Reunion (30 page)

“Truly,” Tradssij replied in the chipped tones of command, adding an especially brusque gesture of second-degree concern coupled with first-degree comprehension. “However, until we are able to asscertain exactly what iss happening, I will rissk no more of my crew than iss necessary. In the abssence of communication or explanation from the landing party, I musst do what I believe to be mosst efficaciouss under the circumsstancess. When the ssituation hass sstablized, the sshuttle will be ssent back to the artifact to remove Commander Voocim and her group.”

No argument arose from those AAnn on station. All felt the captain’s ratiocination of the situation to be accurate as well as succinct. Adjusting course, the
Sstakoun
began to move toward the regressing artifact and away from the place where it had recovered the transport module containing the body of Officer Dysseen.

Flinx arrived outside the lock less out of breath than he had expected. The continuing dearth of any AAnn emotions found him puzzled but relieved. Here, at least, he had expected to perceive something, only to be confronted with no evidence of feeling sentience but his own.

The reason for the absence of any significant reptilian emotion was immediately apparent: Only one vessel remained within the lock, and it was not AAnn. As near as he could detect, there were no longer any guards aboard the craft from the
Crotase,
either. Having escaped in Flinx’s transport module, Mahnahmi had left her own shuttlecraft behind.

But why had all the AAnn gone? Had their starship fled orbit as well? Too many events of the past hour were inexplicable. Still, comprehensible or not, the indisputable fact was that he was alive and free.

Nothing and no one challenged him as he entered the lock and cautiously made his way toward and eventually into the unsealed shuttlecraft. The internal layout was relatively typical, the majority of shuttles being built along certain fundamental, common lines. Like all such craft, it was designed to be operated with little effort or training. As he studied the readouts, Flinx felt increasingly confident it would respond to his simple, straightforward instructions.

He felt even more sure of himself when the ship’s systems activated in response to his first verbal command. Given the most generalized coordinates and description, the shuttle’s automatics would be able to lock onto the
Teacher
and home in on her. Barring surprises, within a short while he would finally be back on board his own ship, surrounded by its familiar confines. He found he could barely contain his anticipation. Pip darted contentedly around the bridge, reveling in her companion’s first upbeat emotions in some time. And still he could not sense the menacing presence of any potentially contentious AAnn.

Now that it was almost over, his only regret was that after all he had been through and everything he had suffered, beginning with his sojourn on Earth and ending in this abject outback corner of the AAnn Empire, he had failed to recover the sybfile containing the precious information about his ancestry. It remained with Mahnahmi. As the shuttle cleanly exited the cavernous lock, he found himself once more contemplating the panoply of unfamiliar stars. The syb was out there, she was out there with it, and he did not doubt that he would encounter both of them again.

That was when the shuttle’s automatics announced, in a clear and emotionless male voice, that a starship other than the one he had chosen as a destination was approaching swiftly from several planetary diameters out.

The
Sstakoun
’s weapons master hovered close to his captain, his intricate induction headset a triple metallic band that traversed the upper portion of his golden-scaled skull. Together the two AAnn studied the dimensional projection that showed the Commonwealth shuttle departing the massive, rapidly descending artifact.

“Report,” Tradssij hissed.

A technician responded without looking up. “Detection iss weak at thiss range, Honored Captain, but preliminary sscans indicate only two organic life-forms aboard the fleeing vessel.”

“Mark itss coursse,” Tradssij spoke sharply. “Highesst ressolution quadrant sscan.”

Sounding surprised, another technician reported in a moment later. “Gravitational dissturbance collateral with a massked vessel exisstss at point two-four-five, hypothessizing forward from vissible smaller craft’ss pressent trajectory.”

Tradssij was quietly furious. “We have been indolent. That sshall be corrected.” He gestured appropriately to weapons master Haurcchep. “Extirpate.”

The senior officer responded accordingly, relaying the command together with the necessary ancillary instructions to the fire control team situated elsewhere on the ship. A component of the
Sstakoun
’s limited but deadly arsenal was activated.

