“As I suspected—he was dead from the day he was put into the ship.”
“Yeah? Put in by whom?”
“I had a robot bring some tools down. Use the cutting torch to open the top viewport. You can squeeze in through there.”
“Have you found it yet?” Baker asked, halfway through cutting the glasteel with an ultraviolet laser.
“No. I am scanning polar areas where solar panels could receive continuous light. I will alert you when I have detected something.”
A piece of slag drifted onto the control panel inside the fighter as the section of glasteel gave way. It sizzled for a moment, then crystallized. Grabbing the coolest edge of the piece, Baker pulled it aside and left it floating nearby. He peered inside.
The corpse peered back at him.
Its eyes gazed straight forward, unglazed, clear. Every few seconds a pair of tiny tubes expelled a mist that spread over the sclera and either evaporated or was absorbed. Baker could not tell which.
It was his first indication, however, that the ship still functioned. He maneuvered inside. “Did you know the ship was still running?” he asked.
“Yes. All its battle systems are inoperative, though, and it has lost all conning capability; in fact, the only functional system is the one surrounding the corpse, which takes up very little volume and is separate from the other ship systems.”
I can feel the death pulsating inside that thing. All those tubes like long, fat worms hanging from his neck and thighs. Pumping something gray and thick through its gray body. Out of his dead head staring so clear—I didn’t used to think like this. What’s happening to me?
“Have you found it yet?” he asked.
“Negative. Pan left—I want to look at those contact bundles.”
Baker turned his head.
The eyes of the corpse moved to follow.
They returned to their forward stare as Baker shifted back to examine the body more closely.
A line of drool appeared at the corner of the corpse’s mouth and slowly accumulated until it broke free, a tiny sphere that drifted until it adhered to Baker’s pressure suit.
“There are a series of electrodes,” the computer said, “terminating in the frontal lobes, the parietal and occipital lobes, at the temporal lobes, the cerebellum and the medulla oblongata.”
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.”