chapter twenty-eight

She knew it had been futile. But she had had to try. Now he’d played the card she’d known all along he would play. After several minutes of silence, as Stav maneuvered the ship closer to the central ship and its Indra, Zenn admitted defeat.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

“You never had a choice. But it will be easier. This way.” He walked to the in-soma pod and told it to begin pre-op checks. It split apart, the lid opening with a soft hiss. Zenn slipped off her backpack and set it carefully against the nearest bulkhead. She felt for Katie; the rikkaset twitched against her hand, a small, black nose appeared, two bright eyes blinked up at her. Preoccupied with the pod, Stav didn’t notice.

“Stay, Katie,” Zenn signed quickly, whispering the words to be sure Katie would obey, her voice breaking. “You stay. Friend-Zenn… will be right back.”

She pulled the cover over Katie’s face, then she took a deep breath and went to the pod.

A soft alarm tone pinged from somewhere, and a mild jolt rocked the ship.

“What now?” Stav looked up from his console in irritation.

A creaking rasp of machinery came from the other end of the craft, and the rear airlock hissed open.

“No. Not yet,” Stav said, taking a step toward the hatch.

“I have brought the Earther.” It was Pokt. He didn’t enter but remained half visible in the hatchway.

“I told you to wait,” Stav said, his voice even but seething.

“Yes. I thought it better I come now. To observe the process.”

“You thought…?”

“To see that all goes as promised. With the stonehorse and the fleet.”

“Pokt, I don’t know what you’re getting at…” he said, keeping his eyes on the Skirni as he edged away toward the front of the ship.

“Getting at? Yes, I will tell you what I am getting at, Lieutenant Travosk of the New Law. I had a thought just now. As to the nature of our alliance.” He looked at Zenn, then away.

“You? Had a thought?” Stav gave Pokt a thin imitation of a smile.

“Yes. A thought. That the purpose of this alliance might not be what it seems. Not what you claimed it to be.”

“Pokt, you’re not making sense. And we’re running out of time.” Stav had reached the pilot’s chair.

“Am I not? Making sense?”

“No, Pokt. You are not,” Stav said, then he sat down in the pilot’s chair and leaned back as if to make himself comfortable.

“My sense is this: perhaps you do not intend to keep your word,” Pokt said, stepping into the cabin to keep Stav in sight, walking with his hands held behind him. “Perhaps you will not honor our bargain, and keep the stonehorse fleet for yourself. When it should clearly go to the Skirni.”

“That’s ridiculous, Pokt.” Stav said calmly. “Why would I lie about this? You said yourself, the Skirni and the New Law are allies.”

“Allies?” Pokt’s voice now dropped to a low snarl. “We do not need allies such as you. You who treat Pokt as dirt. You will not deal honorably. We must take what is ours!”

Both Pokt’s hands now jerked up into view. Clamped onto his wrist was a Khurspex whip-whelk, its dull brown shell just beginning to crack open, the fleshy appendage writhing out to test the air.

“The Skirni will have that fleet,” Pokt screamed, raising the weapon to aim at Stav. “And you will pay for your contempt and lies.”

Stav leaned over quickly in his chair. When he rose again, there was a flux-rifle gripped in one hand. Before Pokt could activate the whip-whelk, Stav fired. The razor-flat ribbon of purple, ionized gas scored the Skirni along the side of his head, pitching him backwards to hit the wall, where he slid down and lay still. The smell of burned flesh drifted in the cabin’s air.

Stav rose from his chair and went to look down at the body.

“Poor little Pokt,” he said, then came to stand next to Zenn. “Did he really think the Skirni were going to… what? Rule the universe? That we would allow that? It’s almost tragic.”

He grabbed her shoulder in one hand and pushed her toward the in-soma pod.

“His behavior proves the point, I suppose,” he said. “Treachery. Betrayal. No surprise, is it? Humans could never ally with Asents. Not in any real sense. Get in.” He gave her a shove. “We need to get started.”

