Shipstar

Twenty-four

“They seem as recalcitrant as you implied,” Asenath said, leaning toward Memor and fluttering irked yellows about her neck. Her harsh warm breath rippled Memor’s ruff feathers, an unpleasant sensation.

Bemor added, “More so.”

They were ensconced in a shadowy side chamber after the transmission to the alien ship. The dark rock walls were of truly ancient times, furrowed with past attempts at adornment—panoramas that once depicted vast sagas of civilizations, long vanished. These had nearly worn away, leaving the striations and sparkles of the original grit-soil substance from which the Bowl was first built. The air of great, chilly expanses of time clung to them.

Tananareve, the last remaining Late Invader prisoner, was bending, flexing, pulling her foot to her forehead, sitting up and lying down over and over with a weight on her straightened hind limbs. The motion was distracting. They were flexible creatures, indeed. Memor told herself that the primate was doing it for her health and tried to ignore it.

Asenath restlessly gave an agree-flutter. “I do not enjoy negotiating with those who can see so little of their true position.”

Memor gave a fan-salute of agreement but said, “They are new to all this. No doubt they wish to take their best possible outcome as a beginning position.”

Bemor gave no feather-signals at all, but let his voice range down into low registers. “They are not negotiating from strength.”

“I think they imagine they are,” Memor said.

“I could not diagnose that from their speech,” Bemor said with a casual, superior sniff.

Memor still felt uncomfortable around Bemor, and tried to tell herself that his dismissive murmurs and small feather-displays were not meant to offend her. Perhaps they were mannerisms he had evolved to deal with staff and lower workers? Stiffening her resolve with this thought, she allowed herself some of what the Folk termed “lubrications” on what she had learned, using images of the primate cast on a shimmering wall projection. “I have studied their ‘tells,’ their limited visible methods of adding meaning beyond their words. They communicate, process, and fully feel emotions by mimicking the facial expressions of others nearby. So I studied the subtle shifts in their Captain’s eyes, mouth, even the slight expansions and contractions of his nostrils. Apparently they have no ability to signal with their ears.”

“Ah, their Captain is male? Unusual.” Bemor looked skeptical.

“Bemor, there have been other Invaders who had male hierarchy leadership, yes?” Memor felt this appeal to his greater range of knowledge would mollify her brother. And give a nod to the very idea of male leadership, too—though he knew well that his prominence at high levels was a planned aberration in Folk social structures.

“Of course, though we managed them throughout their Adoption to cleanse them of that destabilizing structure. They are now all proper matriarchies.”

“But not the Sil,” Asenath said.

“They are young, not fully formed,” Bemor countered.

Asenath gestured outside the Citadel, toward where the primate was hanging from a tree limb, her legs raised to form a V. She remained in that position as the moments passed, but her eyes were on her captors. Distracting. “And that one—you watched her during the talk with Captain Redwing? She gave some facials.”

“Of course. Tananareve is under therapy: well fed, often exercised. This local gravity is closer to her home world, too. A fairly simple creature, she is. And she used no unusual signals, as I could see.” The Late Invader was still watching her, but surely Tananareve could not follow the swift, layered Folk speech. Simple commands, yes, but nothing sophisticated. She might overhear a word or two, but never the feather-nuances.

“The eyes,” Bemor said. “What does a slow wink mean to them?”

“Puzzlement, I believe,” Memor said.

“Nothing more?”

“Uh, I believe not.”

“She used a long slow wink when questioned by that male Captain about the whereabouts of their other party.”

“I noticed, but how much can a single small gesture convey?”

“Could it be a sexual signal?”

They all found this amusing, since sex among the Folk involved ritual feather-displays lasting through several mealtimes, classic dancing and cadences, song-trills of expectation and mutual agreed definition, then the ultimate mounting, all with urging songs and the completing union—not a matter to be taken lightly or often.

Memor was pleased that this remark drew amusement; she was known for her humor. “They are storytelling creatures, transferring useful knowledge from short-term into long-term memory, with assigned significance, all by telling a narrative to themselves.”

