The Ascension Factor

"Rat, you and your people take the shuttle. Barb, you work the Voidship and know it better than anybody here. Take Willis and his engineers. Remember, no lasguns. You have your vacuum suits on, use them. The rest of us will handle this little nest here. If Flattery doesn't trust us anymore, let's make it worth his while."

Mack knew that he had the edge over Brood as long as they met in the near-zero gravity in Current Control. Brood's techs might figure out the old hardware that ran Current Control, but the new organic hookups throughout the Orbiter and ship, grown by Islanders specifically for MacIntosh, might be a surprise. These kelp fibers bent light and encoded messages chemoelectrically within cell nuclei. This enabled kelp to bring light to the ocean depths and messages to the Orbiter. The switching speed and capacity of kelp hookups far outstripped any hardware that Pandorans had developed.

Too late, Raj, Mack thought. Current Control will never be the same.

Brood could only fail. In the time it would take his techs to figure out Mack's secret system they would all be grandparents.

***

The is is holy and the void is home.

Hot suns melted through the thick, post-squall mist to scorch the albino nose and exposed arms of Crista Galli. When an offshore gust caught the mist in a whirl it freshened her hot skin like silk. She had felt the whump of breakers in the surf beyond the fog and now she could see just how close the waves really came.

"Tide's shifted again," Ben told her.

He held her right hand but his voice sounded empty with distance, thick-tongued. He blinked a lot, and his motions were slow, exaggerated.

Dusted, she thought. I wonder how it feels.

She was convinced now that the dust had returned her to reality, rather than removed her from it. It was her personal antidote, an antiamnesiac that spun valves and opened the stream of memory.

She remembered Zentz, too. He had been a mere captain when he came into the lab at the Preserve that made up her home. He took away the researcher who was talking with her at the time, a young Islander woman who taught social psychiatry at TaoLini College. Once a week Addie came to question Crista about her dreams and always spent the afternoon with her in the solarium over tea. Crista had awakened in that lab a twenty-year-old female human without a single memory.

The psychiatrist, Addie Cloudshadow, tried to get those memories back. In the process she became Crista's first friend. Because of Zentz, Crista hadn't dared another friend until Ben. Zentz had walked into the lab that day with his weapon drawn, said simply, "Come with me," and shot Addie just outside Crista's hatch. Crista was sedated through her hysteria, and Flattery promised to take care of Zentz. Four years later Zentz surfaced as Flattery's Chief of Security and Crista vowed to escape the Preserve.

Today the mist kept her from seeing either up or down the beach. That glimpse of Zentz would have terrified her a day ago, but today she was not afraid. Something in the flash of kelp-memory warned her of Nevi, the other shadow in the mist, but it also illuminated a tension between the two that she knew would work to their favor.

The kelp had replayed for her Nevi's refueling incident, and she'd even forayed briefly into Zentz's mind. She had never seen anything so filled with horror and fear. She felt hate there, too, but it had long ago given way to a fear of Flattery that, itself, became an intense personal fear of Spider Nevi.

Divided they fall, she thought.

Flattery's world was coming apart, fighting itself, dying a thrashing death faster than it could inflict death on others. This was what Zentz had seen when the kelp grabbed him, and only Crista knew the strength of his resolve not to die at Flattery's feet or at Nevi's hand.

Crista had one open view from where she stood in the rocks, over the boil of breakers and out to sea. Though the tidelands wallowed in their salty fog, the sea itself glistened out to meet the sky somewhere in the distance. As far as the eye could sea, huge fronds of kelp rose lazily from the sea and splashed lazily back. Crista found comfort in the play of the kelp and the infinity of the horizon.

"What a time to be dusted," Ben mumbled, and shook his head.

"Rico has a plan," Crista whispered, "and he's ready to start it righ... now."

Crista Galli felt her hair prickle when Rico's electric dance of light crackled up like a shield around her. The high suns roiled fog off the wet beach and coated her skin with a fine grit of salt. The mist enhanced the surreal quality of Rico's lifesize hologram. From the back side it was like looking through a fogged mirror that refused her reflection. Crista watched the barest shadows of Nevi and the others as they ghosted the boundaries of the holo image that erased herself and Ben from the visible landscape.

Nevi and Zentz positioned themselves behind the light curtain, calling out strategy codes to each other.

"Flank sweep, left," Nevi said. His voice was unhurried, precise. "Cover high. I'll take point and ground."

"But the... they disappeared!"

"It's a trick," Nevi said, "a camera trick. They're in there and can't get out. Position?"

"Secure. Ten meters, left flank. I can't see shit in this soup."

Zentz spoke more with a gargle than with real words.

"Ozette!" Nevi called, "she's sick. She goes back or she dies, you know that. It's not a choice. Send her out."

Ben's finger went to his lips.

"He can't see us," Ben whispered. "Don't move."

She couldn't tell one person from the other. The gigantic holo danced on its curtain of mist. Surreal figures outside the holo field became a futile blur. Three lasgun flashes burst the curtain of rippling light and a cascade of prisms lighted up all around her. Ben pulled her to the ground and in a blink the image reformed.

"Stay low and don't move," he whispered. "This is the perfect holo. Perfect!"

She wriggled with him into a fold of hylighter against a black lava boulder. Though faint, a wisp of images rose out of the hylighter skin and filled her mind in a steady unraveling of Pandora's tangled politics. The thick skin of the hylighter held the warmth of afternoon sunlight. With Ben tucked close against her she felt safe. Flashes of sunlight sparkled intermittently throughout the hologram that surrounded them. Crista drew a new strength with the hylighter's touch, and a confidence that insisted Nevi would fail.

"They can't see us as long as we stay inside the image," Ben whispered. His voice strained with the effort of focusing through the dust coursing his veins. He kept low, but his quick eyes took in all of the scene that they could.

"This is incredible!" he marveled. "We're inside a hol... where the hell did he get the triangulators to bring this off? And the resolutio... ?"

"From the kelp," Crista said. "He got everything he needed from Avata."

"I wish we could see what the hell's happening," Ben whispered. "Right now we're inside a hole in the light show. See this edge here? Rico's holo follows the outline of our hylighter. He's made a stage out of a hylighter skin."

His finger reached out to the edge of the hylighter skin and appeared to disappear as he pushed it through the hologram. A momentary flutter of light and shadow around his finger was the only sign of disturbance of the image.

"The mist makes the illusion especially colorful," he said. "All the tiny flashes that you see are the lasers catching a water droplet spi

"I can take her back dead or alive, Ozette," Nevi's voice insisted. It was closer now, only a few steps away. "If she's dead, the world will think you killed her. If she's aliv... well, then everyone gets another chance."