Shipstar (44 page)

FORTY
-
FIVE

Cliff crouched with the others and watched the big blimp skyfish wallow on the mountaintop. Scampering crews had secured the huge thing at both ends and now were lashing the sides down with big cables. A heavy rain ate most of the light from the skyfish itself, dim glows of ivory that got drowned in the brilliant lightning flashes. Hammering raindrops scattered even the crashes of lightning into a blurred white murk.

“Where’d the Folk go?” Irma shouted against the wind.

“Into that big entrance!” Aybe pointed. “They had that thing they put Tananareve into with them.”

Terry said, “Remember what threw us around, back in the skyfish? To make a shock like that, and blow sheets of rock off this mountain—that takes a lot of quake energy. But there aren’t quakes here—no plate tectonics.”

Aybe swept rain from his eyes and jutted his chin out. “Look, the Bowl has a light, elastic underpinning, with not much simple mass loading. So an impact, from something thrown down here, that has a lot of energy. Real quick it moves through the support structure. It came here, to this big slab of rock, a whole mountain—and knocked the bejeezus out of it.”

“Just as we landed. What luck.” Irma huddled down. Cliff read her body language: the rain was warm, at least. It smacked down hard.

Terry sniffed and said, “I’d like to get out of this damned rain.”

As if on cue, white specks began smacking down on the flat rock plain around them. “Hail!” Aybe said.

A dirty white ball the size of his fist hit Cliff in the side. He thought he felt a rib crack. The weather here was bigger and harder than he could deal with. Plus the darkness of the storm kept making him feel like sleeping.

“Let’s get inside, out of this storm,” Cliff said. “Not the skyfish—who knows what’ll happen in there?”

To his surprise, the others just nodded. They looked tired, and that made them compliant. He turned to Quert. “How can we get into their station?”

Quert had been dealing with his Sil, who were doing what they usually did at a delay—resting. They were squatting and eating something they had gotten on the skyfish. The more anxious humans just milled around. “Let us lead,” Quert said.

The Sil set off at an angle to the crack that had formed in the slab rock. In the confusion of abandoning the skyfish, they had all managed to slip away from the Folk and their many, panicked attendants. The darkness from huge black clouds that slid endlessly across their sky had sent the crew into jittery, nervous states, their legs jerking as they moved, eyes cast fearfully skyward. They had never known night, and this vast storm could not be common here.

The crack finally ended several hundred meters away from the skyfish. The Sil simply walked around the end of it with complete confidence, and headed back toward a raised bump near the larger mound of the Folk station. As they all cautiously approached, the lightning came less often. Cliff looked back in the darkness and saw the skyfish dimly lit from inside, like some enormous orange Halloween lantern on its side. There was no one in the tube passageway that led downward. “Why?” Cliff asked Quert.

“All fear,” Quert said. “Folk, others, all hide inside.”

And so it was. They padded carefully down corridors and across large rooms bristling with gear whose function Cliff could not even guess. It seemed to be working, there were some small lights on the faces, but no clue as to what they did.

“Folk not know how to work when big change comes,” Quert said laconically. He relayed this to the Sil and they all made the yawning, hacking sound of Sil laughter.

They came into a large room that looked down on an even larger area. Quietly they crept up to the edge of a parapet and saw below a milling crowd. The attendants and servants, a throng including alien shapes Cliff had never seen before, and robotic ones as well, held back toward the walls. At the center were the three large Folk and the machine holding Tananareve. The far walls were large oval screens showing views of the Knothole region. One smaller screen was a view from far above, where a long tear in the atmospheric envelope had drawn clouds streaming in, moisture condensing and lightning forking along the flanks of immense purple storms.

“That’s the top of the typhoon we’re under,” Terry said. “Judging the scale, I’d say those cloud banks are the size of Earthside continents—and look at that lightning flash! You can see it coiling around. As big as the Mississippi, easy.”

“Look,” Irma said, pointing at the shifting view as it tilted toward the Knothole. “There’s the jet—and my God!—
SunSeeker
.”

