Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  As he watched an internal status board Fred was manning, Redwing felt a hard jar run down the axis. Ayaan Ali quickly corrected for a slew to their port side. The fusion chamber’s low rumble rose. It sounded, Redwing thought, a lot like the lower notes on an organ playing in a cathedral.

  “Exhaust flow is pulsing,” she said. “External pressure is rising behind us.”

  “Funny.” Redwing watched the screens intently. “Makes no sense.”

  “We’re getting back pressure.” Her hands flew over the command board. A long, wrenching wave ran through the ship. Redwing sat at last in a deck chair—just in time, as a rumbling sound built in the walls and surges of acceleration shook the ship.

  The aft picture worsened. They saw from two angles looking aft that the plume was bunching up, as if rippling around some unseen obstacle. The logjam thickened as they watched. Rolling waves came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.

  “Getting a lot of strange jitter,” Beth said. She was in uniform, crisply turned out.

  Redwing looked around. “It’s your sleep time.”

  “Who could sleep through this? Captain, it’s building up.”

  “You’re to take the chief pilot’s chair in three hours—”

  “Aft ram pressure is inverting profile,” Ayaan Ali said crisply. “Never happens, this. Not even in simulations.”

  “I can feel it,” Beth said. “This much vibration, the whole config must be—”

  “Too much plasma jamming back into the throat.” Ayaan Ali gestured to the screen profiling the engine, its blue magnetic hourglass-shaped throat. Its pinch-and-release flaring geometry was made of fields, so could adjust at the speed of light to the furious ion pressures that rushed down it, fresh from their fusion burn. But it could only take so much variation before snarling, choking—and blowing a hole in the entire field geometry. That would direct hot plasma on the ship wall itself, a cutting blowtorch.

  As they watched, the orange flow in its blue field-line cage curled and snarled. “It’s under pressures from outside the ship,” Ayaan Ali said, voice tight and high.

  “If it gets close to critical pressures, shut down,” Redwing said. He was surprised his own voice sounded calm.

  Beth said, “But we’ll—”

  “Go to reserve power if we have to,” Clare said.

  “That won’t last long,” Karl said. “And this external pressure on our magscoop could crumple it.”

  A long, low note rang through the ship—a full system warning. No one had heard that sound since training. The drive had not been off since they left Earthside.

  “I’m going to spin us,” Ayaan Ali said. “Outrace the pressure.”

  She ran the helm hard over and the magscoop responded, canting its mouth. Next she flared the magnetic nozzle at the very aft end of the ship, clearing it of knotted plasma. That took two seconds. Then she flexed the field back down and ran the fusion chamber to its max. Redwing could follow this, but her speed and agility were what made her a standout. They were all hanging on as the entire ship spun about its radial axis. Redwing closed his eyes and let the swirl go away from him, listening to the ship. The pops and groans recalled the drastic maneuvers they’d run SunSeeker through, during the years-long Oort cloud trials. He trusted his ears more than the screen displays of magnetic stresses.

  The rumbles ebbed away. When the spin slowed, he opened his eyes again. The screens showed milder conditions around the ship. “I broke us out of that magnetic pinch,” Ayaan Ali said. “We got caught in a sausage instability. Had to flex our scoop pretty hard.”

  Redwing recalled that meant the radial squeezing the jet sometimes displayed. Karl had said the jet narrowing looked like some sort of sausage mode, which took it through the Knothole and made it flare out once it was well beyond. But they weren’t that close to the Knothole. That was the point—the kink instability took a while to develop while the jet was arrowing in toward the Bowl.

  Redwing thought it strange that the pinch effect had been so strong. He asked Karl if the magnetic pressures on their magnetic nozzle could be so strong, but before Karl could answer he felt a prickly sensation play fretfully across his skin. Everyone looked around, sensing it also.