Asenath said, “They constantly update this?”

“Without complete fidelity to the original, yes. Remembering a narrative alters it.”

Bemor said mildly, “So they know their inner selves as fictional characters, written by themselves? Then rewritten?”

After more agreeable and incredulous laughter, and then a timely arrival of small tasty animals served on sticks by the attendants, Asenath said, “I fear that adds to their lack of realism. We should remind them of it.”

Bemor looked skeptical, with purple rushes at his neck. “That would be…?”

“Memor, fetch forth your primate.”

When Tananareve came hesitantly through the arch, the contrast of her spindly, pale skin and dull-toned clothes with the three large full-feathered Folk was striking. Her feet slapped the bare cold stones in her frayed boots and her breath wheezed as she got used to the moist, salty scents of life within a Citadel. She was only a bit larger than the attendants who sat dutifully near Asenath, Bemor, and Memor, their faces always tilted upward hopefully in the ivory light, watching to see what their superiors might need.

“How do you think, little one?” Bemor addressed the primate with his rumbling voice.

Memor was shocked. Somehow in a mere few sleep-times, Bemor had mastered the Late Invader tongue, solely from Memor’s reports and recordings. His pronunciation was accurate, too, strong on the clunky primate vowels. She felt a wash of cold anxiety and not a little fear. My brother truly is quicker, sharper. Can it be because he links so much with the Ice Minds?

“Clearly,” Tananareve said. “Quietly.”

Bemor gave an amused rustle that no doubt the primate did not fathom. “Quite well put,” he said in Anglish. “Do you think your Captain will cooperate with us?”

“If you let go of our people, he will.”

“We will compromise on that. We might very well let many of you go on to Glory.”

“Nope, we all go.”

“That is unreasonable.”

Bemor turned to Memor and in Folk said, “This is normal?”

“They sail before the thousand breezes that blow through their opaque unconscious Underminds,” Memor said. She noted the primate was looking at them, but did not worry that this creature could fathom their speech. After all, Folk had layered grammars and conditional tenses the primates totally lacked.

Bemor huffed skeptically. In formal Folkspeak he said, “Very pretty. What do we do?”

“They do learn by experience,” Asenath said. “Memor herself says so. They are in a wholly strange place and may relapse into patterns from their past, fearing to face their future here.”

“To face their fate,” Bemor said.

Asenath said, “In them there is an undercurrent of strong neurological response to social life. In their neural patterns I read connecting elements, plainly honed by long natural selection. They evolved as hunter-gatherers within a socioeconomy where sharing and justice were critical to long-term survival. Yet these fail when extended to larger groups—a major problem of theirs, even now. Judging from the encased memories I read, even their stable societies oscillated between banquets and barbarism.”

Bemor said formally, “Our long voyages have revealed much poignant wisdom. I have often viewed from the hull observatories, the vibrant stars glaring in their perpetual dark. That star swarm marks not so much a mystery but a morgue, brimming with once glorious and now dead civilizations. This I learned from the Ice Minds.”

Memor rustled at this. Here at last Bemor played his strong card, the slow intelligences of great antiquity. They dozed through the Bowl’s long voyages, else they might try too many experiments. In this way they were a reserve of long-term wisdom, not of mere passing expertise. They had been present at the Bowl’s construction, even participating in its design, or so legend had it. How such cold creatures could know mechanics was an ancient puzzle.

Bemor used the rolling cadences of formal speech to stress his different status. Infuriating, but she could do nothing overt about it. And she was his sister twin, too. Asenath would falsely assume they worked together. Perhaps, Memor saw, she could use that in her own favor.

“You believe they wish to play a role in this Glory matter already?” Asenath asked intently.

Bemor fan-marked yellow agreement tones. “They must. The Glorians have technologies we need to ascend to a higher level of communications, with minds that have ignored us until now. The Ice Minds also surely wonder if these primates could ever fit in on the Bowl. They have implied such.”

Asenath said, “The primates will have to.”

Bemor said with casual superiority, “If they are able. We live among the long history of spaces and species. We encourage local groupings and discourage long travels across the Bowl. These adventurers may not fit in well. They seem obsessed with pushing beyond their horizons.”

