Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  “Uh—no, sir. Not on the curriculum, couple centuries back.”

  A quiet jab, well delivered. Redwing nodded and smiled in tribute. “Then full speed ahead.” In a tribute to ancient naval traditions, he added, “Give us some steam.”

  “I don’t like to flex our magnetic scoop system any more, uh, sir,” Karl said.

  “Same small-scale problem?”

  “Yeah. The system’s pretty compressed. We can’t get into the magneto components to adjust them. It’s a mechanical problem, not just some digital e-management thing.”

  “Do your best.” Not the time for more technospeak. Though that was all that kept them alive, of course. “Belay any repairs until we get Beth aboard. How’s the flexi gear straightening?”

  “Programmed on the printer,” Jampudvipa said. “Fold points and tension web seem sturdy enough to compile at pickup.”

  “Excellent. Clare?”

  “Look at the screen. The laser pods are above us now.”

  What’s the old saying? “Come in under their radar” means something else. This is running in under the guns of a fortress that cannot fire down into the Bowl lifezone. “Um. Can we skim that close to the atmosphere?”

  Karl pointed to the blue sheen cast off by the boundary film of the atmosphere. This close in, it spread like an ocean landscape, yet the eye saw through it to lands and seas below. These stretched away in infinite perspective, intricate layers basking in unending solar radiance, free of night. The eggshell sheen of the boundary tricked the eye into seeing it as an ocean, with lands on the floor below. There were even long rolling waves to the boundary, flexing in slow, marching rows.

  Redwing had to admit the design features here were clever beyond easy measure. Rather than fading off in the familiar exponential, like planets, the Bowl’s air ran up and into a hard boundary. The air was thin there, hundreds of kilometers high—but the multilayer smart film kept the errant wind streams and vortices at bay, spreading the energies across vast distances, smoothing them out. No molecules leaked away forever, as they had for poor Mars. The Bowl’s own magnetic field gave a spiderweb defense against cosmic rays and angry storms flailing out from the persecuted star that powered all this. Its fields were like spaghetti strands wrapped around the atmosphere, layers of argument against intruding particles wanting to plow into innocent gases.

  Redwing said, “What other weapons does this place have?”

  “More than we do,” Clare said mildly.

  “Look,” Jampudvipa said with an irked twist to her mouth, “this thing’s unknowably old. Ancient! Beyond ancient. On Earth a century was a huge time for weapons to evolve. I read up on this in preoutbreak history, back when we were on one world. Amazing stuff. In the same century as the first nuke got used, we also killed each other with bayonets and one-shot rifles. So how can we think about—this?”

  This outbreak of consternation made them all sit back, think.

  Karl said solemnly, “The laws of physics constrain everybody—even the Bowl Folk, whoever they are. Or whatever.”

  “Tech has its own evolution,” Clare said. “What’s in those big domes at the Bowl rim?”

  “No way to know. Fly low, is all we can do,” Redwing said. Taking my ship into uncharted waters … It was liberating to be simply honest.

  They slid on a blithe arc over the quickly spinning lip of the Bowl. Sensors set on the big domes and their enormous snouts registered no change.

  Cruising over the Bowl’s lip and down the swiftly rushing hull brought quick instructive views. SunSeeker had come at the Bowl from the side and below, along the axis of revolution and through the Knothole. Now Redwing could see the detailed and intricate lattice that framed the hull’s support structures, threaded by long ribbed structures that looked like enormous subways and elevators, some with spiky turrets protruding at the junctions. But here and there were sections clearly retrofitted, yellow and green splotches of newer joints and fix-up ornamentations of mysterious use.

  Additions and afterthoughts, he judged. Some reminded him of accumulated grime, touch-up attempts and insertions. Like the yellowing varnish on a Renaissance masterpiece, he thought. Strip away the accretions, and beneath is the original brilliance. Interstellar archaeology.

  SIX

  Karl deployed the smart flexi with an electric shock. Under a kilovolt surge the velvet blue shroud billowed out—so thin, he could see the gyrating hull grinding past in the distance. Starlight lit its eternal churn. A certain serenity enveloped the view, for the background was the eternal spread of stars. The approaching dot was for the moment nothing.

