Infinity's Shore

PART NINE

WE’RE ALL FEELING rather down right now. Suessi called from the second dross pile where his work crew just had an accident. They were trying to clear the area around an old Buyur ore-hauler when a subsea quake hit. The surrounding heap of junk ships shifted and an ancient hulk came rolling down on a couple of workers — Satima and Sup-peh. Neither of them had time to do more than stare at the onrushing wall before it crushed them.

So we keep getting winnowed down where it hurts most. Our best colleagues — the skilled and dedicated — inevitably pay the price.

Then there’s Peepoe, everyone’s delight. A terrible loss, kidnapped by Zhaki and his pal. If only I could get my hands on that pair!

I had to lie to poor Kaa, though. We cannot spare time to go hunting across the ocean for Peepoe.

That doesn’t mean she’ll be abandoned. Friends will win her freedom, someday. This I vow.

But our pilot won’t be one of them.

Alas, I fear Kaa will never see her again.

MAKANEE finished her autopsies of Kunn and Jass. The prisoners apparently took poison rather than answer our questions. Tsh’t blames herself for not searching the Danik agent more carefully, but who would have figured Kunn would be so worried about our amateur grilling?

And did he really have to take the hapless native boy with him? Rety’s cousin could hardly know secrets worth dying for.

Rety herself can shed no light on the matter. Without anyone to interrogate, she volunteered to help Suessi, who can certainly use a hand. Makanee recommends work as good therapy for the poor kid, who had to see those gruesome bodies firsthand.

I wonder. What secret was Kunn trying to protect? Normally, I’d drop everything to puzzle it out. But too much is going on as we prepare to make our move.

Anyway, from the Jophur prisoners we know the Rothen ship is irrelevant. We have more immediate concerns.

THE Library cube reports no progress on that symbol — the one with nine spirals and eight ovals. The unit is now sifting its older files, a job that gets harder the further back it goes.

In compensation, the cube has flooded me with records of other recent “sooner outbreaks”—secret colonies established on fallow worlds.

It turns out that most are quickly discovered by guardian patrols of the Institute of Migration. Jijo is a special case, with limited access and the nearby shrouding of Izmunuti. Also, this time an entire galaxy was declared fallow, making inspection a monumental task.

I wondered — why set aside a whole galaxy, when the basic unit of ecological recovery is a planet, or at most a solar system?

The cube explained that much larger areas of space are usually quarantined, all at once. Oxygen-breathing civilization evacuates an entire sector or spiral arm, ceding it to the parallel culture of hydrogen breathers — those mysterious creatures sometimes generically called Zang. This helps keep both societies separated in physical space, reducing the chance of friction.

It also helps the quarantine. The Zang are unpredictable, and often ignore minor incursions, but they can be fierce if large numbers of oxy-sapients appear where they don’t belong.

We detected what must have been Zang ships, before diving past Izmunuti. I guess they took us for a “minor incursion,” since they left us alone.

The wholesale trading of sectors and zones makes more sense now. Still, I pressed the Library cube.

Has an entire galaxy ever been declared off-limits before?

The answer surprised me.

Not for a very long time … at least one hundred and fifty million years.

Now, where have I heard that number before?

WE’RE told there are eight orders of sapience and quasisapience. Oxy-life is the most vigorous and blatant — or as Tom put it, “strutting around, acting like we own the place.” In fact, though, I was surprised to learn that hydrogen breathers far outnumber oxygen breathers. But Zang and their relatives spend most of their time down in the turbid layers of Jovian-type worlds.

Some say this is because they fear contact with oxy-types.

Others say they could crush us anytime, but have never gotten around to it. Perhaps they will, sometime in the next billion years.

The other orders are Machine, Memetic, Quantum, Hypothetical, Retired, and Transcendent.

Why am I pondering this now?

Well, our plans are in motion, and soon Streaker will be, too. It’s likely that in a few days we’ll be dead, or else taken captive. With luck, we may buy something worthwhile with our lives. But our chances of actually getting away seem vanishingly small.

And yet … what if we do manage it? After all, the Jophur may get engine trouble at just the right moment. They might decide we’re not worth the effort.

The sun might go nova.

In that case, where can Streaker go next?

We’ve tried seeking justice from our own oxy-culture — the Civilization of the Five Galaxies — but the Institutes proved untrustworthy. We tried the Old Ones, but those members of the Retired Order proved less impartial than we hoped.

In a universe filled with possibilities, there remain half a dozen other “quasisapient” orders out there. Alien in both thought and substance. Rumored to be dangerous.

What have we got to lose?

Kaa

GLEAMING MISSILES STRUCK THE WATER WHENEVER he surfaced to breathe. The spears were crude weapons — hollow wooden shafts tipped with slivers of vol-canic glass — but when a keen-edged harpoon grazed his flank, Kaa lost half his air in a reflexive cry. The harbor — now a cramped, exitless trap — reverberated with his agonized moan.

The hoonish sailors seemed to have no trouble moving around by torchlight, rowing their coracles back and forth, executing complex orders shouted from their captains’ bulging throat sacs. The water’s tense skin reverberated like a beaten drum as the snare tightened around Kaa. Already, a barrier of porous netting blocked the narrow harbor mouth.

Worse, the natives had reinforcements. Skittering sounds announced the arrival of clawed feet, scampering down the rocky shore south of town. Chitinous forms plunged underwater, reminding Kaa of some horror movie about giant crabs. Red qheuens, he realized, as these new allies helped the hoon sailors close off another haven, the water’s depths.

Ifni! What did Zhaki and Mopol do to make the locals so mad at the mere sight of a dolphin in their bay? How did they get these people so angry they want to kill me on sight?

Kaa still had some tricks. Time and again he misled the hoons, making feints, pretending sluggishness, drawing the noose together prematurely, then slipping beneath a gap in their lines, dodging a hail of javelins.

My ancestors had practice doing this. Humans taught us lessons, long before they switched from spears to scalpels.

Yet he knew this was a contest the cetacean could not win. The best he could hope for was a drawn-out tie.

Diving under one hoonish coracle, Kaa impulsively spread his jaws and snatched the rower’s oar in his teeth, yanking it like the tentacle of some demon octopus. The impact jarred his mouth and tender gums, but he added force with a hard thrust of his tail flukes.

The oarsman made a mistake by holding on — even a hoon could not match Kaa, strength to strength. A surprised bellow met a resounding splash as the mariner struck salt water far from the boat. Kaa released the oar and kicked away rapidly. That act would not endear him to the hoon. On the other hand, what was there left to lose? Kaa had quite given up on his mission — to make contact with the Commons of Six Races. All that remained was fighting for survival.

I should have listened to my heart.

I should have gone after Peepoe, instead.

The decision still bothered Kaa with nagging pangs of guilt. How could he obey Gillian Baskin’s orders — no matter how urgent — instead of striking off across the dark sea, chasing after the thugs who had kidnapped his mate and love?

What did duty matter — or even his oath to Terra — compared with that?

After Gillian signed off, Kaa had listened as the sun set, picking out distant echoes of the fast-receding speed sled, still faintly audible to the northwest. Sound carried far in Jijo’s ocean, without the myriad engine noises that made Earth’s seas a cacophony. The sled was already so far away — at least a hundred klicks by then — it would seem forlorn to follow.

But so what? So the odds were impossible? That never mattered to the heroes one found in storybooks and holosims! No audience ever cheered a champion who let mere impossibility stand in the way.

Maybe that was what swayed Kaa, in an agonized moment. The fact that it was such a cliché. All the movie heroes — whether human or dolphin — would routinely forsake comrades, country, and honor for the sake of love. Relentless propaganda from every romantic tale urged him to do it.

But even if I succeeded, against all odds, what would Peepoe say after I rescued her?

I know her. She’d call me a fool and a traitor, and never respect me again.

So it was that Kaa found himself entering Port Wuphon as ordered, long after nightfall, with all the wooden sailboats shrouded beneath camouflage webbing that blurred their outlines into cryptic hummocks. Still hating himself for his decision, he had approached the nearest wharf, where two watchmen lounged on what looked like walking staffs, beside a pair of yawning noor. By starlight, Kaa had reared up on his churning flukes to begin reciting his memorized speech of greeting … and barely escaped being skewered for his trouble. Whirling back into the bay, he dodged razor-tipped staves that missed by centimeters.

“Wait-t-t!” he had cried, emerging on the other side of the wharf. “You’re mak-ing a terrible mistake! I bring news from your own lossssst ch-ch-children! F-from Alvi—”

He barely escaped a second time. The hoon guards weren’t listening. Darkness barely saved Kaa as growing numbers of missiles hurled his way.

His big mistake was trying a third time to communicate. When that final effort failed, Kaa tried to depart … only to find belatedly that the door had shut. The harbor mouth was closed, trapping him in a tightening noose.

So much for my skill at diplomacy, he pondered, while skirting silently across the bottom muck … only to swerve when his sonar brushed armored forms ahead, approaching with scalloped claws spread wide.

Add that to my other failures … as a spy, as an officer … Mopol and Zhaki would never have antagonized the locals so, with senseless pranks and mischief, if he had led them properly.

… and as a lover.…

In fact, Kaa knew just one thing he was good at. And at this rate, he’d never get another chance to ply his trade.

A strange, thrashing sound came from just ahead, toward the bottom of the bay. He nearly swung around again, dodging it to seek some other place, dreading the time when bursting lungs would force him back to the surface.…

But there was something peculiar about the sound. A softness. A resigned, melodious sadness that seemed to fill the water. Curiosity overcame Kaa as he zigzagged, casting sonar clicks through the murk to perceive—

A hoon!

But what was one of them doing down here?

Kaa nosed forward, ignoring the growing staleness of his air supply, until he made out a tall biped amid clouds of churned-up mud. Diffracted echoes confirmed his unbelieving eyes. The creature was undressing, carefully removing articles of clothing, tying them together in a string.

Kaa guessed it was a female, from the fact that it was a bit smaller and had only a modest throat sac.

Is it the one I pulled overboard? But why doesn’t she swim back to the boat? I assumed…

Kaa was struck by a wave of image-rupture alienation — a sensation all too familiar to Earthlings since contact — when some concept that had seemed familiar abruptly made no sense anymore.

Hoons can’t swim!

The journal of Alvin Hph-wayuo never mentioned this. In fact, Alvin implied that his people passionately loved boats and the sea. Nor were they cavalier about their lives, but mourned the loss of loved ones even more deeply than a human or dolphin would. Kaa suddenly knew he’d been fooled by Alvin’s writings, sounding so much like an Earth kid, never mentioning things that he simply assumed.

Aliens. Who can figure?

