Heaven's Reach u-6 Read online

  Then, with an abrupt display of unleashed energy, Mudfoot leaped into the crowd of floating words, flailing left and right with agile forepaws, slashing sentences to ribbons, knocking whole paragraphs awry before Streaker’s artificial g-field yanked him to a crouched landing on the metal deck. At once, he swiveled with a hunter’s delighted yowl and readied another pounce.

  “Don’t save those changes!” I shouted at the autoscribe with unaccustomed haste. “Make all text intangible!”

  My command made Mudfoot’s second leap less satisfying. Robbed of semisolidity, the words of my journal were now mere visual holograms, unaffected by physical touch. His second assault slashed uselessly while he passed through ghostly symbols, barking with disappointment.

  Moments later, though, Mudfoot perched once more on my right shoulder, as Huphu glared at him lazily from the left. Both of them preened for a while, then began rubbing my throat, begging for an umble.

  “You don’t fool me for a dura,” I muttered. But there seemed little else to do except repair the damage, finish up this journal entry, and then give them what they wanted.

  I was doing that — singing for two noor and a herd of mesmerized glaver — when the Niss Machine barged in with a message.

  I still have no idea why the snide robotic mind keeps interrupting this way, without preamble or greeting, despite my complaints that it grates against a hoon’s nature. And the tornado of spinning, twisted lines somehow hurts my eyes. Ifni, it’s hard enough getting used to the idea of talking computers, even though I used to read about them in classics by Nagata and Ecklar. Can it be that the Niss has some sort of family relationship with Mudfoot? A connection via the Tymbrimi, would be my guess. You can tell by their disdain for courtesy and knack for putting people off balance.

  “I bring a message from the bridge crew,” announced the whirling shape. “Although I see little good coming out of it, they want to see one or two of your charges up there. You must bring the creatures along at once. A crew member is already coming to replace you here.”

  Gently putting Huphu down on the metal deck, I gathered Mudfoot in a carrying hold, comfortably cradling him in the crook of one arm, so he could not writhe free. He seemed content, but I was taking no chances. The last thing I needed was for him to dash off in some random direction on our way to the bridge, wreaking havoc in the galley, or hiding in some storeroom till Streaker was blasted to smithereens.

  “Won’t you tell me what it’s all about?” I asked.

  The abstract lines appeared to shrug.

  “For some reason, Dr. Baskin and Sage Sara Koolhan seem to think the beast may speak up, at an opportune moment, helping us deal with potentially hostile aliens.”

  I umbled a deep, rolling laugh.

  “Well they got hopes! This Ifni-slucking tytlal is gonna talk when it wants to, and the universe can go to hell till then, for all it cares.”

  The lines twisted tighter than ever.

  “I am not referring to the tytlal, Alvin. Please put the little rascal down and pay attention.”

  “But …” I shook my head, human style, confused. “Then, who …?”

  The Niss hologram bent toward the far wall, making an effort to point.

  “You are requested to bring up one or two of those.”

  I stared at a crowd of goggle-eyed cretins. Mewling, nosing through their own revolting feces … “blessed” with sacred forgetfulness, immune to worry.

  So this hurried journal entry ends on a note of blank surprise.

  They want me to bring glavers to the bridge.

  Lark

  HE STUMBLED DOWN TWISTY, INTESTINELIKE corridors, fleeing almost randomly through the vast ship, pausing occasionally to rest his head against a squishy bulkhead and sob. Cloying Jophur scentomeres mingled with his own stench of self-disgust and grief.

  I should have stayed with her.

  Lark’s unwashed body, still sticky with juices from that dreadful nursery, kept moving despite fatigue and hunger, driven on by occasional sounds of pursuit. But his mind seemed mired, with all its fine edges dulled by regret. Repeatedly, he tried to rouse from this depression and come up with a way to fight back.

  You’ve got to think. Ling is counting on you!

