The Ascension Factor

Kelp lights winked out all around them as the sea was glutted with shredded fronds and torn vines.

"Sister Kelp," Elvira said, following his gaze across the tumultuous surface, "she retracts, saves herself."

"Elvira, I don't want to hear that 'Sister Kelp' crap. I want to get us out of here."

"Overflights!" she warned, and pointed to two specks at ten o'clock off the port cabin. Her hands automatically worked the dive sequence, but the engines remained still.

"Jammed," she said, her face impassive and dazed. "Silt an... kelp in the niters."

"Don't sweat it, Elvira," Rico said. He patted her arm. "They're the ones who dropped the charges. If they carried all that payload, they're short on fuel. At least we're not dealing with a bunch of mines out here."

Rico unharnessed himself and got Elvira a towel out of one of the lockers.

"Here," he said. "Dry yourself off, change into a new dive suit. We might be here awhile and there's no sense you getting sick."

She took the towel, and it seemed to Rico that her senses were coming back.

"Flattery can track a one-seater coracle from port to port with the Orbiter, anyway," he said. "These guys can't set down out here, and with Crista Galli aboard they don't dare blow us up. Meanwhile, we've got to get her and Ben to some big medicine, and fast."

Two sonic booms rocked them further as the overflights dove in on them and pulled out. Rico could make out the pilots' faces as the tiny aircraft flashed past.

"They're young, Elvira, did you see that? With their whole lives ahead of them they chain themselves to Flattery." He fisted the arm of his couch and grumbled, "Why do they do that? They should be out cuddling some young thing in a hatchway somewhere. Didn't their mothers teach them any better?"

"Their mothers are hungry, Rico, and they're hungry now."

Rico glanced at Elvira with surprise. He was accustomed to speaking to her but getting nothing but grunts for reply. She was already out of her restraints and fighting the toss of the foil, making her way to the aft lockers.

"You're not going out there again," he said. "The seas are a mess, nothing can get through here."

"You will calm down," she said, and it sounded like an order. Elvira peeled off her dive suit and toweled off her finely toned musculature with the candor typical of Mermen. "Care for the others. I will clean out the filters."

As she slipped into a fresh suit, Rico realized he'd been aroused at the sight of Elvira's pale body. Even her thumb-sized nipples seemed muscular in the chill. He would never approach Elvira, both of them knew that, but the surprise of his arousal reminded Rico of Snej, and how much he'd missed her.

Elvira's plan was the logical thing, he knew. He ticked off a list of priorities.

Ben and Crista, he thought. Keep them breathing. Monitor the radio, prepare for surprises by Vashon security.

Elvira swept past him to the hatch without so much as a glance. Rico fought the pitch and roll of the foil to the lockers and pulled out three more dive suits. He worked himself along by handholds in the bulkhead back to the galley. On his way, he listened to the crackle of the radio and the report from the overflights.

"Skywatch leader to base. Charges away. We have your fish, over."

"Roger, Skywatch. We mark your position. Our bird is launched. ETA thirty minutes. Status report."

Thirty minutes! Rico thought.

Their bird must be a foil, and a fast one.

Not room for a lot of hardware or a lot of bodies - good. We might have a few surprises for them.

The radio continued to chatter about the condition of the Flying Fish and speculation on the occupants, but they were quickly out of range.

Rico bent over Ben and saw that he was immobile, his chest was not rising and falling, but his color wasn't bad. He put his cheek to Ben's mouth and detected the slightest breath. Checking the pulse at Ben's neck, he noted that his partner's heart was beating, but only a few beats per minute, His eyes were open, but still. They looked dry, so Rico opened and closed the lids a few times to lubricate them, then left them closed.

He unhooked the restraints and struggled to get Ben into one of the dive suits.

"We're topside," he said, hoping Ben could hear. "They threw some charges at the kelp, but I think it's just surface damage. Elvira's out there unclogging the intakes. Flattery's people have a foil on our tail, they'll be here in no time. We may have to go over the rail."

He heard a groan from Crista Galli, and saw that she was trying to sit up against her restraints.

"Your girlfriend's coming around," he said. "I'll get her into a suit, then get into the code book and let Operations know what's going on. Everybody else seems to know where we are."

He sealed Ben's suit and inflated the collar, just in case. When Rico turned to Crista Galli, he saw that she was crying. Her red-rimmed, swollen eyes stared at Ben's deathlike form on the galley deck. She seemed to be conscious and aware.

"Can you understand me?" Rico asked. In spite of her restraints, he remained well out of reach.

She nodded.

"Yes."

