Shipstar

by Benford, Gregory

  A hard jerk knocked her over. Memor struggled up to her feet and grasped for the harness, which had come unfastened. She just got it positioned when another twisting roll came through the ship and Asenath collided with her. “We are down!” she cried. “Get out!”

  “But the primate—”

  “Bemor is in charge, and he says we should go out and seek the central shelter. Come!” Asenath turned and fled.

  Memor hesitated. She wanted to know what the Ice Minds said. She started to settle in, restarting the harness configuration, when a voice bellowed at her, “Go! I will care for this.”

  She turned, and joy flooded through her at the sight of Bemor. The ship trembled, and a great wheezing came rattling down through the corridor outside. She hurried away.

  Within a few moments, Memor lost her footing in the dim light outside. She curled up and slammed to ground. Screams, shouts, crashes. The mountain’s firm rock snapped and cracked, heaved and buckled. The path to the shelter now had a great pit crossing it. Sound came from everywhere, and the ground seemed to be grinding against itself, sending gray dust plumes shooting up.

  A black curtain boiled across the sky. Within its churn, flashes snapped like eyes in a great beast. Ozone stung the howling breeze. With it came rain.

  Not rain—mud. Pellets of it, hard and dry on their skins, soft at their centers. They splatted down, rapping Memor’s skull. “From some body of water,” she said wonderingly, “thrown up by something hitting—”

  She extended her long tongue and tasted the warm rain, like water from a bath, and—salt. The great sea was pelting even this high fortress mountain. Memor folded her feathers close and tight, a raincoat of sorts.

  A pool of ink poured across the sky, layers of cloud sliding over each other as if liquid. The reassuring steady day had now turned to a dim night, one filled with sky fireworks far brighter now than the star and jet. Her view flashed in blue-white light and then vanished into the murk. “Bemor!” No answer. She got up and walked on legs like pillows through strobes of lightning.

  The flashes showed ahead a new problem—a crevasse yawned. It was a split in the crowning rock slab itself, showing fresh sharp edges. She could barely glimpse the far side in the lightning flashes. Far away. Even in this low gravity, nothing could leap it, certainly none of the bulky Folk. It blocked their way to the station.

  Memor looked around in anxious despair. Various staff and crew milled at the edge of this gap, looking desperate. She sniffed their acrid fears. Asenath was nowhere among them. Another blue-white flash allowed her to survey the gathering jam all along the broken path, jostling and shouting strident calls.

  Memor saw a new problem. Where were the Sil? And the primates?

  FORTY-THREE

  Redwing paced the bridge and watched the approaching shapes, flitting close now among the roiling turbulent knots. Moments ticked by, and the bridge was silent. Beth was ready to focus their exhaust as much as the tunable scoop mag fields allowed. And now there was something new and strange as well.

  Their hull resounded with a strange strumming symphony. The long notes were just at the edge of hearing but clear and distinct. Haunting low notes came like the beating of a giant heart, or of grand booming waves crashing with slow majesty upon a crystal beach, ceramic resonating instrument. Redwing felt the notes with his whole body, recalling a time when as a boy he stood in a cathedral and heard Bach on a massive pipe organ. The pipes sent resounding wavelengths longer than the human body. He did not so much hear notes as feel them as his body vibrated in sympathy. A feeling like being shaken by something invisible conveyed grandeur in a way beyond words.

  Beth said, “Whatever’s outside—and I can’t see a thing on these screens, just plasma and magnetic signatures—is trying to say something.”

  Karl said, “Their last attempt killed Clare.”

  “Yes, a horrible way to die. I … I wonder how whatever is outside makes sounds?” Beth said. “Oh—Cap’n, there’s a dense plasma knot headed for us.”

  “Focus it in on the prow fields,” Redwing said. “Can we snag it and narrow the exhaust, then aim at the first of those fliers?”

  “I … think … so.” Beth and the entire bridge crew were concentrated on their work, belted in tight, eyes following screens, hands hitting key commands. “The workaround on that digital algorithm block is coming up, running right. The Artilects are all over this problem, but they don’t like it.”

