Green, Sharon - Mind Guest.htm

  Mind Guest

  by Sharon Green

  A Diana Santee Spaceways Novel

  Chapter 1

  Waking up began as a struggle, the sort you strain against with all

  your strength and get absolutely nowhere with. I strained and struggled

  and found nothing but fog to fight, but by the time I reached the

  groaning stage the fog was beginning to lift. I became aware of what I

  entailed, then felt the hum that touched deeply but lightly in my

  bones. I knew the hum should mean something, but I was still too deep

  in the fog to know what.

  It took a lot of effort to turn to my left side and open my eyes, and I

  couldn't remember why the effort was necessary. All I saw was a small

  room, plain metal walls, built-in drawers, and nothing else. All behind

  a thin but unbreakable mesh of monostrand, the sort used m spaceships

  to protect sleepers from the sudden loss of gravity.

  Spaceship.

  I had to be on a ship, but where was I going? Was the assignment

  finished already? Assignment. What assignment? What the hell was going

  on? I put a hand to my head as if that would stop the spasms going on

  inside it, but there was still too much fog. Raising my arm seemed to

  be a signal for the fog to close in again, and that turned the switch

  off on my struggling.

  The next time my eyes opened, the fog was all gone. I saw the top of

  the bunk section, the monostrand safety net closing the only open side,

  felt the throb that meant live but unfiring engines. I was in a ship,

  all right, but this time I knew all about it. The assignment I'd been

  so worried over even when I didn't remember anything about it hadn't

  been finished, not unless you count getting grabbed as finishing it.

  I'd walked right into Radman's waiting arms, just as if I were

  responding to an invitation he'd sent out. I sat up carefully on the

  bunk, trying not to bash my thick head on the metal above, disgusted

  with myself and impatient with the dizziness the last of the drug

  caused. Radman had used cryosol, and there was no knowing how long it

  had kept me under.

  I ran my hands through my tangled hair as I sat cross-legged, giving

  myself a couple of minutes to take inventory before pressing on to the

  harder job of getting out of the bunk. My entire body felt heavy and

  without strength, probably a combination reaction from the drug and the

  length of time I'd been unconscious, but I didn't hurt anymore. My

  clothes were long gone, cut away at Radman's direction while he stood

  and grinned and drooled, and naturally not replaced. He'd pretended to

  be delighted that it was a female Special Agent who had been sent after

  him, but his delight had switched to panic when one of his men had

  gotten careless enough to let me almost get one leg free. 'There were

  only five of them there besides Radman himself, and those aren't very

  comfortable odds against a hyper-A. The nickname means High Percentage

  Risk Agent and isn't handed out to every male with big muscles or every

  female with a pretty smile. Radman had never heard the nickname, but he

  didn't have to. He'd heard about Special Agents, and believed enough of

  what he'd heard to be very, very careful.

  I unhooked the monostrand mesh and swung my legs over the side of the

  bunk, then stood up. I was feeling steadier than I thought I would, but

  a couple of twinges flashed here and there, an unpleasant tail-end reminder of Radman's reaction to my "attempted escape." After I'd been

  chained with no more than a single link's space between wrists and

  ankles, Radman had spent some time kicking me around-literally.

  Experience had probably taught him how much pain he could give without

  actually breaking anything important, and he'd put that knowledge to

  work. By the time he'd worked off the heavy sweat he'd felt at the

  thought of my getting loose I was sure he'd cracked a couple of ribs at

  the very least, but I'd been wrong. Nothing had scraped together inside

  when a couple of Radman's men had carried me to a metal-framed cot and

  had shifted the chains on me to create the ever-popular spread-eagled

  look. Radman had gotten hot from the fun he'd had knocking' me around,

  and wanted to spend some time working that off. I have a high pain

  threshold, but happily not that high; it didn't take long before his

  second-stage battering put me out. Which was a damned good thing. If

  I'd still been conscious when it came time for him to let rip I would

  have spit in his face, and I'd been in no shape to stand what would

  have come from that little gesture.

  The small cabin opened onto a somewhat larger common room, from which

  it was possible to reach the rest of the ship. All the lights were set

  at daylight normal, but I ignored the brightness in the common room the

  way I had in the cabin and made my way to the tiny galley. I took a

  long drink of water while the ship thawed and heated a synthegg

  sandwich for me, then sat and ate it while a second was being done.

  Cryosol slows your bodily processes while it keeps you unconscious, but

  that just means you won't starve to death before you wake up. It

  doesn't mean you can afford to forget to grab at least a quick bite

  once you're up and around again, despite the fact that you're not

  feeling very hungry. People have been known to die from the oversight,

  and it would have been rude of me to die so quickly and thereby spoil

  all of Radman's carefully laid plans.

