Twenty-one
The pilot's death wish disturbed Myla. Thinking that
maybe his dreary surroundings had undermined his spirits, she pretended to
have found a hydroponic garden. Showing him the way down gray corridors,
she fed him a constant stream of visual suggestions, and when the final
hatch opened, she shared with him a wilderness of his own creation, a
place she had never before seen.
The sky was a vaulted dome, clearer than the skies of
Covonia and heavily streaked with high altitude clouds. Things like dark
balloons floated by at a lower altitude.
"How did they get here?" the pilot said in amazement.
"What are they?"
"Juni plants. They do that when they seed."
The pilot let the way to a forest with trees standing
hardly higher than her head. A few yards beyond, because the garden was
contained within the Hive station and couldn't be unreasonably large, a
small valley with orange and green vegetation appeared.
An enormous snake three times her size slipped
through the grass and violently startling Myla. A snake with fur, and
when it raised its head, with an animal's face and big, brown eyes.
The pilot chuckled at her reaction. "Don't worry.
They won't hurt you. They're called brats. We tame and ride them for
sport."
The pilot sat on a low ledge of rock heavily layered
with fossils. He frowned. "Big place."
"It's a big station."
"It's my world, though. I wonder how the Hive knows
about it."
"They get around," Myla said.
"I never saw Hive craft when I was a kid."
"When they don't want to be seen, they send in
machines almost microscopic in size." It was just a story she made up,
but it sounded entirely possible. "It's a good thing they're not very
creative with the technology they've got. I don't think we could defend
against it."
Tears came to the pilot's eyes. "We can be just as
dumb sometimes. Me, for example. I just blundered into them."
He stared at her with a funny look in his eyes. Myla
had seen it in Jeremy's eyes and knew what the look of longing and hunger
meant, even though Jeremy had never touched her in the ways he touched his
Tech female friends his own age. He had told her he would not do that
until she had gotten older.
She shook her head in rejection of his desire. "I've
got a boyfriend. I think I’m too young."
"Maybe in time," he said. "You can never escape this
place, you know. Who is he?"
"His name is Jeremy Kael. He's a pilot like
yourself. He's a Tech."
"I see. You don't look like a Tech."
Myla flashed a smile. "I'm a Nat."
"So am I. All my people are Nats, although we still
have more than our share of augmentations, and we interface with our
computers, because otherwise we'd be way too dumb to keep ourselves out of
trouble, but avatars are illegal where I come from."
"Looks like we didn't quite make it," Myla said,
"keeping ourselves out of trouble, I mean."
He grinned, and then his smile faded away. "I could
stay here forever, if I had someone like you to share it with."
Myla hurt on the inside. She had never known anguish
so intense.
"Don't worry," he said. "Forever is a long time, and
I'm a realist. Don't worry about me, Myla."
"Do you really think you could blow this place up?"
He gave her a casual shrug. "The Hive has no
internal security, and it's got three field engines. You only have to
debalance one and they all go to hell. It's something that can't possibly
happen by accident, so they don't protect against it. I'm not certain I
can get to the right controls, though. Could you?"
"Yes," Myla said without hesitation. "I know I can.
I'm not sure if I should."
He shook his head solemnly. "You know you should.
You just don't want to."
"Okay, so I don't want to hurt you."
"I'm already hurt. It's the only way to stop the
hurt. Unless you're going to stay here with me forever."
And he gave her a meek, hopeful smile.
Myla looked down at herself. In his dream, she was
perfect now, all pink and even a bit plump and dressed in a tunic with her
bare legs showing. Deception, all of it. She had nothing to give the
pilot except for the thing he wanted the most, death, and she knew it would be
for the best if she complied. He suspected what the Hive had done to him,
and if he ever found out for certain, his bad dream would become a
nightmare, and it would never end.
She nodded compliance.
"You'll stay?" he said laughing.
"I can't stay,” she said with downcast eyes. “Not
even if I wanted to. I'm not what I seem to be. I don't even think I
know myself any more what I am. But I'll do what you want."
His smile was too strained to be sincere. "Then do
it now. It won't take long, will it?"
She shook her head. “It won’t take long at all.”
Myla retreated from the dream. Alone in the courier
with Jeep and the mud dragon, she clenched her fists and wailed her misery
and her helplessness until the worst of her pain was gone.
"Dikki, show me what he meant!" she said with tears
running freely from her eyes.
"Myla, I cannot."
"I'm not asking you to do it! Just
show me!"
Dikki showed her three of something, and she could
sense the critical balance and the fact that nothing stood in her way to
disturb that balance.
"If I touch that, how long would it take to blow up
the station?"
"Thirty millionths of a standard second, Myla."
"Then we'd have to blow ourselves up with it."
"We can withstand the force of the explosion, if our
field is closed to within one tenth of one percent of pinch-off."
Pinch-off. Exile into another universe.
"Isn't that cutting it awful close?"
"Within thirty millionths of a second, Myla, we will
be many hundreds of kilometers distant. The danger will not last long."
She had no decision to make. Only one course of
action lay open to her. Before she committed herself, she opened her view
of the station as wide as she could. Thousands of machines lay stretched
before her in that strange universe. When she reached out to identify
them, they stirred at her command. Alarms went off in the station.
"They felt that," Myla said in surprise.
"The Hive will focus upon our unauthorized presence
within forty-six standard seconds. At that time, they will close our
interface and isolate us."
Myla gestured with an invisible hand. “What are all
those machines for?
"They are warcraft and mining equipment stored in
docking berths."
"But I can make them all move."
Dikki remained silent, oblivious to the expanse and
speed of the countless extrapolations Myla processed in the next handful
of seconds. All of the machines that would move suddenly disengaged from
their docking and began to back from their bays. "We're taking them all
with us, Dikki. No sense in letting them go to waste. How much time do
we have?"
"Fourteen standard seconds. Thirteen. Twelve."
A sequence of alarms began going off, each more
strident than the previous. Almost as fast as she had reacted to move the
machines to safety, the docking bays began to seal. Myla send as many
craft as could move speeding outward in all directions.
Thirty millionths of a standard second lay between a
thought and utter destruction. "Five," Dikki said. "Four. Three."
"You can tell when I do it?" she said to Dikki.
“I can.”
She took a breath. She did it, and then she cried
out, knowing what she had done.
Dikki reacted far quicker than her cry. Space folded
upon their craft. Her godlike view of the universe of machines ended,
leaving her stranded in a much smaller space with just Dikki.
Too much utter silence engulfed her, and lingered.
"Let me see," Myla said.
Dikki balked.
"Let me see!"
Dikki let her see, and she looked out into a light
brighter than the core of a sun.
