Baker nodded. “Brain wave sensors for a dead man?”
“The hookups seem to be for remote control of the body.”
Baker frowned. “Remote from where? You said there was no communication equipment. Somewhere in the ship, maybe? An autonomous onboard computer?”
The corpse inhaled.
The dry, wheezing sound rasped in Baker’s headphones. He threw his arms back, crying out when they thudded against the confines of the tiny cockpit.
“Jesus! Did you hear that?” It’s still alive!
“Registered. The corpse has no need to breathe. It is kept alive-about as alive as the irreversibly comatose-by the life support tubing.”
Life support, hell. That thing is dead, yet it’s groaning and rattling like some great shuddering air sack-
“Kinney,” the corpse wheezed in a dry, creaking monotone.
Kinney! It’s always Kinney. Now the dead have come back and they call him instead of me and I don’t want to go but they’ll take me because I’m in his body…
Calm. Calm down. It’s only a talking corpse…
“Virgil Grissom Kinney.”
Just a dead body that’s controlled from somewhere…
Baker switched on his suit’s outer speakers and said, “This is… Kinney.”
“I’ve heard your computer’s half of the conversation over its speaker.” The eyes slowly turned toward the vidcam. The corpse’s s lips did not move when it spoke. Baker looked below the body’s chin to see a small speaker grill protruding from above the trachea. Its mouth hung open partway, another droplet of saliva accumulating near the tip of its brown, immobile tongue. “It’s nice to hear you, too.” Its speech sounded normal enough, though artificial.
“Who are you?” the computer asked.
“You let the machine ask questions?” the dead man said, turning his eyes to stare at Baker.
“Answer it,” Baker said. He sat on the control console with his legs floating on either side of the seated body. He let them float closer to the sides of the chair. “Who are you?”
“Well,” the voice said, “I’m certainly not this hunk of meat you’re staring at. I’m currently sitting in the war room at- well, never mind. It’s in trans-Plutonian space, though, and that’s all you need to know.”
“What’s your name?”
The corpse blinked. Slowly. A nice touch, Baker thought. “Lev Pokoynik. Call me Lee. And you’re Virgil Gri-”
“Jord Baker. Test pilot for the Brennen Trust.”
The corpse said nothing. It blinked again.
“Your image matches-”
“Plastic surgery,” Baker said, trying to keep a straight face. I wonder how much he’ll swallow. “I took his place on the flight.”
“You…” the croaking voice hesitated. After a moment, it resumed. “We have a Jord Baker listed as dead shortly before Kinney was trained for piloting the Valliardi Transfer.”
“A trick. We switched places. Kinney couldn’t handle the transfer. He flipped out.”
The corpse’s eyebrows wrinkled unevenly. “In the case report of the psychtech in charge, Kinney is listed as having survived…”
“I’m Jord Baker. I can see you can’t read minds, at least not my mind. What does it matter, anyway?”
“Can’t you see?” Some of the mist from the eye moisturizers clung to its lids like tears.
Baker edged closer to the chair. “See what?”
“Can’t you see what we’ve been forced to do simply to use the Valliardi Transfer? The only way to control a ship across lightspeed distances is to link it telepathically with a living being. We tried human pilots-they went crazy and killed themselves. We tried autonomous robot drones-they couldn’t think well enough. So we wire up dead bodies to keep them functioning as remote receptors and pilots, and psychlink them to sensitives here at the base.
“It allowed us to attack your spacecraft. We first estimated your projected flameout point. We narrowed it down to a space one light second or so in radius. We matched our velocities to what we guessed yours would be and transferred out. I had to wait five hours. When the fighter reached normal space, my recontact with it-and my communication-was instantaneous.
“The way I knew the instant of your flameout was through the use of my sensitivity. No, I can’t read minds, but I could tell what you were aware of and vaguely what you felt. This also enabled me and my attack wing to close in on you so tightly.
“You lasered us on re-emergence. That was a good move on your part. I stayed linked to the ship to see if I could transfer back. No such deal. I went off shift, but got called away from a good meal when we lost the fighter from our screens. Do you know how hard it is to re-establish contact with a psych-fighter?”
“No. You want me badly, don’t you?”
“We want to know how you can survive the transfer.”
“I don’t know how or why. I don’t think I want to know. And I have no reason to let you vivisect me to make your war more efficient.”
The voice rose until the little speaker distorted its sounds. “Do you think we’d use it for something as stupid as war? Idiot! The Valliardi Transfer is humanity’s only doorway to the stars. It’s cheap, subjectively instantaneous-”
“Almost.”
“-and so close to freeing us to settle the rest of the galaxy that it’d be a crime against all mankind if you escaped from us.”
The computer interrupted. “Twenty-four ships have just appeared beyond the flak halo. They’re accelerating toward us and will be within laser range in-”
“Get us out! They’re already in Valli range!” Baker’s last word choked in his mouth as everything twisted around him.
Make it stop. I can’t go on with the shrinking and the shoving through into that place of light and the door that never opens for me though I want it to and pray it to. They want me for Kinney. Kill Kinney and I won’t have to die and die and die…
“Hang on,” the computer said. “Deceleration!”
Baker’s legs wrapped tightly around the corpse’s chair, pulling forward to grasp it with his arms. The engine array thundered into power. Metal crushed against metal; the fighter slammed against the rear bulkhead to crash partially through the plating. The force of the fall threw Baker loose. His fingers dragged at the tubes and wires connected to the dead pilot, tearing them free. The body slammed atop him in the corner of the fighter; gray fluid spattered across his goggles. They had not fallen far, but the acceleration made it feel worse.
“Status!” he cried into the mouthpiece, pushing the stiff corpse away and trying to get his bearings.
“We transferred to five kilometers above the surface of Mercury. We are rising tangentially and decelerating under gravitational attraction.”
“The other ships?” Baker stole a glance at the corpse. Its mouth hung crooked, something black and thick draining from its throat and nose. One of its eyes had burst against the console and oozed gray. Did Lee feel that?
“They had not matched velocities to ours and would be in peril if they transferred down before adjustment. In the meantime, I have plotted a course for the cryonic preservation unit at the south pole and will land us there.”
“Land us? Are you crazy? This is a spaceship!” He struggled to his feet and grabbed for the hole in the ship’s viewing port.
“Warning-delta v.” The vernier rockets blazed, knocking Baker to the side. They cut off and he resumed his climb out to discover that the top of the fighter had wedged against the bent bulkhead, leaving only a narrow space between the two.
“I’m stuck here! Keep conning the ship. I’ll try to get to Con One or Two.”
“I had no intention of giving up. We are heading south in a forced low altitude orbit.”
“We can’t land something this big!” He snaked his arms out of the hole in the hatchway.
“The skirting on the engine array is high enough to protect the engines, the gravity is low enough, the planet has no atmosphere, we are in a hurry-I can synthesize no simpler solution.”