She entered the Drone's room. "You have one unit," the arrogant hostage said. That was a measure of Canopian time equivalent to about a quarter of a Solarian hour. Feeding and grooming the Drone normally required three units, so this would force her to hurry. Possibly they were keeping him alive because they might need him as a figurehead in dealing with nonhostage ships, at least until the overt takeover occurred. The Slaves would obey the Drone without question, but might balk at running a Droneless ship; the familiar symbol of authority was important. The captain could be forced to perform to a certain extent with the discipline box. So they kept him at least minimally healthy.
The hostage phased out the laser curtain so Melody could pass, then restored it behind her. Now she was in with the Drone, but still didn't know how to free him. This box-laser combination was a simple yet excruciatingly effective prison.
She opened the warm canister of burl-juice and set it under the Drone's proboscis. He dipped his imbibing tube into it and slowly drew the liquid in. Meanwhile, Melody picked up the set of brushes that were on the floor beside him, and brushed out the fur of his abdomen and legs. The wings needed attention too, but it was impossible to treat them in a hurry; she would only tear the gossamer membranes. Such a beautiful figure of an entity, this super-Master; how it hurt her $fe-mind to groom him so hastily.
He knew how to be freed—if only he could tell her. Yet how would he do that, with the pain-box monitoring his reactions?
"Time," the hostage said coldly.
So soon! She had hardly started. But she dared not dally; the hostage would act ruthlessly. She set aside the brush, picked up the empty canister—and found it half-full.
Strange. The Drone always consumed a full ration; it was necessary for his health. He had typical Canopian Master nerve; his predicament would not have affected his appetite or performance. He was not sick. He must have slowed his consumption deliberately, an internal matter that would not activate the discipline box. Perhaps he was trying to commit suicide by starving himself—no, the box would stop that, too. So something else....
The hostage-insect touched the control, phasing out the curtain. And suddenly Melody caught on.
She hurled the canister at the hostage. It struck it on the head, the juice spraying over it. It stumbled back, cursing in some Andromedan language. The blow alone would not have hurt it much, but the sticky juice coated its faceted eyes and filmy wings and distracted it.
Melody ran toward the shelf on which the discipline box sat. The curtain here had not been phased out; the hostages were too canny for that. She took a breath, closed her humanoid eyes tightly, and launched herself at the box.
The laser caught her in a ring of fire that singed off her hair and clothing. The agony was momentarily unbearable, but her flying inertia carried her into the wall. Her hand struck the box, caught it, held it though her legs remained in the curtain of agony and were being inevitably cooked. She gritted her teeth and grabbed the setting-knob, twisting it violently.
Immediately she realized it was the wrong knob, the wrong direction. The Drone stood stiffly, shuddering; she was inflicting nine- or ten-level pain on him, up near the fatal range! Quickly she turned it down to zero, then found the personal tuner and wrenched it around. He was free!
The Drone moved so quickly he seemed a magnificent blur, or maybe it was her burned eyes fading. He shot over to the hostage, picked it up in his two front legs and stove its head in with one crunch of his deadly mandible pincers. Then he took the laser-control and turned it off.
In another moment the Drone was back with Melody. He lifted the box from her flaccid fingers and twiddled with it. At that moment another hostage entered the room, but it froze as the Drone found his setting on the box. Stiffened by pain, the hostage could offer no resistance as the Drone calmly moved over and crunched its head.
Melody, satisfied the situation was under control, fainted.
She woke in pain. Another Slave was tending to her. But as soon as her eyes opened, the Drone came over, "Sfe of Y◊jr, I am in your debt," he said.
There was something strange about his intonation. In a moment it came to her: he had omitted the baton sinister! Not the $fe of Slave-status, but Sfe of free-status. There was no finer reward for a Canopian humanoid.
But of course she was neither slave nor humanoid in her home-Sphere. "I am Melody of Mintaka," she said with difficulty, for her lips were burned. It was hard to look at him, because part of her eyelids was also gone and her eyeballs were drying. "Please return me to my ship—the Ace of Swords—so I can transfer to another body."
"Immediately, alien ally," the Drone said. "This host of yours is finished; we preserve animation at this moment only by application of strong drugs. You acted with extraordinary courage. How may I repay my debt to you?"
Courage? Her? She had acted before she had a chance to consider the personal consequence, and once she was in it there had been nothing to do but carry through. But evidently debt was not merely a Polarian or Mintakan concept. "Just use your ship well on behalf of our galaxy—and be kind to your next body-Slave."
"Agreed," the Drone said, not bothering to quibble with her implication that he had not treated his prior Slave properly. $fe had loved him; he had obviously treated her well. But Melody was already fading out; she knew this body was dying. Little of the skin remained, and the legs might as well have been amputated.
She woke in her Yael body. The Canopian shuttle had brought her home, and Skot had retransferred her. She must have given the code signal somewhere along the way. "What happened?" Skot demanded to know.
"Bit of trouble. Let's get on with the job."