  In fact, Lark wasn’t even sure where to go looking for his lover. His mental image of the Polkjhy was a blur of tangled passages linking odd-shaped chambers, more chaotic than the hivelike innards of a qheuen dam. Anyway, suppose he did find his way back to the prison section, the vault where he and Ling had made their getaway just a few days ago. By now the place would be triply guarded. By Jophur ring stacks, robots, and the tall human renegade.

  Rann will be expecting me. He knows exactly what I’m thinking … that I want to go charging to her rescue.

  Alas, Lark was no man of action like his brother, Dwer. The odds paralyzed him. He was too good at envisioning drawbacks and potential flaws in each tentative plan.

  As long as I’m free, Ling can still hope. I have no right to throw that away by rushing into a trap. First priority has to be a place where I can rest … maybe find something to eat … then come up with a plan.

  Using the purple ring as a universal passkey, Lark inspected various rooms along his meandering path, hoping to find a tool or information he could use against the enemy. Some compartments were empty. Others were occupied by Jophur crew, but these paid little heed to the distraction of an opening or closing door. Like their traeki cousins on Jijo, Jophur tended to be task-focused, reacting slowly to interruptions.

  Only once did Lark fail to duck out of sight in time.

  He was poking through a laboratory filled with coiled, transparent glassy tubes that flickered and hissed with roiling vapors. Abruptly Lark found his path blocked by a massive ring stack. It had just turned away from an instrument console, and all sensor toruses were active.

  Flatulent smoke bursts vented from the Jophur’s peak, indignant to spy an intruding human. Fatty toruses flickered with shadowy patterns of light and dark, expressing surprised rage.

  If he had paused to think, Lark would never have had the courage to lunge toward that intimidating mass, thrusting his only weapon past a dozen reaching tentacles. Tendrils converged to surround him, slapping his shoulders.

  Master rings make Jophur ambitious and decisive, thought a bookish corner of his mind. But thank Ifni they’re like traeki in other ways. Their sluggish nerves were never tested by carnivores on a savannah.

  But Jophur had other advantages. Throbbing feelers coiled around his neck and arms, even as soporific juices sprayed from the throbbing torus in his hands, the final gift of gentle Asx.

  This time there was no reaction from the huge, tapered tower. Its grippers tightened, drawing Lark toward glistening, oily flanks.

  He felt the purple ring flex and emit three more sprays, each one a different pungent fetor that made his eyes sting and his throat gag … till constricting pressure round his chest made it impossible to breathe at all.

  The trick may not work anymore. They may have spread the word. Distributed counteragents …

  All at once, the greasy titan shivered. The nooses tensed … then slackened, going limp as the Jophur settled its great mass to the floor, discharging a low sigh and rank smells. Lark nearly strangled on his first ragged breath. Shrugging free of the horrid embrace, he stumbled away, sucking for fresh air.

  They’re catching on. Each time the purple ring fools one of them, they share information and antidotes. Even Asx couldn’t anticipate every possible scent code the Jophur might use.

  The big stack seemed quiescent now, but Lark worried it might have put out an alarm. Swiftly, he scanned the rest of the chamber for co-workers. But the creature was alone.

  Lark was about to head back to the corridor when he stopped, intrigued to see that the Jophur’s console was still active. Holo displays flickered, tuned to spectral bands his eyes found murky at best. Still, he approached one in curiosity — then growing excitement.
/>   It’s a map! He recognized the battle cruiser’s oblate shape, cut open to expose the ship’s mazelike interior. It turned slowly. Varied shadings changed slowly while he watched.

  I wish I knew more about Galactic tech. Before the Rothen-Danik expedition came to Jijo, computers had been legendary things one read about in dusty tomes within the Biblos archive. Even now, he saw them partly through two centuries of fear and half-superstition. Of course, even the star-sophisticate Ling would have trouble with this unit, designed for Jophur use. So Lark chose not to touch any buttons or sense plates.

  Anyway, sometimes you can learn a lot just by observing.

  This bright box over here … I know I’m in that quadrant of the ship. Could it signify this room?

