inner sense-plate, where it oozed aromatic scramblers — chemicals tuned to randomize the lock’s coding. From experience, he knew it could take half a midura for their pursuers to get through — unless they brought heavy cutting tools to bear.
Why should they bother? They know we’re trapped inside.
He found it especially galling to be cornered by Rann. The third human prisoner had thrown in his lot with the Jophur, perhaps currying favor for the release of his Rothen patron gods from frozen internment on Jijo. It left Lark with no options, since the purple ring would have nil effect on the big Danik warrior.
Turning around, Lark saw that the glass walls — stretching from floor to a high ceiling — made up giant vivariums holding row after row of wriggling, squirming things.
Midget traeki toruses!
Clear tubes carried brown, sludgelike material to each niche.
Refined liquid mulch. Baby food.
We’re in their nursery!
By itself, no traeki ring was intelligent. Back on the world where they evolved, slithering through fetid swamps as wormlike scavengers, they never amounted to much singly. Only when traeki began stacking together and specializing did there emerge a unique kind of presapient life, ripe for adoption and Uplift by their snaillike Poa patrons.
This is where the Polkjhy crew grows special kinds of rings, packed with the right skills to be new members of the team.
A potent kind of reproduction. No doubt some of the pulsing doughnut shapes were master rings, designed millennia ago to transform placid, contemplative traeki into adamant, alarming Jophur.
Lark jumped as a human scream clamored down the narrow aisles. Pulse pounding, he ran, shouting Ling’s name.
Her voice echoed off glass walls. “Hurry! They’ve got me cornered!”
Lark burst around a vivarium to find her at last, backing away from two huge Jophur workers, toward a niche in the far wall. The nursery staff, Lark realized. Each tapered pile consisted of at least thirty component toruses — swaying and hissing — two meters wide at the bottom and massing almost a ton. Their waxy flanks gleamed with an opulent vitality one never saw in traeki back home on Jijo, flickering with meaningful patterns of light and dark. Colored stenches vented from chemsynth pores, as manipulator tendrils stretched toward Ling.
She moved lithely, darting left and right. Seeking an opening or else something to use as a weapon. There was no panic in her eyes, nor did she give Lark away in her relief to see him.
Of course, Jophur vision sensors faced all directions at once. But with that advantage came a handicap — slow reaction time. The first stack was still swaying toward its victim when Lark dashed up from behind. Somehow, Asx’s gift knew to send a jet of sour spray, striking a gemlike organ that quickly spasmed and went dim.
The whole stack shuddered, slumping to quiescence. Lark wasted no time spinning toward the other foe — only to find his right arm suddenly pinned by an adamant tentacle! An odious scent of TRIUMPH swirled as the second Jophur pulled him close, coiling tendrils and commencing to squeeze.
The purple ring spasmed in Lark’s hand, but the chemical spray could not hit its mark at this impossible angle, past the Jophur’s bulging midriff. The master torus drove its lesser tubes with a malice and intensity Lark had never seen in serene traekis back home. The constriction grew unbearable, expelling his breath in a choking cry of agony.
A shattering crash filled his ears, as a rain of wetness and needlelike shards fell across his back.
The Jophur emitted a shrill ululation. Then someone shouted a fierce warning in the clicking whistles of staccato Galactic Two.
“To let the human go — this you must.
“Or else other young ones — to ruin shall fall!”
The harsh pressure eased off Lark’s rib cage just as consciousness appeared about to waver and blow out. His captor huffed and teetered uncertainly. Peering blearily, Lark saw that slivers of glass dusted the big stack, and moisture lay everywhere. Then he caught sight of Ling, crouching several meters away with a crooked metal bar, brandishing it threateningly in front of another vivarium. Where she had found the tool, he couldn’t guess. But the floor was already strewn with flopping infant rings decanted violently from one of the nurturing mulch towers. Some struggled on vague flippers or undeveloped legs. Midget master rings waved neural feelers, seeking other toroids to dominate.
Lark felt the nursery worker tremble with hesitation.
Noises beyond the doorway indicated that the Polkjhy crew were already at work, unscrambling the door. Clearly, the two fugitive humans weren’t going anywhere.
The Jophur stack decided. It released Lark.
He managed to keep from slumping to the floor, teetering on wobbly knees, feebly raising the purple torus for a clean shot at the pheromone sensors.
In moments, the second worker joined the first in estivation stupor.
Sheesh, Lark pondered. If this was just a tender nurse, I’d hate to meet one of their fighters.
Ling grabbed his arm to keep him from buckling.
“Come on,” she urged. “There’s no time to rest. We’ve got lots to do.”
“What’re you talking about?” Lark tried asking. The question emerged as a gurgling sigh. But Ling refused to let him sink down and rest.
“I think I know a way out of here,” she said urgently. “But it’s going to be an awful tight fit.”
True to her prediction, the cargo container was tiny. Even by scrunching over double, Lark could barely cram himself inside. The purple ring squirmed in the hollow between his rib cage and a wall.
“I still think you should go first,” he complained.
Ling hurriedly punched commands on a complex keypad next to the little supply shuttle. “Do you know how to program one of these things?”
She had a point, though Lark didn’t like it much.
“Besides, we’re heading somewhere unknown. Shouldn’t our best fighter lead the way?”
Now Ling was teasing. Whoever went first would overcome opposition by using Asx’s purple gift, or else fail. Physical strength was nearly useless against a robot or a full-size Jophur.
He glanced past her toward the far door of the nursery, where the red glow of a cutting torch could be seen, slicing an arched opening from the other side. Apparently, Rann and the Jophur had given up unscrambling the lock and decided on a brute-force approach.
“You’ll hurry after me?”
For an answer, she bent and kissed him — once on the forehead in benediction, and again, passionately, on the mouth. “How is that for a promise?” she asked, mingling her breath with his.
As Ling backed away, a transparent hatch slid over the little cab — built to carry equipment and samples between workstations throughout the Jophur ship. There had been a crude version of such a system back at Biblos, the Jijoan archive, where cherished paper books and messages shuttled between the libraries in narrow tubes of boo.
“Hey!” he called. “Where are you sending m—”
A noise and brilliant flash cut off his question and made Ling spin around. The torch cutter was accelerating, as if the enemy somehow sensed a need to hurry. To Lark’s horror, the arc was over half finished.
“Let me out!” he demanded. “We’re switching places!”
Ling shook her head as she resumed programming the console. “Not an option. Get ready. This will be wrenching.”
Before Lark could protest a second time, the wall section abruptly fell with a crash. Curt billowings of sparks and dense smoke briefly filled the vestibule. But soon, Jophur warriors would come pouring through … and Ling didn’t even have a weapon!
Lark hammered on the clear panel as several things happened in rapid succession.
Ling knelt to the floor, where scores of infant traeki rings still squirmed in confusion amid shards of their broken vivarium. She emptied her cloth sling, gently spilling Asx’s second gift — the wounded crimson torus — to mingle among the others.
