Heaven's Reach (28 page)

It felt like trying to see through your own blind spot. But he concentrated, fighting the aversion with all the techniques he had learned on Jijo.

At last, he managed barely to make out glimmers of movement amid the blackness.

Sensing his strong desire to see, the
rewq
symbiont slithered downward, laying its filmy body over his eyes—translating, amplifying, shifting colors back and forth until he grunted with surprised satisfaction.

Objects swarmed around
Streaker
's prow. Robots, or small shiplike things. They darted about, converging en masse near a part of the ship that everyone aboard seemed to have conveniently forgotten!

Emerson glimpsed a small, starlike flare erupt. Glints of actinic flame.

He wasted no more time cursing. On hands and knees, he scuttled out of the little observation dome,
built by some race much smaller than humans that had once owned this ship long before it was sold, fifth-hand, to a poor clan of ignorant wolflings, freshly emerged from an isolation so deep they used to wonder if, in all the universe, they lived alone.

He had no way to report his discovery. No words to shout over an intercom. If he went to the Plotting Room, grabbed Gillian's shoulders, and
forced
her to look forward, she would probably respond. But how long might that take?

Worse, could it even risk her life? Whatever means was being used to cast this spell, it bore similarities to his own prior conditioning and Emerson recognized a special brand of ruthlessness. Those responsible might sense Gillian's dawning awareness, and clamp down harshly through her psi talent.

He could not risk exposing her to that danger.

Sara? Prity? They were his friends and dear to him. The same logic held for the other Streakers. Anyway, there was too little time to make himself understood.

Sometimes you had to do things yourself.

So Emerson ran. He dashed forward to the cavernous hangar—the Outlock—that filled
Streaker
's capacious nose. All the smaller vessels that once had filled the mooring slips when they departed Earth were now gone. The longboat and skiff had been lost with Orley and the others at Kithrup. Even before that, the captain's gig had exploded in the Shallow Cluster—their first terrible price for claiming Creideiki's treasure.

Now the docks held rugged little Thennanin scout-boats, taken from an old hulk the crew had salvaged. It felt all too familiar, slipping into one of the tiny armored vessels. He had done this once before—turning on power switches, wrestling the control wheel built for a race with much bigger arms, and triggering mechanisms to send it sliding down a narrow rail, into a tube that would expel it.…

Emerson quashed all memory of that last time, or else courage might have failed him. Instead, he concentrated
on the dials and screens whose symbols he could no longer read, hoping that old habits, skills, and Ifni's luck would keep him from spinning out of control the moment he passed through the outer set of doors.

A
song
burst unbidden into his mind—a pilot's anthem about rocketing into the deep black yonder—but his clenched jaw gave it no voice. He was too busy to utter sound.

If it were possible to think clear sentences, Emerson might have wondered what he was trying to accomplish, or how he might possibly interfere with the attackers. The little scout had weapons, but a year ago he had not proved very adept with them. Now he could not even read the controls.

Still, it could be possible to raise a ruckus. To disrupt the assailants. To dash their shroud of illusion and alert the Terran crew that danger lurked.

But what danger?

No matter. Emerson knew his brain was no longer equipped to solve complex problems. If all he accomplished was to draw the attention of the Zang—bringing their protective wrath down on the trespassers—that might be enough.

The wounded Fractal World turned before him as the airlock closed and he gently nudged the boat's thrusters, moving toward the interlopers. Waves of aversion increased in strength as he drew nearer. Pain and pleasure, disgust and fascination—these and many other sensations washed over him, rewarding Emerson each time his eyes or thoughts drifted away from the activity ahead, and punishing every effort to concentrate. Without the experience on Jijo, he might never have overcome such combination. But Emerson had learned a new habit. To
seek
discomfort—like a child pressing a loose tooth, attracted by each throbbing twinge,
teasing
and probing till the old made way for the new.

The little rewq helped. Sensing his need, it kept ripple-shifting through various color spectra, conveying
images that wavered elusively, but eventually resolved into discernible shapes.

Machines.

He realized at least a dozen spindly forms had already latched themselves to
Streaker
's nose. They clambered like scavenging insects probing the eye of some helpless beast. If the goal were simple destruction, it would all be over by now. Their aim must be more complex than that.

He recognized the hot light of a cutting torch. Either they were trying to burn their way into the ship, to board her, or …

Or else their effort was aimed at cutting something off. A sample, perhaps. But of what?

Emerson pictured
Streaker
in his mind, a detailed image, unimpaired by his aphasia with sentences. The memory was wordless, almost tactile, from years spent loving this old salvaged hull in ways a man could never love a woman, supervising so many aspects of its transformation into something unique—the pride of Earthclan.

All at once he recalled what lay beneath that bitter, flickering glare.

A symbol. An emblem supposedly carried by all ships flown by oxygen-breathing, starfaring races.

The rayed spiral crest of the Civilization of Five Galaxies.

