Shipstar (32 page)

“And if we can’t?” Redwing persisted.

Karl said, “The more plasma we get into our magscoop, the better. So we steer for the density ridges, held in by the helical mag field.”

Ayaan Ali pursed her full lips, and her long eyelashes flickered. Redwing recalled this was the closest she came to showing that she was irked. “The jet’s mag pressure is high. It and those fast-changing plasma pressures can punch our scoop around, too. They’re two orders of magnitude beyond our optimal design.”

Redwing saw himself as referee when crew disagreed on the tech issues, but in the end he knew he had to decide who was right. “How bad can it be if we lose our magscoop shape?”

“We’ll tumble,” Ayaan Ali said.

“And we can recover,” Karl said evenly.

They had the reliable Bear Down leptonic drive, the first to use the dark energy substrate as an energy stabilizer. Redwing did not pretend to understand its complex mechanisms that somehow drew power from the substrate of the very universe. Fundamentals were not his concern; its operation was. Karl pointed out endless details but in the end they had to play the hand they were dealt—a drive running on empty, unless they could grab enough plasma.

Ayaan Ali laid out the geometry on the big display screen that dominated the bridge.
SunSeeker
had to stay below the Bowl rim, or else come within the sighting angle of the domed gamma ray lasers sited there. Their “experiment” with flying a small package over the rim—and watching it disappear in a furious instant—proved that the Folk sense of diplomacy did not include letting them get out of the narrow cage
SunSeeker
now occupied. They could navigate in the space below the rim, down to the upper reaches of the Bowl’s air zones. Spread out as the Bowl was over hundreds of millions of kilometers, it exerted a small but steady grav pull on them. Thrusting with the thin plasma here offset that. And through the center of that volume the jet spiked like a living, writhing yellow lance.

Ayaan Ali’s 3-D display showed in detail the atmosphere’s partitions far below them. It was not continuous, or else pressure differences between the low-grav sections would cause the air to gather there to a stifling degree. Instead, firm walls isolated wedges of the Bowl, cutting off circulations to high latitudes. Yet the air zones allowed gas to flow throughout the entire circumference of the annular regions. This meant that the air could flow over zones covering the size of the entire solar system, creating weather patterns unknown on mere planets. But the air could not ascend to the higher latitudes—the “bottom” of the Bowl, toward the Knothole.

“Those partitions are a wonder,” Ayaan Ali said. “Made of some layered stuff that is flexible enough to have some give to it. But it’s hundreds of kilometers on a side!”

Redwing nodded, thinking again,
What could I be missing? This thing was built by engineers who thought like gods. They must have methods we can’t see, can’t yet imagine.

Yet the Folk who ran this place had let Beth’s team escape. First from their low-grav Garden prison, then from the Bowl itself.
Beth is quick, ingenious, a real leader, but still … They’re not all that smarter than we are. Bigger, though, Beth says. So how do they run this contraption?

Ayaan Ali pointed to the roughly conical section, shaded blue, that was their allowed flight volume. She said, “So we can cruise around in here, and zip across the jet when we want to. So far we’ve just circled it, mostly.”

Karl pointed at her simulation, which showed the bright jet purling down from the star, tightening as it neared the Knothole, then—as the display moved down, its smart eyes following his finger-point—beyond, where it expanded again, losing luminosity. That made the fast wind that
SunSeeker
had been swimming upriver against for a century, slowing them, costing them time and supplies. Coasting on the vagrant tendrils of plasma fraying off the jet had been a constant piloting problem, running Ayaan Ali ragged. Beth’s return had taken some of the burden from her, and together they would take on the reverse problem—flying into the jet’s thick, turbulent, moving cauldron of ionized particles and mag fields.

“I’ve calculated how to tip in near the top—that’s our sign convention, right? Top is as high as we dare get, just below the deflection ability of the gamma ray lasers. We turn and plunge down, toward the Knothole. We sway back and forth across the jet while we drive down. Thrust hard in a helix winding path.”