"Have you ever had this reaction before?"

"Yes." Her voice was slurred. "Once. Before he gave me shots. I pretended to take pills, spit them out later."

"What will happen next?"

She tried a shrug. "More of the same. Maybe seizures. It take... a while." She added, in a slurred whisper, "Nobody's ever made me feel like a human being except Ben."

Rico noticed that the pupils of her eyes dilated and constricted wildly.

Must be some potent drugs, he mused. Damn that Flattery.

"We are in the open," he explained, "and helpless. You need to have a dive suit on in case we go into the water."

It flashed on him then what Flattery must've realized all along, what Operations warned in their instructions: "Do not let her into the water. Do not let her contact the kelp." This was speculation, precaution. There would be no other choice if Vashon security showed up, there was no point worrying about it.

"I can help you with it if you can't do it yourself. I'm sorry to say this, but I'd rather not touch you,"

He held the suit out to her at arm's length.

"I can't get out of this harness," she said.

Rico tapped the quick-release mechanism and she was free. He recoiled from her, partly as a reflex, partly because the foil pitched his way.

At this, she cringed away from him, her face even more pale and her jaw set.

"And what do you think I am?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Do you?"

"I know that I don't thin... I can't think that I do thi..." She gestured limply at Ben. "It can't be me!"

"It's the drugs," Rico said.

He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She needed reassurance, not another enemy. "Remember, the drugs are Flattery's doing, not yours."

Her tears, the way she looked at Ben seemed like the genuine article.

But look at what happened to Ben, he cautioned himself.

"Get your suit on," Rico said. "We don't have much time."

Crista had to slip out of her dress to don the dive suit. Rico knelt beside Ben, a hand on his forehead. He moved a little, and Rico took it for a good sign. His breathing was much stronger.

Crista did not seem modest at all, nor did she look like a monster.

Probably spent so much time as a lab animal she didn't have a chance to get shy.

Rico, like Ben, had been raised among Islanders, a generally shy lot. Rico admitted to himself that Crista had the best-looking legs he'd ever seen. Again, he thought of Snej back at Operations, and sighed. He planned to send a message to her, too, along with whatever he'd think of to say to Operations. He turned back to Crista Galli.

A little pale, he thought.

She seemed very weak, and struggled just to pull her suit on and fasten the seals. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Her forehead beaded sweat and she was still more pale than when Rico had first seen her in the village. Her eyes were doing their dilation trick and he noticed an uncontrollable tremor in her legs.

"Can you get back into your harness?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"No," she said, her voice weaker now. "It's startin..."

She was drifting out again. She lay down on her couch, eyes still open.

"Are you still with us?" he asked. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Rico still didn't want to touch her. Whatever it was, it had nearly killed Ben and he wasn't about to let the same thing happen to himself. He reached around her carefully and snicked the harness into place, then snugged it up with a jerk. He pushed the head of the couch back so that she lay flat. By then Crista was unconscious again.

Rico hurried into his own suit and noted that the seas had calmed somewhat. He could hear the thump and scrape of Elvira at the hull ports, and hoped that the kelp wouldn't set her hallucinating as it did some people. She seemed to have been all right before.

"It'd be just our luck," he muttered to himself. "Best damned pilot in the whole damned world thinking her gauges are grapefruits."

There was a very loud scrape, more of a long, slithering rasp across the top of the foil. Then another. It was the same serpentine sound that the kelp had made when it grabbed them. Rico jumped for the cabin, but it was too late.

The whole foil tipped on its side and he was thrown against the port bulkhead so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He saw, through the swarm of black amoebas across his vision, that they were airborne. He was jostled again, not so much this time, and as the bow of the foil tilted upward he saw them being pulled up into a mass of hylighter tentacles.

"Shit!"

He struggled to his knees and crawled the upended bulkhead to the command couch under the plaz. He could flip open a port and get a shot at it with his lasgu...

That was when he saw how big this hylighter really was. He guessed it at a hundred meters across, with its two lead tentacles, which gripped the foil, at nearly that length. Even the smallest tentacle was thicker than Rico.

They were already a hundred meters or so in the air, and rising.

That pitch back there, he thought, it must've dumped a helluva ballast to be able to pick us up.

It was then that he thought of Elvira, and scrambled for a view of the seas below. She was there, dive suit inflated, floating on her back. She must have seen him, but she didn't wave.

"Damn!"

