Nothing in nature produces infinite acceleration. Tally knew that very well. It was probable that his computer brain would withstand whatever forces it was exposed to. His body was another matter. It was as weak as any human’s. If he damaged another embodiment beyond repair, he would never hear the last of it.
Those thoughts were completed inside a nanosecond. He switched his suit at once to its highest level of upward thrust. His inertial positioning system indicated he was still falling. That was no surprise. It took time to cancel out his downward speed, and start him back up toward the surface. Then he realized that the situation was worse than that. His acceleration was still in the wrong direction. The thrust provided by his suit was not sufficient to balance the downward force, and that force increased with every passing second.
It couldn’t be any type of high-density natural body at the middle of the hollow planetoid. The attraction was too strong for that. So what was it?
Tally had been falling with his body in a vertical position. He looked down, past the boots of his suit, and saw directly beneath him a rolling whirlpool of black oil, curling and tumbling on itself. As he watched, it grew rapidly in size. In another split-second he would fall into its depths.
E.C. felt the enormous satisfaction of one whose theories had been fully vindicated. This was a Builder artifact. The proof of that was right below him, in the form of a Builder transport vortex.
As he dropped into the churning heart of the whirlpool, his attosecond mental circuits had time for a last twinge of conscience. Despite his promise, it was unlikely that in the immediate future he would be able to report his discovery to Julian Graves.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
And then there were none
First the Have-It-All flew away. The ship vanished into the nearby Bose node, taking with it—to who-knew-where—Louis Nenda, Atvar H’sial and their slaves, along with survival specialist Sinara Bellstock. Next to leave were Hans Rebka and Darya Lang, flying off to Iceworld with Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner. Finally, E.C. Tally departed.
The Pride of Orion—what was left of it, after giving birth to the Savior and the Tally-ho—felt like a dead ship.
At first Torran Veck and Teri Dahl avoided each other’s company. Both felt like failures, the specialists that no one had a use for. Neither wanted the company of still another failure. But finally, with the arrival of Tally’s message, they had to talk to each other.
“What does he mean, I have discovered a planetoid to which some intelligent agent may have made modifications?” Teri Dahl was lightly built, with long, slim limbs, dark-brown hair, and a coffee complexion. Her constant irritation was being mistaken for a child. She was sitting cross-legged on the bunk in Torran Veck’s cabin. “If that embodied computer were a human, he’d be a moron. Tally couldn’t have been more vague if he tried.”
“It’s ridiculous.” Torran Veck occupied—and overflowed—the only chair. “Graves received that message hours ago, and since then there hasn’t been another word. Suppose Tally is in trouble? We know the exact location of his ship, and you and I are trained survival specialists. Why aren’t we heading out there. Why are we sitting doing nothing?”
“Why are we here at all, when Ben Blesh and Sinara Bellstock and Lara Quistner are away on assignments?” Teri glanced at the cabin eye, confirming that it was turned off. It was, but even so she lowered her voice. “When we were in our final stages of training, did you have an affair with one of the instructors?”
“What if I did?” If Torran Veck was startled by the sudden change of subject, he did not let it show. “It wasn’t forbidden, and I wasn’t the only one. I certainly didn’t get favored treatment on any of the tests—Mandy was probably harder on me than anyone else.”
“I believe you. I’m not suggesting you had an easy time. But I’ll tell you one thing. If I’d had something going with an instructor, after our training was all done there were certain questions I couldn’t have resisted asking Mandy.”
“Like?”
“Like how well I had done, compared with others. That wouldn’t be giving me an advantage. It would just be pillow talk.”
“Mm.” Torran Veck had a big, fleshy nose. He tended to pinch the bridge between finger and thumb when he was thinking. He held it now. “What gave us away? We agreed there would be no signs of public affection and no favoritism. Otherwise we’d both have been in trouble.”
“You overdid it. Both of you. In the classes, Mandy was hard on you when there was no reason. And you never looked directly at her.”
“Mm.”
“Well? Did you? Ask questions, I mean, about how you had done?”
“Maybe.”
“And perhaps how other people had done?”
“So what if I did? Teri, where are you taking this?”
“I didn’t have Mandy’s ear, but all during training I couldn’t help comparing the members of our group. I watched you perform, and Lara, and everyone else. I bet you did the same.”
“Of course I did.”
“But you had Mandy to confirm your gut reactions. I didn’t. I’ll tell you what I think, and I’d like your comment. All right?”
“Maybe.”
“There were two stand-out trainees in our group. Their names were Torran Veck and Teri Dahl. You and me. We were easily the best of the bunch, and there was hardly a whisker separating our final scores.”
Torran stopped holding the bridge of his nose. “Are you sure you didn’t have inside information?”
“Not a scrap. But I use my eyes and ears, same as you do. Comments?”
“Some of these are Mandy’s, not mine—though I agree with you and her, we were both top of the class, kick-ass compared with the others. Ben’s smart, but he has these feelings of inadequacy. That makes him want to do wild things, just to prove he can. He gets scared, but he’ll try to be a hero even if it kills him. If Ben gets into trouble it will be because he thinks that when you are in charge it’s a weakness to say you don’t understand or don’t know. Lara is smart, too—hell, we all are. But her personality has a built-in contradiction. She doesn’t really want to run things. So she takes orders—but then she resents being given them. She will get into trouble trying to prove that she makes command decisions as well as anyone, when in fact she doesn’t.”
He paused, until Teri asked, “That leaves Sinara. What about her?”
“Mandy has a soft spot for Sinara.”
“So do you.”
“A little. I have a soft spot for you, too, but not enough to distort my judgment of either of you. Sinara ought never to have become a survival specialist. She has mood swings. Sometimes she’s all dreamy and romantic, sometimes she’s a practicing nymphomaniac.”
“You would know, I suppose.”
“Don’t go by rumors. Anyway, Sinara isn’t exactly what you would call a responsible person. If Ben is looking to be a hero, Sinara is looking to find one. Mandy believes Sinara only went into this business because her family wanted her to—father’s dying wish and all that. He was in the same line of work, killed in the Castlemaine disaster. But Sinara shouldn’t be looking after other people. She needs somebody to look after her.”