Shipstar

Thirty-three

“What’s that?” Irma pointed.

Hanging among cottony clouds, near to the woody horizon, was a thing that struck him as a silvery, flapping blimp. Coming toward them.

“What’s that?” Cliff echoed to Quert—who scowled.

“Escape,” Quert said. “So you say?”

“From what?”

“Folk know where we are. Track us.”

“They can?” Terry asked.

“Makes sense,” Irma said. “They must have sensors embedded in the original frame that holds the Bowl together. Any smart building does. The trick would be managing such a torrent of data.”

Quert gave an assenting eye-click and fell silent. The Sil took their orders from Quert and studiously let Quert alone speak for them. Cliff wondered about this but did not want to bring up or question an arrangement that was at least keeping his small party out of the hands of the Folk.

When the spidows gave up the chase, the tired party of Sil and humans had moved on awhile, crossed a stream that Quert said spidows could not, and then stopped without a word. Cliff could feel the adrenaline collapse; he had gotten used to it after so many scares and flights. He wondered how the Sil managed crises. The same play of hormones?

Some cold food with water from the convenient spring made them all feel better. Cliff had little storage left in the electronics he had carried all this time. He had chronicled all the places he had been and enjoyed looking back over the images. One from a good while back he liked, a clear day when the great sweep of the Bowl and its jet was sharp and clear. Too often the deep atmosphere blocked long views with enormous stacks of cloud. He had caught some of the team in the foreground, slogging along near a zigzag tree.

“You’re keeping notes?” Irma asked. “I filled my data storage a long time ago.”

Cliff shrugged. “I’m either lazy or just plain picky. After the first week, when I was taking shots of every flower, tree, animal, insect, bird—well, harder to be a scientist when you’re on the run.”

“One thing you’re not is lazy.” She looked at his small working screen. “Notes for each shot, even.”

“I do them at our rest stops, like this.”

But there was no real resting, as the Sil made clear.

Quert eyed the humans. “We not go under now. Best not.”

“Into the tunnels?” Aybe asked. “The trains? They’ll catch us there?”

Slow steady eye-shifts. “Soon. Yes. Best not go in tunnels.”

“I kind of liked those fast tunnels,” Aybe said.

“Folk hold them now.”

“So … what do we do?” Terry persisted.

“See there.” Quert’s slim arm pointed. The small silvery thing hung in the distance above a dense forest ridgeline. It moved slowly and the sun reflected winking spots of yellow and blue from it. “Tadfish.” The Sil around him shuffled uneasily but as usual said nothing.

“We’re getting away in that?” Irma frowned doubtfully.

“Best way,” Quert said, and they moved forward steadily. “Hide in sky.”

Cliff wondered at the Sil social conventions, and their psychology. They were all in mortal danger but the Sil showed little jittery nervousness. Quert ruled absolutely. In contrast, he had to deal with ongoing questions and doubt from Aybe, Terry, and Irma. Only the need to move on, endlessly on, kept him in shaky control.

The tadfish was coming this way and as they entered the nearby forest of vine-rich trees and brush, Cliff could see it had a deft grace to its movement, though he could not see how it did so. Tendrils of vines yearned for the sun, though some turned at another angle, apparently partial to the jet’s rosy rays—specialization at work. The woods had a thick cloying stink, but were so thick overhead that the tadfish crew could not possibly see them below. Animals scampered away in their path, but there were plenty more concealed. From endless movement, Cliff had picked up ways to sense the life around them. Some animals here were superb at hiding, skinnying up into dense trees, or burrowing in hidden pits like trapdoor spiders. Others just flew away on quick stubby wings, fluttering fast enough to discourage pursuit.

Aybe and Irma walked with him, and Sils were both point and rear guards. The Sil somehow kept themselves in good order, Cliff saw, while the humans in their worn cargo pants with big flap pockets were drab and saggy. The Sil had patched those up for the bedraggled humans, back in the all-too-brief rest period following the battle with the skyfish. All that now seemed a long time ago. More wear had made their clothes ragged and rough. In contrast, the Sil had loose-fitting, lightweight tan and dusty white jumpsuits that never looked the worse for wear. They could be cleaned by just dipping them in water and connecting them to the Sil onboard and solar-powered back-batteries. Apparently some electrical method rejected ions the cloth disliked and knitted up broken fibers. The humans marveled at this.

Cliff let himself relax for a moment and enjoy the one sure thing he knew here—life: wild flocks of strange things wheeling and crying high overhead; guttural lowings and crisp cacklings from the forest around them; a smelly cloying carpet underfoot, springy, more like moss than grass, starred with bright stalks like flowers; zigzag trees silvery and ripe with flapping life, big coppery-winged things that shrieked and dived at humans when they could. Somehow the big things knew not to go after the Sil, who used their arm-arrows to slice them from the sky. Cliff hit a few with his laser and so did the others and they sank to the ground after that, going for cover.

They managed to get some sleep. Cliff woke up several times, slapping and swearing at bugs that got into his clothes. Terry kept warily watching the trees and shrubs. The spidow encounter and the bird attack had made them jumpy. There were a lot of ropy vines, and gibbering small things rushed among them, sometimes hurling down oblong red fruit as if to drive the intruders away. A Sil caught one fruit and bit into it, made a twisted face, and tossed it aside. Cliff saw a long vine move on its own and pointed. “A snake. Adapted to trees, probably disguises itself as a vine.”

Quert heard and nodded. “We call sky pirates.”

Irma chuckled. “Why?”

“Intelligent. In a way.”

“Really? What do they do with intelligence?”

“Save food for hard times.”

