Startide Rising (36 page)

“I don’t believe you!” Takkata-Jim spluttered, spraying water in all directions. “On Earth we were promisssed! Streaker is our ship!”

Gillian shrugged. “Ask your bridge crew if the battle controls work,” she offered. “Have someone try to leave through the outlock. Try to open the door to the armory.”

Takkata-Jim whirled and sped to a comm screen at the far end of the room. His guard stared at Gillian momentarily, then followed. His look conveyed a sense of betrayal.

Not all of the crew would feel that way, Gillian knew. Most would probably be delighted. But deep inside an implication would settle. One of the main purposes of Streaker’s mission, to build in the neo-fen a sense of independence and self-confidence, had been compromised.

Did I have any other choice? Is there anything else I might have tried first?

She shook her head, wishing Tom were here. Tom might have settled everything with one sarcastic little ditty in Trinary that put everybody to shame.

Oh, Tom, she thought. I should have gone instead of you.

“Gillian!”

Makanee’s flukes pounded the water and her harness whirred. With one metal arm she pointed up at the wounded dolphin floating in the gravity tank.

Creideiki was looking back at her!

“Joshua H. Bar—but you said his cortex was fried!” Metz stared.

An expression of profound concentration bore down on Creideiki’s features. He breathed heavily, then gave voice to a desperate cry.

“Out!:”

“It’sss not possible!” Makanee sighed. “His ssspeech centers…”

Creideiki frowned in effort.

* Out :

Creideiki!

* Swim :

Creideiki!

It was Trinary baby talk, but with a queer tone to it. And the dark eyes burned with intelligence. Gillian’s telempathic sense throbbed.

“Out!:” He whirled about in the tank and slammed his powerful flukes against the window with a loud boom. He repeated the Anglic word. The falling tone-slope was like a phrase in Primal.

“Out-t-t!: ”

“Help him out-t!” Makanee commanded her assistants. “Gently! Quickly!”

Takkata-Jim was heading back from his comm screen at high speed, wrath on his face. But he stopped abruptly at the gravity tank, and stared at the bright eye of the captain.

It was the last straw.

He rolled back and forth, as if unable to decide on appropriate body language. Takkata-Jim turned to Gillian.

“What I’ve done was in, what I believed to be the best interest of the ship, crew, and mission. I could make a very good case on Earth.”

Gillian shrugged. “Let’s hope you get the chance.”

Takkata-Jim laughed dryly. “Very well, we’ll hold this charade ship’sss council. I’ll call it for one hour from now. But let me warn you, don’t push too far, Dr. Baskin. I have powers ssstill. We must find a compromise. Try to pillory me and you will divide the ship.

“And then I will fight-t-t you.” he added, low.

Gillian nodded. She had achieved what she had to. Even if Takkata-Jim had done the worst things Makanee suspected of him, there was no proof, and it was a matter of compromise or lose the ship to civil war. The first officer had to be offered an out. “I’ll remember, Takkata-Jim. In one hour, then. I’ll be there.”

Takkata-Jim swirled about to leave, followed by his two loyal security guards.

Gillian saw Ignacio Metz staring after the dolphin lieutenant. “You lost control, didn’t you?” she asked dryly as she swam past him.

The geneticist’s head jerked. “What, Gillian? What do you mean?” But his face betrayed him. Like many others, Metz tended to overestimate her psychic powers. Now he must be wondering if she had read his mind.

“Never mind,” Gillian’s smile was narrow. “Let’s go and witness this miracle.”

She swam to where Makanee waited anxiously for the emerging Creideiki. Metz looked after her uncertainly, before following.

W
ith trembling hands, he pulled vines away from the cave entrance. He crept out of his shelter and blinked at the hazy morning.

A thick layer of low clouds had gathered. There were no alien ships, yet, and that was just as well. He had feared they would arrive while he was helpless, struggling against the effects of the psi-bomb.

It hadn’t been fun. In the first few minutes the psychic blasts had beaten away at his hypnotic defenses, cresting over them and drenching his brain in alien howling. For two hours—it had felt like eternity—he had wrestled with crazy images, pulsing, nerve-evoked lights and sounds. Tom still shook with reaction.

