Infinity's Shore (19 page)

S
UESSI FELT NOSTALGIC ABOUT BEING HUMAN. NOW and then, he even wished he were still a man.

Not that he was ungrateful for the boon the Old Ones had granted him, in that strange place called the Fractal System, where aloof beings transformed his aged, failing body into something more durable. Without their gift, he would be stone dead—as cold as the giant corpses surrounding him in this dark ossuary of ships.

The ancient vessels seemed peaceful, in dignified repose. It was tempting to contemplate resting, letting eons pass without further care or strife.

But Suessi was much too busy to spare time for being dead.

“
Hannes
,” a voice crackled directly to his auditory nerve.

“
Two minutes, Hannes. then I think-k we'll be ready to resume cut-t-ting
.”

Shafts of brilliant illumination speared through the watery blackness, casting bright ovals toward one curved hull
segment of the Terran starship
Streaker.
Distorted silhouettes crisscrossed the spotlight beams—the long undulating shadows of workers clad in pressurized armor, their movements slow, cautious.

This was a more dangerous realm than hard vacuum.

Suessi did not have a larynx anymore, or lungs to blow air past one if he had. Yet he retained a voice.

“Standing by, Karkaett,” he transmitted, then listened as his words were rendered into groaning saser pulses. “Please keep the alignment steady. Don't overshoot.”

One shadow among many turned toward him. Though cased in hard sheathing, the dolphin's tail performed a twist turn with clear body-language meaning.

Trust me … do you have any choice?

Suessi laughed—a shuddering of his titanium rib cage that replaced the old, ape-style method of syncopated gasps. It wasn't as satisfying, but then, the Old Ones did not seem to have much use for laughter.

Karkaett guided his team through final preparations while Suessi monitored. Unlike some others in
Streaker
's crew, the engineering staff had grown more seasoned and confident with each passing year. In time, they might no longer need the encouragement—the supervising crutch—of a member of the patron race. When that day came, Hannes would be content to die.

I've seen too much. Lost too many friends. Someday, we'll be captured by one of the eatee factions pursuing us. Or else, we'll finally get a chance to turn ourselves in to some great Institute, only to learn Earth was lost while we fled helter-skelter across the universe. Either way, I don't want to be around to see it.

The Old Ones can keep their Ifni-cursed immortality.

Suessi admired the way his well-trained team worked, setting up a specially designed cutting machine with cautious deliberation. His audio pickups tracked low mutterings—
keeneenk
chants, designed to help cetacean minds concentrate on explicit thoughts and tasks that their ancestral brains were never meant to take on. Engineering thoughts—the kind that some dolphin philosophers called the most painful price of uplift.

These surroundings did not help—a mountainous graveyard
of long-dead starcraft, a ghostly clutter, buried in the kind of ocean chasm that dolphins traditionally associated with their most cryptic cults and mysteries. The dense water seemed to amplify each rattle of a tool. Every whir of a harness arm resonated queerly in the dense liquid environment.

Anglic might be the language of engineers, but dolphins preferred Trinary for punctuation—for moments of resolution and action. Karkaett's voice conveyed confidence in a burst phrase of cetacean haiku.

The cutting tool lashed out, playing harsh fire toward the vessel that was their home and refuge … that had carried them through terrors unimaginable.
Streaker
's hull—purchased by the Terragens Council from a third-hand ship dealer and converted for survey work—had been the pride of impoverished Earthclan, the first craft to set forth with a dolphin captain and mostly cetacean crew, on a mission to check the veracity of the billion-year-old Great Library of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies.

Now the captain was gone, along with a quarter of the crew. Their mission had turned into a calamity for both Earthclan and the Five Galaxies. As for
Streaker
's hull—once so shiny, despite her age—it now lay coated by a mantle of material so black the abyssal waters seemed clear by comparison. A substance that drank photons and weighed the ship down.

Oh, the things we've put you through, dear thing.

This was but the latest trial for their poor ship.

Once, bizarre fields stroked her in a galactic tide pool called the Shallow Cluster, where they “struck it rich” by happening upon a vast derelict fleet containing mysteries untouched for a thousand eons. In other words, where everything first started going wrong.

