Infinity's Shore

This was a more dangerous realm than hard vacuum.

Suessi did not have a larynx anymore, or lungs to blow air past one if he had. Yet he retained a voice.

“Standing by, Karkaett,” he transmitted, then listened as his words were rendered into groaning saser pulses. “Please keep the alignment steady. Don’t overshoot.”

One shadow among many turned toward him. Though cased in hard sheathing, the dolphin’s tail performed a twist turn with clear body-language meaning.

Trust me … do you have any choice?

Suessi laughed — a shuddering of his titanium rib cage that replaced the old, ape-style method of syncopated gasps. It wasn’t as satisfying, but then, the Old Ones did not seem to have much use for laughter.

Karkaett guided his team through final preparations while Suessi monitored. Unlike some others in Streaker’s crew, the engineering staff had grown more seasoned and confident with each passing year. In time, they might no longer need the encouragement — the supervising crutch — of a member of the patron race. When that day came, Hannes would be content to die.

I’ve seen too much. Lost too many friends. Someday, we’ll be captured by one of the eatee factions pursuing us. Or else, we’ll finally get a chance to turn ourselves in to some great Institute, only to learn Earth was lost while we fled helter-skelter across the universe. Either way, I don’t want to be around to see it.

The Old Ones can keep their Ifni-cursed immortality.

Suessi admired the way his well-trained team worked, setting up a specially designed cutting machine with cautious deliberation. His audio pickups tracked low mutterings—keeneenk chants, designed to help cetacean minds concentrate on explicit thoughts and tasks that their ancestral brains were never meant to take on. Engineering thoughts — the kind that some dolphin philosophers called the most painful price of uplift.

These surroundings did not help — a mountainous graveyard of long-dead starcraft, a ghostly clutter, buried in the kind of ocean chasm that dolphins traditionally associated with their most cryptic cults and mysteries. The dense water seemed to amplify each rattle of a tool. Every whir of a harness arm resonated queerly in the dense liquid environment.

Anglic might be the language of engineers, but dolphins preferred Trinary for punctuation — for moments of resolution and action. Karkaett’s voice conveyed confidence in a burst phrase of cetacean haiku.

Through total darkness

Where the cycloid’s gyre comes never …

Behold — decisiveness!

The cutting tool lashed out, playing harsh fire toward the vessel that was their home and refuge … that had carried them through terrors unimaginable. Streaker’s hull — purchased by the Terragens Council from a third-hand ship dealer and converted for survey work — had been the pride of impoverished Earthclan, the first craft to set forth with a dolphin captain and mostly cetacean crew, on a mission to check the veracity of the billion-year-old Great Library of the Civilization of the Five Galaxies.

Now the captain was gone, along with a quarter of the crew. Their mission had turned into a calamity for both Earthclan and the Five Galaxies. As for Streaker’s hull — once so shiny, despite her age — it now lay coated by a mantle of material so black the abyssal waters seemed clear by comparison. A substance that drank photons and weighed the ship down.

Oh, the things we’ve put you through, dear thing.

This was but the latest trial for their poor ship.

Once, bizarre fields stroked her in a galactic tide pool called the Shallow Cluster, where they “struck it rich” by happening upon a vast derelict fleet containing mysteries untouched for a thousand eons. In other words, where everything first started going wrong.

• • •

Savage beams rocked her at the Morgran nexus point, where a deadly surprise ambush barely failed to snare Streaker and her unsuspecting crew.

Making repairs on poisonous Kithrup, they ducked out almost too late, escaping mobs of bickering warships only by disguising Streaker inside a hollowed-out Thennanin cruiser, making it to a transfer point, though at the cost of abandoning many friends.

Oakka, the green world, seemed an ideal goal after that — a sector headquarters for the Institute of Navigation. Who was better qualified to take over custody of their data? As Gillian Baskin explained at the time, it was their duty as Galactic citizens to turn the problem over to the great institutes — those august agencies whose impartial lords might take the awful burden away from Streaker’s tired crew. It seemed logical enough — and nearly spelled their doom. Betrayal by agents of that “neutral” agency showed how far civilization had fallen in turmoil. Gillian’s hunch saved the Earthling company — that and a daring cross-country raid by Emerson D’Anite, taking the conspirators’ base from behind.

Again, Streaker emerged chastened and worse for wear.