"There is no 'else,'" Chief Thunderbird squawked. "They attacked us. We resisted. They defeated us—over and over. They even approached the holy planet of the Mother Herself!"
He stopped there, wrapped in silence and fear. Krake gnawed a strand from his beard. "Well?" he demanded. "What then?"
Chief Thunderbird drummed restlessly on his belly plate. "They went away," he said at last.
Krake stared at him. "What do you mean, Vent away'? First they attack and beat you—then they just leaveV
"That is the case," the Proctor agreed. "You are puzzled, one sees. Yes, that is appropriate. We too were puzzled; the records of the time show long debates, questions, speculations —but there is no answer to those questions, Krake. The Sh'shrane simply went away."
"Until now," said Litlun unhappily.
Krake shook his head, and turned to stare up at the growing cluster of red and green markings on the screen. There were at least a hundred of them now, he saw, but their pattern was spreading out, fanwise, like the spray from a garden hose being turned across a lawn.
"Proctor?" Moon Bunderan ventured. "Are you sure these things on the screen are the—the Sh'shrane?"
"The instrument readings are the same," Chief Thunderbird said simply. "Those are the indications of their ships." He might have said more, but there was a sudden, low bleating sound from the Taur.
"Wait," Moon said, putting her ear close to the great bull head to listen. Then she looked up. "Thrayl says it is true. They are the same."
"How the hell does he know that?" Krake demanded, but Litlun was gabbling already.
"Of course they are the same! And they are most terrible, for they are not living things at all."
"Machines," said Chief Thunderbird. "They are machines. Not the same as the Brotherhood, not like the Taurs, not even like humans. They arc only machines."
"And they kill" said Litlun, his eyes rotating fearfully.
Krake sat back, puffing out his cheeks in frustration. "Are you telling me they're robots or something like that?" he began. "Because if you are—"
He didn't finish. Marco interrupted him. "Captain?" he said. "Look at the screen."
Krake turned to do it, and his eyes widened. There were as many of the blotches as ever, but they seemed smaller, paler than before. And in the moment he watched they were beginning to disappear.
Krake took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "whatever they are, it looks like we've lost them."
"One is not sure of that," Chief Thunderbird said despairingly.
Screens back on the infrared, Krake could see the great, ruddy coal dwindling behind them, and nothing at all of those frightening "Sh'shrane" ships. He left Marco at the board with orders to keep running—not because he thought it was the best thing to do, but because what better choices did he have?
Sue-ling Quong had removed the chip from her skull again and was hovering over her patient, Moon Bunderan at her side. "Get some rest, Sue-ling," Moon urged the older woman. "I'll watch him."
"He's lost sensation in his left side," Sue-ling fretted. "There might be a clot—I think I'll probably have to go in again."
"Not the way you are," Moon insisted. "You didn't have enough rest to go into a surgical operation again. Get some more sleep—I'll watch over Sork." She turned to look sadly at her Taur, who was slumped against a wall, his great eyes open but unseeing. "I can watch two patients as well as one," she said.
Sue-ling was suddenly remorseful. "I've been forgetting about Thrayl. I'm sorry, Moon. He looks like he needs help, too."
"There isn't any help I can give him," Moon said sadly. "He refuses food, water—he refuses everything, even to talk most of the time. When he speaks at all he talks about great pain and a kind of crippling anger that I just don't understand."
"But at least I should check him over!"
"Oh, Sue-ling," said Moon, half amused, half exasperated, "what do you know about Taurs? IVe tended them all my life, and I'm telling you it's nothing physical with Thrayl."
Sue-ling looked doubtful, but Moon was firm. "Captain Krake," she called. "Please make her get some more rest." And, surprisingly, Sue-ling submitted, and it was only when Moon was watching them leave together that she began to wonder if she had made a mistake.
Long before they reached Sue-ling's room, Francis Krake was wondering the same thing. He could feel himself getting ill at ease. "I don't really have to escort you, Sue-ling," he said. "I do think you ought to rest a little more, though."
But she said, "Please. I'm not going to sleep, Francis. I have to check Sork again in an hour." She sat down on the edge of her bed, then leaned back and closed her eyes. For a moment Krake almost believed that she really had dropped off, but just as he was about to leave quiedy she spoke again.
"Sork isn't doing well at all. I think he's paralyzed on one side."
"So you'll have to operate again?"
She opened her eyes and regarded him. "If I thought I could do any good, do you think I'd be loafing around here? I just don't have the tools. If we were on Earth I could do lots of things—transplant fetal tissue, perhaps, or maybe repair the damage with microsurgery. But what can I do on this ship?" She shook her head. "But if he continues to get worse, I'll have to try, anyway."
She sat up, putting that thought out of her mind. "So talk to me, Francis. Tell me what's been happening. What were those things on the screen that had the Turtles so frightened?"
Krake had forgotten that Sue-ling had been under the memo disk through much of the incident. He said, temporizing, "If you just rest for a while now I'll fill you in later—"
"Now, Francis!"
What Krake knew best about Sue-ling Quong was that she could be just as stubborn as he. "All right," he said, and told her, as briefly as possible, everything that had happened, and everything the Turtles had said. She was wide awake long before he was through. "I'm sure they suspected it was these machines they call the Sh'shrane right away," he finished, "but Chief Thunderbird wouldn't tell us that. Maybe it was too frightening for him."
"You say they're supposed to be machines?"
He nodded. "If they're really the Sh'shrane they are. The Turtles found that out long ago, in that old war, when they captured a couple of shot-up Sh'shrane ships. The crews inside were dead, of course. If you can say that a machine is 'dead,' because that was what they were. Litiun says they were really ugly things. Naturally, the Turtles would be bound to think that anyway. But, from what they say, the Sh'shrane do sound rather nasty—pyramidal metal bodies, with a lot of tentacles-"
"Like Marco and Daisy Fay?"
Krake gave her a suddenly hostile look. "My friends are people, Sue-ling!"
She was penitent. "I didn't mean anything by it. They're my friends, too. I'm sorry I said that." Then she shivered. "And it's these Sh'shrane things that are chasing us now?"
"They were. Maybe. I mean, if the things chasing us really were the same Sh'shrane. But you don't have to worry about them, Sue-ling. Whatever they were, they're no danger to us now. You know we're safe as long as we're in wave-drive—one photon can't catch up with another."
"You're sure of that?" He nodded, half amused, and she sighed and closed her eyes.
He looked down at her, wondering if he ought to leave— knowing the answer, unwilling to do it. In Francis Krake's eyes at that moment, Sue-ling Quong appeared to be the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Not at all an ordinary-looking one, of course. In particular, he thought (remembering that long-ago love for the first time without pain), not at all like the lost Madeleine McKay. Sue-ling's eyes were almond-shaped and long, but they were intensely blue. Her high cheekbones were Oriental, but her hair was a lustrous coppery red. She was an arresting blend of East and West, and Francis Krake, who had missed the experience of the last few centuries of interbreeding, thought her a srartlingly desirable one.