Heaven's Reach (20 page)

Gillian's earlier plan, to draw the battleship after us into a deadly double suicide, would have caused my own death, and that of everyone else aboard—but my homeworld might then have been safe.

The trade-offs were stark and bitter. I found myself resenting the older woman for making a choice that spared my life.

I also changed my mind about the Zang.

Well? What're you waiting for? Shoot back!

The Jophur were oxygen beings like myself, distant relatives, sharing some of the same DNA that had spread around the galaxies during a predawn era before Progenitors arose to begin the chain of Uplift. Nevertheless, right then I was cheering for their annihilation by true aliens. Beings from a strange, incomprehensible order of life.

Come on, Zang. Fry the big ugly ring stacks!

But things went on pretty much the same as distance narrowed between the two giants. The globule spent itself prodigiously to block missiles and gouts of deadly
fire from the great dreadnought. Yet despite this, some rays and projectiles got through, impacting the parent body with bitter violence. Fountains of gooey material spewed across the black background, sparkling gorgeously as they burned. Waves rippled and convulsed across the Zang ship. Still it forged on while the glavers yowled, seeming to urge the hydros on.

“T-point insertion approaching,”
announced a dolphin's amplified voice. It had a fizzing quality that meant the speaker was breathing oxygen-charged water, so it must be coming from the bridge.
“All hands prepare for transition. Kaa says our guides are acting strange. They're choosing an unconventional approach pattern, so this may get rough!”

Gillian and Sara gripped their armrests. The dolphins in the Plotting Room caused their walkers' feet to splay out and magnetize, gripping the floor. But there was little for me and the glavers to do except stare about with wild, feral eyes. In the forward viewer, I now saw the starscape interrupted by a twist of utter blackness. Computer-generated lines converged while figures and glyphs made Sara murmur with excitement.

I watched the ship ahead of us, the first Zang globule, shiver almost eagerly as it plunged at a steep angle toward the twist.…

Then it
fell
in a direction I could not possibly describe if my life depended on it.

A direction that I never, till that moment, knew existed.

I glanced quickly at the rearward display. It showed the other hydro vessel shaking asunder before repeated fierce blows as the Jophur battle cruiser fired desperately with short-range weapons. The two behemoths were almost next to each other now, matched in velocity, still racing after us.

A final, frantic hammering ripped through the Zang ship, tearing it into several unraveling gobs.

For a moment, I thought it was over.

I thought the Jophur had won.

Then two of those huge gobs
curled
, almost like
living tendrils, and settled across the gleaming metal hull. They clung to its surface. Spreading. Oozing.

Somehow, despite the distance and flickering haze, I had the sense of something probing for a way
in.

Then the image vanished.

I turned back to the main viewer. Transition had begun.

Kaa

T
HERE WAS A FINE ART TO PILOTING A STARSHIP
through the stretched geometries of a transfer point. No machine or logical algorithm could manage the feat alone.

Part of it involved playing hunches, knowing when to release the flange fields holding you to one shining thread and choosing just the right moment to make a leap—lasting both seconds and aeons—across an emptiness deeper than vacuum … then clamping nimbly to another slender discontinuity (without actually touching its deadly rim) and riding that one forward to your goal.

Even a well-behaved t-point was a maelstrom. A spaghetti tangle of shimmering arcs and folds, bending the cosmic fabric through multiple—and sometimes partial—dimensions.

A maze of dazzling, filamentary imperfections.

Stringlike cracks in the mirror of creation.

For those wise enough to use them well, the glowing strands offered a great boon. A way to travel safely from galaxy to linked galaxy, much faster than using hyper-space.

But to the foolish, or inattentive, their gift was a quick and flashy end.

Kaa loved thread-jumping more than any other part of spaceflight. Something about it meshed with both sides of neo-dolphin nature.

The new brain layers, added by human genecrafters, let him regard each strand as a
flaw
in the quantum metric, left behind when the universe first cooled from an inflating superheated froth, congealing like a many-layered cake to form the varied levels of real and hyperspace. That coalescence left defects behind—boundaries and fractures—where physical laws bent and shortcuts were possible. He could ponder all of that with the disciplined mental processes Captain Creideiki used to call the Engineer's Mind.

Meanwhile, in parallel, Kaa picked up different textures and insights through older organs, deep within his skull. Ancient bits of gray matter tuned for
listening
—to hear the swishing structure of a current, or judge the cycloid rhythms of a wave. Instruments probed the dense tangle of fossil topological boundaries, feeding him data in the form of
sonar images.
Almost by intuition, he could sense when a transfer thread was about to play out, and which neighboring cord he should clamp on to, sending the
Streaker
darting along a new gleaming path toward her next goal.

Thomas Orley had once compared the process to “leaping from one roller coaster to another, in the middle of a thunderstorm.”