The screens showed swift small motes dodging and banking in the center of the luminous swirling plasma jet. A quick close-up of their own starship showed it plowing through knots of turbulence and making a tight helix, aiming its pencil exhaust in a tight hot luminous finger at the—

“Damn, they hit it!” Aybe said, eyes jumping. “Blew that flier to pieces.”

“Damn right!” Terry said, pumping his fist.

They didn’t know what was going on, but excitement rippled through humans and Sil alike as they watched something like a dogfight going on. Cliff watched the ballet of ships moving at many hundreds of kilometers a second, seen on scales that had to be zoomed six or seven orders of magnitudes. Nothing but machines could handle this, and even they seemed strained from the sudden turns and swerves they saw.

The crowd below gazed upward at the screens, and the Folk were at the center, managing machines. The odd curved box that held Tananareve was with them. He wondered what they were making of this confusing mess. He grasped Irma and held her close. They kissed, not caring if anyone saw. Then the guards arrived.

FORTY
-
SIX

They were drenched and cold, Folk and Serfs alike, but the hour demanded attention. Memor slumped down to rest, sitting back a bit on her haunches.

Their flight from the poor agonized and wounded skyfish had been rowdy, noisy, swept by rain beneath inky clouds flashing with electrical anger. Their ragged party had slipped and stumbled their way across great slabs of rock, with Memor trying to keep order in their flight. A team from the station had come out to erect, with swift competence, a bridge over the jagged chasm that had split open. The station’s deputy commander said a flying hard-carbon flange had fallen on the mountain, apparently freed of its support structure high up in the envelope’s stanchions, and plunged deep into the mountain’s firm mass. The shock wave had rocked the skyfish sideways and blown several of its compartments, spilling crew onto the rock. That knife-sharp girder had also split a crevasse at the worst possible moment, spraying fragments into the skyfish and killing some local staff. The great skyfish bellowed and writhed against the crews attempting to moor it, killing several. Its flailing fins were sharp and deadly.

Considering this, it was a wonder anything worked.

Memor sagged with exhaustion. She watched Asenath stand proudly at the prow of the command center in their mountain shelter, in full authority. She listened to the panicked signals from the fliers, displayed on screens and sounding shrill even in this large command room. The fliers were guided by robot minds, high level and capable of what seemed like emotions. The voices were brittle, sharp, edged with urgency. The swift ships tumbled and gyred, blown about by the ramscoop thrust. That made evasive navigation and aiming nearly impossible.

“We could use the Lambda Gun, as you said before, Wisdom Chief,” a small lieutenant said softly. “One of the fliers bears only the gun. It is bulky and makes maneuver difficult in the jet. That flier hangs back, away from the pencil exhaust the primates are using against us.”

“Under whose orders was this done?” Memor said.

“Mine,” Asenath said firmly.

“Have the Ice Minds agreed? They have—”

“Bemor is not here, so we cannot readily consult with the Ice Minds. He is off managing their discourse, if that is the proper word, with your talking primate. So I shall have to assume command.”

Memor felt compelled to say, “Separated command? This is not proper use of the hierarchy—”

“Ah, but then, this is a clear emergency. Communications are fragmented and time ticks on. I order the Lambda Gun unfolded.”

Memor felt a sudden spike of fear. “That, that will take time—”

“Get to it,” Asenath ordered the lieutenant. Various officers, gathered around the two Folk in a crescent, rustled with unease. Nobody moved. The silence stretched.

Memor said, “You had the Lambda Gun prepared before, didn’t you?”

Asenath gave an irritated fan-rebuke to her underlings. “Now!” They scurried off to their many tasks.

Almost casually, in a way that told Memor this had been long planned, Asenath turned and gave a gray green feather rush of haughty disregard. “I felt it necessary. Events now prove me correct.”

