Heaven's Reach (31 page)

“Impact-t in thirty secondsss!”
called Tsh't from the bridge.
“Shall we open fire?”

“Negative!” Gillian shouted. “No one has used a beam or particle weapon on us yet. I'm not about to start. Let's see what their business is first.”

One swarm converged near
Streaker
's aft end. Several of the big, spiky mechs clamped on. Soon, a bright, shimmering glow began to float around them.

“They are dissolving the ship!”
the Niss cried out.
“Matter removal rates exceed thirty tons per second … and rising. We must fight them off!”

Tsh't reported targeting one of the machines with a laser turret, but Gillian countermanded the fire order.

“Don't do a thing till I say so! Akeakemai, give me a zoom focus on the machines that are still floating out there,
behind
the ones that landed!”

It was hard to peer past the fog that was being kicked up. But Gillian thought she made out a giant cylinder. A hooplike shape.

“It's a spool! Like the ones they unreel when they weave repair nets.” She turned her head and cried,
“Quick. What is the spectral signature of the removed material? Is it pure carbon?”

A brief pause. When the Niss spoke again, it sounded subdued.

“Carbon it is.”

“How pure?”

“Very. The vapors contain no metal from
Streaker'
s true hull. How did you know?”

Gillian's throat still felt as if her heart was beating there. But some of the panicky feeling ebbed.

“These big guys don't give a damn about petty bickering among hot-tempered oxy-life-forms. They have a job to do, and they're running out of raw materials. Their best supply of carbon was already disrupted when the Jijoans somehow triggered flares on Izmunuti. But
we
carry layers of the same material sought by the harvester sail-ships! This work team must have sensed us passing nearby and sent machines to fetch more for repairs.”

“Confirmed,”
said the Niss.
“As they move slowly along the hull, evaporated material is being sucked up and spun into polycarbon fiber, leaving the fuselage beneath intact.”

Hannes Suessi called jubilantly from Engineering, clearly delighted to learn how the machines swiftly removed a coating that had stymied him for months.

“At this rate, we'll shed several megatons in no time,” he added. “It's gonna make us much more nimble.”

By now the second swarm—shown as red pinpoints—arrived in the vicinity of
Streaker
's nose. Another set of enormous mechanisms clamped onto the bow. These huge visitors showed no special interest in the area around the rayed spiral symbol.

Gillian nodded.

“I guess they'll strip us from both ends now. Let's pray this really does leave the hull itself intact. If our luck has turned, their presence may deter anyone else from shooting at us till we're near the t-point.”

The Niss whirled thoughtfully.

“Of course there is another danger. If law and consensus are totally broken throughout the Fractal World
,
nothing prevents the various ‘retired' factions from getting in touch with their younger cousins, via hyperwave or time drop.”

“In other words, we might see battlefleets of Soro, Jophur, or Tandu come boiling through at any minute. Great.” She sighed. “All the more reason to get the hell—”

The spinning moiré patterns suddenly ballooned outward—an expression of surprise.

“Something is different,”
the Niss announced.
“The group at the bow … it is not doing the same thing as those at the stern.”

Gillian took a step forward.

“Show me!”

At first the scene looked similar. Several long-legged machines clung to
Streaker
's soot-covered hull, plying the black surface with shimmering rays. Only this time no milky haze of vapor poured toward mouthlike collectors. No streams of dark fiber spun out the machines' back ends, to collect on huge spools. Instead, something weird happened to the dense coating
Streaker
had picked up during its passages through Izmunuti's atmosphere. A rainbowlike sheen rippled and condensed slickly behind the great mechanisms as they marched a spiral pattern along the hull.

No one spoke for several minutes. So unexpected and unexplained was this behavior that Gillian had no idea how to react.

“They're … not taking the carbon away. They are—”

“Transforming it, somehow,”
agreed the Niss.

At last, Suessi called. The chief engineer's cyborg image appeared on a secondary screen. Although his head was now a mirrored dome, Gillian could tell from the old man's body language that he had a theory.

“The soot poured out by Izmunuti … the phases that condensed on us were mostly carbon, all right. But a large fraction consisted of fullerenes—so-called ‘buckeyballs' and ‘buckeytubes.' There were a lot of Penrose diamond states, too. The material had some mighty strange properties, as we found when we tried cutting it,
back on Jijo. All sorts of caged impurities give it traits like a high temperature superconductor, plus an altered coefficient of friction—”

“Hannes!” Gillian interrupted. “Please get to the point.”

The silvery dome nodded.

“I've scanned the surface these new machines are leaving behind. The coating is far more uniform than raw star soot. The buckey states intermesh with each other in ways I've never seen. I'd have to guess the properties we observed before would be enhanced by many orders of magnitude.”

One of the dolphins muttered.

“Oh great-t. Now it will be even harder to ssscrape off!”

Gillian shook her head.

“But what are they trying to accomplish? To seal us inside?”

If so, there might still be time to evacuate the ship, sending the crew scrambling for airlocks at the stern. Perhaps they might find shelter among the first group of machines.

