Shipstar

ONE

Memor glimpsed the fleeing primates, a narrow view seen through the camera on one of the little mobile probes. Simian shapes cavorted and capered among the understory of the Mirror Zone, making their way to—what? Apparently, to the local express station of mag-rail. Very well. She had them now, then. Memor clashed her teeth in celebration, and tossed a squirming small creature into her mouth, crunching it with relish.

These somewhat comic Late Invaders were scrambling about, anxious. They seemed dreadfully confused, too. One would have expected more of ones who had arrived via a starship, with an interstellar ram of intriguing design. But as well, they had escaped in their scampering swift way. And, alas, the other gang of them had somehow evaded Memor’s attempt to kill them, when they made contact with a servant species, the Sil. So they had a certain small cleverness, true.

Enough of these irritants! She would have to concentrate and act quickly to bring them to heel. “Vector to intercept,” Memor ordered her pilot. Their ship surged with a thrumming roar. Memor sat back and gave a brief clacking flurry of fan-signals expressing relief.

Memor called up a situation graphic to see if anything had changed elsewhere. Apparently not. The Late Invader ramship was still maneuvering near the Bowl, keeping beneath the defensive weapons along the rim. From their electromagnetic emissions, clearly they monitored their two small groups of Late Invaders that were running about the Bowl. But their ship made no move to directly assist them. Good. They were wisely cautious. It would be interesting to take their ship apart, in good time, and see how the primates had engineered its adroit aspects.

Memor counted herself fortunate that the seeking probe had now found this one group, running through the interstices behind the mirror section. She watched vague orange blobs that seemed to be several simians and something more, as well: tentacular shapes, just barely glimpsed. These shapes must be some variety of underspecies, wiry and quick. Snakes?

The ship vibrated under her as Memor felt a summoning signal—Asenath called, her irritating chime sounding in Memor’s mind. She had to take the call, since the Wisdom Chief was Memor’s superior. Never a friend, regrettably. Something about Asenath kept it that way.

Asenath was life-sized on the viewing wall, giving a brilliant display of multicolored feathers set in purple urgency and florid, rainbow rage. “Memor! Have you caught the Late Invaders?”

“Almost.” Memor kept her own feather-display submissive, though with a fringe of fluttering orange jubilance. “Very nearly. I can see them now. The primate named ‘Beth’ has a group, including the one I’ve trained to talk. I’m closing on them. They have somehow mustered some allies, but I am well armed.”

Asenath made a rebuke display, slow and sardonic. “This group you let escape, yes?”

“Well, yes, they made off while I was attending to—”

“So they are the escaped, I take it. I cannot attend to every detail, but this was a plain failure, Attendant Astute Astronomer. They eluded you.”

Memor suppressed her irritation. Asenath always used full titles to intimidate and assert superiority—usually, as now, with a fan-rattle. “Only for a short while, Wisdom Chief. I had also to contend with the other escaped primates, you may recall, Your Justness.”

“Give up everything else and get us that primate who can talk! We need it. Don’t fire on them. If they die, you die.”

Memor had to control her visible reaction. No feather-display, head motionless. “Wisdom Chief? What has changed?”

No answer. Asenath’s feather-display flickered with a reflexive blush of fear, just before she faded.

She was hiding something … but what? Memor would have to learn, but not now. She glanced at the detection screen, ignoring her pilot. Beth’s group had disappeared into a maze of machinery. There were heat traces in several spots, leading … toward the docks. Yes! Toward another escape.

There had been six of these Late Invaders when they escaped. Now the heat traces found only five, plus some slithering profiles of another species. Had one died or gone astray? These were a social species, on the diffuse hierarchy model, so it was unlikely they had simply abandoned one of their kind.

“Veest Blad,” she said to the pilot, “make for the docks. We’ll intercept them there. Fast.”

Two

Tananareve Bailey looked back, face lined, sweat dripping from her nose. Nobody behind her now. She was the last, almost keeping up. Her injuries had healed moderately well and she no longer limped, but gnawing fatigue had set in. She was slowing. Her breath rasped and her throat burned and she was nearly out of water.

It had been a wearing, sweaty trip through the maze she thought of as “backstage.” The labyrinth that formed the back of the Bowl’s mirror shell was intricate and plainly never intended for anybody but workers to move through. No comforts such as passageways. Poor lighting. Twisty lanes a human could barely crawl through. This layer underpinning the Bowl was the bigger part of the whole vast structure, nearly an astronomical unit across—but only a few meters thick. It was all machinery, stanchions, and cables. Control of the mirrors on the surface above demanded layers of intricate wiring and mechanical buffers. Plus, the route twisted in three dimensions.

Tananareve was sweating and her arms ached. She couldn’t match the jumping style of her companions in 18 percent gravity without a painful clicking in her hip and ribs. Her pace was a gliding run, sometimes bounding off an obstructing wall, sometimes taking it on her butt—all assisted by her hands. It demanded a kind of slithering grace she lacked.

Beth, Lau Pin, Mayra, and Fred were ahead of her. She paused, clinging to a buttress shaft. She needed rest, time, but there was none of that here. For a moment she let the whole world slide away and just relaxed, as well as she could. These moments came seldom but she longed for them. She sighed and … let go.…

Earth came to her then … the quiet leafy air of her childhood, in evergreen forests where she hiked with her mother and father, her careless laughter sinking into the vastness of the lofty trees. Her heart was still back there in the rich loam of deep forests, fragrant and solemn in the cathedral redwoods and spruce. Even in recalling it all, she knew it had vanished on the tides of time. Her parents were dead for centuries now, surely, despite the longevity treatments. But the memories swarmed up into her as she relaxed for just a long, lingering moment.

Her moment of peace drained away. She had to get back to running.

In the dim light, she could barely make out the finger snakes flickering ahead of the long-striding humans. They had an amazingly quick wriggle. Probably they’d been adapted through evolution to do repairs in the Bowl’s understory. Beth had gotten fragments of their history out of the snakes, but the translation was shaky. They’d been here on the Bowl so long, their own origins were legends about a strange, mythical place where a round white sun could set to reveal black night.

“Beth,” Tananareve sent over short-range comm, “I’m kinda … I … need a rest.”

“We all do,” came the crisp reply. Beth turned up ahead and looked back at her, too far away to read an expression. “Next break is five minutes.”

“Here I come.” She clamped down her jaw and took a ragged breath.

Their target was an automated cargo drone. The snakes had told of these, and now the bulkheads and struts they passed were pitched forward, suggested they were getting close. Up ahead, as she labored on, she could see it emerge, one in a line of identical flat-bellied cylinders. Tananareve could see the outline of a great oyster-colored curved hatch in its side, and—was that? Yes!—stars beyond a window wall. She felt elation slice through her fatigue. But now the hip injury had slowed her to a limping walk.

Without the finger snakes, this plan would have been impossible.

She limped up to the rest of them, her mouth already puckering at the imagined taste of water. The three snakes were decorated in camouflage colors, browns and mottled blacks, the patterns almost the same, but Tananareve had learned to tell them apart. They massed a bit more than any of the humans, and looked like snakes whose tails had split into four arms, each tipped with a claw. Meaty things, muscular, slick-skinned. They wore long cloth tubes as backpacks, anchored on their ridged hides.

Beth’s team had first seen finger snakes while escaping from the garden of their imprisonment. Tananareve surprised a nest of them and they fled down into deep jungle, carrying some cargo in a sling. The snakes were a passing oddity, apparently intelligent to a degree. Her photos of them were intriguing.

Now it was clear the finger snakes must have tracked and observed their party ever since. When Fred led the humans to an alien computer facility, they were not in evidence. Fred had found a way to make the computer teach them the Bird Folk language. Among his many talents, Fred was a language speed-learner. He got the quasilinear logic and syntax down in less than a day. Once he had built a vocabulary, his learning rate increased. A few more days and he was fluent. The whole team carried sleep-learning, so they used a slip-transfer from Fred’s. By then he had been somehow practicing by himself, so it was best that he got to talk to the snakes first.

