Read Singularity's Ring Online
Authors: Paul Melko
Singularity's Ring (19 page)
With his hands, he signed, “Your place.” Then left him.
Manuel stood in the dark, crying until he was too tired to stand, then he slid under the covers with the four, and slept.
I awoke screaming, knowing I was alone.
Strom! Meda! Moira! Quant! Corrine!
I screamed, straining to sit up, roll over, stand, but being unable.
I screamed, straining to sit up, roll over, stand, but being unable.
“Jesus! This one is squirting again.”
“Let him. Did you see his feet?”
“Yeah.”
I opened my eyes, saw a white ceiling. My arms and feet were restrained. Not good.
“Where am I?” I croaked. My throat was gritty. I swallowed dryness. “Where’s my pod?”
“You brokens always want to know that.” A face appeared above me. An unmodified singleton. He wore a white smock. The name Fanning was stitched to his coat.
“I’m not broken.”
“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
I fought down panic. “I’d like to see my pod now, please. The ones I was with.”
“No can do. It’s time to take care of this smell.”
Fanning raised a hypodermic and tapped my inner arm looking for a vein. Two other men, no, a duo, stood by the door grinning. He was military, judging from the camouflage fatigues he wore. With a start of recognition, I saw it was Anderson McCorkle.
“No! I don’t need that.”
“Don’t fight it, kid,” one of the duo said.
“You put up a good chase, but face it, you’re caught,” said his partner.
Fanning smiled and inserted the needle, holding the arm against my jerking.
“This man is a spy!” I cried. “He’s trying to kill us. You need to alert the OG!”
“Now there’s a new one,” Fanning said.
Cotton filled my ears, and all I could taste was the metallic sheen on my tongue. My eyes focused and took images of what I looked at, but it was as if my nervous system were dull.
I exhaled.
“What was that?”
“Cluster buster.”
The phrase thundered in my ears, then faded away, and for a moment it meant nothing. Cluster dissolution factor.
I heaved at my bonds.
“Take me to my pod!” I yelled. I tried to send the distress pheromone, but I was detached from my body. I couldn’t trigger the glands in my neck. The pads on my palms were dry.
“There, there. You’ll be okay in a while. We’ll take care of the rest now.”
The man disappeared from my view, leaving the military duo. They leaned close.
“You know how many people are looking for you, freak?”
“They scrambled Space Fleet when you disappeared onto the Ring.”
“But by then, we knew you were compromised.”
“If we hadn’t known when you got fucked in the back of the head by Leto—”
“—we knew when you ran for the Ring.”
“Bad move.”
“The worst move was when you made me look bad.”
McCorkle disappeared from my view. The light went out, leaving me in near darkness, save for the light coming through the transom above the door.
The door shut, clicking locked.
I fought back tears as the desperation rose in me. If the drug had destroyed my ability to bond with my pod, I was certain to go insane. My body shuddered, and I felt cold, alone, empty.
In anger I slammed against the bonds holding my arms and legs, rattling the hospital bed. My legs bounced off the mattress, and I saw them rise up.
I realized that the leg manacles had more play than the
ones on my arms. I raised my legs, and saw a leather strap binding my modified feet, but it had a good twelve inches of slack.
ones on my arms. I raised my legs, and saw a leather strap binding my modified feet, but it had a good twelve inches of slack.
I brought my feet together and they touched. I laughed, perhaps a bit maniacally. My captors had commented on my modified toes, but they hadn’t understood their capabilities. Even McCorkle hadn’t understood.
“Idiots,” I muttered and began unbuckling the left fetter. It came open easily. Then with my free left foot, I undid the right ankle. Rolling my torso up, my feet stretched over my head. Yet I couldn’t reach the straps on my wrists. I tried pulling my feet all the way around and down to my waist where my arms were, but I wasn’t that flexible.
I flopped back down. Then I raised my hips and bent my knees back, bringing my feet up under my hips. Just barely, I could reach the shackles at my wrists. Straining, my toes found the buckle on my left hand, and it opened. In moments I was free of the bed.
The room was small, just two meters square, the bed against the wall opposite the door. The ceiling was high. The only window was the transom over the door, which let in fluorescent light from the hallway.
I tried the knob, but it was locked from the outside. I looked up at the transom. Pulling the bed over, I could easily reach the top of the door. Jumping, I caught the edge of the transom and pulled myself up to the thick ledge.
Through the window I saw an empty hallway. I pushed at the transom window, but it was locked as well. I pushed harder and the window rattled in its frame. Dust rose around me, but I couldn’t smell it. It tickled my nose and I almost sneezed, but the odor was utterly absent. They had stolen something from me.
In rage I punched at the window. It shattered and fell with a crash onto the floor of the hallway outside.
Gingerly, I slipped through the opening, feeling a graze of glass on my back, and jumped beyond the mess of glass on the floor.
My clothes had been removed, and I wore a pale green hospital smock. I rubbed at my back where the broken glass in the transom frame had sliced me. The pain I felt, and I was thankful. It stoked my anger. My hand came away damp with blood.
The sound of the window would bring someone soon, and even if it didn’t, the broken glass on the floor would be obvious to the first person who walked by. I needed cover; I needed to find my pod.
The hallway was lined with doors, and extended in both directions for twenty or thirty meters before teeing off. I picked a direction at random and started opening doors. Each door opened to a cube just like the one I had been in, with a bed. All were empty, but then I opened one with a sleeping pod member. It was no one I knew, but I shook the woman awake and kept looking.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked.