She stared up at the muscular, glistening snake that hung ten meters above their heads and seemed at least that long. It curled itself and leveraged onto another branch of a tall, spindly tree. Above it were cocoons of pale gray suspended among bare branches. “Like those?”

Quert gave an assenting eye-click. “Call them—” He paused, searching for the right Anglish term. “—mummies. Smart snakes store so many. Sometimes mummies we use for fertilizer.”

Aybe gaped at this and as they moved on, he said, “Mummies for … I don’t get it.”

“Closed ecology, see?” Irma shrugged. “They have to keep everything moving.”

“So does the Earth,” Aybe said. “At least, until we started industrializing space. Then we did metal smelting and manufacture in vacuum, where we could throw the wastes into the solar wind, and clean up the planet a bit.”

“But this ground ecology is just a few tens of meters deep,” Cliff said. “Has no plate tectonics. Can’t hide carbon from its air. Can’t bring fresh elements up from far below, vomit it out from volcanoes.”

Irma finished, “So you do that artificially. Plus you save resources. You might not get any more for a while. Or ever again.”

He nodded at this elementary wisdom that could always bear repeating, especially on the Bowl. They were still trying to figure out the greater scheme here, as a long-term investment. A negotiation might come up ahead, and Redwing would need to know something about those on the other side of the table.

That suited Cliff for now: seeing the Bowl as a puzzle. He had always been a problem-solver, a man who reflexively reacted to the unknown by breaking it into understandable pieces. Then Cliff would carefully solve each small puzzle, confident that the sum of such micro-problems would finally resolve the larger confusions. Irma thought the same way, one reason he liked her so much. On this endless trek through strange lands, they had grown to need each other. Every day was unnerving and wonderful at the same time, and for the same reasons. His whole team had gone into cold biostasis—always a risk—so they could reach an alien planet they knew very little about. Now they were immersed in that, multiplied by orders of magnitude. And they knew even less about this huge strange thing, the Bowl. It was daunting and thrilling, every day—in a place where there were not really days at all.

Now that they had a clear destination, the team of Sil and humans moved on with renewed energy. As they mounted a low hill, they saw the tadfish was closer. “It lands there,” Quert said, gesturing toward the next hill.

The slowly drifting football-shaped creature was maneuvering under tendrils of rain. Cliff remembered the one that had ravaged the Sil city and looked at its blister pods, wondering if the skyfish carried weapons there.

“Virga,” Aybe said. “That’s the name for when water evaporates away before hitting the ground. See? It’s falling from clumps of altocumulus clouds up there.” Among towering, steepled clouds rain fell, to be absorbed by lower, dryer layers.

“Tadfish drinking,” Quert said. “Hurry.”

They came up on the strange creature through a cluster of zigzag trees thickly wreathed in green vines. The silvery tadfish settled down in a clearing near some ceramic buildings. Quert picked up the pace. Cliff watched the complex sheen of skin as it flexed and stroked its translucent fins. Some attendants clustered at its base as it settled down. Quert was taking them in a flanking approach through the zigzag and vine maze. The ground crew was Kahalla in bright, creamy clothes. They took a small party of passengers off, and Cliff could not see who or what they were as they went into the dun-colored buildings. The Sil did not slow down.

With the humans struggling in the rear, the whole band sprinted from the last of the zigzags into the open pale dirt field and quickly across to the tadfish. They approached its face as its big green oval eyes peered down at them.

Several Sil peeled off and took up positions between the tadfish and the buildings. Cliff came out of the trees and saw some of the Kahalla ground crew turn back. They started running toward the tadfish, and the Sil moved to block them. A Kahalla drew a weapon and one Sil flexed his arm. The Kahalla went down instantly. The other Kahalla backed off and the Sil advanced.

Quert said, “They stay. Tadfish small. Not carry all of us.”

“Ah.”

The tadfish mouth was still open. Quert ducked and ran directly into the mouth. This looked to Cliff like a very bad idea. He slowed as they approached the ruby red lip of the mouth and saw the floor of the mouth was a hardened cartilage, lime green and ribbed. He tromped in, boots rapping on the cartilage. A musky smell seemed to wrap around his face. He edged down a narrow passage to the left, dimly lit by amber phosphors in the fleshy walls. The walls pulsed with heat and he emerged into a long room devoted to the view out a transparent wall in the tadfish side. The humans were there but no Sil. As he crossed the room, he felt a surge and the tadfish took off, angling over the zigzags. It turned to bask in the wind and accelerated. Everyone caught their balance, bracing against the softly resistant, fleshy walls. Below he saw Kahalla figures running vainly toward some tow lines that had held the tadfish in place. They retracted, and a Kahalla raised a tube weapon toward the humans looking down. It sighted—then lowered the weapon and shook its arms in frustration.

Irma said, “The Sil stole this thing.”

They all laughed a bit in appreciation, relieved, and Quert came into the room. In its staccato manner, it confirmed that the Sil had kept track of when the tadfish would set down on its regular route and had rushed to get there just in time to seize the tadfish when the flight crews changed shift. “Good timing,” Terry said, and Quert gave a hand-pass that meant assent.

Cliff did not remark that the Sil had not bothered to tell the humans what was up. Quert didn’t like debating policy; indeed, the Sil did not share the human appetite for endless talk and at times made fun of it.

“So now we’ll ‘hide in the sky’ as you said.” Aybe scowled. “From what?”

“Folk trace us. Saw at Ice Minds. Kahalla alert them.”

