—Let them come and look! Can it matter?—
A ship of the Soro had been watching them for some time. Could it have divined their purpose?
—Never! The citation was too obscure! Our new weapon has sat unnoticed too long in the dusty archives. They will first understand when this moon begins to vibrate on the fifteenth probability band sending out waves of uncertainty that will tear their battle fleets apart! Then their shipboard Libraries will undoubtedly remember, but too late!—
The Brother of the Ebony Shadows watched from space as the resonator neared completion, watched as the grounded ships fed their combined energies to the resonator. From a thousand units out he could feel the wave build …
—What are they doing? What are the Progenitor-scorned Soro doing?—instruments showed that the Brothers of the Night were not alone on the fifteenth band! From the Soro ship came a small tone, a variation of the beat emanating from the small moon. An echo.
The fifteenth band began to beat. It was impossible, but it resonated along with the Soro rhythm!
The Brothers on the ground tried to damp the runaway signal, but it was already too late! The small moon shook, and finally crumbled. Great shards of rock tumbled apart, crushing the little ships in their way.
—How could they have known? How could they…?—
Then the Brother of the Ebony Shadows understood. Long ago, when he had begun his search for a new weapon, there had been a helpful Librarian … a Pilan. The Pilan had always been there with the useful suggestion, with the helpful reference. The Brother had thought nothing of it. Librarians were supposed to be helpful, and neutral, whatever their backgrounds.
—But the Pil are clients to the Soro—The Brother realized—Krat knew all along—
He gave the order sending his remaining forces into hiding. —This is only a setback. We shall yet be the ones to capture the Earthlings!—
Behind the fleeing remnants, the small moon continued to dissolve.
H
annes Suessi lay prone on the heavy work sled next to Thomas Orley. The gaunt, balding artificer gestured at the wreck before them.
“It’s a Thennanin ship,” the chief engineer said. “It’s pretty badly crumpled, but there’s no doubt. See? There are no objectivity anchors, only stasis projectors on the main flanges. The Thennanin are terrified of reality alteration. This ship was never designed to use a probability drive. Definitely, it’s Thennanin, or a Thennanin client or ally.”
The dolphins circled slowly nearby, taking turns at the airdomes underneath the sled, emitting excited sonar clicks as they eyed the gigantic crushed arrowhead below them.
“I think you’re right, Hannes,” Tom said. “It’s a behemoth.”
That the ship was still in one piece was amazing. In its Mach five meeting with the ocean, it had caromed off at least two small sub-surface islands—leaving substantial dents in them—and plowed a deep gouge in the ocean floor before finally catching up against a furrow of pelagic mud, just before it would have smashed into a sheer scarp. The cliff face looked crumbly and precarious. Another substantial jolt would surely cause a collapse, burying the wreck completely.
Orley knew that it was the quality of the Thennanin stasis shields that had made such a performance possible. Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.
It was difficult to assess the damage yet. Down here the illumination from the surface was blue-tinged and dim. The fen wouldn’t turn on the arc lights they had strung up until Tsh’t said it was safe. Fortunately, the wreck was in water shallow enough to visit, yet deep enough to shield them from spy eyes overhead.
A pink-bellied bottlenose dolphin swam up next to the sled. She worked her foodmouth in a thoughtful circular motion.
“It’s really amazing, isn’t it, Tom?” she asked. “It should be in a jillion piecesss.”
This deep, there was an odd clarity to the fin’s voice. Bursts of air from her blowmouth and sonar clicks joined in a complex manner to make speech an intricate juggling of bodily functions. To a landlubber human, a neo-dolphin speaking underwater sounded more like an avant-garde orchestra tuning up, than someone speaking a derivative of the English language.
“Do you think we can make any use of it-t?” The dolphin officer asked.
Orley looked again at the ship. There was a good chance that in the confusion of battle none of those contending over Kithrup had bothered to note where this sparrow had fallen. He already had a few tentative ideas, one or two of which might just be bold and unexpected—and idiotic—enough to work.
