Raven's Children

by Sabrina Chase

  “What is that?” he asked, pleased that his voice remained even.

  Ennis smiled, the resemblance to a wolf once again flitting across Harrington’s mind. “Meet Radersent. That’s his ship we have.”

  “Dear God.” Without conscious thought he went to the viewport, drawn irresistibly. His eyes drank in every detail, every alien feature, wondering what the crab saw in turn. It appeared to be holding some kind of device.

  “More send,” a synthetic voice said, coming from a tangled mass of equipment on a bench.

  “Guess he wants ta know who you are,” a man with stiff dark hair said. “What’s the name?”

  “This is Jim Perwaty,” Ennis said. “He and Radersent were shipwrecked in the same location.”

  Harrington put a hand against the wall to steady himself. They were talking to the crab. “Tell him my name is Harrington.” Questions jostled in his mind. He couldn’t decide which one to ask first.

  “You the one who’s gonna go tell Fleet?”

  Perwaty’s question released his paralysis. “Are you mad? How could I possibly leave now?”

  Ennis turned on him, eyes blazing. “Because if you don’t, the war could drag on until we’re all dead of old age. Dammit, that’s priceless information! He knows the ship and he’s willing to talk to us. Fleet needs this, and you are the only means we have to get it to them.”

  “There must be another way.” This was too cruel. What could be better than the chance to interview a crab? How could they even think of asking him to give that up?

  Cameron stirred. “If I show up anywhere legal, Toren or Fleet will grab me and I have other responsibilities right now. Ennis just has Toren to worry about, but he can’t go either. We need this to get to the right person the first time, because we might not get a second chance. This is too important to screw up.”

  The synthetic voice spoke again. “Query, where picture humans?”

  Cameron gave Perwaty a quizzical look. “He means the kids,” he explained. “They like using the display with him.”

  “They’ll be back as soon as we leave,” she said. “Which depends on Mr. Harrington.”

  He took a deep breath. “You have to understand, you are asking me to turn my back on the best story I have ever had. You’ll hand him and the ship over to Fleet and they won’t let me get near either of them again. I have wanted nothing more than this—‌and you want me to leave?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” she said, a note of regret in her voice. She exchanged a look with Ennis. “And it’s just the ship for now.”

  “Then I want to come back,” he said forcefully. “If he’s not going with the ship, I want to return and stay with you until he does leave. Fleet isn’t the only one with a need for information. This is the first alien intelligence we’ve encountered, and the rest of humanity deserves to know what we’ve been facing all this time.”

  Ennis made a sharp, negating gesture. “That’s not possible. Fleet—‌”

  “Fleet will have plenty of time to figure out how to deal with Mr. Harrington’s plans for publication,” Cameron interrupted. “If he’s on my ship he’s not going to have much opportunity to spread the news.”

  Ennis stared at her, his jaw working, then threw up his hands. “They aren’t going to like this.”

  “That’s their problem. It sounds fair to me.” The tone was one of finality.

  “Right, then,” Harrington said brightly into the brittle stillness between them. “What exactly am I supposed to tell them?”

  Ennis hesitated, then took out the datatab folder he’d had at the meeting place, only now it had several more tabs. “There’s a list of locations here,” he said, tapping one with a blue border. “You have access to a data account with bounceback?”

  “A limited one.”

  “It will do. Give us the address. We’ll send you a message with the number of one location on that list. The ship will be there.”

  Very cautious. Quite proper, under the circumstances. He entered the address into Ennis’s datapad.

  “Query, Harrington child Roberts?” said the mechanical voice.

  The crab was standing so close to the viewport he could see the tendrils on either side of his narrow head shifting among themselves, like restless snakes.

  “It would appear something is being lost in translation,” Harrington observed, after recovering from his surprise.

  “He asks that about everybody,” Perwaty said dismissively. “Never have figured out why.”