  Abruptly a yellow arc cut through the air above the deck. It crackled and snaked as it moved, but turned aside whenever it met a metal barrier. They all bailed out of their couches. Redwing lay flat on the deck as the snapping, curling discharge twisted in the air above him. The crackling thing snarled around itself. Sparks hissed into the air. Yellow coils flexed, spitting light. The discharge arched and twisted and abruptly split, shaped into an extended cup shape that spun.

  “It’s shaping the … the Bowl,” Beth said.

  The yellow arc made a bad cartoon, snapping and writhing, never holding true for long.

  Redwing felt his heart thump. “Something is out there. Making trouble for us.”

  Beth said, “Something we can’t see.”

  Redwing recalled that in their discussions he had asked, What could I be missing? Well, here it was.

  Beth had once said that flying into the jet could give them an edge, all right—but there were huge unknowns. Unknown unknowns were like a double-edged sword, she had said, with no handle. You didn’t know which way the edge would cut.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Asenath made a show of her entrance. She gave the assembled crew and servants a traditional bronze-golden chest display, then unfurled side arrow lances, ending in brilliant purple fan crescents. Her cycle-shaped tail laces coiled out with a snap, their flourish attracting attention first to tail, then with a flurry, to breast. Even the sub-Folk knew this strategy, though without nuance or passion. Crowds of them in the big bay of the skyfish clustered and tittered as Asenath presented. Memor watched with glazed eyes, Bemor at her side and the primate crouched nearby.

  The grand bang and rattle caught many eyes, so she followed with a sharp pop. Yellow patch flares then ignited their tips, flavoring the already fragrant air. Quills rattled at incessant pace, rolls and frissons, japes and jars. All this was a part of the eternal status-flurry that kept order across the great stretches of the Bowl.

  “What’s all this for?” the primate said.

  The impudence of this question, coming at the climax of Asenath’s display, angered both Memor and, she could see, Bemor. The primate was about to become very useful, so Memor decided to discipline her in full view of all. As she turned, Bemor clasped her shoulder in a restraining grasp. “Do not. It will disturb this creature more than you know.”

  “I have spent more time with her than—”

  “Than I have, yes. But indulge me this once.”

  Memor explained to the primate that such social rituals shored up the hierarchy needed to manage the entire Bowl society. Whenever the Folk visited a local venue of use, such as this skyfish, they reminded all of how the vast world worked, by showing ancient rituals. “Making the past come into their present, and so reside for their futures.”

  “It’s just a dance with feathers, incense, songs, and whatever drug is floating in this air,” Tananareve Bailey said. “I can sense it creeping in through my pores.”

  “I will be most surprised if it affects your chemistry. It is tuned for these Kahalla and their minions, plus adjacent evolved subspecies.”

  Tananareve coughed. “Stinks, too.”

  Memor rankled at this but said, “The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival, operating on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully, but the unit of survival is different at each of the six time ranges. On intervals of what you would term years, or orbital periods, the unit surviving is the individual. On a time scale of decades of orbitals, the unit is the family. On a scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation—such as this district of the Kahalla. On a time range of millennia, the unit is the culture. The Kahalla culture is widespread. So they may lend that gracious stability t
o vagrant districts. On a time scale of tens or more of millennia, the surviving unit is the species. Some cultures do survive that long, and we encourage that. On the range of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our Bowl.” Memor made a signifying fan-rattle to conclude and for punctuation gave a sweet aroma-belch from her neck.

  Bemor added, “That is the scale we now confront with you Late Invaders.”

  “Huh? We’re just stopping by.”

  Bemor huffed in amusement. “Not so. You are important at this juncture as we approach Glory.”

  “Who says?”

  “The Ice Minds,” Memor injected, though she knew the primate did not know the term, much less the substance.

  Asenath finished and resumed command of this skyfish with quick, darting orders. Squads rushed off to prepare for battle, a rolling bass note summoned crew to stations, and an electric intensity shot through the air—a zippy ion augmentation to stimulate. A wall flushed from its solemn gray to a stunning view of the region the skyfish commanded.

