THIRTY-SEVEN

Redwing stepped into the garden and inhaled through his nose. Good moist green smells. Take a moment, just a breather. The animals—

The animals had been tied down, netted, and they were not happy. He hadn’t ordered that. He should have, of course, the way SunSeeker was lurching about. Had the finger snakes done that?

The finger snakes. Redwing tended to forget that they were part of what he was trying to save. Were they in their tunnel? No, he could see all three of them wrapped around three thick-bole apple trees.

A smartbot prowled the rows of plants, testing soil and injecting fluids where needed. Just growing plants hydroponically wasn’t enough. Humans needed micronutrients, vitamins, minerals—but so did the plants and animals they ate. So all organisms in the looping food chains had to provide the right micronutrients needed by others, without them getting locked up in insoluble forms or running out. Selenium had gone missing a century back, he had learned from the log. Only with sophisticated biochem types woken up for the task did they get the food chain running right again.

Redwing savored the leafy comfort lacing the air and staggered as SunSeeker surged. Redwing caught himself on a stanchion. The snakes didn’t seem to notice. Phoshtha and Shtirk were watching a screen, a view of lands showing murkily through the jet, while they worked on small things with their darting, intricate hands. Thisther was watching the captain.

Redwing asked, “Thisther, did you secure the pigs and sheep and such?”

“Yes. Was well done?” A thin, reedy command of Anglish.

“Yes, thank you. Are you comfortable?”

“Better. What a ride!”

Redwing left the garden feeling better. Now what? There was nothing like cramped quarters to concentrate the mind. So he went to his cabin as the deck creaked and rolled with the jet storms that whipped by it. He watched the Bowl view crawl past on his wall and did a few standing exercises, adjusted against the tilt local grav had, due to the helix SunSeeker was following. He had learned to disappear within himself, walling out a ship’s routine humming and stale smells and dead air, to create a still, silent space where he could live, rest, think. In the continual noise of the ship he had learned to hear well, picking telltale murmurs out of SunSeeker’s constant vibrations.

A call buzzed in his ear. “Cap’n, got something to see on the bridge. The jet’s really snaking now. Flares like sausages running down it, too.”

He started back, still listening to the pops and creaks of his ship. With his crew he also knew how to listen carefully, or to deliberately not hear. An essential skill, taking only a lifetime of daily practice to master.

Beth’s voice had been strained, and she had just replaced Ayaan Ali in the lead pilot’s chair, with Clare Conway in the second chair. They all looked pale, their eyes never leaving the wall screens and operations boards. SunSeeker’s long helix within the jet had worn them all down, and now the pace was picking up. He hadn’t been resting well, and neither had the others. Coffee could only do so much.

As he entered the bridge, he noted that everyone had coffee ready at the elbow. Should he tell them to switch to decaf? No, too much meddling.

Karl said as Redwing came onto the bridge, “It’s whipping around in the Knothole, just as the simulation said.”

On the biggest screen, the jet was now lit up in yellow. They were looking straight down it and could see the flexed jet now bulging very close to the Knothole edge. “See, the Knothole has big mag fields to stop it.”

“Are we driving the jet just enough to give them a scare?” Redwing leaned over the panel and switched to a flank camera view. “And what’s that secondary bump?”

Karl studied it. Redwing noted that Beth was working a different telescoping camera, focused far away from the jet, on the mirror zone. Karl said, “That’s a nonlinear effect—a backflow.”

“You mean there’s a shock wave working back toward us?” Redwing watched the small sideways oscillation evolve, working around the rim of the jet. “It’s from the big kink?”

SunSeeker could run for weeks in the jet without climbing into view of the gamma ray lasers on the Bowl rim. They were already fairly deep in the Bowl and getting a closer view of the zones near the Knothole, where centrifugal gravity was less. The mirror zone, a vast annulus, was behind their forward-looking views, and ahead loomed the forested regions just in from the Knothole. Beth had been kept somewhere in all that.

