My first impressions were being reinforced. Someone or something had played rough—very rough.
Numbers four, five, and six were repeats of my very first contact with the black forts, complete with a grassy plain, a welcoming laser, and no higher life. In all cases, I avoided the fireworks.
Number seven was another dust ring.
Number eight was slightly different, breaking the pattern. No intelligent life, but I did find a perfectly circular inland sea, deeper than anything on the planet, with what seemed to be fused shorelines.
By the time I got around to following the ninth trail, I was expecting some sort of local disaster, but through force of habit, dropped the detector out. I couldn’t get it back, because, even from the undertime, I could feel the energy cascade. I left—quickly—without even breaking out anywhere.
On Azure, I thought about it, munched on some ration cubes, but stopped when my stomach threatened not to hold them. I sat down on the grass.
Whoever or whatever inhabited the planet—my ninth lead from the Lyste fort—had located and blasted out of existence a small block of metal in literally fractions of a unit. They’d used enough force to shake the undertime. From my point of view, “hostile” wasn’t descriptive enough.
I thought about going back to the Aerie, but I was too damned tired. So I climbed into the bubble tent, and I slept. I also dreamed, dreamed of shadow sharks spitting flames, swallowing me whole with gaping black jaws. When I finally woke in the dim glow of a gray morning I was drenched in sweat. The nearby stream took care of that, and ration sticks helped clear my mind.
First, I needed to trace down the remaining leads to see what other shark planets existed—or that I could find. I decided to begin with the last three leads from the black fort on Lyste, rather than from Lead Nine, hoping they were relatively harmless.
All three were negative, for which I was grateful. The tenth lead, the first one I tried on this round, was another black hole, neutron star, what have you. The next one was another asteroid belt, and the twelfth lead from Lyste was a dead moon pocked with a series of deep, regular, and very artificial craters.
I still didn’t want to trace the leads from the three other deserted black forts or dig into the mysteries of Lead Nine … and I felt grubby. So I dived back to Quest to resupply, clean up, and get a good night’s sleep in the Aerie.
Heimdall hit me even before I cleared the Travel Hall. “Progress?” he asked in that slimy, extra-polite manner of his.
“Another inhabited shark planet, more high-tech than I thought, and a bunch more forts to check out. Now I need sleep and more supplies, and a lot more time.”
“Any chance of a tissue sample?” he asked, obviously still hung up on his nutty scheme of genetic sterilization.
I turned on him, almost blasted him right on the spot with a thunderbolt. “Don’t you understand? These people have faster reflexes than you or I do by a factor of between ten and a hundred. I might be able to shoot them in the back—maybe—but unless I could find an isolated individual, and I’ve never seen one yet, no, you aren’t getting a tissue sample.”
He fell back, pale, whether from rage or what, I didn’t know or care.
As he departed, Freyda glided up, a cold flame, standing there in her black on black of a Tribune. “Another ten-day?”
“Maybe.” I wasn’t committing to anything.
I didn’t sleep that much, perhaps because of the shifts between the cluster and Query. Most of the next day, I just rested, watching the view from the Aerie, enjoyed the eagles soaring in the shadows, the rose light of sunset reflected on the ice fields of Seneschal, and the silver rivers in the canyons below.
The following morning I left straight from the Aerie with a deep dive to Azure. It had rained, lightly, and the bubble tent was streaked with dust and pockmarks, but the grass around the tent was dry.
Gritting my teeth, I tightened my equipment belt and plunged through the chill of the time barrier. While not exactly eager to get on with the investigation of possible time leads from the other three forts on the currently uninhabited planets, I wanted to get it done.
In about three days objective, I managed to finish that part of the task. All the time-ties from the forts on leads four, five, and six, led to three times/locales. The first was Lyste. The second was Lead Nine—I never did call it anything else. And the third common contact point was the planet with the pretty circular sea.
When in doubt, try the easiest way first. That was my operating principle. So I scoured the empty planet with the pretty circular sea first, and tried to track things every which way. Nothing.
I felt I knew enough about Lyste, and that left Lead Nine, where I’d
never even broken out. On the fourth day after promising Freyda I’d try for answers within ten, I geared up and dropped back to Lead Nine, knowing I couldn’t put it off any longer.
With my experience out in the open against the sharks, if that was what they were, I decided that investigating the black fort of Lead Nine from the undertime was definitely the best way to start.
I located what seemed to be the control center where, unlike Lyste, there were people present. Gambling that they wouldn’t destroy an entire control room to get a momentary intruder, I flashed through with my holopak set as quick as possible.
After a quick retreat to Azure, I congratulated myself on making a breakout against the sharks and remaining in one piece. Sitting on my grassy knoll in relative safety, I studied the single frame.
First, the center was operated and functional. Second, the sharks present looked a bit less humanoid than the bunch on Lyste. Third, I was lucky to be back in one piece, since all three sharks in the control room were looking at me, with sidearms up and ready. I rocked back and forth on my knees, wondering how they had managed it.
The holo frame was out of focus around the control board, the same way the frame I’d taken of the fort on Lyste had turned out.
I looked back at the frame, concentrating on the chairs and the consoles, evaluating the differences between the two forts.
Item: I could have used the chair on Lyste, but not the one on Lead Nine.
Item: The sharks of Lead Nine had access to and control of their fort.
Item: Lyste and Lead Nine were on opposite sides of the cluster.