They just showed up, no diplomacy or signposting. Typical snake character—do, don’t retreat into symbols or talk. When the finger snakes crawled through the door, somehow defeating Lau Pin’s lock, Fred said hello and no more. He wasn’t exactly talkative either—except, as he often rejoined, when he actually had something important to say.

So after his hello, and a spurt of Snake in reply, Tananareve was able to yell at them. “Give you honor! We are lost!”

Five snakes formed a hoop, which turned out to be a sign of “fruitful endeavor commencing.” Tananareve made a hand-gesture she had somehow gotten from the slip-transfer. This provoked another symbol, plus talk. Formal snake protocol moved from gestures and signs into the denser thicket of language. Luckily, the highest form of Snakespeech was a modified Bird Folk structure that stressed lean and of sinew as virtues, so their knotted phrases did convey meaning in transparent, staccato rhythms.

The finger snakes were rebels or something like it, as nearly as Tananareve could untangle from the cross-associations that slithered through Snakespeech. Curious, also. Humans were obviously new to their world, and therefore they began tracking the human band in an orderly, quiet way shaped by tradition. The snakes worked for others, but retained a fierce independence. Knowledge was their strong suit—plus the ability to use tools of adroit shape and use. They went everywhere in the Bowl, they said, on engineering jobs. Especially they maintained the meters-thick layers between the lifezone and the hard hull. In a sense, they maintained the boundary that separated the uncountable living billions from the killing vacuum that waited a short distance away.

The snakes wanted to know everything they could not discover by their intricate tracking and watching. They knew the basic primate architecture, for their tapering “arms” used a cantilevered frame that bore a warped resemblance to the human shoulder. This, plus a million more matters, flew through their darting conversations. Snakes thought oddly. Culture, biology, singing, and food all seemed bound up in a big ball of context hard to unravel. But when something important struck them, they acted while humans were still talking.

When it was clear that humans would die if they stayed at low gravity for too long, the finger snakes led them here: to a garage for magnetically driven space vehicles. Snake teams did the repairs here.

One of the finger snakes—Thisther, she thought—clicked open a recessed panel in the drone, so the ceramic cowling eased down. Thisther set to work, curling head to tail so his eyes could watch his nail-tipped fingers work. The wiry body flexed like cable. Phoshtha turned away from him, on guard.

Tananareve was still guessing at genders, but there were behavior cues. The male always seemed to have a tool in hand, and the females were wary in new surroundings. Thisther was male; Phoshtha and Shtirk were female.

Phoshtha’s head dipped and curled as she turned around, seeking danger. Shtirk wasn’t visible; she must be on guard. Tananareve sensed no obvious threats, barring, perhaps, a whistling just at the edge of her hearing.

Phoshtha wriggled to meet her. “Thisther knows computers-speak,” she said. “King of computers = persons. Will write thrust program for us quick, person-comp-adept, she is. Are you sick?”

“Was injured,” Tananareve said. “Not sick. Am healing.” Both spoke in Bird talk, its trills and rolled vowels chiming like a song.

“Is well we know.”

The curved side of the cargo drone slid up with a high metallic whine. Green verdant wealth. The drone was filled, jammed with vegetation—live plants standing forth in trays, rich hanging streamers. Lights in the curved ceiling glared like suns. Thisther continued to work, and suddenly trays were sliding out and falling. Half the trays had piled up on the deck when it stopped.

“Keep some plants. Air for us while we travel,” Phoshtha said. She wriggled away.

Lau Pin jog-hopped in the light grav, springing over to help Tananareve. “You okay? Shall I carry you?”

“I’m fine. What’s that whistling?” It was loud and now had a low rumble to it.

“We need to get aboard,” Lau Pin said, glancing around at the snake teams at work. “Quick.” He tried pulling her along by her belt, desisted when he saw her pain.

Tananareve walked over to a copper-hued wall, leaning against its warmth. The finger snakes chattered in their jittering bursts and oozed across the platforms with wriggling grace. She studied them amid the noise, and … let herself go.

She was back in the leafy wealth she had grown up in and, yes, knew she would never see again. She allowed her head to tilt back and felt her spine kink and lapse as it straightened and eased. Amid metal and ceramics, she thought of green. This odd construction they were moving through, a weird place bigger than planets, had its own version of green paradise … and was the only reason she had survived in it. The vast, strange canopies with their chittering airborne creatures; the stretching grasslands and zigzag trees; animals so odd, they threw her back into her basic biology—they were all natural in some way, yet … not. Someone had designed their setting, if not their species.

Those sprawling lands of the Bowl had been tolerable. These mechanical labyrinths below the Bowl’s lifesphere were … not. She had seen quite enough, thank you, of the motorized majesty that made such a vast, rotating artifact. Rest, that was her need now. She had to descend into blissful sleep, consign to her unconscious the labors of processing so much strangeness.

She let go slowly, head lapsing back. Easing was not easy, but she let herself descend into it, for just a moment before she would get up again and stride off, full of purpose and letting no soft moments play through her … Just for a while …

“Looks like the male is finished playing with the controls,” Lau Pin called.

Dimly she sensed the snakes moving by her. Thisther wriggled into the hold … then Phoshtha and Shtirk.

Tananareve came out of her blissful retreat slowly. Voices echoed odd and hollow around her. Lead infected her legs; they would not move without great strain. She made herself get unsteadily up onto two uncertain feet. Clouds in her mind dispelled slowly—something about green wealth, forests of quiet majesty, her parents …

She made her chin snap up, eyes fluttering, back on duty … and slowly turned to survey the area. Where’s Beth?

Clouds still grasped at her. Breathe deeply, keep it up.

Tananareve strode off to check around some angular buttress supports. No human about.

The snakes had crawled into the ship, fitting somehow into open spaces. Lau Pin jogged to join them. He glanced back at her, waved a hand, turned, went away.…

Still there were clouds. She listened intently as she tried to put one small foot in front of the other. Remarkably difficult, it was.

Rumbling, sharp whistling, chatter. Tananareve walked a bit unsteadily back toward the ship. Her vision was blurred, sweat trickling into her eyes and stinging.

The great curved door closed in Tananareve’s face.

“Hey,” Tananareve said. She stopped, blinked. Clouds swept away on a sudden adrenaline shock—

“Wait!”

The drone slid out of line and away, slow at first, then faster and faster.

“Dammit!” she shouted. “Damn—” She couldn’t hear herself over a whistling roar. Hot air blasted her back.

“Wait!” Beth Marble shouted. She could feel the acceleration building. The finger snakes were wrapped around support pillars, and her crew were grabbing for tie-downs. She found handholds and footholds while thrust pulled massively at her.

She wailed, “Tananareve!”

“She was sick,” Phoshtha said, recessed eyes glittering. “Thrust would have killed her. She would have slowed us.”

“What? You let—” Beth stopped. It was done; handle the debriefing later, in calmer moments. The snakes were useful but strange.

They were accelerating quickly and she found a wedge-shaped seat. Not ideal for humans, but manageable. There was little noise from the magnetics, but the entire length of the drone popped and ponged as stresses adjusted.

Lau Pin said, “I have SunSeeker online.”

“Send Redwing our course. Talk to him.” Beth couldn’t move; she was barely hanging on to a tie-down bar. “Use our best previous coordinates.”

“Okay. I’m having it compute from the present force vectors.” Lau Pin turned up the volume so others could hear. “Lau Pin here.”

“Jampudvipa here, bridge petty officer. Captain Redwing’s got some kind of cold, and Ayaan Ali is bridge pilot. What’s your situation?”

“We’re on our way. It went pretty much as we’d planned. Hardly anything around on the way but finger snakes. We’ve got three with us. Uh … We lost Tananareve Bailey.”

“Drown it,” the officer said. “All right. But you’re en route? Hello, I see your course … yeah. Wow. You’re right up against the back of the mirror shell.”

“Jampudvipa, this drone is driven by magnets in the back of the Bowl. Most of their ships and trains operate that way, we think. It must save reaction fuel. We don’t have much choice.”

