The Starry Rift Part 22

"I figured."

"Once I work for Zeal. All go well . . . until one day. Then I make mistake. Zeal get angry. Zeal take hands. Zeal say 'more use on end of machine.'"

"I'm sorry."

"Zeal got temper. One day Zeal get angry with you."

"I'll be off the s.h.i.+p before then."

"You hope."

Now it was my turn to sound angry. "What does it matter? There's nowhere for me to go. I have no choice but to work with Zeal."

"No," she said. "You have choice."

"I don't see that I do."

"I show. Then you understand. Then you help."

I looked at her. "I just tried to shoot you. Why would you still trust me?"

She c.o.c.ked her head, as if my question made only the barest sense to her. "You ask me . . . what my name is." She blinked, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face with the effort of language. "What my name was."

"But you didn't know."

"Doesn't matter. No one else . . . ever ask. Except you, Peter Vandry."

She took me deeper into the s.h.i.+p, into the part I had always been told was off-limits because of its intense radiation. Dimly, it began to dawn on me that this was just a lie to dissuade the curious.

"Zeal not happy, you not bring me in," she said.

"I'll make something up. Tell him I couldn't find you, or that you tricked me and destroyed the gun."

"Not work on Zeal."

"I'll think of something," I said glibly. "In the meantime . . . you can just hide out here. When we dock, we can both make a run for it."

She laughed. "I not get off Devilfish, Peter Vandry. I die here."

"No," I said. "It doesn't have to happen like that."

"Yes, it does. Nearly time now."

"Back there," I said. "When you did that thing with the gun . . . what did you mean when you said 'baby'?"

"I mean this," she said, and opened a door.

It led into a huge and bright room: part of the engine system. Since my time on the s.h.i.+p, I had learned enough of the ramscoop design to understand that the interstellar gases collected by the magnetic scoop had to pa.s.s through the middle of the s.h.i.+p to reach the combustion chamber at the rear . . . which was somewhere near where we were standing.

Overhead was a thick, glowing tube, running the length of the room. That was the fuel conduit. With the drive off, the gla.s.s lining the tube would have been midnight black. Only a fraction of the glow from the heated gases shone through . . . but it was still enough to bathe the room in something like daylight.

But that wasn't the only bright thing in the room.

We walked along a railinged catwalk, high above the floor. Below, but slightly off to one side, was a thick metal cage in the form of a horizontal cylinder. The cage flickered with containment fields.

Something huge floated in the cage. It was a creature: sleek and elongated, aglow with its own fierce, bra.s.sy light. Something like a whale but carved from molten lava. Quilted in fiery platelets that flexed and undulated as the creature writhed in the field's embrace. Flickering with arcs and filaments of lightning, like a perpetual dance of St. Elmo's fire.

I squinted against the glare from the alien thing.

"What . . . ?" I asked, not needing to say any more.

"Flux Swimmer," she said. "Devilfish found her . . . living in outflow jet from star. Didn't evolve there. Migrated. Star to star, billions of years. Older than Galaxy."

I stared, humbled, at the astonis.h.i.+ng thing. "I've heard of such things. In the texts of the Kalarash . . . but everyone always a.s.sumed they were legendary animals, like unicorns, or dragons, or tigers."

"Real," she said. "Just . . . rare."

The creature writhed again, flexing the long, flattened whip of its body. "But why? Why keep it here?"

"Devilfish needs Flux Swimmer," she said. "Flux Swimmer . . . has power. Magnetic fields. Reaches out . . . shapes. Changes."

I nodded slowly, beginning to understand. I thought back to the engagement with the other ramscoop; the way its intake field had become fatally distorted.

"The Flux Swimmer is the Devilfish's weapon against other s.h.i.+ps," I said, speaking for the girl. "She reaches out and twists their magnetic fields. Zeal always knew we were going to win." I looked down at the creature again, looking so pitiful in its metal cage. I did not have to read the animal's mind to know that it did not want to be held here, locked away in the heart of the Devilfish.

"They . . . make her do this," the girl said.

"Torture?"

"No. She could always . . . choose to die. Easier for her."

"How, then?"

She led me along an extension to the catwalk, so that we walked directly over the trapped animal. It was then that I understood how the crew exerted their control on the alien.

Hidden from view before, but visible now, was a smaller version of the same cage. It sat next to the Flux Swimmer. It held another version of the alien animal, but one that was much tinier than the first. Probes reached through the field, contacting the fiery hide of the little animal.

"Baby," the girl said. "Hurt baby. Make mother shape field, or hurt baby even more. That how it works."

It was all too much. I closed my eyes, numbed at the implicit horror I had just been shown. The baby was not being hurt now, but that was only because the Devilfish did not need the mother's services. But when another s.h.i.+p needed to be destroyed and looted . . . then the pain would begin again, until the mother extended her alien influence beyond the hull and twisted the other s.h.i.+p's magnetic field.

"I see why the captain cut our field now," I said. "It was so she could reach through it."

"Yes. Captain clever."

"Where do you come into it?" I asked.

"I look after them. Tend them. Keep them alive." She nodded upward, to where smaller conduits branched off the main fuel line. "Swimmers drink plasma. Captain lets them have fuel. Just enough . . . keep alive. No more."

