“Toshio!” she accused.
“That wasn’t me.” He caught his breath and backed out of arms’ reach. “It must have been your other lover.”
“My … Oh, no! Sah’ot!” Dennie whirled around searching and kicking, then whooped as something got her from behind again. “Do you scrotum-brained males ever think of anything else?”
A mottled gray dolphin’s head broached the surface nearby. The breather wrapped over his blowmouth only muted his chattering laughter slightly.
* Long before humans
Rowed out on logs—
* We made an invention
* Care to
Manage a try—
* At
Ménage a trois? *
He leered, and Toshio had to laugh as Dennie blushed. That only set her splashing water at him until he swam over and pinned her arms against one of the sleds. To stop her imprecations he kissed her.
Her lips bore the desperate tang of Kithrup as she kissed him back. Sah’ot sidled up alongside them, and nibbled their legs softly with jagged, sharp teeth.
“You know we’re not supposed to expose ourselves to this stuff if we can help it,” Toshio told her as they held each other. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
Dennie shook her head, then buried her face in his shoulder to hide it.
“Who are we fooling, Tosh?” she mumbled. “Why worry about slow metal poisoning? We’ll be dead long before our gums start to turn blue.”
“Aw, Dennie. That’s nuts…” He tried to find words to comfort her, but found that all he could do was hold her close as the dolphin wrapped himself around them both.
A comm buzzed. Sah’ot went over to switch on the unit on Orley’s sled. It was the one connected by monofilament cable to Streaker’s old position.
He listened to a brief burst of primitive clicks, then squawked quickly in reply. He rose high in the water, popping his breather loose.
“It’s for you, Toshio!”
Toshio didn’t bother asking if it was important. Over that line it had to be. Gently, he disengaged from Dennie. “You finish packing. I’ll be back right away to help.”
She nodded, rubbing her eyes.
“Stay with her for a while, will you, Sah’ot?” he asked as he swam over to the comm unit. The Stenos shook his head.
“I would gladly, Toshio. It’sss my turn to amuse the lady, anyway. Unfortunately, you need me here to translate.”
Toshio looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“It is the captain,” Sah’ot informed him. “Creideiki wants to talk to both of usss. Then he wants us to help him get in touch with the techno-inhabitants of this world.”
“Creideiki? Calling here? But Gillian said he was missing!” Toshio’s brow furrowed as Sah’ot’s sentence sunk in.
“Techno … He wants to talk to the Kiqui?”
Sah’ot grinned.
“No, sir; they hardly qualify fearless military leader. Our captain wants to talk with my ‘voices.’ He wants to talk to those who dwell below.”
T
he Brother of Twelve Shadows piped softly. His pleasure spread through the waters around him, below the carpet of weeds. He swam away from the site of the ambush, the faint thrashing sounds of the victims dying down behind him. The darkness beneath the weeds didn’t bother him. Never would absence of light displease a Brother of the Night.
“Brother of the Dim Gloom,” he hissed. “Do you rejoice as I do?”
From somewhere to his left, amongst the dangling sea vines, came a joyful reply.
“I rejoice, Senior Brother. That group of Paha warriors shall never again kneel before perverted Soro females. Thank the ancient warlords.”
“We shall thank them in person,” Brother of Twelve Shadows answered, “when we learn the location of their returning fleet from the half-sentient Earthers. For now, thank our long-deceased Nighthunter patrons, who made us such formidable fighters.”
“I thank their spirits, Senior Brother.”
They swam on, separated by the three score body lengths demanded by underwater skirmish doctrine. The pattern was inconvenient with all these weeds about, and the water echoed strangely, but doctrine was doctrine, as unquestionable as instinct.
Senior Brother listened until the last weak struggles of the drowning Paha ceased. Now he and his fellow would swim toward one of the floating wrecks, where more victims surely awaited.
It was like picking fruits from a tree. Even powerful warriors such as the Tandu were reduced to floundering dolts on this carpet of noxious weeds, but not the Brothers of the Night! Adaptable, mutable, they swam below, wreaking havoc where it could be wrought.