He stared as the hoon tied the string of clothes around her left wrist and held the other end to her mouth, calmly exhaling her last air, inflating a balloonlike fold of cloth. It floated upward, no more than two meters, stopping far short of the surface.

She’s not signaling for help, he fathomed as the hoon sat down in the mud, humming a dirge. She’s making sure they can drag the bottom and retrieve her body. Kaa had read Alvin’s account of death rituals the locals took quite seriously.

By now his own lungs burned fiercely. Kaa deeply regretted that the breather unit on his harness had burned out after Zhaki shot him.

He heard the qheuens approaching from behind, clacking their claws, but Kaa sensed a hole in their line, confident he could streak past, just out of reach. He tried to turn … to seize the brief opportunity.

Oh, hell, he sighed, and kicked the other way, aiming for the dying hoon.

It took some time to get her to the surface. When they broke through, her entire body shook with harsh, quivering gasps. Water jetted from nostril orifices at the same time as air poured in through her mouth, a neat trick that Kaa kind of envied.

He pushed her close enough to throw one arm over a drifting oar, then he whirled around to peer across the bay, ready to duck onrushing spears.

None came. In fact, there seemed a curious absence of boats nearby. Kaa dropped his head down to cast suspicious sonar beams through his arched brow — and confirmed that all the coracles had backed off some distance.

A moon had risen. One of the big ones. He could make out silhouettes now … hoons standing in their rowboats, all of them turned to face north … or maybe northwest. The males had their sacs distended, and a steady thrumming filled the air. They seemed oblivious to the sudden reappearance of one of their kind from a brush with drowning.

I’d have thought they’d be all over this area, dropping weighted ropes, trying to rescue her. It was another example of alien thinking, despite all the Terran books these hoons had read. Kaa was left with the task of shoving her with the tip of his rostrum, a creepy feeling coursing his spine as he pushed the bedraggled survivor toward one of the docks.

More villagers stood along the wharf, their torches flickering under gusts of stiffening wind. They seemed to be watching … or listening … to something.

A dolphin can both see and hear things happening above the water’s surface, but not as well as those who live exclusively in that dry realm. With his senses still in an uproar, Kaa could discern little in the direction they faced. Just the hulking outline of a mountain.

The computerized insert in his right eye flexed and turned until Kaa finally made out a flickering star near the mountain’s highest point. A star that throbbed, flashing on and off to a staccato rhythm. He could not make anything of it at first … though the cadence seemed reminiscent of Galactic Two.

“Ex-x-xcuse me …”he began, trying to take advantage of the inactivity. Whatever else was happening, this seemed a good chance to get a word in edgewise. “I’m a dolphin … cousin to humansss … I’ve been sssent with-th a message for Uriel the—”

The crowd suddenly erupted in a moan of emotion that made Kaa’s sound-sensitive jaw throb. He made out snatches of individual speech.

“Rockets!” one onlooker sighed in Anglic. “The sages made rockets!”

Another spoke GalSeven in tones of wonder. “One small enemy spaceship destroyed … and now the big one is targeted!”

Kaa blinked, transfixed by the villagers’ tension.

Rockets? Did I hear right? But—

Another cry escaped the crowd.

“They plummet!” someone cried. “They strike!”

Abruptly, the mountain-perched star paused its twinkling bulletin. All sound seemed to vanish with it. The hoons stood in dead silence. Even the oily water of the bay was hushed, lapping softly against the wharf.

The flashing resumed, and there came from the crowd a moan of shaken disappointment.

“It survives, exists. The mother battleship continues,” went the GalTwo mutter of a traeki, somewhere in the crowd.

“Our best effort has failed.

“And now comes punishment.”

Lark

THE MOMENT LARK PRAYED FOR NEVER CAME. THE walls did not shatter, torn by native-made warheads or screaming splinters of greatboo. Instead, the sound of detonations remained distant, then diminished. The floorthrobbing vibration of Jophur defense guns changed tenor now that the element of surprise was gone, from frantic to complacent, as if the incoming missiles Were mere nuisances.

Then silence fell. It was over.

He let go of the Egg fragment, and released Ling, as well. Lark pulled his knees in, wrapped both an is around them, and rocked miserably. He had never felt sc disappointed to be alive.

“Woorsh, that was close!” Ling exhaled, clearly savoring survival. Not that Lark blamed her. She might still nurse hopes of escape, or of being swapped in some Galactic prisoner exchange. All this might become just another episode in her memoirs. An episode, like me, he thought. The clever jungle boy she once met on Jijo.

His old friend Harullen might have seen a bright side to this failure. Now the angered Jophur might extinguish all sapient life on the planet, not only their g’Kek blood enemies. Wouldn’t that fit in with Lark’s beliefs? His heresy?

The Six Races don’t belong here, but neither do they deserve annihilation. I wanted us to do the right thing peacefully, honorably, and of our own accord. Without violence. All this burning of forests and valleys.

“Look!”

He glanced at Ling, who had stood up and was pointing at Ewasx. The ring stack still quaked, but one torus in the middle was undergoing full-scale convulsions. Throbbing indentations formed on opposite sides, distending its round shape.

Both men joined Ling, staring with unbelieving eyes as the dents deepened and spread into circular bulges, straining outward until a sheer membrane was all that restrained them. The Jophur’s basal legs started pumping and flexing.

The humans jumped back when Ewasx abruptly skittered across the floor, first toward the armored door, then away again, zigging and zagging three times before finally sagging back down, like a heap of flaccid tubes.

The middle ring continued to throb and swell.

“What is it doing?” Ling asked in awe.

Lark had to swallow before answering.

“It’s vlenning. Giving birth, you’d say. Traekis don’t do this often, ’cause it endangers the union of the stack. Mostly they bud embryos and let ’em grow in a mulch pile, on their own.”

Rann gaped. “Giving birth? Here?” Clearly, he knew more about killing Jophur than about the rest of their life cycle.

Lark realized — the catatonia of Ewasx was not caused simply by the surprise rocket attack. That shock had triggered a separate convulsion just waiting to happen.

Membranes started tearing. One of the new rings, almost the size of Lark’s head and colored a deep shade of purple, began writhing through. The other was smaller and crimson, emerging through a mucusy pustule, trailing streamers of rank, oily stuff. Both infant toruses slithered down the flanks of the parent stack, then across the metal floor, seeking shadows.

“Lark, you’d better have a look at this,” Ling said.

He could barely yank his gaze away from the nauseating, bewitching sight of the greasy newborns. Upon stumbling over to join Ling, he found her pointing downward.

“When it ran back and forth, a dura ago … it left this trail on the floor.”

So what? he thought. Lark saw smears, like grease stains on the metal plating. Traeki often do that.

Then he blinked, recognizing Anglic letters. One, two, three … four of them.

REWQ

“What the …?” Rann puzzled aloud.

Lark raised a hand to his forehead, where his rewq symbiont lay waiting for its next duty while supping lightly from his veins. At a touch, it swarmed over his eyes, recasting the colors in the room.

At once, everything changed. Till that moment, the still-quivering flanks of the Jophur had seemed a mottled jumble of distorted shades. But now, rows of letters could be seen, crisscrossing several older rings.

lark, the first series began one ring opens doors. use it. rejoin the six.…

A squeal of pain interrupted from Lark’s right, unlike any shouted by a mammal. He whirled, and cried, “Stop!”

Rann stood over one of the newly vlenned rings, his foot raised to stomp on it a second time. The small creature shook, bleeding waxy fluids from a rent along one flank.

“Why?” the Danik demanded. “You sooners signed our death warrants with that crude missile attack. We might as well get in some of our own.”

Ling confronted her former colleague hotly. “Fool! Hypocrite! You stopped Lark earlier, and now do this? Don’t you want to get out of here?”

She bent over the quivering ring and reached toward it nervously, tentatively.

Lark turned back toward the ring stack … the composite being that had somehow managed to become Asx again, in a strange, limited way. The letters were already fading as he read the second line.

Give other to Phwhoon-dau/Lester. he/you/they must

This time, the scream was human.

Ling! He spun around and rushed to her aid.

She held the little wounded torus in one hand while the other clawed over her shoulder at Rann. The male Danik throttled her from behind, his forearm around her throat, closing her windpipe, and possibly her arteries.

Rann heard Lark’s irate bellow and swiveled lightly, using Ling’s body as a shield while he kept choking her. Rann’s face was contorted with pleasure as Lark feinted right, then launched himself at the star warrior’s other side. There was no time for finesse as they all toppled together, a grappling mass of arms and legs.

It might have been an even match, if Ling hadn’t passed out. But when her body slumped, insensate. Lark had to face Rann’s trained fury alone. He managed to get a few blows in, but soon had his hands full just preventing the Rothen agent from striking a vital spot. Finally, in desperation, he threw his arms around Rann, seizing his broad torso in a wrestler’s embrace.

His opponent felt confident enough to spare some strength for taunts.

“Darwinist savage …” Rann jeered, close to Lark’s ear.

“… devolved ape …”

Lark managed an insult of his own—.

“The … Rothen … are … pigs.…”

Rann snarled and tried to bite his ear. Lark swung his head aside just in time, then slammed it back into Rann’s face, breaking his lip.

Abruptly, a stench seemed to swell around their heads, filling Lark’s nostrils with a cloying, sickening tang. For an instant he wondered if it was the Danik’s body odor. Or else the smell of death.

Rann managed to free a hand and used it to pummel Lark’s side. But the pain seemed distant, and the blows vague, unsteady. Vision wavered as the awful smell increased … and Lark grew aware that his opponent was being affected, as well.

More so.

In moments, Rann’s iron grip let go and the man collapsed away from him. Lark backed up, gasping. Through a haze of wavering consciousness, he noted the source of the stench. The wounded traeki ring had climbed onto Rann’s shoulder and was squirting yet another dose of some noxious substance straight into the star god’s face.

Should … make it … stop, now, Lark thought. An excess might not just knock Rann out, but kill him.

Life had priorities, though. Fighting exhaustion and the tempting refuge of sleep, Lark rolled over to seek Ling, hoping enough life still lingered to be coaxed back into the world.

Blade

“… THE MOST EFFECTIVE WARHEADS WERE THE ones tipped with toporgic capsules, filled with traeki formula type sixteen an’ powdered Buyur metal. Kindle beetles were useful in settin’ off the solid rocket cores. A lot of the ones that didn’t use beetles either fizzled or blew up on their launchpads.…”

Blade listened to the young human recite her report to an urrish telegraph operator, whose keystrokes became fast-departing beams of light. Jeni Shen winced as a pharmacist applied unguents to her singed skin. Her face was soot-covered and the left side of her jerkin gave off smoldering fumes. Jeni’s voice was dry as slate and it must have been painful for her to speak, but the recitation continued, nonstop, as if she feared this mountaintop semaphore station might be the first target of any Jophur retaliation.

