Dreamlike, he thrashed. Swam. Punched angrily at torpid air that caught his fists in cobwebbed resistant softness, blunting every movement.
Like a baby in an awful ambient pouch, he thought. Helpless and fearing birth.
His skin was a stretched, livid thing. The burning he had suffered now returned doubly. A searing, itching sheet covered him, tight, a livid seethe. He ran numbed hands over his chest and thighs, and each touch brought an angry, prickly dart that launched small storms of heat across him.
Something scratched at his mind.
A clawing itch that worked its way inward. A stuttering run down his spine.
Cool liquid pain. He braced himself against this sudden brute invasion.
A tentative, telescoped presence slid by him in murky shadow.
Tiny warm breezes licked him, feathering his hair.
Something massive and deliberate circled. It moved in tides of light, filigreed by dancing shadows that flittered like small mad birds against the windowpanes of his mind.
Abruptly he was not in the tight, rubbery air. Before him welled a streaming aura. Red and pink scraped and rustled. Shifting blobs drifted, eclipsing each other like sluggish planets. Their shadows played among blue traceries.
He squinted, or thought he did. His arms and legs still swam in the gurgling, patient fluid that forgave all movement, but he smelled an acrid wind. Heard harsh clacks and clatters. Tasted blood and a biting, cool jelly. Glimpsed a tunnel projecting away from him in ruddy, smoldering splendor.
He realized that the cyborg had tapped into his sensorium. It was sampling him—he could feel a blunt, chilly, awkward rummaging. Astringent light played along rumpled walls nearby. Slithery harmonics played somewhere, lurking just beyond clear hearing.
And he had gained symmetric access to its warped world. A ledge studded with ornately shaped protrusions swept by. Without something he knew for comparison he could not tell how quick this motion was, but a sickening tug in his stomach told him of lurching acceleration, wrenching turns around corners, abrupt surges up seemingly impossible wall slopes.
Gobbets brown and sticky rained down everywhere. They were languid, oscillating spheres that blew on a warm wind, voluptuous and fat. Killeen realized that a dim echo of the cyborg’s hunger had leaked through to him, making his mouth water. A savory drop struck the wall and bounced, wobbly and fat and beckoning.
The cyborg ate it. A rasping tang shot through him, not in his mouth but somehow up and down his chest, striking hard into his cock, squeezing his ass tight in an exquisite, ungovernable reflex. Killeen felt a stretched sense of something plunging through him, blundering.
The cyborg accelerated. Kileen felt himself rushing with a rolling yaw toward a snub-nosed cylinder of white and orange. The cyborg did not slow and Killeen instinctively braced himself for a collision—which did not come.
Instead, the cylinder swallowed them. What had appeared to be a protruding point was instead an opening. As they sped through hexagonal tunnels, banking up onto the side faces with centrifugal ease, Killeen began to get a sense of the place outside. Arthur said:
Your eyes saw the cylinder as pointing toward us, because of the cast of shadows. Grey points out that the human eye has evolved to see by light from the sky, remember, and reads shadows with that bias. Here the glow comes from the floor, and more weakly from the walls. The shadows are therefore reversed, and mean the opposite of what your automatic reactions assume.
“Can you change that?”
No—such matters are buried deep in the brain. The cyborg sees by infrared, I gather. On a perpetually cloudy planet, the ground would often be warmer than the sky, and thus more luminous in the infrared. Such an evolutionary aspect would explain why these tunnels are floor-illuminated. Since we are receiving this cyborg’s raw data, we process it with our bias and get exactly the upside-down result. To see as it does we would have to invert your accustomed perception patterns.
“Look, how can I get quit of this?”
Consider—such an ability probably implies that the original species, which has now cyborged itself, often lived underground. It no doubt foraged above ground, but infrared vision would allow it to see from the warmed walls of its burrows. Once occupied, their own body heat would allow them some dim wall radiance. Such ecological niches stress skills at construction and three-dimensional spatial abilities. Perhaps this explains why they are building the huge things in orbit.
“Guttin’ this planet, just so they can build bigger anthills?”
Perhaps so; evolution is destiny, I’ve always believed. But there are other implications.
“Somethin’ we can use?” Killeen had listened to enough empty talk.
My first conclusion is that we’re underground, doubtless. If we leave this pouch we’re in, we’ll wander quite blindly through a maze of tunnels. Hopeless to escape, I fear.
Killeen grunted sourly.
I advise caution.
“Don’t see it much matters what I do.”
Until we know why it brought you here we should remain flexible.
Killeen tried to distance himself from the sensations that washed through him, tried to think. Despairing, he wondered what had happened to the Family. He had gotten a distant impression, as the cyborg ship reeled him in, of other craft moving swiftly in the sky. His comm had squawked twice with human voices, faint and unintelligible.
Has anyone survived? It was one thing for a Cap’n to die in a chance encounter with a mech, or with a thing like this huge assembly of living and mechlike parts, and quite another to be cut off from your command, still alive while everyone you loved and honored was dead, killed by your own incompetence.
He made himself envision possibilities. The cyborgs might not have bothered to get Jocelyn from the Flitter. But unless she got to the surface, the Cap’ncy would go to Cermo automatically. He wasn’t quick to lead in a crisis. The man would try, of course, but Shibo would probably have to make the hard decisions. She and Cermo could hold the Family together on alien soil.
If any of them still lived…
PART FOUR
Such Men Are Dangerous
ONE
The pouch clenched and split and spewed him out.
Killeen gasped for breath, as though he had been holding a single lungful the entire time—days? weeks?—he was enclosed. The featherlight emulsifying fluid that had held him somehow managed to bring air and food in through his lungs, for he felt no hunger.
He got to his knees, expecting to see tunnels in the cyborg warren. Instead a fresh, sharp breeze brought him smells of fragrant mold and dusty hills. His eyes cleared. Fuzzy patterns telescoped into crisp images, the world seeming to stretch and draw closer to him.
