Infinity's Shore

“Hr-rm. Let me look at you all. Ur-ronn, you seem so much … drier than I saw you last.”

Our urrish buddy blew a rueful laugh through her nostril fringe. Her pelt showed large bare patches where fur had sloughed after her dousing. “It took our hosts a while to adjust the hunidity of ny guest suite, vut they finally got it right,” she said. Her torso showed tracks of hasty needle-work — the phuvnthus’ rough stitching to close Ur-ronn’s gashes after she smashed through the glass port of Wuphon’s Dream. Fortunately, her folk don’t play the same mating games as some races. To urs, what matters is not appearance, but status. A visible dent or two will help Ur-ronn show the other smiths she’s been around.

“Yeah. And now we know what an urs smells like after actually taking a bath,” Huck added. “They oughta try it more often.”

“You should talk? With that green eyeball sweat—”

“All right, all right!” I laughed. “Just stopper it long enough for me to look at you, eh?”

Ur-ronn was right. Huck’s eyestalks needed grooming and she had good reason to worry about her spokes. Many were broken, with new-spun fibers just starting to lace the rims. She would have to move cautiously for some time.

As for Pincer, he looked happier than ever.

“I guess you were right about there being monsters in the deep,” I told our red-shelled friend. “Even if they hardly look like the ones you descr—”

I yelped when sharp needles seemed to lance into my back, clambering up my neck ridge. I quickly recognized the rolling growl of Huphu, our little noor-beast mascot, expressing gladness by demanding a rumble umble from me right away.

Before I could find out if my sore throat sac was up to it, Ur-ronn whistled from the pane of dark glass. “They turned on the searchlight again,” she fluted, with hushed awe in her voice. “Alvin, hurry. You’ve got to look!”

Awkwardly on crutches, I moved to the place they made for me. Huck stroked my arm. “You always wanted to see this, pal,” she said. “So gaze out there in wonder.

“Welcome to the Great Midden.”

Asx

HERE IS ANOTHER MEMORY, MY RINGS. AN EVENT that followed the brief Battle of the Glade, so swiftly that war echoes still abused our battered forest canyons.

Has the wax congealed enough yet? Can you stroke-and-sense the awesome disquiet, the frightening beauty of that evening, as we watched a harsh, untwinkling glow pass overhead?

Trace the fatty memory of that spark crossing the sky, brightening as it spiraled closer.

No one could doubt its identity.

The Rothen cruiser, returning for its harvest of bioplunder, looted from a fragile world.

Returning for those comrades it had left behind.

Instead of genetic booty, the crew will find their station smashed, their colleagues killed or taken.

Worse, their true faces are known! We castaways might testify against them in Galactic courts. Assuming we survive.

It takes no cognition genius to grasp the trouble we faced. We six fallen races of forlorn Jijo.

As an Earthling writer might put it — we found ourselves in fetid mulch. Very ripe and very deep.

Sara

THE JOURNEY PASSED FROM AN ANXIOUS BLUR INTO something exalting … almost transcendent.

But not at the beginning.

When they perched her suddenly atop a galloping creature straight out of mythology, Sara’s first reaction was terrified surprise. With snorting nostrils and huge tossing head, the horse was more daunting than Tarek Town’s stone tribute to a lost species. Its muscular torso flexed with each forward bound, shaking Sara’s teeth as it crossed the foothills of the central Slope by the light of a pale moon.

After two sleepless days and nights, it still seemed dreamlike the way a squadron of the legendary beasts came trotting into the ruined Urunthai campsite, accompanied by armed urrish escorts. Sara and her friends had just escaped captivity — their former kidnappers lay either dead or bound with strips of shredded tent cloth — but she expected reenslavement at any moment. Only then, instead of fresh foes, the darkness brought forth these bewildering saviors.

Bewildering to everyone except Kurt the Exploser, who welcomed the newcomers as expected friends. While Jomah and the Stranger exclaimed wonder at seeing real-life horses, Sara barely had time to blink before she was thrust onto a saddle.

Blade volunteered to stay by the bleak fire and tend the wounded, though envy filled each forlorn spin of his blue cupola. Sara would trade places with her qheuen friend, but his chitin armor was too massive for a horse to carry. There was barely time to give Blade a wave of encouragement before the troop wheeled back the way they came, bearing her into the night.

Pounding hoofbeats soon made Sara’s skull ache.