Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “All fear,” Quert said. “Folk, others, all hide inside.”

  And so it was. They padded carefully down corridors and across large rooms bristling with gear whose function Cliff could not even guess. It seemed to be working, there were some small lights on the faces, but no clue as to what they did.

  “Folk not know how to work when big change comes,” Quert said laconically. He relayed this to the Sil and they all made the yawning, hacking sound of Sil laughter.

  They came into a large room that looked down on an even larger area. Quietly they crept up to the edge of a parapet and saw below a milling crowd. The attendants and servants, a throng including alien shapes Cliff had never seen before, and robotic ones as well, held back toward the walls. At the center were the three large Folk and the machine holding Tananareve. The far walls were large oval screens showing views of the Knothole region. One smaller screen was a view from far above, where a long tear in the atmospheric envelope had drawn clouds streaming in, moisture condensing and lightning forking along the flanks of immense purple storms.

  “That’s the top of the typhoon we’re under,” Terry said. “Judging the scale, I’d say those cloud banks are the size of Earthside continents—and look at that lightning flash! You can see it coiling around. As big as the Mississippi, easy.”

  “Look,” Irma said, pointing at the shifting view as it tilted toward the Knothole. “There’s the jet—and my God!—SunSeeker.”

  The screens showed swift small motes dodging and banking in the center of the luminous swirling plasma jet. A quick close-up of their own starship showed it plowing through knots of turbulence and making a tight helix, aiming its pencil exhaust in a tight hot luminous finger at the—

  “Damn, they hit it!” Aybe said, eyes jumping. “Blew that flier to pieces.”

  “Damn right!” Terry said, pumping his fist.

  They didn’t know what was going on, but excitement rippled through humans and Sil alike as they watched something like a dogfight going on. Cliff watched the ballet of ships moving at many hundreds of kilometers a second, seen on scales that had to be zoomed six or seven orders of magnitudes. Nothing but machines could handle this, and even they seemed strained from the sudden turns and swerves they saw.

  The crowd below gazed upward at the screens, and the Folk were at the center, managing machines. The odd curved box that held Tananareve was with them. He wondered what they were making of this confusing mess. He grasped Irma and held her close. They kissed, not caring if anyone saw. Then the guards arrived.

  FORTY-SIX

  They were drenched and cold, Folk and Serfs alike, but the hour demanded attention. Memor slumped down to rest, sitting back a bit on her haunches.

  Their flight from the poor agonized and wounded skyfish had been rowdy, noisy, swept by rain beneath inky clouds flashing with electrical anger. Their ragged party had slipped and stumbled their way across great slabs of rock, with Memor trying to keep order in their flight. A team from the station had come out to erect, with swift competence, a bridge over the jagged chasm that had split open. The station’s deputy commander said a flying hard-carbon flange had fallen on the mountain, apparently freed of its support structure high up in the envelope’s stanchions, and plunged deep into the mountain’s firm mass. The shock wave had rocked the skyfish sideways and blown several of its compartments, spilling crew onto the rock. That knife-sharp girder had also split a crevasse at the worst possible moment, spraying fragments into the skyfish and killing some local staff. The great skyfish bellowed and writhed against the crews attempting to moor it, killing several. Its flailing fins were sharp and deadly.

  Considering this, it was a wonder anything worked.

  Memor sagged with exhaustion. She watched Asenath stand proudly at the prow of the command center in their mountain shelter, in full authority. She listened to the panicked signals from the fliers, displayed on screens and sounding shrill even in this large command room. The fliers were guided by robot minds, high level and capable of what seemed like emotions. The voices were brittle, sharp, edged with urgency. The swift ships tumbled and gyred, blown about by the ramscoop thrust. That made evasive navigation and aiming nearly impossible.

  “We could use the Lambda Gun, as you said before, Wisdom Chief,” a small lieutenant said softly. “One of the fliers bears only the gun. It is bulky and makes maneuver difficult in the jet. That flier hangs back, away from the pencil exhaust the primates are using against us.”

  “Under whose orders was this done?” Memor said.

