Startide Rising (6 page)

T
he first phase of the fight was a free-for-all. A score of warring factions scratched and probed at each other, exploring for weaknesses. Already a number of wrecks drifted in orbit torn and twisted and ominously luminous. Glowing clouds of plasma spread along the path of battle, and jagged metal fragments sparkled as they tumbled.

In her flagship, a leathery queen looked upon viewscreens that showed her the battlefield. She lay on a broad, soft cushion and stroked the brown scales of her belly in contemplation.

The displays that rimmed Krat’s settee showed many dangers. One panel was an overlay of curling lines, indicating zones of anomalous probability. Others pointed out where the slough from psychic weapons was still dangerous.

Clusters of lights were the other fleets, now regrouping as the first phase drew to a close. Fighting still raged on the fringes.

Krat lounged on a cushion of vletoor skin. She shifted her weight to ease the pressure in her third abdomen. Battle hormones always accelerated the quickening within her. It was an inconvenience which, in ancient days, had forced her female ancestors to stay in the nest, leaving to stupid males the fighting.

No longer, though.

A small, bird-like creature approached her side. Krat took a ling-plum from the tray it proffered. She bit it and savored the juices that ran over her tongue and down her whiskers. The little Forski put down the tray and began to sing a crooning ballad about the joys of battle.

The avian Forski had been uplifted to full sapiency, of course. It would have been against the Code of Uplift to do less with a client race. But while they could talk, and even fly spacecraft in a pinch, independent ambition had been bred out of them. They were too useful as domestics and entertainers to be fated anything but specialization. Adaptability might interfere with their graceful and intelligent performance of those functions.

One of her smaller screens suddenly went dark. A destroyer in the Soro rearguard had been destroyed. Krat hardly noticed. The consolidation had been inexpensive so far.

The command room was divided into pie sections. From the center, Krat could look into every baffled unit from her couch of command. Her crew bustled about, each a member of a Soro client race, each hurrying to do her will in its own sub-specialty.

From the sectors for navigation, combat, and detection, there was a quieting of the hectic battle pace at last. In planning, though, she saw increased activity as the staff evaluated developments, including the new alliance between the Abdicator and Transcendor forces.

A Paha sub-officer poked its head out of detection sector. Under hooded eyes, Krat watched it dash to a food station, snatch a steaming mug of amoklah, and hurry back to its post.

The Paha race had been allowed more racial diversity than the Forski, to enhance their value as ritual warriors. It left them less tractable than suited her, but it was a price one paid for good fighters. Krat decided to ignore the incident. She listened to the little Forski sing of the coming victory—of the glory that would be Krat’s when she captured the Earthlings, and finally squeezed their secrets out of them.

Klaxons shrieked. The Forski leapt into the air in alarm and fled to its cubbyhole. Suddenly there were running Paha everywhere.

“Tandu raider!” the tactical officer shouted. “Ships two through twelve, it has appeared in your midst! Take evasive maneuvers! Quickly!”

The flagship bucked as it, too, went into a wild turn to avoid a spread of missiles. Krat’s screens showed a pulsing, danger-blue dot—the daring Tandu cruiser that had popped into being within her fleet—which was even now pouring fire into the Soro ships!

Curse their damnable probability drives! Krat knew that nobody else could move about as quickly as the Tandu, because no other species was willing to take such chances!

Krat’s mating claw throbbed in irritation. Her Soro ships were so busy avoiding missiles, nobody was firing back!

“Fools!” Krat hissed into her communicator. “Ships six and ten, hold your ground and concentrate your fire on the obscenity!”

Then, before her words reached her sub-captains, before any Soro even fired back, the terrible Tandu ship began to dissolve on its own! One moment it was there, ferocious and deadly, ranging in on a numerous but helpless foe. The next instant the spindly destroyer was surrounded by a coruscating, discolored halo of sparks. Its shield folded, and the cruiser fell into itself like a collapsing tower of sticks.

With a brilliant flash, the Tandu vanished, leaving a cloud of ugly vapor behind. Through her own ship’s shields, Krat could feel an awful psychic roar.