Some microwave noise blurred the signal, then, “Call me Jam. And you don’t have pressure suits?”

“No, and there’s no air lock. No way to mate the ships.”

A pause. “Well, Ayaan says she can get SunSeeker to the rendezvous in ten hours. After that … what? Stet. Stet. Lau Pin, we can maybe fit you into the bay that held Eros before we lost it. If not … mmm.”

Lau Pin said, “The finger snakes don’t keep time our way. I think it’s longer for us. I’ll make regular checks and send them.”

“We’ll be there. And you all need medical assistance? Four months in low gravity, out in the field—yeah. We’ll have Captain Redwing out of the infirmary by then, but it only holds two. Pick your sickest.”

“Would have been Tananareve.”

The drone was gone. The system’s magnetic safety grapplers released with a hiss. Tananareve stood in the sudden silence, stunned.

A high hiss sounded from a nearby track. She turned to find a snake to stop the drone, call it somehow—and saw no snakes at all. All three had boarded the drone. Now the shrill hiss was worse. She stepped back from the rising noise, and an alien ship came rushing toward the platform from a descending tube. It was not magnetic; it moved on jets.

Tananareve looked around, wondering where to run. The ship had a narrow transparent face and through it she could see the pilot, a spindly brown-skinned creature in a uniform. It looked not much bigger than she was and the tubular ship it guided was enormous, flaring out behind the pilot’s cabin. The ship eased in alongside the main platform, jetting cottony steam. Tananareve wondered what she should do: hide, flee, try to talk to—?

Then, behind huge windows in the ship’s flank, she saw a tremendous feathered shape peering out at her, and recognized it. Quick flashing eyes, the great head swiveling to take in all around it, with a twisted cant to its heavy neck. She gasped. Memor.

Three

Redwing looked out across the yawning distances, frowning.

Far down, there were all the artful graces of land and sea, suspended before a warming sun like a rich, steaming dish offered on a steel-hard plate. Everything was larger, grander, and strange.

The Bowl seas were light blue expanses larger than Jupiter, bounded by shallow brown edges. Across those ran arcs of grand wave trains, immense ripples that must roll on for years before finding a shore. At finer resolution, sediment plumes of tan and chocolate spread across shallow seabeds, feeding kelp straits of festering ripe green. Rumpled hill ranges were larger than Asia. Never driven by continental drift, these crosshatched the vast lands, carved by rivers that could cut no farther than the Bowl’s hull. Indeed, he could see places where wind or water had worn away the living zone, leaving patches of rusting metal. Under close-up, he and Karl watched teams repairing such erosions.

The deserts were huge, too. Tan lands of grass went on over distances greater than the Moon was from Earth, with only dots of green beckoning where an oasis sprouted. Sprawling dry lands ended where water found its way to make moist forests. Storms spiraling in immense white-bright pinwheels churned with ponderous energies, raking across deserts larger than planets, and over forests so deep, no one could ever walk out of them.

How did anyone design a thing like this? A vast trapped atmosphere, oceans the size of planets, lakes like continents, yet no real mountains—maybe that was a clue. Of course, putting an Everest on the Bowl would make it lopsided and complicate dynamics. There could be no plate tectonics and so no volcanoes, but how did this biosphere circulate carbon and water? On Earth, a complex cycle a hundred million years long did the job. As well, Earth’s tectonic ranges forced air over and around them, generating the moving chaos humans called weather. The Bowl’s dwellers did not suffer from mountain wind shadow, or the combing winds that raced through narrow passages. Mountains made for stormy trouble on Earth. The Bowl was a milder place than planets could be.

But why build a whole contraption like this, when you could just move to Florida?

The question wasn’t just rhetorical. If he could fathom what built such a thing, and why, he might have a clue about how to deal with them.

Ping. His autosec reminded him of lunch.

He thought of it as the mess, very old school, but Fleet said it was a Starship Wardroom. He sat as usual for Meal 47, his current choice: classic turkey dinner, rich cream sauce and cranberries. He made himself not think about the simple fact that it was all made of ingredients centuries old; after all; so was he.

He had kept mistaking what Mayra Wickramsingh said at every meal: Nosh for me, it sounded like. After she and her husband, Abduss, went down in the disastrous descent to the Bowl, he had looked it up. The Linguist AI had a transform function, so it learned even through his mushy pronunciation; the AI found it was an Indian phrase, naush faramaiye, meaning “please accept the pleasure of savoring this meal,” which seemed like bon appétit to Redwing. Suitable. “Naush faramaiye to you all,” Redwing said, bowing his head. The crew bowed back. Clare looked puzzled.

“Cap’n, I’m having trouble with the Artilect coherence,” Jampudvipa said.

Redwing still used AI as a shorthand for the shipboard systems that patiently oversaw operations, since that’s what everybody called them when he was growing up. But Artilect was the actual Fleet term, since integrated artificial minds constituted a collective intellect. It was useful to think of the systems as different people, engaged in a constant congress, discussing the ship’s current state. “What’s their problem?”

“They want to go back into full scoop mode.”

“In a solar system? We can’t get the necessary plasma densities.”

“I know.” Jampudvipa shrugged. “I think they’re showing mission fatigue.”

“Have you tried to give them some shut-eye time, one by one?”

“They resist it.”

“Enforce it. Tell them they need a psych reboot, only make the language prettier.”

This got rueful laughs around the wardroom table. “Diplomacy—not our strong suit,” Clare Conway said. She was more personable than most pilots, one of the reasons she had made the crew. Redwing had gone through her file while making his selection of whom to revive.

Ayaan Ali frowned. “It is serious problem, Artilect coherence. They start to disagree, to have their own ideas—trouble.”

“They want what’s impossible,” Karl Lebanon said. He folded his hands and leaned back against a bulkhead. As general technology officer, he shepherded Artilects through daily problems, plus a dozen other jobs. “We can’t go back to interstellar mode.”

Clare sipped her coffee. “They have to adjust our ramscoop intake in ten-second intervals, to optimize. That burns their attention reservoir, makes their duty cycles long. Stresses them pretty hard.”

“We’re getting system clash in our magnetic scoop system,” Karl said. “It’ll tire the Artilects and we’ll start getting torques, surges, inductive effects that wear down our gear.”

“Same small-scale coil problem?”

“Yeah. The system’s pretty stressed. Never made for this kind of low-velocity maneuvering. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them.”

Clare said, “A mechanical problem, fixable—but only if we could get a bot in the inductive chamber. Those we could maybe make, but present bot complement can’t do it. That choice set is not even in the partition menu.”

“We can’t downtime them?” Redwing knew the answer but if he let people talk, they felt better. All three chimed in with their versions of the same hard fact: A ship designed to work at interstellar speeds was a bitch to control in planetary orbit, and have any actual maneuvering capability. The Artilects were taking the brunt of it.

Redwing nodded as each spoke but ran his own inventory as well.

By this time his knees were sending angry messages that they wanted a trial separation. His weight workout this morning had pushed the limit too far, again. A warning sign: When he overexerted, he was working out unconscious worries. So he concentrated on Clare’s detailed tech talk and focused outward, nodding and keeping his gaze on her while thinking about all the crew. They worked well together, as the Psych Artilect Adept predicted, before Redwing had wakened the new members. How well would they do when Beth’s team came aboard? Only four left out of six, but—the ship would get more crowded and irritations would begin to build. He had a time window before he would have to decide whether to get out of this entire situation and cast off into interstellar flight again or—what? Go down onto the Bowl in enough numbers to accomplish a resupply and … what? Too many unknowns.

He let the crew run on for a while, noting that their uniforms were getting a tad messy, hair uncombed, beards a few days old. He would have to sharpen them up a bit, and now might be the time.

At least this crew would look better then, when and if they got Beth’s team aboard. They’d have to double on berths. Working spirit and order would be more difficult. A clock would start ticking.

He said mildly, “Officer Jampudvipa, with the Artilects going moody, should we be letting them run the bridge alone while we have lunch?”

Blinks, nods. Jampudvipa looked rueful, mouth turning down, and got up hurriedly. “Yes, sir. They’re in collective agreement mode but—yes.”