Asenath said, “Most of our Adopted give their names as ‘the people’—whom they of course assume to be blessed. Others are, well, not so blessed. Each likes to see itself as central and important even among the vast tracts of the Bowl. Many live within a history of faces—bosses and chiefs, matrons and managers on high. As they adapt, these Adopted, to the majesty that is the Bowl, their history becomes simple. It is about who wore their own species’ crown and then who wore it next.”

Bemor fluttered agreeably. “Of course, as planned long ago. The Adopted do not any longer reflect upon great matters, beneath our eternal sun, untroubled by the universe around them. They dwell in comfort, without the horrors of unsteady sunlight, of seasons and slantwise sun. The Ice Minds see nothing but the entire universe, all around them. They are of the constant dark.”

Memor thought this a bit much, attaching Ice Mind majesty to his own agenda. But she said nothing. She thought, though, upon her own past roles in this. Species grew in number until the Folk had to shepherd them to their equilibrium value. Belligerence and slaughter ran their bloody course. Borders brought a fretwork of scars, a long scrawl of history made legible on ground. With borders of sand or forest or water, Astronomer Folk shaped place to match species. Boundaries defined. When warring muddles arose, they examined yet again why territory caused them. Often this came from inept borders drawn by yawning bureaucrats far in the past.

So Memor and others thrust themselves into the ground truth of locales, letting time brew wisdom from raw rubs and strife. Such lands were often the equivalent of cluttered attics, stuffed by history with soiled rags, dented cans, and old, oily wood: a single spark could ignite them. Such running sores where species war raged unchecked, the Folk could only cleanse with great diebacks. Quite commonly, the packing fraction of religious passions in too little space was the deep cause, and had to be corrected. Folk molded the Adopted so none sprawled in an unending tide. Conversations and genetics shaped better and longer than mountains and monsoons could. Tribal beliefs in a tyrannical God figure running an imaginary, celestial dictatorship were often easier to manage. They understood hierarchy.

Such was the aged truth the Folk learned either from the Cold Minds or from hard experience. Memor had climbed up with a chilly indifference to necessity, and so now had merited the honor of dealing with the Late Invaders. I hope I can capture the renegades and win approval, Memor thought, suppressing her Undermind’s qualms. Or else there will come … execution. She felt a shudder from her Undermind—something she could not see, a secret of great implication … it slipped away.

Her reverie done, Memor snapped back to attention. Asenath ventured, “So … we should not consider these primates good Adoption candidates?”

Bemor gestured at the primate, who narrowed her eyes and looked intently at him. “No, I believe they can be broken to the rule of reason, in time. But their Adoption should not be assumed to be an important value to us. We need them to help negotiate with the Glory system, true. But we can then cast them aside like a sucked carcass, if we wish, at little loss.”

“What habitat would suit these creatures, then?” Asenath asked.

Memor said, “I have plumbed the mind of this primate, Tananareve. I gather they want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be close to a body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean. They prefer to live in those environments in which their species evolved over millions of years. Instinctively, they gravitate toward parklands and transitional forest, looking out safely over a distance toward reliable sources of food and water. They can flee predators from land to water, or back, or to forest, where their kind once lived in trees.”

“What a primitive mode!” Asenath seemed repulsed.

“Is this opinion, that the primates are mostly useful for dealing with Glory, the sole wisdom the Ice Minds wish to convey to us at this point?” Memor asked, turning to Bemor.

“I think that is quite enough indeed,” Bemor said—rather haughtily, Memor thought. “But…” Bemor moved uneasily, feathers rustling. “The Ice Minds do not always reveal their thinking. They seem unusually interested in these primates. Still, they wish us to secure the help of these Late Invaders.”

Asenath rushed to send an assent-flutter toward Bemor and turned a subtle angle toward him, and so away from Memor. “So, Contriver, I propose that we give the primate ship a reminder of their true position.”

“Um,” Bemor said with a skeptical eye-cant. “How?”

