David Brin - Heaven's Reach

And yet, he knew its promise was but a slender reed. Hardly much basis for hope. As if the universe would ever really give him a chance at vengeance! Life was seldom so accommodating. Especially to the weak, the harried and pursued.

Still, Emerson felt grateful for the gift of strange poetry. Though it wasn’t an engineer’s language, Trinary excelled at conveying irony.

He watched through a broad crystal window as neodolphins raced back and forth, traversing Streaker’s water-filled bridge with powerful tail thrusts, leaving trails of fizzing, hyper-oxygenated water in their wake. Other crewfins lay at ramplike control stations, their sleek heads inserted in airdomes while neural cables linked their large brains to computers and distant instrumentalities.

The crystal pane vibrated against his fingertips, carrying sonar clicks and rapid info-bursts from the other side. The music of cooperative skill. A euphony of craft. These were the finest members of a select crew. The Tursiops amicus elite. The pride of Earth’s Uplift campaign, recruited and trained by the late Captain Creideiki to be pilots without peer.

The dolphin lieutenant, Tsh’t, crisply handled routine decisions and relayed orders to the bridge crew. Beside her, chief helmsman Kaa lay shrouded by cables, his narrow jaw open and sunken eyes closed. Kaa’s flukes slashed as he steered the starship like an extended part of his own body. Thirty million years of instinct assisted Kaa — intuition accumulated ever since his distant ancestors ceded land for a fluid realm of three dimensions.

Behind Emerson, the Plotting Room was equally abuzz. Here dolphins moved on rollers or walkers — machines that offered agility in dry terrain, making them seem even more massively bulky next to a pair of slender bipeds. And yet, those humans called the tune, directing all this furious activity. Two women whose lives had been utterly different, until circumstances brought them together.

The two women Emerson loved, though he could never tell them.

Thrumming engine sounds changed pitch as he sensed the nimble ship brake harder to fight its hyperbolic plunge, clawing against the drag of a giant star, changing course in another of Gillian Baskin’s daring ventures.

Emerson had paid a dear price for one of her earlier hunches, in that huge, intricately structured place called the Fractal World — a realm of snowy icicles whose smallest branchlets spread wider than a planet. But he had never resented Gillian’s mistake. Who else could have kept Streaker free for three years, eluding the armadas of a dozen fanatical alliances? He only regretted that his sacrifice had been in vain.

Above all, Emerson wanted to help right now. To go below, toward those distant humming motors, and help Hannes Suessi nurse more pseudovelocity from the laboring gravistators. But his handicap was too severe. His torn cortex could not read sense from the symbols on flashing displays, and there was only so much you could do by touch or instinct alone. His comrades had been kind, giving him make-work tasks, but he soon realized it was better just to get out of their way.

Anyway, Sara and Gillian were clearly up to something. Tension filled the Plotting Room as both women argued with the spinning apparition of the Niss Machine.

Its spiral lines coiled tightly. Clearly, a moment of drama was approaching.

So Emerson played spectator, watching as a chart portrayed Streaker’s tight maneuver, slewing past giant Izmunuti’s stubborn grasp, threading hurricanes of ionized heat that strained the laboring shields, changing course to climb aggressively toward a cluster of pale, flickering lights.

A convoy of ships … or things that acted like ships, moving about the cosmos at the volition of thinking minds.

He overheard Sara utter buzzing glottal stops to frame a strange GalSix term. One seldom heard, except in tones of muted awe.

Zang.

Despite his handicap, Emerson abruptly knew what advice Gillian was receiving from the young Jijoan mathematician. He shivered. Of all the chances taken by Streaker’s crew, none was like this. Even daring the throat of a newly roused transfer point might have been better. Just thinking about it provoked a reply from some recess of his sundered brain. Precious as a jewel, a single word glittered hot and hopeless.

Desperation …

It didn’t take long for Streaker’s tactic to be noticed.

The Jophur enemy — just twenty paktaars away — began slewing at once, shedding pseudovelocity to intercept the Earthship’s new course.

A crowd of others lay even nearer at hand.

Blue glimmers represented frail harvesting machines — Emerson had seen graphic images and recognized the gossamer sails. By now half the luckless convoy were already consumed by rapidly expanding solar storms. The rest gathered light frantically, pulsing with inadequate engines, struggling to find refuge at the older transfer point.

Among those frail sparks, four bright yellow dots had been cruising imperviously, speeding to assist some of the beleaguered mechanicals. But this effort was disrupted by Streaker’s sudden, hard turn.

Two of the yellow glows continued their rescue efforts, darting from one harvester to the next, plucking a glittering nucleus unit out of the swelling flames and leaving the broad sail to burn.

A third yellow dot swung toward the Jophur ship.

The last one moved to confront Streaker.

Everyone in the Plotting Room stopped what they were doing when a shrill, crackling sound erupted over the comm speakers. Though Emerson had lost function in his normal speech centers, his ears worked fine, and he could tell at once that it was unlike any Galactic language — or wolfling tongue — he had ever heard.

The noise sounded bellicose, nervous, and angry.

The Niss hologram shivered with each staccato burst of screeching pops. Dolphins slashed their flukes, loosing unhappy moans. Sara covered her ears and closed her eyes.

But Gillian Baskin spoke calmly, soothing her companions with a wry tone of voice. In moments, chirps of dolphin laughter filled the chamber. Sara grinned, lowering her hands, and even the Niss straightened its mesh of jagged lines.

Emerson burned inside, wishing he could know what Gillian had said — what well-timed humor swiftly roused her crewmates from their alarmed funk. But all he made out were “wah-wah” sounds, nearly as foreign as those sent by a different order of life.

The Niss Machine made rasping noises of its own. Emerson guessed it must be trying to communicate with the yellow dot. Or rather, what the dot represented … one of those legendary, semifluid globes that served as “ships” for mighty, cryptic hydrogen breathers. He recalled being warned repeatedly, back in training, to avoid all contact with the unpredictable Zang. Even the Tymbrimi curbed their rash natures when it came to such deadly enigmas. If this particular Zang perceived Streaker as a threat — or if it were merely touchy at the moment — any chance of survival was practically nil. The Earthship’s fragments would soon join the well-cooked atoms of Izmunuti’s seething atmosphere.

Soon, long-range scans revealed the face of the unknown. An image wavered at highest magnification, refracted by curling knots of stormy plasma heat, revealing a vaguely spherical object with flanks that rippled eerily. The effect didn’t remind Emerson of a soap bubble as much as a tremendous gobbet of quivering grease, surrounded by dense evaporative haze.

A small bulge distended outward from the parent body as he watched. It separated and seemed briefly to float, glistening, alongside.

The detached blob abruptly exploded.

From the actinic fireball a needle of blazing light issued straight toward Streaker!

Klaxons erupted warnings in both the bridge and Plotting Room. The spatial chart revealed a slender line, departing the yellow emblem to spear rapidly across a distance as wide as Earth’s orbit. As a weapon, it was unlike any Emerson had seen.