  He had static-fixed the flexi to the Bernal’s hull. Its sensors would follow inbuilt commands he could activate. Well, here goes …

  The flexi popped open at the electro-command. Yet the micro sensors at the far end remained live and ready, he saw from his wrist monitor. The flexi bubble furled out as liquidly as a cape cast off a shoulder, though all this was in high vacuum, no gravity or atmosphere to command its dynamics. Such a thin fabric of layered smart carbon could be made and trained in the ship printers, but he had never tried anything this complex before. Now they had to use it to rescue Beth’s team from the big train car that came swarming up at them, the dot assuming a velocity a bit too high. Problems, yes. Perhaps not fatal, entirely. Yet.

  Karl had not been thawed when SunSeeker shot through the Knothole, so all this gigantic architecture was new to him. He stared, momentarily lost in detail.

  “Coming up on rendezvous prompt,” Jam sent on comm. “Bogie on vector grid.”

  “Got it.” He eased the flexi controls, using both hands. For ease of manual operations, there were no left-handed crew on SunSeeker. Karl had made the crew cut because he was genuinely ambidextrous. In college he had made extra cash as a juggler.

  “It’s coming up too fast,” Jam said urgently.

  “I’ve got mag fields on, maybe I can push it off.” Karl ran the mag amplitude to the max. That was a stressor in a thick-hulled freighter like the Bernal; he could hear tinny pings.

  He was looking out a true port, not a screen. Living inside a starship with only screen views felt disconnected. There was something about capturing the actual starlight photons bouncing off the Bowl that made it more real. This huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together, he realized. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar. So he scanned the Bowl’s wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes on his bridge board. It was only a few tens of meters thick, pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Which meant the Bowl stress-support material had to be better than SunSeeker’s. What engineers they were.…

  Jam said, “It’s braking. Must have some maneuvering ability.”

  “I can see them,” Kurt said quietly. He ran his scopes to the max. There were windows in part of the hauler and human heads peering out at him. He had to admire them. They had made it through captivity, struck out across unknown alien territory, stolen transport, liberated themselves—and were coming back to the ship to report.

  Jam said, “Ease them in. Careful.”

  “I read their roll at near zero, yaw zero point three five, but correcting—and pitch seven point five degrees.” Kurt rattled off the numbers just to be saying something while he used hand controls to turn Bernal into a plausible alignment.

  “Bearing in,” Jam said. “Just got confirming signal. Ha! As if anybody else were meeting us out here.”

  “Aligned. Now’s the hard part.”

  Center ball was smack on, horizontal bar of the crosshatch dead center with vertical bar, and the bulky burnished train car that looked like a shoe box came to rest in the Bernal rest frame. With both hands he triggered the flexi with an electrostatic burst.

  The flexi skirted across the gap like an unfolding velvet blue scarf. It unfolded and cl
amped on to the boxcar metal around the simple air lock. It anchored and popped him a message: PRESSURE SEAL SECURED.

  “Got it.” Kurt palmed the pressure valves, and air rushed into the flexi corridor between the ships. Of course, the craft weren’t perfectly matched. But the flexi compensated, extruding further lengths of itself to accommodate the vagrant torques and thrusts as the two spacecraft wobbled and rocked in the magnetic grasp. Pressured. Secure.

  “The flexi’s working!” Jam’s words came compressed, excited. “Ayaan was right. Programming them to double-seal solved the pressure problem, straightened them out.”

  The boxcar’s lock popped and he saw the first head appear, looking around. Beth he recognized from her photo.

  “Tag ’em through.” It happened fast and he had to keep them aligned with the mag grapple. Kurt watched the people come out through the boxcar air lock. The flexi was so transparent, he could see them kick against the sides for momentum and glide through the channel into the Bernal. He counted them. But—

  “What’s that with you?”

  “Snakes,” Jam sent the audio through a direct link.

  It was Beth. “Smart snakes. They helped us.”

  “Trouble,” Kurt said to himself.