He had painted a red line in her simulation, standing for
SunSeeker
’s calculated path. Its helix widened as it got nearer the Knothole and the magnetic field lines—blue swirls embedded in the yellow and orange showing plasma—bulged outward in response. “See? We make the jet sway a little. A kink in the flow.”

Redwing thought he followed this, but decided to play dumb. “Which are?”

“I’m sure you went through the basic plasma-instabilities material, Cap’n. It was in your briefing run-up.”

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. He let it simmer a bit. “Karl, you will always answer a direct technical question and skip your idea of what I know. Assume I know nothing.”

“Sorry, um, Cap’n. Of course. Certainly. I meant that…” His voice trailed off, uncertain of anything.

Redwing bailed him out. “Like a fire hose?”

“Right! Fast water going through a fire hose, if it swerves a little, the centrifugal force of it forces the hose even more to the side. It corkscrews, makes a kink.”

“So it will lash the side of the Knothole? You’re sure?”

Karl paused, nodded. “More of a brush, I’d say.”

Redwing nodded. Ayaan Ali said, “I have some good news. We got a short signal from Cliff’s team—from Aybe.”

Redwing brightened. “Where are they? What—?”

“Here. They passed under the edge of the mirror zone and got out onto the hull. Found ice there. Then they had to take off. They got led to a place where there were something like, well, talking stones.”

Redwing leaned forward. “And those said…?”

A shrug. “We got cut off. See down there? They were in lands between that zone of hexagonal mirrors. The icelands, with some life in them, those are on the outer hull under the mirrors, which keep it cold. Then Cliff’s team and those Sil got to the drylands between the mirrors and this huge ocean.”

Redwing stared at the view. Even when Ayaan Ali brought up a max resolution image, there was nothing to show more than occasional towns and roads. Again it struck him how much of this place was endless forests and seas and ranges of tan hills. Very few large cities and plenty of room for wildlife. Why?
Hard to evaluate a thing as big as this Bowl. Earth alone had plenty of habitats that a few thousand years back were places where the crown of creation would be a tasty breakfast.

Karl asked, “Those are—what, hurricanes on that ocean?”

“Seems so.” Ayaan Ali pointed to a few. “The big winds have lots more room to play out, too. Huge storms. Cyclones the size of planets.”

Redwing stood to end the meeting. “We’ll hit the jet in a few days, right? Keep doing your simulations and drills. Get some rest, too,” with a nod to Ayaan Ali.

Now that the die was cast, he needed some alone time.
SunSeeker
’s steady rumble always told you that you were in a big metal tube, only meters away from other people. And meters away from both a furious fusion burn and, not far from that, high vacuum. First he quietly made his way through the biozones, sniffing and savoring air that came fresh from the oxy-making plants, and avoiding the finger snakes in their happy labors. They were fun, but he was not in a fun mood.

Gecko slippers let him walk the far reaches of the ship, out of the centri-grav torus. They were like weak glue on your soles, following the sticky patches on the walls. The zero-grav plants were matted tangles of beans and peas, with carrots that grew like twisted orange baseballs and green bananas that made weird toroids. A finger snake tunnel ran underneath. The snakes weren’t showing.

He went on into the hibernation modules, where what he thought of as the biostasis crew lay. Just sleeping, sort of, though hard to wake up. His footsteps rang as he walked the aluminum web corridor beside the solemn gray capsules. He didn’t want to call out of cold sleep enough people to crew a big landing expedition, not for the Bowl anyway. In the defrosting and training they would all have to triple up on a hot hammock, and shower once a week. As it was now, even the small present crew—nine plus Redwing plus three finger snakes—got two showers a week and didn’t like it.

Now that they were headed for a battle, of sorts, he realized how far from its expected role this expedition had come. This was not a craft built for war and neither were the crew. They had been carefully tuned for exploration and centuries of confinement. They were living in a constantly running machine where opening a hatch without proper precautions could kill you dead in seconds flat.