That let him focus on the others. “Beth’s team will be aboard in a few hours. That’s if we’re lucky and solve the problem we have to focus on now. Still, I want everybody spruced up—clean, shaven, bright eyed.” Nods all around, some repentant. He turned to Karl. “But the major problem is, how do we get them aboard?”

“I’ve got her photos of the vehicle they’re in—basically, a magnetic train car with locks facing outward, to vacuum,” Karl said. “But they don’t have their suits. The aliens, these ‘Folk,’ took those at capture.”

“So…” Redwing let them think a moment. “Can we match velocities and run a pressured conduit?”

“Not easily.” Karl’s mouth fretted as he thought. “We’ve got EVA gear, sure, but it’s one-man, for repairs.”

“How about the Bernal?” Clare asked. “It’s for freight transfer, but we could maybe refit it for a fix-up flexi passage.”

“I don’t trust anything flexi to stand up to torques and stretches,” Karl said. “If we try it, yes, Bernal is the best craft.”

Redwing had used the repair bots to inspect SunSeeker’s hull soon after entering the Bowl system, and he privately agreed with Karl. In interstellar mode, their strong magnetic fields had kept the ship from the blizzard of neutral atoms and dust. SunSeeker was less effective dealing with erosions while it maneuvered at low thrust around the Bowl. The externals looked pitted and scarred now, and he wondered about whether the repair bots could spot flaws that could prove fatal in a personnel transfer. Or if the flexi would sustain pitting from random debris. A thousand questions nagged at him.

Redwing said, “We could try a fit with our dorsal hatch. We’d have to rig some kind of docking collar.”

This they liked. Redwing let them toss ideas around for a while as he tried to envision exactly how that configuration might work. Ayaan Ali had little to say, but he saw a quick widening of her eyes and nodded at her, holding up a hand to draw attention.

“I … have an idea,” she said quietly. “But we must work quickly.”

Four

Beth watched the Bowl’s outer hull, a fast-forward world flittering by below the hard black of space. Even protrusions the size of skyscrapers were just passing gray blurs. In contrast, though the Bowl itself had a surface rotation speed in the range of many kilometers a second, the array of gas clouds and nearby suns hung still. Even high speeds on the interplanetary scale meant nothing to the solemn stars.

Their tubular craft traveled down the outside of the Bowl, hovering close on magnetically secured trap-rails. She watched enormous plains of gray steel and off-white ceramic flash by. Images jittered so fast, she could not tell what was important. A wall with crawling maggot robots, doing unknown labors. A sliding cascade of liquid metal fuming in high vacuum as it slid into jet-black chunks, then ivory cylinders, then shapely gray teardrops—all to descend into intricate new works, objects meant for mysterious use. All that went by in a stretched display she processed in a few seconds—an entire industrial process carried out in cold vacuum, far from the Bowl star’s intrusions. It seethed with robot motion. Fumes danced, billowed, and evaporated away in lacy blue streamers.

Now enormous tangled structures the size of mountains flowed by them. She could see lattice works and cup-shaped constructs but not what they did. It was difficult to keep perspective and their speed seemed to increase still, pressing her at an angle. She was sitting in a chair designed for some other being, one wider and taller. Windows on all sides showed landscapes flitting by, lit by starlight and occasional bright flares amid the odd buildings. From above her head came occasional clanking noises and whispery whistles—sounds of the mag-rail.

“All this industrial infrastructure,” Fred said quietly beside her. “Kept out of their living zone.”

“Ah, yes,” Beth said, not taking her eyes from the images flashing by in the big board window. “We hardly saw any cities before, either.”

“Sure, the Bowl’s land area is enormous, but then you realize that their whole mechanistic civilization is clinging to the outer skin. So they have twice the area we thought.”

Beth glanced upward into the “sky,” where the hull’s burnished metal gleamed beneath fitful lights. “And anyone who lives here, does so wrong way up. Centrifugal gravity pushes them away from the hull, so the Bowl is always over their heads. The stars are at their feet.” Beth laughed softly. “An upside-down world of its own.”

“Smart, really.” Fred was watching, too, his eyes darting at the spacious spectacle zooming past. “You can do your manufacturing and then throw your waste away in high vacuum.”

Beth shook herself; enough gawking. “Look, we’re in a cargo drone. We have to be ready in case we stop and get new passengers.”

“Relax. We’ll feel the deceleration, get ready.”

“At least we should search for food dispensers. This passenger compartment is for whoever’s accompanying the cargo—”

“Plants, yeah,” Fred said distantly, still distracted by the view. “Those finger snakes arranged to escort the plants, fit us in. Neat.”

Beth smiled. Fred had summed up days of negotiations. Their halting efforts had been beset by translation errors and mistakes. Even sharing a sort-of common language, a mix of Bird and Anglish, there were ambiguities that came from how different minds saw the universe. The snakes used wriggles and tiny movements of their outsized faces to convey meaning, and it took a while to even notice that. Words meant different things if a right-wriggle came with it, versus a left-wriggle. The snakes had similar troubles reading “primate face gestures” as they termed it.

Fred turned to her. “You’re worried about Tananareve.”

“I … yes.”

“You’re surprised I noticed.”

“Not really, I—”

“Look, I know what’s in my personnel file. I’m classic Asperger’s, yep. But I hope I make up for it by, well, my quirky ability to see how things work. Or that’s what the file says.”

To stall for time she asked, “How did you see your file?”

Fred was honestly surprised. She realized he did not actually know how to be dishonest, or at least without detection. “An easy hack.”

“Well … yes. I read everybody’s file before we left SunSeeker. Standard field-prep method.”

“So I should overlook how you fret about us, especially Tananareve.”

“She’s not really recovered, and I should’ve noticed she didn’t get in here with us.”

Fred gave her an awkward smile. “Look, the place was confusing and we didn’t have any time. She wandered off. There were the finger snakes making a racket and shooting questions at us.” A sigh. “Anyway, put it aside. We’ve got the boarding problem coming up.”

She sighed. “Right, of course.” So much for Asperger’s patients not picking up on social signals. What had that training program said? “Cognitive behavioral therapy can improve stress management relating to anxiety.” Yet Fred seems calmer than the rest of us.…

Fred pressed on. “The snakes say we’re due for a stop about where SunSeeker could rendezvous with us. But we have to come out at high speed, so they have to match us. But—”

“Nothing like pressure suits aboard,” Lau Pin said. “The snakes say they can’t make anything like that, not in time.”

He and Mayra had come up, carrying a bowl of what looked like gruel. Mayra scooped some out with a spoon, tasted it. “Bland, but no harm on my bioregister. This comes out of a dispenser in the next car.”

So they all fell to eating. Beth was hungry, so the lack of taste in the muddy mixture of carbs and sugars didn’t stop her. She was thinking, anyway. Silence, except when two snakes came by and chattered in their high, fluting voices. Beth ignored them while Mayra carried on a halting conversation with the aliens. Intelligent aliens, the goal of centuries of searching, and I don’t have time for them.…

Her hand stopped with her spoon in midair as she stared into the distance. Slowly she turned to Mayra. “Ask them if we can disconnect this car from the track,” she said.

The big problem was hard to sense when you were blithely standing in fractional gravity and not paying attention to the sky. Here on the mag-train, that sky was filled with stars, and it took an hour or two to notice that they were moving. As she thought, Beth watched a bright star move off the window where she sat. The Bowl rotated in thirty-two hours, so the night sky seemed to move a bit slower than it did on Earth. She recalled how, in elementary school, she had been amazed that while sitting at her desk she was really whizzing around at well over a thousand kilometers an hour. The Earth’s rotation did that, and its orbit moved her at thirty kilometers a second, too. Now she was sitting in a fast train car and also moving with the Bowl’s rotation, hundreds of kilometers a second. Leaving the Bowl meant launching into space at that huge velocity.

Mayra said, “They’re scared. Why would you want to—?”

“Can they do it?”

