David Brin - Heaven's Reach

“I believe you.” Ling nodded. “That’s why we mustn’t go there. In case we’re still being followed.”

She didn’t look much like a star god anymore, with her dark hair hacked short and pale skin covered with soot. Wearing just a torn undertunic from her once shiny uniform, Ling now seemed far wilder than the Jijoan natives she once called “savages.” In a cloth sling she carried a crimson torus that leaked gore like a wounded sausage.

Lark saw her meaning. Ever since they had tried sabotaging the dreadnought’s control chamber, giant Jophur and their robot servants had chased them across the vast vessel. As fugitives, the humans mustn’t lead pursuers to the one place offering food and shelter.

“Where to then?” Lark hated being in the open. He grasped their only weapon, a circular purple tube. Larger and healthier than the red one, it was their sole key to get past locked doors and unwary guardians.

Ling knew starships far better than he. But this behemoth warship was different. She peered up one shadowy tunnel, a curled shaft that seemed more organic than artificial.

“Just pick a direction. Quickly. I hear someone coming.”

With a wistful glance toward their “nest,” Lark took her hand and plunged away at right angles, into another passageway.

The walls glistened with an oily sheen, each passage or portal emitting its own distinct aroma, partly making up for the lack of written signs. Although he was just a primitive sooner, Lark did know traeki. Those cousins of the Jophur had different personalities, but shared many physical traits. As a Jijoan native, he could grasp many nuances in the shipboard scent language.

Despite the eerie hall curvature, he was starting to get a mental picture of the huge vessel — an oblate spheroid, studded with aggressive weaponry and driven by engines mighty enough to warp space in several ways. The remaining volume was a labyrinth of workshops, laboratories, and enigmatic chambers that puzzled even the star sophisticate, Ling. Since barely escaping the Jophur command center, they had worked their way inward, back toward the tiny eden where they had hidden after escaping their prison cell.

The place where they first made love.

Only now the greasy ring stacks had shut down all the axial drop tubes, blocking easy access along the Polkjhy’s north-south core.

“It makes the whole ship run inefficiently,” Ling had explained earlier, with some satisfaction. “They can’t shift or reassign crew for different tasks. We’re still hurting them, Lark, as long as we’re free!”

He appreciated her effort to see a good side to their predicament. Even if the future seemed bleak, Lark felt content to be with her for as much time as they had left.

Glancing backward, Ling gripped his arm. Heightened rustling sounds suggested pursuit was drawing near. Then Lark also heard something from the opposite direction, closing in beyond the next sharp bend. “We’re trapped!” Ling cried.

Lark rushed to the nearest sealed door. Its strong redolence reminded him of market days back home, when traeki torus breeders brought their fledglings for sale in mulch-lined pens.

He aimed the purple ring at a nearby scent plate and a thin mist shot from the squirming creature. Come on. Do your stuff, he silently urged.

Their only hope lay in this gift from the former traeki sage, Asx, who had struggled free of mental repression by a Jophur master ring just long enough to pop out two infant tubes. The human fugitives had no idea what the wounded red one was for, but the purple marvel had enabled them to stay free for several improbable days, ever since the battleship took off from Jijo on its manic errand through outer space.

Of course we knew it couldn’t last.

The door lock accepted the coded chemical key with a soft click, and the portal slid open, letting them rush through acrid fumes into a dim chamber, divided by numerous tall, glass partitions. Lark had no time to sort impressions, however, before the corridor behind them echoed with human shouts and a staccato of running feet.

“Stop! Don’t you stupid skins know you’re just making things worse? Come out, before they start using—”

The closing door cut off angry threats by Ling’s former commander. Lark pushed the purple traeki against the inner sense-plate, where it oozed aromatic scramblers — chemicals tuned to randomize the lock’s coding. From experience, he knew it could take half a midura for their pursuers to get through — unless they brought heavy cutting tools to bear.

Why should they bother? They know we’re trapped inside.

He found it especially galling to be cornered by Rann. The third human prisoner had thrown in his lot with the Jophur, perhaps currying favor for the release of his Rothen patron gods from frozen internment on Jijo. It left Lark with no options, since the purple ring would have nil effect on the big Danik warrior.

Turning around, Lark saw that the glass walls — stretching from floor to a high ceiling — made up giant vivariums holding row after row of wriggling, squirming things.

Midget traeki toruses!

Clear tubes carried brown, sludgelike material to each niche.

Refined liquid mulch. Baby food.

We’re in their nursery!

By itself, no traeki ring was intelligent. Back on the world where they evolved, slithering through fetid swamps as wormlike scavengers, they never amounted to much singly. Only when traeki began stacking together and specializing did there emerge a unique kind of presapient life, ripe for adoption and Uplift by their snaillike Poa patrons.

This is where the Polkjhy crew grows special kinds of rings, packed with the right skills to be new members of the team.

A potent kind of reproduction. No doubt some of the pulsing doughnut shapes were master rings, designed millennia ago to transform placid, contemplative traeki into adamant, alarming Jophur.

Lark jumped as a human scream clamored down the narrow aisles. Pulse pounding, he ran, shouting Ling’s name.

Her voice echoed off glass walls. “Hurry! They’ve got me cornered!”

Lark burst around a vivarium to find her at last, backing away from two huge Jophur workers, toward a niche in the far wall. The nursery staff, Lark realized. Each tapered pile consisted of at least thirty component toruses — swaying and hissing — two meters wide at the bottom and massing almost a ton. Their waxy flanks gleamed with an opulent vitality one never saw in traeki back home on Jijo, flickering with meaningful patterns of light and dark. Colored stenches vented from chemsynth pores, as manipulator tendrils stretched toward Ling.

She moved lithely, darting left and right. Seeking an opening or else something to use as a weapon. There was no panic in her eyes, nor did she give Lark away in her relief to see him.

Of course, Jophur vision sensors faced all directions at once. But with that advantage came a handicap — slow reaction time. The first stack was still swaying toward its victim when Lark dashed up from behind. Somehow, Asx’s gift knew to send a jet of sour spray, striking a gemlike organ that quickly spasmed and went dim.

The whole stack shuddered, slumping to quiescence. Lark wasted no time spinning toward the other foe — only to find his right arm suddenly pinned by an adamant tentacle! An odious scent of TRIUMPH swirled as the second Jophur pulled him close, coiling tendrils and commencing to squeeze.

The purple ring spasmed in Lark’s hand, but the chemical spray could not hit its mark at this impossible angle, past the Jophur’s bulging midriff. The master torus drove its lesser tubes with a malice and intensity Lark had never seen in serene traekis back home. The constriction grew unbearable, expelling his breath in a choking cry of agony.