The Terragens Council sent her out to join a scattered fleet of exploration vessels, checking the veracity of the Library. So far only a few minor gaps had been found in its thoroughness. Here a star misplaced. There a species miscatalogued. It was like finding that someone had written a list describing every grain of sand on a beach. You could never check the complete list in a thousand lifetimes of a race, but you could take a random sampling.
Streaker had been poking through a small gravitational tide pool, fifty thousand parsecs off the galactic plane, when she found the Fleet.
Toshio sighed at the unfairness of it. One hundred and fifty dolphins, seven humans, and a chimpanzee; how could we have known what we found?
Why did we have to find it?
Fifty thousand ships, each the size of a moon. That’s what they found. The dolphins had been thrilled by their discovery—the biggest Derelict Fleet ever encountered, apparently incredibly ancient. Captain Creideiki had psicast to Earth for instructions.
Dammit! Why did he call Earth? Couldn’t the report have waited until we’d gone home? Why let the whole eavesdropping galaxy know you’d found a Sargasso of ancient hulks in the middle of nowhere?
The Terragens Council had answered in code.
“Go into hiding. Await orders. Do not reply.”
Creideiki obeyed, of course. But not before half the patron-lines in the galaxy had sent out their warships to find Streaker.
Toshio blinked.
Something. A resonance echo at last? Yes, the magnetic ore detector showed a faint echo toward the south. He concentrated on the receiver, relieved at last to have something to do. Self-pity was becoming a bore.
Yes. It would have to be a pretty fair deposit. Should he tell Hikahi? Naturally, the search for the missing crewfen came first, but …
A shadow fell across him. The party was skirting the edge of a massive metal-mound. The copper-colored mass was covered with thick tendrils of some green hanging growth.
“Don’t go too close, Little Hands,” Keepiru whistled from Toshio’s left. Only Keepiru and the sled were this close to the mound. The other fins were giving it a wide berth.
“We know nothing of this flora,” Keepiru continued. “And it’ss near here that Phip-pit was lost. You should stay safe within our convoy.” Keepiru rolled lazily past Toshio, keeping up with languid fluke strokes. The neatly folded arms of his harness gleamed a coppery reflection from the metal-mound.
“Then it’s all the more important to get samples, isn’t it?” Toshio replied in irritation. “It’s what we’re out here for, anyway!” Without giving Keepiru time to react, Toshio banked the sled toward the shadowy mass of the mound.
Toshio dove into a region of darkness as the island blocked off the afternoon sunlight. A drifting school of silverbacked fish seemed to explode away from him as he drove at an angle along the thick, fibrous weed.
Keepiru squeaked in startlement behind him, an oath in Primal Dolphin, which showed the fin’s distress. Toshio smiled.
The sled hummed cooperatively as the mound loomed like a mountain on his right. Toshio banked and grabbed at the nearest flash of green. There was a satisfying snapping sensation as his sample came free in his hand. No fin could do that! He flexed his fingers appreciatively, then twisted about to stuff the clump into a collection sack.
Toshio looked up and saw that the green mass, instead of receding, was closer than ever. Keepiru’s squawling was louder.
Crybaby! Toshio thought. So I let the controls drift for a second. So what? I’ll be back in your damned convoy before you finish making up a cuss-poem.
He steepened his leftward bank and simultaneously set his bow planes to rise. In a moment he realized it was a tactical mistake. For it slowed him down just enough for the cluster of pursuing tendrils to reach his sled.
There must have been larger sea creatures on Kithrup than the party had seen so far, for the tentacles that fell about Toshio were obviously meant to catch big prey.
“Oh, Koino-Anti! Now I’ve done it!” He pushed the throttle over to maximum and braced for the expected surge of power.
Power came … but not acceleration. The sled groaned, stretching the long, ropy strands. But forward movement was lost. Then the engine died. Toshio felt a slithery presence across his legs, then another. The tendrils began to tighten and pull.
Gasping, he managed to twist around onto his back, and groped for the knife sheathed at his thigh. The tendrils were sinuous and knotty. The knots clung to whatever they touched, and when one brushed against the back of Toshio’s exposed left hand the boy cried out from the searing pain of contact.