"We've got to stop this ever happening again," I said, reopening my eyes. Then a thought occurred to me. "But she can stop it, can't she? If the mother has enough influence over magnetic fields to twist the ramscoop of a s.h.i.+p thirty kilometers away . . . surely she can stop the captain and his crew? They're cyborgs, after all. They're practically made of metal."

"No," she said, shaking her head in exasperation-either with the situation, or her own limitations. "Mother . . . too strong. Long range . . . good control. Smash other s.h.i.+p, easy. Short range . . . bad. Too near."

"So what you're saying is . . . she can't exercise enough local control, because she's too strong?"

"Yes," she said, nodding emphatically. "Too strong. Too much danger . . . kill baby."

So the mother was powerless, I thought: she had the ability to destroy another ramscoop, but not to unshackle herself from her own chains without harming her child.

"Wait, though. The thing with the gun . . . that took some precision, didn't it?"

"Yes," she said. "But not mother. Baby."

She had said it with something like pride. "The baby can do the same trick?"

"Baby weak . . . for now. But I make baby stronger. Give baby more fuel. They say starve baby . . . keep baby alive, but just." She clenched her fist and snarled. "I disobey. Give baby more food. Let baby get stronger. Then one day . . ."

"The baby will be able to do what the mother can't," I said. "Kill them all. That's the bad thing, isn't it? That's what you were warning me about. Telling me to get off the s.h.i.+p before it happened. And to make sure Zeal didn't put implants in my head. So I'd have a chance."

"Someone . . . live," she said. "Someone . . . come back. Find Devilfish. Let mother and baby go. Take them home."

"Why not you?"

She touched the side of her head. "I, lobot."

"Oh, no."

"When bad thing happen, I go too. But you live, Peter Vandry. You wethead. You come back."

"How soon?" I breathed, not wanting to think about what she had just said.

"Soon. Baby stronger . . . hour by hour. Control . . . improving. See, feel, all around it. Empathic. Know what to do. Understand good." Again that flicker of pride. "Baby clever."

"Zeal's on to you. That's why he sent me here."

"That why . . . has to happen soon. Before Zeal take away . . . me. What left behind after . . . not care about baby."

"And now?"

"I care. I love."

"Well, isn't that heartwarming," said a voice behind us.

I turned around, confronted by the sight of Mister Zeal blocking the main catwalk, advancing toward us with a heavy gun in his human hand: not a tranquilizer this time. He shook his head disappointedly. "Here was I, thinking maybe you needed some help . . . and when I arrive I find you having a good old chinwag with the lobot!"

"Zeal make you lobot too," she said. "He train you now . . . just to build up neuromotor patterns."

"Listen to her," Zeal said mockingly. "Step aside now, Peter. Let me finish the job you were so tragically incapable of completing."

I stood my ground. "Is that right, Zeal? Were you going to make me into one of them as well, or were you just planning on taking my hands?"

"Stand aside, lad. And it's Mister Zeal to you, by the way."

"No," I said. "I'm not letting you touch her."

"Fine, then."

Zeal aimed the gun and shot me. The round tore through my leg, just below the knee. I yelped and started to fold as my leg buckled under me. By tightening my grip on the railings I managed not to slip off the catwalk.

Zeal advanced toward me, boots clanging on the catwalk. I could barely hold myself up now. Blood was drooling down my leg from the wound. My hands were slippery on the railing, losing their grip.

"I'm trying not to do too much damage," Zeal said, before leveling the gun at me again. "I'd still like to be able to salvage something."

I steeled myself against the shot.

"Baby," the girl called.

Zeal's arm swung violently aside, mas.h.i.+ng against the railing. His hand spasmed open to drop the gun. It clattered to the deck of the catwalk, then dropped all the way to the floor of the chamber, where it smashed apart.

Zeal grunted in anguish, using his good hand to ma.s.sage the fingers of the other.

"Nice trick," he said. "But it'll only make it slower and messier for both of you."

With both hands-he couldn't have been hurt that badly-he delved into the pocket on the front of his ap.r.o.n. He came out with a pair of long, vicious-looking knives, turning them edge-on so that we'd see how sharp they were.

"Baby . . ." I called.

But Zeal kept advancing, sharpening the knives on each other, showing no indication that the baby was having any effect on his weapons. It was only then that I realized that the knives were not necessarily made of metal.

Baby wasn't going to be able to do anything about them.

Zeal's huge boots clanged ponderously closer. The pain in my leg was now excruciating, beginning to dull my alertness. Slumped down on the deck, I could barely reach his waist, let alone the knives.

"Easy now, lad," he said as I tried to block him. "Easy now, and we'll make it nice and quick when it's your turn. How does that sound?"

"It sounds . . ."

I pawed ineffectually at the leather of his ap.r.o.n, slick with blood and oil. I couldn't begin to get a grip on it, even if I'd had the strength to stop him.

"Now lad," he said, sounding more disappointed than angry. "Don't make me slash at your hands. They're too good to waste like that."

"You're not getting any part of me."

He clucked in amus.e.m.e.nt and knelt down just far enough to stab the tip of one of the knives-the one he held in his right hand- against my chest. "Seriously, now."

The pressure of the knife made me fall back, so that my back was on the deck. That was when I touched the deck with my bare hand and felt how warm it was.

Warm and getting hotter.