With that happy thought, he turned back.
You’re worrying, not thinking.
He could use some time with the finger snakes.

*   *   *

Rich garden smells slapped him in the face. He looked around him, seeing miniature sheep and full-sized pigs and chickens, clucking and grunting—and no finger snakes. Their tunnel was big enough, he could peer into it … but he went to the screens. If they weren’t in the tunnel, he’d still find them easily enough.

Now, what had the finger snakes left on-screen? They’d been watching the Bowl slide past, even as he had. No, they hadn’t: this view was following a cityscape as it rolled below
SunSeeker
. If Redwing understood rightly, that was a Sil city, newly rebuilt after an attack from the Folk. It looked quite strange. Streets and peaks like hieroglyphs, or wispy Arab writing.

He jumped when a flat head poked his elbow. “This they did hide,” said—Shtirk? Marked near the tail with a bent black hourglass. “Hide no more. A great shame.”

“Wait. Is this writing? So big?”

Its voice had a sliding, flat tone, faint. “Can see such writing from everywhere on the Bowl. This says the Bird Folk stamped their own world flat. A mistake in steering ended their bloodline. This was in a message … a message from the stars. Captain, yes please, how does a star send a message?”

Redwing dithered for a moment about how much to reveal; but he wanted to know what Shtirk knew. “You know what a star is? It’s like your sun,
that
sun, but much farther away. Stars have worlds, not Bowls but spinning balls. We have a message from one of those, from Glory. We haven’t been able to read it all, and it’s still coming in.”

“The Sil read,” Shtirk said. “Your bandits learn find the message from you, the Sil from them, then the Sil read. Now they tell us. Thisther goes to tell you all in command deck. Is it true? Bird Folk did smash their own world?”

Redwing laughed. “And they think they’re the Lords of Creation! Yeah, I believe it. I’ll put it to the others, and we’ll look through the message from Glory. But I believe it.”

*   *   *

Fred Ojama and a giant snake were hard at work at the control screens when Redwing found them. Thisther’s head and the fingernails on its tiny quick tail were close up against the controls, typing. Fred was saying, “Yup, yup, yup…”

“Fred?”

“Sir.” Fred didn’t turn. “If you’ll look past me … see the starscape? And the blue dot? The dot is the Bowl. The stars move, too. I’ve run this twice already. The Bowl left Sol system in Jurassic times, then tootled around to several other stars—not moving as fast as it does now. Then they came back between the Cretaceous and Tertiary. If the times hold, then the mass of the Bowl ruined some comet orbits that second time, and that was it.”

“It?”

“The timeline checks. They caused the Dinosaur Killer impact.”

Thisther said, “Great shame. They hid this for lifetimes of worlds.”

“My God,” Redwing said.

Thisther said in his quiet way, “But no more. All will know. They killed their own genetic line. Sil will tell all.”

THIRTY
-
TWO

Tananareve realized she should agree with the big, ponderous beast that was Memor. She had come to think of the alien as a kind of smart elephant, with a sense of humor equally heavy. “Yes, that was a clever saying,” Tananareve made herself say.

“I am happy you have discovered the nuances of our nature,” Memor said.
Apparently sarcasm is unknown here, never mind irony,
Tananareve thought. She knew Memor thought what she’d said was amusing, from the way her body shook, but it went right by human ears.

“The wonder of all this is what impresses me most,” Tananareve said to move on to better things. Memor and Bemor were huge and strange, but they liked her to play the awed-primate role. The hard case was Asenath, who mostly ignored Tananareve except for the occasional glower. Plus deliberately aimed stale exhaled breaths and well-timed, acid farts.

They stood among a crowd of hundreds of squat, humanoid creatures who formed neat, obedient circles around the Folk party. She watched these, the first human-shaped aliens she had seen, trying to understand the blank expressions on their hairy faces, to figure out what was going on. Beyond the crowd was a tall pinnacle with a single round thing in it that she had just now realized was an eye or camera, watching all this.