HEARING IK SHOUT his name, Bandicut ran out of the alcove and around the nearest work-stations, following the sound. He saw Ik just as the Hraachee’an stepped through a tall frame and vanished into a pale violet glow. “Ik!” Bandicut shouted, too late. The others ran up behind him. Where Ik had been standing, there was only the work-station with what he presumed was a portal frame floating in the air beside it.
Brr-dang. “Where did he go?” Li-Jared cried, pounding on the console.
Bandicut waved at the portal, which was now translucent. Why had it turned translucent? Bandicut jabbed at it with a stiff-fingered hand. His fingertips slid off the plane of the force-field, or whatever it was. “Look!” Antares cried, pointing to the work-station display. It showed something like a meadow—and Ik’s back, walking away from them. They all stared in disbelief.
“We must save the location!” Li-Jared shouted, flexing his hands helplessly over the unfamiliar controls. It was clear he had no idea how to do that.
The view blinked and changed to a different scene, a public concourse thronging with peoples of all kinds, none of them Hraachee’an. “What the hell is this?” Bandicut asked.
“Whatever it is, it isn’t where we just saw Ik go!” Antares said. “Can we get back there?”
“I don’t know!” Bandicut muttered. “Napoleon?”
The robot edged up beside him and poked at the console, finally locating a suitable access point. He worked a moment. “Cap’n, I can’t seem to do that.”
“Let me see what I can find,” Jeaves said.
The rest of them fidgeted, while Jeaves worked. By the time Jeaves spoke again, the display had changed to show a lounge of some kind. Against a luminous blue background ragged bits of darkness flickered. Bandicut pointed. “Shadow-people! Aren’t those shadow-people?”
Li-Jared bonged, beside him. “Yes!”
“Can they help us find Ik?”
“Perhaps,” Jeaves said. “But—”
Li-Jared’s hands were in the air, waving. “Can’t you for once just help and not argue about it? That’s Ik we’re losing!”
“Of course,” said Jeaves. “I am attempting to contact the shadow-people via the iceline. Please stand by.”
They stood, looking anxiously at each other. As they waited, the monitor screen suddenly blinked off, then returned to life. Now the shadow-people were more clearly visible, and Bandicut could just make out the whreeeking sound of their conversation, like high-pitched violin strings. Jeaves spoke again. “It’s a little confusing. The shadow-people are in a state of turmoil. Something highly unusual is going on in the portal transportation system, some kind of power struggle between . . . I suppose you would say government factions. They couldn’t tell me much about it, but they didn’t seem surprised to hear about Ik being isolated from us after he went through the portal.” Before Bandicut could ask, Jeaves added, “Not the boojum, no. But there are new blocks in the system that inhibit even the shadow-people from tracking in all directions.”
Bong-g. “That’s bad! If the shadow-people can’t track him, what chance do we have?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeaves. “But it seems as though Ik somehow dropped out of the iceline tracking system when he went through that portal.”
Bandicut felt a pang of alarm. “Like when the boojum was in the system. I know, you said the boojum was dead, but . . .” If they were going to have to confront something like the boojum again . . .
“I found no indication of a malicious entity in the system,” said Jeaves. “The shadow-people are upset, yes, but it seems more like dismay over a decision by a government authority—possibly a jurisdictional dispute. It’s interfering with all kinds of things. It might just have been bad luck that Ik got separated when he did.”
Bandicut frowned doubtfully. “Do you believe in luck?”
“Ordinarily, no,” Jeaves answered. “But if this is part of a larger operational problem . . .”
/// It doesn’t reassure me that it might be
part of an operational problem, ///
Charli muttered.
/I don’t buy it either./ Bandicut tapped on the display and looked back at Jeaves and Napoleon. “I still don’t understand why we can’t get this thing to go back to where Ik disappeared. Even if the system’s no longer tracking Ik, it shouldn’t have lost the location information, should it?”
Jeaves seemed to freeze for a moment. Napoleon touched a small recess on the console and said, “It shouldn’t, no. But I can’t seem to find any—it’s as if the record of places visited has been deleted, and the system can’t bring it back.”
“That’s just weird.”
“Certainly weird for Shipworld,” Napoleon said.
Jeaves spoke again. “Bear with me a moment while I search on the image we caught of that little bit of landscape. Maybe we can do it the hard way.”
Jeaves worked in silence. Suddenly he lurched back, as if shocked. The view in the monitor abruptly changed from a search mode to something radically different. Now it showed a deep cave, illuminated from within by a watery light. “Well, that’s more than a little odd.”
