The Ship Who Saved The Worlds - The Ship Who Saved the Worlds Part 45
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The Ship Who Saved the Worlds Part 45

"What is new?" he asked, in Standard, making his way to the screen nearest the console.

"Good morning, captain," Keff said, still staring at the griffin on the screen, a delicate, sable-furred one with a chip on its front left fang. He swiveled toward the screen. "Language lessons."

"The beasts!" Narrow Leg exclaimed, his hands flying.

"We're close enough to pick up their low-power transmissions," Carialle said, forwarding receiver data to the Cridi technical operator. "I think it's a tower-based, amplitude-modulated system."

"Indeed? The monsters have come far," the Cridi captain said. "No electronics were reported many years past."

"How long?" Keff asked. "My own species went from wood stoves to satellite technology in the same generation."

The Cridi opened his large mouth wide, then closed it. "I have forgotten that progress moves tenfold, and tenfold again. It is long since my people discovered non-motor engines."

"Mine, too," Keff said. "It looks like these people made their leap much more recently."

"Have done so without morals," the Cridi said, almost dismissively. "We shall have much to say to them on that subject."

Keff held up his hands. "Slow down a little, Narrow Leg. I've barely learned how to say 'Greetings,' in their language. It is going to take time."

"We shall help you," Narrow Leg said, resolutely. "It is better to work on a project that will advance our understanding than spend time playing puzzles." He shot an impatient glance at his crew, who were now involved in an interactive game with the brainship.

"I'll take care of that," Carialle said cheerfully. She reached into her peripherals for her game function and clicked it off. Screens all over the Cridi ship went blank, and she heard outraged peeps. Disappointed crew members, suddenly noticing that their captain's eye was upon them, immediately tried to look busy.

"I'll tight-beam them all the linguistic data we have so far," she said.

"Think of it as a new kind of game," Keff said, more lightly than he felt. "We're stalking the wild syntax in its lair."

"No. It is rather another weapon in our hand," the Cridi captain said. "This is the confirmation we have sought, after all: that the marauders are here. That is where retribution begins."

"No!" Carialle interrupted him, with a touch of alarm. "Captain, we are investigating this system to gather information, not start an interstellar war. We're not armed."

"No, you are not, but we are."

"With respect, Captain, we must-and will-stand between you and the griffins if you start a conflict."

"Even though yours have also died at their hands." The old male made it a statement instead of a question.

Keff gulped, the memory of the dead on the asteroid clear in his mind. "That only makes what we have to do that much harder, Narrow Leg. That is the unhappy part of diplomacy."

"In the end such an outcome can only be a tragedy," Narrow Leg said, with a sudden expression of sympathy. "I shall not be the one to sacrifice our friendship. We will help you."

The radio transmissions from the griffin homeworld were primitive and infrequent, but as the two ships neared it, Carialle had no trouble capturing and translating the broadcasts into pictures and sound.

The files they'd gotten from the pirate base computer were put to one side. To Keff and IT those had been no help at all. The overlay of narration in musical horn-call on the astrogation file was unreliable as a point of comparison between the two languages. Where Central Worlds had long commentary on a particular system, there might be a single phrase or two of description in griffin. On a star-chart dismissed by the CW astrogators in four sentences as unimportant, Keff listened to a three-minute horn solo that sounded beautiful, but meant nothing to IT. He couldn't separate the language into words. Here and there, a word in the griffin speech sounded like the CW name for a system: "Farkash," for "Barkus," and so on. The difference was due to the griffin facial physiognomy. Keff wondered what had happened to the human computer operator who had told them how to use the system and pronounced some of the names for them.

In the live transmissions from the planet, Keff saw the creatures speaking in colloquial dialect. After several hours of listening to tape after tape, he was delighted to begin to discern patterns. Each of the messages began with the same word or words of greeting: "Freihur." Keff had his "hello."

"This is my Rosetta stone," he told Tall Eyebrow, with a flourish. "This is the way we can begin to understand the language."

