Infinity's Shore

BONE-RATTLING CONCUSSIONS GREW MORE TERRIFYING with each dura, hammering our undersea prison refuge, sometimes receding for a while, then returning with new force, making it hard for a poor hoon to stand properly on the shuddering floor.

Crutches and a back brace didn’t help, nor the little autoscribe, fogging the room with my own projected words. Stumbling through them, I sought some solid object to hold, while the scribe kept adding to the mob of words, recording my frantic curses in Anglic and GalSeven. When I found a wall stanchion, I grabbed for dear life. The clamor of reverberating explosions sounded like a giant, bearing down with massive footsteps, nearer … ever nearer.…

Then, as I feared some popping seam would let in the dark, heavy waters of the Midden … it abruptly stopped.

Silence was almost as disorienting as the jeekee awful noise. My throat sac blatted uselessly while a hysterical Huphu clawed my shoulders, shredding scales into torglike ribbons.

Fortunately, hoon don’t have much talent for panic. Maybe our reactions are too slow, or else we lack imagination.

As I was gathering my wits, the door hatch opened and one of the little amphibian types rushed in, squeaking a few rapid phrases in simplified GalTwo.

A summons. The spinning voice wanted us for another powwow.

“Perhaps we should share knowledge,” it said when the four of us (plus Huphu) were assembled.

Huck and Pincer-Tip, able to look all ways at once, shared meaningful glances with Ur-ronn and me. We were pretty rattled by the recent booming and shaking. Even growing up next to a volcano had never prepared us for that!

The voice seemed to come from a space where abstract lines curled in tight patterns, but I knew that was an illusion. The shapes and sounds were projections, sent by some entity whose real body lay elsewhere, beyond the walls. I kept expecting Huphu to dash off and tear away a curtain, exposing a little man in an emerald carnival suit.

Do they think we’re rubes, to fall for such a trick?

“Knowledge?” Huck sneered, drawing three eyes back like coiled snakes. “You want to share some knowledge? Then tell us what’s going on! I thought this place was breaking up! Was it a quake? Are we being sucked into the Midden?”

“I assure you, that is not happening,” came the answer in smooth-toned GalSix. “The source of our mutual concern lies above, not below.”

“Exflosions,” Ur-ronn muttered, blowing through her snout fringe and stamping a hind hoof. “Those weren’t quakes, vut underwater detonations. Clean, sharf, and very close. I’d say soneone uf there doesn’t like you guys very nuch.”

Pincer hissed sharply and I stared at our urrish friend, but the spinning voice conceded.

“That is an astute guess.”

I couldn’t tell if it was impressed, or just sarcastic.

“And since our local guild of exflosers could hardly achieve such feats, this suggests you have other, fowerful foes, far greater than we feevle Six.”

“Again, a reasonable surmise. Such a bright young lady.”

“Hr-rm,” I added, in order not to be left out of the sardonic abuse. “We’re taught that the simplest hypothesis should always be tried first. So let me guess — you’re being hunted by the same folks who landed a while back in the Festival Glade. Those gene raiders Uriel got word about before we left. Is that it?”

“A goodly conjecture, and possibly even true … though it could as easily be someone else.”

“Someone else? What’re you say-ay-aying?” Pincer-Tip demanded, raising three legs and teetering dangerously on the remaining two. His chitin skin flared an anxious crimson shade. “That the eatees-tees-tees on the Glade might not be the only ones? That you’ve got whole passels of enemies?”

Abstract patterns tightened to a tornado of meshing lines as silence reigned. Little Huphu, who had seemed fascinated by the voice from the very start, now dug her claws in my shoulder, transfixed by the tight spiral form.

Huck demanded, in a hushed tone.

“How many enemies have you guys got?”

When the voice spoke again, all sardonic traces were gone. Its tone seemed deeply weary.

“Ah, dear children. It seems that half of the known sidereal universe has spent years pursuing us.”

Pincer clattered his claws and Huck let out a low, mournful sigh. My own dismal contemplation-umble roused Huphu from her trancelike fixation on the whirling display, and she chittered nervously.

Ur-ronn simply grunted, as if she had expected this, vindicating her native urrish cynicism. After all, when things seem unable to get any worse, isn’t that when they nearly always do? Ifni has a fertile, if nasty imagination. The goddess of fate keeps shaving new faces on her infinite-sided dice.

“Well, I guess this means — hrm-m — that we can toss out all those ideas about you phuvnthus being ancient Jijoans, or native creatures of the deep.”

“Or remnants of cast-off Buyur machines,” Huck went on. “Or sea monsters.”

“Yeah,” Pincer added, sounding disappointed. “Just another bunch of crazy Galactics-tic-tics.”