Spaced Out

Torture Who You Have To

"To maintain control over the information you carry. Vortrand has always been power hungry. I didn't realize how hungry until that moment. Don't mistake his grasping ambition for concern or care."

Lily shook her head. "Stop trying to confuse me."

The Utori made a sound like he meant to speak, but released it as a sigh instead. With one arm draped across Lily's chest, Vlex reached for a control cluster embedded in the alcove. He tapped and rearranged the colored motes glowing in the dark stone. The scraper thrummed with purpose. From the observation shield, Lily saw activity where the ship's scythe-shaped wings bowed inward. A sinister mass burgeoned between the wings' sharp tips. The vaporous tumor grew and blotted out the scenery before it.

"What is that?" Lily asked.

"A highly condensed fade field held in check by an expanding a-particle shell."

Lily tensed. "You can't blast your way out."

"Actually, I can, but why shoot through this manta's dermal layers when I can launch from the claustra itself?"

Angling around, Lily stared up at Vlex's pointed chin. "But if you punch into zospace from here—"

"We won't enter zospace. That's inefficient Verakian technology back-engineered from manta biology. They may as well use cardboard oars. No, the fade field there will expand past the range of the a-particle shell. When that occurs in the next peccard, the fade field will suck us into a void shunt leading directly to the nearest Utori claimedspace checkpoint."

"Void shunt," Lily mumbled.

"Think of it like a tunnel that exists temporarily outside of time and space before rapidly collapsing."

That sounded a little like a worm hole. And the sucking part, the way the fade field seemed to swallow everything around it...

"Is that a black hole?" Lily asked, breathless, remembering how the fade cannons took a chunk out of Me that vanished out of existence.

"A proto-singularity. It will collapse quite rapidly to take us, and most of this manta, with it into the shunt."

"But the crew!"

Vlex shrugged. "You've refused to manipulate the manta. This is my only recourse besides a slow death at the hands of Verakian Command."

"Fine, fine, I'll help! Just stop whatever you're doing."

The commander organized the control cluster to its original arrangement. The fade field shrank then winked out. With the flat of his hand, Vlex gestured. "Please."

Closing her eyes, Lily pictured the central port fissure dilating. She directed the thought outward then opened her eyes. The charred fissure remained puckered shut. Features scrunched into a scowl. The first time she influenced the manta she'd been very close to the reclamation chamber's port fissure. The second time she'd been plugged into Me and her bond with them amplified her neural signal. On the scraper she was cut off from the manta entirely.

Closing her eyes again, Lily explored her mind. Locating the small, alien space in her brain that was the connection to the ship was far more difficult unplugged from the fledgling. Doctor Puu's mental exercises helped. Thoughts snagged on the splinter of her connection to Me and their parentship. Beyond that tiny fracture, the manta's neural network sprawled in a web of bright veins. Smaller webs connected to the larger sprawl. The mini-networks belonged to the fledglings birthed by this ship. Two of them were only half formed. The little intact web had to be Me's. Did she tap into this space each time she projected a thought transmission? All she seemed to do was imagine her desired effect and she did that now, picturing the port fissure opening and willing the image from her mind.

A golden pulse traveled through Me's sprawl and into the manta's where it spread through the mature ship's neural web.

"There we are," Vlex said and Lily opened her eyes.

The blackened port fissure expanded. Lily called flagettes from the opening and they came. Ropey nerve connections from the manta's m-layer snaked towards and wrapped around them. They dragged the scraper into the ship's segmented dermis. Crackles of violet energy zig-zagged around them. Bioluminescent striations in the manta's fleshy-wet interior flared at their presence. Vlex cursed.

"If you can expedite this process you ought to. We are likely five cezins away from taking a phozone burst."

Licking her lips, Lily concentrated. At the point where her brows creased, dull pain blossomed and spread. Flagettes responded to her command and hurried their passage through the manta's phozone-primed skins. A surge of blinding brightness chased them from o-layer. A tinny drumming, like thousands of tiny pebbles dropping onto an aluminum sheet, jittered the scraper's back end. Violet sparks swarmed about the observation shield then the ship coasted through them. They swooped into the star pocked void, leaving the docking claustra behind them.