Ammonite Stars (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #4-5 (9 page)

Diva growled again. “I do not snuggle up to booby birds! And they are not booby birds, you Kwaidian no-brain!”

Six felt generally pleased with life. Things were back to normal. And Diva was showing signs of fatigue. He had known it would be a long and drawn-out campaign. Whistling cheerfully, he set off at a spanking pace in the direction of the space shuttle. Perhaps it was time to plan a new skirmish. He wasn’t going to give up, however long it took. It was not in his nature.

THEY WERE ALL panting by the time they made it back to the space shuttle. Although it was cutting it a bit close to the hurricane force winds, Six decided to take the ship back up into space. They had the trimorphs, and, by all accounts, the visitor was a very long way away from Pictoria right now. There was no reason to spend a very uncomfortable night on the surface of the planet listening to the wind buffeting the shuttle.

The shuttle lifted smoothly away from the planet, and then started to shake as it traversed the pressures already building up in the higher troposphere and stratosphere, before freeing itself of the remains of the Pictorian atmosphere, and docking safely in the Independence, in the mesosphere.

They made their way out of the air lock, where they found Arcan waiting for them. He darkened as he saw that they had brought back the trimorphs, but then seemed to freeze as he was able to communicate with them, and realized that these were the trimorph equivalent of himself. He turned first black and then iridescent as he listened attentively to the account which the small beings were clearly giving him.

“The visitor has been transported somehow to Dessia!” His voice thundered in their heads, and they all tried to cover their ears with their hands; a particularly useless move since Arcan spoke to them by other means than sound waves.

“Yes, Arcan, but please don’t shout. It hurts us!” Grace told him.

The orthogel entity shimmered apologetically. “I am sorry. I didn’t realize. What are we going to do? How can we get the visitor back? How did the Dessites find him? How did they get him to transport back to Dessia? How long has he been there?”

The trimorphs situated themselves in front of Arcan. “He would have been very excited at being finally mobile. He must have been transmitting that to the Dessites in some way, as well. Of course, the old visitor couldn’t have transported anywhere, but this visitor bimorph
can
. He may not have known how to dominate his abilities, and somehow they seem to have managed to pull him out of this world, and get him to decohere in Dessia.”

“Then we will have to go and get him back. Is there anything you two can do?”

The trimorphs shimmered. “We only have a tiny part of the Arcan brain. You can’t expect us to solve all the problems. Why … we only have the same amount of brain as … as … as Six here!”

Six stiffened. “Here! Be careful what you are saying, microbe! I’ll have you know that my brain is perfectly capable.”

Arcan scintillated. “You keep telling me that, Six, but I can’t say I have seen much evidence. Of course, you do very well for a transient.”

Diva grinned and turned to the trimorphs. “I feel for you,” she told them. “To have to exist with only the same amount of brain as Six! Imagine!”

“At least my few neurons were able to pass the quantum mechanics exam, my lady, if I remember correctly,” snapped Six. “Not like some.”

“Poof! I can hardly remember that far back. Anyway it is very uncouth of you to point it out.”

“Well, since I was never brought up to be couth, that can hardly surprise you, can it? I mean, it was not exactly a priority in the uninhabitable zone. No doubt couthness was absolutely essential when wallowing around in gold-plated bathtubs filled by vats of wine.”

“We do other things on Coriolis, you know.”

“Sure. Throw people into pits with wild animals, or have them encased alive in rexelene blocks. Very couth.”

“That word doesn’t even exist, and neither does couthness!”

“Does too!”

“Does not!”

Ledin looked over towards Grace and raised his eyebrows. She giggled; Six and Diva still liked to pretend they were fourteen again from time to time.

“Oh, and I suppose you think dictionaries grow on trees on Kwaide?”

“Fool!”

“Imbecile!”

“Moron!”

They grinned at each other, feeling pleased. The rest of their audience ignored them. These words were not new.

Below them, on Pictoria, it was possible to see the cloud base moving now rapidly across the surface of the planet. It was nearly dusk, and at the edge of the sunlit area the winds were now hurricane force. Ledin looked down, letting the conversation around him disappear into the background for a moment. He still found it hard to believe that he was actually 30,000 light years away from home. It was incredible. He had been born a no-name, like Six; most of his life he had only had one goal – to survive. It was a long, long journey from that ungainly waif on Kwaide to this privileged position on another planet. He looked down at the strange, red parallel lines of the hills running from north to south, and the tree-like effect of the pot-holed areas around the buttes. It was a landscape of intense colours – the red rocks and the purple sphere and rings of the gas giant beyond Pictoria. Then the intense orange-red of the star which hung huge in the sky beyond. It was absolutely nothing like anything he had ever seen before. He found himself thinking about his sister. How she would have liked this place, had she survived. It was identical to the planet of her dreams, the secret place she had described to him so many times.

“—don’t you think, Ledin?”

“Sorry?” He turned around immediately. “I’m afraid I wasn’t concentrating.”

“I was saying,” said Diva with a severe look, “that we have no choice but to go and look for the visitor.”

“To Dessia? Isn’t that … I mean, wouldn’t that be … well, a bit reckless?”

“It might.” Diva inclined her graceful neck. “Can you come up with another idea?”

“No-o-o. But maybe Grace can.”

