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Now that it had broken through, he suspected that it could wreak havoc with
Current Control. If it was as big as the Gridmaster said it was, then the
blue kelp could possibly be Current Control.
If this kelp's on our side, then Flattery's surrounded, he thought. But what
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if it's not on our side?
Beatriz was his big worry now. She always checked in from the docking bay,
but this time he had heard nothing. When she was incommunicado inside her
studio he suspected trouble. It wasn't like her at all. Just a blink after
Spud left, a spinjet jockey reported seeing a body expelled from the shuttle
airlock. Nobody was answering his calls in security or inside the studio.
"Dammit!"
Now the Gridmaster was getting a response from the kelp, an incredibly healthy
and powerful response. This stand that the depth charges had stunned back
into mere reflex reawakened immediately -- with a corresponding shift in
frequency.
This is the new kelp, he thought. It's absorbed the memories of our domestics
and taken them over.
All of the hardware from the domestic kelp was intact, but instead of dozens
of frequencies dancing the screens, there was now only one kelp frequency on
the Gridmaster.
Mack's screen showed the grid reforming, except for an unresponsive area in
the northwestern corner. He hoped that wasn't pruned back too far.
"Well," he muttered, "so far it seems to like us." He had planned to use
Current Control to turn the kelps against Flattery. He'd groomed as many
sentient stands as he could muster for one last try, for the time that
Flattery went too far. MacIntosh saw war as a drug, an extremely addicting
drug, and he didn't want Pandorans to start using it.
"I want that sector on visual," he told the sector monitor. "We should be
able to spot them."
All he got on visual was the gray-black whirl of afternoon squall that
obliterated his view of the entire sector. Ozette, LaPush and Galli were
under there somewhere. He hoped against hope that
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0-%20The%20Ascension%20Factor.txt the depth charges didn't turn them all into
soup.
Com-line's still down to the studio, he thought. If Spud doesn't get in
there, we'll have to get their attention somehow.
A feeling stranger than his weightlessness flipped through his stomach. He
shook it off, as he had shaken off the chill that slipped into the air after
her shuttle docked. He wondered how many had come up on that flight. The
shuttle could carry thirty to forty, depending on equipment.
Then there was OMC life-support, and the techs. Everyone aboard would have to
know what happened.
He didn't like thinking about the OMC, where it came from, what Flattery had
done to it. She had been Alyssa, not "it," but he found "it" a lot easier to
handle at the moment. Life-support was
Mack's responsibility, as it had been aboard the Earthling. He did not relish
the notion of that job.
"Well," he muttered to himself, "before we get that far I might have a few
surprises for
Flattery."
A soft tone went off near the turret, alerting him that something was forming
up on the kelp's private holo stage. MacIntosh had built the thing after
consulting Beatriz on holography. He had routed it through the Gridmaster in
hopes of getting images from the kelp. In the two months that it had been
experimental it had far exceeded his dreams.
The kelp had been frustrated for a long time, and it had a lot to say. So far
it was all images, flashing lights and odd sounds. The images were clear --
usually solid information about real things in real time. The sounds and
lights seemed to be "talk," or inflection, or philosophizing.
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MacIntosh had not yet been able to interpret anything but the more obvious
images.
He launched himself across the small office toward his new setup at the base
of the turret. He didn't care much for the near-zero-gee environment this
close to the axis, but it was the most practical location for an observation
station. At first, he had liked the immediate access to the shuttle port.
To get the near-normal gravity rimside he would have to put up with the
annoying two-minute spin of the Orbiter that made visualization of anything
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