Aboard the shuttle, Flinx scrutinized the projection that showed the AAnn vessel rapidly closing on his coordinates. There was nothing he could do. The shuttle was not designed to execute elaborate evasive maneuvers, and the light armament it carried would not penetrate a warship’s minimum defensive field. Maybe they were just coming in for a closer look. If only they held off long enough for him to board the
Teacher,
he felt he would be able to hold his own. The Ulru-Ujurrians had equipped it with more than adequate defenses. But as long as he was stuck on the slow-moving shuttle, he was helpless.

The shuttlecraft’s voice directed his attention to the other tridimensional display. Intending only to glance in its direction, he ended up staring at it for a very long time. Then, realizing he had no need of onboard technology to perceive what was being manifested, he turned and walked to the unpretentious viewport that curved around the forepart of the ship. Everything that had been delineated in the tridee display was as apparent to the naked eye as it had been to the shuttle’s monitors. There was no need for magnifying devices or vision-enhancing instrumentation. Whether he altogether believed what he was seeing was another matter entirely.

Thousands upon thousands of square kilometers of dense cloud cover, dull brown and bronze tinged with orange, faded yellow, and red, had begun to shrink from the periphery of the methane dwarf. Not by means of simple evaporation or from being blown out into space due to some inexplicable internal cataclysm, but in response to a powerful unknown force that was sucking clouds, upwellings, and entire storm systems inexorably downward. As the thick, abyssal atmosphere was thinned, the inner core of the swirling planet began to reveal itself. Like a few other methane dwarves, Pyrassis Ten boasted a solid center. Unlike the heart of similar celestial bodies, the tenth planet of the Pyrassisian system brought to light an albedo that was off the charts.

Perhaps because it had been polished.

As the enshrouding atmosphere of the gigantic globe was drawn forcibly downward into a complex of gargantuan vents and intakes, the serrated surface of the inner planetary core was exposed. Billions of lights, intensely brilliant and of multiple hues, began to wink to life within the crust of synthetic structures the size of small continents. From a rather dull orb of ordinary aspect, the tenth planet of Pyrassis’s sun was metamorphosing rapidly into the most dazzling sight in the immediate heavens.

As torrents of cloaking atmosphere the size of whole mountain ranges continued to flow into unfathomable depths, they threw off continual salvos of lightning tens of kilometers high. The towering electrical discharges struck the shimmering surface of the newly exposed core without visible effect. As Flinx looked on in awestruck silence with Pip cuddled close to his neck, the artifact he had first thought to be a moon continued to approach the core’s solid surface. Only when it seemed as if a devastating impact was inevitable did a portion of the planetary crust retract ponderously inward. Descending gradually and under flawless control, the artifact concluded a stately entrance into a holding bay capacious enough to admit a real moon.

Big enough to boast its own atmosphere, the artifact, whose size had stunned him when the inorganic nature of its origin had first been revealed, was nothing more than a lifeboat. It was the tenth planet of the Pyrassisian system that was the actual
ship.
Staring hard at the gleaming surface and the manifold diverse projections with which it was studded, a chill traveled through Flinx unlike any other he had ever experienced—because he recognized at least a few of those lofty, monumental shapes. Subsequent magnification on the dimensional display only confirmed identification of an image he had resurrected from memory.

Clearly visible on the curving, burnished exterior of the artificial globe were no less than a dozen krangs, the ancient Tar-Aiym weapon that was capable of dynamically generating and projecting forth a Schwarzchild discontinuity. It was a device, a weapon, against which nothing could stand. If symmetry held, still more of them were likely to be found on the other side of the exposed surface. As to the multitudinous other revealed protrusions and concavities, the intent behind their ominous contours and configurations could barely begin to be inferred.

Half a million or more years old, the tenth planet of the Pyrassisian system was a Tar-Aiym warship twice the size of Earth.

And it was waking up.

