Eric looked down at Arla in the communications chair. “Now what?” he asked her.
“Now, we push it toward the Realm. What’s supposed to happen is the heat exhaust melts the ice as we push and we slide father into the shell. When we get to the Realm, we head to ground looking like a great, hulking lump of ice.” She frowned. “Did I say that right?” Her hand fell onto her pouch of stones and she jerked it away.
“I, for one, hope you did,” said Adu. “Although what they’ll think when they see a lump of ice going this fast, I don’t know.”
“We’ll just have to hope the satellites don’t think.” Eric stretched his arms over his head until his joints popped.
“They’re Vitae satellites,” Adu reminded him. “How can we be sure what they do?”
Eric swung his arms down. “Adu, that’s not really helpful.”
“My apologies, Sar Born.”
Eric nodded and, almost absently, stroked the curve of Arla’s shoulder. “Let us know when we have to strap down,” he said, and he left the bridge. Arla stood. Her concentration focused on Adu, but she said nothing. She just followed Eric Born out of the chamber.
Adu shifted himself to make room for the work being done inside his skull. Most of the processing right now was actually being done by the Cam programs. It was able to calculate the angles and bursts of thrust needed to push them around the binary, keeping their “tail” angled away from the suns. They would fly into the system between the satellites, and get just a little too close to the planet. Its gravity would grab hold of them and drag them down. Nothing surprising. Nothing unnatural. Nothing to rise from the ashes and craters.
Adu tried to be content. He tried to draw comfort from the fact that he would be able to fulfill his parent’s first instructions. Down in the Realm of the Nameless Powers he’d be able to find out the origin of the Vitae’s plans.
But there was nothing down there. He tried to tell himself that he’d eventually be able to find an open line, or a satellite transmission, or something that would allow him to get a message through to his parent. As it was, though, the only networks existed in the android body and in the shell of the ship, and the ship would soon be gone, even if its passengers survived.
Survive, yes, but for what? To pace the ground carrying the useless Cam routines around with him, until something was found for him to do? What would it be? There was nothing down there but stone and water and vegetation. He’d checked as soon as they’d entered the system. The only life was the uninterpretable Vitae transmissions, flitting between their ships.
“You will stand by them.” Dorias had sunk deep into him. “Eric Born will find a way to get you back out once we know what is happening.” A pause. “Do you think I want you lost? You’ll be carrying everything I need to know.”
The memory was warm and firm and a part of him, but it was still not enough to silence the fear of diving straight into nothingness.
What made it worse was that there was a way out. He’d spotted it. Between the plotting strategies Dorias had poured into him and the equipment list he had read in Cam, he knew how to get out of this android and this shell of a ship.
Cam twitched, suddenly alert on new levels. Adu fastened his attention fully on its activities. The monitors were picking up localized increases in hull temperature, pinpricks of heat. Cam didn’t understand. Adu prodded it and opened up part of its memory to remind it they were in a hostile space. Now it had it. The pinpricks were targeting lasers. The Vitae satellites had spotted them.
Adu waited, listening to the comm lines with Cam’s ears. There was nothing but unintelligible Vitae noise. The pinpricks stayed where they were, tracking the comet they had become a part of.
Did the satellites think? Were they trying to decide what to do? Had the Vitae in their ships been notified, or was this just standard operating procedure? Track every bit of junk and rock that floated into the system and wait for it to do something stupid?
Adu knew his questions were useless. There wasn’t even any way to tell if the satellites themselves were armed. The comet’s cloud of crystals and dust made too much interference for the U-Kenai to get a detailed picture. The ship could tell where the satellites were, but that was all.
There was nothing Adu could do. The course was laid in and plotted. Changing it under the satellites’ gazes would definitely cause an alert to be sent to the Vitae’s flesh-and-blood watchers. The U-Kenai was built for running away, not for fighting, and halfway buried in ice and dirt, it wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. They were already in the trap. All of them.