“Looks like the kink went nonlinear and launched this shock back at us,” Karl said. “I don’t understand—”

“Here’s a better view,” Beth said. “I asked the Bridge Artilect to find any part of the mirror zone that could give us an angled reflection, and it found this.”

She smiled, and Redwing saw she was enjoying this. She always seized fresh opportunity with relish, one of her best qualities. The wobbly, somewhat blurred image gave them a view from far away to the side. He watched the kink bulge warping as it met the higher mag fields at the Knothole rim, and a countershock race away up the jet. That played among the boundary mag fields of the jet, pushing out farther to the side—

“It’s going to hit the atmospheric membrane in the closest-in zone,” Beth said. “Moving at high speed—over a hundred klicks a second in sideways motion.”

“This wasn’t in the simulation, as I recall.” Redwing let his statement hang there, without a tone of sarcasm. Flat facts spoke for themselves.

Karl nodded, said nothing. Beth watched the fast-moving side shock as it plowed toward the atmosphere’s envelope, a layer sketched in by a graphic; it wasn’t truly visible in these narrow line widths. “Is there enough mass in that to do damage?”

“Plenty,” Karl said, “and the magnetic energy density, too, can hammer the envelope.” He looked worried and said no more.

“What about the structure itself?” Redwing said. He knew this huge thing had to have incredible strength to hold it together. SunSeeker had a support structure made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship’s axial core. Maybe the Bowl material was similar.

Karl said in a distant tone, almost automatically, “I scanned the Bowl wraparound struts, the foundational matter, on the long-range telescopes. Had the Artilects do a spectral study. It was only a few tens of meters thick, mostly carbon composite looks like, at least on the outside. That’s pretty heavily encrusted with evident add-on machinery and cowlings. Calculated the stress.”

“Which means…?” Redwing persisted.

“The Bowl stress-support material has to be better than SunSeeker’s. Maybe lots better.”

“Should we alter our planned trajectory?” Beth asked, eyes moving among the screens.

“Not yet.” He was thinking fast but getting nothing. So many factors at play … “That display we got before, the lightning here on the bridge, it must be some kind of message.”

“I noticed something here before,” Karl said. “Look.” He thumped his command pad and brought up a recorded scene on a side screen. “See that?”

The vector locator was focused on the zone nearest the Knothole. They could see the massive mag field coils at the rim, then the boundary of the atmospheric envelope, shiny in orange, reflected jet light. There were verdant forests sprawling away from the bulky Knothole structures.

“That’s the same sort of area we were in,” Beth said. “Low gravs, huge tall trees, big spider things. And I saw some of that orange light shimmering up high, from far off, bounced off the upper boundary layer, I guess. Jet light.”

Partway into the large band of forest was a burnt brown and black slash among the lush greens, now mostly faded. Something had left a fresher black burn on the metal and ceramic portion near the Knothole, where the jet passed through.

Karl said slowly, “So instability was a major problem here. It’s damaged the Bowl before.”

“But shouldn’t forest have covered over damage pretty quickly?” Beth asked.

“Maybe it was damage to the understructure,” Karl said. “It broke systems that deliver water and nutrients. Not repaired yet.”

“That means they’re neglecting upkeep,” Redwing said. “The usual first sign of a system sliding downhill.”

“So why don’t they have defenses against the occasional jet malf?” Beth asked.

A long silence. They recalled the crackling image of the Bowl dancing in air above the bridge, sent by some mysterious agency. Karl had explained it in terms of some inductive electromagnetic fields, playing along the outside of the ceramic walls nearby. Redwing was skeptical of that mechanism but certain that the event had been a crude attempt at getting their attention. Then nothing more happened. “A trial run, maybe,” Karl had said. Redwing decided to keep to their planned helical trajectory.

Clare Conway said, rising from the copilot chair, “Cap’n, I see three small ships coming up behind us. They popped into view of long-range microwave radar minutes ago.”

