The Ascension Factor Read online

  A certain stirring now in the tips of its fronds told the Immensity that “the One,” the Holomaster, was passing. The Immensity could unite fragmented stands of kelp into one will, one being, one blend of physics that humans called “soul.” Deep in its genetic memory lay a void, an absence of being that could not be teased out of the genetics labs of the Mermen. This void waited like a nest for the egg, the Holomaster who would teach the kelp how to unite fragmented stands of humans.

  Twice this Immensity gave up its body but never its will. It was capable of neither sorrow nor regret, simply of thought and a kind of meditative presence that allowed it to live fully in the now while Flattery’s electrical strings at Current Control manipulated the puppet of its body.

  Reflex is a speedy response made without the brain’s counsel. Reaction is a speedy response made with minimal counsel. This kelp grew up expecting to be left alone. It learned reaction only after its vines twined with domestic kelp. It learned to kill when threatened and to show no mercy. Then it learned to expect retaliation for killing.

  This Immensity expected to live forever. Logic dictated that it would not live forever if it continued reacting to humans. And now, the One was passing! It knew this as surely as the blind snapperfish knows the presence of muree.

  The original Immensity of kelp, Avata, encompassed all of the seas of Pandora under one consciousness, one voice, one “being.” Its first genetic extinction came early in the formation of the planet. It had been at the mercy of a fungus. A burst of ultraviolet from a huge sunstorm killed off the fungus. Somewhere, a primitive frond lay mummified in a salt bog awaiting Pandora’s first ocean.

  The second extinction was by human beings, by the human bioengineer Jesus Lewis. The kelp was teased back to life by a few DNA miners about fifty years later. The revitalized kelp that the Mermen resurrected was developed from these early experiments. Now kelp once again filled the seas, dampening the murderous storms.

  Once again the great stands scattered scent. They grew close with the years, their fronds spoke the chemical tongue. This Immensity itself retained two and a quarter million cubic kilometers of ocean.

  The One rode a kelpway that skimmed the Immensity’s reach. This particular kelpway came out of a stand of blue kelp that had been known to attack its own kind, overpowering nearby stands, sucking out their beings and injecting its own. It had suffered many prunings, and was sorely in need of guidance. This the Immensity knew from snatches of terror that drifted in on torn fronds. The One could not be trusted to such a dangerous stand. At whatever cost, the One must be spared.

  The kelp shifted itself slightly, against the electrical stings from Current Control, to bring the One into its outmost currents, spiraling into the safer deeps of its own stand.

  Chapter 22

  You have been educated in judgment, which is the essence of worship. Judgment always occurs in the past. It is past-thinking. Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future. Thinking is the performance of the moment, out of which you use your judgment to modulate will. You are a convection center through which past prepares future.

  —Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, from Conversations with the Avata

  “Course change.”

  Elvira’s voice was emotionless as rock but Rico detected the slightest edge of worry in the flurry of her fingers across her command console. She never piloted the foil in its voice mode because she preferred to speak as seldom as possible. That Elvira had spoken at all worried him—that, and the increasing shimmy that had begun a few minutes back.

  “Why?”

  When working with Elvira, Rico picked up her habit of non-speech. She seemed to like that.

  “Channel change,” she said, nodding toward her display. “We’re being steered off course.”

  “Steered?” he muttered, and checked his own instruments. They maintained their position in the kelpway, but their compass said the huge undersea corridor was running in the wrong direction.

  “Who’s doing the steering?”

  Elvira shrugged, still busy with her board. She had taken them deep into sub train traffic to minimize tracking, and they ran without the help of sensors that would light their progress through the kelpways.

  “We’re out of the wild kelp sector outside Flattery’s launch site,” he said, “that’s where theweirdness usually happens.”

  One-half of his screen displayed the navigation grid projected by Current Control from its command center aboard the Orbiter. The other half of the screen tracked their actual course through the grid, which now appeared to be bent.

  Bending, he corrected himself. It looks like our whole end of the screen is pouring down a drain. “Anything on the Navcom?” he asked.

  Sometimes Current Control changed grids through the kelp to accommodate weather conditions farther upchannel or the recent stumping of a stand of rogue kelp.

  “Negative,” she said. “All clear.”

  The ride began to get bumpy and Rico cinched himself tighter to his couch. He keyed the intercom and said, “Rough water, everybody cinch up. Ben, you’d better come up here.”

  Below them Rico could see another cargo train careening dangerously close to the kelp, attempting to recover from the sudden change. Their dive lights showed him that the kelp seemed to be in a struggle with itself, fluttering the channel as if pressing against a great force.

  Ben used the hand grips along the bulkhead to work his way to his console. “Can we get Current Control?” Ben asked. He dropped into his couch and cinched up.

  “Not without giving up our position.”

  “We got out too easy,” Ben said. “They’ve got a bug on this thing, anyway …”

  “Had,” Rico said, smiling. “I did an E-sweep when we left the harbor, thinking the same thing. Found it. Elvira here jettisoned the little devil into a netful of krill that we passed about a dozen grids back.”

  “Good work, both of you,” Ben said. “All right, then let’s try that cargo train below …”

  The Flying Fish was buffeted again by something like a huge fist. Elvira wrestled with the controls to keep them out of the kelp.