She did as ordered, stepping into the pod and lying down on her stomach on the lounge seat. She buckled the safety harness around her and rested her hands on the control surfaces hidden on either side. This new unit had the same general layout as the cloister’s older pod, and she’d memorized the various controls’ positions during her in-soma training. Stav likely knew the designs of both pods, but she could try to stall him.

“I’ll need time to get familiar with these,” she said, feeling dead inside as she put her hands on one control and then another. “It’s different from the one we had.”

“No, it’s not. At least, not in any way that concerns us just now.” Stav leaned close to her. He nodded at the open hatch Pokt had entered from. “He’s right there, your father. Fail this, do anything foolish, and you’ll live just long enough to watch me take out my disappointment on him. Do we understand each other?”

Zenn said nothing and toggled a switch. The pod door swung shut with a soft, breath-like sigh.

Inside the cramped pod, Zenn was alone; alone with her thoughts of her father and her stupid, girlish daydreams about saving him, her hopes twisted into the nightmarish bargain she had made in order to see him once more, alive and unharmed.

“We’re there,” came Stav’s voice, then his image materialized on the small view screen just in front of her face. He was seated in the pilot’s chair. “Prepare for insertion. And make sure you–”

The transmission was severed by a loud, high-pitched electronic screech. The screens flickered off and on again as the pod was seized by a shaking so violent Zenn nearly had the breath knocked out of her.

“What was that? What’s happening?” she said into the mic mounted on the pod wall near her left cheek.

“It’s the restraining satellites.” She saw Stav wave his hands at a screen and the pod stopped shaking. “The Indra is resisting their control. I’ve boosted the levels.”

“Resisting?” A terrifying thought swept everything else from Zenn’s mind. “Is she spiking a fever? What’s her internal D-rad level?”

“Yes, she’s feverish. But the Dahlberg radiation is within limits. It’s survivable.”

“For how long?” Zenn said, not quite able to believe she was heading into a lethally stressed Indra.

“The sedation sats will hold until the nexus is needed. It’s not your concern.”

Before Zenn could protest that it was very much her concern, the in-soma pod lurched into motion, and the unit’s bow-cam view screen showed the med ship’s outer hull door sliding up. Barely fifty feet away, the armored mass of the Indra’s head filled the opening, scales gleaming dully in the faint starlight, its colossal body out of sight, hidden within the huge bulk of the meta-ship that cocooned it.

The launch arm pushed the pod out into the void, and Zenn’s body lifted up, weightless against the safety harness. With a slight lurch, the arm and the attached pod came to a stop. The tip of the pod was resting lightly against the Indra’s skin.

The arm jerked into motion, extending again, and the pod was carried toward a dark spot just below the crease where the creature’s giant skull met the first node of the spine. Hidden in a fold there, Zenn knew, was one of four cranio-mitral valves spaced around the base of the Indra’s skull.

Made up of two muscular flaps that opened and closed to relieve pressure in the skull, the cranio-mitral valves kept the Indra’s head from literally exploding during the awesome forces generated by quantum tunneling. The valves led directly into the foramen magnum – the hole that admitted the spinal cord into the skull. The foramen opening was the critical boundary. If the Indra perceived her and the pod as a foreign body at that point, it would be all over. That’s where the immune response would trigger, the same response that lit up the Indra chamber when her mother, in her malfunctioning pod, had been lost doing what Zenn was about to do now. Unless the tissue inside her own brain deceived the creature, it would release a pulse of radiation no amount of shielding could withstand, a deadly particle-wave no living organism could survive. What had her mother felt when she saw the radiation gauge in her pod leaping into the red zone? Did she feel heat? Pain? Panic? Astonishment?

The nose of the pod had just penetrated the Indra’s body when both view screens went black. Zenn’s pulse rate galloped.

Claustrophobia enfolded her like a heavy, suffocating blanket. She gasped out loud at the sensation and fought to remain calm, made herself draw the air of the cabin deep into her lungs, then slowly exhale. The pod slid ahead. She was inside the Indra’s body.

