Infinity's Shore

Dwer recalled slogging through the same bitter steppe months ago, guiding Danel, Lena, and Jenin toward the Gray Hills. He still bore scars from that hard passage, when knifelike stems slashed at their clothes, cutting any exposed flesh.

This was a better way of traveling, floating high above. That is, if you survived searing lightning bolts, and thunder that loosened your teeth, and terrifying brushes with mountain peaks that loomed out of the night like giant claws, snatching at a passing morsel.

Maybe walking was preferable, after all.

He drank from his water bottle. Dawn meant it was time to get ready. Dormant machines would have flickered to life when first light struck the decoy balloons, electric circuits closing. Computers, salvaged from ancient starships, began spinning useless calculations.

The Jophur must be on the move, by now.

He reached up to his forehead and touched the rewq he had been given, causing it to writhe over his eyes. At once, Dwer’s surroundings shifted. Contrasts were enhanced. All trace of haze vanished from the horizon, and he was able to look close to the rising sun, making out the distant glimmers of at least a dozen floating gasbags, now widely dispersed far to the east, tiny survivors of the tempest that had driven them so far.

Dwer pulled four crystals from a pouch at his waist and jammed them into the gondola wickerwork so each glittered in the slanted light. A hammer waited at his waist, but he left it there for now, scanning past the decoys, straining to see signs of the Gray Hills.

I’m coming, Jenin. I’ll be there soon, Lena.

I’ve just got a few more obstacles to get by.

He tried to picture their faces, looking to the future rather than dwelling on a harsh past. Buried in his backpack was a sensor stone that would come alight on midwinter’s eve, if by some miracle the High Sages gave the all clear. If all the starships were gone, and there was reason to believe none would return. By then Dwer must find Lena and Jenin, and help them prepare the secluded tribe for either fate destiny had in store — a homecoming to the Slope, or else a life of perpetual hiding in the wilderness.

Either way, it’s the job I’m trained for. A duty I know how to fulfill.

He found it hard to settle his restless mind, though. For some reason Dwer thought instead about Rety, the irascible sooner girl who had chosen to stay with the Streaker crew. No surprise there; she wanted nothing in life more than to leave Jijo, and that seemed the most likely, if risky, way.

But Dwer’s mind roamed back to their adventure together — as captives of the Danik robot, when Dwer used to carry the machine across rivers by wearing it like a hat, conducting its suspensor fields through his own throbbing nervous system.…

All at once he realized. The recollection was no accident. No random association.

It was a warning.

Creepy shivers coursed his spine. Eerily familiar.

“Dung!” he cried out, swiveling to the west—

— just in time to spy a tremendous object, blue and rounded, like a demon’s face, soar past the Rimmer peaks and hurtle silently toward him, outracing sound.

It was like watching the onrush of an arrow, aimed straight at your nose. In moments the starship grew from a mere speck, burgeoning to fill the world!

Dwer shut his eyes, bracing for erasure.…

Kiduras passed, two for each racing heartbeat. After twenty or so, the gondola was struck by a wall of sound, shaking him like thunder.

But sound was all. No impact.

It must have missed me!

He forced an eye open, turning around…

… and spied it to the east, bearing toward the decoy balloons.

Now he could tell, the behemoth moved at a higher altitude. The imminent collision had been a mirage. It never came within a league of him, or gave Dwer any notice.

But it can’t miss the decoys, he thought. They’re in open view.

Blade, his childhood qheuen playmate, had reported that balloons seemed transparent to Jophur instruments. But that was at night. It’s almost broad daylight now. Surely they see the gasbags by now.

Or maybe not. Dwer recalled how excited the balloon concept made the Niss Machine, which understood a lot about Jophur ways. Perhaps Gillian Baskin knew what she was doing.

The idea was to get the Jophur confused. To send them searching around for supposed enemy ships they could detect only vaguely.

Sure enough, the space titan decelerated ponderously, descending in a long spiral around the general area. An aura of warped air seemed to bend all light passing within half a radius of the tremendous globe. The rewq made clear this was a shield of some sort — apparent grounds for the Jophur assumption of invincibility.

Dwer reached for the hammer at his waist … and waited.

Lark