  “Everything ready?” Cameron asked. Ennis nodded, and she tapped at the broad gold bracelet on her wrist. “Ready, Kilberton?” She paused as the answer was relayed, then indicated the door. “OK, let’s go. Sooner you leave the sooner you can come back,” she said, looking at Harrington.

  They both saw him out the hatch. He was aware of a tense feeling in the air, and they seemed hurried suddenly. The crewman was still on guard, weapon drawn. Harrington caught the glance between Cameron and the guard, a minute shake of the head that followed.

  “Keep it safe,” Ennis said softly.

  “I give you my word,” Harrington replied. The hatch opened.

  He was not surprised when the dock indicator changed to red seconds after the hatch was closed.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  It floated in the sargasso, starlight reflecting off beams that should never have been visible. That has got to be the ugliest ship in creation. Moire gave the viewscreen another glance, shuddered, and turned back to Raven’s realspace controls.

  “Tell me more, Gren.”

  There was a pause. Gren was on board the modified ship, moving it into position.

  “Main personnel hatch is standard, and a couple of emergency ones. Forward docking controls, too. Cargo hatches won’t match anything. Got more space for cargo than Raven, but it’s scattered all over. We can get the crab box in, though.”

  “Will it fly?” She couldn’t help asking. Gren had a gift; she trusted his judgment implicitly. It was just looking at it. The front section, about a third of the ship, looked more or less intact. What had been the ore–‌hauler’s main cargo area was gone. Only the outer structural ribs and the gravitational nodes remained. The back end was open. It looked like a skeletal fish.

  “Everything tests out. I tuned it to balance with the crab ship inside, since we’re going to do a slipstream tow.”

  She shuddered again. Well, no guts, no glory. That was the only way to get the ship out, unless they suddenly had a communication breakthrough and translated the crab pilot’s manual.

  “OK, we’ll be there in a few minutes. Guess we’ll give it a try.”

  Ennis had come on the bridge while she was talking, and his gaze strayed to the viewscreen. His eyes widened, and his face sagged with fascinated horror.

  “Is that…‌?”

  “Yup.” Moire made a minor adjustment to the board. “Gren is proud as punch. That was not an easy order I gave him.”

  A grin flashed across his face. “I was just thinking…‌Wernicki at Lambert Station—‌I told you about her, right?”

  Moire nodded. “If it wasn’t in the manual, it didn’t exist? She’d better not see this. She’d have a seizure.”

  “Exactly.”

  The skeletal ship occupied all of the forward screen now, and she started the docking procedure to the one functional hatch.

  She took a breath and forced herself to speak. “Gren told me they found a ten–‌person escape pod, intact. Just needed some recharging and routine maintenance. He thinks there’ll be no problem tucking it in that tunnel to the crab ship hatch for your quarters.”

  It was hard, watching his face change when he understood. For a moment he looked like the old Ennis, grim and joyless. She hated that.

  “We should get Radersent to fix those melting doors of his so humans can open them. Won’t do much good to hand off a working crab ship if they have to use a can opener to get in,” she said, with a cheerfulness she did not feel. It worked; a re
luctant smile crossed his face.

  “You use the strangest expressions sometimes,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m going to have to find a reference for all these archaic terms.”

  All the docking pinlights were green. She got up and stretched. “Better talk to Gren. We might not be able to get to the crab ship when we’re in drive.”

  The interior of the tow ship was still littered with pieces of equipment and other gear. Gren listened to her question with his usual gloomy expression. As she had feared, the gravitational weirdnesses would cut off access to the crab ship.

  “Anything that might disturb the field would be bad. If it was one of ours we might be able to do it, but…‌” Gren rubbed his chin. “It’s risky.”

  “Yeah, we’ve got enough of that right now. Guess we’d better have Radersent get to work on the door controls while we get the ships lined up.”

  Gren grunted. “He’ll have plenty of time, then.”