“… Observers report that the best targeting happened in rockets that had message-ball critters aboard. Usin’ ’em that way was just a whim of Phwhoon-dau’s, so there weren’t many. But it seemed to work. Before everything blew up, Lester said we should reexamine all the Buyur critters we know about, in case they have other uses.…”

The stone hut was crowded. The missile assault, and subsequent fires, had sent refugees pouring through the passes. Blade was forced to wade through the tide of fugitives in order to reach this militia outpost, where he might make a report of his adventure.

He found the semaphore already tied up with frenzied news — about the successful downing of the last Jophur corvette … and then the failure of a single rocket even to dent the mother ship. That night of soaring hopes crashed further when casualties became known, including at least one of the High Sages of the Six.

Yet a low level of elation continued. Bad news was only expected. But a taste of victory came amplified by sheer surprise.

Blade recalled vividly the fiery plummet of both burning halves of the ruined starship, setting off firestorms. I’m glad it only landed in boo, he thought. According to the scrolls, Jijo’s varied ecosystems weren’t equal. Greatboo was a trashy alien invader — like the Six themselves. The planet was not badly wounded by tonight’s conflagration.

Me neither, Blade added, wincing as a g’Kek medic tried to set one of his broken legs.

“Just cut it off,” he told the doctor. “The other one, too.”

“But that will leave you with just three,” the g’Kek complained. “How will you walk?”

“I’ll manage. Anyway, new ones grow back faster if you cut all the way to the bud. Just get it over with, will you?”

Fortunately, he had managed to land on two legs spread apart at opposite sides of his body. That left a tripod of them to use, dragging himself from the fluttering tangle of fabric and gondola parts. The moonlit mountainside had been rocky and steep, a horrid place for a blue qheuen to find himself stranded on a chill night. But the beckoning glimmer of flashed messages, darting from peak to peak, encouraged him to limp onward until he reached this sanctuary.

So, I’ll be able to tell Log Biter my tale, after all. Maybe I’ll even write about it. Nelo should provide backing for a small print run, since half of my story involves his daughter.…

Blade knew his mind was drifting from thirst, pain, and lack of sleep. But if he rested now he would lose his place in line, right after Jeni Shen. The station commander, hearing of his balloon adventure, had given him a priority just after the official report on the rocket attack.

I should be flattered. But in fact, the rockets are used up. Even if there are some left, the element of surprise is gone. They’ll never succeed against the Jophur again.

But my idea’s not been tried yet. And it’d work! I’m living proof.

The smiths of Blaze Mountain have got to be told.

So he sat and fumed, half listening to Jeni’s lengthy, jargon-filled report, trying to be patient.

When the amputation began, Blade’s cupola withdrew instinctively, shielding his eye strip under thick chitin, preventing him from looking around. So he tried pulling his mind back to the time when he briefly flew through the sky … the first of his kind to do so since the sneakship came, so long ago.

But a qheuen’s memories aren’t strong enough to use as a bulwark against pain.

It. took three strong hoons to keep the leg straight enough for the medic to do it cleanly.

Lark

A SECOND STENCH MET HIM WHEN HE WAKED. The first one had smothered cloyingly. When it filled the little room, the world erased under a blanket of sweet pungency.

The new smell was bitter, tangy, repellent, cleaving the insensate swaddling of unconsciousness. There was no transitory muzziness or confusion. Lark jerked upright while his body convulsed through a series of sharp sneezes. All at once he knew the cell, its metal floor and walls, the cramped despair of this place.

A greasy doughnut shape — purple and still covered with mucus — sent a final stream of misty liquid jetting toward his face. Lark gagged, backing away.

“I’m up! Cut it out, dung eater!”

The room wavered as he turned, searching … and found Ling close behind, wheezing at the effort of sitting up. Livid marks showed where Rann had throttled her, nearly taking her life.

Lark turned again, scanning for his enemy.

In moments, he spied the Danik agent’s bare feet, jutting from beyond the rotund bulk of Ewasx.

Ewasx? Or is it still Asx?

The ring stack shivered. Trails of waxy pus trickled from twin wounds on either side, where the vlenned rings had made their escape.

I could try to find out.… Try talking to—

But Lark saw an orderliness to the trembling toruses. A systematic rhythm. Almost regimented. Warbling sounds escaped the speaking vent.

“H-h-h-alt, humans.… I/WE COMMAND … obedience…

The voice wavered unevenly, but gained strength with each passing dura.

Ling met his eyes. There was instant rapport.

Asx had gone to a lot of trouble to provide gifts.

Time to give them a try.

“STOP THAT!” Ewasx adjured. “You are required to … desist.…”

Fortunately, the Jophur’s limbs were still locked in rigor. The lowermost set shivered with resistance when the master ring tried to make them move.

Asx is still fighting for us, Lark realized, knowing it could not last.

“Use the purple one,” he told Ling, who cradled the larger newborn torus. “Asx said it opens locks.”

She lifted her eyes doubtfully, but presented the ring to a flat plate beside the door. They had seen Ewasx touch it whenever the Jophur wanted to leave the cell. Meanwhile, Lark used his frayed shirt as a sling to carry the smaller, crimson traeki. The one cruelly injured by Rann. The one Lark was supposed to deliver to the High Sages — an impossible task, even if the mangled thing survived.

A moan echoed from behind Ewasx. It was the Danik warrior, rousing at last. Come on! Lark urged silently, though Ling almost surely had never used such a key to force a lock.

The purple ring oozed a clear fluid from pores near the plate. Clickety sounds followed, as the door mechanism seemed to consider.…

Then, with a faint hiss, it opened!

He hurried through with Ling, ignoring bitter Jophur curses that followed them until the portal shut again.

“Where now?” Ling asked.

“You’re asking me?” He laughed. “You said Galactic ships are standardized!”

She frowned. “The Rothen don’t have any battlecruisers like this beast. Neither does Earth. We’d be lucky to glimpse one from afar … and even luckier to escape after seeing it.”

Lark felt spooky, standing half-naked in an alien passageway filled with weird aromas. A Jophur might enter this stretch of corridor at any moment, or else a war robot, come to hunt them down.

The floor plates began vibrating, low at first, but with a rising mechanical urgency.

“Just guess,” he urged, trying to offer an encouraging smile.

Ling answered with a shrug. “Well, if we keep going in one direction, sooner or later we’re bound to reach hull. Come on, then. Standing still is the worst thing we can do.”

The hallways were deserted.

Occasionally, they hurried past some large chamber and glimpsed Jophur forms within, standing before oddly curved instrument stations, or mingled in swaying groups, communing with clouds of vapor. But the stacks rarely moved. As a biologist, Lark could not help speculating.

They’re descended from sedentary creatures, almost sessile. Even with the introduction of master rings, they’d retain some traeki ways, like preferring to work in one place, relatively still.

Lark found it bizarre, striding past closed doors for more than an arrowflight — then another, and a third — using their passkey ring to open armored hatches along the way, meeting no one. Asx must have taken this into account, giving us even odds of reaching an airlock and…

Lark wondered.

And then what? If there are sky boats or hover plates, Ling might understand their principles, but how will she operate controls made for Jophur tentacles?

Maybe we should just head for the engine room. Try to break some machinery. Cause some inconvenience before they finally shoot us down.

Ling picked up the pace, a growing eagerness in her steps. Perhaps she sensed something in the thickness of the armored doors, or the subtly curved wall joins, indicating they were close.

The next hatch slid aside — and without warning they suddenly faced their first Jophur.

Ling gasped and Lark’s knees almost failed him. He felt an overpowering impulse to spin around and run away, though it was doubtless already too late. The thing was bigger than Ewasx, with component rings that shimmered a glossy, extravagant health he had never seen on a Jijoan traeki.

The way Rann compares to me, Lark thought numbly.

During that brief instant, his companion lifted the purple ring, aiming it like a gun at the big Jophur.

A stream of scent vapor jetted toward the stack.

It hesitated … then raised up on a dozen insectoid legs and sidled past the two humans, proceeding down the hall.

Lark stared after it, numbly.

What was that? A recognition signal? A forged safeconduct pass?

He could imagine that Asx — wherever the traeki sage had concealed a sliver of self — must have observed all the chemical codes a Jophur used to get around the ship. What Lark could not begin to picture was what kind of consciousness that implied. How could one deliberately hide a personality within a personality, when the new master ring was in charge, pulling all the strings?

The Jophur rounded a corner, moving on about its business.

Lark turned to look at Ling. She met his eyes and together they both let out a hard sigh.

The airlock was filled with machinery, though no boats or hover plates. They closed the inner door and hurried to the other side, applying the trusty passkey ring, eager to see blue sky and smell Jijo’s fresh wind. If they were lucky, and this portal faced the lake, it might even be possible to leap down to the water. Surviving that, their escape could be cut off at any point, once they passed into the Jophur defense perimeter. But none of that seemed to matter right now. The two of them felt eager, indomitable.

Lark still cradled the injured red ring, wondering what the sages were supposed to do with it.

Perhaps Asx expects us to recruit commandos and return with exploser bombs, using these rings to gain entry.…

His thoughts arrested as the big hatch rolled aside. Their first glimpse was not of daylight, but stars.

An instant’s shivering worry passed through his mind before he realized — this was not outer space, but nighttime in the Rimmers. A flood of bracing, cool air made Lark instantly ebullient. I could never leave Jijo, he knew. It’s my home.

A pale glow washed out the constellations where a serrated border crossed the sky — the outline of eastern mountains. It would be dawn soon. A time of hopeful beginnings?

Ling held out her free hand for Lark to take as they strode to the edge and looked down.

“So far, so good,” she said, and he shared her gladness at the sight of glinting moonlight, sparkling on water. “It’s still dim outside. The lake will mask our heat sign. And this time there will be no computer cognizance to give us away.”

Nor convenient breathing tubes, to let us stay safe underwater, he almost added, but Lark didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm.

“Let’s see if there’s anything we can use to get down to the lake, without having to jump,” Ling added. Together they inspected the equipment shelves lining one wall of the airlock, until she cried out excitedly. “I found a standard cable reel! Now if only I can figure out the altered controls …”

While Ling examined the metal spool, Lark felt a change in the low vibration that had been growling in the background ever since they escaped their prison cell. The resonance began to rise in pitch and force, until it soon filled the air with a harsh keening.

“Something’s happening,” he said. “I think—”

Just then the battleship took a sudden jerk, almost knocking them both to the floor. Ling dropped the cable, barely missing her foot.

A second noise burst in through the open door of the airlock. An awful grinding din, as if Jijo herself were complaining. Lark recognized the scraping of metal against rock.

“Ifni!” Ling cried. “They’re taking off!”

