In the silence, and to take my mind off the disturbing feeling that my stomach was going to turn itself inside out, I looked over to my left. 'I'm Tyndel. Who are you?'
'I can't believe you're sitting there.'
'Why not?'
'Do you think you'll ever come home?'
'No.' Even if I returned to earth, it wouldn't be home. Home had vanished with Foerga and the mad truffler. 'That doesn't bother you?'
'I can't do much about what can't be changed,' I pointed out.
'You sound like the rest of them.' The bound woman snorted and turned her head away from me and toward the blank shuttle wall. 'Real courage in men vanished with the ancients.'
The whining outside the shuttle continued into higher and higher frequencies, until it felt like my teeth would shatter. I tried closing my eyes, but that was worse, with images of Shraddans and demon guns flickering through my mind, followed by endless canisters of nanosprays and nanites weaving invisible and unseen webs around me, webs that pushed me in one direction, then another.
I opened my eyes and waited.
How long before there was a clunk that signaled docking at Orbit One, I didn't know, not until my internal demons observed forty-three standard minutes since liftoff.
I could feel myself drifting upward against the restraining harness, my stomach seemingly climbing faster than the rest of me. I swallowed down acid and fear, but it took several gulps. I wanted to burp, but dared not. My eyes flicked to the bound woman.
She glared at me, and I asked, 'What did you do to end up here?'
'Questioned the wisdom of Rykasha. They know not the greatness of the True God. Nor do you, although you could, if you would but look.'
If she happened to be so insane, why was she being shipped off earth like a package for delivery? Why hadn't she been adjusted?
'They can't adjust Believers. We are the Angels and the Followers of the True Lord.' She laughed. 'The old demons won't tell you that, but adjustment doesn't work on us. So they have to send us home.'
'Home?' I blurted.
'The home of God, among the nearer stars.'
I did not answer. What could I have said? My internal data store offered no suggestions or answers. All I had absorbed contained nothing on angels or followers or gods. I frowned. Cerrelle had mentioned the Followers, with great distaste, but even with that insight I could find nothing. Then, I didn't know for what exactly I was searching. That was half the problem with nano-implanted knowledge. Without the right referents or key words, a lot of it was useless.
Instead, I waited for the various uniformed figures to pull themselves out of the shuttle, partly out of stubbornness and partly because my stomach wanted to turn itself inside out, and I was fighting it on that, mostly from pride, calling on old Dzin muscular control techniques.
Suddenly, the bound woman retched a spray of stuff that drifted up and toward me. Hastily, I unfastened the harness and bumbled my way back toward the lockers, banging my shoulder into the corner of the lockers. My fingers felt like thumbs as I fiddled with the locker latch, glancing toward the nauseating mess in midair. Tyndel?'
I tried to turn and found the motion bounced me off the opposite bank of lockers. I grabbed the back of the last shuttle seat and swallowed to try to quell a rebellious stomach before turning toward the voice.
A slender dark-haired woman in a dark blue singlesuit gestured. 'Stop flailing around. Use the overhead guidelines. That's what they're for.'
The purpose of the lines against the shuttle ceiling was obvious - after she had pointed them out and explained - like everything else put together by the Rykashans, except half the time they didn't bother with the explanations. Duffel in one hand, I pulled myself toward the open lock door, past the white-face bound woman, avoiding the mess she had made.
'Bastards ... God will smite them ...' So these true believers couldn't be adjusted? Interesting ... if true.
The guideline ended short of the shuttle door, and I looked around, then grasped a railing and pulled myself down until I was approximately level with the woman who had called me.
She extended a hand. One of her boots was somehow attached to a metallic-looking strip in the tubular tunnel that melded with the shuttle portal.
I took her hand. It was cool, long-fingered, and muscular - like Foerga's.
'There. Use the bulkhead handholds until we get to the transition lock. I'm Martenya. Cerrelle told me you've had trouble adjusting to some of the requirements of Rykashan society. So she asked me to see that you got to the Taibr.'
'Cerrelle?' Why had she made the arrangement and not Andra?
'She can be hard on people from whom she expects a lot.' Martenya shrugged. 'Some people won't use their potential, and she's never accepted that, even though she understands that it happens.' She turned and pulled herself along the tubular tunnel, leaving me behind in the grayness that from appearance could as easily have been drilled through the cliffs overlooking Deep Lake or set anywhere underground in Lyncol - just rough gray walls with handhold bars at waist height.
Martenya waited at the transition lock - scarcely more than an oversized barrel big enough for three people. When she touched a stud, the portal through which we had entered closed. Then, after a moment, the lock shivered and seemed to move. Abruptly, I could feel myself reorienting, and my feet swinging down. We left the lock at right angles to the way we had entered, stepping into a narrow corridor lit indirectly. These walls glistened a muted metallic blue.
My knees tended to go up too far, and I felt like I had to take steps that were nearly babylike to keep from bouncing into the ceiling or whatever it was called.
'The overhead.' supplied Martenya. 'Walls are bulkheads. Enjoy the gravity while you can. We don't bother engineering for spin forces on the smaller outstations, and you're headed for one of the smallest.'
I almost asked why, but forced myself to go through the mental sorting process to see if I could discover the reason buried in the mass of data I'd been force-fed. 'The highest payback for unskilled interstellar labor?'
'Exactly.'
A man passed us going in the opposite direction, using a long gliding stride, with his feet barely leaving the dark gray carpet underfoot. I tried to imitate his gait. The motion seemed to help keep my knees from rising so high.
'That's better,' observed Martenya. 'We still have another quarter of the wheel to go to reach the locks to the upper transition ring. You don't have that much time before the Taibr leaves. You can use the canteen on board while the ship's on ion boost.'
She offered nothing more, and I asked nothing.
The second transition lock was like the first, except that the gravity - or centrifugal force - was markedly less by the time we reached it.
The passenger section of the Taibr was less than half that of the orbit shuttle, if more luxurious, with eight rows of upholstered couches, two in a row, each with wide straps, and each seemingly formed out of a solid block of some sort of plastic. Synthcomposite, my internal demons supplied. Above each couch was a shell-like block that apparently descended over the couch to form a monolith around the passenger.
'Gee-foam and restraints - they're all nanite-based. While the needle's accelerating or between insertion and exit, you'll be unable to move at all. A good thing, too, since you'd be jelly on the bulkhead if you could.'