“Yes, at the next stop. There’s a launch facility they use for traveling off the Bowl, but—”

“How do we shed the velocity?” Fred said.

Beth said, “Carefully, I bet. If they can launch, they must fire us off against the Bowl’s rotation, to bring the exit speed down to a manageable level.”

“SunSeeker must be moving at a few tens of klicks a second,” Fred said. “To lose half a thousand klicks a second…” His voice trailed off into a croak, apparently at the magnitude of it. “… that’s not the way to do it, though.”

Beth watched the landscape zoom by outside. Were they slowing?

Mayra said, “They call it the Jumper.”

“A launch facility?” Beth asked. “Fred, what did you mean?”

“The obvious way to get off the Bowl is to go near the axis, where there’s nearly no centrifugal grav, so not a high speed. Then leap off into vacuum.”

“We’re headed that way, but—” Beth stopped. “Where is this Jumper?”

Mayra chattered to the snakes, and then said, “The next stop, if we take the right shunt. They say.” She looked doubtful, as if this was all moving too fast. Which it is, Beth thought, in more ways than one.

The finger snakes rattled their “shells,” which seemed to work like fingernails. She had seen them use those with lightning-quick skill, to manipulate the intricate tools carried in their side pouches. Now they made a noise like castanets—or, she noticed, like a rattlesnake about to strike. Each snake had four of them on their four fingers. Beth saw Mayra drawing back, her face a mask of alarm. “What’s—?”

“They sense great risk,” Mayra said slowly, “in taking a Jump in this hauler.”

“Not space rated?”

“No, a lack of ‘life caring’—habitat gear, I think. That noise, though … Ewww.”

“Yeah, kinda hard to take,” Beth said. The snakes were weaving now, standing on leathery, strong “arms” and straining up into the air. Their bodies seemed all ribbed muscle, eyes glittering as they glanced at each other.

Fred said, “Maybe they’re deciding whether the risk is worth it.”

“Worth what?” Mayra asked, her face still tight with alarm.

“Worth going with us,” Fred said. “That’s what you meant, right, Beth?”

“I figured there had to be a way to launch into raw space without going to the pole, the Knothole, to get the speed down. I guess there is.”

Mayra said, “That’s what the finger snakes imply. They’re working out whether to help us do that … I think.” A wry shrug. “Not really sure.”

Beth leaned forward, eyes still on the scenery flashing by above the perpetual night sky below. Yes, they were moving slower. Definitely. And was the grav here lighter? So they were moving toward the Knothole? “They can handle the tech for a Jump?”

“Yes, they say. But … they say it will be hard on us. A lot of acceleration, and—”

The snakes chattered and rattled and Mayra bowed her head, listening. “The seats will self-contour, so we will … survive.”

“It’s that hard?” Fred asked.

“High. We don’t have suits that baffle us against sudden surges.” Mayra shrugged. “It is not as though we could have carried them with us, all these months.” A slow sad smile.

Beth saw she was recalling her husband, who had died when they broke out of confinement, crushed by a hideous spiderlike thing. “What else?”

“They say there is little time to do it. As soon as we reach the next station stop, they must gain control of the shunting system. They say they can, the attendants there—mostly finger snakes—are old friends. Then they must move us into a cache that will ratchet us into a ‘departure slot’ as they call it. Then we move into line and get dispatched by an electromagnetic system. It seizes us, in a manner independent of the precise shape of this hauler … and flings us into space, along a vector counter to the Bowl’s spin.”

Mayra had not spoken so much in a long while. Beth chose to take that as a positive sign. She was right about gear; they had little and would be forced to use whatever came to hand. The seats here were oddly shaped and not designed for humans. The finger snakes had couches to strap into. Not so the bare benches she was sitting on. Still less so for the latrine, which turned out to be a narrow cabin with holes in the floor, some of them small, others disturbingly large.

She signed. “I know it may be uncomfortable. But it’s the only way.”

Silence. Even the snakes had gone quiet.

Lau Pin said, “We’re dead if we stay down here. They’ll catch us again. We escaped once; that trick won’t work again.”

Mayra and Fred nodded. Collective decision, great.

Beth noted the snakes watching her. They had somehow deduced that she was the nominal leader of these odd primates who strode into their lives. Maybe all smart species had some hierarchy?

“Okay, we do it. Notice we’re slowing down?”

Fred nodded. “Yeah, felt it.”

Lau Pin said, “We don’t have much time. Got to hit the ground and move fast. The snakes will tell us what to do.”

“Right, good,” Beth said. She glanced at Mayra. “And … what else?”

“Well…” Mayra hesitated. “It’s the finger snakes. They want to come with us.”

Five

Redwing plucked a banana that grew in a weird toroid, peeled and ate it, its aroma bringing back memories of tropical nights and the lapping of waves. Cap’n’s privilege.

His comm buzzed and Clare Conway said, “We’ll need you on the bridge presently.”

“On the way.”

Yet he hesitated. Something fretted at the back of his mind.

Redwing had read somewhere that one of his favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, had been asked what was the best training for a novelist. He had said “an unhappy childhood.” Redwing had enjoyed a fine time growing up, but he wondered if this whole expedition was unfolding more like a novel, and would be blamed on one person, one character, the guy in charge: him. Maybe you got a happy childhood and then an unhappy adulthood, and that’s how novels worked.

His mother had made it happy. His father was away at one war or another while he grew up, and when he was home seemed absorbed by sports and alcohol. But that didn’t include playing catch with Redwing or coming to his football games. His mother had given him a birthday gift of a telescope and microscope, and a big chemistry set. He bought chemical supplies by selling gunpowder and other pyrotechnics to the local kids. So science had been in his bones from the time he could read. But there were other currents in the mix. He bought a bicycle and a better telescope with gambling cash. His mother, who was a bridge Grand Master, always played penny-ante poker with Redwing while they waited in the car for his music lessons to start. He then applied what she had taught him to the neighborhood kids. They didn’t know how to count cards or compute probabilities from that. They also paid to see him blow something up or dissect some poor animal as a bio experiment. He was without principle but soon had enough principal to advance. A university career and PhD led to space, where he really wanted to go. But this far?…

Maybe, considering a “fault tree” analysis of his life, having a father who never gave him much time, Redwing figured he was socially unhappy enough to satisfy Hemingway. But finding fault wasn’t like solving a problem, was it?

He had been gaining belly weight in these long months skimming along the Bowl structure. Onboard physio analysis said cortisol was the culprit, a steroid hormone prompted by the body’s “fight or flight” response to stress. It had bloated him, listening to the plight of his teams fleeing aliens, and damn near nothing he could do to help.

He paused outside the bridge, straightened his uniform, and went in with his shoulders straight.

“Cap’n on bridge,” Ayaan Ali said crisply. Unnecessary, but it set the tone. Going into battle, if that’s what this was, had a way of quickening the heart.

“We’re skimming as close as we can to the Bowl rim,” Ayaan Ali said. “Having thruster problems.”

Redwing made a show of staying on his feet, taking in the screens, not pacing. “Seems like cutting it pretty near.”

Karl Lebanon, neatly turned out with his general technology officer uniform cleaned and creases stiff, said, “That magneto grip problem is back, big-time. Sir.”

Redwing gave him a nod. “Hand-manage it. Stay with the scoop Artilect all the time, ride it.”

“Yes, sir. It knows what’s up, is running full complement.”

“Stations,” Redwing said quietly. Old trick: speak softly, make them stay sharp to hear.

He didn’t want to call out of the cold sleep enough people to crew this any better, much less to populate some kind of a big landing expedition. Defrosting and training them would burn time and labor. Even after the reawakened came up to speed, at Glory system in some far future, the whole crew would all have to triple up on a hot hammock schedule, skimpy rations, and shower once a week. Under such stress, how could they perform? He didn’t want to find out. Not yet, anyway.

SunSeeker had five crew defrosted, including Captain Redwing. Beth’s remaining four would make nine. If he had the chance to rescue Cliff’s team, they’d be fourteen aboard. A bit crowded, but they could do it.