The fins were crying out to each other, and there were sounds of vigorous movement not far away. But other than a brief hope that nobody else was caught, Toshio had little time to think of anything but the fight at hand.
The knife came free, gleaming like hope. And hope brought hope as two small strands parted under his slashing attack. Another, larger, one, took several seconds to saw through. It was replaced almost instantly by two more.
Then he saw the place to which he was being drawn.
A deep gash split the side of the metal-mound. Inside, a writhing mass of filaments awaited. Deep within, a dozen meters farther up, something sleek and gray lay already enmeshed in a forest of deceptively languid foliage.
Toshio felt open-mouthed steam fill his facemask. The reflection of his own eyes, dilated and stricken, was superimposed on the motionless figure of Ssassia. Gentle as her life had been, though not her death, the tide rocked her.
With a cry, Toshio resumed hacking. He wanted to call out to Hikahi—to let the party leader know of Ssassia’s fate—but all that came out was a roar of loathing of the Kithrupan creeper. Leaves and fronds flew off through the churning water as he sliced out his hatred, but to little good, as the tendrils fell more numerous about him to draw him toward the gash.
* Ladder climber—Sharp-eyed rhymer *
* Call a fix—for seeking finders *
* Trill sonar—through the leaf blinders *
Hikahi calling.
Above the churning of his struggle and the hoarseness of his breath, Toshio could hear the combat sounds of dolphin teamwork. Quick trills of Trinary, unslowed for human ears except for that one brief command, and the whining of their harnesses.
“Here! Here I am!” He slashed at a leafy vine that threatened his air hose, barely missing the hose itself. He licked his lips and tried to whistle in Trinary.
* Holding off—the sea-squid’s beak *
* Suckers tight—and outlook bleak *
* Havoc done—on Ssassia wreaked! *
Lousy form and rhythm, but the fins would hear it better than they would a shout in Anglic. After only forty generations of sapience, they still thought better in an emergency when using whistle rhyme.
Toshio could hear the sounds of combat coming closer. But, as if hurried by the threat, the tentacles began drawing him back more rapidly, toward the gash. Suddenly a suckercovered strand wrapped itself around his right arm. Before he could shift his grip, one of the burning knots reached his hand. He screamed and tore the tendril away, but the knife was lost into the darkness.
Other filaments were falling all about him. At that moment Toshio became distantly aware that someone was talking to him slowly, and in Anglic!
“…says there are ships out there! Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim wants to know why Hikahi hasn’t sent a monopulse confirmation…”
It was Akki’s voice, calling from the ship! Toshio couldn’t answer his friend. The switch for the sled radio was out of reach, and he was a bit preoccupied.
“Don’t respond to this message,” Akki went on obligingly. Toshio moaned at the irony as he tried to pry a tendril off his facemask without doing further insult to his hands. “Just transmit a monopulse and come on back-k, all of you. We think there’s a space battle going on over Kithrup. Probably those crazy ETs followed us here and are fighting over the right to capture us, just like at Morgran.
“Gotta c-close up, now. Radio silence. Get back as soon as you can. Akki out.”
Toshio felt a tendril seize hold of his air hose. A solid grip, this time.
“Sure, Akki, old friend,” he grunted as he pulled at it. “I’ll be going home just as soon as the universe lets me.”
The air hose was crimped shut, and there was nothing he could do. Fog filled his facemask. As he felt himself blacking out, Toshio thought he saw the rescue party arrive, but he couldn’t be sure if it was real or a hallucination. He wouldn’t have expected Keepiru to lead the charge, for instance, or for that fin to have such a ferocious demeanor, heedless of the burning suckers.
In the end, he decided it was a dream. The laser flashes were too bright, the saser tones too clear. And the party came toward him with pennants waving in their wake like the cavalry that five centuries of Anglic-speaking man had come to associate with the image of rescue.
O
n a ship in the center of a feet of ships, a phase of denial was passing.
