Slave of the Legion

'It most certainly does not. By the way—I have another fascinating piece of trivia for you.'

'Well, I can hardly wait.' I picked up a blanket and wrapped it tightly around my shoulders.

'Look out the plex.' I looked out.

'See that bright star there?'

'Yeah?'

'We're heading right for it—Tess checked.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah. Only it's not a star.'

'What is it?'

'It's a planetoid—no atmosphere. Tess says it's a bleak, lifeless chunk of rock.'

'And we're heading there?'

'Yes.'

'That's interesting. What do you think is going to happen when we get there?'

'I don't know.'

'Hmm. Well, look, I've got an even more urgent problem. You said you looked around the ship. Did you find anything that looked—even vaguely—like a toilet?'

Another dazzling smile. 'As a matter of fact, I did. I'll show you. It appears to be either a vaporizer unit, or a matter duplicator. It's a container, with an open top. But after you put something in it, you press a lever, and it's disintegrated.'

'You think it might be a matter duplicator?'

'Could be. It could be that an exact visual duplicate of whatever you put in there shows up someplace else.'

'You mean, some Omni postal worker might be puzzling to find an address on whatever I deposit into this device?'

'Maybe. However, remember the original of whatever you put in there is vaporized when you hit the lever. In your case—if you plan on sitting on the thing—I'd advise you to be very, very careful you don't hit that lever until after you stand up.'

'Good advice,' I said. A gigantic O snapped into being right at my side. I jumped, almost knocking Tara over. 'Deadman!' I shouted. 'I wish it would stop doing that!'

'Calm down!' Tara hissed. 'You'll wake up Willard.'

Chapter 16 Last Stop

'That's it—we're going into orbit. A perfect orbit.'

Tara gazed grimly out the plex—so did I. I was back in my liteshirt. It smelled a lot better. Gildron had Willard in his huge arms. Willard pulled viciously at Gildron's hair. They were getting along well.

The dead world we were approaching was glowing a dark silver, lit only by distant stars. It was hurtling through the vac on its own—it had no sun. A lost world, alone in the immensity of the vac.

'No advanced signals, Thinker,' Sweety reported. 'No atmosphere, no life, no movement on the surface.'

'Thank you, Sweety.'

'It's nothing, Thinker.'

'Funny,' I mused. 'The O's have obviously programmed the ship to travel here, and orbit this world. I wonder why.'

'Are we going to land?' Willard asked. 'Can we wear a vac suit?'

'I don't think we're going to land, honey,' Tara replied.

'Why would anyone want to come here?' I asked. 'It looks awfully dead to me.'

Tara did not answer. She was watching the planet as we approached it. There was nothing at all we could do about it—we could not control the ship.

In orbit, we lounged on the bridge sipping dox, looking out the plex. The airless planet rolled past to one side, crisp and clear, a terrifying panorama—stark frozen mountains of silvery rock and ancient plains of pale powdery dust, awful seas of icy dust with grim islands of glittering stone. A dead world peppered with millions of harsh craters, splattered with the debris of the cosmos. An ancient, fossil moon. It was clear that it had never known life. It had been hurtling through infinity, lost and alone, since the dawn of time.

'What do you think?' I asked.

'I don't like it,' Tara replied.

'Neither do I.'

'Why here?'

'Yeah. Why here.'

'There's a reason the O's were coming here,' Tara said.

'Probably. Certainly! What do you think?'

'They were escaping from Uldo.'

'All right.'

'Maybe with a damaged star drive.'

'But they made it here—it's quite a journey! Something worked,' I said.

'All right, they made it here. But something was wrong. Maybe they couldn't go where they would normally go.'

'Or maybe they couldn't go how they would normally go.'

'So they came here.' Tara was gazing out the plex.

'An alternate.'

'It was an emergency. A designated emergency destination.'

'Meet you in Omega Spiral, Null Six Sector, nobody will bother us there. And bring the tow-truck.'

'I think that's it,' Tara said. 'That's it! We're here for a rendezvous with the O's!'

I put down my dox, carefully. We sure didn't need this.

###

'Well, I'm damned if I can figure this out.' I turned away from the controls, baffled.

'This isn't going to work,' Tara said. 'Their minds are completely different from ours. The only thing that makes any sense here is the nav settings—and the stars. And that's because it's quantum, and Tess can read it. But the rest of it is not quantum. It's based on something else. Maybe some kind of mental energy. We could work on this all our lives and never understand it.'

I was looking out at the dead world below us. This was the very edge of the galaxy, and the stark, tortured terrain was typical of almost all worlds—airless, lifeless, and incredibly beautiful.

'Tara to Wester, over.'

'Sorry. You were saying?'

'I was saying we're…finished. I don't know what to do next. I've tried everything, and so has Tess. We've looked at uniphysics, rads, pressure, fluids, mags, biomags, biotics, vac, sound, quantum effects, DNA, electrochem, electrorads, lasers, vac, plasma, ionics, crystalflash, temperature…I even tried psyching it to life. Nothing makes sense. It may be mental.'

'So we wait. For them to come.'

'You're not going to be able to do any funny tricks this time, Wester. It was a miracle you stabilized that