The Ascension Factor

The screams, the pleading, the curses with Flattery's name on them silenced in the few moments it took the captain to walk her to the hatchway. It seemed that she walked forever, because there were the bodies of her crew to step over, and her legs were so uncharacteristically unsteady.

"Now see what you have done," Brood said to her. He squeezed her upper arm and shook her. "See what a mess your broadcast has made."

She couldn't speak or she would cry, and she didn't want to cry for him. She slapped away his touch when he took her arm to steady her. The last body she had to step over to reach the hatchway was the makeup girl's.

What was her name? Beatriz felt a new panic rise. I can't blank out her name.!

It was Nephertiti, yes, Nephertiti. Someone pretty and dark-skinned, like herself, with wide eyes. She told herself to remember this, to remember it and to see that somehow, sometime the world would know.

"You're a cool one," the captain told her. "You probably saw worse than this at Mesa two years back."

She stopped in the hatchway and turned, still not speaking.

"I saw you there, too," he said. "I saw both you and your boyfriend bounced ass over teakettle when that mine blew up your rig. Thought you both bought it."

She nodded, started to say, "So did we," but nothing came out of her throat but a croak.

For the first time she noticed his name, stitched above the Vashon Security insignia at his left breast: "Brood." Her only wish right now was that she would live long enough to see Captain Brood die.

He turned back to the studio and its seventeen dead warm bodies. Beatriz looked once again at herself on the monitor. The tape replayed an interview with Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster of Current Control. He was one of the few humans, other than Flattery, to survive the opening of the hyb tanks twenty-five years ago. He was so tall she'd had to stand on a box to do the interview. She had met him on her first flight to the new orbital complex, the day after her last night with Ben. Within a month she was sure that she was in love.

"Bag 'em up," the captain told his men. "Squeegee this place down, seal it off, then get all their production shit aboard."

He bowed to her then, opened the hatch for her and said, "We're expecting the replacements for your crew any minute. They are my men, and will do as they're told. My squad and I will travel along, to see that you do, too."

* * *

The mind at ease is a dead mind.

— Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, Current Control

Dwarf MacIntosh floated in the turretlike chamber of Current Control and surveyed the planet below for the birth of a certain squall at sea. It happened at about this time every day that a swirl of clouds materialized over Pandora's largest wild kelp bed. It was some comfort now to see this squall forming; it told him that something was normal today even though the behavior of the kelp was completely loco. Today, humans didn't make much sense to him, either.

"The Turret," as he called it, was a plasma-glass extravagance of materials and workmanship that MacIntosh had fabricated for himself before installing Current Control in the orbital station.

I'd have taken the job anyway, Mack admitted, but only to himself. "Kelpmaster" wasn't so much a job to him as it was a privilege. He couldn't have allowed any of Flattery's goons such an easy throttlehold on the kelp. Besides, he felt much more comfortable in orbit than he did on Pandora's surface.

Like Flattery, Mack had been cloned, raised and trained in the sterility of Moonbase, in the hyperregimentation and clonophobia of Moonbase. His whole life, until hybernation, had been spent orbiting an Earth that, for him and for all clones, never existed. In those days, Flattery had openly pined for a life Earthside, but even then Dwarf MacIntosh looked outward, past Earth's measly system to the possibilities beyond.

From his turret Mack observed and charted many of these possibilities. He named them, but not the few special names he saved for his unborn children. He had spent the past two years above Pandora, refusing the usual R&R rotations groundside. In that time MacIntosh had not recognized a single star that would lead them Earthward. He liked it that way.

Dwarf MacIntosh awoke from hybernation on Pandora one day in indescribable pain and found himself in the middle of nowhere, galactically speaking. In spite of the planet's horrors he was in his own heaven among a trillion brand-new stars. The other survivors clung to that little wretch of a planet and most of them died there. Alyssa Marsh. well, she died, too. She died the day Moonbase started imprinting her for backup OMC.

Mack and Flattery shared a dream of driving further into the void. Mack felt it a pity, in a way, since he had never liked Flattery, even during training with him back at Moonbase. Their differences had come out lately over management of the kelp.

If Flattery had any idea of what we've done, of what the kelp is.

"Dr. MacIntosh, shuttle's set for launch."