Heaven's Reach (15 page)

The tutor remained silent for a long time, leaving both human castaways with no way to deal with the ship on their own.

There were makeshift controls, left in place by
Streaker
's dolphin crew when they had resurrected this ancient Buyur hulk from a pile of discarded spacecraft on Jijo's sea bottom. Mysterious boxes had been spliced by cable to the hulk's control circuits, programmed to send it erupting skyward along with a swarm of other revived decoys, confusing Jophur instruments and masking
Streaker
's breakout attempt. But since the dolphins had never expected stowaways, there were only minimal buttons and dials. Without the tutor, there'd be no chance of making the ship budge from its current unguided plummet.

Lacking anything better to do, Rety and Dwer went forward and stared ahead through the bow windows, pitted from immersion in the Great Midden for half a million years. Together, they tried to spot the mysterious “spinning hole in space” that Jijo's fallen races still recalled in sagas about ancestral days—the mighty doorway each sneakship passed through when it brought a new wave of refugee-settlers to a forbidden world in a fallow galaxy.

At first, Rety saw nothing special in the glittering starscape. Then Dwer pointed.

“Over there. See? The
Frog
is all bent out of shape.”

Rety had grown up amid a primitive tribe, hiding in a grubby wilderness without even the rough comforts of Dwer's homeland, the Slope. Living in crude huts, with just campfires to ward off chill and darkness, she had constellations overhead nearly every night of her life. But while her cousins made up elaborate hunters' tales about those twinkling patterns, her only interest lay in their practical use as signposts, pointing the westward
path she might someday use to escape her wretched clan.

Dwer, on the other hand, was chief scout of the Commons of Jijo, trained to know every quirk of the sky—from which the Six Races always expected doom and judgment to arrive. He would notice if something was out of place.

“I don't see …” She peered toward the cluster of glimmering pinpoints he indicated. “Oh! Some of the stars … they're clumped in a circle and—”

“And there's nothing inside,” he finished for her. “Nothing at all.”

They stared silently for a while. Rety couldn't help comparing the disklike blackness to a predator's open maw, looming rapidly to swallow the ship and all its contents.

“The stars seem t'be smearing out around it,” she added.

Dwer nodded, making hoonish umbling sounds.

“Hr-rm. My sister called this thing a sort of
twist in the universe
, where space gets all wound up in knots.”

Rety sniffed.

“Space is
empty
, dummy. I learned that back when I lived with the Daniks, in their underground station. There's nothin' out here to
get
twisted.”

“Fine. Then
you
explain what we're about to fall into.”

Little yee chose to speak up then.

“no problem to explain, big man-boy.

“what is life?

“is going from one hole to another, then another!

“is better this way. go in! yee will sniff good burrow for us.

“good, comfy burrow is happiness.”

Dwer glanced sourly at the urrish male, but Rety smiled and stroked yee's tiny head.

“You tell him, husban'. We'll slide on through this thing, slick as a mud skink, an' come out in the main spiral arcade of Galaxy Number One, where the lights are bright an' ships are thicker than ticks on a ligger's back. Where the stars are close enough to gossip with
each other, an' everyone's so rich they need computers to count their computers!

“Folks like that'll need folks like us, Dwer,” she assured. “They'll be soft, while we're tough an' savvy, ready for adventure! We'll take on jobs the star gods are too prissy for—an' get paid more'n your whole Commons of Jijo is worth.

“Soon we'll be livin' high, you watch. You'll bless the day you met me.”

Dwer stared back at her. Then, clearly against his will, a smile broke out. This time the laugh was friendlier.

“Honestly, Rety. I'd rather just go home and keep some promises I made. But I guess that's unlikely now, so—” He glanced ahead at the dark circle. It had grown noticeably as they watched. “So maybe you're right. We'll make the best of things. Somehow.”

She could tell he was putting up a front. Dwer figured they would be torn apart soon, by forces that could demolish all of Jijo in moments.

He oughta have more faith
, she thought.
Somethin'll come along. It always does.

With nothing better to do, they counted the passing duras, commenting to each other about the strange way stars stretched and blurred around the rim of the monstrous thing ahead. It doubled in size, filling a quarter of the window by the time Rety's “tutor” popped back into existence above the black box. The tiny face had triumph in its eyes.

“Success!”
it exulted.

Rety blinked.

“You mean you found a way to control this tub?”

“Better than that! I managed to coax more power and bandwidth from the communications system!”

“Yes?” Dwer moved forward. “And?”

“And I got a response, at last!”

The two humans looked at each other, sharing confusion. Then Rety cursed.

“You didn't pull the bloody-damn
Jophur
back to us, did you?”

That might help the
Streaker
crew. But she had no interest in resuming her former role as bait. Rety would
rather risk the transfer point than surrender to those stacks of stinky rings.

“The battleship is beyond effective range as it dives toward the red giant star, where other mighty vessels are dimly perceived engaging in energetic activity that I cannot make out very well.