His gill-slits pulsed, sucking the metal-tangy water through. The Brother of Twelve Shadows detected a patch of slightly higher oxygen content and took a slight detour to pass through it. Keeping to doctrine was important, surely, but here, underwater, what could harm them?
There was suddenly a flurry of crashing sounds to his left, a brief cry, and then silence.
“Lesser Brother, what was that disturbance?” he called in the direction his surviving partner had been. But speech carried poorly underwater. He waited with growing anxiety.
“Brother of the Dim Gloom!”
He dove beneath a cluster of hanging tendrils, holding a flechette gun in each of his four tool-hands.
What, down here, could have overcome so formidable a fighter as his lesser brother? Surely none of the patrons or clients he knew of could do such a thing. A robot should have caused his metal detectors to go off.
It suddenly occurred to him that the half-sentient “dolphins” they sought might be dangerous in the water.
But no. Dolphins were air-breathers. And they were large. He swept the area around him and heard no reflections.
The Eldest Brother—who commanded the remnants of their flotilla from a cave on a small moon—had concluded that the Earthlings were not here in this northern sea, but he had sent a small vessel to harass and observe. The two brothers in the water were all that had survived. Everything they had seen suggested the quarry wasn’t here.
The Brother of Twelve Shadows quickly skirted the edge of an open pool. Had his younger brother strayed into the open and been blasted by a walker above?
He swam toward a faint sound, weapons ready.
In the darkness he sensed a bulky body up ahead. He chirped out, and concentrated on the complex echoes.
The returning sounds showed only one large creature in the vicinity, still and silent.
He swam forward and took hold of it, and mourned. Water pulsed through his gill-slits and he cried out.
“I am going to avenge you, Brother!
“I am going to slay all in this sea who think!
“I am going to bring darkness upon all who hope!
“I am going to…”
There came a loud splash. He let out a small “urk” sound as something heavy fell from above onto his right side and wrapped long legs and arms around him.
As the Brother of Twelve Shadows struggled, he realized in stupefaction that his enemy was a human! A half-sentient, frail-skinned, wolfling human!
“Before you do all those other things, there’s one thing you’ll do first,” the voice rasped in Galactic Ten, just behind his hearing organs.
The Brother wailed. Something fiery sharp pierced his throat near the dorsal nerve-chord.
He heard his enemy say, almost sympathetically, “You are going to die.”
A
ll I can tell you, Gillian Baskin, is that he knew how to find me. He came here aboard a ‘walker,’ and spoke to me from the hallway.”
“Creideiki was here? Tom and I figured he’d deduce we had a private high-level computer, but the location should have been impossible…”
“I was not terribly surprised, Dr. Baskin,” the Niss machine interrupted, covering the impoliteness with a soothing pattern of abstract images. “The captain clearly knows his ship. I had expected him to guess my location.”
Gillian sat by the door and shook her head. “I should have come when you first signaled for me. I might have been able to stop him from leaving.”
“It is not your fault,” the machine answered with uncharacteristic sensitivity. “I would have made the request more demanding if I thought the situation urgent.”
“Oh sure,” Gillian was sarcastic. “It’s not urgent when a valuable fleet officer succumbs to pressure atavism and subsequently gets lost out in a deadly alien wilderness!”
The patterns danced. “You are mistaken. Captain Creideiki has not fallen prey to reversion schizophrenia.”
“How would you know?” Gillian said hotly. “Over a third of the crew of this vessel have shown signs since the ambush at Morgran, including all but a few of the Stenos-grafted fen. How can you say Creideiki hasn’t reverted after all he’s suffered? How can he practice Keneenk when he can’t even talk!”
The Niss answered calmly. “He came here seeking specific information. He knew I had access not only to Streaker’s micro-branch Library, but the more complete one taken from the Thennanin wreck. He could not tell me what it was he wanted to know, but we found a way to get across the speech barrier.”
“How?” Gillian was fascinated in spite of her anger and guilt.
“By pictograms, visual and sound pictures of alternate choices which I presented to him quite rapidly. He made quick yes or no sounds to tell when I was getting—as you humans say—hotter or colder. Before long he was leading me, making associations I had not even begun to consider.”
“Like what?”
