when the Aurora's drive went without warning from low to high power. Instead of the light acceleration of easy cruising, the ship surged forward.

  Even if he had been ready, Jeff would have had trouble remaining on his feet. He fell forward over the folding chair. It collapsed under his weight, sending him crashing to the floor of the bubble. He landed hard on his arms and chest, barely able to protect his face with his hands. Lying unable to move, he both felt and saw the long column that supported the observation bubble flex and whip under the sudden force of the drive. The floor of the nacelle resonated beneath his chest with the deep, groaning note of a gigantic organ pipe.

  He rolled over, braced himself on his hands, and struggled to his knees. He had to get back to the main hull. If anywhere at all was safe, that would be it. Even if the sounder swallowed up the Aurora, the crew might still escape in the pinnace.

  New shouts and screams were coming over the communication channel, Dufferin's high-pitched cries mingled now with some deeper bellow. It sounded as though a furious argument were going on below. The shreep-shreep-shreep of sounder interference became louder. Jeff looked out, away from the ship. The Aurora's evasive action, far from losing the sounder, had brought it closer. The black maw seemed only meters away, spanning the sky.

  He paused for a moment, imagining he saw a spark of iridescence deep within the mouth's dark cavity. Could that be a Cauthen starfire, the fabulous gem that had sparked the original exploration and development of the Messina Dust Cloud? If so, he might be the first living person who had ever seen one, inside a sounder.

  His sanity returned. There'd be time to think about historic firsts only if you remained a living person. Get back to the main hull!

  He pushed aside the shattered chair and struggled to lift the hatch. The little plate seemed to weigh a ton. Before he could move it, another sharp pulse of force came from the Aurora's drive. The spike holding the observation nacelle curved through thirty degrees, sending Jeff rolling around the curved floor of the bubble. Moments later, the drive cut back to such a gentle thrust that he was almost floating.

  As he rose to his feet Jeff had his second attack of sanity. The sounds coming through the communications link suggested total chaos in the control room. Dufferin must have been trying anything he could think of, blindly, to escape the sounder. And as long as the Aurora veered and darted erratically, in random directions and with variable thrust, Jeff would never be able to make his way through the narrow shaft to the main hull. He would be all right on the ladder now, with the drive throttled back almost to nothing. But how long would that last? Another pulse of two or three Gs, like the one they had just experienced, and his grip would tear free. He would accelerate helplessly down the twenty-meter drop. At three Gs, a fall of one tenth of that distance could be deadly.

  He was stuck in the observation nacelle. His only possible escape route was too dangerous to use. That realization forced a decision: If he could do nothing, he would do nothing. It calmed Jeff completely. He rolled onto his back, cushioned the back of his head on his hands, and stared up at the blind face of the sounder. It had so grown in size that he felt he could reach out through the transparent wall of the bubble and touch one of the floating blue-white tentacles.

  That was an illusion, he knew, an effect created by the sounder's immense size and the lack of anything to provide a scale of distance. The sounder was still probably a hundred meters away. The maw was opening wider, as though preparing to ingest the ship. It was impossible to believe that the object he was looking at was not a sentient creature, well aware of the presence of the Aurora.

  Both ship and space sounder had turned during their past few seconds of violent maneuvers. The observation bubble now pointed not toward the glowing face of the Messina Dust Cloud, but to an expanse of open starry sky. Jeff could see an octagonal pattern of distortion imposed on that background. Far too many stars were visible, as though space near the sounder had been drawn in and compressed by its presence.

  He tried to estimate the rate at which the maw was increasing in apparent size. Unless something changed, the Aurora—or at least its observation bubble, which was the part that most concerned him—would be within that dark mouth in less than thirty seconds.

  The knowledge that you were about to die was supposed to calm you. It didn't work that way at all. Jeff, gazing down the maw, felt an all-over terror. He didn't want to die. His pulse was pounding faster and faster, his guts were knotted with the fear of imminent pain and death.

  The blow, when it came, felt as though his heart was smashing out of his chest. A terrible, overwhelming force crushed him, molding his body to the rounded contours of the little chamber. In navy centrifuge tests he had endured as much as seven Gs. This was nine G, ten G, what? More, far more, than anything he had ever experienced. Part of the broken chair was digging deep into his shoulder, but he could not change his position by a millimeter.

