Without thinking, he reached out curiously to touch the rubbery lips of her implant socket.
Her eyes opened at once, looking up at him. "Please don't, Francis," she said.
"I was just curious," he said, excusing himself, not truthful.
"Does it repel you?" she asked.
"—No," he said, not sure that was truthful, either. "Does it hurt?"
"Of course not. . . . But I don't really like it, Francis. I wasn't always a memmie. I was an ordinary human doctor, but then, when I found myself working with memmie surgeons, with all those Turtle skills, I decided I had to be able to do the things they could do. So I made up my mind." She shrugged. She was particularly beautiful when she moved like that, Krake thought, her soft, warm shoulders moving so gracefully. "The next day I let them slot my skull."
"And now you're sorry?"
"Sorry? What's the good of being sorry? It's done, and there it is."
"It doesn't change anything. You're still very beautiful," he told her.
That stopped her. She looked at him in a different way. "Francis," she said seriously, "I'm sorry if I'm still giving you any wrong ideas, but please don't. That's the one thing I am sorry about. You're a wonderful man, and any woman would be proud to have you for a lover—but I've still got those other commitments." She smiled regretfully up at him. "I know I forgot them for a while. But I have to start remembering again."
When push came to shove, Sue-ling refused to stay away from her patient for the full hour. Krake was glad enough of that. It was frustrating to be alone in the sight and smell of her, and not be allowed to touch . . . and he was beginning to want to be back in the control room of his ship, too.
There seemed to be no need for that. As he stood behind Marco Ramos at the board, staring up at the screens, the dull coppery disk had long since dwindled to be just another coal in those hostile skies. "I don't see any trace of the Sh'shrane ships," Krake said.
"No, Captain. They just disappeared half an hour ago. I guess we're home free."
Krake made a noise in his throat. In lighter mood it might have been a laugh. "Free, probably. Home, I doubt," he said.
Marco twisted one eyestalk to regard him. "Have you got any new orders for me, Captain?"
Krake shook his head. "Continue as you are. I don't know where we're going, but we're certainly on our way." Feeling helpless, and angry at himself for the feeling, he turned to Moon Bunderan. "Any bright ideas from Thrayl?"
She sighed. "Nothing useful, I'm afraid. All he says is that the bad song is getting very loud. I'm worried about him, Captain."
Krake didn't respond. He didn't want to say the truth, which was that he was worried about all of them, himself included. He turned to the room at large. "Any ideas, anybody?" But Kiri Quintero merely looked politely apologetic, Marco and Daisy Fay were silent and the Turdes were muttering unhappily to each other, their transposes off, paying no attention to the others.
That left Sue-ling Quong.
She was ignoring everyone but her patient, crouched over Sork's silent form, methodically rolling the sensors over his body to check for pulse, temperature and other vital signs. Krake didn't like staring at her, but he couldn't help himself, though the sight brought him no more than a feeling of desolation. He had no right to Sue-ling Quong, he reminded himself . . . but it hurt just as much as though he had.
She looked up. "He's deteriorating, all right," she reported, her face drawn but determined. "I'm going to have to go in again."
"But you said you needed things you don't have here."
"That's right," she said, "but what choice have I got? He's going to die if I don't do something. Maybe I can patch him together a little better . . . but I'll have to have help. Daisy Fay, Marco—will you give me a hand with him?"
"I'll do it," Moon Bunderan offered, but Sue-ling shook her head.
"Not this time, Moon. You take care of Thrayl."
"Do what she says, Marco," Krake ordered, and slipped into the place before the board to relieve him, while Kiri Quintero silently took the other board over from Daisy Fay McQueen. Krake watched without joy as his crewmates carried Sork Quintero away. Francis Krake certainly did not wish Sork any harm. There was, it was true, a part of his mind that was calculating the effect Sork Quintero's death, if that happened, would have on his own chances with Sue-ling . . . but that was not a thought he wanted to concentrate on. It was ugly. It was also stupid, because whatever happened to Sork, there would be no practical benefit for Krake as far as Sue-ling was concerned while Kiri Quintero was still around. . . .
He turned when he heard Kiri call his name. Kiri was looking unusually agitated. "Francis?" he called. "Have you been looking at the screen? Is there something wrong with our instruments?"
Startled, Krake swung back to stare. Yes, there did seem to be something unusual there on the screens. It was no more than a faint, fuzzed appearance, hard to detect, much less to identify. It wasn't easy for Krake to be sure even that anything was actually there, for it was no more than the almost invisible haze of a summer morning's mist.
But it had not been there before.
Suddenly alarmed, Krake touched the board, switching frequencies for the sensors. One after another he scanned every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum. Infrared, optical, all the way down through microwave—yes, the fuzz was there in every frequency, all over the sky. And it was growing rapidly denser until it became a milky glow, like a bright fog, all around The Golden Hind.
"What the hell!" Krake snapped. But his voice was drowned out by a simultaneous keening from both Turtles. "One knew it!" Chief Thunderbird moaned, and Lidun cried:
"It is surely the Sh'shrane!"
Krake looked at them, baffled. "What are you talking about? There's no way those ships could catch up with us in wave-drive!"
Chief Thunderbird was frantic. "One has told you their ships are better than ours!" he bellowed.
"But there's no ship there," Krake said reasonably, "only a kind of—"
"Smudge," he had been going to say. He didn't get the word out.
Suddenly there was a ship.
More accurately, there was a piece of a ship. The stranger did not appear on the screen at once. It began to show up bit by bit, like an ancient dirigible poking its nose out of a cloud. It kept on coming.
A ship it certainly was. A ship of unfamiliar design, football-shaped, and huge. When the last of it had emerged from the milky cloud, its bow was almost touching the hull of The Golden Hind.
"It is truly the Sh'shrane," moaned Chief Thunderbird.
Krake shouted in wordless startlement and anger. He pounded on the keys of the controls—trying to accomplish what, he could not have said—to do anything, to change the course, to come out of the wave state—it made no difference, for nothing worked. The Hind did not respond.
The strange vessel settled itself against the hull of The Golden Hind with a solid nudge and hung there. A hatch in its side opened. And out of it came—
Sh'shrane.
There was no doubt that that was what they were, metal monsters no larger than a cat, waving short, stubby, flexible members like arms. They collected at the hull of the Hind and then began crawling purposefully along it toward the lock of Hind's scout ship.
"But we're in wave-drive," Krake said stupidly. He could not believe what he saw. Everyone knew that a ship in wave-drive was completely isolated from every material object in the universe. There was no way these things could have reached them!