Giant cruisers spilled out of a rent in space, to fall toward the pinpoint brilliance of a non-descript reddish sun. One by one, they tumbled from the luminous tear. With them came diffracted starlight from their point of departure, hundreds of parsecs away.
There were rules that should have prevented it. The tunnel was an unnatural way to pass from place to place. It took a strong will to deny nature and call into being such an opening in space.
The Episiarch, in its outraged rejection of What Is, had created the passage for its Tandu masters. The opening was held by the adamant power of its ego—by its refusal to concede anything at all to Reality.
When the last ship was through, the Episiarch was purposely distracted, and the hole collapsed with soundless violence. In moments, only instruments could tell that it had ever been. The affront to physics was erased.
The Episiarch had brought the Tandu armada to the target star well ahead of the other fleets, those who would challenge the Tandu for the right to capture the Earth ship. The Tandu sent impulses of praise to the Episiarch’s pleasure centers. It howled and waved its great furry head in gratitude.
To the Tandu, an obscure and dangerous form of travel had once again proved worth the risks. It was good to arrive on the battlefield before the enemy. The added moments would give them a tactical edge.
The Episiarch only wanted things to deny. Its task now finished, it was returned to its chamber of delusions, to alter an endless chain of surrogate realities until its outrage was needed by the Masters once again. Its shaggy, amorphous shape rolled free of the sensory web, and it shambled off, escorted by wary guardians.
When the way was clear, the Acceptor entered, and climbed on spindly legs to its place within the web.
For a long moment it appraised Reality, embracing it. The Acceptor probed and touched and caressed this new region of space with its farflung senses. It gave out a crooning cry of pleasure.
“Such leakage!” the Acceptor joyously announced. “I had heard the hunted were sloppy sophonts, but they leak even as they scan for danger! They have hidden on the second planet. Only slowly do the edges of their psychic shields congeal to hide from me their exact location. Who were their masters, to teach these dolphins so well to be prey?”
“Their masters are the humans, themselves unfinished,” the Leading Stalker of the Tandu replied. Its voice was a rhythmic pattern of rapid clicks and pops from the ratchet joints of its mantis-legs. “The Earthlings are tainted by wrong belief, and by the shame of their own abandonment. The noise of three centuries shall be quieted when they are eaten. Then our hunter’s joy will be as yours is, when you witness a new place or thing.”
“Such joy,” the Acceptor agreed.
“Now stir to get details,” the Stalker commanded. “Soon we do battle with heretics. I must tell your fellow clients their tasks.”
The Acceptor turned in the web as the Stalker left, and opened its feelings to this new patch of reality. Everything was good. It passed on reports of what it saw, and the Masters moved the ships in response, but with the larger part of its mind it appreciated … it accepted … the tiny red sun, each of its small planets, the delicious expectancy of a place soon to become a battlefield.
Soon it felt the other war fleets enter the system, each in its own peculiar way. Each took a slightly inferior position, forced by the early arrival of the Tandu.
The Acceptor sensed the lusts of warrior clients and the cool calculations of calmer elders. It caressed the slickness of mind shields rigidly held against it, and wondered what went on within them. It appreciated the openness of other combatants, who disdainfully cast their thoughts outward, daring the listener to gather in their broadcast contempt.
It swept up savage contemplations of the Acceptor’s own annihilation, as the great fleets plunged toward each other and bright explosions began to flash.
The Acceptor took it all in joyfully. How could anyone feel otherwise, when the universe held such wonders?
H
igh in the port quarter of Streaker’s spherical control room, a psi operator thrashed in her harness. Her flukes made a turmoil of the water, and she cried out in Trinary.
* The inky, eight-armed, squid-heads find us! *
* Ripping pods of them do battle! *
The operator’s report confirmed the discovery made by the neutrino detector only minutes before. It was a litany of bad news, related in trance-verse.
* They scream and lust—
To win and capture … *
From another station came a calmer bulletin in dolphin accented Anglic.
“We’re getting heavy graviton traffic, Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim. Gravitational disturbances confirm a major battle is forming up not far from the planet-t.”