  “They don’t have to,” Redwing said.

  The strange deep notes running through the ship’s hull ceased. “They’re leaving us alone, maybe,” Beth muttered.

  The roiling knot of hot ions clamped within a nest of rubbery magnetic fields came slamming at them at over seven hundred kilometers a second. “Added to our speed, the impact will be well over a thousand kilometers a second,” Karl said. “Is the magscoop cinched in?”

  “As much as we can,” Beth said, voice high and lips tight.

  They watched the large blob come straight at them. It was far bigger than SunSeeker’s scoop, and they felt the surge, their heads snug against their chair braces. The ship groaned.

  Their internal diagnostics tracked the flow of dense plasma through the magnetic funnel out front, through the tapered neck that flushed it into the reaction chambers. There lived the steadily maintained, self-shaping field geometries that further compressed the plasma, added catalysts, and—the screens showed the pulsing glow in coiled doughnuts of prickly yellow—burned with fusion fire. This got expelled at the max temperature, into an opening throat that sent this starfire into the classic magnetic nozzle facing aft.

  But not exactly dead aft. Beth’s fingers flew over the complex command web. The fields slanted slightly, clamping down on the flow, shunting it sideways. The bridge surged again under this momentum change. The Ship Stability Artilect kept them from tumbling with extruded counterfields. Virulent plasma jetted out in a starboard cant. Beth altered the fusion geometry’s exit profile to include more shaping magnetic fields in the exhaust. The emerging bolt of hot plasma was like a finger scratching across the wave behind them.

  “With a little bit of windage…,” Beth mused, intent on the screens.

  A flier lay dead at the center of the bolt. When the exhaust struck it, the image wobbled, refracted by the complex play of forces, then sharpened. Fragments swirled where the flier had been.

  “Got it,” Beth said quietly.

  “Brilliant,” Redwing said. “The others—”

  “The second one is taking an evasive trajectory,” Karl said. “Moving away laterally.”

  Beth angled their exhaust and caught it before the flier could get away. Nobody cheered.

  “The third is dropping back,” Karl said.

  “We can’t fly much farther up the jet,” Redwing said. “They know that. We’ll reverse, make our turn.”

  “And that third one will be waiting for us,” Beth finished for him. “And it’ll be ahead of us.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Tananareve was grateful the walls of her confinement were soft but firm. Whatever was carrying her along did not trouble to make the trip pleasant. Jerks and jostles made it hard to keep focused on the sliding, cool voice of the Ice Minds in her mind, overlayered with their images of the lands where they lived.

  Starlight cast stretched pale fingers across the plain of rock and ice, where vacuum flowers dutifully pointed their parabolic eyes at the slow sweep of target suns. Around the base of the light-harvesters flowed the pearly fluids that were the commingled selves of the Ice Minds. How these blended thought and became coherent, she could not imagine.

  The moment hastens. We decided to revive ourselves wholly, to deal with this pressing problem.

  “What problem?”

  Your species. The Folk believed they could deal with you as a young and largely incompetent species, but we came to see this is not so.

  She thought of saying, Gee, thanks! but sarcasm might not translate in dealing with ali
ens. “Look, we have been imprisoned or chased ever since we got here.”

  The Folk are our— A pause. —our police. They also maintain at equilibrium. We are not at equilibrium now. They have failed to understand your kind. Now disruption proceeds.

  “What? Why? How?”

  Your ship has disturbed our jet. The Folk have ordered attacks on your ship. This is against our wishes. We cannot well communicate with your kind in your ship, as some of the Folk have prevented that. We wish you to speak directly to your ship through channels we shall soon open.

  “That’s a lot to take in. SunSeeker is in your jet? Wow.”

  Into her mind came an image of a small dark mote plowing upstream against a torrent of coiling plasma. The view backed away and she could see the jet slide sideways as it approached the Knothole. It surged over the Knothole restraining fields and into several life zones. Atmosphere belched out. Some thin girders holding the atmosphere zones apart fractured and fell. She was startled.

