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It had exited C and actually gone negative, so that their relative speeds were a narrowing slow drift.
“Twenty meters-second,” Jillan read the difference. “Plus ten, plus five-five, plus five-seven K.”
There were no maneuvering options. Lindywas already at the edge of her safety reserve, and a ship which could shift course and stop like that—could overhaul them with the merest twitch of an effort. Rafe flexed his fingers on the main throttle and let it go.
“Maybe it’s curious,” Jillan said under her breath. “ Lilesnever said it fired.”
“Got their signal,” Paul said, and punched it in for both of them... (!) (!!!) (!!!!!).
“Echo it,” Rafe said. They were still getting signal from John Liles, a screen now Dopplered in retreat, echoed from other ships. Station might be aware by now that something was amiss; but there was still the lagtime of reply to go. As yet there was only Ajaxsending out her longscan and her frantic instruction to John Liles.
Lindy, on her own, facing Leviathan, sent out a tentative pulse.
(!) (!!!) (!!!!!)
Scan beeped, instant at their interval. “Bogey’s moving,” Jillan said in a still, calm voice. It was. “Cut the signal,” Rafe said at once; and on inspiration: “Reverse the sequence and send.”
(!!!!!), Paul sent. (!!!) (!)
No. Negative. Reverse. Keep away from us.
The bogey kept coming, but slower, feather-soft for something of its power, as if it drifted. “10.2 meters-second,” Jillan read off. “Steady.”
“It could shed us like dust if it wanted to,” Paul said. “It’s being careful.”
“So we ride it out,” Rafe said. A hand closed on his arm, Jillan’s. He never took his eyes from the screens and instruments. Neither did she.
The bogey filled all their vid now, monstrous and flashing with strange lights, a sudden and rapid flare.
“It’s braking,” Jillan said. “4 .. 3 ... relative stop.”
“Station,” Paul sent, “this is SSEIS 243 Lindy, with the bogey in full sight. It’s looking us over. We’re transmitting vid; all ships relay.”
There was no chance of reply from station, a long timeline away. “Relaying,”a human ship broke in, someone calling dangerous attention to themselves by that sole and human comfort.
“Thank you,” Paul said, and kept the vid going, still sending.
The surface of the bogey had detail now. The warts were complex and overlapping, the smallest of the extrusions as large as Lindyherself. The camera swept the intruder, finding no marking, no sign of any identifiable structure which might be sca
Suddenly scan and vid broke up.
And space did.
III
Capture.
Trishanamarandu-keptareached for the mote with <>’s jump field.
<> left the star, dragging the captured mote along.
Rafe had time to feel it happening. He screamed—a long, outraged “No!”—at the utter stupidity of dying, perhaps; at everything he lost. His voice wound strangely material through the chaos of the between, entwined with the substance and the terrified voices of Jillan and Paul. He was still screaming when the jump came, the giddy insideout pulse into hereand when, falling unchecked out of infinity into substance that could be harmed. He reached out, groping wildly after controls as the instruments flashed alarm. Orientation was gone. They were moving, his body persuaded him, though he felt no G. He pushed autopilot: red lights flared at him, a bloody haze of lights and blur.
Lindy’s autopilot kicked in, and it was wrong ... he felt it, the begi
Paul and Jillan.
“Jillan!”
Paul’s voice.
Tumble went on and on. Instruments broke up again, and another motion complicated the spin: autopilot malfunction. They had been dragged through jump, boosted to velocity a good part of C, and Lindywas helpless, uninstrumented for this kind of speed. Every move the autopilot made was wrong, complicating Lindy’s motion.
He fought to get his hand to the board, to do something, a long red tu
Someone screamed his name. His eyes were pressing at their sockets and his brain at his skull, his gut crawling up his rib cage to press his lungs and heart and spew its contents in a choking flood that might be hemorrhage. The tu
<> maneuvered carefully to secure the ship: field seized it, stabilized it from its spi
Getting inside it... was another matter altogether.
Kill it, some advised.
</> moved to do that. <> blocked that attempt with brutal force. An extensor probe drifted along a track and reached down, punched through the hull with very precise laser bursts and bled off an atmosphere sample from the i
Nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, oxygen ... Trishanamarandu-keptahad no internal atmosphere. <> started acquiring one, here and in other sections.
<> had no need of gravity; but <> began to acquire it, basing calculations on the diameter and rotation of the structure back at the star.
<> extended other probes and surveyed the small ship’s hull, locating the major access.
The interior was, once <> had gotten a probe inside to see, messy. The occupants, stained with red fluids, stirred only feebly, and more and more extensors cooperated in freeing the occupants from their restraints, in moving them outside, while other extensors intruded into every portion of the diminutive ship, testing the instrumentation, sampling the consumables. <> flurried through incoming data in a general way, relating that and what it discovered in the tiny ship’s computers, simple mathematical instruments adequate only for the most basic operations.
The subjects offered resistance, though weakly, at being containered and moved a great and rapid distance through Trishanamarandu-kepta’s twisting interior. One was very active: it thrashed about at intervals, losing strength and smearing the transparent case with red fluids at every outburst, which indicated rapidly diminishing returns, whether this motion was voluntary or not. It screamed intermittently, and whether this was communication remained to be judged.
It screamed a very long scream when it was positioned in the apparatus and the recorder came on and played through its nervous system. So did the other two. Most vocal organisms would.
Each collapsed after the initial spasm. Vital signs continued in a series of wild fluctuations which seemed to indicate profound shock. <> maintained them within the recorder-field and realigned them with the hologrammatic impression <> had taken.
<> took cell samples, fluid samples, analyzed the physical structures from the whole to the microscopic and chemical while the entities remained conscious. <> was careful, well aware that some of the procedures might cause pain. <> reduced what wild response <> could, elicited occasional murmurings from the subjects. <> recorded those sounds and played them back; played back all response it had ever gotten from this species, here and from the other ship and from the star system in general.
The subjects responded. Sympathetically, on both recorded words and answers, the holo images <> had constructed ... reacted.