Redwing flicked the radar display on the biggest screen. “Where’d they come from?”

“From the Knothole rim, looks like,” Clare said.

Karl said, “Maybe this answers Beth’s question. They’re sending out something to attack us.”

“What’s their ETA on current trajectory?” Redwing asked, keeping his voice calm.

“Two hours, approx,” Clare said.

“Get me an image.” Redwing considered what they could do. SunSeeker had no substantial defenses against projectile or high-intensity laser weapons. He had learned a simple rule back in the brief, enormously destructive Asteroid War: that any mass hitting at three kilometers per second delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT. And SunSeeker was moving well above 100 km/sec now. Add to that any incoming kinetic energy of an attacker. Square it. Any interesting space drive was a weapon of mass destruction, even to itself.

That was why the ship had auto-laser batteries run by the Artilects, designed for interstellar travel. They could hammer a rock the size of your fist or smaller into ionized atoms in a microsecond. But above that mass level, not much. They might deflect it a bit, which could be useful. That’s all. Throw a living room couch at SunSeeker at these speeds and they would suffer a hull breach.

“They’re small, can maneuver faster than we can,” Clare said. “Accelerating at three gravs, too.”

“So maybe robotic,” Redwing said. This was not looking good. “How do they navigate in the jet? Can we tell?”

“Looks like magscoops, same as us. Smaller, of course.”

Clare brought up the same telescope Beth had used and sought out the small moving dots. “Less than a hundred meters across,” she said. “Cylindrical, with an ionized propulsion signature.”

Redwing said, “Maybe they didn’t take us seriously before. Slow reflexes.”

“No,” Karl said flatly. “We’re missing something here.”

The ship strummed with long rolling waves and sharp pops and snaps. No one spoke, and Redwing listened to his ship while all around him his crew worked to find out more about the roiling jet that streamed by, into the magscoop and their fusion chambers. The shipboard Artilects were working as well, but seldom spoke or called attention to themselves. They were built and trained for their talents to sustain, not for imagination and quick responses to the wholly new.

Into the long uncomfortable silence Beth said quietly, watching the screens, “That shock wave pushing out the jet in the Knothole—it’s hit the membrane. At high velocity.”

They all turned and saw it on max amplification. Beth had used the overlay yellow and orange to signify plasma and lag fields, and strands of these showed the jet striking the boundary of the Bowl biosphere. Filmy gases escaped into space, pearly strands they saw in the visible. Redwing knew what this meant. The plasma’s high-energy particles, encased in the sheath of magnetic fields, would deliver prickly energies. This would fry away the long-chain organic molecules that made the gossamer boundaries. Those separated the Bowl’s many compartments, holding the great vaults of air above the living zones. So it would all go to smash and scatteration in a blizzard of unleashed furies.

He tried to imagine what that meant to those living there. Then he made himself stop.

A booming roll came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.

“Plasma densities nearby are rising. Our exhaust is getting blocked again,” Beth said.

“This is how it started before,” Karl said. “To break down air, the voltage is—”

“Megavolts,” Clare snapped. “Got it. If that happens, stay flat. Stick your head up, it’ll draw current, fry you.”

“You think they—it—is trying to kill us?” Beth said. “This could be communication.”

“Strange way to do it,” Redwing said.

“Retaliation for thrashing the jet, I’d think,” Fred said. He had come onto the board so quietly no one noticed him.

“I’m getting rising inductive effects close to our skin,” Beth said. “Must be Alfvén waves rippling in on the scoop fields. Higher electric fields—”

Redwing felt his hair stand on end. He hit the deck.

Sparks snapped. Everyone flopped onto the deck and lay flat. A bright yellow-white line scratched across the air. More lines sputtered. They arched and twisted. Some split, and yellow green strands shaped a tight shape—

“Human form!” Fred said from the deck. “They’re making our image. They know what we are.”