  SEVEN

  It was a rough ride, irritating for Memor. She was cramped in the rattling hot cabin, subjected to rude accelerations. Her pilot seemed to take relish in throwing them into wrenching swoops and pivots. Magnetic ships moved more smoothly, of course, but Memor had chosen a rocket vehicle: it would not have to hover so close to the outer hull of the World. Memor braced against the surge and wondered if her pilot could be among the disaffected. This might be a small way of expressing smoldering anger. Best make a note for future use?

  Surely not. Veest Blad was of an Adapted species, but he had been with her for years, back before Memor became female. Veest was too smart not to be loyal.

  “Ah!” And there, her prey were in sight. That limping one was Tananareve. And those ropy things the probes had seen, now wriggling into one of the cargo cars in a magnetic train, were finger snakes.

  Treason! They must be assisting the escaping bipeds. Finger snakes were a useful species, but their adaptation to civilization had always been chancy.

  The car’s side closed. The whole train lifted, eased away from the docks, and moved into star-spattered space.

  Memor considered. She had the acceleration to catch the train. Could she shoot out the magnetic locking plates without harming those inside? But Asenath had forbidden that—and the primate Tananareve, Memor saw abruptly, was still standing on the dock.

  Tananareve had been the language adept of this band, with many sleeps spent acquiring the Folk language. Thus, the most important, for Asenath wanted a speaking primate, for reasons unknown. But … the creature seemed ready to fall over. How far could she get before Memor claimed the rest of them and came back for her? Perhaps she would not even be needed … but wait—

  “Veest Blad, land near the biped. Not too near. We don’t want her fried.”

  “Yes, lady.”

  So what was that about? Memor had countermanded her own decision. A moment’s brief look into her Undermind told her why. The abandoned female looked to be dying, and she was the one whom Memor had inspected, had trained, had grown to know. The others—perhaps they could be caught, perhaps they might all be killed by Memor’s overbuilt weapons, true—but they weren’t needed while Tananareve was here.

  * * *

  Tananareve wiped sweat away and watched the bulbous vehicle settle a good distance away, engines throbbing. Still teetering a bit, feeling woozy, she stood in the hot moist wash of rocket exhaust, waiting. Running wouldn’t help her. She’d seen the tremendous creature’s speed.

  Memor opened the great target-shaped window and rolled out. It looked painful: the rocket vehicle was cramped for her. Memor walked to Tananareve, huffed, and bent low, her eye to the woman’s eyes. In her own tongue she asked, “Where have they gone?”

  Tananareve groped for a lie, and it was there. Beth’s team had discussed destinations, and rejected—“They’ve gone to join Cliff.”

  “The other fugitives? The killers?”

  “Cliff’s team, yes.”

  “Where?”

  She said, “I don’t know. The aliens knew.”

  “The limbless ones? They are Adopted, but often rebellious. We must take action against them. Tananareve, how goes your adventure?”

  “We were dying for lack of weight,” she said. “Lost bone and muscle. What choice did we have?”

  Memor seemed to restrain herself. “No choice now. Come. Or shall I carry you?”

  Tananareve took two steps, wobbled, and fell over.

  She woke to a vague sensation, a hard surface with big ribs under it: Memor’s hands. She flexed her fists and shook her head, trying to get her mind to work. Now they were in the ship, her face close against a wall dotted with icons for controls. Something rumbled, vibrated. Language? And now the wall took on the appearance of a distant forest of plants grown in low gravity, like the place she’d escaped from. A creature like Memor stepped into view and flexed a million multicolored feathers.

  No way could Tananareve follow a conversation that was largely the flexing of feathers and silent subsonic tremors that shook her bones. Memor was holding Tananareve like a prize, and the other was snarling.…

  * * *

  Asenath the Wisdom Chief was not of a mind to be placated. “One! You have one, and it is dying!”

  “I will save it,” Memor said. “I will take it … her … down to the Quicklands, where spin gravity can restore her muscle and strengthen her bones. I know what she eats and I will procure it. This female is the one who understands me best. Gifted, though in many ways simple. She knows Rank One of the TransLanguage. Wisdom Chief, will you question her now?”