Memor felt icy fatigue run through her but summoned up reserves, rustled her feathers, and turned inward. She had heard of the Lambda Gun long ago as a historical curiosity, and now had to call up its history to have any hope of dealing with Asenath. Her Undermind held this lore, and was sore abused. She felt this as she unveiled portions, stripping back layers of youthful memory, gazing inward past the trauma suffered after the revelation of the Great Shame. She felt it now in its full ghastly panorama—the images of a long cometary tail, pointing directly at Earth in the final moments, like an accusatory finger, and the spreading circle of destruction that annihilated the ancient civilization of smart, warm-blooded reptiles. Their majesty lay not in vast edifices, culminating in the Bowl. Instead, they were heirs to the fraction of that great species which relished their natural planet and did not want to take part in the Bowl, or its technical prowess, or the alliance with strange minds in the cometary halo. They had kept Earth green and fertile, restricting their own numbers so the natural luxuriant world was not paved over with artifice. In a way, Memor recalled, the Bowl became a tribute to their deep instincts. Its huge expanses enabled many species to live intelligently in Zones dominated by leafy wealth, though built upon a substrate of spinning metal and carbon fiber intricacies. A natural world built upon a machine …

She had become lost in her introspection, a common liability of voyages into the Undermind’s shadowy labyrinths. Memor revived an old image of the Lambda Gun, a fearsome projector of gray spherical bulk, tapering into a belligerent snout. It could project a disturbance in the vacuum energy of space-time, throwing this knot of chaos out in a beam. Suitably tuned, it would cause, when it struck solid matter, a catastrophic expansion of a small volume of space. The inflation field increased the cosmological constant in a very restricted region for a brief snap of time. Whatever contained this howling monstrosity, reborn from the first instant of this universe, would be ripped into particles far smaller than nuclei.

Memor recoiled from this appalling vision. With a hasty withdrawal salute, she slammed her Undermind shut. “This is grisly! This is a planet buster, capable of delivering enormous energies—”

“So well I do know,” Asenath replied. “I have studied this ancient device and its history. The true Ancients invented it as a last resort against balky species. Some hurled relativistic masses at the Bowl to drive it away. The Lambda Gun put a quick end to their mischief.”

“Surely we have shields that would be useful—”

“Not against a vagrant craft with powerful magnetic scoops. We enjoyed great magnetic craftsmanship in Ancient ages, but our Bowl does not muster such intensities. Nor do the Diaphanous have ready responses. Meanwhile, the jet stands in a nonlinear kink mode and deals us terrible destruction.”

Asenath said this with a reasonable air and somber fan-display. Memor knew she could not deflect Asenath in an area where her expertise and rank prevailed. She gave it one last try. “The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous are in charge of jet dynamics!”

“And they have failed. Prepare to fire,” Asenath said to a lieutenant, and turned her back on Memor.

FORTY
-
SEVEN

Beth felt the hairs on her neck rise, prickly and trembling as the electrical charge built again. But this time she was getting irked and instead of flattening herself yet again on the deck, she hit a hard thruster in the magscoop. Fields vented plasma and the ship lurched. The others were hitting the deck but Beth discharged a brace of capacitors in the magscoop’s leading magnetic fields. This gave a powerful burst of electrons at the far end of the scoop, moving at the speed of light. Instantly her neck hairs stopped tingling.

“Cap’n, looks like I’ve found a way to offset the charge buildup these things are using against us,” she said with a deliberately casual air.

Redwing looked up from the deck, where he had sprawled. “Brilliant!”

“And she nailed that flier flat on, too,” Karl said with one of his seldom-seen grins. “There’s only one flier left, and it’s hanging back pretty far.”

“Good,” Redwing said, getting up and straightening his uniform. He was always meticulous when on the bridge. “But we’re near the top of our mission profile, right?”

Beth checked. “Yes, sir, got to turn around soon and head back down, run with the jet.”

“That will lower our plasma influx pretty far,” Karl said. “We’ll have a reduced exhaust.”

“So the exhaust will be less useful as a weapon, certainly,” Redwing said. “Let’s try to hover near our top limit, then. Can you do that, Officer Marble?”

Redwing also liked to get formal in tight situations. She had often wondered if in such moments he saw himself as fearless admiral at the helm of a battleship on tossing gray seas. Well, this was about as close to that as he was going to get, and as close as she ever wanted to be.

“Keep an eye on that flier as we make our turn.” Redwing settled into his deck chair. He looked tired and gray to Beth, but so did they all now. Hours of dodging among the jet knots, harvesting them with split-second timing and then blowing the excess post-fusion plasma out the flexing nozzle as a weapon—well, it added up fast.