Transformation Space - Marianne de Pierres [113]
‘Fariss?’ He wanted to thank her for this – it was his world not hers – but the words dried up in his mouth.
She didn’t wait for him to free his tongue. Slipping her weapon into her belt, she sauntered straight out into the IN corridor.
Janne and the Feohte crouched closer to the bend. Thales couldn’t see past them, or hear anything until the first shout. Then suddenly the Feohte were gone, a dozen women swarming up the passage.
Magdalen put a restraining hand on him. ‘We’ll just give them more to worry about. When the hatch is clear, we go.’
Thales waited in an agony of dread while Linnea crept forward and peered after the Feohte. A moment later she flattened herself back against the wall. Instinctively Thales did the same but Magdalen was slower to react.
The station sec guards bolted past them, one of them colliding with the slight woman, knocking her against the rough conduit. The guard picked himself up and kept running but Magdalen lay still.
Linnea went to her and felt over her head. ‘She’s out.’
‘Can you get her back to Ling-Ma’s ship by yourself?’ asked Thales.
Linnea nodded. ‘Should do. She weighs less than a bag of beans. Now, remember that the common wall is the one behind the node. You cut through the wrong one and you’ll be floating – permanently.’
Thales gave a grim nod. ‘May Villon protect you, Linnea.’
She gave him a strange look. ‘That’s what Mira Fedor said too.’
He watched the brawny woman lift Magdalen into her arms and leave. When she’d gone he walked into the IN passage.
Farris was crouched at the hatch. A mess of tangled bodies lay before her on the floor, throats cut. Most of the dead were Farr’s mercs but not all. Two Feohtes were being shifted aside from the mercs and covered out of respect.
As Thales drew closer he saw the surviving Feohte sheathing curved bloody swords in their belts alongside their soft-projectile guns. He wanted to force his way past them to Fariss’s side and touch her for reassurance, but he wouldn’t get that chance again, not until this was over.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw him. A quick frown creased her blood-dirtied face. ‘Where are they?’
‘Magdalen was knocked out by a station guard. Linnea’s taking her back to Ling-Ma.’
She pressed her lips together, unimpressed. ‘Janne, you got that cutting gear? Could get messy in here, depending on how many Lasper’s got with him. I’m bettin’ on not too many.’
Janne tossed her the sack. ‘Sounds like a good bet.’
BALBAO
Balbao didn’t register the intruders at first. He was deep in a sea of virtual images: Lorenz attractors, Tangent and Rossler maps and Listovich equations, the elegance and mystery of which had transported him far from the fraught IN chamber. Ra had shown him things he’d never dreamed to know, reconstructing a chaotic beauty and symmetry from an ancient humanesque theorem.
We’ve had the key to read our futures all this time, said virtual Balbao. But we’ve not known which way to turn it.
Frustrating and amusing, said virtual Ra.
And now?
And now to perturb the stability of the system.
Virtual Ra flew at the ocean of fractals with fierce active hands. As he worked, their symmetries faltered and began to change, so that they became a chain of staggered links. Ra stabbed at the breaks in their flow, prising them apart. Then he began picking at them like a carrion bird, searching through them for … what?
Aaah. There. Virtual Ra disappeared, funnelling down into the break in the fractal like water draining through a low point.
Virtual Balbao felt the pull as well, the attraction of the break that Ra had manufactured. His perspective began to alter, the diagrammatic vanished and he found his mind-self immersed in a spinning well of images – fleeting, overwhelming rushes of information that Balbao couldn’t possibly process.
Ra was ahead of him diving in and out of information accumulations, ripping and tearing and flinging segments about.
What