  “What would I ask?” Asenath’s feathers showed rage, but that was a plumage lie. Memor’s undermind had caught the truth: She was in despair.

  Memor found that revealing. Earlier the Wisdom Chief had been trying to bring about Memor’s disgrace and death. What had changed? Memor decided to wait her out.

  Asenath broke first. “There comes a message from the Target Star, from our destination.”

  All Memor’s feathers flared like a puffball. The human, engulfed, tried to wriggle free. Memor said, “That is wonderful! And dangerous, yes? Can you interpret—?”

  “There are visuals. Complex ones. The message seems aimed at these creatures. At your Late Invaders!”

  Memor’s feathers went to chaos: a riot of laughter. “That is … endlessly interesting.”

  “You must care for your talking simian. We will try to make sense of this message. It is still flowing in. If I call, answer at once, and have the human at hand.”

  * * *

  Tananareve had caught little of that. She was nibbling at a melon slice now, slipped to her by Memor. She was enraged—tight-lipped, squinting in the strange glow—that she’d been caught again, but grudgingly grateful that Memor had brought provisions. The huge thing did not seem to mind carrying on conversation in front of a human, either.

  What was that about? Hard to follow. Was Glory inhabited? And had someone there sent a message? Surely not to Earth; that would be foolish, when the Bowl was straight between Earth and Glory, and so much more powerful.

  The captain should be told. He and his crew would figure it out.

  Rockets fired, accelerations gripped her—and Memor’s ship was in flight. Tananareve sagged into the pull. The hard clamp was too strong to allow movement. She relaxed against the floor and tried to get into savasana pose, letting her muscles ease, hoping that her dinosaur-sized captor wouldn’t step on her.

  EIGHT

  They couldn’t all get into SunSeeker’s infirmary. Beth and Fred and Captain Redwing hovered around the door, watching as Mayra and Lau Pin were led to elaborate tables. Tubes and sensors snaked out to mate with them. Jam, acting as
medic now, watched, tested, then asked, “Are you comfortable?”

  Mayra and Lau Pin mumbled something.

  “I’m sedating you. Also, you’re being recorded. Mayra Wickramsingh, I understand you lost your husband during the expedition?”

  “Expedition, my arse. We were expi … expiment … animals for testing. Big birds had us—”

  Redwing said, “Come with me. You’ll both be on those tables soon enough, but for now we’ll give you gravity and normal food.”

  Beth resisted. “You’re testing her while she talks about Abduss? He was slaughtered by one of those monstrous spider-things.”

  “We’ll need to know how badly that traumatized her. The rest of you, too. How are you feeling now?”

  Fred said, “Hungry.” He lurched up the corridor toward the ship’s mess, then sagged against the bulkhead. “Feeble.”

  Beth asked, “How is Cliff? Where is he?”

  Redwing allowed a vexed expression to flit across his face, then went back to the usual stern, calm mask. “Holed up with some intelligent natives, Cliff’s last message said. The Folk tried to kill them all. They were shooting down from some living blimp—sounds bizarre, but what doesn’t here? The locals helped Cliff’s people get away. Aybe sends us stuff when he can. We have pictures of a thing that looks a lot like a dinosaur, plus some evolved apes. I sent those to you; did you get them?”

  Fred spoke over his shoulder. “We got them, Cap’n. The Bowl must’ve stopped in Sol system at least twice. Once for the dinosaurs, once for the apes, I figure. And we found a map in that museum globe.”

  “You sent us the map,” Redwing said, ushering them along the corridor. A pleasant aroma of warm food drew them. “How did that strike you?”

  “Strange. Might be history, might be propaganda for the masses.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  She smiled. “It was in a big park, elaborate buildings, the works.”

  Fred wobbled into the mess. Beth was feeling frail, too; there were handholds everywhere, and she used them. Surely she’d been longing for foods of Earth? There had been almost no red meat in the parts of the Bowl she’d seen. Beef curry? Its tang enticed. The mess was neat, clean, like a strict diner. Already Fred had picked a five-bean salad and a cheese sandwich.