The Sardonyx Net (57 page)

He called The Green Dancer. Amber's withered face wavered before him. Tightly he said, “Listen, Amber. This is an emergency. I need to get in touch with Starcaptain Lamonica.”
 

Amber shrugged. “She isn't here.”
 

“I know. But you know where she is, you're her mail drop. If you can't tell me so that I can call her directly, then send someone to tell her to call me.”
 

“It's nearly midnight—”
 

“Damn it, I know what time it is! Tell her it's Starcaptain Dana Ikoro. Give her this line number.” He read it.
 

Amber's eyebrows lifted to her hair. “Clear, Starcaptain,” she said, and switched off.
 

“What are you doing?” demanded Rhani.
 

“Getting a ride to the Net, fast.”
 

Lamonica called. Her voice rasped through the speaker, though the screen stayed free of picture: “Dana, what's going on? I thought we had an agreement.”
 

“Canceled. I want to make a new one. Damn it, will you come online so I can see you!” She glared at him abruptly from the screen, hair standing on end, face bare of glitterstick. Dana put his hands in his pockets and held up the two discs. “Credit. I-disc. I'm free. But before that freedom goes into effect, I need a ride to the Yago Net. It'll mean a thousand credits for you if you can give it to me.”
 

Greed and suspicion contended on her face. She frowned. “I don't like being rushed into things.”
 

“This is an emergency.”
 

“Two thousand credits.”
 

Dana looked at Rhani. She nodded. “Done,” he said.
 

“When do you want this ride?”
 

“Right now. How fast can your bubble do one hundred kilometers?”
 

She grinned. “Ask me something hard.”
 

“See you when you get here.”
 

It took her, as he had known it would, twenty minutes, a fifth of the time that it would have taken him in a sedately paced, planet-bound bubble. He heard the noise, a deeper sound than the city bubblecraft, before he saw it, skin opaqued and gleaming in the moonlight, falling out of the night sky like a meteorite to land at the estate gates. The dragoncats raced to the attack and then heeled to Timithos' whistle; Rhani had already warned him to keep them in. Lamonica swung from the bubble. Dana and Rhani went to meet her. She wore a silver-and-lavender jumpsuit. “Good evening,” she said.
 

“Domna Rhani Yago, Starcaptain Tori Lamonica.”
 

Lamonica nodded without ceremony. “If anyone's looking for me, they won't have any trouble finding me,” she said. “All they'll need to do is follow the wind.”
 

“No one'll look. Did you move
Lamia
?”
 

“I said I would.”
 

Dana sighed. “Then we're in business. Otherwise, we'd have had to turn around to go right back to Abanat.”
 

Rhani said, “Now what will you do?”
 

“Now we'll go to the Net. As soon as I know what's happening there, I'll get in touch with Tam Orion. I'll route the call through LandingPort Station.”
 

“I see.” Rhani looked at the blond Starcaptain. “Your payment's on record, Starcaptain Lamonica. All you have to do is spend it.”
 

Lamonica said, “It's a pleasure doing business with you, ma'am.”
 

Dana said, “We're in a hurry, let's move.” He could not wait to be gone. He felt as if his blood was singeing his veins. Rhani was looking at him as if she wanted to tell him something. He touched her shoulder; she closed her hand over his. Tenderness, regret—he could not analyze the emotions that traveled like light between them.
 

Meaninglessly he said, “It'll be all right, Rhani-ka.”
 

She smiled. The bubble door opened. Lamonica swung into the pilot's seat, hands on the ceiling bar. Dana followed her. He folded himself into the passenger's chair. Rhani waved. Then the bubble shivered and went up.
 

Lamia
's skin was pewter-colored. As they dropped toward her, Dana saw her shining dully in the starlight. Lamonica had positioned her perfectly, between two hills twenty-five kilometers from the Yago estate.
 

Once in the ship, Lamonica moved to the pilot's chair. Dana took the navigator's seat. Events were happening very fast, and he made himself slow down, relax, breathe, damn it. He touched the control panel with his fingertips. He wanted to pinch himself hard to make sure that he, at least, was real.
 

Lamonica was rushing through the takeoff checkout. “What's going on?” she said. “Am I likely to be stopped?”
 

“No, Rhani made a shitload of calls. You're clear with LandingPort Station and at Abanat Landingport.”
 

“And we're going to the Net. Are they expecting us?”
 

“No. That's why we're going out there. No one can reach them; they're not answering their lines. About an hour ago, they sent a distress signal in navigator's code, and it was cut off.”
 

“So someone's on it.”
 

“The Net commander and the chief navigator, and a passenger.”
 

“What are we supposed to do?”
 

“
We
are supposed to do nothing. You're going to take me out to the Net, and I'm going to go in and look. There's a back-up repair crew waiting on the Moon. If I signal you, you'll call them.”
 

“Right. Going under Drive,” she said. The ship shivered. Dana closed his eyes. A hum filled the big round room, half-audible, half-subliminal. Gravity increased. Dana slumped in the contoured chair. He was not uncomfortable: he had done this so many times that his body adjusted automatically, not fighting the weight, waiting for it to pass.... It passed. His breathing slowed to its normal rhythm. He opened his eyes. In the vision screen in front of him he saw a swelling darkness, tinged with a red luminosity which, he knew, came from the heating of the outer shell of
Lamia
herself. The glow faded. On the surface of the swelling planet he saw distinctly one large and three small pinpoints of light. And then, as it always did, the view turned inside out. The swelling began to shrink. The planet's rim appeared in the screen, growing in arc and glowing with a purer and purer radiance.
Lamia
sped from shadow to sun. With reflex born of practice, Dana reached to cut in the light screens.
 

