Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“So Graves got a really good deal. He’s going to be crowing over us for months.”

“I regard that as unlikely. Councilor Graves has already told us that it may be necessary to visit dozens of different worlds before he finds the Zardalu.”

“He can do it. The Erebus has ample power. And if the Zardalu get pesky, the ship has plenty of weapons.”

“It does indeed. But still I suspect that Councilor Graves will shortly become less satisfied with his purchase.”

“Huh?”

“Less satisfied, indeed.” Atvar H’sial paused for dramatic effect. “ Much less satisfied, as soon as he realizes that what he has purchased is an orbital fort — a device which can never make a landing, ever, on any planet.”

Darya Lang sat in the main control room of the Erebus , staring at the list of locations that she had generated and swiveling her chair impatiently from side to side.

Stalemate.

The way that Hans Rebka had described the plan, it sounded almost too easy: acquire the use of a ship and recruit a crew; seek out the refuge of the escaped Zardalu, with adequate firepower to assure their own safety; and return to Miranda with unarguable proof of Zardalu existence.

They had the ship, they had the weapons, and they had the crew. But there was one gigantic snag. The Zardalu had not left a forwarding address. They could be anywhere in the spiral arm, on thousands of habitable planets scattered through thousands of light-years. Neither Hans Rebka nor Julian Graves had offered a persuasive method of narrowing that search, and no one else on board had been able to do any better. To examine all the possibilities, the Erebus would have to fly in a thousand directions at once.

As soon as Darya and Hans Rebka arrived on board the whole group had met; and argued; and dispersed. And now the ship sat in lumbering orbit around Sentinel Gate, while the Zardalu — somewhere — were relentlessly breeding.

Everything in the Erebus had been built in a multiply redundant and durable style. The control room was no exception. Fifteen separate consoles, each with its own weapons center, ran floor-to-ceiling around the circular room. General information centers were fitted into niches between them. Darya sat in one of those, and across from her on the other side of the chamber Atvar H’sial was crouched over another, manipulating controls with a delicate combination of four clawed limbs.

The flat screens could not provide images “visible” to the Cecropian’s sonic sight — so how could she be obtaining useful feedback of information? Darya wished that Louis Nenda or J’merlia were there to act as interpreter, but they had headed off with Hans Rebka to the auxiliary engine room of the ship, where Graves claimed to have found “a fascinating device.”

Kallik was sitting in the niche next to Atvar H’sial, deeply immersed in her own analysis of data. Without examining the outputs, Darya had a good idea what the Hymenopt was doing — she would be sifting the data banks for rumors, speculation, and old legends concerning the Zardalu, and pondering their most likely present location. Darya had been doing the same thing herself. She had reached definite conclusions that she wanted to share with the others — if only the rest would come back from their excursion to the engine room. What was keeping them so long?

It occurred to her that there was something deeply significant in what was happening. She, Atvar H’sial, and Kallik — the females in the party — were working on the urgent problem of Zardalu location, analyzing and reanalyzing available data. Meanwhile all the males had gone off to play with a dumb gadget, a toy that had sat on the Erebus for millennia and could easily wait another few years before anyone played with it.

Darya’s peevish thoughts were interrupted by a startling sound from the middle of the control chamber. She turned, and the skin on her arms and the back of her neck tightened into goose bumps.

A dozen hulking figures stood no more than a dozen paces from her. Towering four meters tall on splayed tentacles of pale aquamarine, the thick cylindrical bodies were topped by bulbous heads of midnight blue, a meter wide. At the base of the head, below the long slit of a mouth, the breeding pouches formed a ring of round-mouthed openings. While Darya looked on in horror, lidded eyes, each as big across as her stretched hand, surveyed the chamber then turned to look down on her. Cruel hooked beaks below the broad-spaced eyes opened wide, and a series of high-pitched chittering sounds emerged.

Once seen, never forgotten. Zardalu.

Darya jumped to her feet and backed up to the wall of the chamber. Then she realized that Kallik, across from her, had left her seat and was moving toward the looming figures. The little alien could understand Zardalu speech.

“Kallik! What are they—” But at that moment the Hymenopt walked right through one of the standing Zardalu, then stood calmly inspecting it with her rear-facing eyes.

“Remarkable,” Kallik said. She moved to Darya’s side. “More accurate than I would have believed possible. My sincere congratulations.”

She was talking not to Darya, but to someone who had been sitting tucked out of sight in a niche on the side of the control room. As that figure came into view, Darya saw that it was E.C. Tally. A neural connect cable ran from the base of the skull of the embodied computer, back into the booth.

“Thank you,” E.C. Tally said. “I must say, I like it myself. But it is not quite right.” He inspected the Zardalu critically, and as Darya watched the aquamarine tentacles of the land-cephalopods darkened a shade and the ring of breeding pouches moved a fraction lower on the torso.

“Though congratulations are due more to this ship’s image restoration and display facilities,” the embodied computer went on. He circled the group of Zardalu, trailing shiny neural cable along the floor behind him. “All I did was feed it my memories. If something as good as this had been available on Miranda, perhaps I would have had more success in persuading the Council. Do you think that it is a plausible reconstruction, Professor Lang? Or is more work needed before it can mimic reality?”

Darya was saved from answering by the sound of voices from the control-room entrance. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka appeared between two of the massive support columns, talking animatedly. They glanced at the Zardalu standing in the middle of the room, then marched across to Darya and Kallik.

“Nice job, E.C.,” Nenda said casually. “Put it on video and audio when you’re done.” He turned from the embodied computer and the menacing Zardalu, and grinned at Darya. “Professor, we got it. We agree on everything. But me and Rebka gotta have your help persuading Graves and J’merlia.”

“You’ve got what?” Darya was still feeling like a fool, but she could not help returning Nenda’s grin. Villainous or not, his presence was always so reassuring . She had been unreasonably delighted to see him at their first meeting on the Erebus , and she found herself smiling now.

“We figured out how to track down the Zardalu.” Hans Rebka flopped down into the chair where Darya had been sitting.

“Damn right.” But Nenda was turning to face the crouched figure of Atvar H’sial. “Hold on a minute, At’s sending to me. She’s been working the computer. I’ll be back.”

If Nenda and Rebka agreed on anything, that was a first. It seemed to Darya that they had been snarling at each other since the moment when the Erebus picked up Darya and Hans Rebka and made its subluminal departure from Sentinel Gate. It did not help to be told by Julian Graves that Darya herself was the hidden reason for the argument.