Infinity's Shore (47 page)

The glowering starman was obsessed with a different wafer-gleaned fact.

There had been a
spy
among the station's staff of outlaw gene raiders. Someone who kept a careful diary, recording every misdemeanor performed by the Rothen and their human servants.

An agent of the Terragens Council!

Apparently, Earth's ruling body had an informant among the clan of human fanatics who worshiped Rothen lords.

He wanted badly to quiz Ling, but there was no time for their old question game. Not since they fled the Dooden disaster along with Lester Cambel's panicky aides, plunging through a maze of towering boo. New trails and fresh-cut trunks had flustered the breathless fugitives until they spilled into an uncharted clearing, surprising a phalanx of traeki who stood in a long row, venting noxious vapors like hissing kettles.

Galloping squads of urrish militia then swarmed in to protect the busy traeki, nipping at ankles, as if the humans were stampeding simlas, driving Cambel's team away from the clearing, diverting them toward havens to the west and south.

Even after finally reaching a campsite refuge, there had been no respite to discuss far-off Galactic affairs. Ling spent her time with the medics, relating what little she had learned from the spy's notes about the qheuen plague.

Meanwhile, Lark found himself surrounded by furious activity, commanding an ever-growing entourage of followers.

It goes to show, desperate people will follow anyone with a plan.

Even one as loony as mine.

Hoonish bearers took up the grays' burdens, and the caravan was off again. Half a dozen blue qheuens took up the rear, so young their shells were still moist from larval fledging. Though small for their kind, they still needed help from men with hammers and crowbars, chiseling away limestone obstructions. Lark's scheme counted on these adolescent volunteers.

He hoped his farfetched plan wasn't the only one at work.

There is always prayer.

Lark fondled his amulet. It felt cool. For now the Egg was quiescent.

At a junction the earlier zealot cabal had veered left, carrying barrels of exploser paste to a cave beneath the Rothen station. But Lark's group turned right. They had less distance to cover, but their way was more hazardous.

Jimi the Blessed was among the burly men helping widen the path, attacking an obstruction with such fury Lark had to intervene.

“Easy, Jimi! You'll wake the recycled dead!”

That brought laughter from the sweaty laborers, and booming umbles from several hoonish porters.
Brave
hoons. Lark recalled how their kind disliked closed places. The urs, normally comfortable underground, grew more nervous with each sign of approaching water.

None of them were happy to be approaching the giant star cruiser.

The Six Races had spent centuries cowering against
The Day
when ships of the Institutes would come judge their crimes. Yet, when great vessels came, they did not bear high-minded magistrates, but
thieves
, and then brutal killers. Where the Rothen and their human stooges seemed crafty and manipulative, the Jophur were chilling.

They demand what we cannot give.

We don't know anything about the “dolphin ship” they seek. And we'd rather be damned than hand over our g'Kek brothers.

So Lark, who had spent his life hoping Galactics would come end the illegal colony on Jijo, now led a desperate bid to battle star gods.

Human literature has been so influential since the Great Printing. It's full of forlorn causes. Endeavors that no rational person would entertain.

He and Ling were helping each other descend a limestone chute, glistening with seepage and slippery lichen, when word arrived from the forward scouts.

“
Water just ahead
.”

That was the message, sent back by Jeni Shen.

So
, Lark thought.
I was right.

Then he added—

So far.

The liquid was oily and cold. It gave off a musty aroma.

None of which stopped two eager young blues from creeping straight into the black pool, trailing mulc-fiber line from a spool. Hoons with hand pumps kept busy inflating
air bladders while Lark steeled himself to enter that dark, wet place.

Having second thoughts?

Jeni checked his protective suit of skink membranes. It might ward off the chill, but that was the least of Lark's worries.

I can take cold. But there had better be enough air.

The bladders were an untested innovation. Each was a traeki ring, thick-ribbed to hold gas under pressure. Jeni affixed one to his back, and showed him how to breathe through its fleshy protrusion—a rubbery tentacle that would provide fresh air and scrub the old.

