Ascending

But I did not know how long I had blanked out, and that terrified me.

'Is something wrong?' Festina asked. I opened my mouth to say, I am very very scared… but she was looking at Bell, not me.

I pushed myself up to look at Bell too. Even though the Cashling woman had no face, it was clear she was most upset. In fact, his. Prophet was wheezing indignantly from a dozen orifices at once.

'This stupid ship!' Lady Bell said. 'The most important day of my life, and wouldn’t you know, the communication system breaks down. We can’t raise a peep from Jalmut; no trans-light communications at all.'

As the human phrase goes, a chill went down my spine. In fact, it felt more as if the chill moved upward from my stomach to my shoulders and thence to my face, but perhaps chills behave non-traditionally in artificial gravity.

'Uh-oh,' muttered Uclod. 'I hate to say it, missy,' he told Bell, 'but it sounds like you’re getting jammed.'

'Jammed?' Aarhus repeated. 'Oh crap.'

'Quick!' Festina said. 'We need a long-range scan right now!'

'No, we don’t,' Nimbus answered quietly.

He waved a foggy arm, pointing behind our backs. We all whirled to look through the glass bulkhead.

There, looming across half the sky, was the stick-ship.

Big Bully

'Damn, that’s a big sucker,' Festina whispered.

The Shaddill had appeared alongside Royal Hemlock, a vast brown forest beside a single white tree. Every stick in the Shaddill ship seemed larger than the entire Hemlock: longer and wider, like oaks crowding in on a paper birch. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of the brown sticks, one of which telescoped lazily toward the dwarfed navy vessel.

'What are the odds,' Uclod asked, 'those bastards will just grab Hemlock and fly away?'

'They don’t want to fly away,' Festina said. 'They want to capture everyone who knows too much. You. Oar. Anybody you might have talked to.'

'Which means the whole damned crusade.'

'Right. They want to nab every last ship.'

'How the hell will they do that?' Uclod asked. 'We’ve got dozens of little ships. If we scatter in different directions—'

'They won’t let us,' Festina said. With sudden urgency, she rolled to her feet. 'Lady Bell, is there any way to opaque this ship’s hull?'

'Why would I want to do that?' the lady asked.

A flash of blue brilliance burst upon us like lightning. For a moment, Festina’s face was reduced to pure black and white: white eyes, black pupils, white skin, black birthmark, white anger, black 'I knew this would happen' expression. Then her body crumpled limply to the floor.

Everyone else was already lying down.

Another Ship Bites The Dust

I am such a one as thrives on bright light. I did not feel invigorated by this particular light, but I did not slump over unconscious either. Perhaps, as the Pollisand had joked, many types of light just pass right through my body. At any rate, I am not so weak as opaque persons, so it takes more than a garish flash to subdue me.

The others, alas, were unconscious… everyone but Nimbus, who still hovered mistlike above the unmoving bodies. It annoyed me that he too had remained awake; one enjoys being special, or at least more special than an entity made of fog. Nevertheless, I could guess why he had not succumbed: a creature consisting of tiny floaty bits might not be affected by Sinister Weapon Beams in the same manner as creatures made from meat… and of course he was nearly as transparent as I, not to mention he too had been designed by the Shaddill.

Perhaps we had both been constructed immune to Shaddill weaponry. If so, the stick-people were greatly foolish — if I were designing artificial beings, I would make them especially susceptible to my favorite weapons, so I could quell rebellions with dispatch. But then, the Shaddill were villains; and if I had learned anything from the fictional writings of my people, it was that Villains Always Make Mistakes.

'What shall we do now?' I whispered to Nimbus. 'If the Shaddill think we are unconscious, this is an excellent time to take them by surprise.'

'Don’t be too hasty,' the cloud man replied. 'They know you’re here, right? Catching you seems to be a priority for them. And they must suspect their stun-beam doesn’t work on you — it didn’t work when you were in Starbiter, so why should it work now?' He drifted across the floor a short distance, then drifted back again: the cloudish equivalent of pacing. 'Maybe they’re hoping you’ll do something noticeable so they can tell where you are.'

'Ahh,' I said. 'That is astute reasoning.' I looked up at the glass roof. 'Of course, they will see me as soon as they look in this direction. I am harder to notice than opaque persons, but I am not invisible.'

'Don’t worry about that,' Nimbus told me. 'In a Cashling ship like this, the hull is only transparent one way; you can see out, but no one can see in. The Shaddill won’t spot you that easily.'