They were rising fast above the spreading plain. The atmosphere became supersaturated, the air suddenly full of mist. Cliff looked out along the axis of his shadow and there it was forming, a huge round luminous rainbow. The circular rainbow popped into the halo air. It formed near the top of a mountain, aslant from the constant star hanging at his back. He could see five separate colors; the red was intense. Slowly the mist dissolved and the spectral promise faded away. Yet it moved him with its beauty and its quick demise.

The tadfish walls popped and creaked. Irma said, “What’s that?” They rose faster. The fins outside beat in synchronous rhythm, and they heard a heavy thudding through the walls. “Is that its heart?”

Aybe looked out the transparent wall. “Maybe the body is expanding. It must be making more hydrogen from water, filling itself out.”

Cliff put his head against the oddly warm transparent window and only then noticed a separate transparent bulge farther along the curving skin. It promised a better viewing angle. But the wall nearby had no opening. He saw no way to reach that bulge but ran his hands along the wall and felt a crease in the warm flesh. He pried at it, and with a rasping purr a sheet came free along a seam. A pressure seal, apparently. He peeled it back and saw a narrow footway lit by blue phosphors. A few steps took him to the transparent blister. From here he could see farther around the curve of the great flying balloon, and the stately ranks of flapping translucent fins.

The view now was majestic and vast. The deep Bowl atmosphere fell off slowly with height, so a living balloon with a fishlike shape could rise a long way before the slackening pressure outside made it bulge. He looked down through many kilometers at the clouds flowing over the low mountains that only a short while ago, while they were running, had loomed in the distance. Refracted glows of the jet and star danced and coiled in deep clouds. Except for the slow thump of the tadfish heart, he felt as though he were hanging in air, seeing the Bowl as did the great birds he had seen far up the towering sky.

He turned to rejoin the others and saw to his side another pressure seal. He felt it for a seam. Then Irma came into the cramped blister. “What’s going on?”

“Look, we’re just passengers, can’t do anything but wait. Let’s see how this thing works. Might be useful up ahead.”

Irma twisted her mouth in a skeptical curve. “I could use a rest.”

“The more we know, the better.”

Irma leaned against the warm wall and gazed out on the spectacular view. “Um, maybe. Me, I’ve got strangeness overload. Every day there’s more to digest. And on the run, too.”

He smiled. “We’re in the belly of a beast already. Let’s not get digested.”

She shrugged. “These passages are claustrophobic. Let’s leave Aybe and Terry back there—Quert’s brought some gloppy food for them and they’re wolfing it down. Tastes like a chicken-flavored milk shake. Hard bits in it, too, tasted like bitter snails. I can wait.”

They went through the narrow tunnels along the tadfish’s streamlined form. It had a torpedo shape, and the occasional viewing blister was flanked by big slabs of sinewy brown muscle. These flexed as it propelled forward and Cliff sniffed; their close, moist air took on a sweaty, salty tinge.

“Fishoids, torpedo-shaped predators,” Irma said when they looked out a blister and saw a swarm of long tubular birds flocking below. They swerved and scooped in the air, catching something that vented from the tadfish. “Feeding on waste?” Irma asked.

“One species’ waste is another’s food,” Cliff said.

Around the long curve of the tadfish body came big gliding shapes in convoy, more like manta rays than like birds. They were flying in a V formation and had slick, matted gray skins. Diving and banking in concert through the thick air, big eyes intent on the feeding tubular birds. Their shapes, Cliff saw, reflected the demands of curvature, flow, and tension as they lazily slid down the air. Meaty triangular wings led back to rudderlike fins and a long spike at the tail. Cliff pointed. “The killing instrument.” A pair of eyes protruded in knobs at either side of their wedgelike heads, above the long slit mouth. Another pair of bigger, yellow eyes sat close together and peered forward. The flying tubes moved with stately grace through the glassy air. Fleshy, oarlike appendages flanked the heads, as the manta snapped up the smaller tubular birds. Through the window, Cliff and Irma could hear cries and shrieks as the pillage cut through the flock.

It was a strange sight and over in a moment. The mantas dove under the tadfish, while a few survivors scattered in frantic haste. Irma put an arm around Cliff’s waist and he felt a rush of contentment. In all this strangeness, the small comforts mattered most. They stood that way awhile, until warm air drew their attention to an inward-leading passage. He was trying to analyze all they were seeing, but the dimly lit passage drew them onward. Squishing sounds came from ahead. They worked along a throbbing wall and came upon a translucent interior layer, where they could see dark bones working in a sheath. Low murmurs and hums came through the transparent wall, and they could see gray fluids running down the bulky flesh everywhere. Lubricants?

“This is its internal skeleton?” Cliff wondered. The sliding parallel bones worked through thick green collars, coiling like a flexible spring. But their attention focused on two moving stick-figure creatures that seemingly tended this living machinery. They were about a meter tall, with six limbs that moved quickly, clambering everywhere, adjusting the mechanical supports of the bony spine. These creatures used their flexing limbs as either arms or legs, depending on where they scampered over the big moving apparatus. Irma pointed—they had long, two-petaled tails that folded to protect sexual organs that occasionally came into view as they worked. They seemed like slender, pink skeletons, with brains carried in a bump between the pair of limbs at the top of the spinal cord. Three eyes worked on stalks, making an equilateral triangle around a broad red slit of a mouth.

“They can see us,” Irma said, “but they’re ignoring us.”

“Not so peculiar, really. Think what it’s like to work on a public conveyance,” Cliff said. “They’ve seen plenty odder than we are.”

They moved along the transparent wall and saw two thick, muscular creatures wearing what seemed to be equipment belts. They were working on a panel pulled open, revealing some complex piping throbbing with amber liquids. They moved with deft small fingers, using tools too small to make out. “Those look like the ones we saw before,” Irma said. “Remember? We were—”

“Screwing, yes. And one of them fell on us.”

