Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  They found another a few moments later. Some had gotten in here, Cliff supposed, and were eating Kahalla eggs. “Food source,” Irma said.

  Several of the big orange spheres were already spattered over the ceramic floor, their insides gone. Cliff followed, still dazed by the speed of events. He shook his head, rattled. As the Sil searched the aisles of egg-holding cylinders Cliff kept up, feeling pretty useless, and then asked Quert, “The Kahalla look kind of like us—two legs, same body shape. But they lay eggs?”

  “Kahalla way,” Quert said. Its eyes were wary, searching the whole room. “Stack their eggs here. Let hatch. Safe so they can work their fields.”

  “Uh, but the spidows—that’s what we call them—they come and eat?”

  An eye-click of agreement. “Been so, long time. We call those things upanafiki. Pests, are.”

  “They’re smart enough to get into these hatcheries.”

  Quert sniffed and gave soft barking sounds with a head-jerk, which seemed to be the Sil equivalent of laughter. All the Sil joined in. Some alien inside joke, Cliff suspected. Or was Sil humor a category outside human comprehension? Quert stopped the quiet barking laugh and said, “Kahalla not smart.”

  “Egg layers…” Cliff tried to get his head around all this.

  Irma said, “Earthside we have monotremes, mammal egg-layers. They’re very old, Triassic maybe.”

  Cliff shook his head. “Forget about parallels to Earth. So: smart egg-layers who are humanoid tool-users. What the hell, with evolution on the Bowl, all bets are off.”

  Quert said, “Upanafiki many. Kahalla crave land. Upanafiki keep Kahalla numbers down. Kahalla and upanafiki—” Quert thrust its bony hands together. “Always. Fight. Dance.”

  Aybe said, “Where did these Kahalla come from? What world?”

  Quert said, “Kahalla means in your tongue One Face Folk.”

  Terry got it. “So they come from a planet tidally locked to its star? On their side it was always sunny. They had an adaptation advantage when they arrived at the Bowl, over people like us who need night. Makes sense.”

  Quert gave an eye-click of agreement. “Spread widely. They are conservative. Folk use them. Not good allies for us.”

  Cliff frowned. Evolutionary theory in the middle of a fight …

  “Come see this,” Irma called. She was at the other end of the room. They followed her up some crudely fashioned stairs of gray clay ceramic. The dusty second floor was like the first but Irma pointed to a hole in its ceiling. “Looks like they dug down through.”

  Cliff crouched, jumped, and caught the edge of the hole. Some of it crumbled away, but he held on and pulled his head through the meter-wide opening. This might be risky, but he was curious—and hanging there, he saw the roof now deserted. A nearby piece of wood caught his eye. He held on with one hand and shuffled a slim shaft nearby into the hole, letting it drop. Then he followed it, landing neatly. Low grav had its uses.

  Irma picked up the slender piece of wood. “It has a tip like flint. Those small spidows—they’re tool-users.”

  “Keep Kahalla stable,” Quert said, glancing upward. “They outside on ground. We go this way.”

  Cliff and Irma looked askance at the alien. Quert went to the stairwell and shouted orders in the slippery Sil speech. Terry and Aybe came up with them. “Those spidows,” Terry said, “they’re chipping at the door with something.”

  Irma needed help, but in surprisingly short order their entire team, humans and Sil alike, made the leap to the ceiling hole. Those already on the roof grabbed their hands and hauled them out, onto the flat roof. It was made of tan triangular bricks. Now Cliff could see Quert’s plan. The hatchery buildings were close together, and the Sil could leap from one roof to the next. So could the humans. The Sil were remarkably calm; they had met this foe before. They started leaping across. Cliff looked down as he took a running jump across. The spidows were clustered around the door to the building they had just left. Several of them held bigger wood shafts, also with blackened hard tips that seemed to have been turned on a fire.

  Irma came next. She landed with one foot halfway onto the next roof lip. Cliff grabbed her and tugged her in. Terry and Aybe followed. By that time, most of the Sil were across to the next building, looking unhurried but quick.