Which meant that with so many ships in the crusade, the Shaddill faced great difficulty determining where I was. Our trying to flee or attack would be a mistake, since it would catch the Shaddill’s attention… but then, I doubted that we could flee or attack. Unfettered Destiny would almost certainly refuse to take commands except from the Cashlings themselves. Indeed, I did not know if I could even leave the studio — without Lady Bell’s or Lord Rye’s permission, the ship’s security systems might not open the door for me.

That is often the way with mechanical devices — they are most exceedingly mulish. Back in my village on Melaquin, many buildings contained shiny equipment with display screens showing excellent three-dimensional curve-graphs in bold fluorescent colors. The village’s maintenance robots kept these devices free of rust, and presumably in perfect running order; however, no one knew what the machinery did. According to tales from my mother (who received the tales from her mother and so on back through the centuries), the equipment would only respond to commands spoken in the ancient language my ancestors used more than four thousand years ago. That language was not the tongue we had learned from the village’s teaching machines; therefore, my sister and I could only stare at the waves of color constantly painting themselves on the monitors, and dream of what excellent deeds we might do if only we learned the correct words to say.

Was I not in the same position now?

Reflecting gloomily on my inability to control the Cashling ship, it struck me that once again I had boarded a vessel, only to find it rendered inoperable shortly after my arrival. This was not an amusing pattern of starship behavior. Moreover, the trend was accelerating. I had lasted seven hours on Starbiter, before she ripped herself apart; then an hour on Royal Hemlock before the dreadful act of sabotage; and finally, only ten minutes on Unfettered Destiny before the attack on the Cashlings made it impossible to command the ship to do anything.

Perhaps I should endeavor to board the Shaddill craft. If I managed to do that, the stick-ship might explode instantly into a cloud of radioactive dust.

Hah!

The Fate Of The Hemlock

Thinking about the stick-ship, I raised my head to the glass ceiling and stared at the alien vessel. A hollow tubelike stick now extended from the Shaddill ship’s belly: reaching out slowly like a snake slithering up to its prey, the stick thwacked against the Hemlock’s hull. Of course I heard no sound through the vacuum of space; but the navy craft shuddered and shook silently with the impact. The collision must have been forceful enough to knock people in Hemlock off their feet — if any of them were still standing after the beam weapon’s attack.

For a moment, the pair of ships just floated there, as if the white navy cruiser were impaled on the big brown stick. Then a thousand tiny vines sprung from the end of the stick, some circling the Hemlock widthwise while others streamed out along the ship’s length, and still more wrapped around the hull in long weaving spirals. In places, the vines crisscrossed each other; in others, they sprouted side tendrils that intertwined and appeared to fuse together. Considering how far we were from the two vessels, the vines must have been quite thick — perhaps as wide around as my entire body; otherwise, I would not have been able to see them at such a distance. But they moved with the speed and flexibility of much smaller strands, until they had completely bound the Hemlock in their great sinister web.

The telescoping stick began to retract: back into the body of the Shaddill ship, dragging with it the trussed-up Hemlock. Two nearby sticks snaked out of the woodpile as if they were interested in having a closer look at the captured prize. They drifted lazily outward, skimming their heads along the length of the navy ship in opposite directions; then they struck simultaneously, jamming their open mouths onto either end of the cruiser. Once the Hemlock had been capped fore and aft in this fashion, it was quickly pulled down into the weaving brown forest. I lost sight of it as dozens more sticks slithered up and over the ship, like a mass of brown snakes squirming onto a single white one.

So that is the end of the Hemlock, I thought. And how long before the Shaddill gather up the crusade ships as well? Even as the words crossed my mind, a new stick telescoped from the Shaddill vessel, reaching for one of the crusade’s smaller craft.

Our own ship had pulled a goodly distance away from Hemlock; therefore, if the Shaddill began scooping up the nearest crusade ships, they would not get to us for a few minutes. However, it was only a matter of time before they swallowed us all.

A Gargantuan Sneeze

I turned to say something to Nimbus — I do not know what it was going to be, I simply wanted to speak and hear his voice in return — but the cloud man had vanished. I blinked and peered around the room. There was no sign of him, not even a little bit. I was about to cry out in anger and fear when I noticed baby Starbiter resting in the pit of Festina’s stomach.

That was a strange place indeed for an infant Zarett.

I moved nearer for a better look. Festina had fallen into a twisted three-quarters position, her bottom half lying sideways on her right hip, but her top half slumped over so her chest and arms lay almost flat on the floor. This left a covered nestlike area under the shelter of her belly, a dark little cave where a small Zarett person could rest safely. Nimbus must have placed Starbiter there in the shadow of my friend’s body, where the little girl would be protected while her father was busy with other activities.