“Coming up, sir.” Ayaan Ali stared intently at the screens. “Rim looks the same, but that big cannon thing is swiveling to track us.”

“We’re in that slot?”

“See those walls?” Below he saw where the atmosphere screen was tied down. There was a rim zone with big constructions dotted across it, out in the vacuum. Ayaan had found a slot between two of them that kept below the cannon declination and now they were gliding through it, a few kilometers above the edge zone. Complex webs of buildings and immense, articulating machinery slid by below.

The Bowl’s outer edge loomed before them, bristling with knobs and bumps the size of nations back on Earth. Looking at the rear screens, he saw the thin, smart film that held in the Bowl atmosphere shimmering in slanting sunlight, blue white. This was the closest they had coasted in to that atmosphere blanket. He hoped they wouldn’t take ground fire, though the Bowl’s Great Plain was a thousand kilometers away, and any projectile fire would puncture their filmy cover. But yes, Karl was probably right, just from elementary geometry.

Still … “We’re low enough?”

“Yes, sir. They can’t depress that snout to aim into the Bowl structure.”

“Smart sociology. If there are wars here, at least nobody can blow a hole in their life support.”

We keep below their firing horizon, so we’re safe. Or so went the theory. So many theories had gotten blown away, ever since they sighted this huge, spinning contrivance. But if this one failed, they’d be in easy range of what looked like, Karl said, a gamma ray laser.

“Karl, what’s the emission gain?”

“They’re running something that gives off a lot of microwaves. Chargers, probably. Running up capacitor banks, I’d guess.”

“To discharge against us, through some plasma implosion, giving them the gammas?”

“That’s my estimate, sir.”

“What do you make of our situation?”

“I had the usual basic training in remote warfare. The find-fix-track-target-engage-assess decision tree, with Artilects providing the live data. That’s all I know.”

“No course in alien strategy and tactics?” This got him a round of chuckles around the bridge, as he had planned. Let them get a little steam out.

“Uh—no, sir. Not on the curriculum, couple centuries back.”

A quiet jab, well delivered. Redwing nodded and smiled in tribute. “Then full speed ahead.” In a tribute to ancient naval traditions, he added, “Give us some steam.”

“I don’t like to flex our magnetic scoop system any more, uh, sir,” Karl said.

“Same small-scale problem?”

“Yeah. The system’s pretty compressed. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them. It’s a mechanical problem, not just some digital e-management thing.”

“Do your best.” Not the time for more technospeak. Though that was all that kept them alive, of course. “Belay any repairs until we get Beth aboard. How’s the flexi gear straightening?”

“Programmed on the printer,” Jampudvipa said. “Fold points and tension web seem sturdy enough to compile at pickup.”

“Excellent. Clare?”

“Look at the screen. The laser pods are above us now.”

What’s the old saying? “Come in under their radar” means something else. This is running in under the guns of a fortress that cannot fire down into the Bowl lifezone. “Um. Can we skim that close to the atmosphere?”

Karl pointed to the blue sheen cast off by the boundary film of the atmosphere. This close in, it spread like an ocean landscape, yet the eye saw through it to lands and seas below. These stretched away in infinite perspective, intricate layers basking in unending solar radiance, free of night. The eggshell sheen of the boundary tricked the eye into seeing it as an ocean, with lands on the floor below. There were even long rolling waves to the boundary, flexing in slow, marching rows.

Redwing had to admit the design features here were clever beyond easy measure. Rather than fading off in the familiar exponential, like planets, the Bowl’s air ran up and into a hard boundary. The air was thin there, hundreds of kilometers high—but the multilayer smart film kept the errant wind streams and vortices at bay, spreading the energies across vast distances, smoothing them out. No molecules leaked away forever, as they had for poor Mars. The Bowl’s own magnetic field gave a spiderweb defense against cosmic rays and angry storms flailing out from the persecuted star that powered all this. Its fields were like spaghetti strands wrapped around the atmosphere, layers of argument against intruding particles wanting to plow into innocent gases.

Redwing said, “What other weapons does this place have?”

“More than we do,” Clare said mildly.

“Look,” Jampudvipa said with an irked twist to her mouth, “this thing’s unknowably old. Ancient! Beyond ancient. On Earth a century was a huge time for weapons to evolve. I read up on this in preoutbreak history, back when we were on one world. Amazing stuff. In the same century as the first nuke got used, we also killed each other with bayonets and one-shot rifles. So how can we think about—this?”

This outbreak of consternation made them all sit back, think.

Karl said solemnly, “The laws of physics constrain everybody—even the Bowl Folk, whoever they are. Or whatever.”

“Tech has its own evolution,” Clare said. “What’s in those big domes at the Bowl rim?”

“No way to know. Fly low, is all we can do,” Redwing said. Taking my ship into uncharted waters … It was liberating to be simply honest.

They slid on a blithe arc over the quickly spinning lip of the Bowl. Sensors set on the big domes and their enormous snouts registered no change.

Cruising over the Bowl’s lip and down the swiftly rushing hull brought quick instructive views. SunSeeker had come at the Bowl from the side and below, along the axis of revolution and through the Knothole. Now Redwing could see the detailed and intricate lattice that framed the hull’s support structures, threaded by long ribbed structures that looked like enormous subways and elevators, some with spiky turrets protruding at the junctions. But here and there were sections clearly retrofitted, yellow and green splotches of newer joints and fix-up ornamentations of mysterious use.

Additions and afterthoughts, he judged. Some reminded him of accumulated grime, touch-up attempts and insertions. Like the yellowing varnish on a Renaissance masterpiece, he thought. Strip away the accretions, and beneath is the original brilliance. Interstellar archaeology.

Six

Karl deployed the smart flexi with an electric shock. Under a kilovolt surge the velvet blue shroud billowed out—so thin, he could see the gyrating hull grinding past in the distance. Starlight lit its eternal churn. A certain serenity enveloped the view, for the background was the eternal spread of stars. The approaching dot was for the moment nothing.

He had static-fixed the flexi to the Bernal’s hull. Its sensors would follow inbuilt commands he could activate. Well, here goes …

The flexi popped open at the electro-command. Yet the micro sensors at the far end remained live and ready, he saw from his wrist monitor. The flexi bubble furled out as liquidly as a cape cast off a shoulder, though all this was in high vacuum, no gravity or atmosphere to command its dynamics. Such a thin fabric of layered smart carbon could be made and trained in the ship printers, but he had never tried anything this complex before. Now they had to use it to rescue Beth’s team from the big train car that came swarming up at them, the dot assuming a velocity a bit too high. Problems, yes. Perhaps not fatal, entirely. Yet.

Karl had not been thawed when SunSeeker shot through the Knothole, so all this gigantic architecture was new to him. He stared, momentarily lost in detail.

“Coming up on rendezvous prompt,” Jam sent on comm. “Bogie on vector grid.”

“Got it.” He eased the flexi controls, using both hands. For ease of manual operations, there were no left-handed crew on SunSeeker. Karl had made the crew cut because he was genuinely ambidextrous. In college he had made extra cash as a juggler.

“It’s coming up too fast,” Jam said urgently.

“I’ve got mag fields on, maybe I can push it off.” Karl ran the mag amplitude to the max. That was a stressor in a thick-hulled freighter like the Bernal; he could hear tinny pings.

He was looking out a true port, not a screen. Living inside a starship with only screen views felt disconnected. There was something about capturing the actual starlight photons bouncing off the Bowl that made it more real. This huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together, he realized. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar. So he scanned the Bowl’s wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes on his bridge board. It was only a few tens of meters thick, pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Which meant the Bowl stress-support material had to be better than SunSeeker’s. What engineers they were.…

Jam said, “It’s braking. Must have some maneuvering ability.”

“I can see them,” Kurt said quietly. He ran his scopes to the max. There were windows in part of the hauler and human heads peering out at him. He had to admire them. They had made it through captivity, struck out across unknown alien territory, stolen transport, liberated themselves—and were coming back to the ship to report.

Jam said, “Ease them in. Careful.”