Creideiki had expressed it differently.

Even during the expedition's early days—when the captain was still with them and
Streaker
's brilliant chief pilot Keepiru handled all the really tough maneuvers—everyone had nevertheless agreed that there was nothing quite like a t-point ride with Kaa at the helm—an exuberance of daring, flamboyant maneuvers that never seemed to go wrong. Once, after a series of absurdly providential thread jumps let him break a million-year-old record, taking the crossing from Tanith to Calafia in
five and a quarter mictaars, the crew bestowed on him a special nickname.

“Lucky.”

In Trinary, the word-phrase meant much more than it did in Anglic. It connoted special favor in the fortune sea, the deep realm of chance where Ifni threw her dice and ancient dreamers crooned songs that were old before the stars were born.

It was a great honor. But some also say that such titles, once won, are hard to keep.

He started losing his during the fiasco at Oakka, that awful green world of betrayal, and things went rapidly downhill after that. By the time
Streaker
fled to a murky trash heap beneath Jijo's forlorn ocean, few called him Lucky Kaa anymore.

Then, in a matter of days, fate threw him the best and cruelest turns of all. He found love … and quickly lost it again when duty yanked Kaa away from his heart, sending him hurtling parsecs farther from Peepoe with each passing minute.

At the very moment she needed me most.

So he took little joy from this flight through a labyrinth of shimmering threads. Only grim professionalism sustained him.

Kaa had learned not to count on luck.

Behind him, the water-filled control room seemed eerily silent. Without opening his eyes or breaking concentration, Kaa felt the other neo-fins holding tense rein over their reflex sonar clicking, in order not to disturb him.

They had cause for taut nerves. This transfer was like no other.

The reason gleamed ahead of
Streaker
—a vast object that Kaa perceived one moment as a gigantic jellyfish … then like a mammoth squid, with tentacles bigger than any starship he had ever seen. Its fluid profile, transformed for travel through the t-point's twisted bowels, gave him shivers. Instinct made Kaa yearn to get away—to cut the flanges and hop any passing
thread, no matter where in the universe it might lead—just to elude that dreadful shape.

But it's our guide. And if we tried to get away, the Zang would surely kill us.

Kaa heard a faint caterwauling cry, coming from the dry chamber next door—the plotting room. By now he recognized the wailing sound of glavers, those devolved creatures from Jijo who had voluntarily returned to animal presapience. That alone would be enough to give him the utter willies, even without this bizarre affinity the bulge-eyed beasts seemed to have with a completely different order of life. That understanding offered
Streaker
a way clear of the dreaded Jophur, but at what cost?

Saved from one deadly foe
, he pondered.
Only to face another that's feared all across Galactic Civilization.

In fact, such dilemmas were becoming routine to the dolphin crew. The whole universe seemed filled with nothing but frying pans and fires.

They're getting ready
, Kaa contemplated as a gentle throbbing passed along the tentacles of the squidlike shape ahead. Twice before, this had just preceded a jump maneuver. On both occasions, it had taken all his skill to follow without slamming
Streaker
into a nearby string singularity. The hydros used a thread-riding style unlike any he had seen before, following world lines that were more timelike than spacelike, triggering micro causality waves that nauseated everyone aboard. Nothing about the Zang method was any more efficient. Each jarring maneuver—and churning neural reflex—made Kaa want to swerve back and do it in a way that made more sense.

I could probably get you there in half the time
, he thought resentfully toward the squid-shaped thing.
If you just told me where we're going.

True, the resonances had changed since he last used this t-point, back when
Streaker
fled the horrid Fractal World, attempting Gillian's last desperate gamble … the “sooner's path,” seeking a hiding place on far-off
Jijo. When that second singularity nexus reopened near Izmunuti, it must have jiggered this one as well. Still, there
must
be an easier way to get where the Zang wanted to go than—

Sonar images merged into focus. He perceived a bright cluster of threads just ahead … a Gordian tangle with no spacelike strands at all.

Ugh! That ghastly clutter has got to be where the hydros are aiming, damn them.

And yet, listening carefully to the transposed sound portrait, he thought he could sense something about the knotty mess.…

You know, I'll bet I can guess which thread they're gonna take.

Kaa's attention riveted. This was important to him. More than duty and survival were at stake. Or the vaunted reputation neo-dolphin pilots had begun to earn among the Five Galaxies. Even regaining his nickname held little attraction anymore.

Only one thing really mattered to Kaa. Getting the job done. Delivering Gillian Baskin and her cargo safely. And then finding a way back to Jijo. Back to Peepoe. Even if it meant never piloting again. He triggered an alarm to warn the others.

Here we go!

The “squid” uncoiled, preparing for its final leap.

Alvin's Journal