Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [258]
"What do you think you're doing?" Forister cried. His voice squeaked through the fourth transition space and fell with a thud on the last word.
Polyon smiled. He could see his own teeth and hair gleaming, white and gold, in the mirror-bright panel. "I," he said gently, "am going to get us out of Singularity. Don't you think it's time somebody did it?"
His reflection narrowed, gave him a squashed face like a bug, dulled the bright gold of his hair and turned his teeth to green rotting stumps. The control panel shrank under his hands, then swelled and heaved like a storm-tossed sea. As normspace approached Polyon darted in, tapping out one set of staccato commands with his right hand, passing the left over the palmpad to call up Nancia's mathematics coprocessors, rattling out the verbal commands that would bring the whole ship around, responsive to his commands and ready to sail the subspaces out of this Singularity.
She was sluggish as any water-going vessel lacking a rudder and taking in water, half the engines obeying his commands, the other half canceling them. The mathematics co-processors came online and then disappeared before he'd entered the necessary calculations, shrieking gibberish and sliding away in a jumble of meaningless symbols. The moment of normspace passed and Polyon ground his teeth in frustration. In the second transformation the teeth felt like squishy, rotting vegetables inside his mouth, then in the third they became needles that drew blood, and by the time normspace returned he had learned not to give way to emotion.
He made two more attempts at controlling the ship, waited out three complete transition loops, before he pushed the pilot's chair back from the control panel.
"Your brainship is fighting me," he told Forister on the next pass through normspace.
"Good for her!" Forister raised his voice slightly. "Nancia, girl, can you hear me? Keep it up!"
"Don't be a fool, Forister," Polyon said tiredly. "If your brainship were conscious and coherent, she'd have brought us out of Singularity herself."
He used the remaining seconds in normspace to tap out one more command. The singing tones of Nancia's access code rang through the room. Forister's face went gray. Then the transition spaces whirled about them, monstrously transforming the cabin and everything in it, and Polyon could not tell which of the distorted images before him showed the opening of Nancia's titanium column.
On the next pass through normal space he saw that the column was still closed. Transition must have garbled the last sounds in the access sequence. He typed in the command again; again the musical tones rang out without their accompanying syllables; again nothing happened.
"You'd better tell me the rest of the code," he said to Forister on the next normspace pass.
Forister smiled—briefly; something in the expression reminded Polyon of his own ironic laughter. "What makes you think I have it, boy? The two parts are kept separate. I didn't even know how to access the tone sequence from Nancia's memory banks. The syllables probably aren't encoded in her at all; they'll be on file at Central."
"Brawns are supposed to know the spoken half of the code," Polyon snapped in frustration.
"I asked to have it changed just before this run," Forister claimed. "Security reasons. With so many prisoners on board, I feared a takeover attempt—and with good reason, it seems."
"I do hope you're lying," Polyon said. He clamped his mouth shut and waited through the transition loop, marshaling his arguments. "Because if Central's the only source for the rest of the code, we're all dead. I can't tap the Net and hack into the Courier Service database from Singularity—and I can't get us out of Singularity without neutralizing the brain."
"You mean, without killing Nancia," Forister said in a voice emptied of feeling. His eyes flickered once to the cabin console. Polyon followed the man's gaze and felt a moment of fear. A delicate solido stood above the control panels, the image of a lovely young woman with