The light-motes sparkled. “Like the way many of the mysteries regarding this unique world seem to come together, the strangely long time this planet has lain fallow since its last tenants became degenerate and settled here to die, the unnatural ecological niche of the so-called drill-tree mounds, Sah’ot’s strange ‘voices from the depths’…”
“Dolphins of Sah’ot’s temperament are always hearing ‘voices.” Gillian sighed. “And don’t forget he’s another of those experimental Stenos. I’m sure some of them were passed into this crew without the normal stress tests.”
After a short pause, the machine answered matter-of-factly.
“There is evidence, Dr. Baskin. Apparently Dr. Ignacio Metz is a representative of an impatient faction at the Center for Uplift…”
Gillian stood up. “Uplift! Dammit! I know what Metz did! You think I’m blind? I’ve lost several dear friends and irreplaceable crewmates because of his crazy scheme. Oh, he ‘hot-tested’ his sports, all right. And some of the new models failed under pressure!
“But all that’s finished! What does uplift have to do with voices from below, or drill-tree mounds, or the history of Kithrup, or our friendly cadaver Herbie, for that matter? What does any of it have to do with rescuing our lost people and getting away from here!”
Her heart raced, and Gillian found that her fists were clenched.
“Doctor Baskin,” the Niss replied smoothly. “That was exactly what I asked your Captain Creideiki. When he put the pieces together for me I, too, realized that uplift is not an irrelevant question here. It is the only question. Here at Kithrup all that is good and evil about this several-billion-year-old system is represented. It is almost as if the very basis of Galactic society has been placed on trial.”
Gillian blinked at the abstract images.
“How ironic,” the disembodied voice went on, “that the question rests with you humans, the first sophont race in aeons to claim ‘evolved’ intelligence.
“Your discovery in the so-called Shallow Cluster may result in a war that fills the Five Galaxies, or it may fade away like so many other chimerical crises. But what is done here on Kithrup will become a legend. All of the elements are there.
“And legends have a tendency to affect events long after wars are forgotten.”
Gillian stared at the hologram for a long moment. Then she shook her head.
“Will you please tell me what the bloody damn hell you are talking about?”
W
e mussst hurry!” the pilot insisted.
Keepiru lay strapped to a porta-doc. Catheters and tubes ran from the webbing that kept him suspended above the water’s surface. The sound of the skiff’s engines filled the tiny chamber.
“You must relax,” Hikahi soothed. “The autopilot is in charge now. We’re going as fast as we can underwater. We should be there very soon.”
Hikahi was still somewhat numbed by the news about Creideiki, and shaken by Takkata-Jim’s treachery. But over it all she could not bring herself to accept Keepiru’s frantic urgency. He was obviously driven by his devotion to Gillian Baskin, and wanted to return to her aid instantly, if possible. Hikahi looked at things from another perspective. She knew Gillian probably already had things well under control back at the ship. Compared with the disasters she had been fantasizing the last few days, the news was almost buoyant. Even Creideiki’s injury could not suppress Hikahi’s relief that Streaker survived intact.
Her harness whined. With one waldo-hand she touched a control to give Keepiru a mild soporific.
“Now I want you to sssleep ” she told him. “You must regain your strength. Consider that an order, if, as you say, I am now acting captain.”
Keepiru’s eye began to recess; the lids drooped together slowly. “I’m shorry, sir. I … I guessss I’m not much-ch more logical than Moki. I’m alwaysss causssing’t-trouble…”
His speech slurred as the drug took hold. Hikahi swam almost underneath the drowsy pilot and sighed a brief, soft lullaby.
* Dream, defender—
Dream of those who love you
And bless your courage—
Y
ou’re saying these … Karrank% … were the last sophonts to have a license to the planet Kithrup, a hundred million years ago?”
“Correct,” the Niss machine replied. “They were savagely abused by their patrons, mutated far beyond the degree allowed by the codes. According to the Thennanin battleship’s Library, it caused quite a scandal at the rime. In compensation, the Karrank% were released from their indenture as clients and granted a world suited to their needs, one with low potential for developing pre-sentience. Water worlds make good retirement homes for that reason. Few pre-sophonts ever arise on such planets. The Kiqui seem to be an exception.”