“Turns out they’re smart tool-users. I wonder what they thought of us.”

“These are ignoring us, same as before. We’re pretty ordinary, I guess.”

“Here, sophisticated means, I guess, not impressed to run into just another funny alien.”

Cliff chuckled. “Puts us in our place, doesn’t it?”

As they neared the tail, there were sudden orange flares jetting from tubes below the viewing blisters. “Must be fueled by hydrocarbons,” Cliff said, “brewed into burnable fuels.”

“We’re moving fast,” Irma said as a surge rippled through the body around them. The floor also rolled a bit, like a ship. “The burn helps.”

“Quert said they’re artificially bred forms of an original balloon-birdlike species,” Cliff said. “So their energy source got engineered, too.”

“We’d better get back,” Irma said. They were moving quickly now, diving out over a sheet of green water that seemed a continent wide, beneath the waving fields of grass. Dotting this grass sea were bumps shaped like tadpoles, with a crust of trees ornamenting them. The thick end pointed upstream, while the water swept debris past and then dropped it in the eddy behind the hummock. This made the tadpole tail grow, building slim islands where animals lived among the dense amber and green trees. All this simmered beneath the reddish light of the star and orange filigrees cast by the slowly churning helices in the jet. As they descended, gaining speed, packs of large fishlike life became clear. They breached the shallow sea in great leaps, hanging in air, then crashing down in great sprays of white.

Irma said, “Those look a lot like dolphins.”

“The basic fish shape, as you say.” Cliff pointed at the width of the moving school. “Thousands of them. What a great way to see Bowl life.”

Irma said, “I always thought, we believe dolphins are not as smart as we because they never built cars or refrigerators or New York or had wars. All they do is spend every day swimming in warm oceans, chasing and eating fish, mating and having fun. The dolphins think they are smarter than us, for the very same reasons.”

Again, Cliff chuckled. “I always thought, on a statistical argument about time scales, that if we ran across intelligent aliens at Glory, they’d be overwhelmingly likely to be far more intelligent than us.”

Irma nodded. “And therefore wouldn’t care at all about us—if they even noticed us.”

“Me, too. But we’ve been able to stay out of the hands of the Folk for a long time now. On their own turf!”

“Could be the aliens who built this place were super-minds, but their descendants have gotten stupid.”

“So both the skeptics about smart aliens were wrong, and so were the optimists?” Cliff liked the idea. “Wonder what that means—”

She and Cliff were so caught up in the sight, they only noticed the huge thing hanging above when it blotted out the star.

The skyfish was firing hydrogen jets behind it and slewing swiftly through the filmy air. Headed toward them. Some strange angular birds were flocking out of the skyfish. They were lean and had long jaws with— “Are those teeth?” Irma asked.

“Looks like. Not friendly, no.”

Thirty-four

They had been running hot and hard now for many hours, and it was starting to show in his crew.

Redwing sat on the bridge because if he paced for hours, as he already had, everybody got edgy. Fair enough; he sat and twitched, mostly by moving his feet, in their gecko shoes, where nobody could see. He had used up his weekly shower ration in two days of this.

They had entered the jet days ago, not that there was any clear sign of it. The mag field values started to climb a day ago and the plasma density followed it. Only by amping certain spectral lines of yellow and green could the wall screens show the filmy curtains of sliding ion flow in the jet. Those weren’t plasma, really—the light came from ions, as electrons found them at last and cascaded down the energy levels to emit a photon. The light showed where plasma eased into little deaths.

Now Ayaan Ali had taken over as lead pilot and Clare Conway sat in the copilot deck chair. Beth Marble had gone to get some sleep. They all watched the blue and green lines work on the large screens, mapping pressures and flux changes at the perimeter of their magscoop fields.

“How’s the scoop impedance looking?” Redwing asked.

“Down to three meg-ohms, sir.” From her sideways glance, he knew Ayaan Ali understood that he could have read it from the screens, but that they needed to have some talk on the bridge, just to diffuse tensions.

A rumble and a rolling shock came rippling through the ship. “Ride’s interesting,” Redwing said mildly.

Ayaan Ali smiled and nodded, eyes never leaving the screens, hands on the e-helm at all times. “We took a shock front from forty-two degrees starboard, seventeen degrees south. Plasma still rising.”

“This fits the model Karl worked up?”

“Um, sort of.” A skeptical arching of eyebrows.

Redwing picked up something more in her body language. Karl and Ayaan Ali always kept a wary distance in crew meetings and were crisply correct around him … which led him to wonder if something was going on between them. They were in a dangerous place, and tensions needed release. He decided to put it away for later, if ever. The mission was the point here. “Okay. Nobody expects models to work well here. I don’t, anyway. Let’s see the aft scoop and plume.” Redwing always felt a bit jumpy about anything sneaking up behind them, though with the Artilects on constant duty, that was extremely unlikely.

The rumbling aft faded. Eerie popping noises came through the support beams and hollow creakings sounded. A sour stench of something scorched—probably just overheating in a forward tank. The display space before them showed flurries of plasma, highlighted in violet, slamming into the scoop.

“Those knots again,” Ayaan Ali said.

“Let’s see long-range radar,” Redwing said.

They studied the yawning space around the jet, looking from multiple dishes. “Nothing near us, nothing in near space, nothing farther out,” Ayaan Ali said. “I’ve always wondered why we saw so few spacecraft. You’d think they would be sending ships out to monitor the whole system.”

Redwing nodded. “This system has no planets, or asteroids, no comets coming in. Nothing bigger than a school bus. But there were some small craft, remember? They came over the Bowl rim, flew along the top of their atmosphere manifolds, ducked into a hole in the upper atmosphere layer.”

