Deadman Switch

"Ready to accept the consequences, are you?" he shot back. "Ready to accept charges of fraud, grand theft, kidnapping, aiding and abetting a prisoner escape, and a half dozen smaller charges? Ready to accept a sentence of psychological blockage or even total reconstruction? Let me tell you straight out, Benedar, that the only reason you're not in a jail cell back on Solitaire is that I laid myself and Carillon down on the line for you."

"I appreciate your support, sir," I said between suddenly stiff lips. Back on Solitaire—did that mean we weren't, in fact, on the planet? That we were already in deep space, tu

My heart froze; but an instant later my fear evaporated. I knew, after all, the sounds of a ship on Mjollnir drive, and I knew the subtle ways Mjollnir-space pseudogravity differed from the real thing. We were still planetside; and if we weren't on Solitaire—

"Well, I'm glad you appreciate something about this mess," Randon growled sarcastically.

"But it wasn't just for me that you're fighting Governor Rybakov," I said, trying to interpret the sense I was reading from him. "In fact... you're not really having to fight them at all. Are you?"

"I fought them when you were first recaptured," he ground out. "And I may have to do it again. At the moment... it turns out that you may be more asset than liability. It all depends."

"On what, sir?"

He grimaced. "On whether or not you and Paquin were hallucinating out there." He took a step toward the door. "Come on."

I glanced at Kutzko, read nothing useful there. "Where are we going?" I asked Randon, swinging my legs carefully over the edge of the bed and sitting up. A rush of dizziness came, faded.

"To see your pet thunderheads, of course," he said. "And you'd better hope the study team out there has come to the same conclusion about them that you have. Otherwise—" he looked me straight in the eye— "I will have to fight for you. And decide how much fighting you're worth."

Turning, he headed out into the hall. Swallowing hard, I followed.

—

The three of us emerged from the Pravilo ship, and I found that we were in the center of a hastily thrown-together encampment about two hundred meters from the four buttes where Calandra and I had been recaptured. A row of mul/terrain cars like the one we'd borrowed from Shepherd Adams was to our left, and fleetingly I wondered what sort of trouble he was in over this. "Where's Calandra?" I asked Randon.

"Still locked up," he said shortly, turning us toward the vehicles. A Pravilo sergeant was waiting at the wheel of the nearest car, clearly expecting us. Randon got in beside him; Kutzko ushered me into the back seat and then joined me.

A couple of minutes later, we were at the buttes.

The encampment at the ship should have prepared me, but I still found myself gaping at the sight that greeted us as we bounced through one of the gaps and came to a halt. The hollow where Calandra and I had set up our camp was crammed full of shiny equipment racks, a half-dozen young techs working busily among them. From the central monitor-type station three flat cables snaked to the edge of the thunderhead city, co

We followed him to the group around the thunderheads, and as we approached an older man straightened up. He glanced at Randon and Kutzko, then focused on me, his sense a combination of interest and distaste. "Mr. Benedar," he nodded, his voice and ma

"You don't believe they're intelligent," I said. It wasn't a question.

His lips compressed momentarily. "Humanity has been waiting to run into another intelligent species for better than four hundred years now," he told me stiffly. "We've put a great deal of thought into the question of identifying and communicating with one, should we ever be lucky enough to run across it. I'll tell you flat out that these—" he waved a hand back toward the thunderheads—"don't match up with any of the established guidelines." He took a deep breath. "Having said that... I'll admit that we really don't yet know what to make of them."

I shifted my eyes over his shoulder. In full daylight, the sense of intelligence and attention was even more apparent than it had been in the dead of night. But it was oddly shifted. Those thunderheads furthest away seemed the most alert, while those closest to us—including the monitored ones—seemed virtually lifeless. "What exactly have you been doing with and to them?" I asked Chi.

He glanced back himself. "Just what you can see. Metabolic monitoring, full electromagnetic scans for any sort of brain waves, real-time layerscans for organs or organ-like structures. All perfectly non-destructive."

"I'm surprised you had all that equipment lying around Solitaire," Randon put in. His interest was genuine, I sensed; apparently, he was seeing the setup for the first time, as well.

"It's not much more than basic biological study gear," Chi told him. "That plus some variations borrowed from one of the hospitals. Also standard." He fixed me with a cool stare. "We're learning a lot more about thunderheads than anyone up to now has ever wanted to... but I can tell you right now that whatever you thought you saw in them, it wasn't sentience."

"If those are the only ones you studied," I said, "I'm not surprised you're having trouble. Those particular ones don't seem very alert at the moment."

The Pravilo officer beside me snorted. "I've heard this one before. You tell people you can put a rock to sleep with hypnosis, and when they ask you to demonstrate you tell them all the rocks in sight are already asleep."

Chi threw him a glance, cocked an eyebrow at me. "Crudely put, perhaps, but you have to admit—"

"There!" I snapped. All three of the thunderheads had abruptly come to life.

Chi spun around. "Where?"

"The thunderheads! Don't you...?"

I hissed through my teeth. The brief flash of intelligence I'd sensed there had gone as quickly as it had come. "It was there. It was."

Chi turned back, eyes flashing with irritation. "Look, Benedar—"

"Why don't we check your monitors?" Randon suggested. "If something really happened, it should have shown up there."

Chi looked at him, took a deep breath. "If you insist. I can tell you right now, though, that it'll turn out to be a false alarm. We've seen them before."

He stalked over to the hollow and the central monitor station. "Give me a composite for the last two minutes," he instructed the young woman sitting there. "All three subjects."

She nodded and tapped keys, and three traces appeared on the display. "There you go," Chi said, waving at them. "Spurious data."

"Wait a minute," I objected. "Who says it's spurious?"

He gave me a patient look. "Just look at the traces. All three virtually identical, and all three begi

I bit at the back of my lip. But I'd sensed their intelligence—could still sense it, at least in the further ones—

"Or else," Randon said thoughtfully, "it means they're deliberately turning it on and off in synch."