The Frog Prince's eyes shone. He and Big Eyes sat with Keff while he was trying to make some sense out of the griffin tapes during that first day. They imitated the phrases they heard, only two or three octaves higher, flutes playing alongside trombones and trumpets. Keff thought they had reasonably good ears, but it was only music to them. They still lacked any concept of meaning. The Cridi were better at concrete, spatial concepts, rather than abstract, but they retained perfectly what he told them. IT began to pick out sentence patterns, even separating word roots where they were repeated in different combinations. Carialle now had thousands of "telephone conversations" from which Keff could work. He was steadily gleaning vocabulary, where the caller occasionally showed an object to his or her callee. None of it was much help; he doubted he'd have occasion to refer to plants, babies, mixing bowls, or necklaces in a diplomatic conversation, but the use of noun and pronoun patterns was useful. Some of the extra memory that the CW had thoughtfully provided Carialle for the diplomatic mission was coming in very handy. They'd have to see what they could do about keeping it when they returned to base.

Keff stayed at the console, still working on the language question when the Cridi went off for baths and bed. He half-listened to the excited chirps of conversation coming from the spare cabin as the frogs discussed the day's discovery. Soon, the noise died away, and he glimpsed the light go out just before the cabin door slid shut.

He was concerned about what he would find when they made orbit, or landed on the griffin homeworld. Would they have to run for their lives? Were they blundering blindly into a trap? And how would the Cridi react? It would be the end of his and Carialle's careers if they deliberately put the elements together for an interstellar conflict.

And he was concerned about Carialle's state of mind. Their duties as hosts and teachers had taken up much of the personal time they usually spent together. For the first time in years he couldn't guess what she was thinking.

Her determination to pursue the hunt had led her to concentrate most of her attention on it. Her theory that the griffin ship was transiting frequently between the Cridi system and the one next door was borne out by the discovery of the wispy threads of many ion trails. They were delicate, hard to see, and remarkably easy to overshoot. Carialle did a lot of backtracking when the thin traces broke and drifted away where they'd been disturbed by anomalies such as ion storms or comets. Picking up the aud/vid broadcasts and confirming that they were heading for the griffin stronghold should have made her relax, but she seemed more concentrated than ever. Multiplexing astrogation, running the ship, playing M&L with the Cridi, maintaining lines of communication and acting as data librarian pulled her attention in a dozen directions at once. Keff worried that in the midst of it all she was thinking too hard about what lay ahead. What if this turned out to be another dry hole in her search for the beings that once threatened her life and sanity? Where would they go next? The team was risking censure and worse by CenCom, and Maxwell-Corey in particular, by ignoring their orders, and yet they couldn't stay off-line forever. Sooner or later they had to communicate, no matter what that brought in return. True, circumstances had changed a routine mission into an emergency, but would the IG see it that way? M-C already doubted the soundness of Carialle's emotions, enough to jeopardize his own position by rigging her with a telltale missile.

Keff felt his face grow hot, and realized he was still just as mad about M-C's impossible gall as he had been when the message probe had launched. He stood up from the console, commanding IT to save his last hour's progress. Then, he plunked himself down on his exercise bench and started pulling on the weight bars until he began to breathe in rhythm. Soon, the resentment was driven out by the simple beat of the weights clapping together. The tension melted away, replaced by the honest warmth of a good workout. Eyes closed, he smiled at the ceiling.

"Penny for them," Carialle's voice said.

He opened his eyes, but continued to haul on the pulleys. "I was just thinking we haven't talked in a long time. Just the two of us."

"I've been missing that, too," she said, regretfully. "It takes a lot out of a girl, playing hostess nonstop."

"Same here," Keff said, giving one last massive flex of his shoulders that took all the tension out of the part of his back between the scapulae, and let the weights down gently. "Just now I'm tempted to agree with the IG's assessment that we're nuts."

"Still doubt we're doing the right thing?"

