Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  They went through the narrow tunnels along the tadfish’s streamlined form. It had a torpedo shape, and the occasional viewing blister was flanked by big slabs of sinewy brown muscle. These flexed as it propelled forward and Cliff sniffed; their close, moist air took on a sweaty, salty tinge.

  “Fishoids, torpedo-shaped predators,” Irma said when they looked out a blister and saw a swarm of long tubular birds flocking below. They swerved and scooped in the air, catching something that vented from the tadfish. “Feeding on waste?” Irma asked.

  “One species’ waste is another’s food,” Cliff said.

  Around the long curve of the tadfish body came big gliding shapes in convoy, more like manta rays than like birds. They were flying in a V formation and had slick, matted gray skins. Diving and banking in concert through the thick air, big eyes intent on the feeding tubular birds. Their shapes, Cliff saw, reflected the demands of curvature, flow, and tension as they lazily slid down the air. Meaty triangular wings led back to rudderlike fins and a long spike at the tail. Cliff pointed. “The killing instrument.” A pair of eyes protruded in knobs at either side of their wedgelike heads, above the long slit mouth. Another pair of bigger, yellow eyes sat close together and peered forward. The flying tubes moved with stately grace through the glassy air. Fleshy, oarlike appendages flanked the heads, as the manta snapped up the smaller tubular birds. Through the window, Cliff and Irma could hear cries and shrieks as the pillage cut through the flock.

  It was a strange sight and over in a moment. The mantas dove under the tadfish, while a few survivors scattered in frantic haste. Irma put an arm around Cliff’s waist and he felt a rush of contentment. In all this strangeness, the small comforts mattered most. They stood that way awhile, until warm air drew their attention to an inward-leading passage. He was trying to analyze all they were seeing, but the dimly lit passage drew them onward. Squishing sounds came from ahead. They worked along a throbbing wall and came upon a translucent interior layer, where they could see dark bones working in a sheath. Low murmurs and hums came through the transparent wall, and they could see gray fluids running down the bulky flesh everywhere. Lubricants?

  “This is its internal skeleton?” Cliff wondered. The sliding parallel bones worked through thick green collars, coiling like a flexible spring. But their attention focused on two moving stick-figure creatures that seemingly tended this living machinery. They were about a meter tall, with six limbs that moved quickly, clambering everywhere, adjusting the mechanical supports of the bony spine. These creatures used their flexing limbs as either arms or legs, depending on where they scampered over the big moving apparatus. Irma pointed—they had long, two-petaled tails that folded to protect sexual organs that occasionally came into view as they worked. They seemed like slender, pink skeletons, with brains carried in a bump between the pair of limbs at the top of the spinal cord. Three eyes worked on stalks, making an equilateral triangle around a broad red slit of a mouth.

  “They can see us,” Irma said, “but they’re ignoring us.”

  “Not so peculiar, really. Think what it’s like to work on a public conveyance,” Cliff said. “They’ve seen plenty odder than we are.”

  They moved along the transparent wall and saw two thick, muscular creatures wearing what seemed to be equipment belts. They were working on a panel pulled open, revealing some complex piping throbbing with amber liquids. They moved with deft small fingers, using tools too small to make out. “Those look like the ones we saw before,” Irma said. “Remember? We were—”

  “Screwing, yes. And one of them fell on us.”

  “Turns out they’re smart tool-users. I wonder what they thought of us.”

  “These are ignoring us, same as before. We’re pretty ordinary, I guess.”

  “Here, sophisticated means, I guess, not impressed to run into just another funny alien.”

  Cliff chuckled. “Puts us in our place, doesn’t it?”

  As they neared the tail, there were sudden orange flares jetting from tubes below the viewing blisters. “Must be fueled by hydrocarbons,” Cliff said, “brewed into burnable fuels.”

  “We’re moving fast,” Irma said as a surge rippled through the body around them. The floor also rolled a bit, like a ship. “The burn helps.”

  “Quert said they’re artificially bred forms of an original balloon-birdlike species,” Cliff said. “So their energy source got engineered, too.”