Helping each other, fighting for balance, they reached the outer hatch and looked down again, staring aghast at a spectacle of pent-up nature, suddenly unleashed.

Well, so much for jumping in the lake, he thought. The Jophur ship was rising glacially, but the first few dozen meters were crucial, removing the dam that had drowned the valley under a transient reservoir. At once, the Festival Glade was transformed into a roiling tempest. Submerged trees tore loose from their sodden roots. Stones fell crashing into the maelstrom as mud banks were undermined. While the battlecruiser climbed complacently, a vast flood of murky water and debris rushed downstream, pummeling everything in its path, pouring toward distant, unsuspecting plains.

Too late, Lark realized. We were too late making our escape. Now we’re trapped inside.

As if to seal the fact, a light flashed near the open hatch, which began to close. An automatic safety measure, he figured, for a starship taking off. Lark barely suppressed an overpowering temptation to dive through the narrowing gap, despite the deadly chaos waiting below.

Ling squeezed his hand fiercely as they caught a passing glimpse of something shiny and round-shouldered — a slick, elongated dome, uncovered by retreating waters. Even under pale predawn light, they recognized the Rothen-Danik ship, still shut within a prison of quantum time.

Then the armored portal sealed with a boom and hiss, cutting off the all-too-fleeting breeze. Trapped inside, they stared at the cruel hatch.

“We’re heading north,” Lark said. It was the one last thing he had noticed, watching the ravaged valley pass below.

“Come on,” Ling answered pragmatically. “There must be someplace to hide aboard this bloated ship.”

Nelo

STILL A FEW LEAGUES SHORT OF THEIR GOAL, THE zealots realized they were surrounded. They spent the night huddled in the marsh, counting the campfires of regiments loyal to the High Sages. Squeezed between militia units from Biblos and Nelo’s pursuing detachment, the rebels surrendered at first light.

There was little ceremony, and few weapons for the rabble to give up. Most of their fanatical ardor had been used up by the hard slog across a quagmire where mighty Buyur towers once reared toward the sky. Already bedraggled, Jop and his followers marched in a ragged column toward the Bibur, enduring taunts from former neighbors.

“Go ahead an’ look!” Nelo pushed the tree farmer toward a bluff where everyone could look across the wide river at shimmering cliffs, still immersed in dawn’s long shadows. Oncoming daylight revealed a vast cave underneath, chiseled centuries ago by the Earthship Tabernacle. Two dozen huge pillars supported the Fist of Stone, hovering like a suspended sentence, just above a cluster of quaint wooden buildings, each fashioned to resemble some famed structure of Terran heritage — such as the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and the Main Library of San Diego, California.

“The Archive stands,” Nelo told his enemy. “You wanted to bring the Fist crashing down, but it ain’t gonna happen. And in a couple o’ years I’ll be makin’ paper again. It was all for nothin’, Jop. The lives you wasted, and the property. You achieved nothing.”

Nelo saw Jop’s bitterness redouble when they reached a new semaphore station, set up directly across the water from Biblos, where they learned about the rocket attack, the destruction of one Jophur ship, and the rumored damage of another. Young militia soldiers shouted jubilation to learn that last night’s distant “thunderstorm” had instead been the unleashed fury of the Six Races, taking vengeance for the poor g’Kek.

A few older faces were grim. The militia captain warned that this was but a single battle in a war the Commons of Jijo could hardly hope to win.

Nelo refused to think about that. Instead, he kept his promise to Ariana Foo, by handing over her message for transmission. Light-borne signals flew better at night, but the operator refired his lamp when he saw Ariana’s name on the single sheet of paper. While that bulletin went out, the captain looked into getting transportation across the Bibur, where showers and clean clothes waited.

And sleep, Nelo thought. Yet, despite fatigue, he somehow felt younger than he had in ages, as if the tiring chase through swamplands had stripped years away, leaving him a virile warrior of long ago.

Leaning against a tree, Nelo let his eyes close for a little while, his mind turning back to plans for a rebuilt paper mill.

Our first job will be helping the blues put their dam back together. Do it right, this time. Less worrying about camouflage and more about getting good power output. As long as I’m at Biblos, I might as well look into copying some designs.…

Nelo’s head jerked up when a carpentry apprentice from Dolo shouted his name. The lad had been reading last night’s semaphore messages, affixed on the wall of the relay post.

“I just saw your daughter’s name,” the young man told him. “She’s on Mount Guenn!”

Nelo took three jerky steps forward … as Jop did exactly the same thing. The farmer’s expression showed the same surprise. His shock and dismay contrasted with Nelo’s joy at hearing that one of his children lived.

Sara! The papermaker’s mind whirled. In the name of the founders, how did she find herself on Mount Guenn?

He hurried over to the shed, eager to learn more. Perhaps there would be word of Dwer and Lark, as well!

At that moment, a shout erupted from one of the operators inside the semaphore hut. While the sender kept on clicking his key, transmitting Ariana Foo’s message, the receiver burst out through the door, a middle-aged woman waving a paper covered with hurried scrawls.

“Mess … mess …” She ran for the militia captain, gasping urgently.

“Message from lookouts,” she cried. “The Jophur … the Jophur ship is coming this way!”

It did not swoop or plummet. The star vessel was far too vast for that.

A haze of suspended dust accompanied its passage above forest or open ground, but when the immense sky mountain moved ponderously over the Bibur, the waters went ominously still. The glassy-smooth footprint spread even wider than its shadow.

Keep going, Nelo prayed. Just pass us by. Keep going.…

But the great cruiser evidently had plans right here, arresting its forward momentum directly over the river, in plain sight of the Great Archive.

Now it was Nelo’s turn to glower as he glimpsed grim satisfaction pass over Jop’s face. Someone must’ve snitched, he thought. Rumors told of Jophur emissaries, establishing outposts in tiny hamlets, imperiously demanding information. Sooner or later some zealot or scroll thumper would have blabbed about this place.

No slashing rays fell from the mighty battleship. No rain of bombs, taking vengeance for its little brother, lost the night before.

Instead, a few small portals opened in its side. About two dozen robots descended, fluttering lazily until they reached hoon height above the water, where they turned in formation and streaked toward Biblos.

A second wave emerged from the great ship, floating down more slowly on wide plates of burnished black. Tapered cones rode those flat conveyances, like stacks of glossy pancakes, each pile on its own flying skillet.

Even before the Jophur party reached the walls of the hidden city, the space dreadnought began moving again, turning its massive bulk to head back the way it came, roughly south by southeast, gaining altitude at an accelerating pace. By the time Nelo lost it in the glare of the rising sun, the cruiser had climbed above the highest clouds.

Crowds gathered at the riverbank, peering at the opposite shore. Biblos still lay immersed in nightlike shadows. By contrast, the robots glittered till they passed under the Fist of Stone, followed by their Jophur masters.

After that, Nelo and the others had to rely on the militia captain, peering through binoculars, to relate what was happening.

“Each Jophur is entering a different building, guarded by several robots. Some use the front door … but one just sent its servants to smash open a wall and go in that way.

“They’re all inside now … and people are running out! Humans, hoons, qheuens … there’s a g’Kek … his left wheel is smoking. I think he’s been shot.”

The crowd murmured frustration, but there was nothing to do. Nothing anybody could do.

“I see militia squads! Mostly humans with some urs and hoons. They’ve got rifles … the new kind with mulctipped bullets. They’re running toward the Science Building!

“They’re splitting up, skirmish style, using opposite doors to sneak in from both sides at once.”

Nelo clenched his hands as he stared across the Bibur. At the same time, he wondered why the great battleship would come all this way, yet not tarry to destroy the center of Jijoan intellectual life.

I guess the cruiser had other matters to attend to Anyway, it’ll be back to pick up their foray party.

There was one hope. Maybe there are some rockets left after last night. Perhaps they’ll catch the cruiser, before it can return.

There was always that hope — though it seemed unlikely the Jophur would be fooled a second time.

Across the river he could see a flood of refugees — scholars, librarians, and students — pouring out of sally ports and over the battlements. There weren’t many g’Kek among the fugitives. Nor traeki. Both races appeared doomed to stay within, destined for different fates, both of them unpleasant.

He wondered, What do the aliens want with our Library? To check out some books and take ’em back home to read?

In fact, that bizarre notion made sense.

I’ll bet the rocket attack made ’em realize we have tricks up our sleeve. Suddenly they’re interested in what we know, and how we know it. They’ll scan our books to find out what other nasty surprises we might come up with.

Something was happening in the shadowed cave. Distant popping sounds carried across the river, doubtless from within the Hall of Science.

“They’re coming out!” the captain announced. His grip on the binoculars stiffened. “The rifle squads … they’re in retreat … dragging their wounded, trying to cover each other. They’re …”

He lowered the glasses. The officer’s eyes were bleak and he stood silently, completely overcome.

A corporal gently took the binoculars and resumed reporting.

“Dead,” was the first word she said.

“I see dead soldiers. They’re all down.”

A hush settled over the crowd. Across the Bibur nothing seemed to be moving anymore, except an occasional sharp-edged machine shape, flitting underneath the Fist of Stone.

The explosers… Nelo wondered. Why didn’t they set off their charges?

The greatest secret of the Six Races. The most secure fortress of humankind on Jijo. Biblos had been captured in a matter of duras. Its treasured archive lay in the tight grip of Jophur invaders.

Ewasx

IS IT SETTLED THEN, MY RINGS? HAVE WE ROOTED out the last corners of your clandestine resistance? Can we assume there will be no more episodes of surreptitious rebellion?

The Priest-Stack threatened to dismantle us/Me after the last embarrassment, when you silly rings foolishly/cleverly managed to perform a vlenning without your master torus knowing. The priest aimed to scrape every drip trail of waxy memory lining our core, seeking clues to the whereabouts of the pair of wolfling vermin you (briefly, mutinously) released into our glorious Polkjhy ship.

But then the stack in change of psychological tactics reported telemetry showing that Lark and Ling almost surely departed the ship when instruments showed an airlock hatch anomalously opening.

Humans are good with water. No doubt they imagined themselves safe after entering the lake, never suspecting that they were about to be swept downstream into a vortex of ruin when our majestic Polkjhy took off!

The droll appropriateness of this fate — the dramatic irony — so pleased the Captain-Leader that a ruling was made, overturning the Priest-Stack’s desire. For the time being, then, our/My union is safe.

DO NOT COUNT ON CONTINUED TEMPERANCE/FORGIVENESS, MY RINGS!

Forgiveness for what, you ask?

Now you worry Me. Is the shared wax so badly melted? Did the Asx personality so damage us, with its second attempt at suicide-by-amnesia? Must I provide memory of recent events through the demi-electronic processes of the master torus?

