"They go out fore and aft, shielding us as we fall back through the midships hatchway. They've been told they have forty seconds before we disconnect and decompress the passageway."
"Good. Carry on. I'll be in Combat."
He did not make it. His wound was worse than he thought. Blessed, Midnight, and the Valerena dragged him to the rider's rudimentary dispensary.
The rider had been away two hours, tumbling like a derelict, when Turtle did reach Combat. "I ought to court-martial you all. But where would I find an unbiased court?"
They were drifting away from the action. The attack was nearing its peak. It would continue a long time unless the Godspeakers had an uncharacteristic attack of strategic sense.
"We pulled it off," he said. "And have a chance of getting out." Six hours and the rider would be outside detection range. There would be futures to consider, probably in the guest colonies Outside.
— 134 —
WarAvocat watched the minutes drag. The suspense was worse than it had been going into that end space ambush. "I want to break away moving dead slow, screen up."
"You think we'll find?..." Aleas's voice caught.
"We'll find Starbase beat all to hell and the Outsider fleet wiped out."
"Why?"
"Or I could be wrong. He could have fooled me again."
VII Gemina broke away into a warships' graveyard. Nothing moved, except as it had died. The heat had fled most of the wreckage. It had been over a long time.
"Prophylactic screening," WarAvocat ordered. "Ahead slow. Anything from Starbase?"
"Negative, sir."
"Scan." Most of the wreckage would have drifted out of detection already. He was awed by what the Ku had brought to the slaughter.
"We have a signal from Orbital Six, sir. Starbase Core survived but lost ninety percent plus outports. It's using that capacity to seek breaches in its environmental armor."
He exchanged glances with Aleas. Starbase would be no help taming Gemina. She said, "You were going to vent a theory about the Ku."
"About how he used us. He stepped into the middle and manipulated everything so it came out to his specs."
She thought he was mad.
"How many got away at S. Alisonica? At T. Rogolica? How many here? He planted them where he could squash them. Without killing any bystanders."
She scowled. She could not believe the Ku had put them through hoops.
The next few decades would be difficult for some Guardship people.
Aleas said, "What I see is the death of the myth of our invincibility. He engineered this, and he failed. Another triumph for us. And that's all. But if news of this gets around, we'll have fires on all the Rims."
She was right. The rest of the universe should hear only of another crushing defeat for Canon's enemies.
How long till Starbase repaired itself? Centuries?
She had made a point within her point. The fleet could not brag about what had happened. The Outsiders would not admit their forces had been crushed. But if the Ku remained at large...
He was at twenty-eight percent of strength with no hope for replacements short of getting in line at Starbase Dengaida. He could not go there till he knew about the Ku.
He cued a conference of rider commanders and fighter pilots, told them he needed Outsider ships with surviving personnel or data systems capable of yielding information. He sent them out. Then he asked Orbital Six for everything about the fighting. When the data was in, he settled to watch the replay.
Simple little thing like history, Jo thought. This happened. So and so did that. Whatchamacaliit reacted thus. Facts and dates in serial, maybe with a body count if that shed any light. History.
Seeker did not see it that way. Specific events, times, persons, had little meaning. History was process and context and slowly oscillating emotion in a psychically unified, intimately interconnected milieu where the players never changed. History was a sluggish, silty river, and he was a fish in a school. The river could not be sliced.
It had looked like a straightforward job of translating, slow but not insurmountable. It had turned into a nightmare of misinterpretations, misapprehensions, mistakes, and miseries. She could not have sustained the task without AnyKaat. Seeker could not have survived without Amber Soul.
"AnyKaat. You ever get nostalgic about Merod Schene?"
"No. That wasn't a good time."
"Life was simpler."
"Too damned simple." AnyKaat snorted. "This loafing is too much for you; why don't you blow yourself away?"
"I wouldn't wish it on another me. Strate would have another Jo out in three days. Hell. I'm about done. If I can just get straight what he's saying about the Web and the Presence."
WarAvocat ran the encounter with the Outsider forerunner five times, speed up, slow down, trying to find a clue to why the ship tripped alarms. Aleas finally took pity. She froze the scene, blew up the nose of the Outsider, scribed a circle. "Those characters are Ku. They translate ‘Delicate Harmony.' The characters on the vanes translate ‘Dire Radiant, One.' The characters between the fighter nests are the Ku date for their surrender and a word that comes through as dishonor but means more."
He disappointed her expectations of gratitude. "He wouldn't advertise himself like that."
"How often would he see the outside of his ship?"
"Not often." Did the Outsiders have their politics, too?
No matter. It was evidence the Ku had been here. "Access, Gemina. Isolate the battle data pertaining to this vessel." It could be another of the Ku's diversions. "I want it temporal, regardless of source. Run at one hundred times real time. Sit down, Colonel Klass. Where have you been hiding?"
"With our aliens, sir."
"Uhm." Strange, that maneuvering with the riderships ... There it was. "But you've got something?"
"It may not be important but it's got to be interesting to anybody who believes the fleet is the pinnacle of technological possibility."
"That sounds ominous. One minute." He watched the tumbling rider till it vanished. He launched a blossom of nine probes down its track, ran up views of Web strands, launched more probes, then faced Klass. "Tell me about it."
She went at it directly. "The Web is an artifact. The Presence—there are three in our part of the galaxy—is an automated repair device."
"Well," he said. And was so stunned he could only repeat himself. "Well." Nowhere in any hypothesis was there a suggestion that the Web was a construct—except in the theological sense. Starbase was the ultimate macroengineering concept.
Klass said, "Seeker says his people have been on the Web six million years. They met one race that had been around an eon. They didn't know who built the Web, they just had legends from older races. The Builders probably were the first intelligence to evolve, and were functionally immortal. They laid out the pattern in starspace at low sublight velocities, taking eons. When they finished this galaxy, they supposedly were going to connect the nearer galaxies. Maybe they're out there spinning the Web right now."
He said nothing. He was in shock.
"The Web wasn't meant for travel, it was a means of communications, like a fiber-optic network. Of course, all that's hearsay now."
"These Builders sure built for the ages if their ‘machines' are still operating."
"Seeker says the Web is deteriorating. Traffic wears it out. In the past billion years a thousand races have found it. The Presences can't keep up. They've stopped trying in some regions."
"Whoa. This is too much right now, with everything else." He had waiting calls nagging. "Get it prepared for review. Sounds like a first-rate job."