Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [256]
"Get Alpha. Don't want to have to explain twice."
Fassa nodded—Polyon thought it was a nod—and ducked into the cabin nearest hers. Darnell quivered and resumed his form as a giant green slug. The passageway elongated into a tunnel with Blaize at the far end, somehow aloof from the group.
Fassa reappeared, shaking her head. "She won't move. I—" She was bright, Fassa del Parma was; in mid-sentence, as space shifted around her, she waited until the next normspace pass to complete her sentence. "—think she's too frightened, I'm scared too. What's—"
Polyon didn't have time to waste listening to obvious questions. When the next normspace passed through them, he was ready to seize the moment. "I'm taking over the ship, is what's happening," he said over the tail-end of Fassa's question. "Any function on this ship that uses my hyperchips is under my command now. The reason—"
Shift, stretch, contract, waver, back to normal for a few seconds.
"—for this long transition is that the ship's brain is nonfunctional, can't get us out of Singularity."
Darnell wailed and vomited more loudly than before, drowning out Polyon's next words and wasting the rest of that normspace pass. Polyon waited, one booted foot contracting as he tapped it, stretching and looping over itself like a snake, then deflating again into the normal form of a regulation Academy boot.
"I can pilot us out of Singularity," he announced. "But I need to be at the control console. May have some trouble there. You'll have to help me take out the brawn and the cyborg."
"Why should we?" Blaize demanded.
Polyon smiled. "Afterwards," he said gently, "I won't forget who my friends are."
"What good—" Darnell, predictably, wanted to know, but the transformation loop washed away his question. And when normspace came round again, Blaize was closer to the rest of them; close enough to answer for Polyon.
"What good will his favor do? Quite a lot, I should imagine. It's not just the hyperchips on this ship, is it, Polyon? All the hyperchips Shemali has been turning out so fast have the same basic flaw, don't they?"
"I wouldn't," said Polyon, "necessarily define it as a flaw. But you're right. Once we're out of Singularity and ready to access the Net again, this ship's computer will broadcast Final Phase to every hyperchip ever installed. I'll have—"
They'd all caught on to the rhythm of the transformation loop by now; the wait through three distorted subspaces was becoming part of normal conversational style.
"—control of the universe," he finished on the next pass through normspace. Blaize had come closer yet; stupid little runt, trying to move during transformations.
"And we'll be your loyal lieutenants?" Blaize asked.
"I know how to reward service," Polyon said noncommittally. Into a Ganglicide vat with you, troublemaker, as soon as I have the power.
"Not if I know it," Blaize mouthed as normspace slid away into the first distortion. He swung a fist at Polyon, but before it landed his hand had shrunk to the size of a walnut, and on the next dip through normspace Polyon was ready for him with a return blow that sent Blaize to the deck. By the time he landed, it was soft as quicksand, a pool in which Blaize swirled, too dizzy to rise immediately.
"Stop me," Polyon said to the other two as normspace passed through, "and you die here, in Singularity, because nobody else can get us out of it. Try to stop me and fail," and he smiled again, very sweetly, "and you'll wish you had died here. Are you with me?"
Before they could answer, a new element entered the game; a hissing cloud of gas, invisible in normspace, dearly delineated as a pink-rimmed flood of rosy light in the first transformational space. It engulfed Blaize and he stopped twitching, lay like one dead in the yielding transformations of the deck.
Sleepgas. And he couldn't shout through the loop to warn them. Polyon clapped both hands over his mouth and nose, saw that Fassa did the same, jerked his head towards the central cabin. That door