  “Mine,” Asenath said firmly.

  “Have the Ice Minds agreed? They have—”

  “Bemor is not here, so we cannot readily consult with the Ice Minds. He is off managing their discourse, if that is the proper word, with your talking primate. So I shall have to assume command.”

  Memor felt compelled to say, “Separated command? This is not proper use of the hierarchy—”

  “Ah, but then, this is a clear emergency. Communications are fragmented and time ticks on. I order the Lambda Gun unfolded.”

  Memor felt a sudden spike of fear. “That, that will take time—”

  “Get to it,” Asenath ordered the lieutenant. Various officers, gathered around the two Folk in a crescent, rustled with unease. Nobody moved. The silence stretched.

  Memor said, “You had the Lambda Gun prepared before, didn’t you?”

  Asenath gave an irritated fan-rebuke to her underlings. “Now!” They scurried off to their many tasks.

  Almost casually, in a way that told Memor this had been long planned, Asenath turned and gave a gray green feather rush of haughty disregard. “I felt it necessary. Events now prove me correct.”

  Memor felt icy fatigue run through her but summoned up reserves, rustled her feathers, and turned inward. She had heard of the Lambda Gun long ago as a historical curiosity, and now had to call up its history to have any hope of dealing with Asenath. Her Undermind held this lore, and was sore abused. She felt this as she unveiled portions, stripping back layers of youthful memory, gazing inward past the trauma suffered after the revelation of the Great Shame. She felt it now in its full ghastly panorama—the images of a long cometary tail, pointing directly at Earth in the final moments, like an accusatory finger, and the spreading circle of destruction that annihilated the ancient civilization of smart, warm-blooded reptiles. Their majesty lay not in vast edifices, culminating in the Bowl. Instead, they were heirs to the fraction of that great species which relished their natural planet and did not want to take part in the Bowl, or its technical prowess, or the alliance with strange minds in the cometary halo. They had kept Earth green and fertile, restricting their own numbers so the natural luxuriant world was not paved over with artifice. In a way, Memor recalled, the Bowl became a tribute to their deep instincts. Its huge expanses enabled many species to live intelligently in Zones dominated by leafy wealth, though built upon a substrate of spinning metal and carbon fiber intricacies. A natural world built upon a machine …

  She had become lost in her introspection, a common liability of voyages into the Undermind’s shadowy labyrinths. Memor revived an old image of the Lambda Gun, a fearsome projector of gray spherical bulk, tapering into a belligerent snout. It could project a disturbance in the vacuum energy of space-time, throwing this knot of chaos out in a beam. Suitably tuned, it would cause, when it struck solid matter, a catastrophic expansion of a small volume of space. The inflation field increased the cosmological constant in a very restricted region for a brief snap of time. Whatever contained this howling monstrosity, reborn from the first instant of this universe, would be ripped into particles far smaller than nuclei.

  Memor recoiled from this appalling vision. With a hasty withdrawal salute, she slammed her Undermind shut. “This is grisly! This is a planet buster, capable of delivering enormous energies—”

  “So well I do know,” Asenath replied. “I have studied this ancient device and its history. The true Ancients invented it
as a last resort against balky species. Some hurled relativistic masses at the Bowl to drive it away. The Lambda Gun put a quick end to their mischief.”

  “Surely we have shields that would be useful—”

  “Not against a vagrant craft with powerful magnetic scoops. We enjoyed great magnetic craftsmanship in Ancient ages, but our Bowl does not muster such intensities. Nor do the Diaphanous have ready responses. Meanwhile, the jet stands in a nonlinear kink mode and deals us terrible destruction.”

  Asenath said this with a reasonable air and somber fan-display. Memor knew she could not deflect Asenath in an area where her expertise and rank prevailed. She gave it one last try. “The Ice Minds and the Diaphanous are in charge of jet dynamics!”