"I wonder," Keff said. He stood up and reached for a towel slung over the back of the Rotoflex. "These people trust us enough to accompany them into the great unknown on their very first spaceflight, with their very first working ship after being grounded for fifty years. So many things could go wrong!"

"But they haven't, Sir Keff," Carialle said, manifesting her Lady Fair image on the wall. It was outlined in white. Keff smiled at her, feeling as if he was meeting an old and beloved friend again after a long, lonely separation. It occured to him, with characteristic wry humor that it had been a long time since he'd seen a flesh-and-blood woman, either. Time enough for that at mission's end. "Don't overanticipate, my dear friend. I'm not, I promise you. Don't worry about specifics. Just keep on your toes."

"Stand and deliver!" a man's baritone voice barked from beside him. Keff jumped to one side, putting the weight bench between himself and the rude looking villain in a tunic standing in a torchlit doorway. The man was leveling a fearsome sword at his throat. Keff grinned ferociously and edged toward his laser epee, slung handily across the back of one of the crash couches. He realized Carialle had created the aural effect by activating only his left ear implant. The villain paced him with his swordpoint, his black brows lowered over narrow eyes.

"Clever, lady," Keff said. With a quick lift and slide, he unsheathed his sword, and assumed the en garde en garde position. position.

"Put 'em up," she said, in the enemy's deep voice. "We both need a good game, just you and me."

"Right," Keff said, tipping the glowing red point of his blade toward the man's face, and circling it slowly. "Shall we duel with, or without conversation?"

"Oh, with," Carialle said, making the man's image grin ferally. "With, of course."

Chapter Thirteen.

The audio channels were full of excited chirping as Carialle and the Cridi ship shifted into orbit over the griffin homeworld.

"We are here!" Tall Eyebrow exclaimed with delight from the crash couch where he was strapped in with Big Eyes. "We have succeeded in reaching this place, all together and with no mishap."

Keff watched as on-screen the clouds parted gently beneath them to reveal a vast and mountainous continent, wedge-shaped, strung from north to south like a harp with silver rivers. On the horizon ahead, a small silver moon rose. Carialle hurtled onward until it passed overhead, and set behind them. A second, larger moon followed, and vanished in turn. A blue ocean swam up, flashed green islands at them, and was replaced by another continent, long and narrow, also mountainous. Keff could see lines of smoke from active volcanoes. Another ocean glided by, this one wider than the first, then the harp reappeared, much closer and larger. Cities showed up in the folds of the mountains, very near the peaks. On extreme magnification, Carialle saw small craft flying, then realized she was seeing griffins on the wing. She showed Keff and the Cridi, who cheeped and peeped over the marvel.

Keff, listening as Carialle monitored active broadcast frequencies for a homing signal, caught Big Voice giving a live play-by-play of the new planet for the benefit of listeners on his homeworld.

"Eleven to the sixth power inhabitants, five oceans, two major continents, but many archipelagoes. Signs are humidity equals point-one atmosphere," Big Voice stated, with great emphasis on the statistics. "It will be uncomfortably dry and hot, but the landing party is prepared for eventualities."

Keff grinned and turned to catch the eyes of the Cridi flying with him.

"Always," Big Eyes said, exasperation evident on her small face. She waved her hands in derisive gesture.

Long Hand watched Carialle's telemetry indicators. "So dry," she said. "It is like Ozran. Some in the other ship will never have experienced such conditions."

"Well, you'll be in water globes," Keff said. "That is, after I make contact and establish parley conditions. I don't want you appearing until I'm sure no one is going to attack us."

"Huh," Small Spot grunted, and raised his hand to show the gleaming finger stalls. "I do not fear. We have the Cores."

"Don't manifest anything that looks like a threat," Keff said.

Tall Eyebrow was studying the astrogation tank carefully, measuring the distance between the two stars that they had just crossed.

"So close. It is a great pity," he said. "These people could have been friends of Cridi and Ozran."