Aboard the
Sstakoun,
surprise and astonishment at the planetary transformation they had been observing turned to fright underscored by second-degree panic. As Tradssij and his officers shouted and argued over what to do next, it did not occur to anyone to countermand the just-given order to fire at the evacuating Commonwealth shuttlecraft. A few seconds too late, it struck the captain of the AAnn ship with appalling realization that dispatching explosive devices in the general direction of the newly revealed colossus might be interpreted by an unknown sentience as something other than a benevolent gesture. Stammering excitedly into the tiny voice pickup that hovered alongside his snout, he frantically tried to rescind the order.

Deep within ancient factitious profundities impenetrable to human or AAnn thought, the synthetic sentience that was the sequentially awakening Tar-Aiym vessel detected a threat directed at the only A-class mind in the immediate astral vicinity. Though the ship was far, far from fully operational, it determined that it was capable of taking certain unassuming measures to countermand the impending danger. As concentric rings of turbulent light expanding to the diameter of a small sea erupted from its summit, a single imposing device of Himalayan dimensions discharged a blinding fork of lightninglike energy so intensely purple it was almost black. When this intercepted the pair of individually powered incoming explosive devices, they vaporized in twin puffs of scattered particles.

His glistening, scale-covered throat suddenly drier than even a desert-loving AAnn would have experienced, a solemn and oddly distracted Tradssij XXKKW pensively voiced the order for the
Sstakoun
to power up its posigravity drive despite the fact that they were too close in-system for reliable activation. It did not matter. A drive field had barely begun to form within the nexus of the ship’s KK-drive projector when the
Sstakoun
was struck by a second compacted helix of furious energy emitted by the azoic planetary core. The result was that the space hitherto occupied by the AAnn warship was forthwith filled with a somewhat larger volume of rapidly dissipating particles from whose constituent atoms every last electron had been forcibly stripped.

Flinx watched the implausible awful transpire. Not unreasonably, he wondered if he might be next. But nothing happened. There was no follow-up, no third eruption of desolating energy. Except for the stable, progressive emergence of thousands and thousands of additional lights on the uneven surface of the planet-sized alien warship, no new or startling class of resplendent power revealed itself.

He thought back to his brief, enigmatic slumber atop the Tar-Aiym control platform. For whatever reason, the majestic and incomprehensibly ancient vessel below had resolved not to look upon him as an enemy. Whether that apparent decision constituted a permanent or temporary state of affairs he had no way of knowing—and he was not about to tarry in the vicinity to find out.

Several excited exchanges with the
Teacher
served to clarify the status of the approaching shuttlecraft. Flinx was not displeased to note that he had acquired a replacement for the one he had crashed on Pyrassis, though he wished the method of acquisition could have been otherwise. He genuinely regretted the premature death of any sentient being, even an AAnn.

His relief upon exiting the interior air lock to find himself once more within the comforting, familiar confines of his own ship was immense. Even the smell of it was exhilarating. Without pausing, he headed directly for the bridge. As he passed through the lounge where he tended to spend the majority of his time while traveling in space-plus, he noted absently that the decorative flora that had been presented to him by the considerate citizens of the distant planet its inhabitants called Midworld appeared to have held up exceptionally well in his absence. Oddly, there were even a few fragments of soil scattered across the otherwise spotless deck; moist terrestrial blemishes occupying locations unexpectedly far from their planters. No doubt a consequence of sluggish, limited movement by the burgeoning alien growths with whose intimate characteristics he was not yet wholly familiar. He made a mental note to see to it that the ship’s hygienics system was careful to recycle the scraps. In space, dirt was a precious commodity.

The bridge greeted his arrival contentedly, as if he had never been away, as if nothing untoward had occurred in his absence. As if the vapor-shrouded planet-sized body outside the port had not been unexpectedly transformed from an apparently ordinary methane dwarf orbiting an unremarkable star in a notably undistinguished star system to the most inconceivable and improbable discovery since the revelation that humans shared the galaxy with other intelligent species.