  Needles of spiral rock forked up, moss-covered and home to many flapping species. The skyfish had recently fed there, from server species that brought arrays of food to be easily ingested as the skyfish moored on the peaks. These erections stood beside bays and lagoons, where waves reflecting the jet and star winked up at them. Here and there in the complex landscape, white snakes curved, highways like lines drawn on a lush green paper.

  To the side, fluttering fast, was a silvery mote. Their target, just as the Kahalla had said.

  “What’s the battle?” Tananareve asked, watching the many minions scurry around.

  “We expect little fighting,” Memor said. “We are to capture the rest of you.”

  “Be careful,” Tananareve said. “They’ve been on the run here a long time. And they bite.”

  Memor found this amusing and sent a subtle fan-display of this to Bemor. “As if we had cause to fear them!” she said in Folk.

  “Yes, perhaps this primate has a sense of humor,” Bemor said, distracted, his big eyes looking into the distance.

  Suddenly Memor felt a tremor from her Undermind. It was a cool trickle of apprehension, not of actual fear, yet its icy fingers crept into her thinking. She paused a moment to do her inward-turning, letting the Undermind gradually open. She found a swamp. Fresh, gaudy notions and worries laced through fetid dark pools of ancient fears, all beneath a sullen sky. Trepidations wrapped around a locus, like tendrils of gray fog settling on a hill. The darting slips of anxiety seemed to orbit that hill. What was in it? Under it? She did not recall ever seeing this rising bulge before. Yet she knew it was not new, but old. She knew the bodies of congested uneasiness might be thrust down for a while, into the recesses of the Undermind. But this was a large bolus of somber dark emotions, and it drove fresh fears into her conscious layers.

  Yet she had no time for this now. Action drew near. “Asenath, how might we assist?”

  “Keep your Late Invader close. We will need her to interpret nuance and the other Invaders’ nonverbal signaling.”

  Bemor seemed uneasy. Memor gave him a flurry of feathers that bespoke concern, but he shook it off with a rustle. She saw from his distant gaze that he was tapped into his comm and studying information.

  He breathed quicker, a low rumble of thought. Memor respected Bemor’s ability to go beyond the Bowl’s constant data flood, mediated through its incessantly collecting local Analyticals. Those artificial minds monitored Bowl data on local scales, then sent it upward through an ascending pyramid of minds both wholly artificial and natural—though, of course, all minds had been bred and engineered for optimal performance, far long ago. Then the smoothed product of much mastication came to such as Bemor, to make sense nuanced of mind-numbingly complex situations. Digested data could help compensate for Folk overconfidence in their own intuitions, thus reducing the distortion of perception by desire. Natural minds were unable to deal with avalanches of data and mathematics, but were excellent at social cognition. Bemor could draw from his deep knowledge of history and the higher intellects. He was good at mirroring others’ emotional states, such as detecting uncooperative behavior, and at assigning value to things through emotion. Was he dealing with new ideas from the Ice Minds now? Something in his posture told Memor that he was deeply concerned about some matter far distant from their pursuit of these Late Invaders.

  Abruptly Bemor broke off and spat at Asenath, “We need those Late Invaders captured immediately. No delay! But handle them carefully. Loss of even one of their lives could endanger us all.”

  Asenath knew enough to take this command without question. She turned and ordered a nearby Kahalla, “Do not chance a glancing shot.”

  “But we planned—,” the Kahalla began.

  “Ignore all that came before. A shot to compel them might do damage to the tadfish. Especially if you miss by even a fraction.”

  “Madam, we have already dispatched the sharpwings,” the Kahalla said, going into a bowing posture of apology.

  “I did not so order!”

  “It was explicit in your attack plan, timed to occur as we first sighted the tadfish.”

  Memor could see that Asenath had no ready reply to this, so she turned away with a rebuking ruffle-display of red with scarlet fringes.

  They all moved close to the observation wall. The tadfish drew nearer and now a school of angular birds came forking in toward the silvery shape. They were big in wing and head. Memor knew these sharpwings as pack birds who could harry and bring down far larger prey.

  Bemor was alarmed enough to be distracted from his comm. “Stop them. Now.”