  When the second sandwich was ready I took it with me to the control

  room. Radman had had a lot of fun telling me all about what he intended

  doing, but even knowing what to expect didn't stop the flutter of panic

  I felt at sight of all that red on the pilot's console. Most pilots

  equate blinking red with the pumping of lifeblood out of a major

  artery, and I was no different. It took an effort to keep from running

  closer and quickly slapping switches, but since I knew how useless

  slapping switches would be I could walk forward slowly until I stood

  behind the pilot's chair.

  The acceleration and deceleration switches had been cut off flush with

  the console, giving the check-off computer hysterics, and the emergency

  rocket toggle was also gone. The life-support system, meteor

  deflectors, view screens and communicator were still on the green, but

  that meant nothing. Radman had preset the view from the forward view

  screen, and the location computer was running a continuous "no

  information" blank tape, showing that I'd left human-inhabited space

  long behind me. Just for the hell of it I checked the number of inches

  of blank tape, multiplied by the standard rounded figure supplied in

  the front of every ephemeris, then took a long, slow bite of my

  sandwich. At the time of calculation I'd already been in an area of

  space that would not be explored for a minimum of two hundred standard<
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  years, with each second passing sending me farther and farther away.

  I'd be able to watch where I was going, Radman had said, live

  comfortably and eat well while I thought about ways of coming back, but

  there'd be no coming back. By going after him I'd earned a free,

  unending vacation trip, and he was going to see that I got what I'd

  earned. I could still hear his heavy, brutal laughter as the cryosol was hype-sprayed into my bloodstream, and I looked down to see that I'd

  unconsciously crushed the sandwich to slop in one hand. I turned and

  left the control room then, and went to get a cup of coffee and another

  sandwich.

  I set up a loose schedule for living in the days that followed, but

  still spent a lot of time reviewing and re-reviewing the moves I'd made

  in going after Radman. I'd expected to see what I'd done wrong rather

  quickly, but time passed and as far as I could see I hadn't done

  anything wrong. Nothing I'd done would have told Radman I was coming

  after him, but I'd still found him waiting for me. I usually had to go

  heavy on the exercising after coming to that conclusion, even though I

  knew intense rage was a waste of time and energy. The position I'd been

  forced into wasn't contusive to sane calm and logical thinking.

  I must have been about two months on my way to nowhere when I finally

  decided I'd had enough of sitting around and doing nothing. Aside from

  the fact that there wasn't much I could do, most of my hesitation had

  come from that terrible human disease called wishful thinking. Being

  fully adult and more realistic than most hadn't stopped me from hoping

  that Starman Courageous and his loyal crew would somehow stumble across

  me, save me from the fate worse than death that had been imposed on me,

  and quickly return me to hearth and home. It took me that two months to

  admit that I was the proud possessor of a fate worse than death, and

  that Starman Courageous, every broad-shouldered and wide-chested inch

  of him, was too busy saving slender helpless female types on tri-v to

  show up. If anything was going to he done, I was the one who would have

  to do it.

  I took one last cigarette with my feet propped up, grabbed a quick

  shower, then found an adjusting tool and headed for the c6ntrol room. I

  knew almost nothing about transbar electronics, but I was faced with

  the choice of tinkering and possibly killing myself fast, or leaving it

  alone and continuing on until I went crazy. Being a loner I hadn't

  found the two months totally unbearable, but two months wasn't two

  years or twenty. If I didn't do something, I was sealed into what would

  eventually become my tomb, and sitting around waiting for the

  inevitable wasn't my usual style.

  The controls had been damaged at the pilot's console, which is usually

  a pretty permanent way of damaging them, but there was one remote

  chance. The transbar leads were tucked away in a box of their own, and

  if I could figure out which leads controlled what, I might be able to

  bypass the console. Only I was not an electrical engineer. My talents

  lie in other directions, and I've piloted many ships, but never had to

  fix any of them. I opened the panel that covered the leads, groaned at

  the nine million different colored wires, then took a deep breath and

  got started.

  I'd found the leads that controlled the shower, the lights, and a dozen

  and a half unknown functions before it happened. I was tightening the

  last lead I'd loosened when the adjusting tool slipped, knocking out a

  lead in the unexplored section. The loose lead swung down and to the

  left, 'toward the bottom contact, but fouled on another lead instead.

  There was a spray of pretty blue sparks for about three seconds, then

  silence. I wondered if I'd done anything serious, only to notice the

  new flashing red light on the control console. I closed my eyes for a

  minute then went to see what it was. It turned out to be nothing much -

  the new blinking red light was for the life support system.