“But very few, very little craft.” Clare shrugged. “And we know the gravitational instabilities that the Bowl risks all the time. If they get too close to the star, they have to fire up the jet and push the stellar mass away, while they grab the rising jet flux and let it push them back. Reverse if they start falling behind. Then there’s the spinning Bowl, same instabilities as a spinning top. But I guess they can run this whole wacky system without many spacecraft.”

Karl came onto the bridge, back from checking inductance coils along the ship. He had heard Ayaan Ali. “It’s all maintained with magnetic fields and jet pressure,” he said. “Plus the reflected sunlight, to heat the hot spot. Tricky stuff.”

“Those inductance coils getting worked hard?” Redwing asked.

“Running high, but within margin.” Karl got into his chair and belted up, casting a side look at Redwing, as if to say, Why don’t you sit?

Redwing never explained that he liked to move through the ship when it was having trouble. He could tell more with his feet and ears than the screens could say.

They had taken three days to cross the jet with the fusion chambers running at full bore, driving them to nearly two hundred kilometers per second. That was far higher than an orbital velocity, though still far under the ship’s coasting specs. SunSeeker now was turning in the helix Karl had calculated, cutting in an arc near the jet’s boundary, its magscoop facing the star at a steep angle and swallowing its heated plasma. They had faced such a headwind coming in and survived. But now the navigation was tougher. This time they had to remain lower than the Bowl’s rim, or else come within the firing field of the gamma ray lasers there.

“How do we know this is the optimal path?” Redwing asked Karl.

“Calculations—”

“I mean from what we’ve learned these last few days.”

“It’s working.” Karl’s lean face tightened, ending in his skewed, tight mouth above a pointed chin where he had begun to grow a goatee. “We’re brushing the mag pressures outward. Our sideways thrust drives the magnetic kink mode, feeding off the jet’s own forward momentum. We’re stimulating the flow patterns at the right wavelength to make the jet slew.”

“We’ll see sideways jet movement before it shoots through the Knothole?”

“It should.” Karl’s gaze was steady, intent. He had a lot riding on this.

“Let’s look aft. Have we got better directionals this time?” Redwing asked Ayaan Ali.

“Somewhat,” she said. “I rotated some aft antennas to get a look, the sideband controllers, too.”

She changed the color view, and Redwing watched brilliant yellow knots twist around the prow of their magscoop like neon tropical storms. “These curlers push us sideways a lot.”

A rumble ran down the axis and Redwing hung on to Ayaan Ali’s deck chair. Clare showed the acoustic monitors display in red lines on a side screen. The strains worked all down the ship axis.

“We’re getting side shear,” Redwing said mildly. He took care not to give direct piloting instructions; no backseat driving.

“I’ll fire a small side jet, let some plasma vent from the side of the magscoop, rotate on the other axis, and take our aft around some.”

Her hands traced a command in the space before her. A faint rumbling began, then a surge. The ship slid sideways and Redwing hung on to a deck chair. Multiple-axis accelerations had never been his strong point. His stomach lurched.

She worked on getting the aft view aligned. SunSeeker’s core was no mere pod sitting atop the big fuel tank that held the fusion catalysis ions. Gouts of those ions had to merge with the incoming plasma, fresh from the magscoop. In turn, the mated streams fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way along the axis, no matter how ornate the subsections got, hanging on the main axis, because the water reserves tank shielded the biozone and crew up front, far from the fusion reactor, and the plasma plume in the magnetic nozzle.

Redwing knew every rivet and corner of the ship and liked to prowl through all its sections. The whole stack was in zero gee, except the thick rotating toroid at the top, which the crew seldom left. A hundred and sixteen meters in diameter, looking like a dirty, scarred angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the outside. There the walls were two meters thick and filled with water for radiation shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with its point forward, bristling with viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through electronic feeds. Yet they had big wall displays at high resolution and smart optics to tell them far more than a window ever could.

Ayaan Ali’s work brought the multiple camera views into alignment with some jitter. They were looking back at the Bowl and she had to tease the jet out of all the brighter oceans and lands slowly turning in the background, a complicated problem.

“Let’s get a clear look-down of the jet,” Redwing said.

To see and diagnose the plume, they had a rearview polished aluminum mirror floating out forty meters to the side. They didn’t dare risk a survey bot in the roiling plasma streams that skirted around the magscoop, with occasional dense plasma fingers jutting in.

The image tuned through different spectral lines, picking out regions where densities were high and glows twisted. On the screen, a blue-white flare tapered away for a thousand kilometers before fraying into streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out an actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern. He was used to seeing it against the black of space, but now all around their jet was a view of the Bowl. The gray-white mirror zones glinted with occasional sparkles from the innumerable mirrors that reflected light back on the star.

Seen slightly to the side of the jet, the Knothole was a patch of dark beneath the filmy yellow and orange filigrees of the jet. Redwing supposed that at the right angle, the whole jet looked like a filmy exclamation point, with Wickramsingh’s Star as the searing bright dot.

Karl said, “See that bulge to the left? That’s the kink working toward the Knothole.”

Ayaan Ali nodded. “Wow. To think we can kick this thing around!”

“Trick is, we’re using the jet’s energy to do the work.” Karl smiled, a thin pale line. “It’s snaking like a fire hose held in by magnetic fields.”

Ayaan Ali frowned. “When it hits the Knothole, how close to the edge does it get?”

“Not too close, I think.”

“You think?”

“The calculations and simulations I’ve run, they say so.”

“Hope they’re right,” Ayaan Ali said softly.

