Swarm Read Online Free Page B

dropped them out of this ship, you murderous piece of flying shit.”
    “Course reversed,” said the ship.
    My anger seemed to have no effect on it. I tried to control myself. If I actually got my kids back, that would be wonderful, but I was still almost beyond any kind of clear thinking. I took deep breaths, trying to calm myself. I had to deal with this situation perfectly. I could not make any mistakes despite my emotional state. Possibly, my kids’ lives were at stake.
    I had a thought then. Maybe other people’s lives were at risk, as well. Could there be other prisoners onboard this ship, dying in tests even now? Maybe no one had made it this far. Maybe I was the first one.
    I thought of a hundred commands. I thought of demanding a view of the world as we glided silently above it. I was burning with questions too, but I didn’t dare ask them. Not yet. What if it took a question as a command to give information? What if I was only allowed one command? If there was some kind of time limit, or if my second command might cancel out my first, then I couldn’t afford to mess around asking more from the ship. Not until I knew more. I was playing a deadly game without knowing the rules, and I would continue to play it as I had been all along, with extreme paranoia.
    There was no reaction for about a minute. I couldn’t feel anything, and the ship didn’t say anything. It was all I could do to stand there, silent, wondering what the hell was going on. I stared at every wall suspiciously, my eyes roving. Suddenly, I thought I felt a tremor. Something had changed. Had we stopped?
    An opening melted away about where I recalled having entered. As with every doorway, it was simply a spot in the metal wall that could vanish and reappear. It was disconcerting, now that I was able to watch the phenomenon up close. Whoever these aliens were, they were much more advanced in practical terms than we were. What had Arthur C. Clarke said? That any technology, sufficiently advanced, would seem like magic to us. That’s how the ship seemed to me right now. Like a magical monster would to a barbarian. I was Jonah, and this was my whale.
    The arm was there, in the newly revealed room, or rather, the top coil of it was there. The rest of it had dipped down into the darkness below the ship. The coils moved, drawing upward. It was coming up, bringing something up with it.
    I glimpsed the slate-gray sea at night. The smell of the cold ocean puffed in, a fresh, salty odor. It smelled good, but it filled me with despair. The arm came up, and at the end of that very long snake-like arm was the hand. In the hand was the broken body of Sandra. She was completely naked now, having lost her cotton blouse in the freezing seawater. Water dripped from her long dark hair and ran in a stream from her dead blue lips. Her right hand was still missing its fingers.
    “No,” I said, “she’s not...” but then I stopped myself.
    “Incomplete statement,” said the ship. The huge black arm froze. It held the dead girl in front of me. She dripped cold water on the deck.
    If I told the ship Sandra was not my child, would it dump her again? Could it actually revive the dead? There was no point in not having it try to fix Sandra. She had earned that much after my failed ‘leadership’.
    “Continue,” I said, “finish executing my command. Revive her. Also, to obey my original order, you must fly back to my farm and get my other children and repair them too.”
    Another room melted open. It was a large one, like the room I was in now, which I had come to think of as the bridge. The new room had tables—raised rectangles of metal, really. Many smaller, three-fingered black arms dangled down over each table. The big arm put Sandra down on a table and then the scene vanished as the walls melted together again.
    Had I blown it? Had I used my one wish and been too unclear? I didn’t know, but didn’t want to start talking to the ship again. Not yet.