“Escaping,” I replied, opening another door.
She trailed after me. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want to be here.”
“Where will you go?”
“To wherever my pod is,” I said.
“I had a pod too,” the woman said wistfully.
“Help me open more doors.”
An orderly appeared at the end of the hall.
He shouted and the woman backed up against the wall, scared.
I looked right at him, started to back away, as he came toward me. Then as the orderly gained full speed, I ran at him, slid beside him, tripping him at the knee, and sent his bulk hurtling down the hall.
I was on top of him in a second, yanking his baton from his hand, and choking him with it. The orderly grunted and went still, his eyes wild.
“I am not a happy person,” I whispered. “I feel very angry. Do you believe me?”
The orderly grunted.
“Good. Now where is the rest of my pod?”
The orderly grunted again. I released the baton from across his throat.
“I don know,” he grunted, coughing once.
I took the baton and whacked the orderly on the back of the skull. Moira would have urged calm and reason; but Moira wasn’t here, and I wasn’t interested in reason. I felt more angry than I ever had before.
“All the new pods are taken to Wings Two and Three. This is Wing Two,” the woman said.
“Where’s Three?”
“I can show you where that is,” she said.
I spun the baton around and hit the man hard enough to knock him unconscious and perhaps fracture his skull. I didn’t care. I dragged the orderly into one of the rooms and stripped him of his clothes. He had an electronic key pass on his belt.
“You look just like a doctor,” the woman said. “It’s scary.”
I saw that she had pheromone glands at her neck and pads for chemical thought on her wrists, but I could smell nothing from her. I didn’t know if it was because of some defect in her or because she had been given the drug too.
“What’s your name?”
“Jol,” she said. “It used to be Edgar Longhorn, before, I mean.” She was a broken pod. Revulsion snaked through me. I swallowed.
“Show me where Wing Three is.”
“This way.”
The woman led me to a stairwell, taking a flight up to the next floor. It opened into an empty hallway identical to the one below.
“How many people do they keep here?” I asked.
The woman shrugged. “I dunno. A lot. We all come here from the creche when … well, when our pods don’t form right.”
“You’ve been here for fifteen years?”
“Yeah. I was born in Osbourne Creche. We formed a pod, my friends and I, and we called ourselves Edgar Longhorn. We were a quartet, but it didn’t work out, so they re-formed a trio without me. I couldn’t … do it after that.”
I looked at her. She had been institutionalized after failing to form even a duo. I’d never considered the failures of the pod system, but now I saw the waste in the process. Even if one individual was ruined for the sake of a thousand viable pods, I wasn’t sure it was worth it.
“I’m sorry you didn’t form a pod.”
“It’s okay. I’ve had years to come to grips with my brokenness. Soon, I should be able to join a singleton enclave. This way.”
She led me down the passageway.
“This is Wing Three.”
Two figures were coming down the hall. I pushed the woman into a side hall, shushing her. Peeking around the corner, I saw that one of the two was the singleton who had worked on me. The second man I did not know; it wasn’t Anderson McCorkle. They were chatting amiably as they walked down the hall. They stopped at a door, laughing at a joke, and turned the knob. Where was the duo?
I was running as they entered. If one of my pod was in that room, I couldn’t allow them to use the drug they had used on me. I couldn’t let anyone else lose her senses as mine were now destroyed.
I caught the door before it shut, holding it just a few millimeters open, and listened at the door.
“Where’s the rest of my pod?” Meda’s voice.
“You have no pod, young lady.”
“Of course I do. We’re Apollo Papadopulos.”
“You wouldn’t be sent here if you were a viable pod.”
“We’re a functioning quintet. You can’t keep us apart.”
“Quintet! There’s like ten of those in the whole world, and you expect me to believe that one of you is tramping through the Amazon jungle? More likely you’re a broken experiment the clusters built. We get them down here all the time. Misshapen, broken people that we have to fit back into society.”
“We’re not broken.” Meda sounded shrill.
“It’s not your fault, I know. You can’t help it that your body was fucked with.”
“What’s in that syringe?”
I pushed open the door and launched myself at the nearest body. I clawed, kicked, gouged, using my feet and hands.
The man’s hypodermic fell, skittering across the room.
The second man grabbed at me, catching my shoulder and pulling me off the first man. I was not as massive as either of the two. I landed with a thump against the wall.
“What’s he doing here?” the first man cried.
I launched myself at him again, fingers outstretched. My hands found his throat, but the second man had me in a headlock. I couldn’t fight two people at once.
The second man pushed me up against the wall, pinning me.
“I’ll get restraints!” said the first man, slipping out the door. “Hey!”
Something thumped against the wall outside the room. Then the pressure on my chest eased. As I fell against the floor, I saw Strom tossing the second man against the first
into a corner of the room. He smiled at me and began to unlace Meda’s restraints.
into a corner of the room. He smiled at me and began to unlace Meda’s restraints.
They touched wrists, and I watched from the floor as they shared memories. I should have been able to smell the pheromones, to catch whiffs of the chemical thoughts. I pulled my hands behind me, suddenly scared.
“Come on,” Strom said. He and Meda ran out of the room, and I followed, pulling the door shut on the two stunned men, locking it.
Quant stood at the end of the hallway. She rushed to Strom and Meda, touching palms. Still I hung back. I should have been able to hear something!
Jol stood nearby, an odd look on her face as she watched my pod consense. She had opened the doors to all the cells, releasing my pod, while I had rushed Meda’s cell.
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