“I read their roll at near zero, yaw zero point three five, but correcting—and pitch seven point five degrees.” Kurt rattled off the numbers just to be saying something while he used hand controls to turn Bernal into a plausible alignment.

“Bearing in,” Jam said. “Just got confirming signal. Ha! As if anybody else were meeting us out here.”

“Aligned. Now’s the hard part.”

Center ball was smack on, horizontal bar of the crosshatch dead center with vertical bar, and the bulky burnished train car that looked like a shoe box came to rest in the Bernal rest frame. With both hands he triggered the flexi with an electrostatic burst.

The flexi skirted across the gap like an unfolding velvet blue scarf. It unfolded and clamped on to the boxcar metal around the simple air lock. It anchored and popped him a message: PRESSURE SEAL SECURED.

“Got it.” Kurt palmed the pressure valves, and air rushed into the flexi corridor between the ships. Of course, the craft weren’t perfectly matched. But the flexi compensated, extruding further lengths of itself to accommodate the vagrant torques and thrusts as the two spacecraft wobbled and rocked in the magnetic grasp. Pressured. Secure.

“The flexi’s working!” Jam’s words came compressed, excited. “Ayaan was right. Programming them to double-seal solved the pressure problem, straightened them out.”

The boxcar’s lock popped and he saw the first head appear, looking around. Beth he recognized from her photo.

“Tag ’em through.” It happened fast and he had to keep them aligned with the mag grapple. Kurt watched the people come out through the boxcar air lock. The flexi was so transparent, he could see them kick against the sides for momentum and glide through the channel into the Bernal. He counted them. But—

“What’s that with you?”

“Snakes,” Jam sent the audio through a direct link.

It was Beth. “Smart snakes. They helped us.”

“Trouble,” Kurt said to himself.

Seven

It was a rough ride, irritating for Memor. She was cramped in the rattling hot cabin, subjected to rude accelerations. Her pilot seemed to take relish in throwing them into wrenching swoops and pivots. Magnetic ships moved more smoothly, of course, but Memor had chosen a rocket vehicle: it would not have to hover so close to the outer hull of the World. Memor braced against the surge and wondered if her pilot could be among the disaffected. This might be a small way of expressing smoldering anger. Best make a note for future use?

Surely not. Veest Blad was of an Adapted species, but he had been with her for years, back before Memor became female. Veest was too smart not to be loyal.

“Ah!” And there, her prey were in sight. That limping one was Tananareve. And those ropy things the probes had seen, now wriggling into one of the cargo cars in a magnetic train, were finger snakes.

Treason! They must be assisting the escaping bipeds. Finger snakes were a useful species, but their adaptation to civilization had always been chancy.

The car’s side closed. The whole train lifted, eased away from the docks, and moved into star-spattered space.

Memor considered. She had the acceleration to catch the train. Could she shoot out the magnetic locking plates without harming those inside? But Asenath had forbidden that—and the primate Tananareve, Memor saw abruptly, was still standing on the dock.

Tananareve had been the language adept of this band, with many sleeps spent acquiring the Folk language. Thus, the most important, for Asenath wanted a speaking primate, for reasons unknown. But … the creature seemed ready to fall over. How far could she get before Memor claimed the rest of them and came back for her? Perhaps she would not even be needed … but wait—

“Veest Blad, land near the biped. Not too near. We don’t want her fried.”

“Yes, lady.”

So what was that about? Memor had countermanded her own decision. A moment’s brief look into her Undermind told her why. The abandoned female looked to be dying, and she was the one whom Memor had inspected, had trained, had grown to know. The others—perhaps they could be caught, perhaps they might all be killed by Memor’s overbuilt weapons, true—but they weren’t needed while Tananareve was here.

Tananareve wiped sweat away and watched the bulbous vehicle settle a good distance away, engines throbbing. Still teetering a bit, feeling woozy, she stood in the hot moist wash of rocket exhaust, waiting. Running wouldn’t help her. She’d seen the tremendous creature’s speed.

Memor opened the great target-shaped window and rolled out. It looked painful: the rocket vehicle was cramped for her. Memor walked to Tananareve, huffed, and bent low, her eye to the woman’s eyes. In her own tongue she asked, “Where have they gone?”

Tananareve groped for a lie, and it was there. Beth’s team had discussed destinations, and rejected—“They’ve gone to join Cliff.”

“The other fugitives? The killers?”

“Cliff’s team, yes.”

“Where?”

She said, “I don’t know. The aliens knew.”

“The limbless ones? They are Adopted, but often rebellious. We must take action against them. Tananareve, how goes your adventure?”

“We were dying for lack of weight,” she said. “Lost bone and muscle. What choice did we have?”

Memor seemed to restrain herself. “No choice now. Come. Or shall I carry you?”

Tananareve took two steps, wobbled, and fell over.

She woke to a vague sensation, a hard surface with big ribs under it: Memor’s hands. She flexed her fists and shook her head, trying to get her mind to work. Now they were in the ship, her face close against a wall dotted with icons for controls. Something rumbled, vibrated. Language? And now the wall took on the appearance of a distant forest of plants grown in low gravity, like the place she’d escaped from. A creature like Memor stepped into view and flexed a million multicolored feathers.

No way could Tananareve follow a conversation that was largely the flexing of feathers and silent subsonic tremors that shook her bones. Memor was holding Tananareve like a prize, and the other was snarling.…

Asenath the Wisdom Chief was not of a mind to be placated. “One! You have one, and it is dying!”

“I will save it,” Memor said. “I will take it … her … down to the Quicklands, where spin gravity can restore her muscle and strengthen her bones. I know what she eats and I will procure it. This female is the one who understands me best. Gifted, though in many ways simple. She knows Rank One of the TransLanguage. Wisdom Chief, will you question her now?”

“What would I ask?” Asenath’s feathers showed rage, but that was a plumage lie. Memor’s undermind had caught the truth: She was in despair.

Memor found that revealing. Earlier the Wisdom Chief had been trying to bring about Memor’s disgrace and death. What had changed? Memor decided to wait her out.

Asenath broke first. “There comes a message from the Target Star, from our destination.”

All Memor’s feathers flared like a puffball. The human, engulfed, tried to wriggle free. Memor said, “That is wonderful! And dangerous, yes? Can you interpret—?”

“There are visuals. Complex ones. The message seems aimed at these creatures. At your Late Invaders!”

Memor’s feathers went to chaos: a riot of laughter. “That is … endlessly interesting.”

“You must care for your talking simian. We will try to make sense of this message. It is still flowing in. If I call, answer at once, and have the human at hand.”

Tananareve had caught little of that. She was nibbling at a melon slice now, slipped to her by Memor. She was enraged—tight-lipped, squinting in the strange glow—that she’d been caught again, but grudgingly grateful that Memor had brought provisions. The huge thing did not seem to mind carrying on conversation in front of a human, either.

What was that about? Hard to follow. Was Glory inhabited? And had someone there sent a message? Surely not to Earth; that would be foolish, when the Bowl was straight between Earth and Glory, and so much more powerful.

The captain should be told. He and his crew would figure it out.

Rockets fired, accelerations gripped her—and Memor’s ship was in flight. Tananareve sagged into the pull. The hard clamp was too strong to allow movement. She relaxed against the floor and tried to get into savasana pose, letting her muscles ease, hoping that her dinosaur-sized captor wouldn’t step on her.

Eight

They couldn’t all get into SunSeeker’s infirmary. Beth and Fred and Captain Redwing hovered around the door, watching as Mayra and Lau Pin were led to elaborate tables. Tubes and sensors snaked out to mate with them. Jam, acting as medic now, watched, tested, then asked, “Are you comfortable?”

Mayra and Lau Pin mumbled something.

“I’m sedating you. Also, you’re being recorded. Mayra Wickramsingh, I understand you lost your husband during the expedition?”

“Expedition, my arse. We were expi … expiment … animals for testing. Big birds had us—”

Redwing said, “Come with me. You’ll both be on those tables soon enough, but for now we’ll give you gravity and normal food.”