“The rescuers I refer to are entirely different parties.”

The tutor paused.

“Go on,” Dwer prompted warily.

“The active scanners were balky and difficult at first. But I finally got them on-line. At which point I spotted several ships nearby, fleeing toward the transfer point just as we are! After some further effort, I managed to flag the attention of the closest
 … 
whereupon it changed course slightly to head this way!”

Rety and Dwer nearly stumbled over each other rushing to the aft viewing ports. They stared for some time, but even with coaxing from the tutor, Rety saw nothing at first except the great red sun. Even at this long range, it looked larger than her thumbnail held at arm's reach. And angry storms extended farther still, with tornadolike tendrils.

Dwer pointed.

“There! Three points up from Izmunuti and two points left. You can't miss it.”

Rety tried looking where he pointed, but despite his promise, she found it hard to make out anything different. Stars glittered brightly.…

Some of them shifted slightly, moving in unison, like a flock of birds. First they jogged a little left, then a little right, but always together, as if a section of the sky itself were sliding around, unable to keep still.

Finally, she realized—the moving stars all lay in an area shaped like a slightly canted
square.

“Those aren't real stars …,” she began, hushed.

“They're reflections,” Dwer finished. “Like off a mirror. But how?”

The tutor seemed happiest explaining something basic.

“The image you see is caused by a tremendous
reflector-and-energy-collector. In Galactic Seven the term is
ntove tunictun.
Or in Earthling tradition—a solar sail.

“The method is used chiefly by sapients who perceive time as less a factor than do oxygen breathers. But right now they are using a supplementary gravitic engine to hasten progress, fleeing unexpected chaos in this stellar system. At these pseudovelocities, the vessel should be able to pick us up and still reposition itself for optimal transfer point encounter toward its intended destination.”

Dwer held up both hands.

“Whoa! Are you saying the creatures piloting that thing don't breathe oxygen? You mean they aren't even part of the, um—”

“The Civilization of Five Galaxies? No sir, they are not. These are
machines,
with their own spacefaring culture, quite unlike myself, or the robot soldier devices of the Jophur. Their ways are strange. Nevertheless they seem quite willing to take us with them through the transfer point. That is a much better situation than we faced a while ago.”

Rety watched the “sail” uneasily. Soon she made out a glittering nest of complex shapes that lay at the very center of the smooth, mirrorlike surface. As the t-point burgeoned on one side and the machine-vessel on the other, she couldn't stave off a wild sensation—like being cornered between a steep cliff and a predator.

“This thing …,” she began asking, with a dry mouth. “This thing comin' to
save
us. Do you know what it was doin' here, before Izmunuti blew up?”

“It is seldom easy understanding other life orders,”
the tutor explained.
“But in this case the answer is simple. It is a class of device called a
Harvester/Salvager.
Such machines collect raw materials to be used in various engineering or construction projects. It must have been using the sail to gather metal atoms from the star's rich wind when the storm struck. But given an opportunity, a harvester will collect the material it needs from any other source of accumulated or condensed …”

The artificial voice trailed off as the tutor's face froze. The pause lasted several duras.

“Any other source,” Dwer repeated the phrase in a low mutter. “Like a derelict ship, drifting through space; maybe?”

Rety felt numb.

The tutor did not say
“oops.”

Not exactly.

It wasn't necessary.

Two young humans watched claws, grapplers, and scythelike blades unfurl as strong fields seized their vessel, drawing it toward a dark opening at the center of a broad expanse of filmy light.

Lark

S
OMETHING WAS HAPPENING.

The deck shuddered and vibrated. Muffled thuds penetrated through the spongy walls, puzzling him at first.

Then Lark recalled the first time he had heard such sounds—just after he and Ling were captured, when the Six Races of Jijo had surprised their tormentors by attacking this battle cruiser with crude rockets.

On a monitor screen he had watched explosive-filled tree trunks blaze like avenging spirits through the sky above the Slope, hundreds of them, handmade by the finest artisans of the Six Races and dispatched on a mission of vengeance. He remembered praying that some of the fiery missiles would get through—to end his life along with all the loathsome Jophur invaders aboard this cruel ship.

Then came that muted rumbling.

“Defensive counterfire.”
Ling had identified the sound as Jophur weapons spoke. One by one, the natives' proud missiles had evaporated, well short of their target … and Lark had had to reconcile himself with remaining alive.

This time, the tempo of jarring quivers rattled the ship ten times as fast.

It sounds pretty frantic. I wonder who the greasy stacks are fighting this time.

Alas, his pursuers gave Lark no time to ponder it. Whatever was going on in space beyond, the hunter robots kept up their relentless and systematic search through twisty corridors, blocking every effort to sneak past them, constantly hemming him northward along the great ship's axis.

Hissing Jophur soldiery accompanied the posse, operating in groups of three or more. And on several occasions he also heard a human voice, male, shouting suggestions to help chase down one of his own kind.