The fin looked at him blankly, for a moment, then nodded vigorously.
* Roger—I’ll dodge her! *
Suessi grimaced at the flippancy. They wouldn’t be fins if they weren’t sarcastic one-half the time and over-eager the other half. Besides, they really had been working hard.
Still, it was a royal bitch working underwater. In comparison, doing construction in weightlessness was a pure joy.
Since the Twenty-first Century, men had learned a lot about building things in space. They had found solutions to the problems of inertia and rotation that weren’t even in the Library. Beings who’d had antigravity for a billion years had never needed to discover them.
There had been somewhat less experience, in the last three hundred years, doing heavy work underwater, even in Earth’s dolphin communities, and none at all in repairing or looting spacecraft at the bottom of an ocean.
If weightless inertia caused problems in orbit, what about the almost unpredictable buoyancies of submerged materials? The force it took to move a massive object varied with the speed it was already traveling and with the cross-section it presented at any given moment. In space there were no such complications.
As the fen reoriented the beam, Suessi looked inside the battleship to see how the other work was progressing. Flashing laser saws, as bright as the heliarc lamps, illuminated the slow dismemberment of the central cavity of the Thennanin battleship. Gradually, a great cylindrical opening was being prepared.
Lieutenant Tsh’t was supervising that end of the work. Her workers moved in that unique neo-fin pattern. Each dolphin used his eyes or instruments for close work. But when approaching an object, the worker’s head would bob in a circular motion, spraying narrow beams of sound from the bulbous “melon” that gave the Tursiops porpoise its highbrow look. The sound-sensitive tip of his lower jaw waved to build a stereoscopic image.
The chamber was filled with creaking sounds. Suessi never ceased to marvel that they made anything out of the cacophony at all.
They were noisy fellows, and he wished he had more of them.
Suessi hoped Hikahi would get here with those extra crewfen. Hikahi was supposed to bring the longboat or skiff with her, giving Suessi a place to dry off, and the others a chance to rest with good air to breathe. If his own gang weren’t relieved soon, there would be accidents.
It was a devil of a plan Orley had proposed. Suessi had hoped that Creideiki and the ship’s council would come up with an alternative, but those objecting to the plan had failed to offer anything better. Streaker would be moved as soon as the signal came from Thomas Orley.
Apparently Creideiki had decided that they all had little to lose.
A “Ker-runch!” sound carried through the water. Suessi winced and looked around. One end of a Thennanin quantum-brake hung limply, broken at the join by the end of Olelo’s bracing beam. The usually impassive fin looked at him in obvious distress.
“Now, boys and girls,” Suessi moaned, “how are we going to make this shell look like it’s survived a fight if we ourselves do more harm than the enemy ever did? Who’d believe it could fly with all these holes in it?”
Olelo’s tail slashed at the water. He let out mournful chirps.
Suessi sighed. After three hundred years, one still wanted to tread lightly with dolphins. Criticism tended to break them up. Positive reinforcement worked much better.
“All right. Let’s try it again, hmm? Carefully. You came a lot closer that time.”
Suessi shook his head and wondered what kind of lunacy had ever driven him to become an engineer.
T
he battle had moved away from this region of space; the Tandu feet had once again survived.
The Pthaca faction had joined with the Thennanin and Gubru, and the lot of the Soro remained dangerous. The Brothers of the Night had been almost destroyed.
The Acceptor perched in the center of its web and peeled back its shields in careful stages, as it had been trained to do. It had taken the Tandu masters millennia to teach its race to use mind shields at all, so loath were they to let anything pass unwitnessed.
As the barriers fell, the Acceptor eagerly probed nearby space, caressing clouds of vapor and drifting wreckage. It lightly skirted over untriggered psi-traps and fields of unresolved probability. Battles were lovely to look at, but they were also dangerous.
Recognition of danger was another thing the Tandu had force-fed them. In secret, the Acceptor’s species didn’t take it very seriously. Could something that actually happened ever be bad? The Episiarch felt that way, and look how crazy it was!
