David Brin: Startide Rising

On a ship in the center of a feet of ships, a phase of denial was passing.

Giant cruisers spilled out of a rent in space, to fall toward the pinpoint brilliance of a non-descript reddish sun. One by one, they tumbled from the luminous tear. With them came diffracted starlight from their point of departure, hundreds of parsecs away.

There were rules that should have prevented it. The tunnel was an unnatural way to pass from place to place. It took a strong will to deny nature and call into being such an opening in space.

The Episiarch, in its outraged rejection of What Is, had created the passage for its Tandu masters. The opening was held by the adamant power of its ego — by its refusal to concede anything at all to Reality.

When the last ship was through, the Episiarch was purposely distracted, and the hole collapsed with soundless violence. In moments, only instruments could tell that it had ever been. The affront to physics was erased.

The Episiarch had brought the Tandu armada to the target star well ahead of the other fleets, those who would challenge the Tandu for the right to capture the Earth ship. The Tandu sent impulses of praise to the Episiarch's pleasure centers. It howled and waved its great furry head in gratitude.

To the Tandu, an obscure and dangerous form of travel had once again proved worth the risks. It was good to arrive on the battlefield before the enemy. The added moments would give them a tactical edge.

The Episiarch only wanted things to deny. Its task now finished, it was returned to its chamber of delusions, to alter an endless chain of surrogate realities until its outrage was needed by the Masters once again. Its shaggy, amorphous shape rolled free of the sensory web, and it shambled off, escorted by wary guardians.

When the way was clear, the Acceptor entered, and climbed on spindly legs to its place within the web.

For a long moment it appraised Reality, embracing it. The Acceptor probed and touched and caressed this new region of space with its farflung senses. It gave out a crooning cry of pleasure.

"Such leakage!" the Acceptor joyously announced. "I had heard the hunted were sloppy sophonts, but they leak even as they scan for danger! They have hidden on the second planet. Only slowly do the edges of their psychic shields congeal to hide from me their exact location. Who were their masters, to teach these dolphins so well to be prey?"

"Their masters are the humans, themselves unfinished," the Leading Stalker of the Tandu replied. Its voice was a rhythmic pattern of rapid clicks and pops from the ratchet joints of its mantis-legs. "The Earthlings are tainted by wrong belief, and by the shame of their own abandonment. The noise of three centuries shall be quieted when they are eaten. Then our hunter's joy will be as yours is, when you witness a new place or thing."

"Such joy," the Acceptor agreed.

"Now stir to get details," the Stalker commanded. "Soon we do battle with heretics. I must tell your fellow clients their tasks."

The Acceptor turned in the web as the Stalker left, and opened its feelings to this new patch of reality. Everything was good. It passed on reports of what it saw, and the Masters moved the ships in response, but with the larger part of its mind it appreciated… it accepted… the tiny red sun, each of its small planets, the delicious expectancy of a place soon to become a battlefield.

Soon it felt the other war fleets enter the system, each in its own peculiar way. Each took a slightly inferior position, forced by the early arrival of the Tandu.

The Acceptor sensed the lusts of warrior clients and the cool calculations of calmer elders. It caressed the slickness of mind shields rigidly held against it, and wondered what went on within them. It appreciated the openness of other combatants, who disdainfully cast their thoughts outward, daring the listener to gather in their broadcast contempt.

It swept up savage contemplations of the Acceptor's own annihilation, as the great fleets plunged toward each other and bright explosions began to flash.

The Acceptor took it all in joyfully. How could anyone feel otherwise, when the universe held such wonders?

High in the port quarter of Streaker's spherical control room, a psi operator thrashed in her harness. Her flukes made a turmoil of the water, and she cried out in Trinary.

The operator's report confirmed the discovery made by the neutrino detector only minutes before. It was a litany of bad news, related in trance-verse.

From another station came a calmer bulletin in dolphin accented Anglic.

"We're getting heavy graviton traffic, Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim. Gravitational disturbances confirm a major battle is forming up not far from the planet-t."

The executive officer of the Streaker listened to the report quietly, letting himself drift sideways slightly in the circulating currents of the command center. A stream of bubbles emerged from his blowhole as he inhaled some of the special fluid that filled the ship's bridge.

"Acknowledged," he said at last. Underwater, his voice was a muted buzz. The consonants came out slurred. "How far away is the nearest contact?"

"Five AU, sssir. They couldn't get here for at leasst an hour, even if they came hell-bent."

"Hmmm. Very well, then. Remain in condition yellow. Continue your observationsss, Akeakemai."

The vice-captain was unusually large for a neo-fin, thickbodied and muscular where most of the others were sleek and narrow. His uneven gray coloring and jagged teeth were marks of the Stenos sub-racial line, setting him and a number of others aboard apart from the Tursiops majority.

The human next to Takkata-Jim was impassive as the bad news came. It only confirmed what he had already feared.

"We had better inform the captain, then," Ignacio Metz said. The words were amplified by his facemask into the fizzing water. Bubbles floated away from the tall human's sparse gray hair.

"I warned Creideiki this would happen if we tried eluding the Galactics. I only hope he decides to be reasonable, now that escape's become impossible."

Takkata-Jim opened and closed his foodmouth diagonally, an emphatic nod.

"Yesss, Doctor Metz. Now even Creideiki must recognize that you were right. We're cornered now, and the captain will have no choice but to listen to you."

Metz nodded, gratified. "What about Hikahi's team? Have they been told?"

"I've already ordered the prospecting party back. Even the sled might be too much of a risssk. If the Eatees are already in orbit they might have means to detect it." "Extraterrestrials…" Metz corrected, automatically professorial. "The term 'Eatee' is hardly polite."

Takkata-Jim kept an impassive face. He was in command of the ship and its crew while the captain was off watch. Yet the human treated him like a fresh-weaned pupil. It was quite irritating, but Takkata-Jim was careful never to let Metz know how much it bothered him. "Yes, Dr. Metz," he said.

The man went on. "Hikahi's party should never have left the ship. I warned Tom Orley that something like this might happen. Young Toshio's out there… and all those crewfen, out of contact with us for so long. It would be terrible if anything happened to them!"

Takkata-Jim felt he knew what was really on Metz's mind. The human was probably thinking about how terrible it would be if any of Streakers crew got themselves killed away from his sight… out where he was unable to judge how they behaved for his behavioral and genetic studies. "If only Creideiki had listened to you, sssir," he repeated. "You always have so much to say."