They continued on the calculated trajectory as the ship sang with the torque. The helix gave them a side acceleration of about a tenth of a grav, so Redwing kept pacing the deck on a slight slant, inspecting the screens in the operating bays.

He also watched how everyone was holding up. His crew had been refined so they fit together like carefully crafted puzzles, each skill set reinforcing another’s. That meant excluding even personal habits, like “mineralarians,” a faction who insisted that eating animals or even plants, which both cling to life, was a moral failing. Instead, they choked down an awful mix of sugars, amino and fatty acids, minerals and vitamins, all made from rocks, air, and water. That could never work while pioneering a planet, so the mineralarians got cut from the candidate list immediately. Same for genetic fashions. Homo evolutis were automatically excluded from the expedition as too untested, though of course no one ever said so in public. That would be speciesism, a sin when SunSeeker was being built, and in Redwing’s opinion, one of the ugliest words ever devised.

But with all the years of screening, there were still wild cards in his deck. Smart people always had a trick or two you never saw until pressure brought it out. Managing people was not remotely like ordering from a menu.

As he watched an internal status board Fred was manning, Redwing felt a hard jar run down the axis. Ayaan Ali quickly corrected for a slew to their port side. The fusion chamber’s low rumble rose. It sounded, Redwing thought, a lot like the lower notes on an organ playing in a cathedral.

“Exhaust flow is pulsing,” she said. “External pressure is rising behind us.”

“Funny.” Redwing watched the screens intently. “Makes no sense.”

“We’re getting back pressure.” Her hands flew over the command board. A long, wrenching wave ran through the ship. Redwing sat at last in a deck chair—just in time, as a rumbling sound built in the walls and surges of acceleration shook the ship.

The aft picture worsened. They saw from two angles looking aft that the plume was bunching up, as if rippling around some unseen obstacle. The logjam thickened as they watched. Rolling waves came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.

“Getting a lot of strange jitter,” Beth said. She was in uniform, crisply turned out.

Redwing looked around. “It’s your sleep time.”

“Who could sleep through this? Captain, it’s building up.”

“You’re to take the chief pilot’s chair in three hours—”

“Aft ram pressure is inverting profile,” Ayaan Ali said crisply. “Never happens, this. Not even in simulations.”

“I can feel it,” Beth said. “This much vibration, the whole config must be—”

“Too much plasma jamming back into the throat.” Ayaan Ali gestured to the screen profiling the engine, its blue magnetic hourglass-shaped throat. Its pinch-and-release flaring geometry was made of fields, so could adjust at the speed of light to the furious ion pressures that rushed down it, fresh from their fusion burn. But it could only take so much variation before snarling, choking—and blowing a hole in the entire field geometry. That would direct hot plasma on the ship wall itself, a cutting blowtorch.

As they watched, the orange flow in its blue field-line cage curled and snarled. “It’s under pressures from outside the ship,” Ayaan Ali said, voice tight and high.

“If it gets close to critical pressures, shut down,” Redwing said. He was surprised his own voice sounded calm.

Beth said, “But we’ll—”

“Go to reserve power if we have to,” Clare said.

“That won’t last long,” Karl said. “And this external pressure on our magscoop could crumple it.”

A long, low note rang through the ship—a full system warning. No one had heard that sound since training. The drive had not been off since they left Earthside.

“I’m going to spin us,” Ayaan Ali said. “Outrace the pressure.”

She ran the helm hard over and the magscoop responded, canting its mouth. Next she flared the magnetic nozzle at the very aft end of the ship, clearing it of knotted plasma. That took two seconds. Then she flexed the field back down and ran the fusion chamber to its max. Redwing could follow this, but her speed and agility were what made her a standout. They were all hanging on as the entire ship spun about its radial axis. Redwing closed his eyes and let the swirl go away from him, listening to the ship. The pops and groans recalled the drastic maneuvers they’d run SunSeeker through, during the years-long Oort cloud trials. He trusted his ears more than the screen displays of magnetic stresses.

The rumbles ebbed away. When the spin slowed, he opened his eyes again. The screens showed milder conditions around the ship. “I broke us out of that magnetic pinch,” Ayaan Ali said. “We got caught in a sausage instability. Had to flex our scoop pretty hard.”

Redwing recalled that meant the radial squeezing the jet sometimes displayed. Karl had said the jet narrowing looked like some sort of sausage mode, which took it through the Knothole and made it flare out once it was well beyond. But they weren’t that close to the Knothole. That was the point—the kink instability took a while to develop while the jet was arrowing in toward the Bowl.

Redwing thought it strange that the pinch effect had been so strong. He asked Karl if the magnetic pressures on their magnetic nozzle could be so strong, but before Karl could answer he felt a prickly sensation play fretfully across his skin. Everyone looked around, sensing it also.

Abruptly a yellow arc cut through the air above the deck. It crackled and snaked as it moved, but turned aside whenever it met a metal barrier. They all bailed out of their couches. Redwing lay flat on the deck as the snapping, curling discharge twisted in the air above him. The crackling thing snarled around itself. Sparks hissed into the air. Yellow coils flexed, spitting light. The discharge arched and twisted and abruptly split, shaped into an extended cup shape that spun.

“It’s shaping the … the Bowl,” Beth said.

The yellow arc made a bad cartoon, snapping and writhing, never holding true for long.

Redwing felt his heart thump. “Something is out there. Making trouble for us.”

Beth said, “Something we can’t see.”

Redwing recalled that in their discussions he had asked, What could I be missing? Well, here it was.

Beth had once said that flying into the jet could give them an edge, all right—but there were huge unknowns. Unknown unknowns were like a double-edged sword, she had said, with no handle. You didn’t know which way the edge would cut.