The Acceptor noticed something it would normally have overlooked. If it had been free to espertouch the ships, planets, and missiles, it would have been too distracted to detect such a subtle nuance—thoughts of a single, disciplined mind.
Delighted, the Acceptor realized the sender was a Synthian! There was a Synthian here, and it was trying to communicate with the Earthlings!
It was an anomaly, and therefore beautiful. The Acceptor had never witnessed a daring Synthian before.
Neither were Synthians famed for their psychic skill, but this one was doing a creditable job of threading through the myriad psi detectors all sides had spread through nearby space.
The feat was marvelous for its unexpectedness … one more proof of the superiority of objective reality over the subjective, in spite of the ravings of the Episiarch! Surprise was the essence of life.
The Acceptor knew it would be punished if it spent much longer marveling at this event instead of reporting it.
That, too, was a source of wonder, this “punishment” by which the Tandu were able to make the Acceptor’s people choose one path over another. For 40,000 years it had amazed them. Someday they might do something about it. But there was no hurry. By that day they might be patrons themselves. Another mere sixty thousand years would be an easy wait.
The signal from the Synthian spy faded. Apparently the fury of the battle was driving her farther from Kthsemenee.
The Acceptor cast about, regretting the loss slightly. But now the glory of battle opened before it. Eager for the wealth of stimulus that awaited it, the Acceptor decided to report on the Synthian later … if it remembered.
T
om looked over his shoulder at the gathering clouds. It was too soon to tell if the storm would catch him. He had a long way to fly before finding out.
The solar plane hummed along at four thousand feet; the little aircraft wasn’t designed for breaking records. It was little more than a narrow skeleton. The propeller was driven by sunlight falling on the wide, translucent wing.
Kithrup’s world-ocean was traced below by thin whitecaps. Tom flew to the northeast, letting the tradewinds do most of the work. The same winds would make the return trip—if there were one—slow and hazardous.
Higher, faster winds pushed the dark clouds eastward, chasing him.
He was flying almost by dead reckoning, using only Kithrup’s orange sun for rough navigation. A compass would be useless, for metal-rich Kithrup was covered with twisty magnetic anomalies.
Wind whistled past the plane’s small conical noseguard. Lying prone on the narrow platform, he hardly felt the breeze.
Tom wished he had just one more pillow. His elbows were getting chafed, and his neck was developing a crick. He had trimmed and retrimmed his list of supplies until he found himself choosing between one more psi-bomb to use at this destination and a water distiller to keep him alive when he got there. His compromise collection was taped to the platform beneath his cushion. The lumps made it almost impossible to find a comfortable position.
The journey was an unending monotony of sea and sky.
Twice he caught sight of swarms of flying creatures in the distance. It was his first inkling that any animals flew on Kithrup. Could they have evolved from jumping fish? He was a bit surprised to find flight on a world so barren of heights.
Of course, the creatures might have been molded by some ancient Galactic tenant of Kithrup, he thought. Where nature’s variety fails, sophonts can meddle. I’ve seen weirder gene-crafted things than fliers on a water world.
Tom remembered a time when he and Gillian had accompanied old Jake Demwa to the Tymbrimi university-world of Cathrhennlin. Between meetings, he and Jill had toured a huge continental wilderness preserve, where they saw great herds of Clideu beasts grazing the grassy plains in precise and complex geometric patterns. The arrangements spontaneously changed, minute by minute, without any apparent communication among the individual animals—like the transient weavings of a moire pattern. The Tymbrimi explained that an ancient Galactic race that had dwelt on Cathrhennlin ages ago had programmed the patterns into the Clideu as a form of puzzle. No one in all time since had ever managed to decipher the riddle, if there actually was one.
Gillian suggested that the patterns might have been adapted by the Clideu for their own benefit. The puzzle loving Tymbrimi preferred to think otherwise.