  Your mind we can approach. The Folk Attendant Astute Astronomer Memor made deep soundings of your neural labyrinths. These we use now. We wish you to speak with your own kind and then to serve to reassure the Diaphanous.

  Another alien? “Who are—?”

  Into her mind came images of fluid fluxes merging in eddies and turning in fat toroids, all in intricate yellow lines against a pale blue background. Somehow she knew these were larger than continents and fuzzy at their edges, where flow was more important than barriers. Intricate coils bigger than worlds, shattering explosions—all testified to the recombining energy of the fields.

  “These … live in the jet?” She could not imagine this, but lack of imagination had ceased to be a good argument here.

  They evolved in the magnetic structures that dot the skin of stars. These could knot off, twist, and so make a new coil of field. Embedding information in those fields led to reproduction of traits. From that sprang intelligence, or at least awareness.

  “But they don’t have bodies. How can they—?” Her grasp faltered.

  You and we do not witness the chaotic tumble of great plasma clouds between the stars. We all see nothing hanging between the hard points of incandescent light, and so falsely assume that space is somehow nothing. But evolution works there against the constant forces of dissolution.

  Tananareve knew a bit of general life theory. Brute forces seemed bound, inevitably, to yield forth systems that evolution drove to construct some awareness of their surroundings. It took billions of years to construct such mind-views. Those models of the external world could become more complex. Some models worked better if they had a model of … well, models. Of themselves. So came the sense of self in advanced animals. But in plasma and magnetic fields?

  The Diaphanous migrated on solar storms into the greater voids where we evolved. When the building of the Bowl began, it became essential to include them, as managers of the jet and of the star itself. Only by shaping the magnetic fields of star and jet can we move the Bowl, with constant attention to momentum and stability. Who else to govern magnetic machinery than magnetic beings?

  The Ice Minds sounded so reasonable, their conclusions seemed obvious. Before her inner eye played scenes of magnetic arches rising from stars, twisting and kinking to cut off and therefore give birth to new self-stabilized beings. She could sense, not merely see, waves lashing among the complex magnetic nets that surged in her mind—speech of a sort, maybe. Now the view in her mind shifted to the jet and the plight of SunSeeker, pursued by small ships of destructive intent.

  “You want to—what? Broker a deal? After hounding us across—”

  The Folk have failed us. Their defenses of the jet are ancient and many failed. Your ship did not even notice these, we are certain. The loosened jet now lashes across Life Zones and wreaks much ill. Yet those who bear down upon that ship now may well have to resort to a weapon we have vowed never to use. It could bring far more evil.

  That, at least, was a familiar concept. Calamity stacking up. “Okay, what do I do?”

  Let us override the Folk pathways. We shall connect you to your Captain Redwing.

  A ripple ran through her mind, a floating airy sensation that somehow mixed with colors flashing in what she felt as her eyes. Yet at the same time, she knew her eyes were open in the complete blackness of the cramped machine. Her eyes saw black, but her mind saw shifting bands of orange and purple, and on top of that—bursting yellow foam ran over an eggshell blue plain. Speckled green things moved on it in staccato rhythm. Twisting lines meshed there and wove into triangles where frantic energy pulsed. A shrill grating sound came with flashes of crimson.

  Then she saw Redwing. His image wobbled and she wondered how they could put that into her mind. “What are you?” His voice echoed as though he were in a chamber.

  “Captain, this is Tananareve. I’m in some device that, well, wants to speak with you. They are—let’s skip that, okay? The Bowl has a lot stranger aliens than we thought.”

  “How do I know you’re really Tananareve at all?”

  This question hadn’t occurred to her. “Recall that party we had before we went down to land? Feels like a long time ago.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.” He was standing on the bridge, and she could see Beth and others in the background, all looking at what had to be a—what? She tried to remember the bridge but failed. Maybe a camera? How did these aliens tap into internal ship systems?