"They still could be," Keff reminded him. "Try to keep an open mind. It may be a fringe group of criminals who've been robbing spaceships. If the government promises to punish the pirates, you could still establish friendly relations-form a Mythological Federation of Planets."

"If they themselves are not involved," Tall Eyebrow said, his small face thoughtful.

The ship rounded the planet twice more at high altitude before beginning to drop. The harp separated into successive bands of tan and blue.

"I've pinpointed the largest population centers," Carialle said, illuminating the planetary map, "but in spite of Keff's suggestions I don't want to land right in the thick of things. Some nice suburban location...X marks the spot. I think I detected a flat place I can land."

A blue dot began to glow on the chart about fifty kilometers outside one of the large cities. Narrow Leg's navigator glanced up from her console at the screen nearest him, and nodded to Keff. "Defenses are in place. Yours, too."

"Right," Keff said, taking a deep breath. "Down we go."

Narrow Leg's ship had dropped back to ride into the lower atmosphere on Carialle's tail. Watching her waveform monitor, she was pleased by the precision that the pilot showed, not getting too close and endangering them both, but staying just far enough back that the end of the elongated oval envelope just nipped his afterburners. You'd think he'd been doing it all his life. The hull sensors went off, indicating Carialle's skin temperature had risen to normal reentry temperatures. She checked the hull for leaks in either the skin plates or in the cooling pods underneath. All was well. The Cridi pilot signalled that he would stay in long orbit, and wished Carialle well.

"We will wait for word to come," he said in creditable Standard.

"See you downstairs," Carialle said, as the Cridi braked, and sailed on above her head.

Her last, long approach was almost entirely over ocean. She descended very quickly, keeping her speed up until the last minute. She hadn't noticed any telemetry beacons, nor radar signals, as if there wasn't a single ear pointed toward space. Strange when you considered that these people were parasites, preying on the isolated Cridi, that they wouldn't be more cautious about invasion of their own airspace. If she'd had functioning saliva glands, she'd have spat.

"All well, Cari?" Keff asked.

"Yes," she said crisply, increasing visual magnification and turning it toward her chosen landing site. "Are you certain we shouldn't land in a covert location? It's possible. Unless that clunky communication system is concealing a much more sophisticated technology underneath, no one can see me."

"No," Keff said. He had prepared his environment suit and kit before strapping in for approach. The light, transparent gloves flapped loose at his wrists as he clutched the ends of his couch arms. "We're not going in to study them. We're entering as envoys of peace, I hope. If nothing else, this will put them on notice that we have observed their people's crimes, and demand cessation of hostilities. What can they do? Attack the entire CW?"

"It looks as if that was just what they have been doing," Carialle said softly. "One ship at a time. Be careful."

"As Big Voice and the other Cridi are always reminding me, lady, we have the Cores. I'll be fine."

Unsatisfied, Carialle returned the greater part of her attention to what lay ahead. Gravity was approximately 1.2 times Standard. That meant those griffin wings had to lift just that much more and stay aloft in very windy skies. They were strong strong. Keff didn't have the advantage he'd had on the base, when they were all fighting that oppressive gravity. He would tire more quickly than they. Carialle maintained respect for the griffins' musculature, having studied the scans all the way from one star to the other. She was trying hard not to admire the fact their bodies, from about the shoulders back looked like a Terran great cat, a species which she was fond of watching for its grace. And those claws and teeth!

Beneath her, the tiny islands flitted by. Volcanic in nature, they had been augmented in size by the growth of a calcifying organism like coral, but less acid sensitive. Her imagination and pattern recognition aptitude saw in the shapes of the most proximate four islets a dragonfly, a chick, an old-fashioned handbag, and a ketchup bottle. Vegetation on the islands was of the same gaudy colors as in the pirate base conservatory; not as vivid, but healthier. That heavy-ammonia atmosphere must not have been good for griffin-world plant life, either. The trace in this air was much, much lower, below half a percent. Keff could almost get along with just eyedrops and nose filters, but she insisted he wear a full envirosuit. She knew she was being too protective, like a mother running after her child with overshoes. Keff meant so much to her she felt an unhealthy twinge of fear at the thought that the griffins might be able to get past the Cridi's impressive shield and harm him. Quickly, she purged toxins from her internal system, and allowed a dose of serotonin and stimulants to enter her bloodstream. She felt better at once. Keff wasn't a child. He had had plenty of experience in worse situations than this. He always sounded as if he was about to do something rash, but he also possessed a healthy sense of self-preservation.