Savage beams rocked her at the Morgran nexus point, where a deadly surprise ambush barely failed to snare
Streaker
and her unsuspecting crew.

Making repairs on poisonous Kithrup, they ducked out almost too late, escaping mobs of bickering warships only by disguising
Streaker
inside a hollowed-out Thennanin cruiser, making it to a transfer point, though at the cost of abandoning many friends.

Oakka, the green world, seemed an ideal goal after that—a sector headquarters for the Institute of Navigation. Who was better qualified to take over custody of their data? As Gillian Baskin explained at the time, it was their duty as Galactic citizens to turn the problem over to the great institutes—those august agencies whose impartial lords might take the awful burden away from
Streaker
's tired crew. It seemed logical enough—and nearly spelled their doom. Betrayal by agents of that “neutral” agency showed how far civilization had fallen in turmoil. Gillian's hunch saved the Earthling company—that and a daring cross-country raid by Emerson D'Anite, taking the conspirators' base from behind.

Again,
Streaker
emerged chastened and worse for wear.

There
was
refuge for a while in the Fractal System, that vast maze where ancient beings gave them shelter. But eventually that only led to more betrayal, more lost friends, and a flight taking them ever farther from home.

Finally, when further escape seemed impossible, Gillian found a clue in the Library unit they had captured on Kithrup. A syndrome called the “Sooner's Path.” Following that hint, she plotted a dangerous road that might lead to safety, though it meant passing through the licking flames of a giant star, bigger than Earth's orbit, whose soot coated
Streaker
in layers almost too heavy to lift.

But she made it to Jijo.

This world looked lovely from orbit. Too bad we had only that one glimpse, before plunging to an abyssal graveyard of ships.

Under sonar guidance by dolphin technicians, their improvised cutter attacked
Streaker
's hull. Water boiled into steam so violently that booming echoes filled this cave within a metal mountain. There were dangers to releasing so much energy in a confined space. Separated gases might recombine explosively. Or it could make their sanctuary detectable from space. Some suggested the risk was too great … that it would be better to abandon
Streaker
and instead try reactivating one of the ancient hulks surrounding them as a replacement.

There were teams investigating that possibility right now. But Gillian and Tsh't decided to try this instead, asking Suessi's crew to pull off one more resurrection.

The choice gladdened Hannes. He had poured too much into
Streaker
to give up now.
There may be more of me in her battered shell than remains in this cyborg body.

Averting his sensors from the cutter's actinic glow, he mused on the mound of cast-off ships surrounding this makeshift cavern. They seemed to speak to him, if only in his imagination.

We, too, have stories
, they said.
Each of us was launched with pride, flown with hope, rebuilt many times with skill, venerated by those we protected from the sleeting desolation of space, long before your own race began dreaming of the stars.

Suessi smiled. All that might have impressed him once—the idea of vessels millions of years old. But now he knew a truth about these ancient hulks.

You want old?
he thought.
I've seen old.

I've seen ships that make most stars seem young.

The cutter produced immense quantities of bubbles. It screeched, firing ionized bolts against the black layer, just centimeters away. But when they turned it off at list, the results of all that eager destructive force were disappointing.

“That-t's all we removed?” Karkaett asked, incredulously, staring at a small patch of eroded carbon. “It'll take years to cut it all away, at-t this rate!”

The engineer's mate, Chuchki, so bulky she nearly burst from her exo-suit, commented in awed Trinary.

Suessi wished he still had a head to shake, or shoulders to shrug. He made do instead by emitting a warbling sigh into the black water, like a beached pilot whale.

Gillian

I
T ISN'T EASY FOR A HUMAN BEING TO PRETEND
she's an alien.

Especially if the alien is a Thennanin.

Shrouds of deceitful color surrounded Gillian, putting ersatz flesh around the lie, providing her with an appearance of leathery skin and a squat bipedal stance. On her head, a simulated crest rippled and flexed each time she nodded. Anyone standing more than two meters away would see a sturdy male warrior with armored derma and medallions from a hundred stellar campaigns—not a slim blond woman with fatigue-lined eyes, a physician forced by circumstances to command a little ship at war.