“Let’s give it a look,” he nodded. “I suggest we split into three teams. Team one heads for any center of emissions, particularly probability, psi, or neutrino radiation, and disables the source. They should also watch out for survivors, though that seems a bit unlikely.”
Suessi snorted as he looked at the pounded wreck. Orley went on.
“Team two concentrates on harvesting. Hannes should lead that one, along with Ti-tcha. They’ll look for monopoles and refined metals that Streaker might be able to use. With luck, they might find some replacements for those coils we need.
“With your permission, Tsh’t, I’ll take team three. I want to look over the structural integrity of that ship, and survey the topography of the surrounding area.”
Tsh’t did a jaw clap of agreement. “Your logic is good, Tom. That is what we’ll do. I’ll leave Lucky Kaa with the other sled, on alert. The ressst shall join their teams at once.”
Orley grabbed Tsh’t’s dorsal fin as she was about to whistle the command. “Oh, we’d better go with breathers all around, hadn’t we? Trinary may not be efficient, but I’d rather put off complex conversations in Anglic than have to risk everybody shuttling back and forth for air, and maybe someone getting hurt.”
Tsh’t grimaced, but gave the command. The party was composed of disciplined fen—the pick of Streaker’s crew—so the gathering at the sled was occasion merely for low-pitched grousing and indignant bubbles as each dolphin was fitted with his wraparound hose of air.
Tom had heard of prototype breathers that would give a fin a streamlined air supply without hindering his speechmouth. If ever he found the time, he might try to rig some up himself. Speaking Trinary posed no real difficulty for him, but he knew from experience that the fen would have problems conveying technical information in anything but Anglic.
Old Hannes was already grumbling. He helped pass out the breathers with ill-disguised reluctance. The chief artificer was conversant in Trinary, of course, but he found the threelevel logic difficult. To cap things off he was a lousy poet. He obviously didn’t look forward to trying to discuss technical matters in whistle rhyme.
They had their work cut out for them. Several of the picked petty officers and crew that had accompanied them on the rescue effort had gone back to the ship, escorting Toshio and Hikahi and the other victims of the stranding waves. Only a short score of fen remained in the party. Should anything dangerous come up they would have to take care of it themselves. No help from Streaker could arrive in time to do any good.
It would have been nice to have Gillian here, Tom mused. Not that inspecting alien cruisers was her area of expertise, but she knew fins, and could handle herself if things got sticky.
But she had work of her own aboard Streaker, trying to solve the puzzle of a billion-year-old mummy that should never have existed in the first place. And in an emergency she was the only other person aboard Streaker, barring, possibly Creideiki himself, who knew about the Niss machine, or its potential value if given access to the right data.
Tom smiled as he caught himself rationalizing again.
Okay, so there are good and logical reasons why the two of us can’t be together right now. Take it for what it’s worth. Do a good job here, and maybe you can be back to her in a few days.
There had never been any question, from the moment they had met as adolescents, that he and she would make a pair. He sometimes wondered if their planners had known in advance, in choosing gametes from selected married couples, that two of the growing zygotes would later fit together so perfectly—down to the simple telempathy they sometimes shared.
Probably it was a happy accident. Human genetic planning was very limited, by law and custom. Accident or no, Tom was grateful. In his missions for the Terragens Council he had learned that the universe was dangerous and filled with disillusionment. Too few sophonts—even those equipped for it—ever got enough love.
As soon as the breathers had been distributed Tom used the sled’s speaker to amplify his voice. “Now remember, everybody; though all Galactic technologies are based on the Library, that collection of wisdom is so huge that almost any type of machine might be inside that hull. Treat everything like it’s booby-trapped until you’ve identified it and rendered it harmless.
“The first goal of Team One, after silencing the wreck, is to find the main battle computers. There may be a record of the initial stages of the fight above. That information might be invaluable to the captain.
“And would you all keep an eye out for the Library glyph? If you find that symbol anywhere, please note its location and pass word to me. I’d like to see what kind of micro-branch they were carrying.”