  “We’d better get back,” Irma said. They were moving quickly now, diving out over a sheet of green water that seemed a continent wide, beneath the waving fields of grass. Dotting this grass sea were bumps shaped like tadpoles, with a crust of trees ornamenting them. The thick end pointed upstream, while the water swept debris past and then dropped it in the eddy behind the hummock. This made the tadpole tail grow, building slim islands where animals lived among the dense amber and green trees. All this simmered beneath the reddish light of the star and orange filigrees cast by the slowly churning helices in the jet. As they descended, gaining speed, packs of large fishlike life became clear. They breached the shallow sea in great leaps, hanging in air, then crashing down in great sprays of white.

  Irma said, “Those look a lot like dolphins.”

  “The basic fish shape, as you say.” Cliff pointed at the width of the moving school. “Thousands of them. What a great way to see Bowl life.”

  Irma said, “I always thought, we believe dolphins are not as smart as we because they never built cars or refrigerators or New York or had wars. All they do is spend every day swimming in warm oceans, chasing and eating fish, mating and having fun. The dolphins think they are smarter than us, for the very same reasons.”

  Again, Cliff chuckled. “I always thought, on a statistical argument about time scales, that if we ran across intelligent aliens at Glory, they’d be overwhelmingly likely to be far more intelligent than us.”

  Irma nodded. “And therefore wouldn’t care at all about us—if they even noticed us.”

  “Me, too. But we’ve been able to stay out of the hands of the Folk for a long time now. On their own turf!”

  “Could be the aliens who built this place were super-minds, but their descendants have gotten stupid.”

  “So both the skeptics about smart aliens were wrong, and so were the optimists?” Cliff liked the idea. “Wonder what that means—”

  She and Cliff were so caught up in the sight, they only noticed the huge thing hanging above when it blotted out the star.

  The skyfish was firing hydrogen jets behind it and slewing swiftly through the filmy air. Headed toward them. Some strange angular birds were flocking out of the skyfish. They were lean and had long jaws with— “Are those teeth?” Irma asked.

  “Looks like. Not friendly, no.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  They had been running hot and hard now for many hours, and it was starting to show in his crew.

  Redwing sat on the bridge because if he paced for hours, as he already had, everybody got edgy. Fair enough; he sat and twitched, mostly by moving his feet, in their gecko shoes, where nobody could see. He had used up his weekly shower ration in two days of this.

  They had entered the jet days ago, not that there was any clear sign of it. The mag field values started to climb a day ago and the plasma density followed it. Only by amping certain spectral lines of yellow and green could the wall screens show the filmy curtains of sliding ion flow in the jet. Those weren’t plasma, really—the light came from ions, as electrons found them at last and cascaded down the energy levels to emit a photon. The light showed where plasma eased into little deaths.

  Now Ayaan Ali had taken over as lead pilot and Clare Conway sat in the copilot deck chair. Beth Marble had gone to get some sleep. They all watched the blue and green lines work on the large screens, mapping pressures and flux changes at the perimeter of their magscoop fields.

  “How’s the scoop impedance looking?” Redwing asked.

  “Down to three meg-ohms, sir.” From her
sideways glance, he knew Ayaan Ali understood that he could have read it from the screens, but that they needed to have some talk on the bridge, just to diffuse tensions.

  A rumble and a rolling shock came rippling through the ship. “Ride’s interesting,” Redwing said mildly.

  Ayaan Ali smiled and nodded, eyes never leaving the screens, hands on the e-helm at all times. “We took a shock front from forty-two degrees starboard, seventeen degrees south. Plasma still rising.”

  “This fits the model Karl worked up?”

  “Um, sort of.” A skeptical arching of eyebrows.

  Redwing picked up something more in her body language. Karl and Ayaan Ali always kept a wary distance in crew meetings and were crisply correct around him … which led him to wonder if something was going on between them. They were in a dangerous place, and tensions needed release. He decided to put it away for later, if ever. The mission was the point here. “Okay. Nobody expects models to work well here. I don’t, anyway. Let’s see the aft scoop and plume.” Redwing always felt a bit jumpy about anything sneaking up behind them, though with the Artilects on constant duty, that was extremely unlikely.

