Seventeen
The universe wheeled around her and disoriented Myla
completely. The transport passed through her field of vision once every
two second, growing smaller each time around, and then vanishing entirely
among the stars.
"Dikki, I lost sight of the courier!"
Dikki babbled mathematical coordinates that were of
no use to her. She tried to use her thrusters to slow her rotation, but
only succeeded in spinning herself on a second axis instead of just one.
And then it was upon her, a gleaming mass like the hand of a beast
swooping down from above. She had the briefest instant to scream before
impact, knowing she was about to die.
The terrible blow shattered her face shield and sent
her spinning. Frost radiated from the web of fractures. Ice crystals of
frozen air puffed into the vacuum, ironically helping to slow her rotation
almost to a standstill.
She felt the cold on her face for a moment, and then
she felt nothing. Slowly, the frost on the inside of her ruined
face shield evaporated, leaving a distorted, but clear view of the universe
beyond.
She opened her mouth to tell Dikki that she had
killed herself. No sound issued from her lips, not in the airless
vacuum. Regardless, she remained clear-headed and just short of complete
panic. A part of her, in fact, remained very calm.
Immamat filled half the sky with its dusky, banded
bulk. Lightning speared through its distant clouds razor sharp and
brilliant. Alexus rose from behind the limb of the gas giant and briefly
blinded her in its brilliant golden light. She caught a glimpse of
beautiful green Covonia moving with the wheeling stars, and then one or
two other of Immamat's moons like colored jewels in the night. Everything
become clear and sharp to her, and deathly quiet. Myla did not
think it a bad way to die.
While she lived, she still had
a mission. She had lost sight of the courier, but it would be
visible among the stars if she only knew where to look. Where had Immamat been in the vault of the sky
at impact? She began to watch the majestic sweep of the
stars, studying as many as possible each time Immamat passed behind her,
watching for one blinking on and off in the sunlight. Focused like a
laser upon her only hope for salvation, hours may have passed, or maybe
only minutes.
A star blinked. She lost it, then caught sight of it
a second time. Reaching for the controls of her EVA thrusters, she
managed to stabilize herself, then accelerate toward the spinning courier.
It gained on her. She
added to her own velocity to compensate until its forward motion ceased and
then began to approach very slowly. It grew in apparent
size, the distance between herself and the vessel now diminishing.
It took form finally, a flat, tear-shaped vessel,
spinning and reflecting sunlight like a mirror in the middle of nowhere.
The systematic flash of reflected starlight hypnotized her. She thought for a time that she was
finally losing consciousness and succumbing to her well-earned death.
A stab of alarm brought her to her senses. Rather
than risk another impact, she decelerated and hovered off to one side of
the vessel. Again, she tried to talk, to ask Dikki for instructions. She
had no idea where to find the airlock, or how to open it.
The courier, though, was not so large that the
airlock markings could not be clearly seen. Slowly and methodically, she
used her thrusters to line herself up, then gave a final, brief burn of
the plasma jets to send herself rushing toward the wheeling hull.
The courier became a landscape of metal passing
swiftly below her. Or above her. Her orientation altered moment by
moment. She had only fractions of a second to grab for the recessed
handholds when they passed by. She held on against the fierce
acceleration threatening to throw her off into space.
She held tight with one hand and fumbled
inside a recess
for the manual latch. Only vaguely did she take notice of the tear
in her body glove along one arm. She felt no discomfort, but she thought her
relative comfort the product of shock. She would have to hurry and take
refuge before the consequence of her injuries caught up with her.
Her hand found the latch.
She twisted and the airlock opened. A tug on the handholds then sent her diving face first into inky blackness.
Automatically, the airlock closed behind her and cycled.
She felt the air pressure, and then heard it. She
felt her lungs expand, and briefly, she felt a moment of deathly cold against
her face and the exposed flesh of her arm. Lights came on inside the courier. Warming
temperatures quickly melted the frost that had formed on the bulkhead.
She took a deep breath. "Dikki?"
Her voice sounded funny. She couldn't be certain the
air pressure was right, or that it had enough oxygen to support her. Or
had she gone so long without air that she should be dead already?
She brushed off the unnerving thought and counted
herself lucky that the stupid Hive built their machines for redundant
manual control. MIs were idiot savants that could think faster than a
human in only the most narrow directions. Maybe the Alazhir Alliance was right
in trying to assure the colonies that advancing human technology would
soon render the Hive outmoded and easily defeated.
She dived through a shiny tunnel that went to the
control room, a flat, saucer-shaped chamber bereft of anything that looked
like controls. "Dikki, can you hear me?"
Dikki's voice sounded from within her hood. "I can
hear you, Myla."
"What do I do now? It's all shiny metal in here."
