“By all means.”
“Is teke still a threat, captain?”
“Mother is vastly weaker in a gravity field,” Royd said. “She has to fight it. Even boosted by the Nightflyer’s power, she can only move one object at a time, and she has only a fraction of the lifting force she wields under weightless conditions. But the power is still there, remember. Also, it is possible she will find a way to circumvent me and cut out the gravity again. From here I can restore it in an instant, but I don’t want any likely weapons lying around even for that brief period of time.”
Melantha reached the cargo area. She stripped off her vacuum suit and slipped into another one in record time, wincing at the pain in her shoulder. It was bleeding badly, but she had to ignore it. She gathered up the discarded suit and a double armful of instruments and dumped them into the conversion chamber. Afterwards she turned her attention to the bodies. Dannel was no problem. Lindran crawled down the corridor after her as Melantha pushed him through, and thrashed weakly when it was her own turn, a grim reminder that the Nightflyer’s powers were not all gone. Melantha easily overcame Lindran’s feeble struggles and forced her through.
Christopheris’s burned, ruined body writhed in her grasp and snapped its teeth at her, but Melantha had no real trouble with it. While she was cleaning out the lounge, a kitchen knife came spinning at her head. It came slowly, though, and Melantha just batted it aside, then picked it up and added it to the pile for conversion. She was working through the cabins, carrying Agatha Marij-Black’s abandoned drugs and injection gun under her arm, when she heard Royd cry out.
A moment later a force like a giant invisible hand wrapped itself around her chest and squeezed and pulled her, struggling, to the floor.
Something was moving across the stars.
Dimly and far off, d’Branin could see it, though he could not yet make out details. But it was there, that was unmistakable, some vast shape that blocked off a section of the starscape. It was coming at them dead on.
How he wished he had his team with him now, his computer, his telepath, his experts, his instruments.
He pressed harder on the thrusters, and rushed to meet his volcryn.
Pinned to the floor, hurting, Melantha Jhirl risked opening her suit’s comm. She had to talk to Royd. “Are you there?” she asked. “What’s happen… happening?” The pressure was awful, and it was growing steadily worse.
She could barely move.
The answer was pained and slow in coming. “…outwitted… me,” Royd’s voice managed. “…hurts to… talk.”
“Royd—”
“…she… teked… the… dial… up… two… gees… three… higher… right… on… the… board… all… I… have to… to do… turn it… back… back… let me.”
Silence. Then, finally, when Melantha was near despair, Royd’s voice again. One word:
“…can’t…”
Melantha’s chest felt as if it were supporting ten times her own weight. She could imagine the agony Royd must be in; Royd, for whom even one gravity was painful and dangerous. Even if the dial was an arm’s length away, she knew his feeble musculature would never let him reach it. “Why,” she started. Talking was not as hard for her as it seemed to be for him. “Why would… she turn up the… the gravity… it… weakens her, too… yes?”
“…yes… but… in a… a time… hour… minute… my… my heart… will burst… and… and then… you alone… she… will… kill gravity… kill you….”
Painfully Melantha reached out her arm and dragged herself half a length down the corridor. “Royd… hold on… I’m coming….” She dragged herself forward again. Agatha’s drug kit was still under her arm, impossibly heavy. She eased it down and started to shove it aside. It felt as if it weighed a hundred kilos. She reconsidered. Instead she opened its lid.
The ampules were all neatly labeled. She glanced over them quickly, searching for adrenaline or synthastim, anything that might give her the strength she needed to reach Royd. She found several stimulants, selected the strongest, and was loading it into the injection gun with awkward, agonized slowness when her eyes chanced on the supply of esperon.
Melantha did not know why she hesitated. Esperon was only one of a half-dozen psionic drugs in the kit, none of which could do her any good, but something about seeing it bothered her, reminded her of something she could not quite lay her finger on. She was trying to sort it out when she heard the noise.
“Royd,” she said, “your mother… could she move… she couldn’t move anything… teke it… in this high a gravity… could she?”
“Maybe,” he answered, “…if… concentrate… all her… power… hard… may be possible… why?”
“Because,” Melantha Jhirl said grimly, “because something… someone… is cycling through the airlock.”
“It is not truly a ship, not as I thought it would be,” Karoly d’Branin was saying. His suit, Academy-designed, had a built-in encoding device, and he was recording his comments for posterity, strangely secure in the certainty of his impending death. “The scale of it is difficult to imagine, difficult to estimate. Vast, vast. I have nothing but my wrist computer, no instruments, I cannot make accurate measurements, but I would say, oh, a hundred kilometers, perhaps as much as three hundred, across. Not solid mass, of course, not at all. It is delicate, airy, no ship as we know ships, no city either. It is—oh, beautiful—it is crystal and gossamer, alive with its own dim lights, a vast intricate kind of spiderwebby craft—it reminds me a bit of the old starsail ships they used once, in the days before drive, but this great construct, it is not solid, it cannot be driven by light. It is no ship at all, really. It is all open to vacuum, it has no sealed cabins or life-support spheres, none visible to me, unless blocked from my line of sight in some fashion, and no, I cannot believe that, it is too open, too fragile. It moves quite rapidly. I would wish for the instrumentation to measure its speed, but it is enough to be here. I am taking the sled at right angles to it, to get clear of its path, but I cannot say that I will make it. It moves so much faster than we. Not at light speed, no, far below light speed, but still faster than the Nightflyer and its nuclear engines, I would guess… only a guess.
“The volcryn craft has no visible means of propulsion. In fact, I wonder how—perhaps it is a light-sail, laser-launched millennia ago, now torn and rotted by some unimaginable catastrophe—but no, it is too symmetrical, too beautiful, the webbings, the great shimmering veils near the nexus, the beauty of it.
“I must describe it, I must be more accurate, I know. It is difficult, I grow too excited. It is large, as I have said, kilometers across. Roughly—let me count—yes, roughly octagonal in shape. The nexus, the center, is a bright area, a small darkness surrounded by a much greater area of light, but only the dark portion seems entirely solid—the lighted areas are translucent, I can see stars through them, though discolored, shifted towards the purple. Veils, I call those the veils. From the nexus and the veils, eight long—oh, vastly long—spurs project, not quite spaced evenly, so it is not a true geometric octagon—ah, I see better now, one of the spurs is shifting, oh, very slowly, the veils are rippling—they are mobile, then, those projections, and the webbing runs from one spur to the next, around and around, but there are—patterns, odd patterns, it is not at all the simple webbing of a spider. I cannot quite see order in the patterns, in the traceries of the webs, but I feel sure the order is there, the meaning is waiting to be found.