Partnership (36 page)

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rotating pinpoint of light with absolute blackness at its center, and opened again into the original triangle.

Needle, eye, pinpoint, triangle; needle, eye, pinpoint, triangle. They were caught in a subspace loop, perpetually decomposing and reforming in a sequence which preserved topological properties but which made no progress towards the escape sequence leading to Central subspace.

A loop like that couldn't have happened, shouldn't have happened, unless the ship's processors had shut down. Or — a wild hope tantalized him — unless the ship's processors were too busy with some other problem to navigate them out of Singularity.

A problem like assimilating a worm program which would turn over all control to a single user, effectively cutting the brain off from her own body and its processing.

Polyon swallowed his unspoken curses and plunged across the cabin. He had some trouble locating the palmpad and holding his hand steady over it, but eventually he managed to match his shrinking and bending arm with the erratic loop of the ballooning palmpad. He slapped the surface twice. "Voice control mode!"

His own voice boomed oddly in his ears, the soundwaves distorted by the perpetual twisting of space around him, but evidently there was something unchanging in the voice patterns which his worm program still recognized. "Voice control acknowledged," an un-dulant voice boomed and twittered from the speakers.

"Unlock this cabin door." The first time the words came out as an unrecognizable squeak; the next, something close to his normal speaking voice emerged and the computer acknowledged the command. But nothing happened. A moment later the quavering vocal signal of the program responded with a shrill squeak that gradually became a groaning boom.

"Unable to identify designated entity."

Polyon was beginning to catch on to the rhythm of the subspace loop. If he kept his eyes fixed on any known point, like the triangle of shelf and wall and brace, he could recognize when they were passing through the decomposition closest to normal space. If he spoke then, residual subspace transformations still distorted his voice, but at least the computer could recognize and accept his orders.

He waited and spoke when the moment was right

"Identify this cabin."

Lights flashed on the cabin control panel, rose and fluttered like fireflies trailing the liquid surface of the panel, swam into elongated hieroglyphics of an unknown language, and sank back into the panel's surface to become a pattern signaling failure.

"No such routine found."

Polyon cursed under his breath, and the subspace transformation loop twisted his words into a grating snarl. Something was wrong with his worm program.

Somehow it had foiled to complete its takeover of the ship's computer functions.

"General unlock," he snapped on the next loop through normal space.

His cabin door irised halfway open, then screeched and wobbled back and forth as die smooth internal glides had jammed on something. Polyon dove through, misjudged distances and clearance in the perpetual liquid shifting of the transformations, cracked a solid elbow on the very solid edge of the half-open door, landed on a bed of shifting sand, rolled, and found his feet in what was again, briefly, the solid passageway outside the cabin.

"Out! Everybody out!" The loop stretched his last word into a howl. At least it got their atterUwn. A green slug oozed through one of the other doors and became Darnell, vomiting. Farther away, Blaize's red head blazed under lights that kept changing from electric blue to ar-

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ificial sun to deepest shadow. Fassa was a china dol]

vhite and neat and compact and perfect, but as the loop

>rogressed she grew to her normal stature.

"What's happening?" The loop snatched away her vords, but Polyon read her lips before the next phase itretched them into rubber. He waited for the next lormal-space pass.

"Get Alpha. Don't want to have to explain twice."

Fassa nodded — Polyon thought it was a nod — and lucked into the cabin nearest hers. Darnell quivered md resumed his form as a giant green slug. The pas lageway elongated into a tunnel with Blaize at the far

;nd, somehow aloof from the group.

Fassa reappeared, shaking her head. "She won't move.

[ — " She was bright, Fassa del Parma was; in rnid-sen-

:ence, as space shifted around her, she waited until the lext normspace pass to complete her sentence."— think ihe'stoo frightened, rmscared too. What's—"

Polyon didn't have time to waste listening to obvious questions. When the next normspace passed through Iiem, he was ready to seize the moment. "I'm taking

>ver the ship, is what's happening," he said over the ail-end of Fassa's question. "Any function on this ship iiat uses my hyperchips is under my command now.