The pod’s exterior headlights switched on, the beam playing across the space ahead, the bow-cam showing the smooth, dull pink membrane lining the spinal interstitial space.

“Cranial temp holding steady,” she said softly to herself, as if hearing the words spoken aloud made the information somehow more reassuring. “Hull integrity nominal.” Her jolting heartbeat slowed. “Internal stats nominal. Forward velocity two thirds.” Her breathing slowed to a steady rhythm. She would do this and come back out and she would see her father again. That was as far as she could think.

The autopilot light blinked steadily on and off, and a low hum sounded as the pod’s exterior coating of millions of tiny artificial polycilia fibers came to life, pushing it ahead, moving slowly, soundlessly forward.

The cranio-mitral valve came into view just in front of her. It was large enough for the pod to squeeze through, but not if its three valve flaps remained shut, closing off the opening. The musculature would be much too strong for the pod to penetrate without a relaxant.

A pinging sound above her signaled the pod’s surgical computer had come online.

“Inject eight point zero cc’s atropoda via intramuscular?” The computer’s gender-neutral voice was maddeningly blasé and relaxed, but she was glad nonetheless that this newer pod model was equipped with the latest medical AI system. It made her feel less alone.

“Yes, inject eight point zero,” Zenn said.

One of the pod’s exterior surgical arms extended until it contacted the surface of the bulging valve muscle. A large pneuma-ject emerged from the tip of the arm, and with a visible effervescent puff of bubbles from its compressed air, a measured dose of atropoda venom was propelled into the valve wall. Harvested from a species of free-swimming seaweed found only amid the sentient reefs of Bensarus Oc, the atropoda produced a unique variety of highly potent, fast-acting muscle relaxant. Very similar, she noted grimly, to the paralyzing toxin of the whip-whelk used to paralyze her, Hamish and Fane. Fane… with his bright, off-kilter smile. Where was the Procyoni sacrist now? Was he safe? Injured? Was he still alive?

She was pulled back to the present when she saw the valve before her relax and yawn open. The polycilia microfibers coating the pod vibrated to life again, carrying her forward through the opening of the foramen magnum. This was it. The entry into the skull. No turning back now. She held her breath as she felt the pod sliding through the muscular valve.

A moment later, her entire body, every cell, every molecule, was bathed in a throbbing stream of energy – the Indra sensing her. But this was different from the other linking events. She wasn’t overwhelmed. She didn’t lose hold of her own mind; her thoughts remained her own, remained clear, maybe even sharper than usual. Now Zenn, in return, was able, was allowed, to sense the Indra’s being. She felt the creature’s ancient, unfathomable consciousness, its mind reacting in vague surprise at first, then questioning, a rapid, probing study of the strange presence within her. Would the Indra react? Would it reject her? Kill her? Kill them both?

Zenn held her breath, watching the D-rad gauge. The gauge ticked up, then back down, stayed down.

No fatal surge of radiation. No lethal immune response. The nexus tissue inside her had done its job. The Indra was aware of the invader in its body but accepted it.

Zenn breathed out at last, scanned the readout dials glowing in front of her, made herself focus on what would happen next. The autopilot reengaged, and the pod moved forward. Now it would enter the narrow open space that ran along the spinal cord. Unlike a mammal’s brain, the Indra’s cerebral material was arrayed like a tree’s leafy branches sprouting from the central trunk of the cord. This open cavity would take her in turn to the brain’s lateral ventricle, a fluid-filled area that, it had always seemed to Zenn, resembled the outline of a butterfly with wings outspread. It should be just twenty feet or so from there to her final destination: the hypertrophal lobe.

The pod slowed to a halt then, held tightly between the innermost part of the double-layered skull walls and the dura mater, the tough membrane that enveloped and protected the brain.

Zenn double-checked to make sure she hadn’t misread the gauge. No, no mistake. The Indra’s fever was generating 274 rads of Dahlberg radiation; 312 rads would disable all the instruments on the pod, and 330 rads would kill any life forms inside her.