  The rumbling aft faded. Eerie popping noises came through the support beams and hollow creakings sounded. A sour stench of something scorched—probably just overheating in a forward tank. The display space before them showed flurries of plasma, highlighted in violet, slamming into the scoop.

  “Those knots again,” Ayaan Ali said.

  “Let’s see long-range radar,” Redwing said.

  They studied the yawning space around the jet, looking from multiple dishes. “Nothing near us, nothing in near space, nothing farther out,” Ayaan Ali said. “I’ve always wondered why we saw so few spacecraft. You’d think they would be sending ships out to monitor the whole system.”

  Redwing nodded. “This system has no planets, or asteroids, no comets coming in. Nothing bigger than a school bus. But there were some small craft, remember? They came over the Bowl rim, flew along the top of their atmosphere manifolds, ducked into a hole in the upper atmosphere layer.”

  “But very few, very little craft.” Clare shrugged. “And we know the gravitational instabilities that the Bowl risks all the time. If they get too close to the star, they have to fire up the jet and push the stellar mass away, while they grab the rising jet flux and let it push them back. Reverse if they start falling behind. Then there’s the spinning Bowl, same instabilities as a spinning top. But I guess they can run this whole wacky system without many spacecraft.”

  Karl came onto the bridge, back from checking inductance coils along the ship. He had heard Ayaan Ali. “It’s all maintained with magnetic fields and jet pressure,” he said. “Plus the reflected sunlight, to heat the hot spot. Tricky stuff.”

  “Those inductance coils getting worked hard?” Redwing asked.

  “Running high, but within margin.” Karl got into his chair and belted up, casting a side look at Redwing, as if to say, Why don’t you sit?

  Redwing never explained that he liked to move through the ship when it was having trouble. He could tell more with his feet and ears than the screens could say.

  They had taken three days to cross the jet with the fusion chambers running at full bore, driving them to nearly two hundred kilometers per second. That was far higher than an orbital velocity, though still far under the ship’s coasting specs. SunSeeker now was turning in the helix Karl had calculated, cutting in an arc near the jet’s boundary, its magscoop facing the star at a steep angle and swallowing its heated plasma. They had faced such a headwind coming in and survived. But now the navigation was tougher. This time they had to remain lower than the Bowl’s rim, or else come within the firing field of the gamma ray lasers there.

  “How do we know this is the optimal path?” Redwing asked Karl.

  “Calculations—”

  “I mean from what we’ve learned these last few days.”

  “It’s working.” Karl’s lean face tightened, ending in his skewed, tight mouth above a pointed chin where he had begun to grow a goatee. “We’re brushing the mag pressures outward. Our sideways thrust drives the magnetic kink mode, feeding off the jet’s own forward momentum. We’re stimulating the flow patterns at the right wavelength to make the jet slew.”

  “We’ll see sideways jet movement before it shoots through the Knothole?”

  “It should.” Karl’s gaze was steady, intent. He had a lot riding on this.

  “Let’s look aft. Have we got better directionals this time?” Redwing asked Ayaan Ali.

  “Somewhat,” she said. “I rotated some aft antennas to get a look, the sideband controllers, too.”

  She changed the color view, and Redwing watched brilliant yellow knots twist around the prow of their magscoop like neon tropical storms. “These curlers push us sideways a lot.”

  A rumble ran down the axis and Redwing hung on to Ayaan Ali’s deck chair. Clare showed the acoustic monitors display in red lines on a side screen. The strains worked all down the ship axis.

  “We’re getting side shear,” Redwing said mildly. He took care not to give direct piloting instructions; no backseat driving.

  “I’ll fire a small side jet, let some plasma vent from the side of the magscoop, rotate on the other axis, and take our aft around some.”

  Her hands traced a command in the space before her. A faint rumbling began, then a surge. The ship slid sideways and Redwing hung on to a deck chair. Multiple-axis accelerations had never been his strong point. His stomach lurched.

