Dwer
INSIDE THE DECOY SHIP, HE COLLAPSED ON THE deck and retched, heaving up what little remained in his stomach.
Midway through that unpleasant experience, another, completely different kind of disorientation abruptly swept over Dwer. For a moment, it seemed as if One-of-a-Kind were inside his head, trying to speak again. The strange, heady sensation might have been almost affable, if his body weren’t racked with nausea.
It ended before he had a chance to appraise what was happening. Anyway, by then he figured he had wasted enough time.
The Jophur won’t take long picking through my little urrish balloon. They’ll start on this bubble next.
In full gravity, it might have been impossible to climb along the full length of the captured ship and reach the aft end. But Dwer took advantage of conditions as he found them, and soon taught himself to fly.
Lark
THEY WERE DASHING DOWN A SMOKE-FILLED HALLway, chased by angry shouts and occasional bolts of shimmering lightning, when an abrupt detonation rocked the floor plates. A wall of air struck the two humans from behind, knocking them off their feet.
We’ve had it, he thought, figuring it must be a weapon, used by the pursuers.
Glancing over his shoulder, however, Lark saw the robots suddenly turn and head the other way! Into a noisome storm of roiling black soot pouring out of the control room.
“Do you think …?” he began.
Ling shook her head. “Jophur are tough. I doubt they were more than knocked around by the explosion.”
Well, he thought. It was only a little piece of rock.
He felt its absence acutely.
Lark helped her up, still wary of returning robots.
“I guess now they know we’re here.”
They resumed running. But a few duras later, Ling burst out in laughing agreement.
“Yeah, I guess now they do.”
Gillian
A PSI-DISTURBANCE WAS DETECTED, EMANATING briefly from the planet. Soon after that, the detection officer announced a change on the tactics screen. “Will you looka that-t!”
Gillian saw it. The Jophur configuration was shifting. The bright red disk seemed to shimmer for a moment. Its “tail” of tiny crimson pinpoints, which had been bunching ever closer to the mother ship, now flexed and began to float away.
“It appears the enemy has jettisoned all the decoys they captured. I can only conclude that they figured out how to scan them quickly and eliminate dross ships from consideration. The decoys will now drift independently toward Izmunuti, while the battleship, free of drag, will catch up with us much faster.”
Gillian’s hopes, which had lifted when the psi-wave came, now sank lower than ever.
“We’d better get ready for our last stand,” she said in a low voice.
From the dolphins there was an utter absence of sonar clicks, as if none of them wanted to reify the moment, to make it real by reading it in sound.
“Wait-t a minute,” Kaa announced. “The Jophur’s decelerating! Coming about to retrieve the jettisoned string!”
“But …” Gillian blinked. “Could they have dropped it by accident?”
The Niss hologram whirled, then accepted the possibility with an abstract nod.
“A hypothesis presents itself. The psi-wave we detected was far too weak to have any effect on a war cruiser … unless it was direct-causative.”
“Explain.”
“It might have served as a trigger that — either by accident or design — precipitated the release of potentialities already in place … say, aboard the Jophur ship.”
“In other words, the wave might have affected them after all. Maybe it set off events that disrupted—”
“Indeed. If this caused the Jophur to lose their control over their string of capture boxes, they would certainly go back and retrieve them, even at the cost of some delay. Because they would suspect the string’s release was the intended purpose of the psi-wave.”
“In other words, they’ll be even more eager to check every box. Hmm.”
Gillian pondered, then asked:
“Has their intercept time been delayed much?”
Kaa thrashed his flukes.
“A fair amount. Not-t enough, however. We’ll make it to the Izmunuti corona, but the enemy will be close enough to follow easily with detectorsss. The plasma won’t make any a-ppreciable difference.”
Gillian nodded. “Well, things are a little better. And a trick or two to make the odds better still.”
The dolphins snickered knowingly and went back to work, emanating confident clicks. Gillian’s last remark was exactly the sort of thing Tom would have said in a situation like this.
In fact, though, Gillian did not know if her scheme was even worthy of the name.
Sara
THEY SAID THAT A PSI-WAVE HAD COME FROM JIJO, but Sara didn’t feel a thing.
Not surprising. Of Melina’s three children, it always seemed that Dwer had some fey sensitivity, while she, the logical one, possessed none. Till recently, Sara had little interest in such matters.
But then she wondered. Might this be what Purofsky said we should look out for?
Sitting at the stateroom’s worktable, Sara addressed the portable computer.
“About that psi-wave — do we have a fix on its hypervelocity?”
“Only a rough estimate. It traveled at approximately two mictaars per midura.”
Sara tried to work out the timing in her head, translating it in terms she knew better, such as light-years. Then she realized the machine could do it for her graphically.
“Show me.”
A holo took shape, portraying her homeworld as a blue dot in the lower left quadrant. Streaker was a yellow glimmer to the upper right, accompanied by other members of decoy swarm number two. Meanwhile a crimson convoy — the Jophur ship and its reclaimed captives — resumed hot pursuit.
The computer put down an overlay, depicting a crosshatching of lines that Sara knew to be wave vectors in level-zero hyperspace. The math was simple enough, but it took her some time to figure out the rich, three- dimensional representation. Then she whistled.
“That’s not inverse square. It’s not even one-over-R. It was directional!”
“A well-conserved, directional wave packet, resonating on the first, third, and eighth bands of—”
The computer lapsed into psi-jargon that Sara could not follow. For her, it was enough to see that the packet was aimed. Its peak had passed right over both Streaker and its pursuer.
The coincidence beggared belief. It meant that some great power on Jijo had known precisely where both ships were, and—
Sara stopped herself.
Don’t leap to the first conclusion that comes to mind. What if we weren’t the beam’s objective at all?
What if we just happened to be along its path, between Jijo and …
She leaped to her feet.
“Show me Izmunuti and the transfer point!”
The display changed scale, expanding until Streaker was shown just over halfway to the supposed safety of