“Execute maser-caut incision to dura mater with minimum-length for pod ingress?” the computer inquired.

Zenn told it to go ahead and another thin, metal arm reached out from the pod’s hull. The maser-cauterizer built into its tip crackled to life, and it slit an opening in the tough, white dura tissue. Surface tension pulled the two sides of the incision apart as the maser made its incision, its heat sealing the edges of the wound as it cut, the fluid around it boiling and bubbling in response. A few seconds later, there was an opening large enough to allow the pod to squeeze through. As the pod moved beyond the dura mater, the enormous brain itself came into view, the mushroom gray and off-white of its convoluted surface billowing away into the dimness. She read the D-rad gauge: 292 rads. Still rising.

Freed suddenly from the grip of the dura, the pod escaped into the open space of the lateral fissure with an unexpected spurt. Before Zenn could react, the pod was knifing through the cerebrospinal fluid so fast, she had to slam her fist onto the emergency braking jet control to keep from ramming the brain tissue ahead of her. The pod slowed just short of impact and coasted to a halt with a slight bump against the soft, spongy mass. She tensed, staring at the monitor dials for any sign of response from the Indra. None came. She made herself relax.

The autopilot resumed control and reversed the pod’s direction, pivoting and moving ahead, passing from the tunnel-like lateral fissure into the more expansive ventricle. The space was about the size of a small, narrow swimming pool and filled with straw-colored cerebrospinal fluid.

Moments later, the outline of the hypertrophal lobe emerged on the view screen. Protruding into the ventricle, the HT lobe was a dangling, six-foot-long sack of heavily veined tissue. Thin bluish threads of interdimensional energy rippled across its surface, appearing, vanishing, appearing again in a pulsing, hypnotic display. The autopilot slowed the pod, allowing it to drift momentarily forward, then stopped, the beating polycilia holding it in position a foot or so from the lobe.

She toggled a switch, and the view screen displayed the cabin of the med ship. Stav was working at one of the science station consoles off to the side of the pilot’s chair.

“I’m at the lobe,” she said into the mic. “What now?”

“Now?” Stav said, looking up from the console and giving her an unsettling grin. “Now you save the human race.”

“How?” she said bitterly. “By giving you control of the Indra fleet? You think that will keep the Earth pure? You think the other planets of the Accord will let you do this? They’ll find a way to take back the ships. You won’t be able to stop them.”

“You believe that’s what we intend? To take the fleet?” He shook his head, as if he pitied her.

“I know you’re not giving the ships to the Skirni. They’re aliens. The New Law wouldn’t do that.”

“Of course we wouldn’t. The Skirni’s compliance was necessary. Over the years, they’d infested most of the Indra ships in the Accord. They had nowhere else to go. And that made them useful. Once. But you’re wrong about the New Law. We don’t want the fleet. We never did.”

“You don’t?” Zenn said, baffled.

“You really have no clue, do you? About what’s inside of you. About what it can do. About the miracle you’re about to perform.”

“What miracle?” She didn’t want to know. And she was desperate to know.

“The Indra mutation your mother passed along to you? It affects more than simple neural tissue. We equipped it with a little clock. Ingenious, really. And it’s been ticking away ever since it took root in you.”

Unnamable fear reared up in her, tightening her throat, making it hard to breathe, hard to speak. She forced the words out.

“A biological clock? What for?”

“For the moment when you would become the nexus. The nexus. What a marvel. That small bit of cultured tissue that lets a single mind connect the minds of all the Indra in the galaxy. The Spex, of course, think it will take them home. I’m afraid they’re in for a little disappointment.”

“They’re not tunneling to their planet?” Zenn said, still not understanding. “Then where?”

“Nowhere. The clock inside you? It’s about to turn the nexus into something unique, unprecedented. A knife, a scalpel. A tool to cut away the alien pollution that threatens the very essence of what it means to be human. What’s about to happen is the end of humanity’s longest war. A war fought for hundreds of years, undeclared, unseen, but war nonetheless. And you, Novice, are the Trojan horse that will win that war for us.”