I sure hope there are still Thennanin out there, and that they fall for it. It had better have been worth it.

According to Gillian, the Niss machine had been confident it had found the right codes in the Library taken from the Thennanin wreck. If there were still Thennanin in the system, they should try to answer. The bomb must have been detectable for millions of miles in all directions.

He dragged a handful of muck out of the gap in the weeds and flung it aside. Scummy sea water welled up almost to the surface of the hole. Another gap probably lay only a few meters beyond the next hummock

—the weedscape flexed and breathed incessantly—but Tom wanted a water entrance near at hand.

He scooped away the slime as best he could, then wiped his hands and settled down to scan the sky from his shelter. On his lap he arranged his remaining psi-bombs.

Fortunately, these wouldn’t pack the wallop of the Thennanin distress call. They were simply pre-recorded message casts, designed to carry a brief code a few thousand kilometers.

He had only recovered three of the message globes from the glider wreck, so he could only broadcast a narrow range of facts. Depending on which bomb he set off; Gillian and Creideiki would know what kind of aliens had come to investigate the distress call.

Of course, something might happen that didn’t fit into any of the scenarios they had discussed. Then he would have to decide whether to broadcast an ambiguous message or do nothing and wait.

Maybe it would have been better to bring a radio, he thought. But a warship in the vicinity could pinpoint a radio transmission almost instantly, and blast his position before he spoke a few words. A message bomb could do its work in a second or so, and would be much harder to locate.

Tom thought about Streaker. It seemed like forever since he had last been there. Everything desirable was there—food, sleep, hot showers, his woman.

He smiled at the way the priorities had come out in his thoughts. Ah, well, Jill would understand.

Streaker might have to abandon him, if his experiment led to a brief chance to blast away from Kithrup. It would not be a dishonorable way to die.

He wasn’t afraid of dying, only of having not done all he could, and not properly spitting in the eye of death when it came for him. That final gesture was important.

Another image came to him, far more unpleasant—Streaker already captured, the space battle already over, all of his efforts useless.

Tom shuddered. It was better to imagine a sacrifice being for something.

A stiff breeze kept the clouds moving. They merged and separated in thick, wet drifts. Tom shaded his eyes against the glare to the east. About a radian south of the haze shrouded morning sun, he thought he saw motion in the sky. He huddled deeper into his makeshift cave.

Out of one of the eastern cloud-drifts, a dark object slowly descended. Swirling vapor momentarily obscured its shape and size as it hung high above the sea of weeds.

A faint drumming sound reached Tom. He squinted from his hiding place, wishing for his lost binoculars. Then the mists parted briefly, and he saw the hovering spaceship clearly. It looked like some monstrous dragonfly, sharply tapered and wickedly dangerous.

Few races delved so deeply into the Library for weird designs as did the idiosyncratic, ruthless Tandu. Wild protrusions extended from the narrow hull in all directions, a Tandu hallmark.

At one end, however, a blunt, wedge-shaped appendage clashed with the overall impression of careless, cruel delicacy. It didn’t seem to fit into the overall design.

Before he could get a better view, the clouds came together, concealing the floating cruiser from sight. The faint hum of powerful engines grew slowly louder, however.

Tom scratched at an itchy five-day growth of beard. The Tandu were bad news. If they were the only ones to show themselves, he would have to set off message bomb number three, to tell Streaker to lock up and get ready for a death-fight.

This was an enemy with whom Mankind had never been able to negotiate. In skirmishes on the Galactic marshes, Terran ships had seldom conquered Tandu vessels, even with the odds in their favor. And, when there were no witnesses around, the Tandu loved to pick fights. Standing orders were to avoid them at all costs, until such time as Tymbrimi advisors could teach human crews the rare knack of beating these masters of the sneak-and-strike.

If the Tandu were the only ones to appear, it also meant he had likely seen his last sunrise. For in setting off a message bomb he’d almost certainly give away his position. The Tandu had clients who could psi-sniff even a thought, if they once caught the mental scent.

Tell you what, Ifni, he thought. You send someone else into this confrontation. I won’t insist it be Thennanin. A Jophur fighting-planetoid will suffice. Mix things up here and I promise to say five sutras, ten Hail Marys, and Kiddush when I get home. Okay? I’ll even dump some credits in a slot machine, if you like.

