They emerged on the shuttle deck. The lights were flashing here, too, but men in ITAA uniform were moving around in purposeful ways.

There was a large crowd and it was getting restive.

The calm voices of the loudspeakers directed the crowd to the lines at gates twelve and fourteen. She joined the line to gate twelve. She was alone, there was no reason not to try and just ride away from all this.

She had a very strong desire to be on the next shuttle out.

All sorts of horrors were flittering through her mind. That stuff, that hideous stuff in those bodies down there, that was what she bad helped bring into the universe once again.

She recalled the helpless blob, a jellyfish attached to some wires, that she had helped dig out of the Karavian sandstones. It had been less than two weeks ago and yet it seemed an aeon. That blob had become what? A terror that might go forth into the human era and destroy everything.

The line was moving slowly. They were tracking IDs, still trying to maintain security. It was holding things up.

A man and a woman were arguing at the front of the line. The man was furious. He was cursing the outwardly placid young people who manned the departure gate. They were doing a good job of remaining impassive in the face of the man's bluster. They still wanted his ID or his thumbprint.

But something was wrong. There was a woman screaming somewhere to the left. Caroline looked wildly around; what was it?

There was a loud groaning sound and a sharp snap. The floor bounced under her feet.

A section of the deck, a hidden maintenance door, was hurled open, smashing an elderly woman beneath it like a mouse in a spring trap. Caroline felt her heart freeze. Tentacles, pink-skinned tentacles as thick as a man's leg, writhed out into the room. Caroline felt her guts turn over and her bladder let go in mortal terror.

The tentacles grabbed people, the way a mantis grabs beetles.

It was abrupt; the movements to strike were precise, guided by the flower growths that sprouted around the tips of the tentacles.

People screamed as they clawed their way over each other, their screams Dopplered away as they vanished down the maintenance port to an unguessable but horrible death.

As tentacles seized people and carried them off, other tentacles fought to get through the struggling thicket of those that already jammed the hatch.

Another section of flooring was coming up. The carpet rose up and then ripped wide open. Tentacles burst forth.

The crowd surged away instinctively. Caroline tripped, and was saved by an elevator that chose that moment to open. She fell on her side halfway into the car.

Reflexively she wriggled inside and rolled to the sidewall.

Tentacles as thick as men's legs darted past the doors.

A man was running for the elevator; he had ten feet to go. He screamed something at her as their eyes met.

Then a tentacle, like an earthworm a foot thick, wrapped itself around his chest and plucked him off the floor, stifling his despairing scream.

He was upside down, arms flailing when he was pulled into a throng of topsy-turvy people being dragged down into the maintenance well. Then the doors closed and the elevator went down.

"Up!" shrieked Caroline in horror, scrambling to her feet.

The elevator skipped a deck and opened again. Human screams echoed. People were running toward the elevator. But the tentacles were there, seizing them from behind.

The doors began to close. Caroline stood there frozen. A woman was at the doors; Caroline saw her hands flash out to hold the doors back.

Then a man in ITAA Fleet uniform grabbed the woman and pushed her aside and thrust himself through the door, which closed behind him.

It was Captain Cachester.

The elevator started up. Caroline stared at him with horror in her eyes.

"You didn't have to do that!" she raged.

He was wild, his breath coming in acute gasps.

"Shut the fuck up!" he screamed. "You're the one who started this! You're the one we have to thank for this."

He subsided into an inarticulate fury and lashed out at her suddenly with a fist. She ducked instinctively and he hit her forehead with his knuckles.

She was knocked into the elevator wall and the whole lift wobbled slightly. Cachester screamed in agony and clutched his broken band. Caroline reached out for support and touched the buttons.

The elevator opened again. It was a maintenance section, mostly dark. There was just the hum of machinery. And something else. Something big that moved nearby.

They froze. To one side Caroline had a good view of it, and her throat constricted at the sight. A baglike thing the size of a room, that pulsed and wobbled like a stomach in the throes of digestion. Tubes ran out of the ceiling down to the bag; the tubes were a meter thick. More tubes grew out of the thing's base, looking like immense, coiled tree roots.

The elevator closed and rose, unnoticed. It passed the next deck and then Cachester jammed it with the emergency button.

"We have to think this out. Where can we go?"

Her forehead hurt, her head was spinning from panic. She could feel her own breath coming in gasps.

Time seemed to be passing very, very slowly.

"I don't know," she said finally.

Cachester paced like a caged rat on amphetamines. Suddenly he said, "Look, we have to get out of the elevator."

"Why? Where can we go?"

He stared at her. He had no idea.

The elevator rocked suddenly. Something was brushing past it. Caroline visualized something like that awful bag thing, or the tentacles. The brushing, rubbing went on for several long seconds, and the elevator rocked to and for gently. Then it ceased.

"What are we going to do?" whispered Cachester, still clutching his damaged fist. He'd cracked the first knuckle on his index finger and it really hurt. In the harsh white elevator light his face seemed sunken, his wits shattered.

"Are there emergency escape hatches on this ship?" Caroline said suddenly.

"Yes, every ship has them. Should be at the deck end, by the outer habwall."

She visualized that. "Then we need to get out on a deck that's safe and get to the far end of the corridors. The elevator shafts are set in the center of each segment, right?"

He saw what she was getting to. "Right."

"The problem is, which deck is safe?"

He looked at her, his head shaking slightly from side to side.