13
Ship of Knyfh
/I wish the support of quadpoint in this crisis/
:: only proceed to action hour you will have support ::
/and if there are complications of the nature — feared?/
:: then quadpoint will resolve them ::
Melody transferred next to a ship of Segment Knyfh. She had no idea what she would encounter there—which was why she selected it. She now had a rough working knowledge of the Swords of Sol, the Cups of Spica, the Disks of Polaris, and the Scepters of Canopus, but the Atoms of Knyfh were a complete mystery to her, despite the fact that her own Sphere Mintaka used a roughly similar type of ship. She didn't understand her own Sphere's ships either. A mystery in the power of the enemy was not good; she had to know its capabilities.
The Knyfh vessel was indeed like a giant atom, an almost perfect replica of the symbol for the Suit of Aura in the Cluster Tarot deck. Two spheres spun in close magnetic orbit about a common center, like a proton and a neutron. Farther out there were a number of rapidly orbiting spots, moving so fast they were virtual rings or globes: the electrons. These were the light-gathering units, but they also seemed to serve admirably as a kind of defensive shield. What would happen to any solid object that attempted to penetrate that glittering barrier?
Segment Knyfh was generally considered to be more advanced than Segment Etamin. A thousand years before, an emissary from the then Sphere Knyfh had brought the gift of transfer to the then Sphere Sol, initiating the explosive expansion of Sol's empire of influence. However, there had never been a close association between the two. Segment representatives met from time to time to determine galactic policy, but news of these contacts was not generally published widely in Sphere Mintaka. So the nature of the other great segments of the Milky Way galaxy was almost as mysterious to Melody as those of Andromeda. She knew the names of the ten major segments, and that was about all.
"Freng, Qaval, Etamin," she thought to herself in a kind of supportive litany. "Knyfh, Lodo, Weew, Bhyo, Fa¿, Novagleam, and Thousandstar." In her youth she had dreamed of what life must be like in Thousandstar, most distant of the segments, and popular literature had many fanciful stories about such places. But genuine information was scant.
So now she went to this representative of the token contingent of the allied segmen
t, and found herself in the incredible body of a sophisticated relative of the magnets. This was no physical ball, but a miniature of the ship, with a compact nucleus of five spheres and a scintillating outer energy shell that rolled across the deck. The magnets Melody had known were bound to the metal passages of a ship, but these atom-hosts used magnetism mainly internally. They could levitate in the vicinity of metal, but could also travel elsewhere, much as Polarians did, utilizing the principle of the wheel. Most—virtually all—of the mass was in the nucleus, so that there was plenty of leverage to control the orientation and motion of the shell.
It was a very nice body, though it was not precisely a body at all by her prior definitions. But she could not concern herself about that; she had to deal with the Andromedan entity that had made it hostage. And it was a savage one: Bluefield of oo. Not the blue of a field of Solarian flowers or of a mournful Mintakan tune, but the hue of an intense magnetic field. Had this entity possessed an aura to match her electrical power, Melody would never have been able to transfer to it. Bluefield fought in the fashion she knew best, sending jolt after jolt of magnetic energy through host and aura, disrupting both by associated currents. Melody was very nearly dislodged before she learned to parry the ferocious onslaught. As she had nowhere to go, loss of her hold would have meant extinction; contrary to spiritualistic folklore, no aura could exist in the absence of some type of host.
But again her overwhelming superiority of aura saved her. She simply had more intensity than any other entity could cope with. She closed in on the Andromedan sentience, tightening her hold. "Yield, Bluefield—so I won't have to destroy you."
To her surprise, Bluefield yielded. Suddenly Melody was in her mind. The oo entities were of the broad class of magnetic sapients, structurally between the solid magnets like Slammer, and the atomic Knyfhs. They had two charged spheres in orbit about each other, but no outer energy shells, and could move anywhere by "walking" the spheres. They were unique (in Melody's limited experience) in that their sapience was housed in two physically unconnected units; a single unit could not function intelligently. The magnetic interactions between the parts not only made motion possible, it made thought possible!
Melody's Mintakan brain was tripartite, each section dominating a type of music: string, percussion, wind. The Solarian brain was bipartite, resulting in confusing dichotomies. This oo mind reflected the split brain of the Andromedan creature, but it was not very much like the human brain. The two parts could separate and reunite with other parts, forming new entities. There were actually four sexes, which could unite in six distinct combinations. The complete entity was therefore technically neuter, or bisexual. Melody, a changeable neuter, had been able to enter this hostage; a truly sexed entity would have been balked.
The Sphere Knyfh host was also technically neuter. Any Knyfh could mate with any other, their mergence of nucleus and electron orbit resulting in prompt fissioning into two new compromise entities. Thus in both species, population was stable; new entities could be produced only from the parts of the old ones.
Melody paused. There was something strange about this. Population could shrink, from the demise of individuals, but if population could not grow....
How had either Knyfh or oo ever gotten started? There had to be a way to create new individuals, to increase the size of the total population. Otherwise the colonization of a sphere or segment would have been impossible. A planet might have several billion sapient inhabitants; a sphere required trillions. Where did they come from?
Melody probed... and her amazement grew. Neither Knyfh nor oo knew the source of their populations. Mergence and fission proceeded indefinitely; prior combinations were impossible to trace down. Their populations did expand, but there was no known origin of individual entities. They were just there, and seemed always to have been there, logic to the contrary.
