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Chapter Eight

THE world was black as Jeff lost consciousness. When he awoke it had turned completely white. Other than that there seemed little difference. He had not been able to move then; he could not move now, not even a finger. His chest was rigid, so constrained that he could barely breathe. As the scene before his eyes came into focus, the uniform field of white took on a pattern of ruled lines. He realized that he was staring at a flat ceiling made up of big square tiles. As he watched, a flicker of red and green came and went.

Nothing like that existed in the observation nacelle. There was nothing remotely like it anywhere aboard the Aurora.

Where was he? He felt as though he had been unconscious for days.

He tried to lift his head. The effort produced a stab of pain in his neck, but it was worth it to be able to move again. He craned forward to look at his body. From his neck down his trunk, arms, and legs, he was totally encased in a rigid white cast. His head was the only thing he could move, and he could lift that only a couple of inches and hold it up for only a few seconds. Soon, even though he was in a low-G field, he was forced to lie back and stare again at the ceiling.

He heard a clicking sound from his left. He wanted to turn in that direction, but the effort produced a worse pain.

"Is someone there?"

Even his throat hurt. The voice that came out sounded nothing like his own.

He was answered by another and louder clicking, then a deep purr like a great cat. He could smell something, an odd odor like oil and cinnamon. Pain or not, he had to see what was beside him. He gritted his teeth and slowly forced his head to turn to the left.

The first thing that came into view were two long, spidery arms. They were made of metal or some dark plastic, and they had three separate joints. A warning voice in Jeff's head said, "Cyborg Territory." He grunted and turned his head farther in spite of the pain. He was afraid that the arms would end at a deformed human torso and some metallic monstrosity of a head. What he saw was not much more reassuring. Both slender arms—and six more like them—attached to a rounded gold tube shaped like a giant wine bottle. A tangled snakes' nest of wires grew out where the cap should have been. The body leaned toward a tall metal cabinet, whose surface was covered with tiny glowing hemispheres that formed an always-changing pattern of red and green lights.

The mop head of wires turned slowly in his direction.

"You are awake," a jerky voice said. "As the monitors indicate, exactly on schedule. That is excellent. Do you know who you are?"

That wasn't the question most on Jeff's mind.

"I'm Jeff Kopal—Jefferson Kopal. Who are you?"

"I am Tilde. Wait here."

The wine bottle rotated rapidly to a horizontal position and scuttled away on all eight limbs like a great spider. Jeff wondered, Was that a cyborg; part human with a machine's limbs and casing? He had no idea of the forms taken by the inhabitants of Cyborg Territory. As for "wait here," what option did he have?

He could not stay with his head twisted to one side, it was too painful. He turned slowly back to his original position.

Where was he, and how had he come here? And what had happened to the Aurora! He felt sure that their final surge of acceleration was far beyond the ship's rated maximum.

He could hear a new sound to his left, an unnerving kind of scraping noise. He had to find out what it was. He turned again, slowly and painfully, and felt enormous relief. A fat black face, all worry and scars, was just a couple of feet away from his.

"Hooglich!"

"Tha's me." She turned, and he realized that the scraping was caused by a heavy chair that she was dragging along behind her. She plumped her massive behind onto the seat and settled down next to him. "How you doing?"

Pain all over, and as uncomfortable as you could get. Even a wimpy coward couldn't say something like that.

"I'm all right. What happened?"

She grunted. "Oh, mebbe ten million things." She dropped her Pool style of speech. "All right, Brother Kopal. Where would you like me to start?"

"Tell me everything."

"That might be difficult. I don't know everything. But I guess you realize that we got away from the sounder—otherwise we wouldn't be here."

"Where's here?"

"On board a Messina Cloud ship. Am I going to talk, or are you going to keep interrupting?"

"I'll be quiet."

"Right. From the beginning, then. The first that me and Russo knew we were in trouble was when Captain Dufferin threw the Aurora onto high G. We realized then there was some sort of problem, but being Squeaky he of course didn't bother to say what. We kind of figured it out, though, when the image of the sounder appeared on the forward screen. By the way," she made a face that Jeff would not like to have met on a dark night, "you may as well hear this from me as from anybody. According to the captain, you are entirely to blame for what happened. You were supposed to be in the observation nacelle to keep an eye out for sounders, and you didn't notify him of danger until too late."

"He didn't send me for that!" Excitement made Jeff's voice crack to an embarrassing imitation of Captain Dufferin's. "I noticed the sounder, but he didn't tell me to keep a lookout. He sent me there to punish me—for talking to you."

