Dreamspy. Jacqueline Lichtenberg
no! Your oath. The Captain will have us organized shortly. Listen, I can’t get anyone at Barkyr. They’re not searching. And I can’t raise Station Prime for relay, either. You have better range than I do. You try.//
//Yes, sir.// She lifted her attention to her mental horizon. There was a new Com Officer on duty, a different Paitsmun. She listened to the traffic for a few minutes, then attracted the attention of the Paitsmun at Barkyr because the Station was busy organizing for battle. //This is Prosperity life pods, Kyllikki, Com Third.// She outlined their problem. //Do you have an estimate on pickup for us?//
//Pickup? Life pods? Prosperity blew? I don’t have lightspeed scan yet. What is your exact position?//
She gave him the numbers from the pod’s instruments. //Our Captain needs to know about a pickup point and time.//
//Depends how the Station does in the next skirmish. Could be a couple days. Head in-system.// He provided orbital data to facilitate pickup, and she copied it.
//Thank you, Barkyr.// The Paitsmun turned away to talk to ships on the other side of the system, ships deployed in case the six attackers were just a diversion. Kyllikki brought her attention in closer. //Get that, Lee?//
//Get what?//
Not taking time to puzzle out what she’d done wrong that had kept Lee from following the exchange, she told him while repeating it all aloud for Idom and Zuchmul. At least Lee didn’t catch me invading his mind again!
But now she was struggling to sort out the internal mentation of her companions from what they were saying aloud and what Lee was projecting. In the background, she was getting the rhythmic traffic handling on the surface of Barkyr, and the military cadences from Station Prime where Barkyr Defense was located. It made an insuperable babble against the backdrop of the Captain’s voice coming from the speakers, shouting over everyone else. Under, over, and around it all like a roaming ghost image, the key to the working realm pulsed lurid colors in time to the throbbing of her head.
It was as if her brain had been riddled with holes, letting data mix into a senseless jumble. She’d never experienced anything like it, never heard of anyone enduring anything like it.
She was about to tell Lee she was going down for the duration when she felt something very strange. But it was also familiar. Chasing it around the edge of her mind, she found she was staring at the monitor, which now showed the outer area where Otroub had blown apart. The bits of debris didn’t show on the toylike display, but she knew that by now the cloud would be very large. There was a shimmering image on the screen, though—no, it wasn’t there. Or was it?
She pointed. “What’s that?”
“What?” asked Zuchmul, leaning closer, his voice sounding like six of him speaking in near unison.
Idom chorused with himself, “There’s nothing there.”
“There’s something....” And then she knew. The life pod from Otroub. “He’s conscious. He’s terrified.” She knew. She didn’t know how she knew. She just knew.
“Who’s terrified?”
“The passenger!” She recounted what she knew of Otroub’s passenger without mentioning her impression that he could be a Dreamer. That, of course, was nonsense. “And Barkyr says it will probably be days until help can reach us, never mind him. He’s hurt. He can’t pilot that pod.”
Idom pivoted in the seat and took her hands. “Kyllikki, it’s at least six times as far from here to that pod as it is from here to Barkyr, and the distance is increasing rapidly. Child, there’s no way you could be getting anything from a non-telepath you don’t even know who’s that far—”
She pulled her hands away. Idom was old enough to have the right to “child” anyone on Prosperity, even the Captain. But fighting the smearing echoes in her brain left her no patience. “Idom, when I tell you how to count a ship into a dive, then you can tell me what I can and can’t do!”
Their eyes locked.
He’s right. It’s not possible. Admitting that she’d been injured in some strange way, she doubted her sanity. Like the light-etched key image that still burned behind her consciousness, the vision of the passenger as Ckam had seen him possessed her mind’s eye. It all whirled and mixed and beat at her, and she couldn’t think straight. But—
“Regardless of what I do or don’t know now, I knew when Otroub blew, that one pod had escaped. Scanners never detected the distress beacon. It’s a defective pod. Are we going to let him die? Out there? Alone?”
Idom sighed. “I do think I can move this thing now, but I programmed Barkyr as our destination. We are being carried in that general direction by momentum—”
“Recalculate,” she said implacably.
He stared at his readouts, nibbling his lip as a strange expression crept over his face. “This pod ejected with a momentum component toward Otroub’s last known position.”
“So? That just makes it easier.”
He twisted to scrutinize her. “This pod has only jets, sails, and gravitics. It’s a pathetic little toy. And we can’t use that pod’s beacon to get a fix. We can’t just wander out and look around until we find it.”
The babble in her head was driving her crazy. She closed her eyes and struggled to reconstruct her silver wall, taking care with every detail of every brick as she had learned to do almost before she could talk. Gradually, the insane babble retreated. To her dismay, it was still very perceptible, but at least it was reduced. I’ll make it.
“Move,” she snapped at Idom. “I think I’ve got the figures.” She had seen Prosperity’s helm display, and had tracked that single life pod. If there was one skill that Teleod training developed, it was visual memory.
With a touch here and a stroke there, she recreated the helm displays. “There. Is that enough, Idom?”
“For me, yes. For the Captain, maybe not.”
They traded places as the Captain’s voice burst from the speaker against a backdrop of silence. Lee must have relayed the message from Barkyr the moment the voice channel cleared, for the Captain was ordering the pods in-system. “Pod Twelve, take course parallel to Pod Six. Pod Eight, deploy sails as soon as Pod Fifteen is clear, and Pod Fifteen—”
Kyllikki searched the controls, trying to find out which pod she was in, and discovered it was Fifteen. “Captain Brev, this is Com Third in Pod Fifteen. We need a decision.”
“Go ahead, Com Third, but keep in mind Prosperity may blow at any moment.”
“Pod Fifteen contains only crew: Idom, Zuchmul, and myself. There was a defective pod ejected from Otroub with their passenger aboard unconscious. A passenger on a courier is likely to be important to the war effort, sir. Request permission to go after that pod. Idom says we can do it.”
She twisted to catch Zuchmul’s gaze with a silent interrogative. “Yes, we can do it,” he agreed.
Brev said, “Idom and you are not exactly expendable.”
“I understand, sir. If you have a pod better situated, I’ll relay my course data to them.” It was a bluff. She intended to argue each pod he elected right out of the job.
After discussion the Captain decided that Pod Fifteen’s ejection velocity was the most favorable for matching course with Otroub’s pod and they were the only one not carrying passengers. They got the job. But Kyllikki didn’t like the look Idom turned on her. Analysis of the random processes of the universe was his field, so he often saw significance where others saw only chaos. And that was the look in his eye, Kyllikki realized, as if she were an element of chaos suddenly imbued with significance. She shivered.
The Captain went on assigning courses to the mob of tiny ships while Idom followed orders and switched frequencies to consult a Helm Officer in another pod, plotting their course correction, avoiding the mines spreading