“Hey,” Lamonica said. He looked at her, and realized that he was weeping. His eyes burned and his nose was thick. She handed him a cloth; he wiped his face clean of tears. Standing, he went to the water cooler and drew a cupful of water. He bounced a little; Lamonica had set the ship's gravity at two-thirds gee. The screen was dark now, with the edge of the moon in focus: they were going in the same direction but Lamonica had switched the camera readout on the vision screen.
 

“Thanks,” he said, reseating himself.
 

She kept her eyes on the controls. “Bad time?”
 

“I've had better.”
 

“It's over now,” she said.
 

“Yeah.” He dug his fingers into the chair's resilient foam. “Sol will freeze,” he said, “before I come back to Sardonyx Sector.”
 

She said, “Don't say that yet, you're still in it.”
 

The words stung like salt on a wound. He could leave it behind, Dana thought, but it would never leave him. The pain and helplessness he had known was etched solidly into its own small corner of his brain.
 

“Explain this to me,” Lamonica said.
 

“Explain what?”
 

“You were a slave when we met in the bar. Tonight you call me and you're free.”
 

“This trip to the Net is the price of that freedom.”
 

“Is it on a contract?” Lamonica said.
 

“Yes, of course.”
 

“I wondered....” Her forefinger made little circles on the arm of her seat. “Any contract involving slavery is only good in Sector Sardonyx, right?”
 

“Yes.” His throat muscles tensed.
 

“So what are we doing here?” she said. “Say the word, and I'll change
Lamia
's trajectory, shoot us past this big silver prison, and Jump. Two weeks in the Hype and we land on Nexus. You'll never have to hear the name Yago again.”
 

He gazed at the moon. Already he thought he could see the Net, a spark of constant brilliance against the satellite's mottled surface. He imagined the screen changing, brightening to a rainbow nimbus, and then darkening to the stygian darkness of the Hype....
Lamia
was Tori Lamonica's. Hers was the course choice, hers the responsibility. All he had to say was yes.
 

But Rhani Yago would know that he had broken a promise; left a contract unfulfilled. Tori Lamonica would know it. And he would know it himself. It would be, he reflected, supremely ironic if he freed himself from Sector Sardonyx by “rescuing” Zed Yago from the Net. Seen that way, this whole expedition turned into a joke, an expression of the universe's, or the luck's, cosmic and comic sense of justice.
 

The universe cared nothing for Dana Ikoro's pain, or for the memories that corded the muscles of his neck, dried his mouth to cotton, and gave him stomach cramps.
 

“Can't do it,” he said.
 

Lamonica splayed a hand in the air. “It's up to you.”
 

As they neared the starship, Dana dug the computer cube out of his pocket and held it up to Lamonica's view. She pointed at the console. “You do it.” Dana turned the cube (blue, three-by-three-by-three centimeters' dimension) till he found the side with a small visual/tactile symbol. He matched the symbol to one on the console. That second symbol marked a sliding panel. He slid it aside and fit the cube, symbol-side first, into the opening there, and pulled the panel closed. The blue cube contained, as Rhani had promised, blueprints of the Net. “Let's see it,” said Lamonica. Dana instructed the computer. Diagrams began to march across the compscreen.
 

Lamonica said, “That cube is worth a fortune.”
 

Dana smiled. “It's not recordable, and it's programmed to self-erase.”
 

“Too bad.”
 

Dana leaned back in the chair to study the diagrams. Despite the superstructure of cells, corridors, and storage spaces, the great wheel of the Net contained recognizable and familiar elements. The Drive Core and the ship's computer sat in the inner rim of the torus. Entrance locks were set at spaced intervals along the outer rim. The Bridge, with its observation windows, was located on what Dana arbitrarily (and temporarily) designated the Chabad-side of the wheel. Fusion thrusters decorated the opposite “side.” The protruding jets gave the wheel, in diagram at least, a slightly lopsided appearance. He wondered why Isobel Yago had chosen to make her prison ship a torus, when a sphere would have been easier to construct and a more efficient use of space. Corridors traversed the doughnut. He asked for an enlargement of the section containing the Bridge. The computer obliged. The maps were detailed, labeled, and color-coded. Rhani had given him all the information she had.
 

He wondered where the emergency was, and what it was, and how much time he had to find it. He said, “Let's see if we can reach them.”
 

“Right.” Lamonica keyed a message. If the computer communications were alive on the Net, the message would be picked up and responded to automatically.
 

There was no response. “I'll call them,” Lamonica said.
 

Dana caught her hand as she reached for the radio switch. “No. Wait.”
 

“Why?”
 

“Moon Base has been calling them steadily since they got the distress signal. Call Moon Base.”
 

Lamonica called. “LandingPort Station Communications, this is
Lamia
, Starcaptain Tori Lamonica, are you there?”
 

“
Lamia
, we hear you.”
 

“Any sound out of the Sardonyx Net?”
 

“Zilch, Starcaptain. Do you want us to keep trying?”
 

“Yes,” Dana said, interrupting. “Don't break.”
 

“Understood. Will you engage?”
 

“Yes. I'm going in.”
 

“Good luck,
Lamia
and captains.”
 

The Net was very close. Lamonica said, “Where do you want to enter, Dana? We're in matching orbit now.”
 

Dana grimaced. He stared at the computer's projection. If something were wrong with the Drive Core, it would be a waste of time for him to enter the ship on the lock nearest the computer. “Someone started to send a distress call.” He tapped the plastic screen. “Maybe that someone's still trying. Engage at Hole Four. I have to start somewhere. I might as well try the Bridge.” In the vision screen, the big wheel was no longer smooth. Knobs and strings and struts decorated its silver skin.
 

Lamonica tipped their seats. “Decelerating,” she said. Gravity increased.
Lamia
sang, tail extending, thrusting, vision screen pointing outward once again to the brown and white and blue world they had just left.