"Myla, there is one manual device on the side of the
console in the middle of the chamber. Move it."
Myla assumed the hump in the middle of the chamber to
be the console, and she found a square button that moved. Controls and
dials rose like magic from the surface of the console, and then a chair
for her to sit in.
"Okay. Now what do I do?"
Dikki tried to explain. Nothing he said made any
sense to her. Myla asked the MI to repeat himself over and over, and
interjected countless questions to define terms unfamiliar to her. A
great deal of time passed until she began to make gradual sense of the
controls. Like her EVA thrusters, she would have simple attitude rockets
at her command.
"Okay, I think I understand the attitude thrusters,
but how do I find the transport?"
"Activate the view screen."
"Oh."
She remembered the appropriate button for the view
screen. When she pushed it, a globe of green lines surrounded her, filled
with bits of green light upon its inner surface. When she looked at any
individual light, it became a view, mostly of bits of rock and ice
tumbling among the stars. She narrowed her search to the brighter lights
and easily found the transport. Without its propulsion field, it looked
like a metallic egg covered with engineering detail. Slowly, she wheeled
the courier about and accelerated gently.
She had time for a nervous smile. She felt as if she
was having a marvelous dream. She didn't want to assess her physical
condition, not until Dikki was at her side to help her with her injuries.
She did not understand why the tear in the suit had not caused pain. If
anything, she felt more alive that ever before, as if the emergency had
awakened within herself reserves of energy she had never known about.
The transport loomed in her green screen. "How do I
dock, Dikki? I can do it, can't I?"
"Match crosshairs, Myla. Bring the two craft
together very slowly. Docking is an automatic subsystem for both
vehicles."
Match crosshairs? She did
as he sat, and one set of crosshairs appeared,
and then another smaller set overlaid upon the approaching transport. The
crosshairs on the transport were rotating with the ship, but as she drew
closer, the rotation stopped and the crosshairs lined themselves up. She
moved the craft together and let go of the controls when she felt the
docking.
"Wow, that was easy enough. Do I have to do anything
else?"
Myla heard a hatch open somewhere nearby.
"I guess not."
A hatch irised open and spilled dim light into her
chamber. Had it been dark? If so, how could she have seen so clearly?
Jeep appeared silhouetted in the hatchway and she
gave Myla the chills. Soft golden light came on in the chamber, the same
intensity and color of light as had appeared in the transport upon Jeep's
arrival. Myla took note of the mystery, but rushed past Jeep to retrieve
the mud dragon before the hatch closed and sealed the little monster aboard the derelict transport forever.
Dikki followed her back to the courier. "Myla, you
are injured."
"I feel okay. It can't be all that bad." The
airlock closed behind her. She turned back to her controls. "How do I
get rid of the transport?"
"Move the courier back."
She used the controls to do so and heard mechanical
sounds of automatic disconnect, and then silence. On her surrounding
screen, she watched the transport tumble slowly into the distance. The
navigational screen then vanished. She turned nervously to Dikki. "Turn
on the engines for me, Dikki. I want to go home."
"Neither of us can pilot the courier at hyperlight
velocity, Myla. I do not have the authority, and no human mind can navigate in
a multidimensional environment."
"Don't tell me you can't interface with Hive
technology, Dikki. It's the same as ours. Is it damaged?"
"There is no physical damage."
Nagging curiosity got the best of her. What of
damage to herself? She glanced down at her arm.
"Oh, no!"
She held the arm out away from her and averted her
gaze. She stared wide-eyed into empty space, trying to rid her memory of
what she had seen. "Dikki, why doesn't it hurt?"
Dikki drew closer. She could hear him hum. "I
cannot assess the extent of the injury."
She flexed her hand and then her elbow. Her arm
worked, but she had seen the depth of the gash. There had been no blood,
but she had caught a glimpse of bone, and she did not understand why it
should have been black. Bones were supposed to be white.
She looked down at her body glove and moaned in
dismay. The blue material was in tatters, showing the inner insulation,
and in places, even bare flesh. Where her skin had been exposed to the
vacuum, it had turned dark brown. Gingerly, she reached down and touched
a spot on her leg. She felt nothing, proof that she had been injured,
although her leg still worked.
"What am I going to do? Dikki, I'm going to die!"
"Myla, I do not have that information, but you do not
seem to be dying at all."
She glanced at Jeep as if hoping for answers from
that quarter. Jeep stood unmoving near the hatch and stared at her with
an unsettling intensity. She then turned back to the controls. It hardly
mattered how bad she was hurt. She was most certainly dead if she could
not help Dikki find a way to interface with the courier and pilot it for
her.
"How do you know the ship's not damaged?" she asked
Dikki.