  The symbols were in efficient Galactic Two, though he found the specific subdialect technical and hard to interpret. Still, he managed to locate the security section where he and Ling had been imprisoned when they were first brought aboard on Jijo. A deep, festering blue rippled outward from that area and spread gradually “northward” along the ship’s main axis, filling one deck at a time.

  A search pattern. They’ve been driving me into an ever smaller volume … back toward the control room.

  And away from Ling.

  From their slow, methodical progress, he estimated that the hunter robots would reach this chamber in less than a midura. Though it was a daunting prospect, that realization actually made Lark feel much better, just knowing where he stood. It also gave him time to seek a flaw in their strategy by studying the map for a while.

  If hunger pangs don’t muddle my brain first. Unfortunately, the pursuers were also herding him farther from the one place he knew of where a human could find food.

  Looking around the laboratory, he found a sink with a water tap. Ling had called it a constant on almost any vessel of an oxygen-breathing species. The fluid was distilled to utter purity, and so tasted weird. But Lark slurped greedily — trying to wash myriad complex ship flavors out of his mouth — before returning once more to peruse the data screens.

  Other than the ship map, most of the displays were enigmatic — flickering graphs or cascades of hurtful color, impossible to comprehend. Except for one showing a black field speckled with glittering points of light.

  Ling and I saw something like this in the Jophur command center. She called it a star chart, showing where we are in space, and what’s going on around us.

  It still made Lark queasy to picture himself hurtling at multiples of lightspeed through an airless void. Unlike Sara, he had never dreamed of leaving Jijo, where his life’s work was to study the life-forms of a richly varied world. Only war and chaos could have torn him away from there. Only his growing ardor for Ling compensated for the loss and alienation.

  And now she was gone from his side. It felt like being amputated.

  Staring at the display — a black vista broken by a few sparkling motes — he felt utterly daunted by the distance scales, in which vast Jijo would be lost like a floating speck of dust.

  One pinpoint glowed steady in the center — the Jophur dreadnought, he guessed. And a great, yarnlike ball in the lower left must be a flaming star. But without his cosmopolitan friend to interpret, Lark was at a loss to decipher other colored objects shifting and darting in between. GalTwo symbols flashed, but he lacked the experience to make sense of them.

  In frustration, Lark was about to turn away when he noticed one slim fact.

  That big dot over there, near the star … it seems to be heading straight for us.

  I wonder if it’s going to be friendly.

  Emerson

  NOTHING COULD FEEL MORE NATURAL OR familiar than looking at a spatial chart. It was like regarding his own face in the mirror.

  More familiar than that, since Emerson had just spent a dazed year on a primitive world, gaping blankly at his reflection on crude slabs of polished metal, wondering about that person staring back at him, with the gaping hole above one ear and the dazed look in his eyes. Even his own name was a mystery till a few weeks ago, when some pieces of his past began falling together.

  … scattered memories of wondrous Earth, and a youth spent targeting himself, with a solemn firmness that awed his parents, toward the glittering lure of five galaxies.

  … his life as an engineer, privileged to receive the very best training, learning to make starships plunge between mysterious folds of spacetime.

  … the lure of adventure — a deep voyage with the famous Captain Creideiki — an offer he could never refuse, even knowing it would lead past the jaws of Hades.

  All that, and much more, was restored when Emerson learned how to beat down the savage pain that kept memory imprisoned, regaining much that had been robbed from him.

  But not the best part. Not the rich, textured power of speech. Not the river of words that used to lubricate each subtle thought and bear knowledge on graceful boats of syntax. Without speech his mind was a desert realm, devastated by agnosia as deep as the crippling wound in the left side of his skull.

  At least now Emerson understood his maiming had been deliberate, an act so malicious he could scarcely grasp its boundaries or encompass the scale of revenge needed to make things right.

  Then, unasked and unexpected, it happened once again. Some mix of sense and emotion triggered a shift inside, releasing a sudden outpouring. All at once he imagined an enveloping swirl of soft sound — reverberations that stroked his skin, rather than his ears. Echoes that he felt, rather than heard.