“What is it?” Li-Jared asked.
Antares pointed. “Look there!” In the portal frame, the translucence had cleared, to reveal the same cave view that showed in the monitor.
“Uh—Jeaves?” Bandicut asked.
Antares stepped around behind him for a better look. “Is someone inviting us to go through here?”
The cave, lit from some point around a bend at the back, hardly looked inviting.
“Strange,” Jeaves said.
“No kidding,” said Bandicut.
“No, I mean we are being invited through.”
“By—”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine. When I was searching for that other landscape image, I felt that something was watching me.”
“Boojum?”
“No. Stop asking if it’s the boojum. More like a system monitor. And then—bing!—I got a message saying the Peloi urgently wished to talk to us.”
Antares was the only one who recognized the name. “The Peloi? Aren’t they involved in the running of this place? I mean, closely connected to the masters?”
“You know about them?” Bandicut asked.
“I’ve heard of them.”
“And—?”
“Uhhll—” Antares opened her hands “—they’re just someone I used to hear about. I don’t know what they do. But before I knew you, I spent a lot of time listening to stories on the iceline, and sometimes there were stories about the Peloi—and how some other factions thought they were ruining things.”
Bandicut cleared his throat. “Did the Peloi say what they wanted from us?”
“Only that we should go through this portal,” Jeaves said, “for, and I quote, ‘an important briefing.’”
Bwang “About what? Is it about what happened to Ik?” Li-Jared demanded, stepping back from the portal, as if to say, If it’s not, I’m not interested.
“Not directly,” Jeaves said. “But oddly enough, they identified themselves as the source of the information I was giving you about the starstream a few minutes ago. They want to share more detail and—this is what they said—ask your advice.”
“Our advice?” Bandicut barked. “What the—?”
“Understand,” Jeaves said. “I have never spoken to the Peloi directly before. I know them only by reputation. But based on that, their claim to be the source of my information is plausible. I know that their ranking in the command structure is formidable.”
“So you think we should go through?” Bandicut asked, gesturing to the portal.
“And what about Ik?” Li-Jared demanded.
“I suspect that if anyone can tell us about Ik, it would be them,” Jeaves said. “Meeting with them might be our best chance to learn where he went. I recommend we accept the invitation.” The robot backed up slightly, as though deferring to the three of them, and Napoleon, to make the decision.
The three looked at one another. “All right, then, let’s go,” Li-Jared said. He saw the surprise on Bandicut’s face. “I know, I know. But if we can’t reach Ik from here, why not go where there’s some information, which is better than no information?” He turned to Jeaves. “Can we leave a message, in case Ik finds his way back here?”
“Normally, yes,” Jeaves said.
“Let me try,” Napoleon said, jacking in again. “I think I can leave a forwarding command, to direct him to wherever we’re going, if he finds his way back here.” He worked a minute longer. “I don’t see any blocks on it.”
Bandicut fretted. Shipworld was immense, and he hated the thought of being separated from his friends.
“Thank you, Napoleon. That makes me feel a little better,” said Li-Jared. “Are we going, then?” Before the others could answer, he said to Jeaves, “Let’s go. You first, Jeaves, or me?”
Jeaves’ headband of eyes swarmed for a moment, perhaps in surprise at Li-Jared’s decisiveness. “If everyone is ready—” he said, and then turned and floated through the portal. Li-Jared followed him. Both became visible on the other side, in the cave. Antares touched Bandicut’s arm and stepped through. Glimmering from beyond the portal, she beckoned him to follow. Bandicut stepped through, and Napoleon came last.
***
The pale light surrounded Bandicut as he joined his companions in the cave. He touched his fingertips wonderingly to the walls that appeared here to be stone, carved and eroded by water, and there metal polished to a cool sheen. Following the illumination, they went deeper into the cave and around several bends, until they came to a circular chamber four or five meters across, its walls lit with a cerulean glow.
They turned around, blinking in the strange light. A heartbeat later, the cavern’s walls turned translucent, and then transparent, and the source of the light became evident: There was water on the other side of the walls. /Is this an aquarium? Are we on the inside or the outside?/ he muttered to Charli.
/// We appear to be in a bubble
at the bottom of a sunlit sea, ///
Charli said, marveling.
The sea surrounded them like a dome. The water was a tropical blue blur, a little hazy with silt.