  After I carefully tossed the adjusting tool away, I sat down in the

  pilot's seat. I would have done better using spit and baling wire on

  the control console, the way Starman Courageous would have, but it might have taken me another two standard months to kill myself with

  spit and baling wire. Why waste the time?

  Then my eyes fell on the forward viewscreen, and I stared hard. I

  hadn't bothered checking it for weeks, but I should have taken a peek

  before starting on the transbar leads - it would have saved some

  trouble. The ship had blundered into the middle of a star system,

  cutting across the orbital path of at least one of the planets. I could

  tell this easily by the sight of the good-sized moon I was heading for,

  but I couldn't tell by eye whether or not I'd hit it. My hand went

  toward the computer outlet automatically, but I pulled it back before

  asking for the data. If the ship was going to hit, it would hit. There

  was nothing I could do about it one way or the other, and if I hit I

  wouldn't have to worry about the new ringing in my ears. My tinkering

  with the transbar leads had done something to the air pressure, and I

  hadn't the faintest idea of how to undo it. I sat back in ~e seat and

  simply watched the moon.

  Six hours later, I was a lot closer to the moon and a lot closer to

  upchucking. The on-again, off-again ringing in my ears was making me

  dizzy and nauseated, but I stayed near the viewscreen to see what was

  happening. Then, suddenly, the proximity alarm went off, almost sending

  me straight up through the hull. Where the hell would another ship be

  coming from way out there? Nothing showed in the forward viewscreen,

  and I was about to activate the others when the ringing got deeper and

  closer to my head. I hesitated a minute, trying to fight the lowering

  air pressure, but it was no good. I didn't touch the transbar leads,

  but the lights went out anyway.

  Chapter 2

  Waking up was downright luxurious. I was lying belly down and I

  stretched in comfort and yawned, wondering why the bunk felt so soft,

  then groaned when I realized it was probably a malfunction in the

  gravity control. I buried my face in the softness, knowing damned well

  that there was almost nothing I could do about it, then lay very still.

  The gentle fragrance coming from what I was lying on was nothing like

  the paper bed linen I'd used so long, and it was also nothing like

  anything I'd ever encountered before. There was dark all around me, the

  familiar dark I always slept in, but even in the dark there was

  something different about my surroundings.

  I moved my fingers over whatever it was I was lying on, getting the

  impression of a soft and very rich-feeling fur. There was no pillow

  under my face, just the fur, and stretching my arms out limited the

  size of the fur whatever to little more than the width of a double bed

  was closer to the edge on the right, so I hung my right arm over it and

  found that the floor was no more than twelve inches below me - and also

  covered with what felt like fur. None of what was happening made
any

  sense: was I dreaming or just plain crazy?

  I shifted over onto my back, in the process making another unsettling

  discovery. I knew I had no clothes on, but I'd had the impression that

  I was covered with something like a light blanket. Now I could feel

  there was a warmth on me, from shoulder height down to past my toes,

  but the warmth wasn't coming from anything as banal as a cover. All at

  once I began feeling annoyed, knowing damned well that by rights I

  ought to be scared stiff, but the whole thing was too stupid to be

  scary. When someone puts you in the dark to terrify you, they don't

  give you fur to lie on, and they don't make sure you're snuggly warm. I

  brushed my loose hair away from my face and made up my mind, then sat up slowly, holding one hand above my head to see if there was anything

  over me.

  As soon as I was sitting straight, there was no longer any need to hold

  my hand up. A light had begun glowing from somewhere, starting very

  faint and low, then brightening to a good level. I took a deep breath

  and let it out slowly, fairly sure - or at least hoping - that there

  was a photocell or some equivalent involved.

  The room that had just come to view was no more than twelve by twelve,

  having very few things in it. There was a small round metallic shape

  next to the bed-couch I was lying on, an amorphous blob that might have

  been a chair, and nothing else. I looked down at the bed-couch under

  me, expecting to see fur, but saw nothing but cloth. Granted, it was a

  silvery-gray cloth that looked better than any other cloth I'd ever

  seen, but it was still just cloth. The couch-bed was a low platform, an

  eight-foot by seven foot oblong, raised slightly at the end that was

  against the wall, and seemingly upholstered. I shifted around a little,

  noticing that the warmth I'd felt earlier was fading, then decided to

  ask the major question: where the hell could I possibly be? It was

  fairly obvious that the proximity alarm bad meant another ship, but

  where had they come from, and who were they? And while I was listing

  interesting questions, it would be smart to include, why? Someone had

  gone to more than a little trouble intercepting my ship, had managed to

  pull me out of it alive - and then had neatly tucked me into beddy-bye

  before disappearing from view. I'm normally grateful for any help I get