Summertide

The Dreamboat was the target — and at that range, there was no way the other ship could miss.

Darya watched in horror as all the weapons fired. She expected their ship to disintegrate around her. But impossibly, the attacking beams were veering away from their expected straight lines. They missed the Dreamboat completely and curved into space, drawn to meet the black sphere as it hung suspended on its golden thread of light.

The beams of the ship’s weapons remained visible as glowing trajectories in space, coupling the Zardalu vessel with the dark ascending globe. The curved lines shortened. The other ship moved closer to the distorted dark region, as though the sphere were reeling in bright strands from the weapons.

But the Zardalu ship was not going willingly. Its drive flared to the brighter violet of maximum intensity, thrusting away from the sphere’s dark singularity. Darya could sense the struggle of huge opposed forces.

And the starship was losing. Caught in the field’s curvature, it moved along the twisting lines of force, drawn irresistibly toward the rising sphere. The sphere itself was moving upward, faster and faster. It seemed to Darya that the Zardalu vessel was sucked into that black void, one moment before the sphere itself flashed up the yellow thread and disappeared.

Then the Summer Dreamboat was moving on, around the curve of Quake. Gargantua sank below the horizon, and with it all sign of the pulsing beam of yellow.

“I don’t know if anyone cares anymore.” It was Rebka’s laconic voice, startling Darya back to an awareness of where she was. “But I just checked the chronometer. Summertide Maximum took place a few seconds ago. And we’re in orbit.”

Darya turned to look down at Quake. There was nothing to see but dark, endless clouds and, beyond them, on the horizon, the blue-gray sphere of Opal.

Summertide. It was over. And it had been nothing like she had imagined. She glanced over at the others, still rubbing their eyes as they lay on the starship floor, and felt a terrible sense of letdown. To see everything — but to understand nothing! The whole visit to Quake at Summertide was an unsolved mystery, a waste of time and human lives.

“The good news is that we reached orbit.” Rebka was speaking again, and Darya could hear the exhaustion in his voice. “The bad news is that the fancy flying we had to do a few moments ago took what little power we had left. We probably have Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to thank for that. I don’t have any idea what was going on back there, or what happened to that other ship, and I really don’t care. I hope Nenda and H’sial got their comeuppance, but right now I don’t have time to bother with it. I’m worried about us. Without power, we can’t make a planetary landing on Opal, or on Quake, or anywhere else. Commander Perry is working up a trajectory that may take us to Midway Station. If we get lucky we might be able to ride the Umbilical from there.”

Working up a trajectory, Darya thought. How can he? Perry doesn’t have hands, just burned bits of meat.

But he’ll do it, hands or no hands. And if his foot were burned like mine, he’d walk on it. He’d run on it, too, if he had to. Hans Rebka talks of luck, but they’ve not had much of that. They’ve had to make their own.

I’ll never mock the Phemus Circle again. Their people are dirty and disgusting and poor and primitive, but Rebka and Perry and the rest of them have something that makes everyone in the Alliance seem half-dead. They have the will to live, no matter what happens.

And then, because she was becoming steadily more relaxed and sluggish in response to the anesthetic and mildly toxic fluid that Kallik had injected, and because Darya Lang could never stop thinking, even when she wanted to, her mind said to her: “Umbilical. We’re going to the Umbilical.”

The least of the Builder artifacts; she knew that, everyone knew that. An insignificant nothing of a structure, on the Builder scale of things. But it was to that very place, to that least of all artifacts, and to that very time, of Summertide Maximum, that all the other Builder artifacts had pointed.

Why? Why not point to one of the striking artifacts — to Paradox or Sentinel, to Elephant or Cocoon or Lens?

Now there’s a worthwhile mystery, Darya thought: a puzzle that someone could usefully ponder. Let’s forget the mess we’re in and think about that for a while. I can’t help Rebka and Perry, and anyway I don’t need to. They’ll take care of me. So let’s think.

Let’s wonder about the two spheres that came out from the deep interior of Quake. How long had they been there? Why were they there? Where did they go? Why did they choose this moment to emerge, and what made the black one take the Zardalu ship with it?

The questions went unanswered. As Kallik’s narcotic venom spread steadily through her bloodstream, Darya was sinking toward unconsciousness. There was too little time left for thinking. Her concentration was gone, her energy was gone, and her brain drifted randomly from one subject to another. Drugged sleep was moments away.

But in the last moment, the single second before her mind vanished into vague emptiness, Darya caught the gleam of a new insight. She understood the significance of Quake and Summertide! She knew its function, and maybe their own role in it. She reached out for the thought, struggled to pull it to her, sought to fix it firmly in her memory.

It was too late. Darya, still fighting, floated irresistibly into sleep.

CHAPTER 23

Rebka woke like a nervous animal, jerking upright and alert from a sound sleep. In that first moment his feelings were all panic.

He had made the fatal mistake of allowing his concentration to lapse. Who was flying the ship?

The only other person halfway competent was Max Perry, and he was too badly injured to take the controls. They could smash into Opal, fall back to the surface of Quake, or lose themselves forever in deep space.

Then, before his eyes opened, he knew things had to be all right.

No one was flying the ship. No one needed to. He was not on the Summer Dreamboat — he could not be. For he was not in freefall. And the forces on him were not the wild, turbulent ones of atmospheric reentry. Instead there was a steady downward pull, the fraction-of-a-gee acceleration that told of a capsule moving along the Umbilical.

He opened his eyes and remembered the final hours of their flight. They had meandered out to Midway Station like drunken sailors, the sorriest collection of humans and aliens that the Dobelle system had ever seen. He remembered biting his lips and fingertips until they bled, forcing himself to stay awake and his eyes to stay open. He had followed Perry’s half-incoherent navigational instructions as best he could, while they tacked for five long hours along the line of the Umbilical. With the help of the tiny attitude-control jets — the only power left on board the Dreamboat — he had brought them to a dazed docking at the station’s biggest port.

He recalled the approach — a disgrace for any pilot. It had taken five times as long as it should. And as the last docking confirmation was received at the ship, he had leaned back in the pilot’s chair and closed his eyes — for one moment’s rest.

And then?

And then his memory failed. He looked around.

He must have fallen asleep at the very second of final contact. Someone had carried him into Midway Station and moved him to the service level of an Umbilical capsule. They had secured him in a harness and left him there.

He was not alone. Max Perry, his forearms caked and daubed with protective yellow gel, drifted on a light tether a few feet away. He was unconscious. Darya Lang hovered beyond him, her flowing brown hair tied back from her face. The clothing had been stripped from her left leg below the knee, and plastic flesh covered her burned foot and ankle. Her breathing was light. Every few seconds she muttered under her breath as though about to surface from sleep. With her face so relaxed and thought-free, she looked about twelve years old. Next to Darya floated Geni Carmel. From the look of her she was also heavily sedated, although she had no visible injuries.