She had an idea. "The deck with that huge thing on it. That seemed quiet apart from that one thing. It didn't take any notice of the fact that the elevator opened there."

"You're mad," he said.

"Look, I'll get out and you stay and go where you want." His eyes glittered in response and his head continued to bob back and forth, but he said nothing.

She tried to recall where that maintenance floor had been. Which decks was it between? They couldn't afford a mistake.

"It was between three and four, wasn't it?"

He stared back.

She hit the button.

They went down.

The door opened. It was still dark and somewhat humid. An odd spicy smell, like that of an alien ocean, filled the air. The bag thing wobbled and jerked, filled to bursting with human bodies that were being digested at enormous speed to provide the growth and energy required by the Battlemaster in its enormous tentacular assault form.

Caroline hesitated. If she ran out there, would it see her and hunt her down?

Peristaltic waves bulged and wobbled down the tubes. She edged out of the elevator and moved away, back to the wall, taking tiny steps.

Cachester was watching her, holding the elevator door open. The bag shuddered and kicked but no tentacles appeared. She ran for the maintenance corridor and made it and turned the corner.

Emboldened, Cachester slipped after her.

The maintenance corridor was empty, lit by small spotlights every fifty meters. Nothing interrupted their progress and they reached the end wall. True to prediction, an emergency hatch was fitted into the wall.

There was a protective case around the mechanism handle; once you broke the case you had four seconds to move the handle or the thing would jam up tight.

On the wall beside it were a set of evac-bag dispensers.

Caroline pressed the activating patch and evac bags shot out. She grabbed one and pulled it free and stepped into the feet, then yanked it over her head and around her shoulders, just as she'd seen people do in the movies.

She broke the case on the hatch handle and yanked it down. The hatch opened with a hiss and she bundled inside. Cachester followed.

"You realize that our only hope is that someone sees us evac and picks us up. We've got about two hours," he said.

"That's more than we've got on this ship."

They pulled the bags tight and activated their air recyclers.

The outer hatch opened and they were swept out into the void of interplanetary space.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.

THINGS HAD BECOME PROGRESSIVELY MORE AND MORE HAZY for Rhem Kerwillig since the Reena thing had let him loot a pharmacy stockroom on deck three.

They'd gotten access through the back, ripping out the ventilation duct. They were looking for food and broke into the pharmacy, mistaking it for the fast-foodery next door.

While the Reena thing corrected the mistake, Rhem grabbed up handfuls of tranx and mooders. He started swallowing them in handfuls and washing them down with soda pop snatched from the fast-food joint.

Meanwhile the big change began. Rhem wasn't quite sure when it started, except that he remembered when they brought back the first man to the maintenance room they'd taken over.

The Larshel thing wrapped itself in a deadly embrace around this man, and a forest of wiry tentacles grew out of Larshel's body and wrapped around the man. Larshel's body swelled enormously and became progressively less and less human looking. The other man's body disappeared.

The man made sounds like a steam engine for a little while, suppressed, choked off by the tentacles probing his throat.

Then the Reena thing had really started bringing more people back, snatched surreptitiously from the populated decks of the Empress Wu.

They were all added to whatever it was that Larshel had become, something that looked like a pink-skinned whale by that point.

Before Rhem's wondering eyes they had been subsumed, reorganized, digested, who knew what, and the "whale" became enormous, filling most of the maintenance room. Rhem was crowded up close to it; there wasn't much space left. Its weird stink, salty, sweet, filled his nostrils. It was like a warm, tropical ocean, covered in candy.

Weird growths, like mouths, erupted from its top and fitted themselves over the ventilation ducts to suck in more air. Despite its size the thing's breathing rate was very high; air whooshed in and out at a tremendous rate.

From the great pink-skinned blob grew more tentacles, at first a dozen or so, no thicker than a garden hose, without suckers or any adornment. They were extremely active tentacles and seemed able to grow to any length required.

Then there were dozens more, and many of them sported flowerlike growths. They grew thicker very quickly, until they were writhing out the door as thick as pythons.

Rhem kept taking pills. There was ancilophen, a stimulant that he found particularly enjoyable at this point. There was also something unpronounceable on yellow triangles that developed this wonderful mood of happy-go-lucky laissez-faire.

The tentacles became vaguely amusing, shoving past him and around him, never touching him, and then wriggling out the door like endless snakes. He chuckled at the sight of them; they were so busy, so active, such odd looking things.

Reena came back with more people. In particular he remembered a woman in a purple evening gown snatched from the women's room on deck four. The woman woke up for a moment, just as she was being cocooned in a mat of tentacles. Her eyes looked at Rhem, who was swigging cherriade and gazing at her blankly. She shrieked briefly and disappeared under the mobile tentacles. Her shrieks ended on a high squeal.

There had been something extraordinary about her eyes, but Rhem was too fogged in to know what exactly it had been.

Now a growth sprouted out of the pink wall close to his head. It made soft suckling sounds as it grew in about a minute to the size of a soccer ball. Flower things grew from it with terrible rapidity. Then a circular hole, a sphincter, grew across the end.

Abruptly the sphincter made whistling, cooing noises and dribbled a pale colorless fluid.

Rhem swigged cherriade and wished he had some whiskey handy. This situation was getting too weird for pills alone.

The whistling subsided and the thing spoke to him.

Rhem jumped at the sound of his name, splurted out with wet smacking sounds between each slowly enunciated word.

"You will be witness. For me, Battlemaster of the Empire. You will tell what happened."

"Witness?" Empire?