  She worked on getting the aft view aligned. SunSeeker’s core was no mere pod sitting atop the big fuel tank that held the fusion catalysis ions. Gouts of those ions had to merge with the incoming plasma, fresh from the magscoop. In turn, the mated streams fed into the reactor. Of course, the parts had to line up that way along the axis, no matter how ornate the subsections got, hanging on the main axis, because the water reserves tank shielded the biozone and crew up front, far from the fusion reactor, and the plasma plume in the magnetic nozzle.

  Redwing knew every rivet and corner of the ship and liked to prowl through all its sections. The whole stack was in zero gee, except the thick rotating toroid at the top, which the crew seldom left. A hundred and sixteen meters in diameter, looking like a dirty, scarred angel food cake, it spun lazily around to provide a full Earth g at the outside. There the walls were two meters thick and filled with water for radiation shielding. So were the bow walls, shaped into a Chinese hat with its point forward, bristling with viewing sensors. From inside, nobody could eyeball the outside except through electronic feeds. Yet they had big wall displays at high resolution and smart optics to tell them far more than a window ever could.

  Ayaan Ali’s work brought the multiple camera views into alignment with some jitter. They were looking back at the Bowl and she had to tease the jet out of all the brighter oceans and lands slowly turning in the background, a complicated problem.

  “Let’s get a clear look-down of the jet,” Redwing said.

  To see and diagnose the plume, they had a rearview polished aluminum mirror floating out forty meters to the side. They didn’t dare risk a survey bot in the roiling plasma streams that skirted around the magscoop, with occasional dense plasma fingers jutting in.

  The image tuned through different spectral lines, picking out regions where densities were high and glows twisted. On the screen, a blue-white flare tapered away for a thousand kilometers before fraying into streamers. Plasma fumed and blared along the exhaust length, ions and electrons finding each other at last and reuniting into atoms, spitting out an actinic glare. The blue pencil pointed dead astern. He was used to seeing it against the black of space, but now all around their jet was a view of the Bowl. The gray-white mirror zones glinted with occasional sparkles from the innumerable mirrors that reflected light back on the star.

  Seen slightly to the side of the jet, the Knothole was a patch of dark beneath the filmy yellow and orange filigrees of the jet.
Redwing supposed that at the right angle, the whole jet looked like a filmy exclamation point, with Wickramsingh’s Star as the searing bright dot.

  Karl said, “See that bulge to the left? That’s the kink working toward the Knothole.”

  Ayaan Ali nodded. “Wow. To think we can kick this thing around!”

  “Trick is, we’re using the jet’s energy to do the work.” Karl smiled, a thin pale line. “It’s snaking like a fire hose held in by magnetic fields.”

  Ayaan Ali frowned. “When it hits the Knothole, how close to the edge does it get?”

  “Not too close, I think.”

  “You think?”

  “The calculations and simulations I’ve run, they say so.”

  “Hope they’re right,” Ayaan Ali said softly.

  They continued on the calculated trajectory as the ship sang with the torque. The helix gave them a side acceleration of about a tenth of a grav, so Redwing kept pacing the deck on a slight slant, inspecting the screens in the operating bays.

  He also watched how everyone was holding up. His crew had been refined so they fit together like carefully crafted puzzles, each skill set reinforcing another’s. That meant excluding even personal habits, like “mineralarians,” a faction who insisted that eating animals or even plants, which both cling to life, was a moral failing. Instead, they choked down an awful mix of sugars, amino and fatty acids, minerals and vitamins, all made from rocks, air, and water. That could never work while pioneering a planet, so the mineralarians got cut from the candidate list immediately. Same for genetic fashions. Homo evolutis were automatically excluded from the expedition as too untested, though of course no one ever said so in public. That would be speciesism, a sin when SunSeeker was being built, and in Redwing’s opinion, one of the ugliest words ever devised.

  But with all the years of screening, there were still wild cards in his deck. Smart people always had a trick or two you never saw until pressure brought it out. Managing people was not remotely like ordering from a menu.