It had been their third attempt to fit a supporting member into a gaping opening in the tail of the sunken Thennanin vessel. They had come closer to getting it right, but still the lead sled had hung back too long and almost let its end be driven into the inner wall of the battleship.
"There now, Olelo, here's how you avoid that beam." He addressed the pilot of the lead sled. His voice projected from the sled's hydrophones. "When you get to their hieroglyph thingie that looks like a two-headed jackal, lift your nose thusly!" He motioned with his arms.
The fin looked at him blankly, for a moment, then nodded vigorously.
* Roger — I'll dodge her! *
Suessi grimaced at the flippancy. They wouldn't be fins if they weren't sarcastic one-half the time and over-eager the other half. Besides, they really had been working hard.
Still, it was a royal bitch working underwater. In comparison, doing construction in weightlessness was a pure joy.
Since the Twenty-first Century, men had learned a lot about building things in space. They had found solutions to the problems of inertia and rotation that weren't even in the Library. Beings who'd had antigravity for a billion years had never needed to discover them.
There had been somewhat less experience, in the last three hundred years, doing heavy work underwater, even in Earth's dolphin communities, and none at all in repairing or looting spacecraft at the bottom of an ocean.
If weightless inertia caused problems in orbit, what about the almost unpredictable buoyancies of submerged materials? The force it took to move a massive object varied with the speed it was already traveling and with the cross-section it presented at any given moment. In space there were no such complications.
As the fen reoriented the beam, Suessi looked inside the battleship to see how the other work was progressing. Flashing laser saws, as bright as the heliarc lamps, illuminated the slow dismemberment of the central cavity of the Thennanin battleship. Gradually, a great cylindrical opening was being prepared.
Lieutenant Tsh't was supervising that end of the work. Her workers moved in that unique neo-fin pattern. Each dolphin used his eyes or instruments for close work. But when approaching an object, the worker's head would bob in a circular motion, spraying narrow beams of sound from the bulbous "melon" that gave the Tursiops porpoise its highbrow look. The sound-sensitive tip of his lower jaw waved to build a stereoscopic image.
The chamber was filled with creaking sounds. Suessi never ceased to marvel that they made anything out of the cacophony at all.
They were noisy fellows, and he wished he had more of them.
Suessi hoped Hikahi would get here with those extra crewfen. Hikahi was supposed to bring the longboat or skiff with her, giving Suessi a place to dry off, and the others a chance to rest with good air to breathe. If his own gang weren't relieved soon, there would be accidents.
It was a devil of a plan Orley had proposed. Suessi had hoped that Creideiki and the ship's council would come up with an alternative, but those objecting to the plan had failed to offer anything better. Streaker would be moved as soon as the signal came from Thomas Orley.
Apparently Creideiki had decided that they all had little to lose.
A "Ker-runch!" sound carried through the water. Suessi winced and looked around. One end of a Thennanin quantum-brake hung limply, broken at the join by the end of Olelo's bracing beam. The usually impassive fin looked at him in obvious distress.
"Now, boys and girls," Suessi moaned, "how are we going to make this shell look like it's survived a fight if we ourselves do more harm than the enemy ever did? Who'd believe it could fly with all these holes in it?"
Olelo's tail slashed at the water. He let out mournful chirps.
Suessi sighed. After three hundred years, one still wanted to tread lightly with dolphins. Criticism tended to break them up. Positive reinforcement worked much better.
"All right. Let's try it again, hmm? Carefully. You came a lot closer that time."
Suessi shook his head and wondered what kind of lunacy had ever driven him to become an engineer.
32 ::: Galactics
The battle had moved away from this region of space; the Tandu feet had once again survived.
The Pthaca faction had joined with the Thennanin and Gubru, and the lot of the Soro remained dangerous. The Brothers of the Night had been almost destroyed.
The Acceptor perched in the center of its web and peeled back its shields in careful stages, as it had been trained to do. It had taken the Tandu masters millennia to teach its race to use mind shields at all, so loath were they to let anything pass unwitnessed.
As the barriers fell, the Acceptor eagerly probed nearby space, caressing clouds of vapor and drifting wreckage. It lightly skirted over untriggered psi-traps and fields of unresolved probability. Battles were lovely to look at, but they were also dangerous.
Recognition of danger was another thing the Tandu had force-fed them. In secret, the Acceptor's species didn't take it very seriously. Could something that actually happened ever be bad? The Episiarch felt that way, and look how crazy it was!
The Acceptor noticed something it would normally have overlooked. If it had been free to espertouch the ships, planets, and missiles, it would have been too distracted to detect such a subtle nuance — thoughts of a single, disciplined mind.
Delighted, the Acceptor realized the sender was a Synthian! There was a Synthian here, and it was trying to communicate with the Earthlings!
It was an anomaly, and therefore beautiful. The Acceptor had never witnessed a daring Synthian before.
Neither were Synthians famed for their psychic skill, but this one was doing a creditable job of threading through the myriad psi detectors all sides had spread through nearby space.
The feat was marvelous for its unexpectedness… one more proof of the superiority of objective reality over the subjective, in spite of the ravings of the Episiarch! Surprise was the essence of life.
The Acceptor knew it would be punished if it spent much longer marveling at this event instead of reporting it.
That, too, was a source of wonder, this "punishment" by which the Tandu were able to make the Acceptor's people choose one path over another. For 40,000 years it had amazed them. Someday they might do something about it. But there was no hurry. By that day they might be patrons themselves. Another mere sixty thousand years would be an easy wait.
The signal from the Synthian spy faded. Apparently the fury of the battle was driving her farther from Kthsemenee.
The Acceptor cast about, regretting the loss slightly. But now the glory of battle opened before it. Eager for the wealth of stimulus that awaited it, the Acceptor decided to report on the Synthian later… if it remembered.
33 ::: Thomas Orley
Tom looked over his shoulder at the gathering clouds. It was too soon to tell if the storm would catch him. He had a long way to fly before finding out.
The solar plane hummed along at four thousand feet; the little aircraft wasn't designed for breaking records. It was little more than a narrow skeleton. The propeller was driven by sunlight falling on the wide, translucent wing.
Kithrup's world-ocean was traced below by thin whitecaps. Tom flew to the northeast, letting the tradewinds do most of the work. The same winds would make the return trip — if there were one — slow and hazardous.
Higher, faster winds pushed the dark clouds eastward, chasing him.
He was flying almost by dead reckoning, using only Kithrup's orange sun for rough navigation. A compass would be useless, for metal-rich Kithrup was covered with twisty magnetic anomalies.