He nodded to Tsh’t. “Is that all right with you, Lieutenant?”
Streaker’s fourth officer clapped jaw and nodded. Orley’s politeness was appreciated, but she was likelier to bite off her own tail than overrule any suggestion he made. Streaker was the first large expedition ever commanded and operated by dolphins. It had been clear from the beginning that certain humans were along whose advice bore the patina of patronomy.
She called out in Trinary.
* Team One, with me—
To diffract above, listening
* Team Two, with Suessi—
To taste for treasure
* Team Three, with Orley—
To aid him scheming
* Drop nothing of Earth here—
To betray our visit
* Clean it up after—
If you must shit
* Think before acting—
In tropic-clear logic
* Now Streaker’s, with stillness—
Away! *
In precise order three formations peeled off, one group embellishing with a synchronized barrel roll as they passed Orley’s sled. In obedience to Tsh’t’s orders, the only sound was the rapid clicking of cetacean sonar.
Orley rode the sled until he was within forty meters of the hulk. Then he patted Hannes on the back and rolled off to the side.
What a beautiful find the ship was! Orley used a hot-torch spectrograph to get a quick analysis of the metal at the edges of a gaping tear in the vessel’s side. When he determined the ratios of various beta-decay products he whistled, causing the fen nearby to turn and look at him curiously. He had to make assumptions about the original alloy and the rate of exposure to neutrinos since the metal was forged, but reasonable guesses indicated that the ship had been fabricated at least thirty million years ago!
Tom shook his head. A fact like that made one realize how far Mankind had to go to catch up with the Galactics.
We like to think of the races using the Library as being in a rut, uncreative and unadaptable, Orley thought.
That appeared to be largely true. Very often the Galactic races seemed stodgy and unimaginative. But …
He looked at the dark, hulking battleship, and wondered.
Legend had it that the Progenitors had called for a perpetual search for knowledge before they departed for parts unknown, aeons ago. But, in practice, most species looked to the Library and only the Library for knowledge. Its store grew only slowly.
What was the point of researching what must have been discovered a thousand times over by those who came before?
It was simple, for instance, to choose advanced spaceship designs from Library archives and follow them blindly, understanding only a small fraction of what was built. Earth had a few such ships, and they were marvels.
The Terragens Council, which handled relations between the races of Earth and the Galactic community, once almost succumbed to that tempting logic. Many humans urged co-opting of Galactic models that older races had themselves co-opted from ancient designs. They cited the example of Japan, which in the nineteenth century had faced a similar problem—how to survive amongst nations immeasurably more powerful than itself. Meiji Japan had concentrated all its energy on learning to imitate its neighbors, and succeeded in becoming just like them, in the end.
The majority on the Terragens Council, including nearly all of the cetacean members, disagreed. They considered the Library a honey pot—tempting, and possibly nourishing, but also a terrible trap.
They feared the “Golden Age” syndrome … the temptation to “look backward”—to find wisdom in the oldest, dustiest texts, instead of the latest journal.
Except for a few races, such as the Kanten and Tymbrimi, the Galactic community as a whole seemed stuck in that kind of a mentality. The Library was their first and last recourse for every problem. The fact that the ancient records almost always contained something useful didn’t make that approach any less repugnant to many of the wolflings of Earth, including Tom, Gillian, and their mentor, old Jacob Demwa.
Coming out of a tradition of bootstrap technology, Earth’s leaders were convinced there were things to be gained from innovation, even this late in Galactic history. At least it felt better to believe that. To a wolfling race, pride was an important thing.
Orphans often have little else.
But here was evidence of the power of the Golden Age approach. Everything about this ship spoke silkily of refinement. Even in wreckage, it was beautifully simple in its construction, while indulgent and ornate in its embellishments. The eye saw no welds. Bracings and struts were always integral to some other purpose. Here one supported a stasis flange, while apparently also serving as a baffled radiator for excess probability. Orley thought he could detect other overlaps, subtleties that could only have come with aeons of slow improvement on an ancient design.