Intellivore - Diane Duane [62]
“No problem, ma’am. Executing now—”
The ride immediately got a lot bumpier. “Oh, great,” Ileen said. “We’re all going to need to have our teeth worked on after this one … assuming we’re lucky enough to get away at all. How’s your luck running?”
“One of my ancestors won big at something called a casino,” said Pickup. “Three hundred years ago …”
“Oh, good,” Ileen said. “Thanks so much.”
She watched the planet creep closer, and wondered what had triggered the sudden move. It must have picked up something from comms, she thought. Or maybe even from the computers. We still don’t understand how it manipulates signal the way it does. But it was moving fast now; the intellivore plainly had decided that the passive mode was no good. It would attack, eat them all if it could—
“Closing, Captain. It’s going to be in range very soon. Thirty seconds—”
Something was tickling at the back of Ileen’s mind, and inside the back of her head, it seemed, a feeling like she had to sneeze with her brain. Part of her wanted to scream, for the feeling was wildly abnormal—her brain did not normally sneeze— and she thought she knew what it heralded. “Mr. Data,” she said, “here it comes! Frances, Paul, fight it the best you can.”
And she began thinking, as hard as she could, of the most aggressive, destructive, nasty thing she could think of right away. It wasn’t hard; her mother had always told her she was a violent little monster. “Straight at it, Paul,” she said, thinking the thoughts with force, as if they were bullets or beams. “Get that deep scan going for Data!”
“Scanning, Captain—”
“And then we’re going to eject the warp core.”
“What??”
“You bet,” Ileen said. Believe it, you bastards. You want to play chicken with starships? Fine. You’re going to blink first. “And we’re going to dump all the antimatter at the same time.” She started making frantic “I’m only kidding” gestures at McGrady. “That scan, never mind that it’s not complete, feed it to Enterprise, now!”
McGrady obeyed her, but while he did so he stared at her as if she was out of her mind.
And then she was out of it.
Everything froze. That planet kept swelling, swelling in the viewscreen. She could not move a muscle. And there was something in her head …
The presence grew. When she was young and had first started studying space travel and the history of it on Earth, she had laughed at the stories of alien abductions, of people claiming things had been done to their bodies and minds.
This, though … this was the real thing. It was as if something looked at her out of the darkness, as if something stood behind her. And it gloated. It was amused. She knew, she could feel, that it had watched and seen, if vaguely and through a curtain of somewhat warped context, that she and the others traveling with her had set themselves against it, that she would try to stop it from doing what it wanted.
It did not deal in words, or at least none that she could translate. There was an effect in the back of her mind, not like a sneeze but like a great bell, tolling, clanging deep and out of tune. But the feeling that went with the tolling, the knell, was amusement, laughter; it thought she was funny. And outrage, too—that she should dare to try to stand in its way.
Something was happening to her mind. It was changing …
Slowly, Ileen came to understand that she was food … and someone was hungry. Someone wanted her more than anything. There was something old, wise, sad out there, asking for help. She was the difference between sorrowful extinction (and the bell tolled) and blessed survival. Her sacrifice would be remembered. Centuries, millennia from now, when other species were dying out, she would be remembered as one who had made a difference, who had preserved life, who had kept her oath. All she had to do now was give herself up. It was better, it was easier. Soon the world would chill down again, would go cold and ordinary. Soon she would be free to move. And when that happened, all she had to do was activate these controls, in this order, to bring that other ship under her control,