said. "How do we find our way around it?"
Tachyon turned to Fortunato. "Instruct the singularity shifter to take you to the middle of the thing. You should end up pretty close to where you want to be. You can find the nerve center by tracking its mind." Tachyon felt the mind of his ship tug at his brain. What is it, Baby?
We're approaching the Swarm Mother's detector range. Thank you. He turned to the others. "You'd better get ready. It's almost time."
Fortunato took out the singularity shifter from the backpack in which Tachyon had hidden it in the spare bedroom of his apartment. In the bottom of the pack was a .45 automatic in a shoulder rig.
"What's this?" Fortunato said. He looked at Tachyon. "You may need it," the doctor said. "It's going to take more out of you than you know, to power this jump." Fortunato touched the butt of the gun, looked at Tachyon. He shrugged. "What the hell," he said, and strapped it on. He hefted the singularity shifter, and he and Brennan and Mai formed a circle. All helped hold'the shifter. Brennan glanced at Mai. She looked back steadily. Out of the corner of his eye he saw in a viewscreen a brilliant flash of light wink out from the Swarm Mother. Baby rocked as the organically generated particle beam struck her, but her defensive screens held. Brennan felt a soft whisper in his brain.
Remember. You must not allow Mai or Fortunato to be captured by the Swarm Mother.
He looked up at Tachyon, who stared at him steadily for a moment, then turned back to his viewscreen.
"Go!" Tachyon shouted.
Fortunato's eyes closed, his brow furrowed in concentration. Spectral ram's horns glimmered from the sides of his head. Brennan felt a sudden wrenching, a tearing as if every cell of his body were being hurled apart. He couldn't breathe with lungs that were no more, he couldn't relax muscles that were torn into their constituent molecules and hurled across hundreds of miles of empty vacuum. He stiffled a scream and his consciousness slammed up against a wall of nausea. The trip was worse than his jaunt to the clinic, for it seemed to last forever, though Tachyon had said a journey by singularity shifter lasted no time at all.
Then, suddenly, he was whole again. He and Mai and Fortunato were in a corridor that was dimly lit by large blue and green phosphorescent cells in the translucent ceiling and walls. Ropy tendrils ran below their feet, presumably conduits for whatever was used as blood and nutrients in the thing. The air was hot and wetly humid and smelled like a greenhouse gone bad. Its oxygen content was enough to make Brennan giddy until he adjusted his breathing. He felt light on his feet, though there was a definite gravitational pull. The Swarm Mother, he realized, must be spinning, producing artificial gravity that was necessary for directed organic growth.
"Are you all right?" he asked his companions.
Mai nodded, but Fortunato was breathing harshly. His face was an ashen mask.
"The . . . space faggot was right . ."he panted. "That was a bitch." His hands were shaking as he fumbled the shifter back into the backpack.
"Relax-" Brennan began, and fell silent.
Somewhere ahead in the twisting, rolling passageway was a vast sucking sound.
"Which way do we have to go?" Brennan asked quietly. Fortunato concentrated mightily. "I can sense some kind of mind up ahead." He pointed in the direction of the sucking sound. "If you could call it a mind . . ."
"Great," Brennan muttered. He unslung his bow. "Listen," Fortunato grabbed Mai's arm. "You could help me out . . ."
"No time for that," Brennan said. "Besides, Mai will need all her own energy to get through this thing. And so will L" Fortunato began to say something, but the sucking sound, which was getting louder and louder, was suddenly right upon them when a grotesque green and yellow mass of protoplasm rolled down a bend in the tubular corridor toward them. It had a score of suckers placed randomly over a globular body that nearly filled the passageway.
"Christ!" Fortunato swore. "What is that thing?"
It was plastered to the side of the corridor, scouring the wall and floor with myriad suckerlike mouths that were ringed by hundreds of foot-long cilia.
"I don't know, and I don't want to find out," Brennan said. "Let's get going."
He selected an arrow and laid it loosely on the string of his bow, and started to