  Rico knew, as they all knew, that any damage to the kelp could be construed as an attack. A lot of kelp lights were active in this sector. Besides the red and blue telltales of a waking stand, this kelp flashed its cold navigation light at random and occasionally flooded them with the brighter fiber-optic sunlight that it transported from the surface. If the stand was one that had awakened, any mistake could get the foil and themselves torn apart at the seams.

  “Didn’t Flattery just go on the air to tell us how safe he’d made the kelpways?”

  “Just goes to show,” Rico said, “you can’t believe that bastard for a goddamn blink.”

  The cargo train passing in the opposite direction beneath them was having even more trouble. A relatively tiny foil could stop in midchannel and hover if necessary, but the cargo train needed to maintain a constant speed for maneuverability. The grid system was set up so that the trains, Pandora’s lifeline, could travel the kelpways swiftly and undisturbed with minimal course changes. From what Rico could see of the bucking cargo, the crew below at both ends of the train had their hands full.

  “It’s bending,” Rico said, watching the Navcom monitor that marked out their grid system. “The whole grid’s bending.”

  “We’d better surface,” Ben said. “Prepare for—”

  “Negative,” Elvira said. “If this is a surface disturbance, things will be worse up there. We need information.”

  Ben grunted acknowledgment.

  “Cargo train identity signal is registered to the Simplicity Maru,” Elvira reported, fighting the controls to maintain hover and an equidistance between walls of the kilometer-wide channel. This ordinarily simple maneuver was made nearly impossible by the ever-changing walls of their kelpway.

  Rico noticed a sweat beading on Elvira’s brow and upper lip.

  Ben keyed for a low-frequency broadc
ast. He hoped he didn’t have to explain the absence of their identity signal.

  “Simplicity Maru, this is Quicksilver,” he lied. “Do you have reports on current disruption?”

  Static hissed back at them, then a microphone clicked on. The message came in badly broken. Undersea communication, especially around active kelp, was always difficult.

  “Simp … Maru. Negative … into kelp.” There was the sound of shrieking metal in the background. “ … king up. We are preparing … ballast. Repeat, preparing …”

  Elvira threw the throttles forward and in spite of a violent buffeting the foil leaped at her touch. Her lips were pressed into a tight line and her knuckles shone white on the controls.

  “Wait, we can’t …” Ben said. His body pressed harder into his couch. “We can’t go into deep kelp.”

  “They’re blowing ballast,” Elvira growled. “That whole cargo train’s going to pop up into us like a cork.”

  Rico felt every fixture aboard rattle like his teeth. “Ben, is the girl secure?”

  “She’s strapped in,” Ben said.

  Just then they cleared the rear cabin of the train. It blew past them toward the surface, containers and cabins tumbling like toys. A few of the containers snagged in the walls of the kelpway, walls that still vibrated with light and that same strange force.

  “This is too weird,” Ben said. “Let’s surface and take our chances with the Director’s air cover. This ride’s getting much too ugly.”

  Elvira nodded curtly and the foil started its ascent. As though alerted by their control panel, the kelp fronds began closing above the Flying Fish. First they formed a canopy, then, a tight and impenetrable mesh. A sudden change of current lurched them to starboard and sent the foil tumbling end over end. Elvira righted them manually, her face very pale.

  “Shit!” Ben fisted the arm of his couch. “Somehow Flattery must’ve got to Current Control …” He snicked his harness release over Rico’s protests.

  “I’m checking on Crista,” Ben said.

  He had to use the handholds to make his way aft on the rolling deck. At the galley’s hatch he turned, suddenly a bit pale himself, and Rico knew what thought had just struck Ben.

  Rico smiled.

  “Rico,” Ben said, “what if …”

  “What if the kelp knows she’s here?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “What if the kelp knows she’s here?”

  “We’d better hope she likes us.”

  “She probably doesn’t have any say in this,” Ben said, and undogged the hatch.

  Rico didn’t care for the snap in his voice.

  “Somebody has a say in this,” Rico muttered. The hatch slammed, dogged itself. Then Rico remembered when the kelp could have had a whiff of Crista Galli. It was the only time that hull integrity had been breached.

  That bug! he thought. That goddamn little mercuroid chip of Flattery’s.

  “We ejected that transmitter, Elvira, and we ejected it in cabin air.” He thought he detected an infinitesimal stiffening of her posture. “If that kelp can sniff, and I hear it can, then it knows there’s more in this can than us worms.”

  Chapter 23

  Mercenary captains either are or are not skillful soldiers. If they are, you cannot trust them, for they will always seek to gain power for themselves either by oppressing you, the master, or by oppressing others against your wishes.

  —Machiavelli, The Prince

  The young security captain, Yuri Brood, was rumored by his men to be the unacknowledged son of the Director, product of an early tryst with a Merman woman from the Domes. The men based this notion on the strong physical resemblance between Brood and the Director, and on Brood’s quick rise to an advisorship that went beyond the formalities of his rank. The two men shared a ruthlessness that did not go unnoticed outside the confines of the squad.

