The Sea is Full of Stars

surprises.

“First, I am certain you remember Captain Kincaid?”

“Yes, more or less. We didn’t see much of him after the first day, of course. I assumed he was in one of the lifeboats or had perished with the ship.”

“Captain Kincaid is too single-minded to die. He was already outside of the ship when it was attacked. In fact, he attached himself to your lifeboat.”

Both men almost jumped in their chairs. “What!”

“Indeed. He seemed to think you had something to do with it, I’m afraid, and he suspected that you would be meeting the perpetrators. And a ship did arrive, and blow up the engine and passenger modules, and then it sent a shuttle to your lifeboat. This was a matter we hadn’t remembered you or anyone else in your lifeboat mentioning.” The irony in his tone was obvious. “Well, you see, Kincaid simply switched from your lifeboat to theirs and rode it back to their ship. They weren’t water breathers, so once he recognized the ship type and operated an emergency airlock, which was being used off and on by work crews after your departure, he got inside and managed a more comfortable ride. It’s quite a large vessel, those frigates. A shave and a uniform and the Captain could pass himself off easily as one who belonged there. The only ones likely to recognize him were the water breathers from the ship, and he wasn’t likely to meet them.”

“Then he infiltrated them and got to their headquarters?” Ari asked, amazed at Kincaid’s daring.

“He did. Indeed, he once got within sight of a Hadun dome that almost certainly had Josich inside. The problem was, he couldn’t get any closer without going through a security ring that nothing could pass without all the requisite codes and authorizations. He could do nothing more alone, so he managed to get off that world and send its coordinates to us.”

“So that’s how you know the story!” Wallinchky commented. “Kincaid sent it.”

“No, he told it to us. We got there, all right, and we caught them web-footed, as it were. Everyone but Josich and his immediate imperial family guard. They happened, by sheer luck, to be on a nearby world not unlike this one. A world with ruins of the Ancient Ones, where they were doing experiments with the thing they stole.”

Wallinchky was more upset at this implication than in being caught in a plot. “You mean it wasn’t junk?”

O’Leary smiled, knowing he’d scored a major blow to the big man’s ego and gotten at least a start of a confession all in one. “Yes, Citizen Wallinchky, it was not junk. For quite a while we didn’t have sufficient power; we spent a fortune getting power to a dead world just so we could at least tickle the Ancient Ones’ artifacts and see if they would scratch. There was finally reaction, but we didn’t get much further. The data stream that thing at the core sends, its pervasiveness, and its complexity, are beyond anything we have or know, and we have no key. In the end the thing was being packed up until we could solve the cryptography problem, if ever, and sent for mothballing.”

“So it’s still junk,” Wallinchky pointed out. “You can tickle but it ignores you.”

O’Leary cleared his throat. “That’s not quite what I said. We can’t talk to it. It doesn’t or can’t talk to us. But it noticed. Oh, how it noticed. Even as we were closing in on them, they had our device set up with a respectable power supply and one hell of a master computer. Josich was there because he was too insecure to risk them actually tapping that godlike power and not needing him anymore. His family unit was there, and it’s a pretty extensive and bloodthirsty lot, because he didn’t like them out of his sight for long periods. They were gearing up for a major test, all of them, when our ships came in. We blew his yacht to Hell, targeted his dome and camp so he’d have nowhere to go, and then came in to wait for the surrender.”

“Then you’ve got Hadun, Inspector?” Wallinchky asked calmly, his mind weighing hundreds of options and moves.

“No, sir. No, we don’t. You see, just at the moment we penetrated the planetary grid, the damnedest thing happened.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small message cube. “Here. Play this and you’ll see just what I mean. It’s from the command ship theater camera.”

Ari, who had a sinking feeling that he was seeing a long, long series of sessions in corrective therapy or worse, took it, almost dropped it, then turned and inserted it into a small cavity in the study computer station. After a few seconds for processing and analysis, Core began running the recording.

The world did look an awful lot like Grabant 4—amazingly so. The Ancient Ones had been consistent in their taste in planets, which back then were probably a lot more livable. Even here they saw signs of seas, rivers, ancient life in sediments, much more, back when there was something to breathe and water to use instead of these barren, sterile deserts.

The shots, six different point-of-view observations that pretty well covered things, were very clear if a bit small on the study screen. Still, it was easy to see the burning domes of the camp, the shattered and still smoking luxury yacht, and tiny little dots running every which way, while something larger and pulsing a white energy was in the center of what was almost certainly an Ancient Ones ruin.

Then, suddenly, visible lines of force, pencil thin, appeared to ooze from the ground at mathematically fixed points and flow together, forming a grid of hexagonal shapes.

“What the hell is that?” Wallinchky wanted to know.

“Just wait,” O’Leary told him. “Coming up is what the full planetary view saw. There! ”

The six views were momentarily interrupted by a full screen of the entire planet. It seemed alive with crisscrossing lines not just on the surface, but also above it, creating a complementary canopy of hexagonal energy patterns 150 or more kilometers up and surrounding the world. The proliferating lines, resembling a fuzzy engineering wire-frame view, eventually obscured all detail.

And then, just as abruptly, it switched off, and the central close-up view of the encampment and the ancient city returned.

“Where is everybody?” Ari asked, feeling uneasy as he watched.

The camp, the smoldering yacht, the ancient ruins, all those remained, but there was no sign of any energy pulses at all, and no sign, either, of any living thing.

“It took guts for the Marines and Special Police to go down there, I’ll tell you,” the Inspector said in what had to be an understatement. “But go down they did.”

They now had a view from one of the squad leader’s environment suit cameras. It came down very near the yacht, and was carrying a nasty rifle clearly designed not just to singe, but to deep fry.

“There are a number of dead bodies around, but you can identify them as having been hit in the assault,” the Inspector noted. “They all have clear breaches in their e-suits, or show signs of explosion damage. The half-dozen or so figures you saw running, though, are not there. Watch. You can see that the sergeant is following the grid the computer made during the attack so that he can trace precisely the route of those who fled. Now look— there! See?”

The picture was of a body. The creature was definitely non-Terran, and appeared to be somewhat squidlike. It wasn’t a familiar shape, but anybody looking at the suit could interpolate the contours. And interpolate they would have to do, since it was sheared, at a diagonal, all the way across.

“You can see the suit’s been cut completely in two,” O’Leary noted.

“But where’s the other half, and whatever that thing was?” Ari asked.

“Where, indeed? We suspect it’s with Josich and the other Hadun who completely and utterly vanished at the same moment. Where did they go? Vaporized, perhaps, but why? And why only the living ones? Swallowed? Again, perhaps, but there is no cavity below and we surveyed to over thirty kilometers down. Not even a shaft. Solid rock, mostly basalt at that point. But there’s one other possibility.”

“Yes?”

“Our computers monitored a sudden energy surge, very tight, a series of bursts and then nothing, shooting out from that very spot like a heavy particle beam weapon out into space. We are missing five people after inventorying them and their records. There were five pulses. The beams vanished—not dissipated, mind you—just beyond the energy shield you saw and not near any of our own ships. This has been reported before on or near these worlds. Normally just legends, or just a few people or even single individuals vanishing on or near these. This is the first time we actually observed and recorded it.”

“And what do you think you saw, Inspector?” Jules Wallinchky asked him. “I’ve been here for years and have