“They are inspecting the magnetic configurations around their ship, probably to better guide their own craft. But it could be they will use it to disturb our magnetic mechanics, as well. Their technique is to spread a wide array of sensors.”

“Adeptly so?” Bemor said.

“These are craftily done, hundreds of disks the size of my toenail. I suggest we wipe our skies free of them.”

“Destroy them?” Memor asked.

“It will serve as a calling card,” Aseneth said with a smirk-flutter.

“I’m sure it will,” Bemor said, sending an assent corona of yellow and blue. He leaned forward eagerly. “We will at least learn something from their response.”

“I shall see it is done,” Asenath said happily. “I believe these Late Invaders will be put in their proper place, and soon realize it.”

Memor wondered if she had been outmaneuvered here. Caution would have been her policy, but Bemor seemed bemused by the idea of overt action. “I hope you enjoy it as well, Asenath,” Memor said with what she hoped was just the right tone of sardonic agreement. It was always difficult to get these things right.

Twenty-five

Blessed night, Cliff thought. The soothing qualities of pure deep darkness washed over them all. After months of relentless sun, they had all they wished of sweet shadow. It fell like a club upon their minds, sucking them into sleep.

He swam up to blurred consciousness after another long sleep, wrapped in a fuzzy warm blanket the Sil had found for them all. His team lay around like sacks of sand, feasting on the festival of dark that released their need, after so long in the field, for rest.

He was still groggy. Something had sent a twinge, awakened him. He got up, pulled on pants and boots, and left their little room carved from brown rock. His boots were getting worn down and he wondered how he could get something serviceable. As usual, the right answer was, ask the Sil.

Small soft sounds were coming from where they viewed the Ice Minds messages. He came in carefully, watching the two Sil speaking in their curious way. There was more eye and head movement than there was talk. And as usual, the most active one was Quert—who noticed Cliff and beckoned him over with an eye-shrug.

“Ask for wisdom of past,” Quert said. “This got now.”

On the screen were phrases that might have been answers to Sil questions.

Over long times there is no lack of energy or materials, only of imagination.

Not having resources makes species resourceful.

Anger dwells long only in the bosom of fools.

“Thanks for having them do this in Anglish.”

“Did not ask. They spoke first to us. Now to you.”

“What is this all about?”

“Want to deal with Folk. You can help. Ice Minds care not for us. Care for you.”

“Why?”

“New Invaders know new things.”

“So they brush you off with ‘Anger dwells long only in the bosom of fools.’ And you are supposed to forget how the Folk killed so many of you?”

Quert gave only a tightening around the eyes, and his words were in a cool whisper. “Ice Minds say we are unquiet in soul.”

“You’re handling those deaths better than I have done with my friend Howard.”

“There is more worry to come.”

Quert beckoned him toward the large portal that gave a view of the sprawling icefields. To the side the stars wheeled and on the dim icy outer crust of the Bowl the vacuum flowers slowly tracked the brightest stars in the moving sky. This was for Cliff still a magical vision. He watched it with Quert, who after a moment made a simple hand gesture and the portal flickered. The view jerked and though the stars still swept across the jet-black sky, now there was a bright object moving counter to the Bowl’s rotation, skating across the blackness. When it was nearly overhead, a sudden beam flashed into view and Cliff realized the craft was using a spotlight. A powerful green laser beam fanned out to a ten-meter circle, sweeping. The beam flared briefly as it shone directly into the portal and then moved on. The bright point of the surveying ship tracked on, away and over the horizon. The stars wheeled on.

“That was a recording?”

An assent-rachet of Quert’s eyes. “They not see your kind. Saw us.”

“Some Sil? If they were looking for us, then we’re safe—”

“Folk say Sil not come here.”

“I thought—” He stopped, realizing that he had not thought at all whether the Sil were trespassing here. Apparently they were. Once the thought occurred, it seemed reasonable. You don’t want riffraff intruding into the provinces of beings who dwell in deep cold. Their mere body heat could cause damage.

“No one is to come talk to the Ice Minds?”

“Not allowed by Folk.”