  “And they have failed. Prepare to fire,” Asenath said to a lieutenant, and turned her back on Memor.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Beth felt the hairs on her neck rise, prickly and trembling as the electrical charge built again. But this time she was getting irked and instead of flattening herself yet again on the deck, she hit a hard thruster in the magscoop. Fields vented plasma and the ship lurched. The others were hitting the deck but Beth discharged a brace of capacitors in the magscoop’s leading magnetic fields. This gave a powerful burst of electrons at the far end of the scoop, moving at the speed of light. Instantly her neck hairs stopped tingling.

  “Cap’n, looks like I’ve found a way to offset the charge buildup these things are using against us,” she said with a deliberately casual air.

  Redwing looked up from the deck, where he had sprawled. “Brilliant!”

  “And she nailed that flier flat on, too,” Karl said with one of his seldom-seen grins. “There’s only one flier left, and it’s hanging back pretty far.”

  “Good,” Redwing said, getting up and straightening his uniform. He was always meticulous when on the bridge. “But we’re near the top of our mission profile, right?”

  Beth checked. “Yes, sir, got to turn around soon and head back down, run with the jet.”

  “That will lower our plasma influx pretty far,” Karl said. “We’ll have a reduced exhaust.”

  “So the exhaust will be less useful as a weapon, certainly,” Redwing said. “Let’s try to hover near our top limit, then. Can you do that, Officer Marble?”

  Redwing also liked to get formal in tight situations. She had often wondered if in such moments he saw himself as fearless admiral at the helm of a battleship on tossing gray seas. Well, this was about as close to that as he was going to get, and as close as she ever wanted to be.

  “Keep an eye on that flier as we make our turn.” Redwing settled into his deck chair. He looked tired and gray to Beth, but so did they all now. Hours of dodging among the jet knots, harvesting them with split-second timing and then blowing the excess post-fusion plasma out the flexing nozzle as a weapon—well, it added up fast.

  The ship rumbled as she took it on a slow tipping angle. She was concentrating so didn’t notice the beeping of the comm.

  Karl picked it up for her. His body went rigid and he glanced at his shocked face. “It’s … Tananareve, Cap’n. For you.”

  He grabbed it. “Redwing here. How in—?” Redwing’s face showed nothing as he listened. Then his mouth slowly opened and he stared into space. “How did—?” More silence. “So they’ll let us go?”

  Beth suddenly realized that this was a negotiation that could end all this madness. She kept SunSeeker in a tight helical turn, with a wary eye on the flier below, now approaching. Something told her that she should make some quick dodgy movements to make them a less predictable target. While hanging on Redwing’s every word, of course.

  “Okay, details later. Right.” Redwing’s entire body was tense now, on his feet, spine ramrod straight. He gripped his chair so hard, she saw his hand turn pale. “What?” The silence seemed long and unbearable, but she noticed the seconds on her situation screen were going by slowly. “Roger. More later.”

  Redwing turned to her and said, “That flier behind us, take all the evasion you can. They’re trying to shut down a weapon that’s in armed and aiming mode right now.”

  She slammed the helm over hard and teased the fusion burn to its max. Then she released the bolus of searing plasma and wrenched the helm again, putting them into a flat spin, then a dive. Pops and creaks came echoing down the bridge from the connecting corridors. Karl’s tablet escaped from the ridged worktable and smacked into the bulkhead.

  Redwing said, “There’s an electromagnetic precursor maybe two seconds before discharge. Look for that. Say again, Tananareve—”

  Karl flicked their EM antennas into one overlay, frequencies color-coded. Beth could see the flier as a dark point among hills and valleys of Technicolor richness. “It’s buried in all this plasma emission,” Karl said.

  “Integrate the whole spectral emission,” Beth said. “I don’t know what frequency it will come out in, but if we—”

  “Got it.” A smooth topological surface appeared now in auburn colors, brown for valleys and nearly yellow at the peaks. The sky flexed like an ocean rolling with colliding wave fronts.

