Jaydium Read Free Page B

remember what it had been like when her father taught her. She held her breath and Eril joined with her.
    There was no sudden agony, but a silken touch, a whisper of delight, and then Eril was inside her mind. For a dazzling instant their awareness merged, they thought as one organic unity. Shipbrain receded to a background monotone.
    She was Eril, he was Kithri and, miraculously, there was no difference between them. She saw through his eyes. She felt the warmth of her own shoulders between his thighs. Her skin tingled, her heart beat wildly, and tantalizing shivers rippled along her nerves.
    The moment of merging faded like honey melting on the tongue, and Kithri was once more a separate entity floating in the web of Kithri/Eril/shipbrain.
    *Ready?* Kithri put ’ Wacker in a straight path across the Plain as she and Eril sorted the housekeeping. The division of tasks that she and Hank had worked out was irrelevant now and she wanted to put it all behind her.
    Bio-homeostasis? Eighty percent to Eril, without a question. Kithri’s heart rate and blood pressure were almost back to normal under his sure touch. She shifted the remaining twenty percent as emergency backup to the ship. Navigation was hers, eighty-five with fifteen percent to ship memory, and power train and life support split a ragged three ways.
    *Down to business* Kithri took hold of the helm, using shipbrain’s external sensors for orientation. With a sure touch, she steadied the ’jet and sent it supersonic across the Plain.
    After a few minutes, she felt Eril relax, lulled by the flat, featureless expanse below them and the empty indigo sky above. His calmness sent ripples of relaxation through her own body. Yet years of running jaydium had taught her better than to trust the Cerrano for even a moment. She kept watch with ’ Wacker’s senses as well as her own.
    Within minutes, shipbrain alerted her to a massive circular air disturbance ahead, three hundred miles in diameter. Instantly she recognized it as a coriolis storm. Driven by the immense heat gradients built up over the reflective Plain and amplified by the rotation of the planet, coriolis winds whipped to hundreds of miles per hour. The eye was usually still, but severe local turbulence along the periphery could prove deadly to even the most skillful pilot.
    Kithri tightened her grip on the controls. *Trouble coming*
    *I don’t see a thing* Eril said.
    *Clear-air coriolis, a big one. Check the infrared, not visual. We’ll try to stay out of the worst of it. Hold on!*
    â€˜Wacker accelerated smoothly to match the wind speed. Then the tiny ship touched the invisible edge of the storm. It shuddered and bucked, spinning out of control.
    An imaginary hand crushed Kithri’s chest, forcing the air from her lungs. Struggling for breath, she tried to brace herself against it. The harness straps bit deep into her flesh as they held her firm in her seat. She gasped and shut her eyes. Ordinary vision was useless here — she couldn’t respond quickly enough. No single unaided human could, only two minds linked in duo .
    Kithri drew on shipbrain, using her years of experience in dealing with minute shifts in wind direction and velocity. The connection to the computer was solid, the ship responsive. She reached for Eril to take up the data sorting and sensor management she couldn’t handle.
    Instead of the silken unity of their first moments of fusion, Kithri collided with a mental blank like a solid wall. She recoiled, stunned.
    *What the hell?*
    One moment Eril had been part of her, the next he simply wasn’t there. Kithri’s first thought was that he was dead, but no — his mind had gone suddenly opaque. More than that, in her moment of confusion he’d somehow managed to grab a huge percentage of helm control.
    What did Eril think he was doing? Was he trying to get them both killed? Did he think he could pilot Brushwacker better than she