“So they’ll come after you?”

“Soon. We move.”

Cliff realized he had thought of this cool dark refuge in rock as a resting place. They were all tired of moving across strange landscapes. But now they would lose that, too.

“Where to?”

“Warm and hot.”

Twenty-six

Redwing woke from a blurred dream of swimming in a warm ocean, lazily drifting … to a melodious call from the bridge. He hated buzzers in his cabin, and so the strains of Beethoven’s Fifth drew him up with their four hammering notes. If he didn’t answer within ten seconds, it would double in volume. He got to it in nine. “Um, yeah.”

“Captain, the smart coins aren’t reporting in,” Ayaan Ali said in a tight, clipped voice. In task rotation, this was her week on the skeleton watch. It was 4:07 ship time.

“How many?” He was still groggy.

“All of them. Their hail marks just winked out. I had them up on the big board along with full stereo visuals in optical. Their hails started disappearing at angle two eighty-seven, and a wave of them swept across the real space coordinate representation. It took, let’s see, one hundred forty-nine seconds to sweep over all of them. I can’t get a response hail from a single one.”

“Sounds like an in-system malf.”

“I checked that. The Insys Artilect says nothing wrong.”

“You called on the other two?”

“I brought them up into partial mode to save time. With just their diagnostic subset running, I got them to review whole-system stats for the last hour. They say there’s nothing wrong.”

“The full Artilect is right, then.” His mind scrambled over the problem, got nothing. “Run it again. And direct for an all-spectrum search. Plus look at all the particle count indexes. Everything we’ve got.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I call—?”

“Right, Karl. And Fred.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be there pronto.”

He made it in under two minutes. His onboard coverall slipped on easily—he had been losing weight lately, working the weights and doing pace running—and he used Velcro shoes. Ayaan Ali’s brow was creased with lines he had never seen before. Worry, not fatigue.

“Nothing unusual in the all-spectrum,” she said, voice high and tight. “Particle fluxes normal. The magnetosonic and ion cyclotron spectrum is as usual, pretty much. But the Alfvén wave spectrum power is up nearly an order of magnitude.”

The Insys Artilect visualized this spectrum, cast over the schematic of their near-space environment. It presented as a green front of waves rolling over the zone of the smart coins, silencing each as it swamped them. With an on-screen slider bar, Ayaan Ali moved this map backwards and forward in time. “I wonder how these magnetic waves could turn off our coins.”

“Tumbling them, I would think,” Karl said. He had come in quietly with Fred just behind. “Alfvén waves can nonlinearly decay into waves short enough to be of the same size as the coins. That tumbles them and can kill their navigation.”

“And maybe turn them off, too,” Fred added.

Karl pointed to the wave sequences. “They spread out from the jet, notice. An example of what my language has a single word for—Vernichtungswille: the desire to annihilate.”

“So this is the Folk reply to our first negotiation?” Ayaan Ali asked.

“Looks like,” Fred said. “Say, what’s that?” The back-time display ran into earlier hours, and Fred reached over to freeze it, march it forward. As he did, a blue wave rushed across the entire display space. He backtracked it, shifting out to larger frames. “Look, it traces back to the jet. What’s blue mean?”

“High-energy ions.” Ayaan Ali thumbed the resolution until they could make out a snarl in the jet itself. It was a knot of magnetic stresses that tightened, fed by smaller curls of magnetic flux that rushed outward along the jet.

“Look,” Fred said. “Kinks came purling along the jet, moving fast. They converged in that knot, and—here comes the blue.”

Karl nodded. “From that we get the Alfvén waves. Very neat, really. They can control the magnetic fields in their jet, focus them.”

“To kill our coins.” Redwing looked around at them. “To show us what they can do.”

A silence as they looked at him, as if to say, What do we do?

“Officers of the bridge, I want you to fly a small satellite over the rim of the Bowl. We haven’t got any recon of the outside of this thing, and Ayaan Ali reports that we got a stray signal from Cliff’s team just hours ago. It was text only, said they were under the mirror zone. If we can put a relay sat within range of them, on the outside, maybe we can make a stable link.”