  He was right. It took over a day of careful, painful maneuvering to get the tow ship, now named Frankenstein, backed up to capture the crab ship. Gren had to turn off the gravity nodes until the ship was perfectly aligned, since otherwise the field would have pulled the crab ship in and damaged Frankenstein. Even with Kilberton in Raven and somebody else in the scout to help guide, it was a frustrating process, but finally everything was arranged to Gren’s satisfaction and he slowly brought the nodes on line.

  As soon as it was clear the crab ship was in place, Moire immediately went to sleep while Gren did his final alignment checks and rested up himself. He and the assistant engineer would be just as busy as Kilberton and herself once they started up, since the gravitics would need constant attention.

  Then it was time.

  “OK, folks, check your shipsuits. This is the real thing,” Moire said over the general shipwide channel. “Drive will start up in three minutes.” She powered up the realspace drives, taking both ships well away from the main area of the sargasso.

  The ramp–‌up was agonizingly slow, but smoother than she had expected. Gren called out the field changes he was making as they went to full field. She had her lineup ready, fighting the growing influence of the anomaly that had caused the sargasso in the first place.

  “Full field,” Gren snapped. “Full field, uniform throughout.”

  “Acknowledge full field,” she replied. “Drive engaging.”

  She knew something was horribly wrong the instant she hit the switch. She could feel the field shift, in that same bone–‌deep way she always felt the change from webspace to real. One hand slapped the emergency dropout as the other fought to keep the control on target, and she saw a flash of blinking red pinlights.

  “Gren! Get that damn field stable!”

  He didn’t respond for a second, making her panic. “Field is stable—‌at least, it would be if we hadn’t just lost two nodes. What happened?”

  Moire glanced at the ship status board. “Looks like we took some damage. No hull breaks, though.” She checked their position. Maybe if they had gotten away from the sargasso in that brief pulse, they could start up again and get away. “Somebody go out in the two–‌seater and check it out.”

  They were closer to the sargasso than when they started. That was impossible. She had a lineup; she’d done it many, many times before. The anomaly might be a pull on them, but it should have just slowed them down, not pulled them back.

  She stared at the scanner, hoping for enlightenment. Maybe they’d have to take it out farther in realspace, then try it again. Farther from the center of the sargasso.

  She leaned forward. The scanner was showing something there, and it wasn’t a ship. At least, not a human one. It must be the oldest craft caught by the sargasso. A pity she’d have to wait to check it out.

  A signal pinged for attention—‌the outside check. “Two of the ribs are damaged,” a breathless voice announced. “Looks like the crab ship is getting loose.”

  They managed to get the crab ship sort of back in alignment, and Moire returned them to their original location, closer to the repair station. Gren stumped up to the bridge, angry that his careful work had been damaged.

  “OK, something seems to have affected the crab ship,” Moire said wearily after much discussion. “So lets ask the crab.” She wondered how they were ever going to get something as abstract as a webspace gravitational anomaly across, but it turned out they didn’t have to.

  “Models?” Moire asked, looking at the roughly made objects her son handed her. She looked in the crab’s quarters. The crab had an assortment of his own, much more finely made. Some seemed to represent human things, but with an alien cast.

  “He made some, to help with words,” Alan said. “We can say more now.”

  They also could feed in vid signal to the display. This didn’t always work, and Moire suspected the crab didn’t see the display like humans did. If it was a simple, black–‌and–‌white diagram, though, he could usually make it out. George had developed a real talent for translating vid stills into these diagrams. They made several attempts to explain the problem without success, until George drew the outside view of Frankenstein and the crab ship.

  Radersent extended his head in the way they now knew indicated interest. “Query, go star–‌star ship break?” the synthetic voice Perwaty had added to the diagnostic scanner output said.

  “That’s web travel, we think,” Perwaty explained. Moire nodded, and Perwaty sent the reply.

  An absolute torrent of words spilled from the output. Moire blinked, stunned, and she could see from the reactions of the others they were equally astonished.

  “Star–‌star crab ship near (undefined) break. Past, Radersent she and Radersent crab go. Past, (undefined) dead Radersent she and dead small–‌ship. (Undefined) dead crab. No see crab ship star–‌star (undefined) not break. Human ship not dead. Past, Past, (undefined) dead crab.”