/// Is anyone here? ///
“Look there,” Antares said. Looming into view were four shapes, iridescent-and-silver creatures larger than any of the company. There might have been more creatures behind them in the haze, but it was hard to be certain. The water shimmered and distorted, making it hard to see clearly.
“Our hosts, I presume,” Jeaves said, with a hint of question in his voice. The four creatures looked like enormous jellyfish, Bandicut thought, or sea-going comb jellies—ovoid cylinders, with wavering ridges and iridescent skins that one moment looked like liquid silver and the next flashed with color. No two of them looked alike, but they all had dark bands of some kind around their middles, like waist bands, studded with round organs that might have been eyes. Dangling from their bodies, like tentacles, were metallic, insectoid legs.
“Uhhl, these are the Peloi?” Antares asked.
Bandicut squinted, noticing something as strange as the creatures themselves. The sea seemed divided into sections, and the sections were flipping somehow, like pages of a paper book. Every time one of those flips occurred, the huge creatures seemed altered, or translated to different locations around the dome. It made them dizzyingly difficult to track.
One of them came to the fore and remained still for a minute. “We are the Peloi,” the creature said, speaking in an audible voice that reverberated through the glass. “And you are John Bandicut, Antares, Li-Jared, Jeaves, and Napoleon—all recently returned from the nebula Starmaker?”
“That’s right,” said Bandicut. It startled him to hear the Peloi so clearly, without any perceptible sense of translation. Did his stones already know these creatures?
“Peloi?” he went on. “I am unfamiliar with the name. Does it refer to your species or your group right here?” When there was no response, he continued, “Why have you brought us here? And can you help us find our missing friend?”
There was another shifting of the water, as though eddying currents were causing curtains to billow and turn. When it steadied again, he was facing a different Peloi.
“You refer to your friend Ik?” the Peloi asked.
“You know him?” Li-Jared asked sharply.
“We know of him,” the Peloi said. “Unfortunately, we do not now have the means to locate him.”
Bwang! “Why not?” Li-Jared sounded aggrieved.
“Because—” and the currents, and creatures, shifted again “—your friend has moved into a region temporarily inaccessible through our iceline nexus.”
Bandicut sighed in disbelief. “I thought the iceline reached everywhere in Shipworld. That was what we were told when we were asked to save it a while back.”
The Peloi drifted closer to the glass. “That is generally true, and we wish now to acknowledge your invaluable service in defeating the boojum. However, there have been unexpected service interruptions.”
“Well, what can you tell us?” Li-Jared asked.
“We observed Ik and a companion enter a long-range portal. Perhaps they hoped to return to you. Instead, they were intercepted by another agency and transported to a sector that is outside our present iceline range. For now, we can neither establish his present position nor communicate with him.”
“Then hell,” Li-Jared snarled. “He could be in trouble!”
“That is possible, but we have no reason to expect trouble,” the Peloi said. “We simply cannot put you in touch at the moment. Later, perhaps—”
Bandicut’s breath exploded in exasperation. “So why did you bring us here? Can’t you identify yourselves? What are your names? Who do you work for?”
Shift, shimmer, movement of light. Another Peloi, another view. “We are the Peloi. We represent certain of those who have guided you toward your previous assignments—who help manage this place, and can be said to participate in the control of Shipworld.”
That brought them all to sharp attention. Li-Jared asked, “You’re the masters of Shipworld?”
“No.” The creatures jostled until three of them seemed to be crowded together facing them. “We represent certain of the masters.”
Jeaves stepped forward. “Are you responsible for sending me—and these good people—on our mission to Starmaker?”
“We are. That is, we conveyed the instructions.”
“And the boojum? And the Neri planet?” Li-Jared asked.
Another Peloi surged forward to answer. “Yes—and if we may say, Well done, on all of those tasks.”
Li-Jared’s already bright blue eyes seemed to flash brighter. “Can’t the masters say that for themselves?”
The Peloi floated for a moment in silence. “Not at this time, no.”
“Why not?” Bandicut barked. “Are they afraid to show themselves?”
“No. But there are circumstances that—” The nearest Peloi swung suddenly, its huge comb rippling. “May we please tell you why we asked you here?”
Bandicut exchanged glances with his friends. “All right. But there’s been a real shortage of information around here. We’d like that to change.”
“We understand. That is why we recently provided Jeaves with new information to share with you. But we have asked to see you because we urgently desire your advice.”
Antares chuckled her disbelief. “Why do you want our advice?”