I didn’t have exactly what I needed. After resting a bit, and eating some ration sticks, of which I was getting more than tired, I pushed my range a trace more—just a year or so backtime—and went back to Lyste, a place a little safer than Lead Nine, my thoughts groping for antiquity, for a glimpse of the past.
Exactly how long it took, I didn’t really know. In a trimmed and ancient grove, in a ring that exuded age, on the side of a hill carpeted with grass and shaded by trees so old that they held time in their needles, I found what I needed, drawn as I was to the spot by ages of thought trapped in the smooth stone walls of the temple, if that indeed was what it was.
I checked the area from the undertime, but not a single shark was near, and I stepped into the local dawn for a look. On the frieze above
the heavy stone lintel was a procession of figures. The frieze was the temple’s only ornamentation.
The procession was simple enough. At the left end, the first figure was a human woman, or close enough to fool me, and at the right end was a female shark. The figures in between showed, to my way of thinking, an evolution from strung-out and slow-witted humanoid to solid and fast-reacting shark people.
I took several shots of the frieze with the holopak, knowing the Tribunes would appreciate any more evidence, although I had no doubts that they already wanted the cluster rid of the sharks.
From Lyste I dived slightly foretime toward Azure—and almost broke out, until I felt a slight buckle to the undertime. Instead, I paused. Breaking out would not have been instantly fatal perhaps, but definitely uncomfortable, since where Azure had been was mostly molten and shattered rocks.
I fiddled around undertime until I could sense what happened. The whole undertime buckled, and a squadron—eleven ships—appeared from nowhere and delivered something—antimatter bombs, whatever. You don’t swallow in the undertime, but I felt like it. Instead I went straight back to Query, and the Aerie. I needed to think, and I didn’t want to deal with Heimdall yet.
As I cleaned up, I tried to think it through.
So … the sharks from Lead Nine were nasty, but would the nastiness last a million years? And how dangerous would they be? I had some evidence of a highly developed defense reaction, but as far as aggression went … all I really had were a few scattered holos from the present time and Sammis’s and Heimdall’s concerns that they would overrun the galaxy.
Would they?
I thought for a while. I didn’t want to do it, but did I really have much choice?
I ate some more pearapples and finished off the firejuice. Then I pulled on the space armor—I hated space armor—and attached the holopak to my belt.
Then I slid out toward and beyond Terra, heading foretime perhaps two thousand years, looking for the bending in the undertime that might signify the undertime ships of the sharks. In itself, I didn’t like the combination of space warships and time ships.
Once again, the business was time-consuming, but not so bad as the original search. It took five days—objective—before I found the first battle, except it wasn’t a battle but a slaughter.
The sun was G-type, yellow, and the fourth planet was a water planet,
except the oceans were boiling when I found it, and a squadron of black ships orbited.
One found my under-the-now track and began following me in real-time, presumably to blast me when I emerged. I didn’t—instead dropped back several days, then popped farther foretime. The sterilization of the planet completed, black ships were doing things to the biosphere. What it was didn’t matter at that point; so I dropped a few hundred years back.
Under me twirled a peaceful-looking planet. I didn’t care much for the purplish ocean or the thick green-tinged air, but there were lights on the night side that had to be cities.
I dropped lower, and under the now.
From the darkest shadows I could find, I watched the equivalent of a street, a long straight grassy strip. In the middle was some sort of moving ramp or way, except that it didn’t move, exactly. Rather, the people on it did, and what they stood on flowed and carried them. And they weren’t exactly people, but sort of triangular floral tripods.
I tried another location, a smaller group of angular buildings, along a lake, but I saw nothing moving except a small six-legged creature that reminded me of a segmented cat.
I flashed through several other locales. The overall impression was of people, some violent, some bored, some working, some playing—even if they were floral tripods.
Then I slid foretime to the first buckling of the undertime, and I watched, not that I could have done that much against the attack.
Hundreds of the black ships appeared in orbit, frying several local satellites, and anything that flew toward them, and began assembling massive lasers, or maybe they were particle beams, turning each on the planet below.
They turned the oceans to steam, superheated steam.
I kept having to duck and dodge, not being able to maintain position more than a few instants in any one time or locale. At that point, with at least four smaller pursuit ships screaming toward me anytime I came close to breaking out, I left, simultaneously shivering and sweating.
I dropped back toward the now quickly, hoping to lose the trackers, and I did after perhaps a century, certainly not far back in terms of my range.
Why didn’t the sharks travel far back- or foretime in their ships? It had to be for two reasons. First, they were bound as we were—they could use their mechanical control of time for instant travel and for scanning of other times and other systems, but once they linked into another system, I suspected that they couldn’t affect their own destiny
in that system. All they could do was watch the undertime and patrol the now.
Second, carrying material gear undertime takes tremendous power, and power had to be a limitation of some sort. The buckling of the undertime around them signified that.
I tried the next system over—but it didn’t have shark- or people-inhabitable planets. Three systems later, I found another planet—low-tech, just into the steam age, I thought. These people were more catlike, if you can imagine a four-legged, two-armed cat, with a brain in the top of the torso.
It didn’t matter there either. This planet was perhaps a shade too dry for the sharks. They bombarded it with water asteroids and superheated the resulting water and the small seas. One more sterile planet ready to be reseeded shark style.
Maybe a doubting type would have insisted on more, but my guts wouldn’t take more, and I now understood the regularity of all the planets in the shark cluster.
After another night’s sleep, I marched into the Tower, but Heimdall apparently had his orders, and we ended up in the Tribunes’ chambers. Freyda, Kranos, and Eranas were waiting.