The Ascension Factor

No one in the shuttle cabin looked familiar. Most of them had changed out of their fatigues and into civilian clothes. They were quiet; Beatriz thought that they must be weighing the consequences of the shootings. She didn't see the man who started it. That was the man she feared even more than the captain - Ben had always said that the jumpy ones get you killed.

How could he be so right and be so far away from me?

She rubbed her tired face and patted her cheeks to keep hysteria at bay. She needed information, and a lot of it.

Mack, she thought. He'll help me, I'm sure.

For an instant her fear included him. After all, he was an original crew member like Flattery. They had worked together long before waking from hybernation on Pandora.

What i... what i... ?

She shook off her fears. If her imagination had to run away with her, she preferred that it ally her with Mack instead of against him. Mack was not at all like Flattery, this she knew. Even Mack had cringed at the news when Flattery converted Alyssa Marsh to an Organic Mental Core.

"I never believed we needed such a thing," he'd told her privately. "Now, with the kelp research, I'm even more convinced that OMCs were just another built-in frustration, a goad to push us even further from humanity."

According to reports - Flattery's reports - Marsh had been found in extremis after an accident in the kelp. He explained to her how clones were property, often merely living stores for spare parts, and how Alyssa Marsh had been prepared for this moment from her girlhood. Now Beatriz realized how fortuitous the timing had been for Flattery, how unfortunate for Marsh and her kelp studies with Dwarf MacIntosh.

What will Mack do?

He would need information, too. Like, how many in this squad? What kinds of weapons? Do they have a plan or is this just reaction to the killings groundside? She couldn't remember how many people worked the orbiter station - two thousand? Three? And how much security did they have aloft?

Not much, she remembered. Just a handful to handle fights and petty theft among the workers.

She'd counted thirty-two in the captain's squad as they boarded the shuttle, and each was heavily armed. Eight of them were assigned to fill out her crew, and they grumbled under the double load. This bunch carried a lot of the old, disfiguring mutations. The gear they'd loaded aboard was mostly weapons, but a few of them knew enough about holo broadcast to bring the bare bones of what they'd need to get Newsbreak on the air. A couple of techs were assigned to oversee the OMC.

Beatriz had kept the worst of the shakes at bay and now, strapped firmly into her couch, she nearly let herself go.

No, she warned herself, hold tight. I can't help anyone dead. I am the only witness against them.

She hoped that the console tape survived back there, and that someone sympathetic would find it.

Who would they show it to that could do anything? she wondered. Flattery?

Beatriz grunted a laugh at herself, then felt the captain's grip on her shoulder. It was firm, not painful. It was not gentle. It reminded her of her father's grip the night he died, and it lightened the same when their engines shut down. This man was the same age as her youngest brother, but there was infinity in his dark eyes. She didn't see much wisdom.

"I know what you're thinking," he said. "I have taken hundreds of prisoners, I have been a prisoner. Believe me, I know what you're thinking."

He gestured the guard beside her away and, surprisingly clumsy in zero-gee, moved up to join her. His voice sounded gravelly, strained, as though it had been screaming. He continued speaking, while his men drifted out of earshot, their glances furtive and their conversations spare.

"We are both in a bad spot, you and I. We both need out of it."

She had to agree.

"Up here it will be all or nothing, we are trapped. There is no escape for either one of us that doesn't require both of us."

To this, too, she had to agree.

But only for the moment, she assured herself, only until I find Mack.

Beatriz realized that, much as it disgusted her, her life depended on communicating with this man.

"You are a military man, an officer. How is it that you walk yourself out the plank like this? You wouldn't have done it on reflex. This is a plan and w... I simply fall into i..."

"My God, you're perceptive," the words came in a rush, the captain's eyes aglitter. "We can only win, Flattery is finished. We have the Voidship and Orbiter - enough food stores for years. We control their currents and weather. We have Flattery's precious Organic Mental Core - shit, we can hook it up to the ship ourselves and fly out of her..."

She didn't hear the rest. Her mind focused on what he'd said at the begi

If he kills everyone aboard the Orbiter.

... He'll have to throw it in," the captain was saying. "The rabble will have at him down there, and he doesn't dare destroy everything that he's worked for up here. Whoever beats him on the ground then can deal with me."

He's really going to do this, she thought. He's going to kill everyone aboard.

He took her hand and she snapped it back with a revulsion that she couldn't hide.

"Us," he said. "I meant they can deal with us. You and me. They'll believe whatever you tell them, at least for a while." He leaned closer, whispered, "You don't want to make another mistake, get more people killed."

She propelled herself out of her couch, not caring where the thrust might throw her in the gravity-free cabin. No one pursued her. The first handhold she grabbed stopped her beside a pair of security, younger than the young captain, who were reviewing the basics of holo camera triangulation.

They really intend to go on the air, she thought.

She looked back at the captain. He had his back to her, briefing several men. The tone of his voice, briskness of his gestures told her that he meant business. It was true, he could do it without her. It was true, that by helping him she might save others. She could not bring herself to speak to him, to go to him in any way. She sighed, and interrupted her two new cameramen.

"No," she said, "with that setup the alpha set only gets fifteen degrees of pan. OK if you're covering a launch, but we'll be inside, in a small spac..."

As she instructed the two young amateurs she saw Brood watching her. He winked at her once, and she successfully suppressed the shudder that tempted her spine.

"They'll want to see this Organic Mental Core in transport, and they'll want to know something about its - her - background. Let's start by getting some of that in the can."

She passed the two-hour flight instructing her camera operators, two men and a woman, none of whom she recognized from the massacre at the SLS studio. Beatriz preferred their company, even if they did answer to the captain. Whether by accident or design, she did not encounter any of that squad during their flight.

The Organic Mental Core was a living brain, enclosed in an intricate plasma-glass container that made allowances for the hookups to come. A complex plug would co

They're supported b... bodies!

She had done a report on such a thing several years ago. Scientists had co

The medtech in charge had a number of active facial tics and each of her questions seemed to accelerate them. She learned nothing about the principle that she hadn't already learned through research or through Dwarf MacIntosh.