“Because we are gathering a team for an urgent mission.”
/// Ah. Another mission.
What a surprise! ///
Li-Jared already had his hands up in protest. “No! We are not going right back out on another mission! You’ve had us going without a break, and—”
“You misunderstand!” said the Peloi. “You have unquestionably earned a rest! But because this matter concerns your own people . . .”
“What do you mean—?” Li-Jared began, but stopped when an abrupt change occurred to their left. That portion of the sea went dark like a theater, and revealed the image of a group of four beings gathered around a console of some kind. One looked vaguely reptilian, another like a bear, and the two others were too much in shadow to be seen clearly. They reminded Bandicut of his own company.
“Who are they?” Antares asked.
“They are agents who, like you, have assisted us in difficult matters. They are preparing for a mission to the planet Karellia.”
Li-Jared gurgled, going stiff.
“The mission also involves human activities.”
Bandicut and Li-Jared looked at each other.
The sea pulled the image of the other team into the background. “This group is uncertain of the best way to approach Karellian people.”
“I should think so!” Li-Jared snapped. “They’re not from Karellia!”
“No. But they plan to go nevertheless . . . to intervene against a great danger.”
“What danger?”
“They must persuade the Karellians to do something that would seem against their own interests.”
Bwang. “What? Why?”
“Because the danger threatens not just Karellia and humanity, but all of us.”
Li-Jared tightly interlaced his fingers and then snapped them open in exasperation, bonging to himself.
“Didn’t we just handle something like that?” Bandicut demanded.
“You did. This danger is closely related.” The sea flickered and flipped, and the Peloi changed once more. “We did not wish to call you to action again so soon. But we do urgently desire the benefit of your wisdom.”
Bandicut shut his eyes, drew a deep breath and expelled it, and opened his eyes. “Let’s have it,” he said.
***
The danger, the Peloi explained, was connected to the starstream that Jeaves had told them about earlier. A tightly woven channel of n-space, it was not just a superhighway for star travel, it was also a distortion of space-time unlike any other known to exist in the galaxy. That was the first part of the problem.
The second part was something . . . emanating from Karellia.
Hearing that made Li-Jared twitchy again, and he paced while the Peloi explained that Karellia was at war.
“War! With humans?” Li-Jared asked, glancing nervously at Bandicut.
“No.” Humanity was not involved; humanity and the Karellians had not yet met. The starstream was not involved in the war, either. Karellia probably did not even know of its existence.
Li-Jared waved impatiently. “Then who are we at war with?”
“Please observe.” The nearest Peloi extended a thin, silver limb and opened another theater view—this time an image showing Karellia, orbiting its sun inside a flickering nebula. “A monitoring probe only recently got this data back to us.” The view from inside the nebula was claustrophobic. From Karellia, almost no stars were visible through the dust and gas, with the exception of its own sun and, at a greater distance, the blurry dot of the nearby companion sun. Further obscuring the view were bright clouds of ionizing radiation in a band that wreathed Karellia. “This energy cloud, more than anything else, inhibits your people’s travel into deep space,” said the Peloi to Li-Jared. “Your people have long since reached local space. But travel through the energy cloud is difficult or impossible. There appears to be no traffic or commerce with the closely neighboring star.”
“That was true when I left,” Li-Jared muttered. “We were just launching our first probes. But still?”
“It is still mostly true. It has not, however, insulated your world from war.”
Li-Jared prompted with a gesture. “How is that possible?”
There was another disconcerting shift in the water, and they faced an iridescent blue Peloi. “A state of war exists with a world called Uduon, a planet of the neighboring sun. We do not know if the two peoples have ever even met—but they have exchanged long-distance bombardment. Our probes have monitored small asteroids on collision course with Karellia.”
Li-Jared staggered back, momentarily speechless. “Asteroids?”
“We do not know how it began, or why. But the war has become a threat to all of us,” the Peloi continued.
“How could it be a threat to all of us?” Bandicut asked, putting words to Li-Jared’s sputters of dismay.
Swirl, flip, and a silver Peloi spoke. “The Karellians have created a temporal shield to protect their homeworld, a shield that manipulates space-time in the region immediately surrounding the planet.” The Peloi drifted closer to Li-Jared, as though to emphasize. “Karellia’s planetary magnetic field, and the high-energy particle flux encircling the planet, together provide the necessary conditions for the creation of the shield. It must be an ingenious device.”