Fhe reason—"

Shift, stretch, contract, waver, back to normal for a few seconds.

" — for this long transition is that the ship's brain is nonfunctional, can't get us out of Singularity."

Darnell wailed and vomited more loudly than sefore, drowning out Polyon's next words and wasting rtie rest of that normspace pass. Polyon waited, one rooted foot contracting as he tapped it, stretching and looping over itself like a snake, then deflating again into the normal form of a regulation Academy boot.

"I can pilot us out of Singularity," he announced.

'But I need to be at the control console. May have some trouble there. You'll have to help me take out the brawn and the cyborg.M

"Why should we?" Blaize demanded.

Polyon smiled. "Afterwards," he said gently, "I won't forget who my friends are."

"What good — " Darnell, predictably, wanted to know, but the transformation loop washed away his question. And when normspace came round again, Blaize was closer to the rest of them; close enough to answer for Polyon.

"What good will his favor do? Quite a lot, I should imagine. It's not just the hyperchips on this ship, is it, Polyon? All the hyperchips Shemali has been turning out so fast have the same basic flaw, donft they?"

"I wouldn't," said Polyon, "necessarily define it as a flaw. But you're right. Once we're out of Singularity and ready to access the Net again, this ship's computer will broadcast Final Phase to every hyperchip ever installed. Ill have — "

They'd all caught on to the rhythm of the transformation loop by now; the wait through three distorted subspaces was becoming part of normal conversation-al style.

" — control of the universe," he finished on the next pass through normspace. Blaize had come closer yet; stupid little runt, trying to move during transformations.

"And we'll be your loyal lieutenants?" Blaize asked.

"I know how to reward service," Polyon said non-committally. Into a GangUdde vat with you, troublemaker, as soon as I have the power.

"Not if I know it," Blaize mouthed as normspace slid away into the first distortion. He swung a fist at Polyon, but before it landed his hand had shrunk to the size of a walnut, and on the next dip through normspace Polyon was ready for him with a return blow that sent Blaize to the deck. By the time he landed, it was soft as 288

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quicksand, a pool in which Blaize swirled, too dizzy to rise immediately.

"Stop me," Polyon said to the other two as normspace passed through, "and you die here, in Singularity, because nobody else can get us out of it. Try to stop me and fail," and he smiled again, very sweetly,

"and you'll wish you had died here. Are you with me?"

Before they could answer, a new element entered the game; a hissing cloud of gas, invisible in normspace, clearly delineated as a pink-rimmed flood of rosy light in the first transformational space. It en-gulfed Blaize and he stopped twitching, lay like one dead in the yielding transformations of the deck.

Sleepgas. And he couldn't shout through the loop to warn them. Polyon clapped both hands over his mouth and nose, saw that Fassa did the same, jerked his head towards the central cabin. That door too was half open. He made for it, staggering through mud and quicksand, swimming through air gone thick as water, lungs aching and burning for a breath. Fell through, someone pushing behind him, Fassa, and Darnell after her. Forget Blaize, the traitor, and Alpha, by now sleepgassed in her cabin. Polyon gasped and with his first burning breath called, "General lock!"

The control cabin door irised shut with a strange jerky motion, as if it were fighting its own mechanism, and Polyon found his feet and surveyed his new territory.

Not bad. The only passenger he'd been seriously worried about was Sev Bryley-Sorensen. But Bryley wasn't here. Good. He was locked out, then, with Alpha and Blaize; probably sleepgassed, like them.

The other two were bent over their consoles, probably still trying to figure out why doors were opening and closing without their command, trying to flood the passenger areas with sleepgas — well, they'd succeeded there, but much good it would do them nowl Through the transitions he saw them turning in their seats, open mouths stretching like taSy in the second subspace, then shrinking to round dots in the third.

