It was hard to explain, even to herself. But she was more certain than ever that Benkovic was not a potential lover, not for her.
Galway did have to give Spence credit for being good-looking. He could be entertaining, too, she had discovered, when he made the effort. Maybe, after all… but no.
He wasn’t inclined to take no for an answer. And so she closed the door of her berth on him, after first politely and then not so politely declining to let him in.
To Branwen’s surprise, he was still there, in the short corridor, when she came out a few minutes later. She had to maneuver past him in the narrow crew tunnel. There was momentary physical contact, which he tried to turn to some advantage. When he was again rejected, he passed it off lightly as a joke.
Benkovic’s eyes glowed after her when she had passed him; she could feel them without looking back. They were attractive eyes, she had to admit, and he knew how to use them. She thought he would have liked to try a more determined grab at her, but knew better than to try that kind of thing with her, and on this ship.
She was now the only female available. Well, the possibility of having to adjust his sex life should have occurred to him before he signed on for a long mission.
One ED female on the crew, four ED males. She wondered if the Carmpan ever worried about his sex life, or lack thereof. That aspect of things didn’t matter to his theme much, if all the stories one heard were true. Maybe she would ask Fourth Adventurer sometime.
Meanwhile she had a much less theoretical problem to contend with: what to do about Spence Benkovic. Experience suggested strongly that in this situation she would be better off being a sexless crew member, just one of the fellows, as long as that role was playable. Unfortunately that no longer seemed to be a possibility. The trouble, one of the troubles, was that no one knew how long this voyage was likely to go on before Domingo was willing to call, if not a halt, at least a pause somewhere for some R and R.
One way to keep Spence at a distance, possibly a good one, would be to take up with someone else. Domingo might well have been her first choice, but she understood by now that he just wasn’t available, even if she did not yet understand exactly why. Because he was captain for one thing, probably. But she had the feeling there was more to it than that.
Iskander… no. She’d rather not. Though from the way Baza looked at her sometimes, Branwen thought that he too might be interested.
That left Simeon. Who had been, she thought, in some way her first choice all along.
Branwen went knocking at Chakuchin’s door.
Conveniently, Simeon too was off watch at the moment. He was pleasantly surprised to see her.
She got the conversation off to an easy start by asking Sim whether he had anything to drink available.
Simeon, having asked her in, started to explain that the only stimulant he needed now was Leviathan. But
the words sounded so ridiculous now that he never finished saying them.
Instead he came out with: “I hate to be alone in weather like this.”
Inside, she let the door of the tiny space sigh closed behind her. “You don’t have to be alone, Sim. Not all the time, anyway.”
Soon the two of them were sitting close together—there was no other way to sit in one of these berth-cabins—with privacy dialed on both the door and the intercom. Only genuine emergency messages ought to be able to get through. Branwen had left her own berth closed up in the same way; supposedly the curious wouldn’t know if she were in there or somewhere else aboard.
For the time being, berserkers were forgotten and so was the captain. And so, for Branwen, were her worries about Spence Benkovic.
A little later, Simeon was saying, rather sleepily: “We never did find anything to drink.”
Galway murmured something and stretched lazily against the cushions of Simeon’s berth. Her standard shipboard coverall had been totally discarded, and his was currently being worn in a decidedly informal configuration. Drink was not really prominent in her thoughts at the moment. She muttered a few words to that effect.
“I know, I don’t need one either, but I thought…” Then Simeon’s words trailed off in astonishment at the expression on his companion’s face.
Branwen was gazing past his shoulder. Her eyes were wide, and her lips made a sound, something totally different from any that he had heard her utter yet.
He twisted his head around just in time to see it, too. Something had just come into the little cylindrical room where they were lying as if to look at them, and in the second or two that Simeon was frozen, looking at it, it appeared to go out through the solid wall and come back in again. The intruder was not ED, or Carmpan, or berserker; it hardly looked like a solid physical body at all. More like a heatwave in the air, or a curl of smoke, but there was too much purpose in the way it moved.
A moment later the man and the woman were both grabbing for the single hand-weapon that was readily available.
What confronted them appeared to Simeon as a physically tenuous, amorphous thing or being, resembling nothing so much as a photographic negative. Before he could make a guess at what the image in the photograph was supposed to show, the thing drifted out of the room again, right through the tightly closed door.
Simeon, whose hand had happened to close on the handgun first, was pointing the weapon after the apparition, on the verge of babbling. He pointed again, helplessly.
“I saw it, too, I saw it, too!” Branwen was already on the intercom, trying to raise help.
Iskander Baza was the next crew member to encounter the intruder. He came across it in one of the small tunnels that served the compact ship as corridors. “Without hesitation Baza drew the small hand weapon he liked to carry at all times and fired. The gun was a short-range beam-projector of a type that he considered unlikely to do any serious damage to the essential equipment within the ship. Iskander’s shot hit—whatever it was—but the beam appeared to have no effect except to make the apparition withdraw.