  Into her head came the Ice Minds’ sliding, calm voice. We have dealt with what you term your Artilects. They are most agreeable.

  “You brought out a bottle of champagne, remember? You said it was for our first landfall at Glory, but what the hell, this was a landfall and so here it was.”

  “Damn!” Redwing’s face broadened into a grin. “It really is you. No video, but—welcome aboard, sort of.”

  “Captain, I’m conveying messages from, well, some aliens we didn’t know were here. They want you to stop fooling with the jet.”

  That comes later. For now tell your commander that they are in grave danger.

  She said that, but Redwing’s face turned away to look at a screen she could partially see. On it some flecks moved against a yellow weave of lines that she knew represented magnetic field contours.

  “You mean these guys coming up on us?”

  Your ship has permission to destroy them. But a weapon aboard one of them can erase your ship.

  “Captain, try to kill them right away. They have something—” She paused, not knowing what to say.

  It is the Lambda Gun, and will disrupt space-time near them.

  “It’s some sort of ultimate weapon,” she said.

  Redwing looked tired. He nodded. “Okay, stay on the line. We’ll try that—”

  The connection broke. His image dwindled and she was in darkness. Somebody was still carrying her around, and she felt a sudden drop. Thump. She heard distant shouts in a language she did not know and felt all at once very tired.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Cliff crouched with the others and watched the big blimp skyfish wallow on the mountaintop. Scampering crews had secured the huge thing at both ends and now were lashing the sides down with big cables. A heavy rain ate most of the light from the skyfish itself, dim glows of ivory that got drowned in the brilliant lightning flashes. Hammering raindrops scattered even the crashes of lightning into a blurred white murk.

  “Where’d the Folk go?” Irma shouted against the wind.

  “Into that big entrance!” Aybe pointed. “They had that thing they put Tananareve into with them.”

  Terry said, “Remember what threw us around, back in the skyfish? To make a shock like that, and blow sheets of rock off this mountain—that takes a lot of quake energy. But there aren’t quakes here—no plate tectonics.”

  Aybe swept rain from his eyes and jutted his chin out. “Look, the Bowl has a light, elastic underpinning, with not much simple mass loading. So an impact, from something thrown down here, that has a
lot of energy. Real quick it moves through the support structure. It came here, to this big slab of rock, a whole mountain—and knocked the bejeezus out of it.”

  “Just as we landed. What luck.” Irma huddled down. Cliff read her body language: the rain was warm, at least. It smacked down hard.

  Terry sniffed and said, “I’d like to get out of this damned rain.”

  As if on cue, white specks began smacking down on the flat rock plain around them. “Hail!” Aybe said.

  A dirty white ball the size of his fist hit Cliff in the side. He thought he felt a rib crack. The weather here was bigger and harder than he could deal with. Plus the darkness of the storm kept making him feel like sleeping.

  “Let’s get inside, out of this storm,” Cliff said. “Not the skyfish—who knows what’ll happen in there?”

  To his surprise, the others just nodded. They looked tired, and that made them compliant. He turned to Quert. “How can we get into their station?”

  Quert had been dealing with his Sil, who were doing what they usually did at a delay—resting. They were squatting and eating something they had gotten on the skyfish. The more anxious humans just milled around. “Let us lead,” Quert said.

  The Sil set off at an angle to the crack that had formed in the slab rock. In the confusion of abandoning the skyfish, they had all managed to slip away from the Folk and their many, panicked attendants. The darkness from huge black clouds that slid endlessly across their sky had sent the crew into jittery, nervous states, their legs jerking as they moved, eyes cast fearfully skyward. They had never known night, and this vast storm could not be common here.

  The crack finally ended several hundred meters away from the skyfish. The Sil simply walked around the end of it with complete confidence, and headed back toward a raised bump near the larger mound of the Folk station. As they all cautiously approached, the lightning came less often. Cliff looked back in the darkness and saw the skyfish dimly lit from inside, like some enormous orange Halloween lantern on its side. There was no one in the tube passageway that led downward. “Why?” Cliff asked Quert.