"I believe it." She did not point out that Jeff had interrupted again. "That's our captain, every time. He's never to blame for anything. I didn't even know that you were out at observation point 'til it was all over. Russo and I assumed that you were with the rest of the officers, at emergency stations and cushioned for high-G maneuvers. Otherwise, we'd never have done what we did." She gestured to Jeff's body cast. "And you'd not have needed that. Of course, if we hadn't acted we might not have escaped from the sounder. If it's any consolation, I'm in deep as you—'taking action contrary to officer's command,' the record says."

"What did you do?"

"Russo and I were down aft. We couldn't see what was happening on the bridge, but it was obvious from the way the Aurora was being thrown around—all fits and starts—that Dufferin didn't have any idea what he was doing. And we could see the sounder, closing in on the ship. So . . . I took over. The commands for the drive arrive aft before execution. I overrode them. I put the Aurora onto ultrahigh emergency thrust, something the manuals warn you never to try—I'm in big trouble for that, too; but the people who write manuals don't have sounders chewing at their rear end. The log shows we touched twelve and a half Gs before we got clear, seven more than the engine danger level. Ruined the Omnivores, of course. I'm charged with that, too, wanton destruction of navy property. I came close to ruining you as well, Brother; but I don't think that worried old Squeaky at all."

"You saved the ship, yet you'll get blamed for damaging the engines?" Jeff forgot about his body cast and made a painful and unsuccessful effort to sit up. "That's not fair."

"Like life. What you going to do about it?"

"I'll make sure Captain Dufferin reports accurately."

"How you'll do that?"

"I will. I can. I'm—" Jeff was about to do something he had sworn never to do. He would never say, "I'm a Kopal," and expect on the strength of that to receive special treatment.

What stopped him was not revulsion at the idea of using the family name. It was the knowledge of where he was: marooned in the Messina Dust Cloud, far from every court of appeal. Until their return to Sol-side, Captain Dufferin was the ultimate authority.

"I'm going to file my own report," he finished weakly. "When we get back."

"Which might be quite a while from now, since we're not heading for the node. In fact, we're going in the opposite direction. Want to hear the rest of it?"

Jeff couldn't nod. It hurt too much. He just closed and opened his eyes.

She seemed to take that as agreement and went on, "We blew the Aurora clear of the sounder. Something strange about that, a sounder showing up so far from a reef, and I've no explanation yet. Russo claims to have ideas. Anyway, the sounder vanished after we were clear, the way they do. It just faded into nothingness and left us wondering if it was ever there. But we were certainly there, a gazillion kilometers from anywhere in a ship with no engines. Most of the officers wanted to send out a distress signal. Captain Dufferin refused. He said a navy ship should not accept assistance from any group trying to secede from Sol. No one asked him the obvious question: What were we supposed to do, sit around in space until we starved or ran out of air? Russo and I weren't in a position to say anything. Squeaky had already accused us of usurping his authority and being partly responsible for the fix the ship was in because we ruined the engines. Russo went forward and eased you back to where you could be looked after. There wasn't much anyone could do, beyond feeding you intravenously and hooking you up to life support. You were in poor shape, but you needed better medical care than the Aurora could provide. A couple of the officers said as much and suggested a Mayday for medical help. They were chewed out by Dufferin for their pains. He said to keep you sedated and out of it until something changed.

"You got slowly worse. We floated where we were for close to a week, with nothing to look at except reefs and dust rivers. And still nothing changed."

Hooglich paused and gloomily shook her rat's nest of tangled hair. It sounded to Jeff as though she were telling a late-night horror story, one that finished, "So we all died."

"But something must have changed," he said. Although he had thought on first waking that he had been unconscious for a long time, he was finding it hard to believe that six days or more had vanished from his life.

"Yeah." Hooglich laughed, for the first time since she had appeared at Jeff's side. "It changed. Me and Russo, we figured we couldn't be in much more trouble, no matter what we did. So we sent the Mayday. Squeaky went crazy when he found out what we'd done. Said we'd be locked in the brig. Trouble is, the Aurora doesn't have a brig; it's way too small for one. After six or seven hours, he stopped frothing at the mouth—because a Cloudship rolled up alongside. I thought, thank God, we're saved. With all the excitement aboard, I'd pretty much forgotten about the ultimatum the Aurora had sent to the Cloud government. But Dufferin hadn't. He said the same thing again, when the Cloudship contacted us to offer help. It had used our original signal as a beacon, and it was curious to find out what the 'else' might be in our 'surrender or else'. What sort of ship had the firepower to make a threat like that to a whole colony?

"Not us, that's for sure. We were floating without a drive. We had all the destructive power of a toy in a bathtub. The Aurora's weapons weren't much to start with, and the ship's drive provided all their energy. No Omnivores, no weapons.

