Chaining the Lady (7 page)

“They messaged me, that, you were coming,” he said in pieces. His power of speech was fading; this deceleration was an awful strain. “But they did not tell me”—a pause to catch up on stifled breathing–”how pretty you would be.”

“Hey, I like him!” Yael said.

“Then you answer him,” Melody replied to her “It's your body he admires. Mine would sicken him.” She turned over control of the vocal apparatus.

“Thank you,” Yael said aloud. “You're not bad yourself. Are you from Outworld?” As though a green man could be from anywhere else.

“The deepest backvines,” March admitted.

“Me too.” They exchanged smiles.

Then the stiffening deceleration forced them both to be silent.

Melody faded in and out, and became expanded or condensed, she was not quite sure which. The viewscreen showed them passing the layers of the cluster fleet like a comet swinging in to its star. First there were the small scouts, needle-shaped because that made them harder to spot and hit as they moved about. It had nothing to do with atmospherics; they flew sidewise as readily as forward, orienting to keep their smallest cross section facing the enemy. They quested far beyond the main mass of the fleet, poking into whatever crannies of space they spied, like curious insects, maneuvering unpredictably. How convenient the human-host imagery became; there were no insects on Melody's home planet.

Melody found her human tongue twitching around in her mouth, and her nostrils narrowing. She stopped it; she could not afford such reactions. The specialists of imperial Outworld had insisted on providing her with a weapon of self-defense despite her protests. Now it was in her nose: two electrically neutral tubelike units whose mechanism could be invoked by the proper combination of air and pressure. She did not dare try to remove the units; they were of the self-destruct variety, or so the Colonel had assured her. But she had no intention of using them. So she quelled her reactions and returned her attention to the fleet.

The next layer consisted of the more disciplined system of attack craft: small, expendable ships which could move out fast and deliver a wallop. Like poisonous reptiles—another analogy lifted from the convenient mind of her host, who seemed to have a ready imagination for such things—they were brightly colored. Perhaps, however, that was merely enhancement by the screen, color-coding them to match the spheres with which they were associated: Sol, Polaris, Canopus, Spica, Nath, and even her own Mintaka? How beautiful that contingent of ships must look, if she could only be sure which one it was.

Of course many of those ships had not been constructed within the spheres with which they were associated. It would have taken the Mintaken craft three thousand years to travel at half light speed from Mintaka to Etamin, and that was longer than the segment had existed. Mattermission would have done it instantly, but was prohibitively expensive for an entire space ship. Transfer was instant and cheap, but of course it was not possible with inanimate objects. It was strictly an energy phenomenon: living energy in the form of Kirlian auras, dead energy in the form of magnetic power or “strong” atomic force. Some theorists thought that the Ancients had been able to imbue physical objects with auras so they could transfer them cheaply to far parts, but few really believed that. Except, perhaps, the military entities who had conceived of these segment fleets all over the galaxy.

Regardless, that technology did not exist today. So the ships had to be constructed right here in System Etamin, by transferred entities from other spheres. Mind, not geography, was the guiding factor: a Mintakan ship was made by genuine Mintakens, though they used human or Polarian bodies. Any Mintakan spacefarer would be at home aboard it. Except someone planetbound like Melody, who had never even seen a Mintakan spaceship before.

Then she did a double take, surprising herself again by the human mannerism. It was a kind of backing up and second inspection with a sensation of mild amazement. “That's Tarot!” she exclaimed.

“That's what?” Yael inquired, and March's head turned slightly. Each thought the remark had been directed at her/him, since Melody had spoken out loud.

“The Mintakan ship: it's shaped like the Broken Atom of the Tarot Suit of Aura. At least it looks that way on the screen.”

“It's to provide spin while fathering light-energy,” March explained. “I was briefed about the fleet before I was exiled. The ships from Segment Knyfh are similar. An outer shell to collect the light, and an inner nucleus for the crew. The whole thing rotates just fast enough to provide proper gravity.”

“How ingenious,” Melody said. Then they both paused for breath again, and she wondered: what was this about his being exiled? But she was sure it would be inappropriate to inquire, and at the moment she was more intrigued by the shapes of the ships, now so clear in the screen.

Some were like great wide-bladed swords, others like monstrous coins, still others like wands or cups. “To think it's been right there under my strings—I mean nose—all this time, all my life, and I never thought to look!” Melody exclaimed to Yael. “All these ships of space—we are a Tarot-symbol segment!”

Yael was diplomatically silent. She knew little of Tarot, and less of symbolism, and hardly saw either the relevance or significance of such a connection. So what if a sword was used as the shape of a ship and the symbol on a card? What was wrong with that? So long as each design could collect the light, as March had explained, and spin up enough gravity.

And this in turn gave Melody further pause for thought. There was not only a substantial aura differential between them; there was an intellectual gulf. Yael was just below the human norm in intelligence, moderately below in education, and well below in intellectual experience. Melody was between 1.5 and 1.7 on the Mintakan intelligence scale, roughly analogous to the human scale, and possessed a Segment Doctorate in General Learning. She had a full lifetime behind her. Yet she realized now that there were fundamental equivalences between her mind and that of her innocent host. They were both female, despite the technical asexuality of Mintakans, and both were novices in this particular situation.

Given that basic set of similarities, Melody was able to appreciate the human girl's view, and to grasp for the first time in her life whet it meant to be intellectually handicapped. Yael genuinely could not appreciate the insights to be obtained from the observation of the parallelism of designs. But she didn't feel stultified, did not suffer directly; she was literally too stupid to know what she was missing. Yet she was in every sense a person, a conscious, feeling entity.