  His eyes would not move in his head. He saw only a shrinking and darkening circle, straight in front of him. The maw was near the center, and he stared at it. It was coming closer—fast—but at the same time it was sliding to one side. The observation nacelle filled with the writhing glow of one of the blue-white tentacles, then suddenly that ribbon of light was also moving past. Jeff saw the broad side of the sounder, like a wall of darkness speeding by. There came a crackle of discharge, as sheets of pink lightning enveloped the Aurora and pulsed within the interior of the bubble. The electronic shreep-shreep-shreep of the sounder rose to a new maximum.

  The Aurora leapt forward as though goaded by the energy pumped into it. Jeff had not believed that the acceleration could possibly increase again. But it did. The new force that pushed him to the unforgiving floor went beyond intolerable. He no longer cared what happened to him. He just wanted it to stop.

  It didn't stop, and it didn't stop, and it didn't stop.
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br />   And then at last, as the world darkened and he slid into unconsciousness, it did.

  Chapter Eight

  THE world was black as Jeff lost consciousness. When he awoke it had turned completely white. Other than that there seemed little difference. He had not been able to move then; he could not move now, not even a finger. His chest was rigid, so constrained that he could barely breathe. As the scene before his eyes came into focus, the uniform field of white took on a pattern of ruled lines. He realized that he was staring at a flat ceiling made up of big square tiles. As he watched, a flicker of red and green came and went.

  Nothing like that existed in the observation nacelle. There was nothing remotely like it anywhere aboard the Aurora.

  Where was he? He felt as though he had been unconscious for days.

  He tried to lift his head. The effort produced a stab of pain in his neck, but it was worth it to be able to move again. He craned forward to look at his body. From his neck down his trunk, arms, and legs, he was totally encased in a rigid white cast. His head was the only thing he could move, and he could lift that only a couple of inches and hold it up for only a few seconds. Soon, even though he was in a low-G field, he was forced to lie back and stare again at the ceiling.

  He heard a clicking sound from his left. He wanted to turn in that direction, but the effort produced a worse pain.

  "Is someone there?"

  Even his throat hurt. The voice that came out sounded nothing like his own.

  He was answered by another and louder clicking, then a deep purr like a great cat. He could smell something, an odd odor like oil and cinnamon. Pain or not, he had to see what was beside him. He gritted his teeth and slowly forced his head to turn to the left.

  The first thing that came into view were two long, spidery arms. They were made of metal or some dark plastic, and they had three separate joints. A warning voice in Jeff's head said, "Cyborg Territory." He grunted and turned his head farther in spite of the pain. He was afraid that the arms would end at a deformed human torso and some metallic monstrosity of a head. What he saw was not much more reassuring. Both slender arms—and six more like them—attached to a rounded gold tube shaped like a giant wine bottle. A tangled snakes' nest of wires grew out where the cap should have been. The body leaned toward a tall metal cabinet, whose surface was covered with tiny glowing hemispheres that formed an always-changing pattern of red and green lights.

  The mop head of wires turned slowly in his direction.

  "You are awake," a jerky voice said. "As the monitors indicate, exactly on schedule. That is excellent. Do you know who you are?"

  That wasn't the question most on Jeff's mind.

  "I'm Jeff Kopal—Jefferson Kopal. Who are you?"

  "I am Tilde. Wait here."

  The wine bottle rotated rapidly to a horizontal position and scuttled away on all eight limbs like a great spider. Jeff wondered, Was that a cyborg; part human with a machine's limbs and casing? He had no idea of the forms taken by the inhabitants of Cyborg Territory. As for "wait here," what option did he have?

  He could not stay with his head twisted to one side, it was too painful. He turned slowly back to his original position.

  Where was he, and how had he come here? And what had happened to the Aurora! He felt sure that their final surge of acceleration was far beyond the ship's rated maximum.

  He could hear a new sound to his left, an unnerving kind of scraping noise. He had to find out what it was. He turned again, slowly and painfully, and felt enormous relief. A fat black face, all worry and scars, was just a couple of feet away from his.

  "Hooglich!"

  "Tha's me." She turned, and he realized that the scraping was caused by a heavy chair that she was dragging along behind her. She plumped her massive behind onto the seat and settled down next to him. "How you doing?"

  Pain all over, and as uncomfortable as you could get. Even a wimpy coward couldn't say something like that.

  "I'm all right. What happened?"

  She grunted. "Oh, mebbe ten million things." She dropped her Pool style of speech. "All right, Brother Kopal. Where would you like me to start?"