  Captain Brood and his squad had been reared in a Merman compound near this Kalaloch district. Brood himself had been schooled privately in the mathematics of logic and strategy—that was standard operating procedure for anyone anticipating an executive position with Merman Mercantile. Brood himself preferred the more direct solutions of physical pressure to the subtleties of politics. His superiors shrugged it off as a phase, agreeing that Brood got results where others failed.

  The old families, Islander and Merman alike, retained a strong sense of loyalty to their communities that made the kind of enforcement that Flattery demanded impossible from within. Security command removed Captain Brood’s team to Mesa for their training and formation of their combat bond, then deployed them to Kalaloch and its shuttle launch site for “police work.” They were one another’s only family, an Island adrift in a sea of enemy. Everyone was kept three villages away from home.

  Survive your tour, advance your rank, retire to an office at the Preserve—this was the universal goal.

  The young captain was afraid, and he wasn’t afraid often. When he was afraid, heads rolled. He and his team were short-timers at one month remaining, just starting their countdown to home. The captain had something to return home to, and he intended to rotate on schedule. He intended that his men rotate back home with him, alive. For a year his district had been Kalaloch and the SLS. His squad’s actions had earned more citations than a dress suit could hold. During that year either the site or his men had been under fire daily.

  Today the captain faced Beatriz Tatoosh from the back of the studio, and he thought what a pity it would be to have to kill her.

  Beatriz did not know what the captain thought, but fear dried out her mouth when she saw his squad enter behind the lights and fan out along the bulkhead backing the studio.

  The captain pointed out each of the live cameras to three of his men. They pulled away from their squad, drew lasguns and without a word each took careful aim at a cameraman.

  Beatriz heard gasps, curses, the arming of weapons. She couldn’t see what was happening because of the glare in her eyes. The large monitor at the back of the studio cleared, then displayed a tape of the last launch, a tape cut by Beatriz and her present team.

  We’re not going out live! she thought. “Dak,” she alerted her floor man, “check the monitor.”

  When her gaze left the monitor it caught the young captain watching her. She remembered seeing him before, his dark eyes flashing her a smile as he led his squad through the labyrinth of the launch site. He half-smiled now, and nodded at her, and with that nod his three men executed her three cameramen.

  At the first shot she was stunned at the suddenness of it all, the audacity as much as the horror. At the second shot it was the smell of death itself that stunned her. At the third shot she faced the immediacy of her own death. She also faced the captain, who was no longer smiling.

  She remembered thinking how hard everyone was breathing just then, how the second guard stood over her dead cameraman and said to the first, “Shit, man, that was no signal …”

  “Shut up, man,” the third one said. “It’s done. Just shut up. It don’t change nothing here at all.”

  “All right!”

  The captain fanned his fingers out from his left palm and the rest of the squad sealed off the studio area. She started to tremble, then concentrated on controlling it so that the captain wouldn’t see.

  Ben was right! replayed through her mind. And who will know?

  Beatriz watched the replay of herself on the monitor, interviewing the Director during one of his ritual visits to the launch site. The expression on her face onscreen, one of admiration and deference, now made her sick to her stomach. Even so, her gaze stayed on the screen, rather than face the unbelievable reality unreeling in her studio.

  Through the shock and the trembling she heard Harlan’s voice from the back of the studio, speeding through a Zavatan chant for the dead. She remembered that the skinny cameraman with the fanlike ears on number three was Harlan’s cousin. The security who had shot him was now dragging him by the feet to the wall. The cameraman’s head
bumped over the sprawl of cables across the deck, the hole in his chest burned so clean it barely bled.

  The three assassins took wider positions in the room. Fifteen people were being held by nine guards in a very small studio with some very hot lights. The captain scanned the studio once, then turned to Beatriz. He indicated the red lights on the triangulators.

  “The red light means the camera is on, correct? It is still recording?”

  She did not answer. She felt it was important that he didn’t hear her voice quaver. She could not take her gaze from his.

  He did not smile this time, nor did he nod. “Finish them,” he said. Then he nodded at Beatriz, “Except for her.”

  The screams, the pleading, the curses with Flattery’s name on them silenced in the few moments it took the captain to walk her to the hatchway. It seemed that she walked forever, because she had the bodies of her crew to step over, and her legs were so uncharacteristically unsteady.

  “Now see what you have done,” Brood said to her. He squeezed her upper arm and shook her. “See what a mess your broadcast has made.”

  She couldn’t speak or she would cry, and she didn’t want to cry for him. She slapped away his touch when he took her arm to steady her. The last body she had to step over to reach the hatchway was the makeup girl’s.

  What was her name? Beatriz felt a new panic rise. I can’t blank out her name … !

  It was Nephertiti, yes, Nephertiti. Someone pretty and dark-skinned, like herself, with wide eyes. She told herself to remember this, to remember it and to see that somehow, sometime the world would know.

  “You’re a cool one,” the captain told her. “You probably saw worse than this at Mesa two years back.”

  She stopped in the hatchway and turned, still not speaking.

  “I saw you there, too,” he said. “I saw both you and your boyfriend bounced ass over teakettle when that mine blew up your rig. Thought you both bought it.”