  Radersent's head was pulled in now, and only his tendrils were moving on the communication device. He was very upset about something.

  “Anybody have any idea what he just said?” Moire asked after trying unsuccessfully to puzzle it out.

  “I’m guessing something like ‘that won’t work,’ which we already know,” Perwaty said dryly. “But he’s saying something about him and not being able to go anywhere.”

  Moire frowned. “We already know the anomaly got him, too. He’s saying something about it killing crabs, right? Maybe that’s why he’s all by himself. Still doesn’t help us, though.”

  Perwaty nodded, and sent another message. Moire saw “[QUERY]FIX” flash across the screen.

  Radersent responded immediately. His tendrils picked up a model of the crab ship. One set of tendrils held it in front of his long, bony face. The others opened up in a cone shape, very much like the ribs of Frankenstein. He held it so the crab model ship was just like George’s diagram, then a twitch of the tendrils made it fly away.

  “Break,” said his synthetic voice.

  Moire grinned. Radersent understood what had happened, all right. The crab went and got the model again. This time he held it so the tendrils enclosed the entire ship.

  “No see crab ship,” he said. “(undefined) no see. No dead crab ship. See human ship. Star–‌star yes.”

  Moire felt suddenly cold. Maybe this was just bad translation, but he seemed to be talking about something that deliberately attacked crab ships. When he talked about damage, he used the word “break”. Now he was using the term that meant “kill”.

  “So we just need to extend the field, is what he’s saying,” Gren commented, breaking his long silence. “That makes sense.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Moire waved it away. “I got that. Do you hear what else he’s saying?” She held out a hand for the scanner, and Perwaty let her take it. [QUERY]RADERSENT SHIP BREAK.

  “No,” said the voice. “Radersent ship dead.”

  MORE SEND. SHOW.

  The crab started assembling his models and arranging the
m carefully on a flat surface.

  “It’s going to take at least two weeks to fix the damage and extend the nodes,” Gren said while Radersent worked. “Is that going to….‌” he hesitated, glancing at Ennis.

  “Yes.” They were already dangerously close to the deadline when she would have to get to Bone to pick up the construction crew. Two weeks was well over the limit, and that assumed it would work the first time. “We’re going to have to come back. Again,” she said with a sigh. “Hey, what’s Radersent doing now?”

  The models were mixed in with a sea of bits of junk now. There was a pattern forming, confirmed when he began to name the models. “Helios,” Radersent said, his one working forelimb indicating one. “Radersent ship.”

  It was the sargasso, at least this section. Then he put one silvery lump at the far end. “(Undefined). Past, dead Radersent ship. Past, past, dead crab ship. Bring human ship.”

  The location was near the center of the sargasso. Where she had seen the unrecognizable object at the edge of the scanner range. This made no sense. The sargasso existed because of a gravitational anomaly, and anomalies had no realspace presence at all. There was nothing to see. She didn’t remember all the details; they knew more about the effects than the theory in her day. Which meant it might not be a real anomaly, but something very different.

  [QUERY]MACHINE. She pointed at the silver lump on Radersent’s display table

  “Yes.”

  [QUERY]CRAB MACHINE.

  “Machine yes. Crab machine no. Human machine no. Dead, dead, dead.” One forelimb swiped suddenly at the silver lump, sending it off into the shadows. Whatever it was, Radersent didn’t like it.

  “Oh shit,” Moire whispered. “More aliens.”

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Kolpe felt like he was going to explode. The Toren enforcer ship that had brought them to Bone was too small, especially when he had to share space with Plymson. Heyt, the commander of the ship and its complement of armed personnel, treated Kolpe and his mission as a minor annoyance, something not to be taken very seriously.

  “Are you expecting me to attack that ship?” Heyt asked, pointing at the screen where the larger of the two ships that had arrived was picking up cargo containers from another ship, the one they had been tracking.