You grow up depending on traeki-secreted chemicals to make native foods edible, and traeki-distilled alcohol to liven celebrations. A traeki pharmacist makes your medicine in a chem-synth ring. Yet you're revolted by the thought of putting one of these things in your mouth.

It tasted like a slimy tallow candle.

Across the narrow chamber, Ling and Rann adjusted quickly to this Jijoan novelty. Of course they had no history to overcome, associating traekis with mulch and rotting garbage.

“Come on,” Jeni chided in a low voice that burned his ears. “Don't gag on me, man. You're a sage now. Others are watchin'!”

He nodded—two quick head jerks—and tried again. Fitting his teeth around the tube, Lark bit down as she had taught. The burst of air did not stink as bad as expected. Perhaps it contained a mild relaxant. The pharmacist designers were clever about such things.

Let's hope their star-god cousins don't think of this, as well.

That assumption underlay Lark's plan. Jophur commanders might be wary against direct subterranean assault. But where the buried route combined with
water
, the invaders might not expect trouble.

The Rothen underestimated us. By Ifni and the Egg, the Jophur may do the same.

Each diver also wore a rewq symbiont to protect the eyes and help them see by the dim light of hand-carried
phosphors. Webbed gloves and booties completed the ensemble.

Ling's tripping laughter made him turn around, and Lark saw she was pointing at
him
as she guffawed.

“You should talk,” he retorted at the ungainly creature she had become, more monstrous than an unmasked Rothen. Hoons paused from laying down cargo by the waterline, and joined in the mirth, umbling good-naturedly while their pet noors grinned with needlelike teeth.

Lark pictured the scene up above, past overlying layers of rock, in the world of light. The Jophur dreadnought squatted astride the mountain glen, thwarting the glade stream in its normal seaward rush. The resulting lake now stretched more than a league uphill.

Water seeks its own level. We must now be several arrow-flights from shore. That's a long way to swim before we get to the lake itself.

It couldn't be helped. Their goal was hard to reach, in more ways than one.

Bubbles in the pool. One qheuen cupola broached the surface, followed by another. The young blues crawled ashore, breathing heavily through multiple leg vents, reporting in excited GalSix.

“
The way to open water—it is clear. Good time—this we made. To the target—we shall now escort you
.”

Cheers lifted from the hoons and urs, but Lark felt no stirring.

They weren't the ones who would have to go the rest of the way.

Water transformed the cavities and grottoes. Flippers kicked up clouds of silt, filling the phosphor beams with a myriad of distracting speckles. Lark's trusty rewq pulled tricks with polarization, transforming the haze to partial clarity. Still, it took concentration to avoid colliding with jagged limestone outcrops. The guide rope saved him from getting lost.

Cave diving felt a lot like being a junior sage of the Commons—an experience he never sought or foresaw in his former life as a scientist heretic.

How ungainly swimming humans appeared next to the graceful young qheuens, who seized the rugged walls with flashing claws, propelling themselves with uncanny agility, nearly as at-home in freshwater as on solid ground.

His skin grew numb where the skink coverings pulled loose. Other parts grew hot from exertion. More upsetting was the squirmy traeki tentacle in his mouth, anticipating his needs in unnerving ways. It would not let him hold his breath, as a man might do while concentrating on some near-term problem, but tickled his throat to provoke an exhalation. The first time it happened, he nearly retched. (What if he chucked up breakfast? Would he and the ring both asphyxiate? Or would it take his gift as a tasty, predigested bonus?)

Lark was so focused on the guide rope that he missed the transition from stony catacombs to a murky plain of sodden meadows, drowned trees, and drifting debris. But soon the silty margins fell behind as daylight transformed the Glade of Gathering—now the bottom of an upland lake—giving commonplace shapes macabre unfamiliarity.

The guide rope passed near a stand of lesser boo whose surviving stems were tall enough to reach the surface, far overhead. Qheuens gathered around one tube, sucking down drafts of air. When sated, they spiraled around Lark and the humans, nudging them toward the next stretch of guide rope.