Incongruity stunned Emerson. At first he wondered if this might be yet another trick, deceiving his perceptions once again, making him
think
that was their target. All this seemed an awful lot of effort to expend simply defacing
Streaker
of its bow insignia.

Anyway, the machines were clearly having more trouble than they had bargained for. The dense carbon coat burdening the Earthship was obdurate and resistant to every attempt by Hannes Suessi and the dolphin engineers to remove it. As he drew closer, Emerson saw that only a little progress had been made, exposing a small patch of
Streaker
's original hull.

He almost laughed at the aliens' discomfiture.

Then he looked beyond, and saw.

More machines. Many of them, swarming darkly, converging from the starry background. Almost certainly reinforcements, coming to make short work of the job.

It was time to act. Emerson reached for his weapons console, choosing the least potent rays, lest he damage
Streaker
by mistake.

Well, here goes nothing
, he thought.

I sure hope this works.

So intent was he on aiming—carefully adjusting the crosshairs—that he never noticed what had just happened
within
his crippled mind.

His use of two clear sentences, one right after another, smoothly expressing both wryness and hope.

Gillian

R
EALIZATION CRACKLED THROUGH HER
consciousness like pealing thunder. She cried out a shrill command.

“Security alert!”

Klaxons echoed down the Earthship's half-deserted halls, sending dolphins scurrying to combat stations. The ambient engine hum changed pitch as Suessi's crew increased power to shields and weapon systems.

“Niss, report!”

The spinning hologram spoke quickly, with none of its accustomed snideness.

“We seem to have been suborned by a combined psi-cyber stealth
attack,
with an aim toward distracting
Streaker'
s defenders, both organic and machine. The fact that you and I roused simultaneously suggests the emitter source has been abruptly destroyed or degraded. Preliminary indications suggest they used a sophisticated logic entity whose memic-level was at least class
—”

“What's our current danger?” Gillian cut in.

“I detect no immediate targeting impulses or macroweaponry aimed at this vessel. But several nearby
automatons show latent power levels that could turn dangerous at close range.

“So far, it seems they are content to fire away at each other.”

She stepped toward the display showing a camera view of the ship's bow … exactly opposite from the region she had been inspecting, suspicious of some unknown menace. Her heart pounded as she saw how close it had been. All might have been lost, if the intruders had not fallen to fighting among themselves. Sharp flashes surged and flared as spiderlike shapes lashed at each other, casting battle shadows uncomfortably close.

“Where the hell are the Zang?” Gillian murmured under her breath.

Scanning the area of space where the hydrogen entities had been, her instruments showed no sign of the big globule-vessel … only a disturbing, elongated cloud of drifting ions.
Perhaps it's only backwash from their engines, when they departed on an errand. They may be back at any moment.

Her mind quailed from the other possibility—that some weapon had removed the Zang from the local equation. A weapon powerful enough to leave barely a smudge of disturbed atoms in its wake.

Either way, the psi attack kept us from noticing our guardians were gone. Someone went to a lot of trouble making sure we'd sit still for a while.

She felt Suessi's engines dig in as Kaa started backing away from the combat maelstrom. But the pilot only made a little headway before the swarm of conflict followed, as if tethered to
Streaker
by invisible cords.

“Do you have any idea who—”

“None of the combatants has identified itself.”

“Then what were they trying—”

“It appears that some group was attempting to steal
Streaker'
s WOM archive.”

“
Streaker
's …?”

Her question froze in her throat. Gillian's mouth closed sharply as she understood.

By law, each Galactic vessel was supposed to carry a “watcher” … a device that would passively chronicle
the major features of its travels. Some units were sophisticated. Others—the sort that a poor clan could afford—were crude mineral devices, capable only of recording the ship's rough location and identifying any ships nearby. But all of them fell into the category of “write-only memories” … designed to store knowledge but never be read. At least never within the present epoch. Eventually, each was supposed to find its way into the infinite archives of the Great Library, to be studied at leisure by denizens of some later age, when the passions of this one had faded to mere historical interest.

At once, the strategem behind this attack made sense to her.

“The Old Ones … they must have found the codes, enabling them to read our WOM. It would tell them where
Streaker
's been!”

“Enabling them to backtrack our voyage and find the Shallow Cluster.”

Gillian's reaction was strangely mixed. On the one hand, she felt angry and violated by these beings who would meddle in her mind and rob
Streaker
of its treasure. Information her crew had guarded for so long, and Tom and Creideiki paid for with their lives.

On the other hand, it might solve so many problems if the thieves succeeded. Some mighty faction would then have the secret at last, perhaps using it to dominate the next age. Battles and great conspiracies could then surge onward, perhaps letting Earth and her colonies drift back into the side eddies of history, neglected and maybe safe for a while.

“I'm surprised no one tried this before,” she commented, wary as she watched the minibattle follow
Streaker
's retreat across the vast interior of the Fractal World.