Knyfh and oo logic did not struggle with this concept. It was not a logic Melody could readily understand, but it seemed to serve well the needs of the species who used it.
At the moment, she had another concern: to rid the ship of hostages. There were nine of them, all with high auras. She had overwhelmed the one with the lowest Kirlian intensity. This ship was the Ace of Atoms; Andromeda had regarded it as a critically important target!
Bluefield was liaison officer to the Knyfh crew. On this ship, like all so far, none of the crew was hostage. The most efficient use of Andromedan power was in making the leaders hostage; the crew merely followed orders. It simplified recovery of the ships; eliminate the hostages and all was well. The crew would never know the difference.
Melody performed the routine duties required of her host, drawing on the hostage-mind. There were always snarls to be untangled, substitutions of all entities, special situations. Melody could not leave her post without suspicion until her shift expired, which meant delay, but she managed to use the time to fill in her gaps of knowledge. She hovered at the communications console, making her decisions known by coded fluctuations of her electron shell, and learned.
This ship's armament was magnetic. Since metal was much used in all ships of the fleet, especially alloys of iron, all were subject to magnetism. The fields generated here were so strong they could operate at intership distance, alternately attracting and repulsing the enemy with such force that his ship could be damaged or even broken apart. At greater distances, the enemy's control instruments could be sabotaged magnetically. These magnetic weapons lacked the almost infinite range of the Solarian lasers, but in near proximity, the Knyfh attack would be devastating. Melody knew she would not want the flagship to be in range of a hostage-controlled Atom.
At least she had time to plan her local campaign. She picked out each name from the hostage mind. The Captain was free. He had a aura of 160, too high to take over by an available oo entity, and was probably the highest loyalist of the entire fleet. But the Transfer Officer was hostage to a oo with an aura of 135, and—
Transfer Officer? Melody focused on that. Sure enough, this ship had a transfer unit aboard! Melody had assumed that the unit on the Ace of Swords was the only one in the fleet, but of course this Atom was a representative of another segment, a more sophisticated one. The presence of the unit made this ship doubly vital. The Andromedans could use it to take over more entities. No... her host-mind informed her that it was not the proper type. To modify it for hostaging would be to put that secret in the field, something that could not be risked. This was inflexible policy; the secret never left Andromeda. In fact, it never left Sphere —, and hardly left Planet £ of that Sphere. Bluefield's information confirmed Tiala's; the / hostage had not lied under the Lot of *. Melody found that vaguely gratifying. And the policy itself was wise, in terms of Andromedan interest. Had Melody been able to capture a modified unit, Galaxy Milky Way would have had equalization of technology at a single stroke.
Still, that unmodified unit was important. It was probably heavily guarded as it was potentially a key mechanism of communication. Put a low-Kirlian voluntary host at each end, and the ships of Segment Etamin and Segment Knyfh could coordinate operations closely. Spot a hostage ship, and if it escaped Knyfh's magnetism, Sol's laser could beam it down. The Andromedans thought the loyal members of the fleet had no communications that could not be monitored by strategically positioned hostages— but here it was!
Should she go first to the loyal Captain, or tackle the hostages one by one herself? Obviously the first. It would be almost impossible to nullify eight more hostages without attracting unfortunate attention. The Captain could handle it most expeditiously. That approach had worked twice before, and as Yael would have put it in her cute Solarian idiom, one did not change a winning game.
But she could not just roll into the Captain's office. On this ship there was protocol to be followed. This was essential in any encounter here, since any two Knfyhs possessed the capacity to mate. Such mating would change the identity of each, and that would be awkward in a military situation. In fact, mating
—or as the Knyfhs put it, exchanging—was forbidden during this tour. The Captain especially was protected from temptation.
"Request permission for private audience with Captain," Melody signaled formally into the officer's circuit. Her present body possessed none of the senses of the Segment Etamin hosts she had previously used; everything was magnetic. But she was becoming accustomed to differing modes of operation, and hardly noticed.
"Hold," the network responded. Presumably the Captain was preoccupied at the moment. Melody returned to her routine.
Soon a Knyfh appeared. "Request dialogue," it signaled.
Melody oriented on it. The magnetic imprint resembled that of the Captain, but the aura differed. She had become highly attuned to aural nuances, for this was her primary tool for identifying hostages. This entity had a powerful aura; too powerful. It had to be a hostage!
"You are not Bluefield," the hostage signaled. "Therefore you must be—"
Melody attacked. She could not afford to have her identity betrayed to the hostages yet! She hurled herself at the globe of the other entity.
Unfortunately, she had not had occasion to study the art of Knyfh personal combat. Her attack was a clumsy thrust that the other entity easily avoided. Melody rolled past and received in return a disorganizing, jolt of current. Her prior aura versus aura battles had seemed equivalent to physical encounters, since they were all on a single level, but now that she was in a real physical encounter, she discovered there was no real parallel at all. In aura versus aura she had a tremendous advantage; here she was merely even—or less than even. That dimmed her confidence considerably.