We were lucky, Krat realized as the psi-noise slowly faded. It was not without reason that other races avoided the Tandus’ methods. But if that ship had lasted a few moments longer …

No harm was done, and Krat noted that her crew had all done their jobs. Some of them were slow, however, and these must be punished …

She beckoned the chief tactician, a tall, burly Paha. The warrior stepped toward her. He tried to maintain a proud bearing, but his drooping cilia told that he knew what to expect. Krat rumbled deep in her throat.

She started to speak, but in the emotion of the moment, the Soro commander felt a churning pressure within. Krat grunted and writhed, and the Paha officer fled as she panted on the vletoor cushion. Finally she howled and found relief. After a moment, she bent forward to retrieve the egg she had laid.

She picked it up, punishments and battles temporarily banished from her mind. In an instinct that predated her species uplift by the timid Hul, two million years before, she responded to the smell of pheromones and licked the birthing slime from the tiny air-cracks which seamed the leathery surface of the egg.

Krat licked it a few extra times for pleasure. She rocked the egg slowly in an ancient, untampered reflex of motherhood.

T
here was a ship involved, of course. All of his dreams since the age of nine had dealt with ships. Ships, at first, of plasteel and jubber, sailing the straits and archipelagos of Calafia, and later ships of space. Toshio had dreamt of ships of every variety, including those of the powerful Galactic patron races, which he had hoped one day to see.

Now he dreamt of a dinghy.

The tiny human-dolphin colony of his homeworld had sent him out with Akki riding on the outrigger, his Calafian Academy button shining brightly under Alph’s sunshine. It started out a balmy day.

Only soon the weather darkened, and all around became the same color as the water. The sea grew bilious, then black, then changed to vacuum, and suddenly there were stars everywhere.

He worried about air. Neither he nor Akki had suits. It was hard, trying to breathe vacuum!

He was about to turn for home when he saw them chasing him. Galactics, with heads of every shape and color, long, sinuous arms, or tiny, grasping claws, or worse—were rowing toward him steadily. The sleek prows of their boats were as lambent as the starlight.

“What do you want?” he cried out as he paddled hard to get away. (Hadn’t the boat started out with a motor?)

“Who is your master?!” They shouted in a thousand different tongues. “Is that He beside you?”

“Akki’s a fin! Fins are our clients! We uplifted them and set them free!”

“Then they are free,” the Galactics replied, drawing closer. “But who uplifted you? Who set you free?”

“I don’t know!” he screamed. “Maybe we did it ourselves!” He stroked harder as the Galactics laughed. He struggled to breathe the hard vacuum. “Leave me alone! Let me go home!”

Suddenly the Fleet loomed ahead. The ships seemed bigger than moons—bigger than stars. They were dark and silent, and their aspect seemed to daunt even the Galactics.

Then the foremost of the ancient globes began to open. Toshio realized, then, that Akki was gone. His boat was gone. The ETs were gone.

He wanted to scream, but air was very dear.

A piercing whistle brought him around in a painful, disorienting instant. He sat up suddenly and felt the sled bounce unhappily with the motion. While his eyes made a blurred jumble of the horizon, a stiff breeze blew against his face. The tang of Kithrup greeted his nostrils.

“About time, Ladder-runner. You gave us quite a scare.”

Toshio wavered, then saw Hikahi floating nearby, inspecting him with one eye.

“Are you okay, little Sharp-Eyes?”

“Um … yes. I think so.”

“Then you had better get to work on your hose. We had to nip it to give you air.”

Toshio felt the knife-edged cut. He noticed that both hands were neatly bandaged.

“Was anyone else hurt?” he asked as he felt through his thigh pocket for his repair kit.

“A few minor burns. We enjoyed the fight, after learning you were all right-t. Thank you for telling us about Ssassia. We’d never have looked there had you not been caught and then told us what you found.

“They are cutting her loose now”

Toshio knew he should be grateful to Hikahi for putting the misadventure in that light. By rights he should be getting a tongue-lashing for rashly leaving formation, and almost losing his life.

But Toshio felt too lost to allow himself even gratitude to the dolphin lieutenant. “I suppose they haven’t found Phip-pit?”

“Of him there’s been no sign.”