Everybody looked hopefully towards Grace, but she shook her head. “If we leave him there they will eventually find out about Pictoria, and although they are 20,000 light years away they might be able to utilize the ortholiquid in the visitor bimorph to bring one or two of them here. That would be a major disaster. If the Dessites get their hands on the ortholiquid, they will be able to utilize its quantum decoherence properties to travel around the galaxy wherever they want.”

“Yes, but we don’t know they are as bad as all that,” said Six.

“We certainly do!” cried Grace. “You weren’t here when they got hold of Arcan, but the visitor was desperate. He begged me to fire on him, rather than let them somehow confine Arcan.”

“Then I hope we are in time to help him,” said Ledin.

“We have to go there. Now.”

“Can we?”

Arcan darkened. “Easily. The trimorphs can feel where the visitor bimorph is. I can take the Independence there now, if you like.”

“Well, I do think—” Diva’s voice trailed off, because the planet beneath them had disappeared, and been transformed into a very different picture. “—Arcan! I thought we were going to take a vote on it!”

“I already voted,” said the orthogel entity – rather smugly, Ledin thought.

Diva’s voice was sharp. “Yes. We can see that. Perhaps you haven’t quite grasped the concept of a votation.”

Arcan shimmered. “We all decide what is best.”

“Yes. But all of us – not just you.”

“But my brain is so much bigger. It is logical to assume that my vote must carry more weight.”

Diva’s fierce eyebrows snapped together. “I don’t know how you managed to come to that particular conclusion, but—”

“Err … Diva?”

“WHAT?”

“We seem to be attracting a lot of attention,” said Six apologetically. “I thought you might like to know, is all.”

They swiveled to stare at the console. Four blips on the screen showed that small spaceships were rapidly approaching their position.

“Are those spaceships like the visitor’s?” asked Diva.

Arcan scintillated. “They would seem to be, yes. Why do you think they are approaching us so rapidly?”

Six’s finely-honed sense of self-preservation had clicked into place. “Because they are going to detonate them all near our position,” he said. “They must use the travelers as missiles as well as for space investigation. I wouldn’t like to be a batch of neurons in any of those particular ships. They are about to be well and truly terminated. And so – if anybody is interested – are we. It looks as if the Dessites don’t stop to ask your intentions when you drop in to visit their planet.”

“Perhaps they will stop when they get closer?” suggested Grace.

Arcan swelled. “Impossible. They are still accelerating towards us. Their intentions can only be hostile.”

“Suggestions?” asked Diva.

“I have one,” said Arcan, but he darkened. “However, if you prefer to take a votation on our future course of action, then I suppose—”

“Just DO it!” screamed Diva, as the blips of the spaceships loomed ominously closer on the screen.

“Since you apparently do not agree with my arbitrarily taking unilateral decisions when we could come to a consensus,” went on Arcan, clearly miffed by her comments.

“Do whatever you WANT!” shouted Diva again, clutching at the console as a series of alarms began to sound on the Independence.

“—Because I wouldn’t like you all to think that I wouldn’t take into account your opinions. That would be unacceptable.”

Six cleared his throat. “I think you can assume we are all with you on this one, Arcan. At your convenience.”

“Thank you Six. Very well then …”

The view in front of them disappeared, and so did the spaceships.

Six glared at Diva. “Next time you are going to criticize Arcan, pick your moment better, will you?”

“I like that!”

“Good,” said Arcan. Everybody stared at him. “It is good that you like it,” he explained carefully, wondering if these small beings were always going to be so slow on the uptake.

Diva found herself with her mouth half open and nothing to say. She looked at Six, who had a sympathetic grin on his face. He shook his head slightly in her direction, warning her to take this no further, and Diva tried to take air in slowly through her nose and calm herself down. She was only partially successful.

“Where are we now, Arcan?” asked Six.

“I have moved us out behind the nearby moon,” said Arcan. “We will have disappeared from their screens. I think they will assume that their instruments picked up a meteoroid which disintegrated. I initiated a fall into the atmosphere before transporting away. With luck they will suspect nothing. What is your plan?”

Diva gave a bitter laugh. “So now you want to know
our
plan, do you?”

“Naturally.”

Grace moved one step closer to Arcan. “I think,” she said timidly, “that we should try to make contact with the visitor through the trimorphs. You did say that the trimorphs could communicate with the visitor through quantum non-locality, didn’t you? Because of the lost animas?”

Arcan nodded his diaphanous ‘head’ and turned to the twins. They communed with each other and the visitor, shades of colour sweeping through each of them as they did. Eventually there was silence.

“The visitor is being held on the main planet, Dessia, as we thought,” Arcan told them. “The Dessites have somehow managed to make a holding pen for him. He tells us that he is unable to penetrate it. Apparently the whole island where the visitor is being held is artificially permeated with some material which they know as carbon nanographite. They use it to make the rock light enough to float on the sea, but it has the unfortunate side effect that it somehow interferes with quantum tunneling and decoherence. From the sound of it, I would say that this is the same material Atheron put into the magnetic plate he made, the one he tied Diva to. I couldn’t get near that either.”

They exchanged glances. This was not good news. It meant that both Arcan and the trimorphs would have to stay well away from Dessia, or risk getting trapped themselves.

A shiver of distaste ran through Arcan. “So it means that one of you is going to have to go down there.”