  Asenath obeyed. Memor knew that here, nearer to the Knothole, craft such as tadfish had a natural utility. Great circulating cells of warm air cycled across the zones and life used these free rides. Skyfish were a transport business in the long voyages and tadfish had been bred from them, long ago, to traverse the shorter routes. In its constant restless way, evolution had spawned species of sharpwings to prey on tadfish. Most often they swarmed the prey, as Memor now watched them do.

  Asenath shouted, “I said to turn them back!” to the Kahalla who backed away from her, head bent deep in contrition.

  “They do not respond,” the Kahalla whispered. “They are hirelings, and hard to deflect once engaged in their ancient battle rites.”

  “So they make for the meaty passengers,” Memor said dryly.

  “Their spirits are up,” the Kahalla said. “Difficult to countermand.”

  Now the sharpwings circled the tadfish. The great fish fired its hydrogen jets at them. Great plumes of ignited gas forked out and burned sharpwings black in an instant. Bodies tumbled away but more sharpwings came arrowing in. Their long jaws with razor teeth sliced at the working fins to disable navigation. The orange tongues licked more sharpwings.

  They were drawing nearer, and Asenath ordered external ears to pick up the battle sounds. Memor could make out the anguish cries of those being burned. Sharpwing song-calls also laced the air, vibrant and shrill. Beneath that came the deep bass roll of the tadfish’s agony. It echoed across the diminishing distance.

  Now sharpwings dove along the tadfish flanks, going for the gut. Their spiked wings ripped along and into the scaly flesh. It was, Memor reflected, as though the attackers were writing on the lustrous flesh their own messages, in long lines that soon brimmed red. These species had evolved to a stable predator–prey balancing, now governed by their betters—but only when their passions could be blunted.

  “Bring your lancing shots to bear,” Asenath ordered.

  “Please note, we cannot be so accurate at this range,” the Kahalla said. “I fear—”

  “Do it.” Asenath was stern. “Otherwise they will bring down the tadfish and devour its passengers.”

  The Kahalla did not attempt to argue. It turned and gave orders. Over the amplified booming, shrieks, and cries, Memor could scarcely hear the sharp psssstt! of the pellet guns. These hit the sharpwings with sh
attering blows. Next came the rattling laser batteries, picking off the great birds with quick stabs of green brilliance. All these weapons had to hit the sharpwings as they banked away from the tadfish, to avoid wounding it, so those sharpwings already close in on the attack escaped for a while. Orange jets from the tadfish belly licked at flights of the sharpwings. Squawks and screeches rose in an anguished crescendo. The thuds of pellets firing slowed as targets became scarce. A rain of blackened and shattered bodies tumbled, turning slowly in the long descent toward the green forests and glinting lakes below.

  The remaining few sharpwings broke off the attack and flapped away, sending mournful long songs forth. “Very good,” Asenath said.

  “Let us escort the tadfish down, then,” Memor said. “We can land and take possession.”

  Asenath conferred with the Kahalla, then turned to address Bemor, ignoring Memor. “We can swallow such a small tadfish. No need to land. We can continue to higher altitudes and catch the fast winds toward the upper Mirror Zone.”

  Bemor sent approval-displays, but his eyes did not move from his comm plate. “Good. Do so. We need the other Late Invaders.”

  Memor felt shunted aside. She had been pursuing these vagrant primates for a great while, and now Bemor—and even worse, Asenath—would get credit for their apprehension. But at least it was done. “Why are they so useful? I am happy to have them in hand, of course, but—”

  Bemor gave a low, bass growl. “The Ice Minds command it. Events proceed elsewhere. A crisis threatens. We must get the primates.”

  “We have this one here—” A gesture at Tananareve.

  “We may need more. The Ice Minds want to use them to converse in an immersion mode.”

  Memor stirred with misgivings. Her Undermind was fevered and demanded to be heard, but there was no time now. “Immersion? That can be destructive.”

  Tananareve seemed to be following this, but wisely said nothing.