By now all the crew members, with the possible exception of the lethargic Carmpan, were alerted to the fact that some kind of emergency was in progress. Everyone not at battle stations was scrambling to get there. But for the moment no one saw anything else strange aboard the Pearl.
Space in the proximity of the ship was a different matter. There were suddenly a swarm of spacegoing vehicles nearby; or else they were constructions or congregations of hitherto unknown life forms; or else they were things that no ED human had ever seen or even imagined before. Whatever they were, they were suddenly detectable around the ship in considerable numbers by the people who were on watch.
A fight began, because the people on the Pearl considered themselves under attack.
The Pearl’s heavy weapons thundered out, striking at flickering, evolving, changing nothingness.
CHAPTER 18
Even in those first few seconds of alarm and scrambling desperation aboard the Pearl. it was already obvious that none of the blasting, melting, disintegrating weapons usually employed in space combat were at all effective against these mysterious encroaching shapes.
Domingo had been in his combat chair at the start of the crisis and was still there. Even with all his instrumentation before him, his first indication of trouble was the alarm on the intercom, the voices of his crew announcing the presence of an intruder on the ship. Such was the subtlety of the invader and of its fellows just outside the hull.
Whatever the things were out there, they were very difficult to see, hard to detect on any of the instruments that the captain presently had in use. A gabble of speech grew steadily on the intercom. “They’re not ships, I tell you—”
“I can see that. They’re not berserkers, either.”
“Not any kind of berserker I ever heard about.”
“Not like any… not like any thing I‘ve ever seen.”
Before they could push each other completely into panic, Domingo roared for silence, then made specific demands on specific
people for readings, reports, information. In moments the incipient panic had subsided. The coordinated use of instruments even began to bring in some useful data.
Within a matter of seconds after the first alarm, using a helpful observation or two passed along by other crew members, Domingo had managed to adjust his instruments so as to be able to get a better look at the things, whatever they were, that had his ship surrounded. What he beheld were bizarre entities of varying and almost indeterminate size and shape. There were dozens of them swarming, flitting by his ship at ranges varying from only a few meters out to several score kilometers and at speeds that ought to mean ship or machine and not any kind of self-propelled life form. But somehow, as he studied them, the impression that these were life forms gradually dominated. Seemingly they were able to avoid the centers of the blasts from the Pearl’s armament while passing unharmed through the outer regions of the explosions, even through zones where steel would have been vaporized. The forms, whatever they were, appeared to be altering themselves from moment to moment, changing their very structure somehow, so beam weapons that would have chewed up a berserker’s shields passed through them harmlessly.
It was almost, the captain thought, as if these things surrounding him and his ship could at will become no more than illusions.
The time elapsed since Branwen and Simeon had sounded the first alarm was still less than a full minute.
Domingo shouted to his crew: “Cease fire. We’re not doing any good. Cease firing!”
The barrage of pulsing beams and flying projectiles ceased, almost instantly. Inside the ship the difference to the ears was minimal, but the alteration in the inward energies of space briefly left an empty feeling in the bones.
The fusillade had achieved nothing but a waste of energy— which would be easy enough to replace—and of certain types of missiles, which would not. The things outside, whatever they were, did not seem to have been injured in the slightest by being shot at, and certainly they had not been driven away. On the bright side, the six humans in their ship were also unharmed. That in itself was enough to convince Domingo that the entities outside the ship were not berserkers and probably were not enemies at all. If the swarming of the wraithlike things around the ship had been meant as an attack, it had to be considered a failure, though at least one of the things had penetrated the hull itself.
But still, a moment after the captain had called a ceasefire, he came near countermanding the order.
His crew were already shouting new alarms at him; unnecessarily, for he could see for himself what was happening now that the Pearl’s guns had quieted. The view outside the ship was changing, becoming vaguely obscured in strips and patches. It was as if translucent nets were being spread around the Pearl.
“I think they’re trying to tie us up, Chief,” Iskander drawled.
To Domingo, the entities outside—units, creatures, beings, whatever they were—appeared to be trying to grapple the Pearl with forcefield weapons. So far, very little power was evident in these weapons, which as far as the captain could tell were indistinguishable from extensions of the creatures’ own bodies; but they appeared to be able, as before, to penetrate the ship’s defensive shields.
Fourth Adventurer’s voice came suddenly on intercom. The tones of weariness and illness had vanished from it, but the words were unsteady with unprecedented excitement: “It is not an attempt to tie you up. It is a probing for information. Act, Captain, act. Respond, lest you be taken for something inanimate.”
Act? And do what? Suppressing a sharp retort, Domingo instead answered his own question for himself.