Thirty-five

Asenath made a show of her entrance. She gave the assembled crew and servants a traditional bronze-golden chest display, then unfurled side arrow lances, ending in brilliant purple fan crescents. Her cycle-shaped tail laces coiled out with a snap, their flourish attracting attention first to tail, then with a flurry, to breast. Even the sub-Folk knew this strategy, though without nuance or passion. Crowds of them in the big bay of the skyfish clustered and tittered as Asenath presented. Memor watched with glazed eyes, Bemor at her side and the primate crouched nearby.

The grand bang and rattle caught many eyes, so she followed with a sharp pop. Yellow patch flares then ignited their tips, flavoring the already fragrant air. Quills rattled at incessant pace, rolls and frissons, japes and jars. All this was a part of the eternal status-flurry that kept order across the great stretches of the Bowl.

“What’s all this for?” the primate said.

The impudence of this question, coming at the climax of Asenath’s display, angered both Memor and, she could see, Bemor. The primate was about to become very useful, so Memor decided to discipline her in full view of all. As she turned, Bemor clasped her shoulder in a restraining grasp. “Do not. It will disturb this creature more than you know.”

“I have spent more time with her than—”

“Than I have, yes. But indulge me this once.”

Memor explained to the primate that such social rituals shored up the hierarchy needed to manage the entire Bowl society. Whenever the Folk visited a local venue of use, such as this skyfish, they reminded all of how the vast world worked, by showing ancient rituals. “Making the past come into their present, and so reside for their futures.”

“It’s just a dance with feathers, incense, songs, and whatever drug is floating in this air,” Tananareve Bailey said. “I can sense it creeping in through my pores.”

“I will be most surprised if it affects your chemistry. It is tuned for these Kahalla and their minions, plus adjacent evolved subspecies.”

Tananareve coughed. “Stinks, too.”

Memor rankled at this but said, “The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival, operating on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully, but the unit of survival is different at each of the six time ranges. On intervals of what you would term years, or orbital periods, the unit surviving is the individual. On a time scale of decades of orbitals, the unit is the family. On a scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation—such as this district of the Kahalla. On a time range of millennia, the unit is the culture. The Kahalla culture is widespread. So they may lend that gracious stability to vagrant districts. On a time scale of tens or more of millennia, the surviving unit is the species. Some cultures do survive that long, and we encourage that. On the range of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our Bowl.” Memor made a signifying fan-rattle to conclude and for punctuation gave a sweet aroma-belch from her neck.

Bemor added, “That is the scale we now confront with you Late Invaders.”

“Huh? We’re just stopping by.”

Bemor huffed in amusement. “Not so. You are important at this juncture as we approach Glory.”

“Who says?”

“The Ice Minds,” Memor injected, though she knew the primate did not know the term, much less the substance.

Asenath finished and resumed command of this skyfish with quick, darting orders. Squads rushed off to prepare for battle, a rolling bass note summoned crew to stations, and an electric intensity shot through the air—a zippy ion augmentation to stimulate. A wall flushed from its solemn gray to a stunning view of the region the skyfish commanded.

Needles of spiral rock forked up, moss-covered and home to many flapping species. The skyfish had recently fed there, from server species that brought arrays of food to be easily ingested as the skyfish moored on the peaks. These erections stood beside bays and lagoons, where waves reflecting the jet and star winked up at them. Here and there in the complex landscape, white snakes curved, highways like lines drawn on a lush green paper.

To the side, fluttering fast, was a silvery mote. Their target, just as the Kahalla had said.

“What’s the battle?” Tananareve asked, watching the many minions scurry around.

“We expect little fighting,” Memor said. “We are to capture the rest of you.”

“Be careful,” Tananareve said. “They’ve been on the run here a long time. And they bite.”

Memor found this amusing and sent a subtle fan-display of this to Bemor. “As if we had cause to fear them!” she said in Folk.

“Yes, perhaps this primate has a sense of humor,” Bemor said, distracted, his big eyes looking into the distance.

Suddenly Memor felt a tremor from her Undermind. It was a cool trickle of apprehension, not of actual fear, yet its icy fingers crept into her thinking. She paused a moment to do her inward-turning, letting the Undermind gradually open. She found a swamp. Fresh, gaudy notions and worries laced through fetid dark pools of ancient fears, all beneath a sullen sky. Trepidations wrapped around a locus, like tendrils of gray fog settling on a hill. The darting slips of anxiety seemed to orbit that hill. What was in it? Under it? She did not recall ever seeing this rising bulge before. Yet she knew it was not new, but old. She knew the bodies of congested uneasiness might be thrust down for a while, into the recesses of the Undermind. But this was a large bolus of somber dark emotions, and it drove fresh fears into her conscious layers.

Yet she had no time for this now. Action drew near. “Asenath, how might we assist?”

“Keep your Late Invader close. We will need her to interpret nuance and the other Invaders’ nonverbal signaling.”

Bemor seemed uneasy. Memor gave him a flurry of feathers that bespoke concern, but he shook it off with a rustle. She saw from his distant gaze that he was tapped into his comm and studying information.