Very well, My rings, I shall do so. Then we will begin again, restoring the expertise that made us useful to the Jophur cause.

• • •

Together we watched while a party from our ship took possession of the so-called Library used by the savage Six Races. Though it contains a pathetically small amount of bit-equivalent data, this is the source/font of their wolfling trickery.

Feral scheming that has cost us dearly.

A fine thing happened when we/I caught sight of those crude buildings made from sliced trees, sheltered in an artificial cave. Many hidden waxy trails resonated with sudden recognition! Accessing these recovered tracks, we were able to tell the Captain-Leader many secrets of this trove of pseudo-knowledge. Secrets Asx had meant to render inaccessible.

Slowly, we regain our former reputation and esteem. Does that make you glad, My rings?

How gratifying to feel your agreement come so readily now! That brief rebellion, followed by a second suicide amnesia, appears to have left you more docile than before. No longer sovereign traeki rings, but parts of a greater whole.

Now regard! Leaving a force behind to secure Biblos, our Polkjhy turns to. its main task. Too long have we let ourselves be diverted/delayed. There will be no more negotiating with Rothen sneak thieves. No more dickering with savage races. Those six will meet their varied fates from land forces already scattered across the Slope.

As for Polkjhy, we cruise toward that continental cleft, that ocean abyss. Estimated locale of the dolphin ship.

IT IS DECIDED. THE ROTHEN HAD THE RIGHT IDEA, AFTER ALL.

We’ll bombard the depths, putting the fugitive Earthlings in peril. To preserve their lives, they will have no choice but to rise up and surrender.

Until now, the Captain-Leader preferred patience over rash action. We did not want to destroy the very thing we seek! Not before learning its secrets. Since no competing clan or fleet has come to Jijo, we appeared to have a wealth of time.

But that was before we lost both corvettes. Before postponements stretched on and on.

Now we are resolved to take the chance!

With depth bombs ready in great store, we plunge toward the zone known as the Rift.

WHAT IS THIS? ALREADY?

DETECTORS BLARE.

IN THE WATERS AHEAD OF US — MOTION!

Joyous hunt lust fills the bridge. It must be the prey, giving away their location as they scurry in search of a new hiding place.

Then remote perceptors cry out upsetting news.

No single ship is making the vibrations we detect.

THERE ARE SCORES OF EMISSION SITES … HUNDREDS!

Sara

EMERSON SEEMED CHEERFUL DURING THE LONG ride down from Mount Guenn, pressing his face against the warped window of the little tram, gazing at the sea.

How would he feel if he knew whom we were meeting? Sara wondered as the car zoomed down ancient lava flows, swifter than a galloping urs.

Would he be ecstatic, or try to jump out and flee?

Far below, a myriad bright sun glints stretched from the surf line all the way to a cloud-fringed western horizon. Jijo’s waters seemed placid, but Sara still felt daunted by the sight. A mere one percent ripple in that vastness would erase every tree and settlement along the coast. The ocean’s constancy proved the ample goodness of this life world — a nursery of species.

I always hoped to see this, before my bones went to the Midden as dross. I just never figured I’d come by horseback, across the Spectral Flow, over a volcano … and finally by fabulous cable car, all toward confronting creatures out of legend.

Sara felt energized, despite the fact that nobody on Mount Guenn had slept much lately.

Uriel had finished using her analog computer barely in time. Just miduras after sending the ballistics calculations north, semaphore operators reported breathless news about the consequences.

Stunning rocket victories.

Discouraging rocket failures.

Forest fires, dead sages, and the Egg — wounded, silent, possibly forever.

Flash floods below Festival Glade, leaving countless dead or homeless.

Nor was that all. Throughout the night, tucked amid other tidings from across the Slope, came clipped summaries of events bearing hard on Sara.

Elation surged when she learned of Blades unqheuenish aerial adventures. Then her father’s report triggered overpowering images of the destruction of Dolo Village, forcing her to seek a place to sit, burying her head in her hands. Nelo lived — that was something. But others she had known were gone, along with the house she grew up in.

Lark and Dwer … we dreamed what it might be like when the dam blew. But I never really thought it could happen.

Waves of sorrow kept Sara withdrawn for a time, till someone told her an urgent message had come, addressed specifically for her, under the imprimatur of a former High Sage of the Six.

Ariana Foo, Sara realized, scanning the brief missive. Ifni, who cares about the dimensions of the ship that crashed Emerson into the swamp? Does it matter what kind of chariot he used, when he was a star god? He’s a wounded soul now. Crippled. Trapped on Jijo, like the rest of us.

Or was he?

After so many shocks that eventful night, Sara was just lying down for a blotting balm of sleep when events close at hand rocked Uriel and her guests.

At dawn, the captains of Wuphon Port sent word of a monster in their harbor. A fishlike entity who, after some misunderstandings, claimed relatedness to human beings.

Moreover, the creature said it bore a message for the smith.

Uriel was overjoyed.

“The little sneak canera that scared us so … the device cane fron the Earthling shif! Ferhafs the Jophur have not found us, after all!”

That mattered. The sky battleship was said to be on the move, perhaps heading in their direction. But Uriel could not evacuate the forge with several projects still under way. Her teams had never been busier.

“I’ll go see the Terran at once,” the smith declared.

There was no lack of volunteers to come along. Riding the first tram, Sara watched Prity flip through Emerson’s wrinkled sketchpad, lingering over a page where sleek figures with finned backs and tails arched ecstatically through crashing waves. An image drawn from memory.

“They look other than I inagined,” commented Uriel, curling her long neck past the chimp’s shoulder. “Till now, I only knew the race fron descrifshuns in vooks.”

“You should read the kind with pictures in ’em.” Kurt the Exploser laughed, nudging his nephew. But Jomah kept his face pressed to the window next to Emerson taking turns pointing at features of the fast-changing landscape. Ever-cheerful, the starman showed no awareness of what this trip was about.

Sara knew what tugged her heart. Beyond all other worries and pangs, she realized, It may be time for the bird to fly back to his own kind.

Watching the robust person she had nursed from the brink of death, Sara saw no more she could offer him. No cure for a ravaged brain, whose sole hope lay back in the Civilization of the Five Galaxies. Even with omnipotent foes in pursuit, who wouldn’t choose that life over a shadow existence, huddling on a stranded shore?

The ancestors, that’s who. The Tabernacle crew, and all the other sneaksbips.

Sara recalled what Sage Purofsky said, only a day ago.

“There are no accidents, Sara. Too many ships came to Jijo, in too short time.”

“The scrolls speak of destiny,” she had replied.

“Destiny!” The sage snorted disdain. “A word made up by people who don’t understand how they got where they are, and are blind to where they’re going.”

“Are you saying you know how we got here, Master?”

Despite all the recent commotion and tragedy, Sara found her mind still hooked by Purofsky’s reply.

“Of course I do, Sara. It seems quite clear to me.

“We were invited.”

Ewasx

FOOLS!” THE CAPTAIN-LEADER DECLARES. “ALL BUT one of these emanations must come from decoy torpedoes, tuned to imitate the emission patterns of a starship. It is a standard tactical ruse in deep space. But such artifice cannot avail if we linger circumspectly at short range!

“Use standard techniques to sift the emanations.

“FIND THE TRUE VESSEL WE SEEK!”

Ah, My rings. Can you discern the colors swarming down the glossy flanks of our Captain-Leader? See how glorious, how lustrous they are. Witness the true dignity of Jophur wrath in its finest form.

Such indignation! Such egotistic rage! The Oailie would be proud of this commander of ours, especially as we all hear impossible news.

THESE ARE NOT DECOY DRONES AT ALL.

The myriad objects we detect … moving out of the Rift toward open ocean … EVERY ONE OF THEM IS A REAL STARSHIP!

The bridge mists with fearful vapors. A great fleet of ships! How did the Earthers acquire such allies?

Even our Polkjhy is no match for this many.

We will be overwhelmed!

Dwer

I AM SORRY,” GILLIAN BASKIN TOLD HIM. “THE DECISION came suddenly. There was no time to arrange a special ride to shore.”

She seemed irked, as if his request were unexpected. But in fact, Dwer had asked for nothing else since his second day aboard this vessel.

The two humans drifted near each other in a spacious, water-filled chamber, the control center of starship Streaker. Dolphins flew past them across the spherical room, breathing oxygen-charged fluid with lungs that had been modified to make it almost second nature. At consoles and workstations, they switched to bubble domes or tubes attached directly to their blowholes. It seemed as strange an environment as Dwer had ever dreamed, yet the fins seemed in their element. By contrast, Dwer and Gillian wore balloonlike garments, seeming quite out of place.

“I’m not doing any good here,” he repeated, hearing the words narrowly projected by his globe helmet. “I got no skills you can use. I can hardly breathe the stuff you call air. Most important, there are folks waiting for me. Who need me. Can’t you just cut me loose in some kind of a boat?”

Gillian closed her eyes and sighed — a brief, eerie set of clicks and chuttering moans. “Look, I understand your predicament,” she said in Anglic. “But I have over a hundred lives to look after … and a lot more at stake, in a larger sense. I’m sorry, Dwer. All I can hope is that you’ll understand.”

He knew it useless to pursue the matter further. A dolphin at one of the bridge stations called for attention, and Gillian was soon huddled with that fin and Lieutenant Tsh’t, solving the latest crisis.

The groan of Streaker’s engines made Dwer’s head itch — a residual effect, perhaps, of the way his brain was palped and bruised by the Danik robot. He had no proof things would really be any better if he found his way back to shore. But his legs, arms, and lungs all pined for wilderness — for wind on his face and the feel of rough ground underfoot.

A ghostly map traced its way across the bridge. The realm of dry land was a grayish border rimming both sides of a submerged canyon — the Rift — now filled with moving lights, dispersing like fire bees abandoning their hives. So it seemed to Dwer as over a hundred ancient Buyur vessels came alive after half a million years, departing the trash heap where they were consigned long ago.

The tactic was familiar. Many creatures used flocking to confuse predators. He approved the cleverness of Gillian and her crew, and wished them luck.

But I can’t help them. I’m useless here. She ought to let me go.

Most of the salvaged ships were under robotic control, programmed to follow simple sets of instructions. Volunteers rode a few derelicts, keeping close to Streaker, performing special tasks. Rety had volunteered for one of those teams, surprising Dwer and worrying him at the same time.

She never does anything unless there’s an angle.

If he had gone along, there might have been a chance to veer the decoy close to shore, and jump off.…

But no, he had no right to mess up Gillian’s plan.

Dammit, I’m used to action! I can’t handle being a passive observer.

But handle it he must.