He couldn't drop her a flare, he couldn't try the engines. Either of these might touch off the hundreds of cubic meters of hydrogen in the monster hylighter. It tucked the Flying Fish upside-down against its great orange belly. Rico had never been this close to a hylighter before, but he'd seen them explode. A hylighter considerably smaller than this one had flattened the first tiny settlement at Kalaloch. Six hundred people cooked alive in that firestorm. He and Ben had covered that one, too.

The living were the worst. He remembered that Ben wouldn't settle for the easy story, the inevitable films of cooked flesh on living bone, shaking chills, vomit and screams.

"Just shoot their eyes," Ben had told him. "Leave the rest to me."

Ben asked them about their lives, not about the blast. The dying and near-dying filled eighteen hours of tape before the dashers hit. It was Rico's footage of the team fighting for their own lives against a dozen hunts of dashers in a feeding frenzy that chilled the holo audience worldwide.

Rico saw that the coast was coming up fast and black weather pushed behind them. He hoped that the weight of the foil wouldn't pull the hylighter too low to clear the gray bluffs ahead. He worked his way back to the cabin along the ceiling and sat below the command couches. This coliseum of a hylighter had a destination in mind, and that destination was land. If it didn't bash them to bits against this cliff face it would blow them up inland.

Rico reviewed their odds and didn't like what he came up with, though he was sure he'd rather clear the cliff than not. He wondered whether Operations had a code provision for this one. He hoped that Operations could beat Flattery's people to Elvira. Rico refused to mull over the consequences if they didn't.

Just off the cliff face the daily afternoon squall whipped up. The sky fisted down on them without warning, clouds churning in their typical black and lasgun gray.

No lightning, Rico prayed to himself. We don't need lightning.

They did need the cloud cover, this he knew. With good cover more overflights and Flattery's spies in the Orbiter would be worthless. The ride got bumpier as the squall moved inland with them. Rico was close enough to the face of the bluff to see the markings on the back of a flatwing when an updraft sank his belly. They almost cleared the top, he saw that clearly, but the stern of the foil caught the lip of the bluff, cartwheeling the bow of their craft deep into the leathery belly of the hylighter.

Unrestrained, Rico was flung like a toy about the cabin. The foil tumbled down the cliff face as the hylighter deflated and collapsed on top of it. When the foil came to rest Rico lay dazed across the plazglas windshield of the cabin. All he could see under the shadow of the hylighter's canopy was an immense cloud of blue dust. He flexed his arms and legs, coughed to test his ribs. Bruised, but nothing broken.

"Great!" Rico told himself. "'Keep her away from the kelp,' they said. Here we are, smothering in the stuff."

He tried calming himself, but a few deep breaths did not still the shaking in his hands. He hoped the foil had slid all the way to the beach. He didn't relish being perched halfway up a cliff.

The afternoon downpour washed over the canopy and their foil. Rico thought of Elvira, caught in open water in the squall, and assessed her chances. They summed up close to zero. She might now be one with her sister kelp.

"At least there's not much hydrogen left in that monster," he muttered.

He switched on the cabin lights and radio. A couple of the lights worked, but the radio was gone. He took a deep breath of the kelp-laced air before heading aft to check on Ben and Crista.

***

If you think that vision is greater than action, why do you enjoin upon me the terrible action of war?
- from Zavatan Conversations with the Avata, Queets Twisp, elder

Mack was awaiting a call-back from security when suddenly his instruments showed random explosive damage to the kelp in sector eight.

He didn't wait. Mack thought. Flattery wants whatever's in there in a bad way.

Mack was sure that the "something" included Crista Galli. Instrumentation showed merging patterns between the wounded domestic kelp and the massive neighboring stand of wild blue. Mack and Alyssa Marsh had done peripheral studies of that particular stand of blue, the largest wild kelp bed in the world.

It learned to hide from us, to convolute itself so it could grow inside a ring of domestic kelps and outmass them without detection.

Now that it had broken through, he suspected that it could wreak havoc with Current Control. If it was as big as the Gridmaster said it was, then the blue kelp could possibly be Current Control.

If this kelp's on our side, then Flattery's surrounded, he thought. But what if it's not on our side?

Beatriz was his big worry now. She always checked in from the docking bay, but this time he had heard nothing. When she was incommunicado inside her studio he suspected trouble. It wasn't like her at all. Just a blink after Spud left, a spinjet jockey reported seeing a body expelled from the shuttle airlock. Nobody was answering his calls in security or inside the studio.

"Dammit!"

Now the Gridmaster was getting a response from the kelp, an incredibly healthy and powerful response. This stand that the depth charges had stunned back into mere reflex reawakened immediately - with a corresponding shift in frequency.

This is the new kelp, he thought. It's absorbed the memories of our domestics and taken them over.