The shape wobbled and throbbed in the fevered air. Carved in shifting, crackling yellow lines, it was like a bad cartoon. Stretched legs, arms flapping, wobbly head, hands first spread then balled into fists, the whole body flailing. Then it was gone in a sizzle and a flicker.

Beth said, “Can they see us?”

“Who’s ‘they’ anyway?” Clare said. Her face was flushed, lips compressed. “They’re trying to jam our fusion burn, get us to stop, I suppose. So they’re sending us an echo, an image of us to—make some kind of communication?”

The shape popped up again. Outlined in crackling yellow and orange, the figure wriggled and sputtered.

“Let me try…” Clare raised a hand slightly into the singed air. A long moment. Then slowly, twisting and shuddering, losing definition in the legs, the figure moved, too. It raised its left hand, mirror image to Clare’s right. Air snapped around the dancing yellow image. The hand flexed, worked, wriggled itself into … fingers. A thumb grew, extended, turned red, and contracted. Now the crackling image filled itself in, a skin spreading yellow-bright and warped and seething. The body grew a head, and it struggled to make a mouth and eyes of pale ivory. The electrical fog flickered, as if barely able to sustain the sizzling voltage.

Clare slowly flexed her fingers. The fingers twitched, too, suffused in a waxy, saffron glow. The body hovered in the air unsteadily, holding pattern, all the defining bright yellow lines focused on the shimmering, burnt-yellow hand.

“Let’s try to signal—,” Redwing began.

The arc snapped off with a pop. There was nothing in the air but a harsh, nose-stinging stench.

Clare sobbed softly. Fred jumped up and turned in all directions, but could see nothing to do. The only sound was the rumbling fusion engines.

“Let’s get back to stations,” Redwing said.

Clare laughed with a high, nervous edge. She got up and resumed the copilot chair. Everyone got back into bridge position, unsteady and pensive.

Fred said, “The low-frequency spectrum has changed.”

“Which means?” Redwing asked.

“It’s got a lot more signal strength. Let me run the Fourier—” His fingers and hands gave the board complex signals through its optical viewers. “Yep, got some FM modulation, pretty coherent.”

“Someone sending? Now?” Beth said. “Maybe they want to talk?”

“This is really low-frequency stuff,” Fred said. “The antennas we use to monitor interstellar Alfvén waves, to keep watch on perturbations in the magscoop. Never thought we’d get a coherent message on those!” Fred brightened, always happy to see a new unknown.

Karl had gotten up and now stood behind Fred’s chair. He said, “That fifteen kilohertz upper frequency—look at the spike. Amazing. Antennas radiate best if they’re at least as large as a wavelength, so … that means that the radiator is at least thirty kilometers across!”

Redwing tried to imagine what big structure could send such signals. “Is there anything on radar of that size in the jet?”

The answer came quickly: no.

“How can we decode it?” Clare asked. She stood and walked over to see Fred’s Fourier display.

Fred said, “I can look for correlates, but—hell!—we’re starting from knowing nothing about who the hell is—”

This time Redwing barely had time to register the prickly feeling on his hands and head before a crackling burnt-yellow discharge surged all along the bridge, snarling. The air snapped as they again dived for the deck. Redwing hit and flattened and saw Clare choose to stand against the nearest wall. A tendril shot forth and caught her. She twitched and crackled as the ampere violence surged through her. Her mouth opened impossibly wide, and a guttural gasp escaped—and then the mouth locked open, frozen. Smoke fumed from her hair. Her legs jumped and her arms jerked and she fell.

Her red coverall sparked at the belt. Tiny fires forked from her fingers as she struck the deck. Her hair seethed with smoke. She shuddered, twitched—was still.

Redwing did not move, but he noticed the tension had left the air. A seared silence came as acrid air stung the nostrils.

In the silence he could hear a last long sigh ease out of Clare, whistling between broken teeth.

Beth sobbed as they gingerly gathered around the singed body. Redwing wondered what he could do in the short time before the cylindrical alien ships arrived, climbing up the jet toward them.