Dwer tried to cultivate patience, ignoring an itch where the bulky suit would not let him scratch, watching the lights disperse — most heading for the mouth of the Rift, spilling into the vast oceanic abyss of the Great Midden itself.

“Starship enginesss!” The gravitics detector officer announced, thrashing her tail flukes in the water, causing bubbles in the supercharged liquid.

“P-passive detectors show Nova class or higher … it’sss following the path of the Riffft.…”

Ewasx

REALIZATION EMERGES, ALONG WITH A STENCH OF frustration.

The vast fleet of vessels that we briefly feared has proved not to be a threat, after all. They are not warships, but decommissioned vessels, long ago abandoned as useless for efficient function.

Nevertheless, they baffle and thwart our goal/mission.

A blast of leadership pheromones cuts through the disappointed mist.

“TO WORK THEN,” our Captain-Leader proclaims.

“WE ARE SKILLED. WE ARE MIGHTY. SO LET US DO YOUR/OUR JOBS WELL.

“PIERCE THIS MYSTERY. FIND THE PREY. WE ARE JOPHUR. WE SHALL PREVAIL.”

Dwer

R GLITTERING LIGHT ENTERED THE DISPLAY ZONE, much higher and much larger than any of the others, and cruising well above the imaginary waterline.

That must be the battleship, he thought. His mind tried to come up with an image. Something huge and terrible. Clawed and swift.

Suddenly, the detection officer’s voice went shrill. “They’re dropping ordnance!”

Sparks began falling from the big glow.

Bombs, Dwer realized. He had seen this happen before, but not on such a profuse scale.

Lieutenant Tsh’t shouted a warning.

“All handsss, prepare for shock waves!”

Sara

A HOONISH WORK CREW SWARMED OVER THE TRAM after the passengers debarked, filling the car with stacks of folded cloth. Teams had been sending the stuff up to the forge since dawn, stripping every ship of its sails. But the urrish smith hardly glanced at the cargo. Instead, Uriel trotted off, leading the way down to the cove with a haughty centauroid gait.

The dense, salty air of sea level affected everybody. Sara kept an eye on Emerson, who sniffed the breeze and commented in song.

“A storm is a-brewin’

You can bet on it tonight.

A blow is a-stewin’

So you better batten tight.”

The khutas and warehouses of the little port were shaded by a dense lattice of melon vines and nectar creepers, growing with a lush, tropical abundance characteristic of southern climes. The alleys were deserted though. Everyone was either working for Uriel or else down by the bay, where a crowd of hoons and qheuens babbled excitedly. Several hoons — males and females with beards of seniority — knelt by the edge of a quay, conversing toward the water, using animated gestures. But the town officials made way when Uriel’s party neared.

Sara kept her attention on Emerson, whose expression stayed casually curious until the last moment, when a sleek gray figure lifted its glossy head from the water.

The starman stopped and stared, blinking rapidly.

He’s surprised, Sara thought. Could we be wrong? Perhaps he has nothing to do with the dolphin ship.

Then the cetacean emissary lifted its body higher, thrashing water with its tail.

“Sssso, it’s true.…” the fishlike Terran said in thickly accented Anglic, inspecting Emerson with one eye, then the other.

“Glad to see you living. Engineer D-D’Anite. Though it hardly seems possible, after what we saw happen to you back at the Fractal world.

“I confessss, I can’t see how you followed us to this whale-forsaken planet.”

Powerful emotions fought across Emerson’s face. Sara read astonishment, battling surges of both curiosity and frustrated despair.

“K-K-K—”

The dismal effort to speak ended in a groan.

“A-ah-ahh …”

The dolphin seemed upset by this response, chuttering dismay over the human’s condition.

But then Emerson shook his head, seeking to draw on other resources. At last, he found a way to express his feelings, releasing a burst stream of song.

“How quaint the ways of paradox!

At common sense she gaily mocks!

We’ve quips and quibbles heard in

flocks,

But none to beat this paradox!”

Gillian

THE ULTIMATUM BLANKETED ALL ETHERIC WAVE-lengths — a scratchy caterwauling that filled Streaker’s bridge, making the oxy-water fizz. Streams of bubbles swelled and popped with each Galactic Four syntax phrase.

Most neo-dolphin crew members read a text translation prepared by the Niss Machine. Anglic letters and GalSeven glyphs flowed across the main holo screen.

HEAR AND COMPREHEND OUR FINAL COMMAND/OFFER!

• • •

Gillian listened for nuance in the original Jophur dialect, hoping to glean something new. It was the third repetition since the enemy dreadnought began broadcasting from high in the atmosphere.

“YOU WHOM WE SEEK — YOU HAVE PERFORMED CLEVER MANEUVERS, WORTHY OF RESPECT AT THIS JUNCTURE, WE SHALL NO LONGER WASTE BOMBS. WE SHALL CEASE USELESSLY INSPECTING DECOYS.”

The change in tactics was expected. At first, the foe had sent robots into the lightless depths, to examine and eliminate reactivated Buyur ships, one by one. But it was a simple matter for Hannes Suessi’s team to fix booby traps. Each derelict would self-destruct when a probe approached, taking the automaton along with it.

The usual hierarchy of battle was thus reversed. Here in the Midden, big noisy ships were far cheaper than robots to hunt them. Suessi had scores more ready to peel off from widely separated dross piles. It was doubtful the Jophur could spend drones at the same rate.

There was a downside. The decoy ships were discards, in ill repair when abandoned, half a million years ago. Only the incredible hardiness of Galactic manufacture left them marginally useful, and dozens had already burned out, littering the Midden once more with their dead hulks.

“FAILING TO COERCE YOU BY THAT MEANS, WE ARE NOW PREPARED TO OFFER YOU GENEROUS TERMS…”

This was the part Gillian paid close attention to, the first couple of times it played. Unfortunately, Jophur “generosity” wasn’t tempting. In exchange for Streaker’s data, charts, and samples, the Captain-Leader of the Greatship Polkjhy promised cryonic internment for the crew, with a guarantee of revival and free release in a mere thousand years. “After the present troubles have been resolved.”

In other words, the Jophur wanted to have Streaker’s secrets … and to make sure no one else shared them for a long time to come.

While the message laid out this offer, Gillian’s second-in-command swam alongside.

“We’ve managed to c-come up with most of the suppliesss the local wizard asked for,” Tsh’t reported. One of the results of making contact with the Commons of Six Races had been a shopping list of items desperately wanted by the urrish smith, Uriel.

“Several decoy ships are being diverted close to shore, as you requested. Kaa and his new t-team can strip them of the stuff Uriel wants, as they swing by.”

The dolphin lieutenant paused. “I suppose I needn’t add that this increases our danger? The enemy might detect a rhythm in these movementsss, and target their attention on the hoonish seaport-t.”

“The Niss came up with a swarming pattern to prevent that,” Gillian answered. “What about the crew separation? How are Makanee’s preparations coming along?”

Tsh’t nodded her sleek head. Taking a break from the laborious, underwater version of Anglic, she replied in Trinary.

Seasons change the tides,

That tug us toward our fates,

And divide loved ones…

To which she added a punctuating coda:

… forever.…

Gillian winced. What she planned — least awful of a dozen grievous options — would sever close bonds among a crew that had shared great trials. An epic journey Earthlings might sing about for ages to come.

Providing there are still Earthlings, after the Time of Changes.

In fact, she had no choice. Half of Streaker’s neo-dolphin complement were showing signs of stress atavism — a decay of the faculties needed for critical thought. Fear and exhaustion had finally taken their toll. No client race as young as Tursiops amicus had ever endured so much for so long, almost alone.

It’s time to make the sacrifice we all knew would someday come.

The chamber still vibrated with Jophur threats. Coming from some other race, she might have factored in an element of bluster and bravado, but she took these adversaries precisely at their word.

The holo display glowed with menacing letters.

WE ARE THE ONLY GALACTIC WARSHIP IN THIS REGION. NO ONE IS COMING TO HELP YOU. NOR WILL ANY COMPETITORS DISTRACT US, AS HAPPENED ON OTHER OCCASIONS.

WE CAN AFFORD TO WAIT YOU OUT, INVESTIGATING AND ELIMINATING DECOYS FROM SAFE RANGE. OR ELSE, IF NECESSARY, THIS NOBLE SHIP WILL FORGO SOLE HONOR AND SEND FOR HELP FROM THE VAST JOPHUR ARMADA.

DELAY MERELY INCREASES OUR WRATH. IT AUGMENTS THE HARM WE SHALL DO TO YOUR TERRAN COUSINS, AND THE OTHER SOONERS WHO DWELL ILLICITLY ON FORBIDDEN LAND.…

Gillian thought of Alvin, Huck, and Ur-ronn, listening in a nearby dry cabin — and Pincer-Tip, who represented them on the bridge, darting to and fro with flicks of his red claws.

We already drew hell down on the locals, when the Rothen somehow tracked us to Jijo. There must be a way to spare them further punishment on our account.

Soon it will be time to end this.

Gillian turned back to Tsh’t. “How much longer before it’s our turn?”

The lieutenant communed with the tactics-and-movement officer.

“We’ll slip in to shore between the fourth and fifth decoys … about eight hours from now.”

Gillian glanced at Pincer, his reddish carapace covered with oxy-water bubbles, the qheuen visor spinning madly, taking in everything with the avidness of adolescence. The local youths should be glad about what was about to happen. And so will Dwer Koolhan. I hope this pleases him … though it’s not quite what he wanted.

Gillian admitted to herself she would miss the young man who reminded her so much of Tom.

“All right, then,” she told Tsh’t. “Let’s take the kids home.”

Lark

TOGETHER, THEY PROVED ONLY HALF-BLIND, STUMBLING down the musty corridors of a vast alien ship filled with hostile beings. Ling knew more than he did about starships, but Lark was the one who kept them from getting completely lost.

For one thing, there were few symbols on the walls, so their knowledge of several Galactic dialects proved almost useless. Instead, each closed aperture or intersection seemed to project its own, unique smell, effective at short range. As a Jijoan, Lark could sniff some of these and dimly grasp the simplest pheromone indicators — about as well as a bright human four-year-old might read street signs in a metropolis.

One bitter tang reminded him of the scent worn by traeki proctors at Gathering Festival, when they had to break up a fight or subdue a belligerent drunk.

SECURITY, the odor seemed to say. He steered Ling around that hallway.

She had a goal, however, which was one up on him. With his head full of fragrant miasmas, Lark gladly left the destination up to her. No doubt any path they chose would eventually lead to the same place — their old prison cell.

Three more times, they encountered solitary Jophur. But puffs from the purple ring caused them to be ignored. Doors continued sliding open on command. The gift from Asx was incredible. A little too good, in fact.