Normspace showed the cyborg freak making a move that wasn't part of the transformation illusion, right arm darting towards her belt. Polyon snapped out a command and the freak's prosthetic arm and leg danced in their sockets, twisting away from the joining point; her flesh-and-blood torso followed the agonizing pull of the synthetic limbs and she rotated half out of her seat. Another command, and the prostheses dropped lifeless and heavy to the floor, dragging the body down with them. Her head cracked against the support pillar under the seat Polyon stepped forward to take the needier before she recovered. Space stretched away from him, but his arm stretched with it, and the solid heavy feel of the needier reassured him that his fingers, even if they momentarily resembled tentacles, had firm hold of die weapon.

With the next normspace pass he was erect again, holding the needier on Forister. "Over there." With a jerk of his head he indicated the central column. Somewhere behind there the brain of the ship floated widiin a titanium shell, a shrunken malformed body kept alive by tubes and wires and nutrient systems, Polyon shuddered at the thought; he'd never understood why Central insisted on keeping these monsters alive, even giving them responsible positions diat could have been filled by real people like himself. Well, the brain would be mad by now, between sense deprivation and the stimuli he'd ordered its own hyperchips to throw at it; killing it would be a merciful release. And it would be appropriate to kill the brawn at die foot of the column.

But not yet. Polyon was all too aware that he didn't know everything there was to know about navigating a brainship. He would need full support from both computers and brawn if he was to get them out of this transition loop alive.

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He studied the needier controls, spun the wheel with his thumb, glanced at Darnell and Fassa. Which of them dared he trust? Neither, for choice; well, then.

which was more afraid of him? Fassa had been show ing an uppity streak, asking him questions when sht should have been listening. Darnell was still green-faced but appeared to be through vomiting. Polyoi.

tossed him the needier; it floated through normspact and Darnell caught it reflexively just before the transi tion shrunk it to a gleaming line of permalloy.

"If either of them makes a move," Polyon said pleasantly, "needle them. I've set it to kill... slowly.'

In fact he'd left the needier as Micaya had it, set & deliver a paralyzing but not lethal dose of paravenin; but there was no need to reassure his captives overmuch. "Now ..." He removed hi*

uniform jacket, draped it neatly over the swivelsesi where Micaya had been sitting, and sat down i:, Forister's chair before the command console. Trans; tions exaggerated the slight flourish of his wrist -

into a great ballooning gesture, spun out his sleeve into white clouds of fabric that floated over an ; dwarfed the other occupants of the cabin.

"What do you think you're doing?" Forister criec His voice squeaked through the fourth transitio space and fell with a thud on the last word.

Polyon smiled. He could see his own teeth and ha: gleaming, white and gold, in the mirror-bright pane.

"I," he said gently, "am going to get us out of Sir gularity. Don't you think it's time somebody did it?"

His reflection narrowed, gave him a squashed fee like a bug, dulled the bright gold of his hair and turne : his teeth to green rotting stumps. The control pan< shrank under his hands, then swelled and heaved lit a storm-tossed sea. As normspace approached Polyo darted in, tapping out one set of staccato commanc with his right hand, passing the left over the palmpa to call up Nancia's mathematics coprocessors, rattling out the verbal commands that would bring the whole ship around, responsive to his commands and ready to sail the subspaces out of this Singularity.

She was sluggish as any water-going vessel lacking a rudder and taking in water, half the engines obeying bis commands, the other half canceling them. The mathematics co-processors came online and then disappeared before he'd entered the necessary calculations, shrieking gibberish and sliding away in a jumble of meaningless symbols. The moment of normspace passed and Polyon ground his teeth in frustration. In the second transformation the teeth felt like squishy, rotting vegetables inside his mouth, then in the third they became needles that drew blood, and by the time normspace returned he had learned not to give way to emotion.

He made two more attempts at controlling the ship, waited out three complete transition loops, before he pushed the pilot's chair back from the control panel

"Your brainship is fighting me," he told Forister on the next pass through normspace.

"Good for her!" Forister raised his voice slightly.