Li-Jared barely breathed. “Even in my time . . . there was discussion of the possibility of time distortions arising in those belts. But . . .” He made a jerky gesture with his hands. “I don’t understand how that is a threat to anyone else.”
“Our information comes from limited remote probes, and we do not know all the details. But we do know that secondary effects of the shield ripple far beyond the local Karellian system. In fact, they ripple all the way out to the starstream, where they generate a temporal wave in the starstream itself. A time-tide in the stream, you might say.”
Li-Jared made a gurgling sound. “I don’t—”
“Look.” The starscape rotated, zoomed, and realigned. Now they could see that the starstream passed just close enough to Karellia for a glowing green wave front emanating from Karellia to intersect it. “This is an artificial image, derived from the data sent by the probes. The green ring maps the temporal disturbance from Karellia.”
“That’s impossible,” Li-Jared protested. “The power outlay would be enormous.”
“And it is. Perhaps the power is drawn from the energy belts encircling the planet. Even so, it only reaches the starstream because so much of the energy is tightly focused in the plane that intercepts incoming asteroids. Which also, unfortunately, intercepts the starstream.”
Li-Jared strode to the holo and waved a hand. “All right, it reaches the starstream. What harm is it doing?”
“Look closely,” said the Peloi. The display flickered, showing a slight ripple where the time-distortion from Karellia intersected the starstream. Glints of actinic light flashed down the starstream from the point of intersection. “Those flashes,” said the Peloi, “are the time-tides our probes have detected.”
“And—?” Bandicut asked impatiently.
“And, the starstream reaches all the way to the center of the galaxy.” The Peloi waved a thin limb, and the view rotated and zoomed inward along the starstream toward the galactic center, where great lanes of dust and glowing gas turned the galactic core into a majestic thing of mystery. “The core is where the ones we call the Survivors live—and where, over a billion years ago, they lived much more openly. Where they were almost destroyed in the most terrible war the galaxy has ever known.”
/// The Survivors?
Meaning . . . the Mindaru? ///
Charli muttered.
The Mindaru, who had very nearly destroyed their company, and the Starmaker Nebula? Bandicut’s throat was suddenly dry.
“The Survivors, who became or spawned the Mindaru, whom you so recently defeated. Yes.” Curtains swirled and concealed the center of the galaxy, and the Peloi swung around to face them. “Do you understand why we are concerned about a temporal disturbance that could connect our present with the galactic core of the past?”
/// Oh dear . . . ///
The nearest Peloi turned a shade of silver-red that looked like coals of fire deep within ashes. “Yes, we know of your death-struggle with the Mindaru. We received the report from your ship’s intelligence, designated Copernicus. We know of the hypernova you prevented, and the star you saved. It was a great victory, and we thank and applaud you for it.”
“Ah,” Antares murmured, not saying, It’s about time you noticed.
“We should have conveyed our thanks to you at once, but we are sorry to say there is some . . . dysfunction . . . in communication between our masters and those who . . .”
“Serve?” Antares asked.
Another shift in the waters. “Yes. We are sorry.”
“You should be,” Li-Jared grunted.
“Yes, well . . .” Bandicut cleared his throat. “Be that as it may, you are telling us that this starstream actually reaches all the way to the place where the Mindaru live? Where they come from? Where their masters are?”
The Peloi made a sound like a viola string humming. “The present location of the Survivors is unknown to us. They may be dead. They may be sequestered somewhere, awaiting the completion of the Mindaru mission to destroy biological life.”
“Mission to—shit, they’re still trying to kill all biological life?”
“We believe so, yes. Why would they have stopped?”
Bandicut shuddered. It fit with what they had glimpsed of the Mindaru way of thinking, and what Napoleon had gleaned from a certain spaceship graveyard, on their last mission. He took a deep breath and returned to what the Peloi were saying. “But you’re not saying that the starstream is reaching them?”
The Peloi hummed. “Reaching them in the present, no.”
Bandicut’s chest tightened. “Then what?” he asked.
A new Peloi said, “If the time tide reverberates down the starstream as we believe, then—”
Napoleon straightened up and spoke up abruptly, finishing the thought. “Then it could open a window in time, through the starstream, to the galactic core of a billion years ago? To the birthplace of the Mindaru?”
“Not just a window, but a pathway. A pathway by which the ancient Mindaru could come forward into our time. And not just to our time, but to our neighborhood in space. The danger could be . . .”
“Terrifying,” Antares said. “It all sounds terrifying.”