Tom smiled as he recalled that trip, their first mission as a pair. Since then he and Gillian had seen more wonders than they could ever catalog.
He missed her already.
The local birds, or whatever, veered away from the growing bank of clouds. Orley watched them until they passed out of sight. There was no sign of land in the direction they flew.
The plane was making nearly two hundred knots. That should take him to the northeast chain of volcanic islands he sought in another two hours or so. Radio, satellite tracking, and radar were all forbidden luxuries. Tom had only the chart pinned to his windscreen to guide him.
He’d be able to do better on the return trip. Gillian insisted he take an inertial recorder. It could guide him blindfolded back to within a few meters of Hikahi’s island.
Should the opportunity arise.
The pursuing clouds grew slowly above and behind him. Kithrup’s jet stream was really cooking. Tom admitted that he wouldn’t mind finding a landing site before the storm reached him.
As the afternoon wore on he saw another swarm of flying creatures, and twice he caught a glimpse of motion in the water below, something huge and sinuous. Both times the thing vanished before he could get a better look.
Scattered among the swells below floated sparse patches of seaweed. Some clusters came together to form isolated mounds of vegetation. Perhaps the flying things perched on those, he thought idly.
Tom fought the tedium and developed a profound hatred for whatever lumpy object lay directly under his left kidney.
The glowering cloudbank was only a couple of miles behind him when he saw something on the northern horizon, a faint smudge against the graying sky.
He applied more power and banked toward the plume. Soon he could make out a dusky funnel. Curling and twisting to the northeast, it hung like a sooty banner across the sky.
Tom strove for altitude, even as the threatening clouds encroached on the late afternoon sun, casting shadow onto the solar collectors on his wing. Thunder grumbled, and flashes of lightning briefly illuminated the seascape.
When it began to rain, the ammeter swung far over to the red. The tiny engine began to labor.
Yes. There it was! An island! The mountain seemed a good way off yet. It was partly hidden by smoke.
He’d prefer to land on a companion isle, one that wasn’t quite as active. Orley grinned at the presumption of anyone in his position making demands. He would land at sea, if need be. The small plane was equipped with pontoons.
The light was fading. In the growing dimness Tom noticed that the surface of the ocean had changed color. Something about its texture made him frown in puzzlement. It was hard to tell what the difference was.
Soon he had little time for speculation, as he fought his bucking craft, struggling for every foot of altitude.
Hoping it would remain light long enough to find a landing place, he drove his fragile ship through the pelting rain toward the smoldering volcano.
H
e hadn’t realized the ship looked this bad.
Creideiki had checked the status of every damaged engine and instrument. As repairs were made, he or Takkata-Jim had discreetly triple-checked. Most of the damage that could be fixed, had been.
But as ship’s master, he was the one who also had to deal with the intangibles. Someone had to pay attention to aesthetics, no matter how low their priority. And however successful the functional repairs were, Streaker was no longer beautiful.
This was his first trip outside in person. He wore a breather and swam above the scarred hull, getting an overview.
The stasis flanges and the main gravity drives would work. He had Takkata-Jim’s and Emerson D’Anite’s word on that, and had checked himself. One rocketry impeller had been destroyed by an antimatter beam at Morgran. The remaining tube was serviceable.
But though the hull was secure and strong, it was not the delight to the eye it had once been. The outer skin was seared in two places, where beams had penetrated the shields to blister the skin.
Brookida had told him that there was even one small area where the metal had been changed from one alloy to another. The structural integrity of the ship was intact, but it meant that someone had come awfully close to them with a probability distorter. It was disturbing to think that that piece of Streaker had been swapped with another similar but slightly different ship, containing similar but slightly different fugitives, in some hypothetical parallel universe.
According to Library records, no one had ever learned to control cross-universe distorters well enough to use them as anything but weapons, though it was rumored that some of the ancient species that “outgrew” Galactic civilization from time to time discovered the secret, and used it to leave this reality by a side door.