Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [257]
The control cabin door irised shut with a strange jerky motion, as if it were fighting its own mechanism, and Polyon found his feet and surveyed his new territory.
Not bad. The only passenger he'd been seriously worried about was Sev Bryley-Sorensen. But Bryley wasn't here. Good. He was locked out, then, with Alpha and Blaize; probably sleepgassed, like them. The other two were bent over their consoles, probably still trying to figure out why doors were opening and closing without their command, trying to flood the passenger areas with sleepgas—well, they'd succeeded there, but much good it would do them now! Through the transitions he saw them turning in their seats, open mouths stretching like taffy in the second subspace, then shrinking to round dots in the third. Normspace showed the cyborg freak making a move that wasn't part of the transformation illusion, right arm darting towards her belt. Polyon snapped out a command and the freak's prosthetic arm and leg danced in their sockets, twisting away from the joining point; her flesh-and-blood torso followed the agonizing pull of the synthetic limbs and she rotated half out of her seat. Another command, and the prostheses dropped lifeless and heavy to the floor, dragging the body down with them. Her head cracked against the support pillar under the seat. Polyon stepped forward to take the needler before she recovered. Space stretched away from him, but his arm stretched with it, and the solid heavy feel of the needler reassured him that his fingers, even if they momentarily resembled tentacles, had firm hold of the weapon.
With the next normspace pass he was erect again, holding the needler on Forister. "Over there." With a jerk of his head he indicated the central column. Somewhere behind there the brain of the ship floated within a titanium shell, a shrunken malformed body kept alive by tubes and wires and nutrient systems. Polyon shuddered at the thought; he'd never understood why Central insisted on keeping these monsters alive, even giving them responsible positions that could have been filled by real people like himself. Well, the brain would be mad by now, between sense deprivation and the stimuli he'd ordered its own hyperchips to throw at it; killing it would be a merciful release. And it would be appropriate to kill the brawn at the foot of the column.
But not yet. Polyon was all too aware that he didn't know everything there was to know about navigating a brainship. He would need full support from both computers and brawn if he was to get them out of this transition loop alive.
He studied the needler controls, spun the wheel with his thumb, glanced at Darnell and Fassa. Which of them dared he trust? Neither, for choice; well, then, which was more afraid of him? Fassa had been showing an uppity streak, asking him questions when she should have been listening. Darnell was still green-faced but appeared to be through vomiting. Polyon tossed him the needler; it floated through normspace and Darnell caught it reflexively just before the transition shrunk it to a gleaming line of permalloy.
"If either of them makes a move," Polyon said pleasantly, "needle them. I've set it to kill . . . slowly." In fact he'd left the needler as Micaya had it, set to deliver a paralyzing but not lethal dose of paravenin; but there was no need to reassure his captives overmuch. "Now . . ." He removed his uniform jacket, draped it neatly over the swivelseat where Micaya had been sitting, and sat down in Forister's chair before the command console. Transitions exaggerated the slight flourish of his wrists into a great ballooning gesture, spun out his sleeves into white clouds of fabric that floated over and dwarfed