Carialle passed over the sandy coast, parting the tree-oids in her wake. She was low enough now that the fliers had noticed her, and some winged to catch up. With a burst of speed for which she immediately chided herself as arrogant, she lost them over the first mountain range. There she noticed broadcast towers, of a design that hadn't been used by the Central Worlds in a thousand years or more.

"Do you see that, Keff?" she asked. She froze the image, and was ten kilometers past it by the time he responded.

"Antiquities," he said, leaning forward against the straps over his chest. "Are they still using those?"

"My monitors say that's where the broadcasts were coming from."

"Whew!" Keff said.

Trimming slightly to follow the contour of the land, she dipped into a valley and up over the next, higher, mountain range. On the other side she found the first flat terrain. Even in the cultivated fields there were traces of the acid rainbow colors. She looked forward to finding out what those bright red grains were.

"Crops look healthy, but there's very little heavy cover," she said. The Cridi were wide-eyed. She manifested her frog image near Big Eyes.

"Enjoying yourself?" she asked.

"Yes!" the Cridi squeaked, grinning in the human fashion. Clutching Tall Eyebrow with one arm, she signed with the other hand. "A new landscape, the first! Videos of original landings and colonies do not compare to own eyes!"

In the other ship Carialle could see the entire crew glued to the 3-D tanks. She was glad they felt the way she and Keff did about exploration. The Cridi would be a wonderful addition to Central Worlds. When M-C finally allowed the documents to be signed, that was.

"Look, that's a spaceport," Keff said, picking out a distant feature on the horizon after they cleared the next mountain ridge. He peered at the spiky growths poking up from the flat plain on the terrain map. "That is a spaceport, isn't it? Yes! Look, you can fit right in! Just land there."

"I intended to," Carialle said, impatiently, as she was already dumping velocity. She extended visuals to extreme magnification, trying to discern the landing pads, and find herself an empty slot to set down.

"What a collection of derelicts!" she exclaimed in dismay. "I'm never going to pass for one of those those. I refuse to try. I do have my pride."

Keff leaned up to peer at the screen and signalled for more magnification. Carialle flung up the image she was viewing. The tiny irregular shapes on the cabin screen suddenly took focus.

"Great stars, you're right," Keff exclaimed, looking as if he didn't know whether to laugh or not. "Those look like they've been cobbled together by committees of people who'd once heard a rumor of a story about a spaceship."

"I have no idea how one of those would fly," Carialle said, "but hit me with a hammer if I ever let their ground crew do maintenance on me."

The field reminded them of the scatter of ship remains on the airless asteroid at the edge of the Cridi system. The three craft that stood on the landing pads had been put together with no practical knowledge of the working details. Exhaust vents were ducted to the outside where they would cause the craft to spin in frictionless space. Fuel tanks were exposed, and in one case, the single hatch hung open to show a control room unprotected by anything so pedestrian as an airlock. And yet two of the ships showed clear signs of having launched and returned safely at least once.

"My internal scans show no shielding in half the bulkheads." Carialle said. "The crew must be suffering from fierce radiation poisoning. If they lived."

"These people are suicidal," Keff said flatly. "Or perhaps they're kamikaze pilots, who refuse to be captured alive."

Carialle was silent a long time while she studied the ships. "I think it's buck ignorance," she said at last. "All the pieces necessary are there, but the instructions for assembling them were in a non-native language, so they did the best that they could."