Beth resisted. “You’re testing her while she talks about Abduss? He was slaughtered by one of those monstrous spider-things.”

“We’ll need to know how badly that traumatized her. The rest of you, too. How are you feeling now?”

Fred said, “Hungry.” He lurched up the corridor toward the ship’s mess, then sagged against the bulkhead. “Feeble.”

Beth asked, “How is Cliff? Where is he?”

Redwing allowed a vexed expression to flit across his face, then went back to the usual stern, calm mask. “Holed up with some intelligent natives, Cliff’s last message said. The Folk tried to kill them all. They were shooting down from some living blimp—sounds bizarre, but what doesn’t here? The locals helped Cliff’s people get away. Aybe sends us stuff when he can. We have pictures of a thing that looks a lot like a dinosaur, plus some evolved apes. I sent those to you; did you get them?”

Fred spoke over his shoulder. “We got them, Cap’n. The Bowl must’ve stopped in Sol system at least twice. Once for the dinosaurs, once for the apes, I figure. And we found a map in that museum globe.”

“You sent us the map,” Redwing said, ushering them along the corridor. A pleasant aroma of warm food drew them. “How did that strike you?”

“Strange. Might be history, might be propaganda for the masses.”

“There’s a difference?”

She smiled. “It was in a big park, elaborate buildings, the works.”

Fred wobbled into the mess. Beth was feeling frail, too; there were handholds everywhere, and she used them. Surely she’d been longing for foods of Earth? There had been almost no red meat in the parts of the Bowl she’d seen. Beef curry? Its tang enticed. The mess was neat, clean, like a strict diner. Already Fred had picked a five-bean salad and a cheese sandwich.

Redwing dialed up a chef’s salad. “We’re recording everything we can get in electromagnetics from the Bowl surface, but there’s not much,” he said.

Beth asked, “What are you doing with our allies? I mean the—”

“Snakes? They kind of give me the willies, but they seem benign. We’re helping the finger snakes unload that ship you hijacked. Those plants will do more for them than for us, don’t you think? Shall we house them in the garden? We’ll have to work out what to give them in the way of sunlight and dirt and water. Want to watch?” Redwing finger-danced before a sensor.

The wall wavered, and yes, on the visual wall there were finger snakes and humans moving trays out of the magnetic car. Beth saw these were new crew. Ayaan Ali, pilot; Claire Conway, copilot; and Karl Lebanon, the general technology officer. The ship’s population was growing. They moved dexterously among the three snakes, struggling with the language problem.

Beth muted the sound and watched while she ate. Silence as she forked in flavors she had dreamed of down on the Bowl. No talk, only the clinking of silverware. Then Fred said, “The map in the big globe? It looked alien, but it’s blue and white like an Earthlike planet.”

“Could that have been Earth in the deep past?”

“Yeah. A hundred million years ago?”

Redwing said, “Ayaan says no. She pegs that clump of migrating continents to the middle Jurassic. Your picture was upside down, south pole up. Argue with her if you don’t agree.”

Fred shook his head. “I can recall it, but look—I sent Ayaan my photo file, so—”

Redwing called up a wall display. “There is a lot of spiky emission from that jet. Seems like message-style stuff, but we can’t decipher it. Anyway, it fuzzed up your pictures and Ayaan had a tedious job getting it compiled. She compiled, processed, and flattened the image store. Piled it into a global map, stitching together your flat-on views—here.”

Fred read the notes. “Of course … All those transforms have blurred out the details, sure. So now, look at South America. Just shows what looking at things upside down and only one side, will do. Now, rightside up and complete, I can see it. How could I have missed it?”

Beth said kindly, “You didn’t, not really. We were on the run, remember? And this doesn’t look a lot like Earth, all the continents squeezed together. But you were right about the Bowl having some link to Earth. Tell the cap’n your ideas.”

Fred glanced at Redwing, eyes wary. “I was tired then, just thinking out loud—”

“And you were right.” Beth opened her hands across the table. “Spot on. Sorry I didn’t pay enough attention. So, tell the cap’n.”

Fred gazed off into space, speaking to nobody. “Okay, I thought … wow, Jurassic. A hundred seventy-five million years back? That’s when the dinosaurs got big. Damn. Could they have got intelligent, too? Captain, I’ve been thinking that intelligent dinosaurs built the Bowl and then evolved into all the varieties of Bird Folk we found here. Gene tampering, too, we saw that in some species—you don’t evolve extra legs by accident. They keep coming back to Sol system because it’s their home.” Fred remembered his hunger and bit into his cheese sandwich.

A smile played around Redwing’s lips. “If they picked up the apes a few hundred thousand years ago, then they could have been en route to Glory for that long. They’re definitely aimed at Glory, just like we were. Beth?” Beth’s mouth was full, so Redwing went on. “All that brain sweat we spent wondering why our motors weren’t putting out enough thrust? The motors are fine. We were plowing through the backwash from the Bowl’s jet, picking up backflowing gases all across a thousand kilometers of our ramjet scoop, for all the last hundred years of our flight.”

Beth nodded. “We could have gone around it. Too late now, right? We’ll still be short.”

“Short of everything. Fuel. Water. Air. Food. It gets worse the more people we thaw, but what the hell, we still can’t make it unless we can get supplies from the Bowl. And we’re at war.”

“Cliff killed Bird Folk?”

“Yeah. And they tried to repay the favor.”

Beth had expected some shipboard protocols, since Redwing liked to keep discipline. But the first thing Redwing said when they got to his cramped office was, “What was it like down there?”

Across Beth’s face emotions flickered. “Imagine you can see land in the sky. You can tell it’s far away because even the highest clouds are brighter, and you can’t see stars at all. The sun blots them out. It gives you a queasy feeling at first, land hanging in the distance, no night, hard to sleep…” She took a deep breath, wheezing a bit, her respiratory system adjusting to the ship after so long in alien air. “The … the rest of the Bowl looks like brown land and white stretches of cloud—imagine, being able to see a hurricane no bigger than your thumbnail. It’s dim, because the sun’s always there. The jet casts separate shadows, too. It’s always slow-twisting in the sky. The clouds go far, far up—their atmosphere’s much higher than ours.”

“You can’t see the molecular skin they have keeping their air in?”

“Not a chance. Clouds, stacking up as far as you can see. The trees are different, too—some zigzag and send long feelers down to the ground. I never did figure out why. Maybe a low-grav effect. Anyway, there’s this faint land up in the sky. You can see whole patches of land like continents just hanging there. Plus seas, but mostly you see the mirror zone. The reflectors aren’t casting sunlight into your eyes—”

“They’re pointed back at the star, sure.”

“—so they’re gray, with brighter streaks here and there. The Knothole is up there, too, not easy to see, because it’s got the jet shooting through it all the time. It narrows down and gets brighter right at the Knothole. You can watch big twisting strands moving in the jet, if you look long enough. It’s always changing.”

“And the ground, the animals—”

“Impossible to count how many differences there are. Strange things that fly—the air’s full of birds and flapping reptile things, too, because in low grav everything takes to the sky if there’s an advantage. We got dive-bombed by birds thinking maybe our hair was something they could make off with—food, I guess.”

Redwing laughed with a sad smile and she saw he was sorry he had to be stuck up here, flying a marginal ramscoop to make velocity changes against the vagrant forces around the Bowl. He didn’t want to sail; he wanted to land.

She sipped some coffee and saw it was best that she not say how she had gotten a certain dreadful, electric zest while fleeing across the Bowl. Redwing asked questions and she did not want to say it was like an unending marathon. A big slice of the strange, a zap to the synaptic net, the shock of unending Otherness moistened with meaning, special stinks, grace notes, blaring daylight that illuminated without instructing. A marathon that addicted.

To wake up from cold sleep and go into that, fresh from the gewgaws and flashy bubble gum of techno-Earth, was—well, a consummation requiring digestion.

She could see that Redwing worried at this, could not let it go. Neither could she. Vexing thoughts came, flying strange and fragrant through her mind, but they were not problems, no. They were the shrapnel you carried, buried deep, wounds from meeting the strange.