Divergence (hu-1) by Charles Sheffield

Author:Charles Sheffield [Sheffield, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_space
ISBN: 978-0-345-36039-7
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1991-03-19T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

After Atvar H’sial had knocked Julius Graves headlong into Birdie Kelly, broken the connection between E. C. Tally’s brain and body, and sent J’merlia rolling and spinning into the pattern of concentric rings, Louis Nenda did not hesitate.

As the Cecropian went scuttling out of the chamber, wing cases wide open, Nenda followed at once.

Let the mess back there sort itself out!

He was cursing — silently. It was no use shouting. Atvar H’sial had astonishing hearing, but she did not understand human speech. And his own pheromonal augment was worthless when she was in full flight, because the necessary molecules had no chance to diffuse into her receptors.

The near-darkness of Glister’s interior made no difference to Atvar H’sial. Her echolocation vision worked as well in pitch blackness as in bright sunlight; but it made things hellishly difficult for Louis Nenda. A Cecropian did not care where she moved, into chambers light or dark, just so long as there was air to carry sound waves. But he sure cared. He was bouncing off dark walls, tangling in nets, tripping over loose cables, diving down steep slopes without any idea what he would meet at the bottom. And all the time he had not the slightest idea where she was heading. He doubted that she knew it herself.

Enough of this, he thought.

He slowed down after a particularly bruising collision with an invisible partition. It would be too easy to knock himself out, and he could not afford that.

The good news was that he could track her, infallibly. The Zardalu augment had been designed for pheromonal speech, with all its subtleties, so simply following another’s scent through Glister’s sterile interior was ridiculously easy. Even if she crossed and recrossed her own path, the strength of the trail would show him exactly where she had gone.

The corridors of Glister turned and twisted, apparently at random. He patiently followed the unmistakable airborne molecules of Cecropian physiology, turn by turn, wherever they led. The only thing he could be sure of was that they were descending, following a gravity gradient to regions of steadily increasing field. But the stronger field increased the danger of injury from a fall. He slowed his pace still further, confident that Atvar H’sial could not get away from him. As he walked he began to make plans.

One word with Graves had been enough to convince him that telling the truth to the councilor would be a terrible idea. He had fought back his own initial urge on awakening — violent flight — because Atvar H’sial was still trapped in the Lotus field. At that point it made sense to blame the field itself and “forget” anything that had happened back on Quake.

Of course, he remembered it all perfectly: the wild ascent from the planet’s surface, the capture of the Have-It-All by the dark sphere, the giddy plunge through space, their arrival at Gargantua and the little planetoid that orbited it — and, finally, the release of the ship onto the surface, while the sphere that had captured and held them moved inside.

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