I can’t believe this trick will work for long, he thought as they hurried deeper into the battleship’s heart. Asx probably expected us to need it for a midura or so, just till we made it outside. Once the crew was alerted about escaped prisoners, the ruse must surely fail. The Jophur would use countermeasures, wouldn’t they?

Then he realized.

Maybe there’s been no alert. The Jophur may assume we already fled the ship!

Perhaps.

Still, each encounter with a gleaming ring stack in some dank passage left him feeling eerie. Lark had lived among traeki all his life, but till this moment he never grasped how different their consciousness must be. How strange for a sapient being to look right at you and not see, simply because you gave off the right safeconduct aroma.…

At the next intersection, he sniffed all three corridor branches carefully, and found the indicator Ling wanted — a simple scent that meant LIFE. He pointed, and she nodded.

“As I thought. The layout isn’t too different from a type-seventy cargo ship. They keep it at the center.”

“Keep what at the center?” Lark asked, but she was already hurrying ahead. Two human fugitives, bearing their only tools — she cradling the wounded red traeki ring, while he carried the purple one.

When the next door opened, Ling stepped back briefly from a glare. The place was more brightly lit than the normal dim corridors. The air smelled better, too. Less cloying with meanings he could not comprehend. Lark’s first impression was of a large chamber, filled with color.

“As I hoped,” Ling said, nodding. “The layout’s standard. We may actually have a chance.”

“A chance for what?”

She turned back to look into the vault, which Lark now saw to be quite vast, filled with a maze of crisscrossing support beams … all of them draped with varied types of vegetation.

“A chance to survive,” she answered, and took his hand, drawing him inside.

A jungle surrounded them, neatly organized and regimented. Tier after tier of shelves and platforms preceded from view, serviced by machines moving slowly along tracks. Arrayed on this vast network there flourished a riot of living forms, broad leaves and hanging vines, creepers and glistening tubers. Water dripped along some of the twisted green cables, and the two of them rushea to the nearest trickle, lapping eagerly.

Now Lark understood the meaning of the aroma symbol that had led them here.

In the middle of hell, they had found a small oasis. At that moment, it felt like paradise.

Emerson

HE DID NOT LIKE GOING DOWN TO THE WATER. THE harbor was too frenzied.

It hardly seemed like a joyous reunion to see Kaa and other friends again. He recognized good old Brookida, and Tussito, and Wattaceti. They all seemed glad to see him, but far too busy to spend time visiting, or catching up.

Perhaps that was just as well. Emerson felt ashamed.

Shame that he could not greet them with anything more than their names … and an occasional snippet of song.

Shame that he could not help them in their efforts — hauling all sorts of junk out of the sea, instructing Uriel’s assistants, and sending the materials up by tram to the peak of Mount Guenn.

Above all, he felt shame over the failure of his sacrifice, back at that immense space city made of snow — that fluffy metropolis, the size of a solar system — called the Fractal System.

Oh, it seemed so noble and brave when he set forth in a salvaged Thennanin scout, extravagantly firing to create a diversion and help Streaker escape. With his last glimpse — as force fields closed in all around him — he had seen the beloved, scarred hull slip out through an opening in the vast shell of ice, and prayed she would make it.

Gillian, he had thought. Perhaps she would think of him, now. The way she recalled her Tom.

Then the Old Ones took him from the little ship, and had their way with him. They prodded and probed. They made him a cripple. They gave him forgetfulness.

And they sent him here.

The outlines are still hazy, but Emerson now saw the essential puzzle.

Streaker had escaped to this forlorn planet, only to be trapped. More hard luck for a crew that never got a break.

But … why … send … me … here?

That action by the Old Ones made no sense. It seemed crazy.

Everyone would be better off if he had died, the way he planned.

The whole population of the hoonish seaport was dashing about. Sara seemed preoccupied, spending much of her time talking rapidly to Uriel, or else arguing heatedly with the gray-bearded human scholar whose name Emerson could not recall.

Often a messenger would arrive, bearing one of the pale paper strips used for transcribing semaphore bulletins. Once, the urrish courier came at a gallop, panting and clearly shaken by the news she bore. An eruption of dismayed babble swelled as Emerson made out a single repeated word—“Biblos.”

Everyone was so upset and distracted, nobody seemed to mind when he indicated a wish to take the tram back up to Uriel’s forge. Using gestures, Sara made clear that he must come back before sunset, and he agreed. Clearly something was going to happen then. Sara made sure Prity went along to look after him.

Emerson didn’t mind. He got along well with Prity. They were both of a kind. The little chim’s crude humor, expressed with hand-signed jokes, often broke him up.

Those fishie things are cousins? she signaled at one point, referring to the busy, earnest dolphins. I was hoping they tasted good!

Emerson laughed. Earth’s two client-level races had an ongoing rivalry that seemed almost instinctive.

During the ride upslope, he examined some of the machinery Kaa and the others had provided at Uriel’s request. Most of it looked like junk — low-level Galactic computers, ripped out of standard consoles that might be hundreds or millions of years old. Many were stained or slimy from long immersion. The melange of devices seemed to share just one trait — they had been refurbished enough to be turned on. He could tell because the power leads were all wrapped in tape to prevent it. Otherwise, it looked like a pile of garbage.

He longed to squat on the floor and tinker with the things. Prity shook her head though. She was under orders to prevent it. So instead Emerson looked out through the window, watching distant banks of dense clouds roll ominously closer from the west.

He fantasized about running away, perhaps to Xi, the quiet, pastoral refuge hidden in a vast desert of color. He would ride horses and practice his music … maybe fix simple, useful tools to earn his keep. Something to help fool himself that his life still had worth.

For a while he had felt valued here, helping Uriel get results from the Hall of Spinning Disks, but no one seemed to need him anymore. He felt like a burden.

It would be worse if he returned to Streaker, a shell. A fragment. The chance of a cure beckoned. But Emerson was smart enough to know the prospects weren’t promising. Captain Creideiki once had an injury like his, and the ship’s doctor had been helpless to correct such extensive damage to a brain.

Perhaps at home, though … On Earth …

He painted the blue globe in his mind, a vision of beauty that ached his heart.

Deep inside, Emerson knew he would never see it again.

The tram docked at last. His mood lifted for a little while, helping Uriel’s staff unload cargo. Along with Prity, he followed the urs and qheuens down a long, twisty corridor toward a flow of warm air. At last they reached a big un der-ground grotto — a cave with an opening at the far end, facing north. Hints of color gleamed far beyond, reminding him of the Spectral Flow.

Workers scurried about. Emerson saw g’Kek teams busy sewing together great sheets of strong, lightweight cloth. He watched urs delicately adjust handmade valves as gray qheuens bent lengths of pipe with their strong claws. Already, breaths of volcanically heated air were flowing into the first of many waiting canopies, creating bulges that soon joined together, forming a globe-ended bag.

Emerson looked across the scene, then back at the salvaged junk the dolphins had donated.

Slowly, a smile spread across his face.

To his great satisfaction, the urrish smiths seemed glad when he silently offered to lend a hand.

Kaa

THE SKIES OPENED AROUND NIGHTFALL, LETTING down both rain and lightning.

The whale sub Hikahi delayed entering Port Wuphon until the storm’s first stinging drizzle began peppering the wharves and huts. The sheltered bay speckled with the impact of dense droplets as the submersible glided up a slanted coastal shelf toward an agreed rendezvous.

Kaa swam just ahead, guiding her through the narrow channel, between jagged shoals of demicoral. No one would have denied him the honor. I am still chief pilot, he thought. With or without my nickname.

The blunt-nosed craft mimicked his long turn around the sheltering headland, following as he showed the way with powerful, body-arching thrusts of his tail. It was an older piloting technique than wormhole diving, not highly technical. But Kaa’s ancestors used to show human sailors the way home in this manner, long before the oldest clear memory of either race.

“Another two hundred meters, Hikahi,” he projected using sonar speech. “Then a thirty-degree turn to port. After that, it’s three hundred and fifty meters to full stop.”

The response was cool, professional.

“Roger. Preparing for debarkation.”

Kaa’s team — Brookida and a half-dozen neo-fins who had come out earlier to unload Uriel’s supplies — moored the vessel when it reached the biggest dock. A small crowd of dignitaries waited on the pier, under heavy skies. Umbrellas sheltered the urrish delegates, who pressed together in a shivering mass, swaying their long necks back and forth. Humans and hoons made do with cloaks and hats, while the others simply ignored the rain.

Kaa was busy for a time, giving instructions as the helmsman fine-tuned her position, then cut engines. Amid a froth of bubbles, the Hikahi brought her bow even with the wharf. Clamshell doors opened, like a grinning mouth.

Backlit by the bright interior, a single human being strode forward. A tall female whose proud bearing seemed to say that she had little left to lose — little that life could take from her — except honor. For a long moment, Gillian Baskin looked on the surface of Jijo, inhaling fresh air for the first time in years.

Then she turned back toward the interior, beckoning with a smile and an extended arm.

Four silhouettes approached — one squat, one gangly, one wheeled, and the last clattering like a nervous colt. Kaa knew the tall one, although they had never met. Alvin, the young “humicking” writer, lover of Verne and Twain, whose journal had explained so much about the strange mixed culture of sooner races.

A moan of overjoyed release escaped those waiting, who flowed forward in a rush.

So — embraced by their loved ones, and pelted by rain — the adventurous crew of Wuphon’s Dream finally came home.

There were other reunions … and partings.

Kaa went aft to help Makanee debark her patients. Streaker’s chief physician seemed older than Kaa remembered, and very tired, as she supervised a growing throng of neo-dolphins, splashing and squealing beyond the Hikahi’s starboard flank. While some appeared listless, others dashed about with antic, explosive energy. Two nurses helped Makanee keep the group herded together at the south end of the harbor, using occasional low-voltage discharges from their harnesses to prevent their patients from dashing off. The devolved ones wore nothing but skin.

Kaa counted their number — forty-six — and felt a shiver of worry. Such a large fraction of Streaker’s crew! Gillian must be desperate indeed, to contemplate abandoning them here. Many were probably only experiencing fits of temporary stress atavism, and would be all right if they just had peace and quiet for a time.

Well, maybe they’ll get it, on Jijo, he thought. Assuming this planet sea turns out to be as friendly as it looks. And assuming the Galactics leave us alone.

In becoming Jijo’s latest illegal settler race, dolphins had an advantage over those who preceded them. Fins would not need buildings, or much in the way of tools. Only the finest Galactic detectors might sieve their DNA resonance out of the background organic stew of a life world, and just at close range.

There are advantages, he admitted. This way, some of our kind may survive, even if Earth and her colonies don’t. And if dolphins are caught here, so what? How could we Terragens get into any more trouble than we already are?