Fred looked at Redwing for a long moment. “You want to risk a satellite?”

“I think we need to know how far these Folk will go,” Redwing said. He kept his tone mild and his face blank.

“As for further measures, I have a brief from Karl”—giving him a nod—“and we will meet in the mess at eight hundred hours to discuss it.” A pause to let this sink in. Time to go public, he figured. “Dismissed.”

He started the meeting with news. Ayaan Ali delivered it, standing beside an image that flickered onto their wall screen. All exec crew were arrayed around the biggest table on the starship, coffees smartly set in front of them, uniforms fresh pressed from the steamer presser, everybody aware that this was not just another damn crew meet.

Grimly she said, “We launched our satellite toward the nearest Bowl rim. It is a microsat with ion drive, so it accelerated fast. I took it over a mountain range that neighbors the rim edge. See the picture sequence.”

A set of stills ran, in time jumps that made the craggy mountains below zoom past. Their peaks were in permanent snow despite the constant sunlight. Redwing supposed this meant that the atmosphere was thin there and the outer skin, which they now knew was quite cold, was only a short distance away. The chill of space kept water frozen out.

Now the scene stuttered forward to show the Bowl rim approaching. The sat probe scanned forward, aft, both sides. At the far left edge, the atmospheric film shimmered, keeping air confined. On the left a small bright light appeared.

“I stop it here,” Ayaan Ali said. “Note the near-UV burst on this view. It appeared within a microsecond frame, apparently a precursor.”

“To…?” Karl wondered.

“This. Next frame.” Ayaan Ali pointed to a bigger white blotch at the same location to the sat probe’s left. Her smile had a sardonic curve. “And that is it.”

Karl asked, “What happened? Where’s the next frame?”

Ayaan Ali gave them a cold smile. “There are no more. It stopped transmitting. Here is an X-ray image of that region. I had it running all during the fly-out, just in case.”

They could make out the dim X-ray images of mountains and Bowl rim. Apparently this came from minor particle impacts of the solar wind. At the very edge of the rim was a hard bright dot. “That’s our probe dying. From spectra and side-scatter analysis, I believe the killing pulse, which we saw the UV precursor of, was a gamma ray beam.”

“From where?” Redwing knew the answer, but he liked to let Ayaan Ali keep the stage.

“That big cannonlike thing farther along the Bowl rim, sir.”

“It’s an X-ray laser?”

Ayaan Ali shook her head. “This image comes from secondary emissions. I can tell by looking at the spectrum. Also, I had a gamma ray detector taking a broader picture. It gave this.”

Another bright dot. This time there was no background at all, just a point in a black field. “The power in this image is five orders of magnitude higher than the X-ray fluence.”

He said flatly. “So we were right. It’s a gamma ray laser.”

Redwing looked at Beth. Ever since she returned, he had asked her to attend tech meetings, reasoning that she might have insights called forth by new events. “As far as I know, we never found a way to go that high in photon energy. Did you see any signs the Folk had tech like that?”

Now Beth shook her head. “Weapons weren’t really around us. Or maybe we didn’t even recognize them as weapons. They didn’t need them, I guess. We were trapped.”

Ayaan Ali said, “Weapons of this class would be very dangerous on a rotating shell world. Blow a hole in the ground and you’re dead.”

Karl said, “There was an Earthside program to develop high-frequency lasers long ago—I mean even before we left—and it never got lasing to gamma energies. At those tiny wavelengths, a laser could focus to very small areas, so you wouldn’t need very much power to blow something to pieces.”

Fred said, “This is bad news. Now we can’t fly a probe over the rim. They can kill any sensors we send out. We’re bottled up.”

“No doubt they expect us to come back to them and ask for a negotiation,” Ayaan Ali said.

“Which we won’t do,” Redwing said. Nobody said anything. Time to change direction. Sometimes that jarred loose a fresh insight. He leaned forward, fingers knitted together. “Beth, do you think that the Folk would ever let us go forward to Glory?”