He breathed quicker, a low rumble of thought. Memor respected Bemor’s ability to go beyond the Bowl’s constant data flood, mediated through its incessantly collecting local Analyticals. Those artificial minds monitored Bowl data on local scales, then sent it upward through an ascending pyramid of minds both wholly artificial and natural—though, of course, all minds had been bred and engineered for optimal performance, far long ago. Then the smoothed product of much mastication came to such as Bemor, to make sense nuanced of mind-numbingly complex situations. Digested data could help compensate for Folk overconfidence in their own intuitions, thus reducing the distortion of perception by desire. Natural minds were unable to deal with avalanches of data and mathematics, but were excellent at social cognition. Bemor could draw from his deep knowledge of history and the higher intellects. He was good at mirroring others’ emotional states, such as detecting uncooperative behavior, and at assigning value to things through emotion. Was he dealing with new ideas from the Ice Minds now? Something in his posture told Memor that he was deeply concerned about some matter far distant from their pursuit of these Late Invaders.

Abruptly Bemor broke off and spat at Asenath, “We need those Late Invaders captured immediately. No delay! But handle them carefully. Loss of even one of their lives could endanger us all.”

Asenath knew enough to take this command without question. She turned and ordered a nearby Kahalla, “Do not chance a glancing shot.”

“But we planned—,” the Kahalla began.

“Ignore all that came before. A shot to compel them might do damage to the tadfish. Especially if you miss by even a fraction.”

“Madam, we have already dispatched the sharpwings,” the Kahalla said, going into a bowing posture of apology.

“I did not so order!”

“It was explicit in your attack plan, timed to occur as we first sighted the tadfish.”

Memor could see that Asenath had no ready reply to this, so she turned away with a rebuking ruffle-display of red with scarlet fringes.

They all moved close to the observation wall. The tadfish drew nearer and now a school of angular birds came forking in toward the silvery shape. They were big in wing and head. Memor knew these sharpwings as pack birds who could harry and bring down far larger prey.

Bemor was alarmed enough to be distracted from his comm. “Stop them. Now.”

Asenath obeyed. Memor knew that here, nearer to the Knothole, craft such as tadfish had a natural utility. Great circulating cells of warm air cycled across the zones and life used these free rides. Skyfish were a transport business in the long voyages and tadfish had been bred from them, long ago, to traverse the shorter routes. In its constant restless way, evolution had spawned species of sharpwings to prey on tadfish. Most often they swarmed the prey, as Memor now watched them do.

Asenath shouted, “I said to turn them back!” to the Kahalla who backed away from her, head bent deep in contrition.

“They do not respond,” the Kahalla whispered. “They are hirelings, and hard to deflect once engaged in their ancient battle rites.”

“So they make for the meaty passengers,” Memor said dryly.

“Their spirits are up,” the Kahalla said. “Difficult to countermand.”

Now the sharpwings circled the tadfish. The great fish fired its hydrogen jets at them. Great plumes of ignited gas forked out and burned sharpwings black in an instant. Bodies tumbled away but more sharpwings came arrowing in. Their long jaws with razor teeth sliced at the working fins to disable navigation. The orange tongues licked more sharpwings.

They were drawing nearer, and Asenath ordered external ears to pick up the battle sounds. Memor could make out the anguish cries of those being burned. Sharpwing song-calls also laced the air, vibrant and shrill. Beneath that came the deep bass roll of the tadfish’s agony. It echoed across the diminishing distance.

Now sharpwings dove along the tadfish flanks, going for the gut. Their spiked wings ripped along and into the scaly flesh. It was, Memor reflected, as though the attackers were writing on the lustrous flesh their own messages, in long lines that soon brimmed red. These species had evolved to a stable predator–prey balancing, now governed by their betters—but only when their passions could be blunted.

“Bring your lancing shots to bear,” Asenath ordered.

“Please note, we cannot be so accurate at this range,” the Kahalla said. “I fear—”

“Do it.” Asenath was stern. “Otherwise they will bring down the tadfish and devour its passengers.”

The Kahalla did not attempt to argue. It turned and gave orders. Over the amplified booming, shrieks, and cries, Memor could scarcely hear the sharp psssstt! of the pellet guns. These hit the sharpwings with shattering blows. Next came the rattling laser batteries, picking off the great birds with quick stabs of green brilliance. All these weapons had to hit the sharpwings as they banked away from the tadfish, to avoid wounding it, so those sharpwings already close in on the attack escaped for a while. Orange jets from the tadfish belly licked at flights of the sharpwings. Squawks and screeches rose in an anguished crescendo. The thuds of pellets firing slowed as targets became scarce. A rain of blackened and shattered bodies tumbled, turning slowly in the long descent toward the green forests and glinting lakes below.

The remaining few sharpwings broke off the attack and flapped away, sending mournful long songs forth. “Very good,” Asenath said.

“Let us escort the tadfish down, then,” Memor said. “We can land and take possession.”

Asenath conferred with the Kahalla, then turned to address Bemor, ignoring Memor. “We can swallow such a small tadfish. No need to land. We can continue to higher altitudes and catch the fast winds toward the upper Mirror Zone.”

Bemor sent approval-displays, but his eyes did not move from his comm plate. “Good. Do so. We need the other Late Invaders.”

Memor felt shunted aside. She had been pursuing these vagrant primates for a great while, and now Bemor—and even worse, Asenath—would get credit for their apprehension. But at least it was done. “Why are they so useful? I am happy to have them in hand, of course, but—”

Bemor gave a low, bass growl. “The Ice Minds command it. Events proceed elsewhere. A crisis threatens. We must get the primates.”

“We have this one here—” A gesture at Tananareve.

“We may need more. The Ice Minds want to use them to converse in an immersion mode.”

Memor stirred with misgivings. Her Undermind was fevered and demanded to be heard, but there was no time now. “Immersion? That can be destructive.”

Tananareve seemed to be following this, but wisely said nothing.

“That is why we need several pathways. The connection may be too much for them, and we will need replacements.”

Memor said softly, feeling a tremor from her Undermind, “What crisis?”

“It goes badly in the jet.”