Kaa had read about local belief in Redemption. A species that found itself in trouble might get a second chance, returning to the threshold state, so that some new patron might adopt and guide them to a better destiny. Tursiops amicus was less than three hundred years old as a toolusing life-form. Confronted by a frolicking mob of his own kind — former members of an elite starship crew, now screeching like animals — Kaa knew it shouldn’t take fins long to achieve “redemption.”

He felt burning shame.

Kaa joined Brookida, unloading Makanee’s pallet of supplies. He did not want to face the nurses, who might reproach him for “losing” Peepoe. At least now there’s a chance to find her. With our own colony in place, I can serve Makanee as a scout, patrolling and exploring … in time I’ll catch up with Zhaki and Mopol. Then we’ll have a reckoning.

The aft hatch kept cycling after the last dolphin was through. Excited squeaks resonated across the bay as another set of émigrés followed Makanee to an assembly point, on a rocky islet in the middle of the harbor. Eager six-limbed amphibian forms, with frilly gill fringes waving about their heads. Transplanted from their native Kithrup, the Kiqui would not qualify as sooners, exactly. They were already a ripe, presapient life-form — a real treasure, in fact. It would have been good to bring them home to Earth in triumph and lay a claim of adoption with the Galactic Uplift Institute. But now Gillian clearly thought it better to leave them here, where they had a chance.

According to plan, the dolphin-Kiqui colony would stay in Port Wuphon for a few days, while a traeki pharmacist analyzed the newcomers’ dietary needs. If necessary, new types of traeki stacks would be designed to create symbiotic supplements. Then both groups would head out to find homes amid islands offshore.

I’m coming, Peepoe, Kaa thought. Once we get everyone settled, nothing on Jijo or the Five Galaxies will keep me from you.

A happy musing. Yet another thought kept nagging at him.

Gillian isn’t just stripping the ship of nonessential personnel. She’s putting everyone ashore she can spare … for their own safety.

In other words, the human Terragens agent was planning something desperate … and very likely fatal.

Kaa had an uneasy feeling that he knew what it was.

Alvin

I GUESS REUNIONS CAN BE KIND OF AWKWARD, EVEN when they’re happy ones.

Don’t get me wrong! I can’t imagine a better moment than when the four of us — Huck, Ur-ronn, Pincer, and me — stepped out of the metal whale’s yawning mouth to see the hooded lanterns of our own hometown. My senses were drenched with familiarity. I heard the creaking dross ships and the lapping tide. I smelled the melon canopies and smoke from a nearby cookstove — someone making chubvash stew. My magnetic earbones tickled to the familiar presence of Mount Guenn, invisible in the dark, yet a powerful influence on the hoonish shape-and-location sense.

Then there came my father’s umble cry, booming from the shadows, and my mother and sister, rushing to my arms.

I confess, my first reaction was hesitant. I was glad to be home, to see and embrace them, but also embarrassed by the attention, and a little edgy about moving around without a cane for the first time in months. When there came a free moment, I bowed to my parents and handed them a package, wrapped in complex folds of the best paper I could find on the Streaker, containing my baby vertebrae. It was an important moment. I had gone away a disobedient child. Now I was returning, an adult, with work to do.

My friends’ homecomings were less emotional. Of course Huck’s hoonish adoptive parents were thrilled to have her back from the dead, but no one expected them to feel what my own folks did after giving up their only son for lost, months ago.

Pincer-Tip touched claws briefly with a matron from the qheuen hive, and that was it for him.

As for Ur-ronn, she and Uriel barely exchanged greetings. Aunt and niece had one priority — to get out of the rain. They fled the drizzle to a nearby warehouse, swiftly immersing themselves in some project. Urs don’t believe in wasting time.

Does it make me seem heartless to say that I could not give complete attention to my family? Even as they clasped me happily, I kept glancing to see what else was going on. It will be up to me — and maybe Huck — to tell later generations about this event. This fateful meeting on the docks.

For one thing, there were other reunions.

My new human friend, Dwer Koolhan, emerged from the Hikahi, a tall silhouette, as sturdy looking as a preteen hoon. When he appeared, a shout pealed from the crowd of onlookers, and a young woman rushed to him, her arms spread wide. Dwer seemed stunned to see her … then equally enthused, seizing her into a whirling hug. At first, I thought she might be some long-separated lover, but now I know it is his sister, with adventures of her own to recount.

The rain let up a bit. Uriel returned, wearing booties and a heavy black waterproof slicker that covered all but the tip of her snout. Behind came several hoons, driving a herd of ambling, four-footed creatures. Glavers. At least two dozen of the bulge-eyed brutes swarmed down the pier, their opal skins glistening. A few carried cloth-wrapped burdens in their grasping tails. They did not complain, but trotted toward the opening of the whale sub without pause.

This part of the transaction, I did not — and still do not — understand. Why Earthling fugitives would want glavers is beyond me.

Gillian Baskin had the hoons carry out several large crates in exchange. I had seen the contents and felt an old hunger rise within me.

Books. There were hundreds of paper books, freshly minted aboard the Streaker. Not a huge amount of material, compared with the Galactic Library unit, or even the Great Printing, but included in the boxes were updates about the current state of the Five Galaxies, and other subjects Uriel requested. More than enough value to barter for a bunch of grub-eating glavers!

Later, I connected the trade with the dolphins and Kiqui who also debarked in Wuphon Harbor, and I realized There’s more to this deal than meets the eye.

• • •

Did I mention the tall prisoner? As everybody moved off to the great hall for a hurried feast, I looked back and glimpsed a hooded figure being led down the pier toward the submarine, guarded by two wary-looking urs. It was a biped, but did not move like a human or hoon, and I could tell both hands were tied. Whoever the prisoner was, he vanished into the Hikahi in a hurry, and I never heard a word about it.

The last reunion took place half a midura later, when we were all gathered in the town hall.

According to a complex plan worked out by the Niss Machine, the whale sub did not have to depart for some time, so a banquet was held in the fashion of our Jijoan Commons. Each race claimed a corner of the hexagonal chamber for its own food needs, then individuals migrated round the center hearth, chatting, renewing acquaintance, or discussing the nature of the world. While Gillian Baskin was engrossed in deep conversation with my parents and Uriel, my sister brought me up to date on happenings in Wuphon since our departure. In this way I learned of school chums who had marched north to war, joining militia units while we four adventurers had childish exploits in the cryptic deep. Some were dead or missing in the smoldering ruins of Ovoom Town. Others, mostly qheuens, had died in the plagues of late spring.

The hoonish disease never had a chance to take hold here in the south. But before the vaccines came, one ship had been kept offshore at anchor — in quarantine — because a sailor showed symptoms.

Within a week, half the crew had died.

Despite the gravity of her words, it was hard to pay close attention. I was trying to screw up my courage, you see. Somehow, I must soon tell my family the news they would least want to hear.

Amid the throng, I spotted Dwer and his sister huddled near the fire, each taking turns amazing the other with tales about their travels. Their elation at being reunited was clearly muted by a kind of worry familiar to all of us — concern about loved ones far away, whose fates were still unknown. I had a sense that the two of them knew, as I did, that there remained very little time.

Not far away I spied Dwer’s noor companion, Mudfoot — the one Gillian called a “tytlal”—perched on a rafter, communing with others of his kind. In place of their normal, devil-may-care expressions, the creatures looked somber. Now we Six knew their secret — that the tytlal are a race hidden within a race, another tribe of sooners, fully alert and aware of their actions. Might some victims of past pranks now scheme revenge on the little imps? That seemed the least of their worries, but I wasted no sympathy on them.

Welcome to the real world, I thought.

Tyug squatted in a corner of the hall, furiously puffing away. Every few duras, the traeki’s synthi ring would pop out another glistening ball of some substance whose value the Six Races had learned after long experience. Supplements to keep glavers healthy, for instance, and other chemical wonders that might serve Gillian’s crew, if some miracle allowed them to escape. If Tyug finished soon, Uriel hoped to keep her alchemist. But I would lay bets that the traeki meant to go along when the Earthlings departed.

The occasion was interrupted when a pair of big hoons wearing proctors’ badges pushed through leather door strips into the feasting hall, gripping the arms of a male human I had never seen before. He was of middle height for their kind, with a dark complexion and an unhappy expression. He wore a rewq on his forehead, and hair combed to hide a nasty scar near his left ear. A small chimp followed close behind, her appearance rueful.

I wasn’t close enough to hear the details firsthand, but later I pieced together that this was a long-lost crew mate of the Streakers, whose appearance on Jijo had them mystified. He had been on Mount Guenn, helping Uriel’s smiths work on some secret project, when he suddenly up and tried to escape by stealing some kind of flying machine!

As the guards brought him forward, Gillian’s face washed with recognition. She smiled, though he cringed, as if dreading this meeting. The dark man turned left to hide his mutilation, but Gillian insistently took his hands. She expressed pleasure at seeing him by leaning up to kiss one cheek.

Perhaps later I’ll learn more about where he fits in all this. But time is short and I must close this account before the Hikahi sets sail to rejoin the dolphin-crewed ship. So let me finish with the climax of an eventful evening.

A herald burst in. His vibrating sac boomed an alert umble.

“Come! Come and see the unusual!”

Hurrying outside, we found the rain had stopped temporarily. A window opened in the clouds, wide enough for Loocen to pour pale, liquid luminance across a flank of Mount Guenn. Swathes of brittle stars shone through, including one deep red, cyclopean eye.

In spite of this lull, the storm was far from over. Lightning flickered as clouds grew denser still. The west was one great mass of roiling blackness amid a constant background of thunder. In miduras, the coast was really going to get hit.

People started pointing. Huck rolled up near my right leg and gestured with all four agile eyestalks, directing my gaze toward the volcano.

At first, I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. Vague, ghostlike shapes seemed to bob and flutter upward, visible mostly as curved silhouettes that blocked sporadic stars. Sometimes lightning caused one of the objects to glow along a rounded flank, revealing a globelike outline, tapered at the bottom. They seemed big, and very far away.

I wondered if they might be starships.

“Balloons,” Huck said at last, her voice hushed in awe. “Just like Around the World in Eighty Days!”

Funny. Huck seemed more impressed at that moment than she ever had been aboard Streaker, by all the glittering consoles and chattering machines. I stared at the flotilla of fragile gasbags, wondering what kind of volunteers were brave enough to pilot them on a night like this, surrounded by slashing electricity, and with ruthless foes prowling higher still. We watched as scores wafted from Mount Guenn’s secret caves. One by one, they caught the stiff west wind and flowed past the mountain, vanishing from sight.

I happened to be standing near Gillian Baskin, so I know what the Earthwoman said when she turned to Uriel the Smith.

“All right. You kept your side of the bargain. Now it’s time to keep ours.”