Beth sighed and looked at the screen, where the explosion of their probe was frozen in time. “They have a very hierarchical society. The big one who interrogated us, Memor, acted as if she owned the world. It’s hard to think they’ll let us go and reach Glory first.”

Ayaan Ali said, “Which we certainly could do, since we won’t be facing their jet backwash.”

Redwing remembered a lecture on alien biospheres during flight training in which someone said, “Humans and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. With aliens, that has to go double.” Yet here he was trying to figure out the negotiating strategy of an alien mind, immersed in a civilization uncountably old. He let them toss ideas around for a while to get them used to their situation. Sending the probe out to get destroyed had given the right edge to this, he decided. And it had laid to rest any notion that the Folk were bluffing.

“So…” He let the pause grow; they were so quiet, he could hear the whisper of the air circulation. “Let’s send a reply.”

Karl got up to speak and flicked on the wall display. It showed the jet in an extreme view—magnetic field lines in ruby, the tubes of bright plasma they contained glowing orange, the Bowl itself sketched in nearby as abstract lines. “We can fire a shot across their bow. The jet is pretty narrow as it approaches the Knothole. Notice the helical mag fields that funnel and contain the plasma. Very neat.”

Beth said, “So the idea is…?”

“Fly into it. Disturb the jet. Let it flicker around in the Knothole.”

They just gaped at Karl. He had a chance to check their teeth and noted that Beth had an incisor with some ragged damage and stains. Beth let out a breath. “I flew us up the jet, remember? Remember? It was like taking a sailing ship through a hurricane. Do that again?”

For a long moment Redwing watched the naked fear play across her face. He recalled the long hours of strain and sweat as the ship popped and creaked, the racking uncertainty Beth had showed as she stayed with it through surges and awful wrenching turns. All the crew had worked to the limits of their endurance. That had been their only real choice. Through it all he showed no uncertainty. That was his job. And in the end he did not regret it.

But this was not a necessity. They could coast here and play for time. But they could not leave. And they were eating their provisions while Cliff’s team was in constant danger.

He said slowly, “I think we need to show them that we are not going along with their agenda. That we will not be docile members of their big club.”

A long silence. Their faces tightened and mouths compressed to thin white lines: startled fright, worry, puzzlement. Karl then said, “I wasn’t thawed when you danced through the Knothole, Beth, but I checked this out with Fred. The physics is fairly straightforward. It won’t last long, maybe ten hours.”

Redwing could see they were too stunned to take it in.

“We’ll leave the technical aspects for later. There will be three crew rated to pilot on the bridge at all times. In fact, all crew present. Warn the finger snakes to anchor themselves.”

Karl said formally, “I want you all to know I have done calculations and simulations. There is a broad parameter range of what we might face. The Navigation Artilects have been working full bore to study trajectories, the back-reaction of the jet plasma flow on our mag throat. It compresses our prow fields and alters our uptake—but that’s mostly good news, because we get more thrust from the plasma. There’ll be plenty of ions to fuel our fusion burn. I think—”

“Yes, technical aspects come later.” Redwing smiled and tried to look confident. “Thanks, Karl.”

Beth looked him straight in the eye. “We don’t understand the Folk worth a damn, sir.”

“Indeed.”

“I have no idea how they’ll respond.” Beth looked worried, and her eyes jerked around the table, looking for support.

“They understand negotiation, that’s clear from our conversation through Tananareve. They’ve killed our coins and now our probe. Let’s show them we know tit for tat, too.”

They looked hard at him. Ayaan Ali still had her slightly wide-eyed, shocked gaze. Fred wore his usual expectant fixed stare. Karl was trying to look confident. Beth’s face was pale and strained, eyes fixed on him.

He stood. “I want you all to know we’ll reply to the Folk. But while doing so, we’ll navigate toward the jet and make preparations.”

They left quietly. None of them looked back at him except Beth. She waited until the others were gone and closed the door. “I have to admit it feels good to be doing something. I didn’t like being in their prison. Even when we got out, it was into a bigger prison.”

Redwing blinked. “One the size of a whole damn solar system?”

She laughed, gave him the high sign, and left.