  "Tell me everything."

  "That might be difficult. I don't know everything. But I guess you realize that we got away from the sounder—otherwise we wouldn't be here."

  "Where's here?"

  "On board a Messina Cloud ship. Am I going to talk, or are you going to keep interrupting?"

  "I'll be quiet."

  "Right. From the beginning, then. The first that me and Russo knew we were in trouble was when Captain Dufferin threw the Aurora onto high G. We realized then there was some sort of problem, but being Squeaky he of course didn't bother to say what. We kind of figured it out, though, when the image of the sounder appeared on the forward screen. By the way," she made a face that Jeff would not like to have met on a dark night, "you may as well hear this from me as from anybody. According to the captain, you are entirely to blame for what happened. You were supposed to be in the observation nacelle to keep an eye out for sounders, and you didn't notify him of danger until too late."

  "He didn't send me for that!" Excitement made Jeff's voice crack to an embarrassing imitation of Captain Dufferin's. "I noticed the sounder, but he didn't tell me to keep a lookout. He sent me there to punish me—for talking to you."

  "I believe it." She did not point out that Jeff had interrupted again. "That's our captain, every time. He's never to blame for anything. I didn't even know that you were out at observation point 'til it was all over. Russo and I assumed that you were with the rest of the officers, at emergency stations and cushioned for high-G maneuvers. Otherwise, we'd never have done what we did." She gestured to Jeff's body cast. "And you'd not have needed that. Of course, if we hadn't acted we might not have escaped from the sounder. If it's any consolation, I'm in deep as you—'taking action contrary to officer's command,' the record says."

  "What did you do?"

  "Russo and I were down aft. We couldn't see what was happening on the bridge, but it was obvious from the way the Aurora was being thrown around—all fits and starts—that Dufferin didn't have any idea what he was doing. And we could see the sounder, closing in on the ship. So . . . I took over. The commands for the drive arrive aft before execution. I overrode them. I put the Aurora onto ultrahigh emergency thrust, something the manuals warn you never to try—I'm in big trouble for that, too; but the people who write manuals don't have sounders chewing at their rear end. The log shows we touched twelve and a half Gs before we got clear, seven more than the engine danger level. Ruined the Omnivores, of course. I'm charged with that, too, wanton destruction of navy property. I came close to ruining you as well, Brother; but I don't think that worried old Squeaky at all."

  "You saved the ship, yet you'll get blamed for damaging the engines?" Jeff forgot about his body cast and made a painful and unsuccessful effort to sit up. "That's not fair."

  "Like life. What you going to do about it?"

  "I'll make sure Captain Dufferin reports accurately."

  "How you'll do that?"

  "I will. I can. I'm—" Jeff was about to do something he had sworn never to do. He would never say, "I'm a Kopal," and expect on the strength of that to receive special treatment.

  What stopped him was not revulsion at the idea of using the family name. It was the knowledge of where he was: marooned in the Messina Dust Cloud, far from every court of appeal. Until their return to Sol-side, Captain Dufferin was the ultimate authority.

  "I'm going to file my own report," he finished weakly. "When we get back."

  "Which might be quite a while from now, since we're not heading for the node. In fact, we're going in the opposite direction. Want to hear the rest of it?"

  Jeff couldn't nod. It hurt too much. He just closed and opened his eyes.

  She seemed to take that as agreement and went on, "We blew the Aurora clear of the sounder. Something strange about that, a sounder showing up so far from a r
eef, and I've no explanation yet. Russo claims to have ideas. Anyway, the sounder vanished after we were clear, the way they do. It just faded into nothingness and left us wondering if it was ever there. But we were certainly there, a gazillion kilometers from anywhere in a ship with no engines. Most of the officers wanted to send out a distress signal. Captain Dufferin refused. He said a navy ship should not accept assistance from any group trying to secede from Sol. No one asked him the obvious question: What were we supposed to do, sit around in space until we starved or ran out of air? Russo and I weren't in a position to say anything. Squeaky had already accused us of usurping his authority and being partly responsible for the fix the ship was in because we ruined the engines. Russo went forward and eased you back to where you could be looked after. There wasn't much anyone could do, beyond feeding you intravenously and hooking you up to life support. You were in poor shape, but you needed better medical care than the Aurora could provide. A couple of the officers said as much and suggested a Mayday for medical help. They were chewed out by Dufferin for their pains. He said to keep you sedated and out of it until something changed.