All of the hardware from the domestic kelp was intact, but instead of dozens of frequencies dancing the screens, there was now only one kelp frequency on the Gridmaster.

Mack's screen showed the grid reforming, except for an unresponsive area in the northwestern corner. He hoped that wasn't pruned back too far.

"Well," he muttered, "so far it seems to like us." He had planned to use Current Control to turn the kelps against Flattery. He'd groomed as many sentient stands as he could muster for one last try, for the time that Flattery went too far. MacIntosh saw war as a drug, an extremely addicting drug, and he didn't want Pandorans to start using it.

"I want that sector on visual," he told the sector monitor. "We should be able to spot them."

All he got on visual was the gray-black whirl of afternoon squall that obliterated his view of the entire sector. Ozette, LaPush and Galli were under there somewhere. He hoped against hope that the depth charges didn't turn them all into soup.

Com-line's still down to the studio, he thought. If Spud doesn't get in there, we'll have to get their attention somehow.

A feeling stranger than his weightlessness flipped through his stomach. He shook it off, as he had shaken off the chill that slipped into the air after her shuttle docked. He wondered how many had come up on that flight. The shuttle could carry thirty to forty, depending on equipment. Then there was OMC life-support, and the techs. Everyone aboard would have to know what happened.

He didn't like thinking about the OMC, where it came from, what Flattery had done to it. She had been Alyssa, not "it," but he found "it" a lot easier to handle at the moment. Life-support was Mack's responsibility, as it had been aboard the Earthling. He did not relish the notion of that job.

"Well," he muttered to himself, "before we get that far I might have a few surprises for Flattery."

A soft tone went off near the turret, alerting him that something was forming up on the kelp's private holo stage. MacIntosh had built the thing after consulting Beatriz on holography. He had routed it through the Gridmaster in hopes of getting images from the kelp. In the two months that it had been experimental it had far exceeded his dreams.

The kelp had been frustrated for a long time, and it had a lot to say. So far it was all images, flashing lights and odd sounds. The images were clear - usually solid information about real things in real time. The sounds and lights seemed to be "talk," or inflection, or philosophizing. MacIntosh had not yet been able to interpret anything but the more obvious images.

He launched himself across the small office toward his new setup at the base of the turret. He didn't care much for the near-zero-gee environment this close to the axis, but it was the most practical location for an observation station. At first, he had liked the immediate access to the shuttle port.

To get the near-normal gravity rimside he would have to put up with the annoying two-minute spin of the Orbiter that made visualization of anything nearly impossible. His body was lanky enough that it got in the way more often than not. Since he'd become acquainted with Beatriz Tatoosh, he had come to like the immediate access to the Holovision studio, too.

His experimental holo stage lit up with the image of a giant hylighter dragging its ballast across the wavetops. This projection was the best quality he'd ever seen. It was a perfect miniaturization and the collating data identified this as the source of the disruption within the kelp. A metallic glint off the ballast drew his attention closer to the tiny three-D scene in front of him.

"That's not ballast!"

The miniature holo played out the incident with the Flying Fish and the hylighter. He watched from the hylighter's view as they bore down on the cliff. They came in fast, and when MacIntosh realized that they wouldn't clear the top he caught himself pulling his feet up. Then the hylighter burst, and the screen went blank.

"There's an Oracle somewhere near there," he muttered. "Maybe we can muster up a rescue team."

He handed himself back to his command console and paged Spud on the intercom. That was when all hell broke loose from the klaxons.

The four-klaxon alarm meant a fully involved fire somewhere in the forward axis section, his section. His greatest fear was for the shuttle docking station and its spare fuel stores.

With a four-klaxon alarm the fire could be in Current Control, the studio area or the shuttle docking bay. All areas sealed off automatically. Warning lights winked on in all axis quarters and the Orbiter intercom repeated calmly, "Vacuum suits mandatory in all sealed areas. In case of fire, vacuum will be installed. Vacuum will be installed. Vacuum suits mandatory in all sealed area..."

MacIntosh typed out the "area clear, visual" code for Current Control on his console. If the area sensors detected no fire danger, then Current Control would not be sealed off. He snapped open the hatchside locker and followed the prescribed drill. He sealed himself into his pressure suit and activated the communication unit beside the faceplate. He sprung the hatch to the passageway in time to see a groundpounder security slap Spud across the face with a lasgun butt. Spud spun against the studio hatch, and the security grabbed a closer handhold for the leverage to try again.

MacIntosh hollered, "Hold it!" but the man hit Spud again. Spud floated, unconscious, in midpassageway.