It was as though the crawler had ceased to exist.
A lump developed in Alemaheyu's throat. He suddenly wished he had a joint to smoke to calm his nerves. But all that would've gotten him was a burst of Sharita's wrath. The comm officer leaped up and hurried over to Rhodan and the commander.
"Sharita," he said, as she looked up at him angrily, "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I think we have an emergency."
3
A vague sense of unease drove Denetree that evening.
She was used to taking off on her bicycle after the shift. Most metach on field duty were too tired afterwards to do more than drag themselves back to the half-gravity of the Middle Deck, eat with their Metach'ton, plug into the Net for an on-line game, or just sit and wait for the next day.
Not Denetree.
Yes, the work was hard, but after a Ship-year—more than half her obligation as a field hand was behind her—she had gotten used to it. In the beginning, only her thighs had developed, and she had otherwise looked like a beanpole. But now she had put on some flesh. Her arms, her entire body had become muscular. In the first months, the effort of cycling had almost completely burned her out. The gravity of the Outer Deck crushed newcomers mercilessly toward the ground, after a few minutes making every movement a torture. There was very little help from machinery in the fields, allegedly to save the always limited supply of energy on board. Denetree felt certain that was true, but exhausting the young metach in performing their service for the Ship seemed to her an equally likely intention. It kept them from getting dumb ideas.
In theory, at least. In practice, Denetree became an example of the opposite. In the unanimous opinion of everyone who knew her, Denetree's endless rounds through the Ship on a bicycle after the end of her shift fell clearly into the category of dumb ideas. Except that it was harmless. Denetree didn't bother anyone, and as long as her rides always took her back to her Metach'ton, and her work performance the next day didn't suffer, no one tried to stop her. Not her neighbors, not the Naahk or the Net.
Immediately after the end of her shift, Denetree climbed on the bicycle she considered "hers." Of course, it wasn't really her own. None of the metach owned their own bicycle, no matter how highly they were placed. The bicycles belonged to all equally—which didn't necessarily mean that every metach could use every bicycle.
Denetree had made a number of changes to the bicycle she used: "optimizations," as she called them. Her bicycle's rims had a smaller diameter than the standard model and the tires were wider with a studded tread—designed for better traction rather than minimal rolling resistance, as was typical. Denetree pumped the tires full enough that only the center of the tire rested on the ground, creating a narrow, smooth strip that made it easier to ride on uneven terrain, but was apparently inferior in direct comparison to the standard ultrathin tires.
The other members of her metach had laughed at her when she rode her bicycle to her shift the first time. "Look, that crazy Denetree has built a plow!" they mocked. "Come on, dig us a furrow!" Only after she had beaten the loudest mocker in a race, handily leaving him in the dust, did they stop their open teasing.
It had been Denetree's luck to end up with one of the heaviest men in the metach as her opponent. He weighed more than a hundred kilos, and she weighed less than half that. Even though his weight should have given him an edge, Denetree beat him, and on the relatively unfavorable surface of the road.
But her bicycle wasn't designed for speed. It had a low center of gravity and a computer-supported gear-shifter, into which she had secretly installed new firmware she had written herself. Those three assets made it possible for her to leave the assigned paths and ride between the fields, and even travel through the Ship's wilderness tracts where only a few metach ever wandered, since they lay away from the settlements and fields.
And the firmware had a second, equally important function: it made the bicycle effectively Denetree's. If anyone else climbed onto the seat, the firmwear switched to neutral. The spectacle that followed had many variations, but only one conclusion: the unhappy would-be rider got off the bicycle cursing, sent a DAMAGED report to the Net over the guidance computer, and left the bicycle in the ditch without another thought. Thanks to Denetree's firmware, none of those reports ever reached the Net.The Net only ever saw a standard green indication from the guidance computer: "Bicycle intact. No maintenance required."
Pedaling furiously in high gear, Denetree left behind the field where she had spent today's shift. Her arms and neck ached. Harvesting jakulent was hard labor. The long-stemmed plants were cultivated by the Ship for the sturdy fibers in their stalks. But choosing which of the stalks were ripe for harvest, cutting them and separating them into their individual fibers was a nasty grind—such hard work that a person was rarely assigned to the work for more than two weeks.
Denetree ignored the pain. She would forget it completely in half an hour, when the exertions of pedaling would bring her pulse to a constant 140 beats per minute, and the blood that pulsed through her veins took the pain with it.
Today, her thoughts were somewhere else.
She was worried about her brother. Venron had become more taciturn in recent weeks than ever before. Not that he had ever said very much, but he had opened up to her, at least, especially when the feeling of being locked in, of there being no way out, threatened to overwhelm him. Then he had laid his head in her lap and looked up at the sky. It hung overhead, close enough to touch—close enough to make one weep—and was always the same. By day, bright, though never blinding; by night, an oppressive, impenetrable black.
Denetree and Venron had endured considerable mockery and nasty remarks over time. Not because of their shared yearning for the stars, which they kept to themselves, but because the brother and sister shared a close relationship. The Ship did not support families. Children were raised in groups according to their ages; siblings rarely knew each other, and only a few cared to try. What would have been the point?
By chance, Denetree and Venron had been assigned to adjacent Metach'tons. And ever since they had run into each other that first time, they had been inseparable. A connection existed between them that even they could not explain.
The strongest bond between them was their common desire to escape to the stars, to find a new life away from the prison of the ship. Venron had often wept as he dreamed of that possibility, but Denetree waited in vain for relieving tears to come to her. The hard grip of his hands around her body relaxed to a gentle touch and his breath evened out as he lost himself in the fantasy of escape.
Denetree had never managed to flee into her dreams to find peace. She only had her bicycle, the pumping of her heart, the protesting throb in her thighs, and the endless rounds through the ship that took her nowhere.
Denetree reached the fields where Venron's Metach'ton was currently assigned. The hut that served the two dozen men and women as a shelter, changing and storage room was deserted. They must have finished their shift already. Denetree thought for a moment, then went on in the direction of the bow. All day long, the members of her Metach'ton had enthused over the party that would be taking place there tonight; perhaps the news had reached Venron's Metach'ton also.
After a few minutes, she saw a group of people moving slowly through the fields. She pedaled faster and quickly caught up. It was Venron's Metach'ton. A swarm of bicycles surrounded an electric-powered harvest platform. It was strictly forbidden to use the platforms for anything other than work—energy was too valuable to waste it on leisure activities—but the young men and women didn't care about the rules. Half the members of the Metach'ton had made themselves comfortable on the dirty platform, while the rest rode on bicycles, trying to hang on to the platform