"I am able to run low level diagnostics. The courier
was disabled by a programming error. Hive executive programming
harbors many
such errors."
"You can tell all that but you can't interface? I
wish I could see. You interface with the Techs all the time. What makes
them so special?"
"Neural buffers," Dikki said.
"So, you can't interface with people unless they have
neural buffers?"
Dikki took an unusual moment to answer. "Direct
neural interface is possible, but it damages the unprepared mind."
Myla studied the hovering MI. "Mind, you said, not
brain."
"The damage is psychological in nature, but it can be
extensive."
Myla stared at the courier's console. So much of it
would be forever beyond her control, but she had to do something, and she
had to do it soon.
"Try it on me," she said. "Just a little. Just
enough so that I know what it feels like."
"I cannot knowing inflict harm upon you, Myla."
"I'm already dead," Myla said in growing bitterness.
"Can't you see that? I'm burned and I'm cut and you said yourself the
radiation would kill me."
Dikki remained ominously silent.
"Just let me try and maybe I can help get Jeep and
that silly mud dragon to Bolphan before they leave us all behind."
"Attempting unauthorized interface via emergency
programming bypass," Dikki said. "Neurological feedback detection in
progress, visual cortex stimulation."
Myla saw a light in her field of vision. It broke up
into funny patterns. The patterns changed, and then began to move.
Colors joined the dance."
"Audio interface."
And then she could hear it as well, like discordant
music.
"Full sensory interface."
Now she could feel as well as see and hear, bumps and
grooves hanging in space, even though she was not using her hands.
Everything started to come together into a coherent whole, like a
multimedia symphony, and it expanded inside her head at the same time.
She feared it would tear her apart, and she understood then the danger
Dikki had warned about. If she lost her sense of who she was, she would
be like the courier itself, an intact machine with no programming
priorities.
But it never got that bad. She organized the
complexity as fast as it unfolded, and she somehow adapted.
"Is this like the Techs do it?" she said.
"It is a test interface, Myla. Your tolerance is
well within buffer parameters. I am increasing amplitude and modulation
and inserting the sensory translation interface."
A three-dimensional universe sprang into shape around
her, a structure more complex than she had ever imagined a thing could
be. Somehow, she could see it all without using her eyes, and hear it
without using her ears. All of her senses were involved. Before her, she
perceived two structures, one she suspected represented Dikki, and the
other the structure of the Hive neural web.
"Dikki, is that bumpy thing you?"
"Neural reference coincides. It is me."
"And that's the courier's brain?"
"The courier's neural matrix."
It looked like Dikki could fit except for blockages
that had been put in place in the Hive's structure to keep intruders out.
Myla reached out for one in that other universe, but found herself raising
her injured arm instead. She put her arm down and reached again in that
other universe, feeling that it was something she should be able to do.
An unimaginable part of herself reached into that
translucent universe and plucked the blockages away, and then she reached
behind Dikki and gently pushed him into place. Dikki stirred within the
recessive shape, fitting himself in place and uploading command
instructions to erect an interface between himself and the ship. She
could feel Dikki's very being and for the first time in her life, she
sensed that Dikki was truly alive in a strange fashion.
Dikki grew and become a thousand times bigger than he
had been. "Myla, I have full command of the courier."
Myla inhabited two universes, far too fascinated by
the new one to retreat completely to the old. It didn't seem necessary to
disengage entirely. She could still see the ordinary world around her
just as she had before, and it made it easier to understand what Dikki was
doing moment by moment. She stood over the control panel and began to
make sense of everything. The exterior of the courier and the interior
model had a clear correspondence, although the interior view was far
greater and infinitely more complex.
"Dikki, I want to go home now."
"Accessing navigational data storage."
She could see for herself that the data available to
Dikki was all Hive-related, mining, manufacturing, maintenance, and
storage facilities.
“I can’t find Bolphan,” Myla said.
“We will not have access to that information from a
Hive perspective,” Dikki explained. “Without it, we cannot hope to reach
Bolphan. It will not be visible to the human eye, or any of our
instrumentation.”
She reached into the navigational data and pointed out a
place of interest. "This place has people in it. We'll go here first.
It has to be an Alliance outpost of some kind. It certainly cannot be
Hive, not with humans in it."
The courier powered up. Myla could literally see the
field intensifying and warping space in more than the three dimensions she
had known. The courier was prepared to go anywhere now, except that Dikki
was a passive agent who would go nowhere on his own. The part of herself
that made choices was entirely missing in his mind, as if he had a mind
without any good reason at all, which she suspected to be the case.
“Dikki, please take us there.”
"Loading navigational computer and initiating
propulsion interface. Myla, we are under way. Estimated time of arrival,
twenty standard minutes."