“Our forward laser turret has a clear line of fire,” announced Tsh't.

Gillian motioned with her right hand, restraining any action for now.

One of the kids from Jijo spoke up then. The little wheeled g'Kek, who called herself Huck, made a good lookout, since she was able to scan four screens at once with her waving eyestalks.

“Uh-oh,” she remarked. “It looks like our new visitors are gonna start fighting, too.”

She pointed to where support vessels from both groups could be seen drifting toward each other. Barely constrained energies crackled as a showdown developed. Scanners showed that many of the lesser war machines were withdrawing from this confrontation.

They'll use us as a battleground. How could things possibly get any worse?

Gillian knew it was a mistake to put it that way. One
should not tempt Ifni, the goddess of luck, who could always come up with one more ratcheting of fate.

The Niss hologram coiled nearby. Its voice was low, resigned.

“Now we are being scanned from the Fractal World itself. Those controlling the great disintegrator beams have turned their targeting apparatus our way. We may soon go the way of the late Zang.”

“They'll risk hitting the habitat, right where it's most vulnerable!”

“Apparently, some think it worth the risk, in order to intimidate us. Or else they would destroy what they cannot keep.”

Gillian had seen those shafts of annihilation in action.
Streaker
could be vaporized in seconds.

Lark

T
HESE WERE HELLISH CIRCUMSTANCES. AND YET
, for a biologist, it might be heaven. While his body endured cramped confinement in a stinking plastic bag, Lark's mind sped through lessons expanding his parochial view of the vast panorama of life. He grew deft at a new form of communication, receiving visual images that came enhanced by meanings and connotations sent through a tube directly to his bloodstream. A language of hormones and mood-tweaking peptides. And it went both ways. Whenever Lark understood something new, he did not have to speak or even nod his head. The mere act of comprehending had metabolic effects—a familiar endorphin burst of satisfaction—that his alien tutor quickly detected. Likewise, confusion or frustration brought rapid changes. The globule-teacher kept revising its presentation until Lark grasped what he was being shown.

It was a strangely active kind of passive study.

Would you call this a form of telepathy?
he wondered.

Yet, the method also seemed slow and crude. As visual lessons, the demonstrations were a lot like puppet
shows. Physical portions of his instructor would bud off the parent body to float within a vacuole cavity, twisting and transforming themselves into living models or mannequins to play out a little scene. The same images might have been presented far swifter, and more vividly, using one of the computerized display units he had seen Ling use, on Jijo and in the Jophur ship.

Inefficient or not, Lark eventually realized why his captors used this approach.

It's fundamental to the difference between hydrogen- and oxygen-based ways of looking at the universe.

At a glance, the two worlds seemed utterly unalike.

While both biologies were based on carbon molecules, one used the reactive chemistry of oxidizing atmospheres, with liquid water serving as the indispensable solvent. Only narrow circumstances of temperature and pressure could nurture this kind of life from scratch: Normally, it arose in filmy skins of ocean and air, coating Earthlike worlds. Venturing beyond these lean oases, oxy-life must carry the same rare conditions with them into space.

“Reducing” environments were far more abundant, covering cold, giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Titan—and even the broad, icy domain of comets. Some of these worlds soaked in abundant hydrogen, while others featured methane, ammonia, or cyanogen. But most shared a few common features—enormous, dense atmospheres and turbulent convecting layers, somewhat like the roiling strata of a sun. Life-giving heat often flowed
upward
, from a hot planetary core. Sometimes there was no solid “surface” at all.

Because of this, most hydros were creatures of a vast, boisterous sky. Up and down became
tall
, unlimited, almost coequal with the other two dimensions. Nor was travel a matter of exertive
flying
, by defying gravity with flapping wings, but of adjusting buoyancy and propelling through fogs so dense the pressure was like the bottom of Earth's sea.

In such a realm, there were advantages to size. Big creatures cruised with languid grace, sifting for organic food. When caught in strong downdrafts, only a giant
could fight free and keep from being hauled to searing, crushing depths. So huge did some hydro-beings grow, they could be viewed from space, resembling titanic, self-contained clouds.

And that was where organic chemistry—the Designer's Assistant—might have left things, if not for action by another party.

The Critic.

Evolution.

Inevitably, the logic of reproduction and advantage took hold on reducing worlds, as it did on oxidizing ones like Earth … though in different ways.

Oxy-life counted on liquid water to carry out the complex colloidal chemistry of proteins and amino acids. Yet, too much watery flow would dilute those same processes, making them useless. Even in the warm sea, this meant crafting compact packages—cells—of just the right size to evolve life's machinery. For two billion years, the limit of biological accomplishment on the early Earth had been to spread single-celled organisms through the ocean, soaking up sunlight and devouring each other while slowly improving their molecular techniques.

Until one day a cell consumed another—and let it continue living. A primitive eukaryote took in a blue-green alga and gave it a home, exchanging safe living quarters for sugars produced from photosynthesis. This act of cooperation gave the combined team a crucial edge in competition with other cells.