Get off the Unicorn

"Sorry, pal, they just took over."

"Took over?" Niall padded into the main cabin, rubbing his right arm. "I thought you'd wake me when we reached their first buoy."

"I did." She turned on the rear screen, focused on the fast-receding marker. "The Corviki don't waste time, which they consider another form of energy."

"Hmmm. An interesting concept."

"We're approaching orbit," she told him.

He blinked in astonishment. "One thing sure: those modifications of yours can sure take speed."

"A point."

"Hey, will they give me time to eat? A cup of coffee, at least?" He gestured at his nakedness. "The head? Clothes?"

"We should have a few moments to spare," Helva said with a laugh. His expression was small-boyembarrassed.

"Ever the courteous hosts."

He had managed to get himself assembled by the time the glowing luminosity that was Beta Corvi's third planet filled the viewscreen. Somewhere down in that moiling envelope of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen were the Corviki. Or were Solar Prane and Kuria Ster, Chaddress or a vengeful Ansra Colmer rising in those spectacular flares to greet the visitors? If anything remained of those personalities. Helva preferred to share Dobrinon's optimistic view that those immigrants retained something of their former personalities.

Helva felt the change in the ship before it registered on the console before Niall.

"We're in orbit? We can transfer?"

The eagerness in his voice produced a perverse reluctance in Helva. Niall couldn't know, despite all she and Davo and the others had told him, how devastating that experience could be, how insidious. Now a new fear threatened her: what could that experience do to the fragile bond they'd been contriving?

"Yes, we can transfer," she said, trying to keep the growing apprehension out of her voice. And she'd thought, Dobrinon had assured her, that she'd made a good adjustment to this return. She'd fooled only herself.

Niall swung the chair round, helmet half-raised to his head.

"Is it still that bad, Helva? I can go alone if it's that hard."

"This we have to do together." "That's the operative phrase, m'girl, together." "Let's go—together."

"That's my Helva." The helmet masked his eyes but not the eager confident smile.

Helva fought/released herself to the experience, knowing an instant of fleeting terror at being outside her safe shell. But as the transfer occurred, she reminded herself that she bad survived a worse terror of complete sense deprivation on Borealis, survived it only because of the Corviki episode. And Niall was with her this time! The pressure enveloped her in a deceptive comfort. She shuddered and the streamers floated up from beneath her.

"Niall!" she exuded, anxious lest in that instant she might have transferred at a distance from him.

"I'm a bloody sea monster." Niall's reassuring dominance was just beyond the large frond. "There you are!" And he emerged, a creature like herself, already coloring the shell with his own personal intensity. A creature like herself!

"Helva! You're…" And they spun toward each other.

"Do not express energy in such a sequence!" A new dominance, dark, dense, powerful, overwhelmed them with its authority. "You have imperfect control of your shells."

By a force more potent than their pent-up frustrations, they were held apart. The energies which they yearned intensely to combine were dampened by the dominance.

Deliberately, Helva now sought to bury her all-toohuman reactions into the Corviki ethos. "Conserve energy. Reduce spin. Lock suborbital speeds."

Niall's shell pulsed and shook with his effort to control his emotions in an alien context and because of the totally unfamiliar, for him, subjection to a supra-authority.

"The emanations are unusually rich," the Corviki emitted, withdrawing some of the repressive authority. "No similar wastage has been observed despite the variety now available for analysis." There was approval in the comment, but also a reinforcement of the initial warning.

With dark and awful despair, Helva forced her attention to the dominance, anything to distract herself from Niall's proximity. In doing so, she recognized a familiar aura in the dominance.

"Manager?"

"Of the same thermal core. There have been recombinations within the mutual group," and the entity turned such a lavender-purple of Corvikian pleasure that Helva interpreted "smugness" in his tone.

Taking cowardly refuge in the mission, Helva immediately explained the purpose of their unsolicited return. As she got to the point, she recognized approval in the Manager's density.

"From such an extrapolation of the data for use in the parameters of your race's limitations, undesirable factors might indeed result from exposing irreconcilables to stability forms," the Manager commented, rippling with muddy blues. "The multiple interaction shows commendable concern for the proper conservation of mass energies. The hypothesis is being examined. Improper equations cause ineffectual results and perverse conclusions. Matter must be expended only in constructive quantities."

Simultaneously a host of other dominances was felt, compounding the authority about her and Niall. The newcomers were, to Helva's mind, dense with experiential energies, held in lease by immense controls.