  They all ran and leaped, ran and leaped, and soon were at the far end of the hatchery buildings. There the Sil slung a thin wire around nearby trees, throwing it with a kind of boomerang hook that wrapped around a tree trunk. Then a Sil attached the wire to its backpack solar panel source, made some adjustments, hit a command switch—and the wire expanded, puffing up into a thick rope that hands could grab. Cliff blinked; a useful trick he had never seen.

  They descended on that rope, belaying a bit to break their sliding descent. Cliff and Irma leaned over the side of the building to glimpse the spidows while others took the rope down. Spidows were still working on the door, chipping with crude spikes. But then some Kahalla came in from a side corridor, shouting. The spidows turned, and a battle began.

  The spidow’s bristly palps moved in a jerky blur. The Kahalla had simple hoes or similar farm tools. They struck down hard on the spidows and pinned them. But there were a lot, and some Kahalla got overwhelmed.

  This was nature red in tooth and claw in a way he’d never seen. There were over a hundred spidows and maybe a dozen Kahalla—a melee. As they watched, Irma said, “A fight over reproduction? Nasty.”

  Quert had come over to them and looked down, unsurprised. “Folk set rules. Keep Kahalla from farming more and more. Use upanafiki to keep not many Kahalla eggs to hatch. These upanafiki pests for us. Their war with Kahalla never end.”

  “The Folk don’t stop this?” Irma asked.

  “Folk want this.” Quert paused, searching for the right Anglish words. “Equilibrium. Stasis.”

  As Cliff watched five spidows swarm fast over a struggling Kahalla humanoid, he thought, Nightmare spiders on a caffeine high. The Kahalla toppled and vanished beneath the swarming spidows. He recalled a remark heard long ago, Flattery isn’t the highest compliment—parasitism is.

  “Damn!” Irma’s shrill shout jerked him out of his thoughts.

  He saw several spidows, their legs grappling for purchase over the lip of the roof, twenty meters away. They had come up the wall. They made a sharp hissing, their legs clicking with darting moves.

  He and Irma had been distracted and now with Quert were the only ones left on the roof. Quert was already ahead of them and took the rope with an easy grace. Down Quert slid, shouting back “Come fast!” Irma went next, and Cliff turned to take a laser shot at the mass of spidows surging across the tan brick roof. The bolts punched holes easily enough, but the spidows did not stop. A bolt to the center did work, and one of the things flopped down. But now they were five meters away. Cliff leaned down and plucked the securing anchor of the rope. No time to slide down it now. He couldn’t be sure the spidows couldn’t use it. The black rope was firmly fixed in the trees thirty meters away, so he just grabbed it and ran off the edge of the roof. He dropped, then swung.

  His breath rasped and he ignored a snap in his shoulder. He tumbled on the descent and tried to pull himself up the rope as it carried him toward the trees. His swing brought him boot-forward, so when he hit the branches of a zigzag tree the leaves lashed him. One limb caught him smack in the face. He hit another, and a sharp pain lanced into his ribs. He gasped and slid down the rope, a nearly vertical drop now. The zigzag tree trunk smacked his thigh, but he managed to get his boots under him. He sprawled when he hit.

  As he was rolling away, his ribs sent him a lance of pain and his vision blurred for a moment. He lay there gasping and hands grabbed him. They heaved him up and Terry shouted, “Gotta run!” So he did. Not very well.

  The spidows were running through the trees already, lots of them. Their chippering calls were loud now. But the spidows were small and if humans were good at anything, he thought, it was sure as hell good ol
d running.

  For a while, though, until they no longer saw the spidows behind them, it was more like limping for him. He was worn out.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Redwing watched the Bowl landscape slide by below, distracting himself for a moment of relaxation with the splendid view. Getting back to work, he switched to interior ship views. In the garden, on screens left and right, two finger snakes were slithering through plants, picking here, planting seeds there, while the third—the male, Thisther, darker and a bit bigger than the others—was playing with two pigs, all three having hissing and oinking fun. A laugh bubbled in Redwing’s throat—and still the big first question was there. What could I be missing?

  Beth was due in a moment and he let the Bowl feed play on his display wall. He took out a tattered, yellowing paper. As part of his several-kilogram weight allowance it was nothing, but in his memories it was everything. His father had written it to him when in the Huntsville hospital from which he would not return. When he was ten, it had meant a great deal and now it meant more.