Long before details loomed through the silty haze, he made out their target by its
glow.
Rann and Ling thrashed flippers, passing Jeni in their haste. By the time Lark caught up, they were pressing hands against a giant slick sarcophagus, the hue of yellow moonrise. Within lay a cigar-shaped vessel, the Rothen ship, their home away from home, now sealed in a deadly trap.

The two starfarers split up, he swimming right and she left. By silent agreement, Jeni accompanied the big man—despite their size difference, she was the one more qualified to keep an eye on Rann. Lark kept near Ling, watching as she moved along the golden wall.

Though he had more experience than other Sixers with Galactic god machines, it was his first time near this interloper whose dramatic coming so rudely shattered Gathering
Festival, many weeks ago. So magnificent and terrible it had seemed! Daunting and invincible. Yet now it was helpless. Dead or implacably imprisoned.

Tentatively, Lark identified some features, like the jutting anchors that held a ship against quantum probability fluctuations … whatever that meant. The self-styled techies who worked for Lester Cambel were hesitant about even the basics of starcraft design. As for the High Sage himself, Lester had taken no part in Lark's briefing, choosing instead to brood in his tent, guilt-ridden over the doom he helped bring on Dooden Mesa.

Despite the crowding sense of danger, Lark discovered a kind of spooky beauty, swimming in this realm where sunlight slanted in long rippling shafts, filled with sparkling motes—a silent, strangely contemplative world.

Besides, even wrapped in skink membranes, Ling's athletic body was a sight to behold.

They rounded the star cruiser's rim, where a sharp shadow abruptly cut off the sun. It might be a cloud, or the edge of a mountain. Then he realized—

It's the Jophur ship.

Though blurred by murky water, the domelike outline sent shivers down his back. Towering mightily at the lake's edge, it could have swallowed the Rothen vessel whole.

A strange thought struck him.

First the Rothen awed us. Then we saw their “majesty” cut down by
real
power. What if it happens again? What kind of newcomer might overwhelm the Jophur? A hovering mountain range? One that throws the whole Slope into night?

He pictured successive waves of “ships,” each vaster than before, matching first the moons, then all Jijo, and—why not?—the sun or even mighty Izmunuti!

Imagination is the most amazing thing. It lets a ground-hugging savage fill his mind with fantastic unlikelihoods.

Churning bubbles nearly tore the rewq off his face as Ling sped up, kicking urgently. Lark hurried after … only to arrest himself moments later, staring.

Just ahead, Ling traced the golden barrier with one hand, just meters from a gaping opening. A
hatchway
, backlit by a radiant interior. Several figures stood in the portal—three
humans and a Rothen lord, wearing his appealing symbiotic mask. The quartet surveyed their all-enclosing golden prison with instruments, wearing expressions of concern.

Yet, all four bipeds seemed frozen, embedded in crystal time.

Up close, the yellow cocoon resembled the
preservation beads
left by that alpine mulc spider, the one whose mad collecting fetish nearly cost Dwer and Rety their lives, months back. But this trap was no well-shaped ovoid. It resembled a partly melted candle, with overlapping golden puddles slumped around its base. The Jophur had been generous in their gift of frozen temporality, pouring enough to coat the ship thoroughly.

Like at Dooden Mesa
, Lark thought.

It seemed an ideal way to slay one's enemies without using destructive fire.
Maybe the Jophur can't risk damaging Jijo's ecosphere. That would be a major crime before the great Institutes, like gene raiding and illegal settlement.

On the other hand, the untraeki invaders hadn't been so scrupulous in scything the forest around their ship. So perhaps the golden trap had another purpose. To capture, rather than kill? Perhaps the g'Kek denizens of Dooden Mesa might yet be rescued from their shimmering tomb.

That had been Lark's initial thought, three days ago. In hurried experiments, more mulc-spider relics were thawed out, using the new traeki solvents. Some of the preserved items had once been alive, birds and bush creepers that long ago fell into the spider's snare.

All emerged from their cocoons quite dead.

Perhaps the Jophur have better revival methods
, Lark thought at the time.
Or else they don't mean to restore their victims, only to preserve them as timeless trophies.