In the few seconds he had to look around, Rick noticed the same design contrasts he had seen on the rest of the ship. Then he spotted the command station of the Farrago.
"Why am I not surprised?" Rick asked himself aloud, walking toward it slowly, almost unwillingly.
"Gorgeous, isn't it?" Lron grunted heartily. "It's Karbarran, of course."
Of course. Who else but the hulking bears could spin a wooden ship's wheel ten feet in diameter? The wheel was made of polished purple wood, set with fittings of white brass. It looked like a giant carved spider with extra legs that had suffered rigor mortis and had an enormous hoop affixed to all its ankles.
"Sentinels' flagship, do you copy?" Lisa's voice was saying over the commo. The Praxians and Karbarrans and Gerudans and others who had been manning the communications consoles made way for Rick as he walked over, in a daze, to respond.
The mike resembled an old-fashioned gramophone horn. A beautifully luminous Spherian woman showed him how to throw the beer-tap lever so that he could transmit. "This is the Farrago, reading you five-by-five, Admiral. When does the party start?"
That drew a low chuckle from Gnea, Bela's younger sidekick-who looked like a giant sixteen-year-old-and an amused rumble from Lron. Lisa answered, "We're ready when you are. Lift off, meet the Pursuer at altitude one hundred thousand or so, and bring him back here in a pass from magnetic east to west, altitude three thousand feet, is that clear? We've accessed old Zentraedi battle tapes; maintain a distance of at least ten thousand feet from your attacker at all times! Do you roger, Farrago!"
Rick repeated the instructions word for word, then it seemed like there was nothing to say.
The Sentinel ship rumbled and quaked, then it was airborne, blasting away into the sky, and still he couldn't decide what it was he wanted to say to his wife. "We still owe each other that waltz, Lisa," he finally blurted.
There was a silent hesitation at the other end of the link, then the brief throb of her laughter.
"You rat! Watch your tail."
The Pursuer was the last of its kind.
Deployed now for a kill in atmosphere, it resembled an umbrella blown inside out by the wind, its fabric stripped away. It plunged toward its prey only to find that its prey was rising to meet it.
It hadn't been an easy hunt; the Pursuer had been created to home in on the Protoculture systemry of an enemy and eliminate the target, but the bizarre ship it had been stalking fit no known profile. Sometimes Farrago was a target; sometimes it simply wasn't.
And so the silent duel had been waged across the light-years, the Pursuer stymied again and again, frustrated by the lifethings in the ship it hunted. But now the kill was near; soon the Pursuer would know the detonation/orgasm/death for which its guiding AI sentience longed.
But now its prey seemed to be coming directly toward it, and that felt wrong. But then the Sentinels' ship did a shuddering wing-over, and plunged back toward the low-hanging pall of Tirol's atmosphere. The Pursuer plunged after, ardently.
"They track Protoculture, y'see," Lron was bellowing above the noise of reentry, holding Rick down with one hand and spinning the cyclopean wheel with the other and a little help from Crysta. "That's how we could keep the Pursuer at bay for so long: we don't run on Protoculture!"
The atmosphere was giving Farrago a radical case of the shakes; crewbeings smaller than the Karbarrans were being jostled around just like Rick. The bridge was bedlam. "W-what do you run on?"
Rick managed to ask.
The word Lron snarled in his guttural basso wasn't one Rick had heard in Zentraedi before, and he managed to query the thin, chip-size translating package clipped to his dress uniform lapel.
"Peat!" it rendered. Rick tapped the transmitter a few times to make sure it was not malfunctioning. He was about to ask for another translation when the bridge screens were filled with the horror of the Pursuer plunging down at them. The Farrago turned over and dove back toward Tirol's surface.
Rick was feeding course information through to the TIC, and trying not to calculate his own chances. The Sentinels' ship had risen high into the light of Valivarre and Fantoma, but it was falling back quickly. One good thing Rick noted was that the Sentinels' vessel, like the SDF-3, had artificial gravity, and so he wasn't likely to get sick before the Pursuer vaporized him.
Suddenly the Pursuer appeared again, looking like an enormous squid about to swallow a minnow. Rick shook off his sense of unreality and slugged Lron in the arm to get his attention. "How come it can track us now?"
Lron made wujfing sounds of amusement. "We set up a Protoculture homing device in the center of the ship, see?"
Rick saw; it was a beacon on the computer-driven schematics off to one side. "Listen, Lron: I've been doing some thinking, and-"
He was interrupted as an especially heavy blow from the Tiresian atmosphere nearly sent him sprawling; Lron had caught him. Amazons and crystal people and foxlike Gerudans were struggling out of the heap they had ended up in.
"— and if this Pursuer of yours had the kind of warhead you're talking about, we're gonna end up fried right along with it when the SDF-3 and the GMU start blazing!"
Lron's muscles stood out against his pelt as he wrestled the wheel around, while holding Rick in place with his free hand. "Do you think we're stupid?"
"No-no-no," Rick responded weakly, as Lron spun the gargantuan wheel and the ship took up its approach.
The Pursuer had its target at last: a bright, strobing Protoculture marker at the center of Farrago. It plunged down. It knew its opponent's performance profile from computer analysis and hard experience, knew that the lumbering Sentinel vessel couldn't possibly pull out of its dive or avoid the final destruction of Pursuer's detonation.
The guidance AI's death was near; it cut in auxiliaries, eager for that moment.
Rick clung to the wooden wheel, looking back through the bridge's clear blister to where the Pursuer was already a discernible speck in the cosmos.
Lron virtually handed Rick over to Crysta. "You're right!" Standing at the wheel, the bear-being pressed the titanic circle against its stem, deepening the dive. "It's almost time to go! Well?
Tell your mate and your people! That thing will be in their laps in another minute!"
Rick struggled to be heard over the winds that bucked and jostled the ship. "What're you talking about? It's following us!"
Lron made a sawing sound that Rick took as laughter. "No time to explain! Hold on!"
Rick didn't have to, because Crysta scooped him up. The smell of her fur was actually rather pleasant, rather relaxing.
Rick, seeing parts of Farrago fly in separate directions, suppressed a certain sadness that he and the REF hadn't been able to do much to help the Invid's victims. It was just bad luck; he waited to die.
Then he saw that the bridge was ascending.
Lisa saw it, too, from her place in the GMU: the Farrago was an amalgamation of the prizes of war, and now the components had broken away.
A module like a streamlined, art-deco grasshopper arced away in one direction; a thing like a glittering bat deployed wings and banked in another. Diverse segments headed toward every point of the compass.
Suddenly, the only thing remaining where the Sentinels' ship had been was a blinking transceiver package attached to a rocketing, remote-guided paravane. It lined itself up and then glided right down into the cross hairs of SDF-3's main gun and the GMU's monster cannon, while ordnance from the VTs closed in.
The creatures so used to sleeping through the long night of Tirol in its transit behind Fantoma were stirred by the light. Something as bright and hot as a sun burned above, interrupting their hibernation.