Heaven's Reach

Lark

HE STUMBLED DOWN TWISTY, INTESTINELIKE corridors, fleeing almost randomly through the vast ship, pausing occasionally to rest his head against a squishy bulkhead and sob. Cloying Jophur scentomeres mingled with his own stench of self-disgust and grief.

I should have stayed with her.

Lark’s unwashed body, still sticky with juices from that dreadful nursery, kept moving despite fatigue and hunger, driven on by occasional sounds of pursuit. But his mind seemed mired, with all its fine edges dulled by regret. Repeatedly, he tried to rouse from this depression and come up with a way to fight back.

You’ve got to think. Ling is counting on you!

In fact, Lark wasn’t even sure where to go looking for his lover. His mental image of the Polkjhy was a blur of tangled passages linking odd-shaped chambers, more chaotic than the hivelike innards of a qheuen dam. Anyway, suppose he did find his way back to the prison section, the vault where he and Ling had made their getaway just a few days ago. By now the place would be triply guarded. By Jophur ring stacks, robots, and the tall human renegade.

Rann will be expecting me. He knows exactly what I’m thinking … that I want to go charging to her rescue.

Alas, Lark was no man of action like his brother, Dwer. The odds paralyzed him. He was too good at envisioning drawbacks and potential flaws in each tentative plan.

As long as I’m free, Ling can still hope. I have no right to throw that away by rushing into a trap. First priority has to be a place where I can rest … maybe find something to eat … then come up with a plan.

Using the purple ring as a universal passkey, Lark inspected various rooms along his meandering path, hoping to find a tool or information he could use against the enemy. Some compartments were empty. Others were occupied by Jophur crew, but these paid little heed to the distraction of an opening or closing door. Like their traeki cousins on Jijo, Jophur tended to be task-focused, reacting slowly to interruptions.

Only once did Lark fail to duck out of sight in time.

He was poking through a laboratory filled with coiled, transparent glassy tubes that flickered and hissed with roiling vapors. Abruptly Lark found his path blocked by a massive ring stack. It had just turned away from an instrument console, and all sensor toruses were active.

Flatulent smoke bursts vented from the Jophur’s peak, indignant to spy an intruding human. Fatty toruses flickered with shadowy patterns of light and dark, expressing surprised rage.

If he had paused to think, Lark would never have had the courage to lunge toward that intimidating mass, thrusting his only weapon past a dozen reaching tentacles. Tendrils converged to surround him, slapping his shoulders.

Master rings make Jophur ambitious and decisive, thought a bookish corner of his mind. But thank Ifni they’re like traeki in other ways. Their sluggish nerves were never tested by carnivores on a savannah.

But Jophur had other advantages. Throbbing feelers coiled around his neck and arms, even as soporific juices sprayed from the throbbing torus in his hands, the final gift of gentle Asx.

This time there was no reaction from the huge, tapered tower. Its grippers tightened, drawing Lark toward glistening, oily flanks.

He felt the purple ring flex and emit three more sprays, each one a different pungent fetor that made his eyes sting and his throat gag … till constricting pressure round his chest made it impossible to breathe at all.

The trick may not work anymore. They may have spread the word. Distributed counteragents …

All at once, the greasy titan shivered. The nooses tensed … then slackened, going limp as the Jophur settled its great mass to the floor, discharging a low sigh and rank smells. Lark nearly strangled on his first ragged breath. Shrugging free of the horrid embrace, he stumbled away, sucking for fresh air.

They’re catching on. Each time the purple ring fools one of them, they share information and antidotes. Even Asx couldn’t anticipate every possible scent code the Jophur might use.

The big stack seemed quiescent now, but Lark worried it might have put out an alarm. Swiftly, he scanned the rest of the chamber for co-workers. But the creature was alone.

Lark was about to head back to the corridor when he stopped, intrigued to see that the Jophur’s console was still active. Holo displays flickered, tuned to spectral bands his eyes found murky at best. Still, he approached one in curiosity — then growing excitement.

It’s a map! He recognized the battle cruiser’s oblate shape, cut open to expose the ship’s mazelike interior. It turned slowly. Varied shadings changed slowly while he watched.

I wish I knew more about Galactic tech. Before the Rothen-Danik expedition came to Jijo, computers had been legendary things one read about in dusty tomes within the Biblos archive. Even now, he saw them partly through two centuries of fear and half-superstition. Of course, even the star-sophisticate Ling would have trouble with this unit, designed for Jophur use. So Lark chose not to touch any buttons or sense plates.

Anyway, sometimes you can learn a lot just by observing.

This bright box over here … I know I’m in that quadrant of the ship. Could it signify this room?

The symbols were in efficient Galactic Two, though he found the specific subdialect technical and hard to interpret. Still, he managed to locate the security section where he and Ling had been imprisoned when they were first brought aboard on Jijo. A deep, festering blue rippled outward from that area and spread gradually “northward” along the ship’s main axis, filling one deck at a time.

A search pattern. They’ve been driving me into an ever smaller volume … back toward the control room.

And away from Ling.

From their slow, methodical progress, he estimated that the hunter robots would reach this chamber in less than a midura. Though it was a daunting prospect, that realization actually made Lark feel much better, just knowing where he stood. It also gave him time to seek a flaw in their strategy by studying the map for a while.

If hunger pangs don’t muddle my brain first. Unfortunately, the pursuers were also herding him farther from the one place he knew of where a human could find food.

Looking around the laboratory, he found a sink with a water tap. Ling had called it a constant on almost any vessel of an oxygen-breathing species. The fluid was distilled to utter purity, and so tasted weird. But Lark slurped greedily — trying to wash myriad complex ship flavors out of his mouth — before returning once more to peruse the data screens.

Other than the ship map, most of the displays were enigmatic — flickering graphs or cascades of hurtful color, impossible to comprehend. Except for one showing a black field speckled with glittering points of light.

Ling and I saw something like this in the Jophur command center. She called it a star chart, showing where we are in space, and what’s going on around us.

It still made Lark queasy to picture himself hurtling at multiples of lightspeed through an airless void. Unlike Sara, he had never dreamed of leaving Jijo, where his life’s work was to study the life-forms of a richly varied world. Only war and chaos could have torn him away from there. Only his growing ardor for Ling compensated for the loss and alienation.

And now she was gone from his side. It felt like being amputated.

Staring at the display — a black vista broken by a few sparkling motes — he felt utterly daunted by the distance scales, in which vast Jijo would be lost like a floating speck of dust.

One pinpoint glowed steady in the center — the Jophur dreadnought, he guessed. And a great, yarnlike ball in the lower left must be a flaming star. But without his cosmopolitan friend to interpret, Lark was at a loss to decipher other colored objects shifting and darting in between. GalTwo symbols flashed, but he lacked the experience to make sense of them.

In frustration, Lark was about to turn away when he noticed one slim fact.

That big dot over there, near the star … it seems to be heading straight for us.

I wonder if it’s going to be friendly.