  LIVE FULLY. TAKE RISKS. THINK CAREFULLY BUT ACT, TOO. SPEAK UP. KEEP MIND OPEN AND HEART WARM. DON’T JUST PASS THE TIME. LIVE LIVE LIVE!—FOR SOMEDAY YOU WILL NOT.

  He recalled the man at his best: sawdust sprinkled in black hair, deftly pushing a Douglas fir two-by-four through the buzzing blade of a circular saw, then trimming it and taking a quick measure of the work by holding it against the studs, nodding in the damp fragrant sawdust air, plucking a nail from where he stored it in his front teeth, fetching a ball-peen hammer from its loop on his belt, two quick whaps and a finishing tap, a bright grin, then on to the next.

  He stared at the paper scrap and then put it away, for perhaps the thousandth time. It was centuries old but still true.

  Beth tapped on his door. He stood to slide the door aside and nodded with a greeting. They got right to it.

  She sat across from him in his narrow cabin and he made a show of finishing a log entry. It was not entirely show. He had to keep on top of how SunSeeker sailed on the vagrant winds of plasma and magnetic fields. Plus preparations for the jet interception. And an anxious, overworked crew.

  But Beth was the hardest. She had been down there for long months and managed to get back aboard, a striking feat. She had prestige with the rest of the crew. She regaled them with stories of aliens and exploits and weird doings down on the Bowl. She’d taken casualties and escaped from a prison. Figured out the alien landscape and made her team get across it. And fly back home in an alien craft. So he had promoted her two grades in the science officer ladder. When she got to Glory—and we will do that, by damn!—she would command the first landing. Still, her tight face promised trouble.

  “We’re in an existential position here, sir,” she began.

  “Right. We don’t have enough supplies to get to Glory. Our logistics were marginal when we sighted the Bowl. Now it’s hopeless. We’ve burned food and essentials hovering over this enormous thing. Plus time.”

  Beth said with deliberation, “I mean, if we commit an overt hostile act, that sure does change the game.”

  He nodded. Always concede the rhetorical stuff. “We have to start a clock running. Otherwise they’ll wait us out.”

  “But their jet is the key to their Bowl. Damaging it is a mortal threat.”

  “Sure it is. We don’t mean to shove a dagger in. We want to show that we can.”

  Beth twisted her mouth into a wry grimace. “A pinprick, then?”

  “That’s all.”

  “These are aliens, Cap’n. Their civilization is older than anything we know. Hell, maybe than we can know. This maneuver, this provocation, is a huge gamble.”

  “That it is.” He sat back and folded his hands on his desk. “One we’ve got to take.”

  “Look, we don’t know how that damn jet operates. How the Folk run it. How unstable it is.”

  “Right. Isn’t that how science works?” Redwing grinned. “If you don’t understand, do an experiment.”

  Beth shook her head. “Plus we don’t understand the Glory message, or how the Folk really feel about it. I just … I worry.”

  “So do I.” What could I be missing?

  “There are risks to every choice. Maybe the right question is, do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one?”

  She sighed and got up. She was a bit wobbly. He wondered if she was truly fit for service as their backup pilot. On impulse, he got up and gave her a firm warm hug. With a sigh, too.

  * * *

  Karl showed him the external views of SunSeeker, freshly gathered by their small auto-cam bots that had flown around the entire ship. “She’s centuries old now, but holding up,” he said with a hint of pride. Karl was a bit stiff and formal, but he could not conceal his feelings completely.

  The ship’s sleek after section hid behind the torus of the life zone. The shuttle cradles along the central boom were yawning yellow and orange cups for craft docking and vacuum maintenance bots. Micrometeorites had pitted the hull, and radiation burns splashed black filigrees along the flanks. The entire sleek design focused on the demands of starflight. Now their planetary-scale orbits made it hard to get adequate plasma into the magnetic funnel, and the ship barely ran. Fitful spasms sometimes passed through her, the coughs and sputters of a system hovering on the brink of shutting down entirely. The fusion fires in her belly ran soft, then hard, then not at all—until Karl and the crew could get them burning full and furious again. It reminded him of a fine ship built for the high seas, rotting beside a wharf.