He envisioned a Tymbrimi-Human-Synthian battle fleet erupting out of the clouds, blasting the Tandu to fragments and sweeping the sky clear of fanatics. It was a lovely image, although he could think of a dozen reasons why it wasn’t likely. For one thing, the Synthians, friendly as they were, wouldn’t intervene unless it was a sure thing. The Tymbrimi, for that matter, would probably help Earth defend herself, but wouldn’t stick their lovely humanoid necks too far out for a bunch of lost wolflings.

Okay Ifni, you lady of luck and chance. He fingered bomb number three. I’ll settle for a single, beat-up, old Thennanin cruiser.

Infinity gave him no immediate answer. He hadn’t expected one.

The thrumming seemed to pass right over his head. His hackles rose as the ship’s strong-field region swept the area. Its shields screeched at his modest psi sense.

Then the crawling rumble began slowly to recede to his left. Tom looked to the west. The ragged clouds separated just long enough to display the Tandu cruiser—a light destroyer, he now saw, and not really a battleship—only a couple of miles away.

As he watched, the blunt appendage detached from the mother ship and began to drift slowly to the south. Tom frowned. That thing didn’t look like the Tandu scout ships he was familiar with. It was a totally different design, stout and stolid, like …

The haze came together again, frustratingly, covering the two ships. Their muttering growl covered the muted grumblings of the nearby volcano.

Suddenly three brilliant streams of green light speared down from the clouds where Tom had last seen the Tandu ship, to hit the sea with flashing incandescence. There came a peal of supersonic thunder.

First he thought the Tandu were blasting the surface below. But a crackling bright explosion in the clouds showed that the destroyer itself was at the receiving end. Something high above the cloud deck was shooting at the Tandu!

He was too busy snatching up his gear to waste time in exultation. He kept his head averted, and so was spared blindness as the destroyer began firing actinic beams of antimatter at its assailant. Waves of heat scorched the back of his head and his left arm, as he stuffed the psi-bombs under his waistband and snapped his breather mask over his head.

The beams of annihilation made streaks of solar heat across the sky. He grabbed up his pack and dove into the hole he had earlier cleared in the thickly woven weeds.

The thunder suddenly muted as he splashed into a jungle of dangling vines. Straight shafts of flickering battlelight speared into the gloom through gaps in the weed.

Tom found he was automatically holding his breath. That didn’t make much sense. The breather mask would not allow much oxygen to escape, but it would pass carbon dioxide. He started inhaling and exhaling as he grabbed a strong root for an anchor.

He found he was laboring for breath. With all the vegetation around him, he had expected the oxygen content to be high. But the tiny indicator on the rim of his mask told him that the opposite was true. The water was depleted compared to the normally rich brine of Kithrup’s sea. The waving gill fins of the mask were picking up only a third as much oxygen as he would need to maintain himself, even if he stayed perfectly still.

In just a few minutes he would start to get dizzy. Not long thereafter he would pass out.

The battle roar penetrated the weed cover in a series of dull detonations. Shafts of brilliance shot into the gloom through openings in the leafy roof, one right in front of Orley. Even indirectly, the light hurt his eyes. He saw fronds just above the waterline, which had recently survived ashfall from a volcano, curl from the heat, turn brown, and fall away.

So much for the rest of my supplies, he thought.

So much for coming up for air.

He wrapped his legs around the thick root as he shrugged out of his backpack. He started rummaging through the satchel, looking for something to improvise. In the sharp shadows he negotiated the contents mostly by touch.

The inertial tracker Gillian had given him, a pouch of food bars, two canteens of “fresh” water, explosive slivers for his needler, a tool kit.

The air meter was turning an ominous orange. Tom wedged the pack between his knees and tore open the tool kit. He seized a small roll of eight-gauge rubber tubing. Purple blobs flickered on the edge of his field of vision as he used his sheath knife to cut a length of narrow hose.

He crammed one end through the mask’s chow-lock. The seal held, but the contents of the tube sprayed at his mouth, making him gag and cough.