On Domingo’s orders, crisply and precisely issued, the Pearl put out her own forcefield weapons in several strengths and varieties, trying to disengage the grip of the enemy’s fields. His crew was trained in the tactics of grappling and ramming with such devices.
Clipping out more orders, Domingo assigned each member of his crew a different section of his ship’s hull to defend. They all went to work in intense silence, manipulating the Pearl’s defensive fields, trying to find a way of repelling the intrusion. Now and then a few terse words were exchanged; for the most part the intercom was silent.
The shadowy tools of the outsiders were now opposed by a variety of fields generated from the Pearl. The result after the first moments of struggle was a tangled snarl that still held the human ship delicately enmeshed. Domingo was confident that even an easy application of his ship’s drive would break the Pearl free; but for the time being he withheld that stroke. He was coming more and more to the opinion that his crew and the outsiders were not so much locked together in a struggle as engaged in a mutual groping for information.
Confused grappling ensued and was protracted over a period of several minutes. Domingo, reading his ship’s instruments from his own station and sifting the fragmentary reports from his crew as best he could, decided there was now at least a strong possibility that the aliens—it was now definite in his own mind that living things opposed him—were also trying to withdraw from the tangle of interlocking forces but found themselves unable to do so, either. Perhaps they too had forces in reserve.
The next report from Fourth Adventurer confirmed definitely that what surrounded the ship were indeed living minds and bodies. “I now have established mental contact with them. It is difficult. Only intermittent communication has been achieved as yet, but it may be the minimum we need.”
“They’re living, then.”
“Indeed they are.”
“They must be aggregations, swarms, almost like the ones we sometimes harvest. But—”
“Yes, Captain. They are in many ways like those other nebular life forms, and related to them through evolution. But these around our ship are more than that. Much more.” Fourth Adventurer said that much and fell silent.
“Can we communicate with them? On an intelligent level, I mean?”
“I shall try now, and report again.”
The Pearl. and the entities around her with which she struggled, were not only bound together but isolated, lost, in swirling nebula. There was still no sign of the Space Force fleet.
“There’s not as many of them around us as there were,” Branwen reported, almost calmly. Some of the mysterious aliens had evidently departed—or dissipated—or died. She thought that their numbers around the Pearl had been greater at the start of the confrontation than they were now, though Domingo thought it was still hard to guess whether there were now twenty of them or a hundred.
Whether the entities might simultaneously be conducting a similar struggle with the Space Force somewhere in the nebula nearby was more than anyone on board the Pearl was able to determine.
Anyone, at least, but Fourth Adventurer. In response to a question from Domingo, the Carmpan now announced that he thought that any such confrontation between the entities and the Space Force was unlikely; his own presence on the Pearl was tending to draw the nebular things here.
“Your presence? Why?”
“They sense my mind, as I sense theirs.”
Benkovic’s voice, sounding shaken, came over the intercom: “What are they, then? What are they? These things aren’t berserkers!”
Domingo spoke almost soothingly. “All right, we already know that much. They seem about as far from being berserkers as they can get. Fourth Adventurer says he’s sure they’re alive, and I have to agree. But what level of intelligence are they, and what do they want?”
The Carmpan at last was able to announce some success in trying to determine that. He was, he said, still managing to maintain a limited telepathic contact with the aliens. “They are of human intelligence. And at the moment the main thing they want is to know what we are; or more precisely, to understand our ship. They sense the continual close presence of my mind and wish to know why it is so bound in heavy matter.”
There was a pause. “You’re saying they’re—a human theme?”
“Indeed, yes. My hope in joining your crew was to welcome a ne
w theme to the brotherhood of the Taj.”
There was silence momentarily on intercom, people looking at one another’s imaged faces. The brotherhood of the what ? Simeon wondered silently.
When no one else said anything, Fourth Adventurer resumed: “I am also endeavoring to explain to them your natures, as the controllers of this ship, but it is difficult. Ships in general are a great mystery to them, as are berserker machines. As, indeed, is telepathy. They communicate among themselves on a purely physical level, as do you and I.”
“A new human theme.” It was a hushed whisper in Branwen Galway’s voice. Others were murmuring, too. Such a discovery had happened perhaps half a dozen times in the whole previous history of Earth-descended exploration.
“Indeed,” Fourth Adventurer repeated patiently, “a theme of humanity whose existence has heretofore been completely unknown to humans of your theme, and only guessed at by my fellow Carmpan and myself. The reason is that only very recently have the people of this new theme become a thinking species. They are the reason for my presence here, for my application to become a member of this crew. Another ship might have brought me to them, but only your ship, Captain, was ready and equipped at the right time and place to have a chance of giving them the help they need. More than words and good wishes will be required to clear their pathway to the Taj.”
Someone asked: “To the what?”
But the captain, impatient, interrupted before the question could be answered.
Domingo said: “Great, great. Meanwhile we seem to have a problem. Two problems, at least.”
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