It was a lesson in perspective that Melody hoped never to forget in the few years remaining to her. For she knew that most of the sapients in the galaxy were more like Yael than like Melody. Melody had existed in an ivory tower, and it was now being blasted apart by new experiences, exactly as the applicable Trump of the Tarot suggested. She had never realized how specifically it could pertain to
her
—which was part of this very experience. The strike of the lightning bolt enabled her to understand the nature of that lightning bolt.

Now the shuttle's deceleration had eased off, and it was oriented on the hull of the mighty flagship, the Ace of Swords. The handle of the sword had seemed small from a distance, but it was a Solarian mile in diameter. This huge rotating mass resembled a veritable planetoid! The ship's magnetic tractor field took hold of the shuttle and guided it into the end of the handle, where there was no gravity right at the axis of rotation. In virtual free-fall the little craft settled into a huge airlock, and a metal covering slid over it. They had docked.

Gas flooded the compartment, and Melody was reminded of her Tarot yet again: naturally there was gas, since war and all things military were associated with the Suit of Gas whose symbol was the Sword. Solarians as a species were identified with the same suit. “Trouble, thy name is Sol.”

Pressure equalized. Melody unstrapped herself, discovering that she could stand, though gravity was minimal here. The port opened and she stepped carefully out, as March deferred to her in a reflex of Solarian etiquette that thrilled Yael. Half floating, Melody come to rest on the deck of the big ship. She found herself in a roughly hemispherical chamber formed by the inner curve of the hull and the dimly illuminated airlock panel above. “So this is the Ace of Swords,” she murmured.

In a moment a door phased open and a space officer strode in. He was a handsome Solarian of middle age, the blazon of imperial Outworld on his chest: a neat superimposition of the ancient letter symbols O and W, the straight lines of the latter segmenting the former into five subsections:

These stood for the five neighboring spheres, each with a curved side and one or two straight sides. Curve as in curve of sphere, straight as in communication between points. Curve as in Polarian circularity, line as in Solarian linearity. The fundamental elements of Outworld society, the mergence of two spheres to form System and Segment Etamin. The combinations of thinking that had made this a galactic power. All vested in this simple symbol.

There was a chill of terror that half-paralyzed the host-body. Melody realized that it stemmed from the host-mind. “What is the
matter
, girl?” she demanded as the man approached.

“The magnet!” Yael screamed.

Now Melody saw something behind the man. It was a brilliantly colored glob that floated, yet it seemed quite solid. It was like a three-dimensional model of the Outworld emblem, a sphere with lines zig-zagging on it. “I see it, but it doesn't look dangerous,” Melody said to Yael.

The Solarian was upon them before Yael could explain. “How pretty you are, Yael of the Dragon World,” he spoke, extending his hand as he glided to a stop. “Welcome to the
Ace of Swords
.”

Of course they had not informed him of her real identity. The Society of Hosts protected the anonymity of those who wished it, and no one outside the Society could be completely trusted. So she used her host's identity as a cover, which delighted the real Yael. Here was adventure, in name as well as in fact.

“Captain Boyd, I presume,” Melody murmured past half-lowered eyelashes. This sort of signal was not as good as a throbbing harmony, but in an amusical body she just had to make do. She took the proffered hand.

There was the electric thrill of intense auras interacting. This was the Captain, all right; he had the highest Kirlian rating in the fleet, 150, and that was much of the reason he
was
captain. With the hostage threat, the only real security of command was to have top officers with Kirlian auras too high to be taken over by the enemy technique. The Society of Hosts had circled delicately, as the Polarian would have put it, or pulled strings as the Solarians described it, to get this officer into place in this crucial location. This single ship was capable of destroying the civilization of a full planet, and of course the only civilized planet within range of this ship was that of Imperial Outworld.

Captain Boyd's aura was even higher than she had been informed. It was on the order of 175, the most potent she had encountered here apart from her own, and it was first cousin to hers in type. She wasn't certain whether this was sloppy testing on the part of the Society of Hosts, or sloppy records, or variance in standards of notation between the spheres. Probably the colonel had simply misremembered it, being more concerned with the actual hostage than with the other personnel of the ship. A pleasant surprise, though.

“Dash,” the Captain said. “Call me Dash...Yael.”

Melody made a little motion that accentuated her host's twin mammaries, and smiled. “Dash.” Now that she knew that sexual interaction was possible apart from reproduction in this species, it was fun to see how well the equipment worked. So long as she never let it go too far. It was obvious that her host's body could never match the sheer physical power of the male of this species, so sexual appeal was also a potential equalizer.

Melody glanced at the hovering magnet that so upset Yael. “Might I inquire about your companion?”

He smiled. “Oh. Sorry. We tend to forget that planetaries aren't used to fleet ways. This is Slammer the Magnet, my bodyguard. Low Kirlian, low intelligence, but the most loyal friend an entity ever had. Say hello to the lady, Slammer.”

Slammer shot forward so quickly that Melody's reflexes were caught short. The ball slammed into her chest—and bounced away without impact. A grossly powerful magnetic field impinged painfully on her aura as contact was made.

Yael screamed, and part of that scream escaped the host-lips. They could have been crushed, host and transferee together, had that thing not reversed itself.

“Impressive, isn't it,” Dash remarked. “You can see I'm quite safe with Slammer around. He's faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive—uh, that's a cute expression from deep in human past, but quite applicable here. One word from me, and the living cannonball clears the way. If an entity tried to draw a weapon in my presence—boom, no entity. But don't worry; Slammer is your friend too.” He turned his head to the hovering ball. “Protect Yael. Understand?”