"I don't believe you!" Takkata-Jim spluttered, spraying water in all directions. "On Earth we were promisssed! Streaker is our ship!"
Gillian shrugged. "Ask your bridge crew if the battle controls work," she offered. "Have someone try to leave through the outlock. Try to open the door to the armory"
Takkata-Jim whirled and sped to a comm screen at the far end of the room. His guard stared at Gillian momentarily, then followed. His look conveyed a sense of betrayal.
Not all of the crew would feel that way, Gillian knew. Most would probably be delighted. But deep inside an implication would settle. One of the main purposes of Streakers mission, to build in the neo-fen a sense of independence and self-confidence, had been compromised.
Did I have any other choice? Is there anything else I might have tried first?
She shook her head, wishing Tom were here. Tom might have settled everything with one sarcastic little ditty in Trinary that put everybody to shame.
Oh, Tom, she thought. I should have gone instead of you.
"Gillian!"
Makanee's flukes pounded the water and her harness whirred. With one metal arm she pointed up at the wounded dolphin floating in the gravity tank.
Creideiki was looking back at her!
"Joshua H. Bar — but you said his cortex was fried!" Metz stared.
An expression of profound concentration bore down on Creideiki's features. He breathed heavily, then gave voice to a desperate cry.
"Out!:"
"It'sss not possible!" Makanee sighed. "His ssspeech centers…"
Creideiki frowned in effort.
* Out :
Creideiki!
* Swim :
Creideiki!
It was Trinary baby talk, but with a queer tone to it. And the dark eyes burned with intelligence. Gillian's telempathic sense throbbed.
"Out!:" He whirled about in the tank and slammed his powerful flukes against the window with a loud boom. He repeated the Anglic word. The falling tone-slope was like a phrase in Primal.
"Out-t-t!: "
"Help him out-t!" Makanee commanded her assistants. "Gently! Quickly!"
Takkata-Jim was heading back from his comm screen at high speed, wrath on his face. But he stopped abruptly at the gravity tank, and stared at the bright eye of the captain.
It was the last straw.
He rolled back and forth, as if unable to decide on appropriate body language. Takkata-Jim turned to Gillian.
"What I've done was in, what I believed to be the best interest of the ship, crew, and mission. I could make a very good case on Earth."
Gillian shrugged. "Let's hope you get the chance."
Takkata-Jim laughed dryly. "Very well, we'll hold this charade ship'sss council. I'll call it for one hour from now. But let me warn you, don't push too far, Dr. Baskin. I have powers ssstill. We must find a compromise. Try to pillory me and you will divide the ship.
"And then I will fight-t-t you" he added, low.
Gillian nodded. She had achieved what she had to. Even if Takkata-Jim had done the worst things Makanee suspected of him, there was no proof, and it was a matter of compromise or lose the ship to civil war. The first officer had to be offered an out. "I'll remember, Takkata-Jim. In one hour, then. I'll be there."
Takkata-Jim swirled about to leave, followed by his two loyal security guards.
Gillian saw Ignacio Metz staring after the dolphin lieutenant. "You lost control, didn't you?" she asked dryly as she swam past him.
The geneticist's head jerked. "What, Gillian? What do you mean?" But his face betrayed him. Like many others, Metz tended to overestimate her psychic powers. Now he must be wondering if she had read his mind.
"Never mind," Gillian's smile was narrow. "Let's go and witness this miracle."
She swam to where Makanee waited anxiously for the emerging Creideiki. Metz looked after her uncertainly, before following.
51 ::: Thomas Orley
With trembling hands, he pulled vines away from the cave entrance. He crept out of his shelter and blinked at the hazy morning.
A thick layer of low clouds had gathered. There were no alien ships, yet, and that was just as well. He had feared they would arrive while he was helpless, struggling against the effects of the psi-bomb.
It hadn't been fun. In the first few minutes the psychic blasts had beaten away at his hypnotic defenses, cresting over them and drenching his brain in alien howling. For two hours — it had felt like eternity — he had wrestled with crazy images, pulsing, nerve-evoked lights and sounds. Tom still shook with reaction.
I sure hope there are still Thennanin out there, and that they fall for it. It had better have been worth it.
According to Gillian, the Niss machine had been confident it had found the right codes in the Library taken from the Thennanin wreck. If there were still Thennanin in the system, they should try to answer. The bomb must have been detectable for millions of miles in all directions.
He dragged a handful of muck out of the gap in the weeds and flung it aside. Scummy sea water welled up almost to the surface of the hole. Another gap probably lay only a few meters beyond the next hummock
— the weedscape flexed and breathed incessantly — but Tom wanted a water entrance near at hand.
He scooped away the slime as best he could, then wiped his hands and settled down to scan the sky from his shelter. On his lap he arranged his remaining psi-bombs.
Fortunately, these wouldn't pack the wallop of the Thennanin distress call. They were simply pre-recorded message casts, designed to carry a brief code a few thousand kilometers.
He had only recovered three of the message globes from the glider wreck, so he could only broadcast a narrow range of facts. Depending on which bomb he set off; Gillian and Creideiki would know what kind of aliens had come to investigate the distress call.
Of course, something might happen that didn't fit into any of the scenarios they had discussed. Then he would have to decide whether to broadcast an ambiguous message or do nothing and wait.
Maybe it would have been better to bring a radio, he thought. But a warship in the vicinity could pinpoint a radio transmission almost instantly, and blast his position before he spoke a few words. A message bomb could do its work in a second or so, and would be much harder to locate.
Tom thought about Streaker. It seemed like forever since he had last been there. Everything desirable was there — food, sleep, hot showers, his woman.
He smiled at the way the priorities had come out in his thoughts. Ah, well, Jill would understand.
Streaker might have to abandon him, if his experiment led to a brief chance to blast away from Kithrup. It would not be a dishonorable way to die.
He wasn't afraid of dying, only of having not done all he could, and not properly spitting in the eye of death when it came for him. That final gesture was important.
Another image came to him, far more unpleasant — Streaker already captured, the space battle already over, all of his efforts useless.
Tom shuddered. It was better to imagine a sacrifice being for something.
A stiff breeze kept the clouds moving. They merged and separated in thick, wet drifts. Tom shaded his eyes against the glare to the east. About a radian south of the haze shrouded morning sun, he thought he saw motion in the sky. He huddled deeper into his makeshift cave.
Out of one of the eastern cloud-drifts, a dark object slowly descended. Swirling vapor momentarily obscured its shape and size as it hung high above the sea of weeds.
A faint drumming sound reached Tom. He squinted from his hiding place, wishing for his lost binoculars. Then the mists parted briefly, and he saw the hovering spaceship clearly. It looked like some monstrous dragonfly, sharply tapered and wickedly dangerous.