The Ascension Factor

Unrestrained, Rico was flung like a toy about the cabin. The foil tumbled down the cliff face as the hylighter deflated and collapsed on top of it. When the foil came to rest Rico lay dazed across the plazglas windshield of the cabin. All he could see under the shadow of the hylighter's canopy was an immense cloud of blue dust. He flexed his arms and legs, coughed to test his ribs. Bruised, but nothing broken.

"Great!" Rico told himself. "'Keep her away from the kelp,' they said. Here we are, smothering in the stuff."

He tried calming himself, but a few deep breaths did not still the shaking in his hands. He hoped the foil had slid all the way to the beach. He didn't relish being perched halfway up a cliff.

The afternoon downpour washed over the canopy and their foil. Rico thought of Elvira, caught in open water in the squall, and assessed her chances. They summed up close to zero. She might now be one with her sister kelp.

"At least there's not much hydrogen left in that monster," he muttered.

He switched on the cabin lights and radio. A couple of the lights worked, but the radio was gone. He took a deep breath of the kelp-laced air before heading aft to check on Ben and Crista.

***

If you think that vision is greater than action, why do you enjoin upon me the terrible action of war?

Mack was awaiting a call-back from security when suddenly his instruments showed random explosive damage to the kelp in sector eight.

He didn't wait. Mack thought. Flattery wants whatever's in there in a bad way.

Mack was sure that the "something" included Crista Galli. Instrumentation showed merging patterns between the wounded domestic kelp and the massive neighboring stand of wild blue. Mack and Alyssa Marsh had done peripheral studies of that particular stand of blue, the largest wild kelp bed in the world.

It learned to hide from us, to convolute itself so it could grow inside a ring of domestic kelps and outmass them without detection.

Now that it had broken through, he suspected that it could wreak havoc with Current Control. If it was as big as the Gridmaster said it was, then the blue kelp could possibly be Current Control.

If this kelp's on our side, then Flattery's surrounded, he thought. But what if it's not on our side?

Beatriz was his big worry now. She always checked in from the docking bay, but this time he had heard nothing. When she was incommunicado inside her studio he suspected trouble. It wasn't like her at all. Just a blink after Spud left, a spinjet jockey reported seeing a body expelled from the shuttle airlock. Nobody was answering his calls in security or inside the studio.

"Dammit!"

Now the Gridmaster was getting a response from the kelp, an incredibly healthy and powerful response. This stand that the depth charges had stu

This is the new kelp, he thought. It's absorbed the memories of our domestics and taken them over.

All of the hardware from the domestic kelp was intact, but instead of dozens of frequencies dancing the screens, there was now only one kelp frequency on the Gridmaster.

Mack's screen showed the grid reforming, except for an unresponsive area in the northwestern corner. He hoped that wasn't pruned back too far.

"Well," he muttered, "so far it seems to like us." He had pla

"I want that sector on visual," he told the sector monitor. "We should be able to spot them."

All he got on visual was the gray-black whirl of afternoon squall that obliterated his view of the entire sector. Ozette, LaPush and Galli were under there somewhere. He hoped against hope that the depth charges didn't turn them all into soup.

Com-line's still down to the studio, he thought. If Spud doesn't get in there, we'll have to get their attention somehow.

A feeling stranger than his weightlessness flipped through his stomach. He shook it off, as he had shaken off the chill that slipped into the air after her shuttle docked. He wondered how many had come up on that flight. The shuttle could carry thirty to forty, depending on equipment. Then there was OMC life-support, and the techs. Everyone aboard would have to know what happened.

He didn't like thinking about the OMC, where it came from, what Flattery had done to it. She had been Alyssa, not "it," but he found "it" a lot easier to handle at the moment. Life-support was Mack's responsibility, as it had been aboard the Earthling. He did not relish the notion of that job.

"Well," he muttered to himself, "before we get that far I might have a few surprises for Flattery."

A soft tone went off near the turret, alerting him that something was forming up on the kelp's private holo stage. MacIntosh had built the thing after consulting Beatriz on holography. He had routed it through the Gridmaster in hopes of getting images from the kelp. In the two months that it had been experimental it had far exceeded his dreams.

The kelp had been frustrated for a long time, and it had a lot to say. So far it was all images, flashing lights and odd sounds. The images were clear - usually solid information about real things in real time. The sounds and lights seemed to be "talk," or inflection, or philosophizing. MacIntosh had not yet been able to interpret anything but the more obvious images.

He launched himself across the small office toward his new setup at the base of the turret. He didn't care much for the near-zero-gee environment this close to the axis, but it was the most practical location for an observation station. At first, he had liked the immediate access to the shuttle port.

To get the near-normal gravity rimside he would have to put up with the a

His experimental holo stage lit up with the image of a giant hylighter dragging its ballast across the wavetops. This projection was the best quality he'd ever seen. It was a perfect miniaturization and the collating data identified this as the source of the disruption within the kelp. A metallic glint off the ballast drew his attention closer to the tiny three-D scene in front of him.

"That's not ballast!"

The miniature holo played out the incident with the Flying Fish and the hylighter. He watched from the hylighter's view as they bore down on the cliff. They came in fast, and when MacIntosh realized that they wouldn't clear the top he caught himself pulling his feet up. Then the hylighter burst, and the screen went blank.

"There's an Oracle somewhere near there," he muttered. "Maybe we can muster up a rescue team."

He handed himself back to his command console and paged Spud on the intercom. That was when all hell broke loose from the klaxons.

The four-klaxon alarm meant a fully involved fire somewhere in the forward axis section, his section. His greatest fear was for the shuttle docking station and its spare fuel stores.

With a four-klaxon alarm the fire could be in Current Control, the studio area or the shuttle docking bay. All areas sealed off automatically. Warning lights winked on in all axis quarters and the Orbiter intercom repeated calmly, "Vacuum suits mandatory in all sealed areas. In case of fire, vacuum will be installed. Vacuum will be installed. Vacuum suits mandatory in all sealed area..."