  With each turning

  Of the cycloid,

  In dimensions

  Beyond number

  Comes a tumble

  Of those cuboids,

  Many sided,

  Countless faces—

  Ever unfair … never nice.

  Watch them spin on,

  So capricious,

  White and spotted,

  Always loaded,

  Yet you, hopeless,

  Reach to gamble,

  Tossing for a

  Risky payback—

  Smack the haughty! Ifni’s dice.…*

  Emerson smiled faintly as the Trinary ode played out, using circuits in his battered brain that even the vicious Old Ones never touched with their knives. Like the groaning melody of a Great Dreamer, it resonated whole, with tones of cetacean wisdom.

  And yet, he knew its promise was but a slender reed. Hardly much basis for hope. As if the universe would ever really give him a chance at vengeance! Life was seldom so accommodating. Especially to the weak, the harried and pursued.

  Still, Emerson felt grateful for the gift of strange poetry. Though it wasn’t an engineer’s language, Trinary excelled at conveying irony.

  He watched through a broad crystal window as neodolphins raced back and forth, traversing Streaker’s water-filled bridge with powerful tail thrusts, leaving trails of fizzing, hyper-oxygenated water in their wake. Other crewfins lay at ramplike control stations, their sleek heads inserted in airdomes while neural cables linked their large brains to computers and distant instrumentalities.

  The crystal pane vibrated against his fingertips, carrying sonar clicks and rapid info-bursts from the other side. The music of cooperative skill. A euphony of craft. These were the finest members of a select crew. The Tursiops amicus elite. The pride of Earth’s Uplift campaign, recruited and trained by the late Captain Creideiki to be pilots without peer.

  The dolphin lieutenant, Tsh’t, crisply handled routine decisions and relayed orders to the bridge crew. Beside her, chief helmsman Kaa lay shrouded by cables, his narrow jaw open and sunken eyes closed. Kaa’s flukes slashed as he steered the starship like an extended part of his own body. Thirty million years of instinct assisted Kaa — intuition accumulated ever since his distant ancestors ceded land for a fluid realm of three dimensions.

  Behind Emerson, the Plotting Room was equally abuzz. Here dolphins moved on rollers or walkers — machines that offered agility in dry terrain, making them seem even m
ore massively bulky next to a pair of slender bipeds. And yet, those humans called the tune, directing all this furious activity. Two women whose lives had been utterly different, until circumstances brought them together.

  The two women Emerson loved, though he could never tell them.

  Thrumming engine sounds changed pitch as he sensed the nimble ship brake harder to fight its hyperbolic plunge, clawing against the drag of a giant star, changing course in another of Gillian Baskin’s daring ventures.

  Emerson had paid a dear price for one of her earlier hunches, in that huge, intricately structured place called the Fractal World — a realm of snowy icicles whose smallest branchlets spread wider than a planet. But he had never resented Gillian’s mistake. Who else could have kept Streaker free for three years, eluding the armadas of a dozen fanatical alliances? He only regretted that his sacrifice had been in vain.

  Above all, Emerson wanted to help right now. To go below, toward those distant humming motors, and help Hannes Suessi nurse more pseudovelocity from the laboring gravistators. But his handicap was too severe. His torn cortex could not read sense from the symbols on flashing displays, and there was only so much you could do by touch or instinct alone. His comrades had been kind, giving him make-work tasks, but he soon realized it was better just to get out of their way.

  Anyway, Sara and Gillian were clearly up to something. Tension filled the Plotting Room as both women argued with the spinning apparition of the Niss Machine.

  Its spiral lines coiled tightly. Clearly, a moment of drama was approaching.

  So Emerson played spectator, watching as a chart portrayed Streaker’s tight maneuver, slewing past giant Izmunuti’s stubborn grasp, threading hurricanes of ionized heat that strained the laboring shields, changing course to climb aggressively toward a cluster of pale, flickering lights.

  A convoy of ships … or things that acted like ships, moving about the cosmos at the volition of thinking minds.