The slow rotation of Kithrup had taken the sun past what would look like four o’clock, Earth time. Low clouds were gathering on the eastern horizon. There was a choppiness to the water that had been absent before.

“There may be a small squall later,” Hikahi said. “It may be unwise to use Earth instincts on another world, but I think we have nothing to fear…”

Toshio looked up. There was something to the south … He squinted.

There it was again, a flash, and then another. Two tiny bursts of light followed in quick succession, almost invisible against the sea glare.

“How long has that been going on?” he gestured toward the southern sky.

“What do you mean, Toshio?”

“That flashing. Is it lightning?”

The fin’s eyes widened and her mouth curled slightly. Hikahi’s flukes churned and she rose up in the water to turn first one eye, then the other, toward the south.

“I detect nothing, Sharp-Eyes. Tell me what you see.”

“Multicolored flashes. Bursts of light. Lots of…” Toshio stopped wrapping his air hose. He stared for a moment, trying to remember.

“Hikahi,” he said slowly. “I think Akkia called me during the fight with the weed. Did you get anything over your set?”

“No I didn’t, Toshio. But remember, we fins aren’t yet so good at abstract thought while fighting. T-try to recall what he said, please.”

Toshio touched his forehead. The encounter with the weed wasn’t something he wanted to think about, right now. It all blended in with his nightmare, a jumbling of colors and noises and confusion.

“I think … I think he said something about wanting us to keep radio silence and come home … something about a space battle going on?”

Hikahi let out a whistling moan and flipped out of the water in a backward dive. She was back immediately, tail churning.

* Close-up

Lock-up

* Go the other way—than up!

Sloppy Trinary. There were nuances in Primal Dolphin which Toshio, of course, couldn’t understand. But they sent a thrill down his spine. Hikahi was the last fin he would ever have expected to slip into Primal. As he finished wrapping his air hose, he realized with chagrin what his failure to tell Hikahi earlier might have cost them all.

He slapped his faceplate shut and flopped over to press the buoyancy valve on the sled, checking simultaneously the telltales on his helmet rim. He ran through the pre-dive checklist with a rapidity only a fourth-generation Calafian colonist could have achieved.

The bow of the sled was sinking quickly as the sea erupted to his right. Seven dolphins breached in a spume of water and exhaled breath.

“S-s-sassia’s tied to your stern, Toshio. Can you shake your leg?” Keepiru urged. “Now is no time to dawdle making up’t-t-tunes!”

Toshio grimaced. How could Keepiru have fought so hard earlier to save the life of someone he ridiculed so?

He remembered the way Keepiru had torn into the weed, the desperate look in his eye, and the glow it had taken when he saw it. Yet now he was cruel and taunting as ever.

A sharp blast of light flashed in the east, searing the sky all around them. The fins squealed almost as one, and immediately dove—all except Keepiru, who stayed beside Toshio—as the eastern cloudline spat fire into the afternoon sky.

The sled finally sank, but in the last instant Toshio and Keepiru saw a hurtling battle of giants.

A huge, arrowhead-shaped space vessel plummeted down on them, pitted and fiery. Wind-swept trailers of purple smoke boiled out of great gashes in its sides, to be flung back into the needle-narrow shock front of its supersonic flight. The shock wave warped even the shimmer of the great ship’s defensive shields, shells of gravity and plasma that sparkled with unhealthful overload.

Two grapnel-shaped destroyers dogged it no more than four ship lengths behind. Beams of accelerated anti-matter flashed from each of the trefoils, hitting their mark twice in terrible explosions.

Toshio was five meters below the surface when the sonic boom hit. It slammed the sled over, and kept it tumbling amid a roar that sounded like a house caving in. The water was a churning maelstrom of bubbles and bodies.

As he struggled with the sled, Toshio thanked Infinity he hadn’t been at the surface to hear the battle passing by. At Morgran they had seen ships die. But never this close.

The noise finally settled down to a long, loud growling. Toshio got the sled righted at last.

Ssassia’s sad corpse still lay tied to the rear end of the sled. The other fins, too scared or prudent to go above, began taking turns at the small airdomes that lined the bottom rim of the sled. It was Toshio’s job to keep the sled still. It wasn’t easy in the churning water, but he did it without a thought.