The tubular passages running through the Ship were far more brightly lit than the last time Eddie Kalish had been here. Electrical activity crackled and seethed along the walls, which had themselves taken on a glowing and translucent aspect, complicated forms like multicoloured oils mixed with water spiralling lazily within them.
For hours Eddie and Trix Desoto worked their way through the Ship, following a schematic that had been, apparently, downloaded by the Faction into the GenTech datanet in a kind of abreactive cybernetic fit that had cut services to three entire GenTech-owned compound-blocks for a month.
They worked to a step-pattern so that Trix was always working on a node while Eddie worked on another nearby. The work itself, it seemed to Eddie, was remarkably simple; he would simply place his fingers on a node and sense a change in the energy flows within, redirect them by a repositioning of his fingers until he felt inside himself that their configuration was correct. Presumably this knowledge had been implanted on some subconscious level via the Loup.
He was reminded of the time back in the hospital room of the Factory, where he had accessed the datanet without ever quite knowing how he was doing it.
Their tandem path took them through spaces that might or might not have been living-quarters, command centres, chambers that appeared to be armament-depositories or hangars for small craft that were, he supposed, the extraterrestrial equivalent of tactical fighters. All the while, the throbbing sense of power accumulating inside the Ship grew stronger.
This reminded Eddie, despite himself, of what was actually feeding it.
“What’s it eating?” he asked Trix. “Neuropeptides or something? And thank you, Mister the Loup, for throwing up the word neuropeptides when I don’t know what the hell it actually means. What I mean is, if it’s eating stuff you find in the brains then why can’t GenTech just synthesise it or something?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” said Trix. “The Ship isn’t digesting the… material as nutrients.”
The material, Eddie thought. She’s acting like she just doesn’t care, but she’s putting up another front. Like she tried to turn it into a joke before. Why didn’t I notice that before?
“The Ship’s liquefying and extruding the material,” Trix Desoto was saying. “Patching it into her own neurotecture. I gather that she operates by way of an interconnected complex of microtubular filaments, operating on the quantum level, hooking into the very fabric of space/time. Drawing power from the fundamental wave-form resonance of the universe itself.
“We got the model from a basic template that the Faction encoded into a clone-host-that old guy I was transporting when we first met, yeah? The parameters were quite clear. And the only real source for those particular microtubular constructs, here and now on Earth, is the human brain.”
“Yeah, but if you got it from a clone-host, whatever the hell that is, then you can clone a-“
“Doesn’t work,” said Trix Desoto. “A clone we’re capable of producing unassisted, under the current state of the art, by its very nature never makes synaptic links or achieves consciousness. Has to be a brain from someone conscious and alive-or at least who was.”
“All the same,” Eddie said. “It all still seems a bit-“
“I know what you mean,” said Trix. “Fundamental lack of connection with other human beings is one thing, but I still think it’s a little bit off.”
Eddie couldn’t work out for the life of him if she had meant that as a joke or not. It would open up a number of not entirely comforting questions either way.
He realised that Trix Desoto had said something else.
“What?” he asked her. “What did you say?”
“I said that, on the other hand, what’s the alternative? The destruction of the universe? Or at least, the destruction of that bit of it with Earth and all the human beings on it?”
Eddie Kalish pondered that for a moment.
“I’m going to ask you what you said again,” he said at last. “But, you know, I mean it in a slightly different way.”
“We don’t get the Ship up and running,” said Trix Desoto, “then the Faction who wants it is just going to lean in-from wherever it is they lean from-and simply grab it. You think the world’s showing cracks now, just you wait until the Hammer of God starts shaking it up like a snow globe. Didn’t the Head get around to telling you that?”
“Not as such, no,” said Eddie. “And on the whole I’m somewhat glad it didn’t.”
They continued on through the Ship, reconfiguring the nodes, Trix still lugging whatever it was that was in her case. The corridors branched and interconnected in any number of ways, but they followed the schematics on a rough trajectory spiralling to the centre.
They were getting quite close. It was hot and the Ship was pounding around him and Eddie’s skin tingled. He felt muscle-masses shifting around under it. Up ahead, Trix Desoto’s form seemed slightly more bulky, her gait more loping.
He hurried forward to catch her up, laid a hand on her shoulder. She swung round, snarling, for a moment her eyes blazing. Then she visibly caught herself.
“I think the Ship’s triggering the Loup,” he told her, taking a somewhat hurried step back. “Even through the Leash. Maybe I need a booster shot or-“
“An imposed reversion would probably kill you at this point,” Trix Desoto said. “It’s the other way around. The Loup’s cutting in, despite the Leash, this near to the core, to compensate for an increase in upsilonic radiation. My advice is just to go along with it and-“
And it was at this point that the explosive charges detonated outside and things went, even more than usual, totally to hell.