"If you think Captain Dufferin was grateful to be rescued, or at least embarrassed by the threats we had made, you don't know the man. The Cloudship jinners came over and gave us temporary power. We agreed that the Auroral Omnivores would be out of commission without a full dock overhaul. We went aboard their ship and met their commander. And Dufferin repeated his order one more time: the Messina Dust Cloud government must surrender."

"They refused?" More and more, Jeff wondered what combination of circumstances had brought him to a ship commanded by Captain Eliot Dufferin.

"Not exactly refused." Hooglich had moved over to study the bank of monitors by Jeff's bedside. "The head of the Cloud-ship was Captain Trask. The answer wasn't a yes, and it wasn't a no. It was more like a suggestion that the two of them could talk the whole matter over on the way to the Cloud center, where the Aurora would be repaired and refurbished. I'd say more like Squeaky was humored, the way you would some harmless half-wit. Except we all know, he can be anything but harmless."

A worry had crept into Jeff's thoughts while Hooglich was talking. At the mention of the Cloudship's captain, it moved to center stage.

"Is Trask a cyborg—like Tilde?" He turned his head, to see if the eight-legged oddity had returned. It hadn't.

Hooglich's face twisted into a scowl. "Didn't you agree not to interrupt? I'm trying to tell you something important."

"This is important."

"You horrified by cyborgs?" When Jeff said nothing, she went on. "I sure hope not, given everything. Anyway, I'll answer your question. Captain Trask is Captain Docie Trask, and if she's not all human she keeps it well hid. As for Tilde, that's a Logan—a smart machine. If Earth wasn't so hung up on keeping intelligent machines off the planet and out of the solar system, you'd have seen Logans long ago. Now can I go on?"

Jeff managed a minute nod, but he was thinking of the first thing she had said. "You horrified by cyborgs?" Was he? Probably. He was frightened by plenty of other things. "I sure hope not, given everything." What did Hooglich mean by that comment? It suggested that although Captain Docie Trask and Tilde the Logan didn't happen to be cyborgs, other beings on this ship, or wherever he was being taken, would be.

"The other thing I want to talk about, Brother Kopal, is you." Hooglich chose the perfect word to bring Jeff's attention back. "I said you were in bad shape when Russo brought you down from the observation bubble, but I didn't tell you how bad. I'll tell you now. You were a mess. You had a broken shoulder blade with a piece of chair still stuck into it. You had lost a liter or more of blood. You had four crushed vertebrae, burst veins in both eyes, a fracture and hemorrhage at the back of the skull, two dislocated hips, hematomas all over your arms and legs from blood pooling on the undersides, and five broken ribs. I think that's all."

Jeff heard the catalog of injuries with a mixture of horror and disbelief. Certainly, he didn't feel good. But with all those things wrong, shouldn't he feel far worse?

"Am I on painkillers now?"

"Not according to the monitors. Do you want to be?"

"No." Jeff risked a slight side-to-side movement of his head. It wasn't his imagination; the pain was less, each time that he moved. That was impossible—unless he had lain unconscious for months and been slowly healing for all that time without knowing it. "How long has it been since the sounder?"

"Nine days."

And five or six days of that had been waiting, before the Messina Cloud ship came onto the scene. He had been receiving proper medical treatment for only half a week. It was all impossible. He ought to feel like death, far worse than he did.

"How long before the cast comes off?"

"Not my department." Hooglich stood up. "Also, you are scheduled for more beauty sleep in just a few minutes."

"I don't want to go to sleep. I want to talk to Captain Dufferin. If he puts in my record that I'm to blame for the loss of the ship, and that gets back to Sol and my family—"

"I'm sorry, Brother Kopal." Hooglich sat down again. "Sorry three different ways. First, Squeaky already put it into the official record. You, me, and Russo are all labeled as bad guys. Second, there's no way we can stop it getting back Sol-side."

"Yes, there is. Nothing can get back to Sol unless it goes through the node, and you said we're heading in the opposite direction."

"True, and true again. We are heading for Confluence Center, the place on the other side of the Cloud where the dust rivers meet. But Squeaky isn't. I said I was sorry three ways, and I mean it. The third way is that two days ago, Squeaky and the rest of the Aurora officers made a break for it. When everything was quiet they went back to the ship, blew the pinnace clear, and hightailed it for the node."

"We have to stop them." Jeff tried to raise his head, but he couldn't do it. The monitor by the side of his bed was hissing, and dark waves were moving in to obscure the ceiling. His tongue seemed too large for his mouth as he mumbled, "We can't, we can't let them . . ."

"Sorry, Brother Kopal." Hooglich was a million miles away, her voice dwindled to an echoing thread of sound. "It's too late. You see, Captain Dufferin is going . . . going to . . . ."

Jeff did not learn what their superior officer was going to do. Because he himself was gone.

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