The Ascension Factor

The caretaker flurried his nervous fingers across the face of his portable control unit.

"Dead," he said. "Something's shorted out the power to all of the sensors."

Flattery heard the low-throated purr of Archangel behind him, and for the first time realized that it wasn't merely a handful of swiftgrazers invading his garden. In blinks there were hundreds of them. Something had whipped them to a fever pitch, and they displayed none of their usual wariness of humans.

"Start shooting," he said, his voice low. "I'll get some fire-power in here."

By the time he had undogged his hatch and signaled for help, the light inside the Greens was too great a glare to let him pick out anything but little blurs of movement across his path. He hurried to dockside and secured himself inside the foil.

Flattery had started the foil's engines and begun his predive checkout when he realized he'd left the mooring lines secured. He glanced up at the caretaker, who was firing wildly at shadows in the greenery, and saw him suddenly disappear under a thick wad of fur. It was as though he'd slipped on a giant coat of swiftgrazers and then disappeared. The coat melted to the deck and disappeared, leaving only the man's weapon, bloody tatters of clothing and a scatter of fleshy bones. Archangel, too, was no match for them, and Flattery had his doubts about the five-man security squad beginning their sweep.

"Not even smart enough to shut the hatch behind them," he mumbled through gritted teeth. "If they don't stop them. "

Flattery didn't have to dwell on the unpleasantness, he had plenty of evidence of swiftgrazer vengeance all around him. The squad had pushed them back far enough that Flattery could make a dash for the mooring lines and free himself from the pier. His only escape now would be to dive out of the Greens and wait. The light in the Greens was so bright that he could barely read his instruments. It nearly surrounded the pool now and he was sure it was some kind of weapon that the Shadows were using against him.

"Rag-tag bunch of bums," he hissed. "Why don't they leave well enough alone? Even they must be smart enough to know I'll be off this planet soon."

As he flooded the dive compartments he thought he saw faces swirling in the light of the Greens — Crista Galli's face, Beatriz Tatoosh, Dwarf MacIntosh and some young fuzzhead that he didn't recognize. He shook his head and attended to his instruments. As he settled beneath the surface of the pool he breathed easier. The foil's atmosphere was contrived, it was not the cool freshness of the Greens, but it was heaven now to Flattery.

His intent was to wait out the incident safely suspended in the waters of his personal lagoon. The foil had full rations for six, enough to last him months, and it could continue to manufacture its own fuel and air supply as long as the membranes held out. They were Islander-grown from kelp tissue in a method perfected several hundred years ago, and had been known to last up to fifty years.

The light above him continued to intensify and the water began a rhythmic chop that alarmed him. He had been reluctant to venture into open water now that the kelpways were down. The idea of picking his way through a tangle of kelp by instruments alone dried his mouth and he forced himself to slow his breathing.

"I'll head for the launch site," he told himself. "The nightside supply shuttle should be ready for launch in three hours."

He marked the time on his log and swung the bow of the foil seaward. Ahead of him lay the vast coastal kelp bed and its infernal lights, blinking at him.

The beachside mortar. they didn't stump this stand as I ordered.

Somehow, the sight of blue and red flickerings across the depths ahead of him filled him with as much fear as the mysterious glare that backed him out of the Greens. Flattery didn't like the feeling of fear.

What if they lob their charges in now? I'd be a dead squawk.

Out of habit, Flattery turned his fear to aggression and throttled himself into the kelp.

The going was much easier than he'd anticipated. Waters off Kalaloch were quiet in spite of the loss of Current Control. That is, they were quiet except for a strange tidal pulse that pursued him from the Greens into open water. The uncontrolled kelp kept the major kelpway to the launch site open. Flattery attributed this to habit, or to perseverance of the last signal sent from Current Control. He was well into the thick of the stand before he realized his mistake.

Several things happened at once, any one of them enough to shake Flattery's resolve to regroup at the launch site. He ran out of fuel less than a kilometer from the perimeter of the site. Instruments showed all fuel-filter membranes functioning normally. Before the foil stalled out and left him adrift in the kelp, Flattery noticed that the CO2 in his cabin was higher than usual. The gas diffusion membranes were functioning, but seemingly in reverse.