payment. Anyway, the consequences looked pretty grim.
In compensation, the Zang demanded the one thing glavers had left.
Themselves.
At least that’s how Sara relayed the legend to Gillian and the rest of us, speaking breathlessly while time bled away and the glavers howled and we plunged ever closer to a vast, threatening space leviathan.
Piecing together what was happening, I realized the glavers weren’t actually talking to the Zang. After all, they’ve reached redemption and are now presapient beings, nearly bereft of speech.
But the Zang have long memories, and our glavers seemed instinctively — maybe at some genetically programmed level — to know how to yowl just one meaningful thing. One phrase to let their ancient creditors know.
Hey! It is us! We’re here! It’s us!
To this identifying ululation, all the Niss Machine had to add/overlay was a simple request.
Kindly get those Jophur bastards off our butts.
Help us get away from here.
Anxious moments passed. My spines frickled as we watched the Zang loom closer. I felt nervous as an urs on a beach, playing tag with crashing waves.
Then, just as it seemed to be swooping for the kill, our would-be destroyer abruptly swerved! A climactic screech came over the loudspeakers. It took the Niss several duras, consulting with the Library unit, to offer a likely translation.
Come with us now.
Just like that, our nemesis changed into an escort, showing us the way. Leading Streaker out of Izmunuti’s angry chaos.
We took our place in convoy as the Zang ship gathered the surviving harvester machines, fleeing toward the old transfer point.
Meanwhile, one of its companion vessels turned to confront our pursuers.
Long-distance sensors depicted a face-off between omnipotent titans.
The showdown was awesome to behold, even at a range that made it blurry. I listened to Lieutenant Tsh’t describe the action for Sara.
“Those are hellfire missiles-s-s,” the dolphin officer explained as the Jophur battleship accelerated, firing glittering pinpoints at its new adversary.
The sap-rings must want the dolphins awful bad, I thought. If they’re willing to fight their way past that monster to get at Streaker.
The Zang globule was even bigger than the Jophur … a quivering shape that seemed more like gelatin, or something oozing from a wounded traeki, than solid matter. Once, I thought I glimpsed shadowy figures moving within, like drifting clouds or huge living creatures swimming through an opaque fluid.
Small bits of the main body split off, like droplets spraying from a gobbet of grease on a hot griddle. These did not hasten with the same lightning grace as the Jophur missiles. They seemed more massive. And relentless.
One by one, each droplet swelled like an inflating balloon, interposing its expanding surface between the two warships. Jophur weapons maneuvered agilely, striving to get past the obstructions, but nearly all the missiles were caught by one bubble or another, triggering brilliant explosions.
From her massive walking machine, watching the fight with one cool gray eye, Tsh’t commented. “The Zang throws parts of its own substance ahead, in order to defend itself-f-f. So far, it has taken no offensive action of its own.”
I recall thinking hopefully that this meant the hydros were of a calm nature, less prone to savage violence than we are told by the sagas. Perhaps they only meant to delay the Jophur long enough for us to get away.
Then I reconsidered.
Let’s say this help from hydrogen breathers lets Streaker make good her escape. That’s great for the Earthlings — and maybe for the Five Galaxies — but it still leaves Jijo in a mess. The Jophur will be able to call reinforcements and do anything they want to the people of the Slope. Slaughter all the g’Kek. Transform all the poor traeki. Burn down the archive at Biblos and turn the Slope into their private genetic farm, breeding the other races into pliable little client life-forms.…
Gillian’s earlier plan, to draw the battleship after us into a deadly double suicide, would have caused my own death, and that of everyone else aboard — but my homeworld might then have been safe.
The trade-offs were stark and bitter. I found myself resenting the older woman for making a choice that spared my life.
I also changed my mind about the Zang.
Well? What’re you waiting for? Shoot back!
The Jophur were oxygen beings like myself, distant relatives, sharing some of the same DNA that had spread around the galaxies during a predawn era before Progenitors arose to begin the chain of Uplift. Nevertheless, right then I was cheering for their annihilation by true aliens. Beings from a strange, incomprehensible order of life.
Come on, Zang. Fry the big ugly ring stacks!
But things went on pretty much the same as distance narrowed between the two giants. The globule spent itself prodigiously to block missiles and gouts of deadly fire from the great dreadnought. Yet despite this, some rays and projectiles got through, impacting the parent body with bitter violence. Fountains of gooey material spewed across the black background, sparkling gorgeously as they burned. Waves rippled and convulsed across the Zang ship. Still it forged on while the glavers yowled, seeming to urge the hydros on.
“T-point insertion approaching,” announced a dolphin’s amplified voice. It had a fizzing quality that meant the speaker was breathing oxygen-charged water, so it must be coming from the bridge. “All hands prepare for transition. Kaa says our guides are acting strange. They’re choosing an unconventional approach pattern, so this may get rough!”
Gillian and Sara gripped their armrests. The dolphins in the Plotting Room caused their walkers’ feet to splay out and magnetize, gripping the floor. But there was little for me and the glavers to do except stare about with wild, feral eyes. In the forward viewer, I now saw the starscape interrupted by a twist of utter blackness. Computer- generated lines converged while figures and glyphs made Sara murmur with excitement.
I watched the ship ahead of us, the first Zang globule, shiver almost eagerly as it plunged at a steep angle toward the twist.…
Then it fell in a direction I could not possibly describe if my life depended on it.
A direction that I never, till that moment, knew existed.
I glanced quickly at the rearward display. It showed the other hydro vessel shaking asunder before repeated fierce blows as the Jophur battle cruiser fired desperately with short-range weapons. The two behemoths were almost next to each other now, matched in velocity, still racing after us.
A final, frantic hammering ripped through the Zang ship, tearing it into several unraveling gobs.
For a moment, I thought it was over.
I thought the Jophur had won.
Then two of those huge gobs curled, almost like living tendrils, and settled across the gleaming metal hull. They clung to its surface. Spreading. Oozing.
Somehow, despite the distance and flickering haze, I had the sense of something probing for a way in.
Then the image vanished.
I turned back to the main viewer. Transition had begun.
Kaa
THERE WAS A FINE ART TO PILOTING A STARSHIP through the stretched geometries of a transfer point. No machine or logical algorithm could manage the feat alone.