  Redwing nodded. “Fair enough. The mag systems, they can handle the jet?”

  Ayaan Ali said, with a tired and exasperated sigh, “Our upgrades are basically fine-tuning. They seem to work. I’m pretty sure, from records and Artilect memories of Beth’s flight up the jet, that we can deal with the turbulence levels.”

  “And if we can’t?” Redwing persisted.

  Karl said, “The more plasma we get into our magscoop, the better. So we steer for the density ridges, held in by the helical mag field.”

  Ayaan Ali pursed her full lips, and her long eyelashes flickered. Redwing recalled this was the closest she came to showing that she was irked. “The jet’s mag pressure is high. It and those fast-changing plasma pressures can punch our scoop around, too. They’re two orders of magnitude beyond our optimal design.”

  Redwing saw himself as referee when crew disagreed on the tech issues, but in the end he knew he had to decide who was right. “How bad can it be if we lose our magscoop shape?”

  “We’ll tumble,” Ayaan Ali said.

  “And we can recover,” Karl said evenly.

  They had the reliable Bear Down leptonic drive, the first to use the dark energy substrate as an energy stabilizer. Redwing did not pretend to understand its complex mechanisms that somehow drew power from the substrate of the very universe. Fundamentals were not his concern; its operation was. Karl pointed out endless details but in the end they had to play the hand they were dealt—a drive running on empty, unless they could grab enough plasma.

  Ayaan Ali laid out the geometry on the big display screen that dominated the bridge. SunSeeker had to stay below the Bowl rim, or else come within the sighting angle of the domed gamma ray lasers sited there. Their “experiment” with flying a small package over the rim—and watching it disappear in a furious instant—proved that the Folk sense of diplomacy did not include letting them get out of the narrow cage SunSeeker now occupied. They could navigate in the space below the rim, down to the upper reaches of the Bowl’s air zones. Spread out as the Bowl was over hundreds of millions of kilometers, it exerted a small but steady grav pull on them. Thrusting with the thin plasma here offset that. And through the center of that volume the jet spiked like a living, writhing yellow lance.

  Ayaan Ali’s 3-D display showed in detail the atmosphere’s partitions far below them. It was not continuous, or else pressure differences between the low-grav sections would cause the air to gat
her there to a stifling degree. Instead, firm walls isolated wedges of the Bowl, cutting off circulations to high latitudes. Yet the air zones allowed gas to flow throughout the entire circumference of the annular regions. This meant that the air could flow over zones covering the size of the entire solar system, creating weather patterns unknown on mere planets. But the air could not ascend to the higher latitudes—the “bottom” of the Bowl, toward the Knothole.

  “Those partitions are a wonder,” Ayaan Ali said. “Made of some layered stuff that is flexible enough to have some give to it. But it’s hundreds of kilometers on a side!”

  Redwing nodded, thinking again, What could I be missing? This thing was built by engineers who thought like gods. They must have methods we can’t see, can’t yet imagine.

  Yet the Folk who ran this place had let Beth’s team escape. First from their low-grav Garden prison, then from the Bowl itself. Beth is quick, ingenious, a real leader, but still … They’re not all that smarter than we are. Bigger, though, Beth says. So how do they run this contraption?

  Ayaan Ali pointed to the roughly conical section, shaded blue, that was their allowed flight volume. She said, “So we can cruise around in here, and zip across the jet when we want to. So far we’ve just circled it, mostly.”

  Karl pointed at her simulation, which showed the bright jet purling down from the star, tightening as it neared the Knothole, then—as the display moved down, its smart eyes following his finger-point—beyond, where it expanded again, losing luminosity. That made the fast wind that SunSeeker had been swimming upriver against for a century, slowing them, costing them time and supplies. Coasting on the vagrant tendrils of plasma fraying off the jet had been a constant piloting problem, running Ayaan Ali ragged. Beth’s return had taken some of the burden from her, and together they would take on the reverse problem—flying into the jet’s thick, turbulent, moving cauldron of ionized particles and mag fields.