  She fought the helm around again and let their speed drop a bit. This let her fill reserve chambers with incoming plasma and build to the max density they could carry. The jet wind was coming in at velocities over a thousand kilometers a second, and she could vary the inflow rate simply by moving the magscoop to angle it more fully into the stream. SunSeeker was working far from its optimal performance peak, which had been designed to run steady and smooth on interstellar plasma, orders of magnitude below the sleeting hail of knotty ionized matter rushing at them. Now she used, without thinking about it, the skills she had won from their flight up the jet when they arrived here. Through long hours she had fought violent currents, swimming upstream against conditions SunSeeker had never seen.

  Now she just let her instincts rule. Her hands and eyes moved restlessly, shaping plasma and bunching it. When she saw the holding chambers were full, she began to trickle more into the fusion chambers. The boost took them up jetward and to starboard as she waited for something strange to come at them.

  It wasn’t subtle. The maroon tones around the flier profile suddenly blossomed with a hard bright yellow peak. She fed the stored plasma into the chambers and goosed the drive. The helm slammed over, and she had time to shout “Incoming!”

  The bridge shuddered and then wrinkled. She looked down the deck line and saw the bulwark ripple and flex. Pops and groans rose. Karl dove for the deck. She felt a tight pressure run through her like a slow, sinuous wave. Her stomach lurched. A deep bass tone rolled along the ship axis and—

  —it was gone. The bridge snapped back into straight lines and firm walls. The hail of small stressed sounds fell away.

  “They missed us,” Karl said.

  Redwing nodded. “But what missed us? The deck got rubbery—”

  “A space-time wrinkle, maybe,” Karl said. “I dunno how in hell anybody could make one, but—”

  “Let me concentrate,” Beth said. “They could shoot at us again.”

  She dodged and swerved and dove and soared and plunged, and time stretched the way space had moments before. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the feeds that told her what the flier was doing. It cut her off on a side curve and flared more exhaust to draw closer. She countered with her own moves. All this she did with hands incessantly moving as her eyes looked for another of the hard bright yellow peaks. But it didn’t come.

  The comm beeped. Redwing answered. “Oh. Good. What? Say again. Good. Great. You’re sure. Okay. Terms come later, sure. Soon, yes.”

  He hung up and turned to Beth. She allowed her eyes to stray to him and she was shocked at how old he looked.

  “They’re standing down. No more pulses like that. Something called the Lambda Gun.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, and the comm beeped again.

  Redwing answered. “What? Look at the star?”

  “Got it,�
�� Karl said. He and Fred, who had come onto the bridge, peered at the big screen.

  Geysers. The curve of the red star worked with furious energies. Flares and huge arches broke into space. Currents swept across the troubled crescent. Beth saw there was a dent in the perfect circle. Something had chewed it.

  Karl said, “Look at these vectors.” He had told the Kinematic Artilect to project an acceptance cone on the thing that had missed them. He had set the basic width to be a few times the jittering pattern Beth had followed to evade whatever the flier threw at them. Within the error bars, the cone snipped a bit off the star.

  Redwing frowned. “Tananareve says the Folk call it a Lambda Gun. It does something with space-time, so if it just projected on—” He stopped. Facts trump words.

  They watched the star adjust gravity against its internal pressures. Huge fissures opened and closed like snapping mouths. Fountains of restless plasma worked up in slender, vibrant yellow tendrils before curving and dying. The star flooded simmering masses into the gap, and waves spread from that. Fluids shaped by strong magnetic fields moved in complex eddies. Storms peeled off this and spread, tornadoes the size of planets.

  Beth let out a long slow breath, trying to get herself back into somewhat normal condition. She was tired and worn and completely confused. Coffee no longer helped. She needed a bath, too.

  She stood, wobbling a little. “Tananareve said more, Cap’n. I could tell. What?”

  “We’ve got a deal. They’ll resupply us.”

  Gasps. Redwing shrugged and smiled, bobbing his head when the entire bridge burst into applause. “Uh, yes. There’s more. They want some of us, maybe enough to avoid inbreeding, to stay on the Bowl. The ones who actually run this place aren’t those Folk at all. Those are like the local police on the beat, or middle managers in a bureaucracy. This thing is so old, something needs to live long enough to run it.”