Study in opposites!

Keepiru answered in Anglic, a pathetically unoriginal "Good to see you, Gillian. You too, T -Tom."

Sah'ot settled down, uncomfortably aware that he had a reputation to live up to. Unlike Keepiru, he would have to come up with a greeting that matched Gillian's.

He would rather have gone someplace to think about Gillian's remark, especially that part about being "ever so man-like ...." Was that a compliment, or was there a touch of pity in Gillian's upper register when she had whistled it?

Thomas Orley stood quietly next to Gillian. Sah'ot felt as if the man were seeing through him.

Sah'ot drew a breath.

Look here!

A monogamous Miracle!

A pair of lovers!

Silhouetted against The wide sky. *

Gillian clapped her hands and laughed.

Thomas Orley only smiled briefly. But apparently he had things on his mind.

"I'm glad you two fins are back," he said. "Gillian and I arrived here last night, she from Streaker and I from the site where Toshio's tsunami ship crashed. Jill brought you folks a monofilament cable, so you can stay in touch with the ship. She'll work with you for a few days on this vital matter of the Kiqui. Also, I understand there are some folks back at the ship who'd like to ask you to collect some data for them. That right, Gillian?"

The blonde woman nodded. Word of Charlie Dart's demands had not delighted Toshio and Dennie.

Orley continued.

"Jill's other purpose in coming here was to deliver some gear to me. I have to go away this morning. I'll be using a solar glider."

Keepiru sucked air. He started to object, but Orley raised a hand. "I know, it's risky. But there's an experiment I have to try in order to see if the escape plan we've put together will work. And since you people are the only ones available, I'm going to have to ask you for your help."

Sah'ot's tail thrashed under the water. He clamped down to hide his feelings, but it was hard. So hard!

So they were truly going to try to escape! He had hoped for better from Orley and Baskin. They were intelligent and experienced, almost-mythical agents of the Terragens Council. Survivors.

Now they were talking madness, and expected him to help! Didn't they realize what they were up against?

He swam up next to Keepiru, wearing the mask of a faithful, attentive client. But inside he felt a turmoil as he listened to the crazy "plan" that was supposed to save them from the bug-eyed monsters.

29 ::: Takkata-Jim "The ship's council meeting was a disaster. It is worse than I thought," the vice-captain sighed.

They plan deception To fool deceivers, And veils To cover whales!

K'tha-Jon tossed his great blunt head in agreement.

"I hear the codeword for thisss project is the 'Trojan Seahorse.' What does that mean?"

"It's a literary allusion," Takkata-Jim replied. He wondered where the bosun had gone to school. "I'll explain some other time. Right now I must think. There must be another way than this suicide plan Creideiki and Orley have devised.

"I had hoped Creideiki would see reason. But now, I just don't know."

"He didn't lisssten?"

"Oh he's very polite! Blowfish Metz swam in my wake point by point, and Creideiki listened so nicely to both of us. The meeting lasted four hours! But the captain decided to go with Orley's scheme anyway! The Baskin fem has already left with supplies for him."

The two Stenos drifted quietly for a long moment. K'tha-Jon waited for the vice-captain.

Takkata-Jim's tail slashed. "Why won't Creideiki even consider broadcasting the location of our find and have done with with it! Instead, he and Orley want to try to trick sophonts who have been trapping each other for millions of years! We'll be fried! Compared with this plan, even your idea of blasting forth with all guns blazing is better. At least we'd be able to maneuver!"

"I only offer a gloriousss alternative to his mad venture," K'tha-Jon said. "But I would go with your plan. Think, if we were the ones to find a way to save the ship and crew, would not the benefits go beyond simply preserving our livesss?"

Takkata-Jim shook his head. "If I were in command, perhapsss. But we are led by this mad, honor-bound genius, who'll only guide us to doom."

He turned away, deep in his thoughts, and swam silently down the corridor to his quarters.

K'tha-Jon's eyes narrowed as they followed the vicecaptain. The bubbles from his blowmouth came out in tiny, rhythmic pops.

30 ::: Akki It wasn't fair! Almost everybody who counted had been allowed to go with Hikahi, to go join the crew working on the Thennanin wreck. The repairs to Streaker were nearly completed, and he was still stuck here, where nothing important was happening at all!

Akki drifted at his study-station, under an airdome near the top of the central bay. Bubbles from below pa.s.sed unhindered through the pages of a holo-text displayed in front of him.

Of all the dumb ideas! Making him study astrogation while the ship was stuck at the bottom of an ocean!

He tried to concentrate on the subtleties of wormhole navigation, but his mind wandered. He got to thinking about Toshio. How long ago had it been since the two of them had had time to pull off a decent prank? It must have been over a month since they'd stolen Brookida's gla.s.ses and replaced them with Fresnel lenses.

I sure hope Toshio's okay. But at least he'd doing something. Why did Creideiki insist I stay here when they need every decent engineer out at the wreck?

Akki tried one more time to focus on the text, but was distracted by a sound. He looked down toward a noisy altercation at one of the food stations. Two fen were taking turns swatting at each other with their flukes while a circle of others watched.

Akki backed out of the airdome and dove toward the disturbance.

"Stop thisss!" he shouted. "Cut it out, now!" He struck out with his own flukes to knock Sth'ata and Sreekah-jo apart.

The observers backed away a little, but the combatants ignored him. They bit and flailed at each other. A kicking fluke struck Akki in the chest, sending him spinning.

Akki gulped to catch his breath. How did they find the energy to fight in oxywater?

He swam up to one of the observers. "Pk'Tow ... Pk'Tow!" He bit the fin on his flank and a.s.sumed dominant stance as Pk'Tow whirled angrily. It wasn't easy to face him down; Akki felt very young. But Creideiki had taught him what to do. When a fin reverts, make him focus!

"Pk'Tow! Stop listening to them and use your eyes. Look at me! As a ship's officer I order you to help me break up this fight!"

The glazed expression faded from Pk'Tow's face. He nodded. 'Aye, sssir." Akki was amazed by the fellow's dullness.

Drops of blood diffused into a pink stain as the combatants slowed down, trading blows, their gill-lungs gasping for breath. Akki collected three more crewfen, swatting and shouting at them to get them focused again, then he moved in. He got the Stenos and the cook separated at last, and led them under guard toward sick bay. Dr. Makanee could keep them isolated until he reported this to the captain.

Akki glanced up and noticed the bosun, K'tha-Jon, pa.s.s by. The giant petty officer didn't even offer to help. He probably watched the whole thing, Akki thought bitterly. K'tha-Jon wouldn't have needed to cajole the onlookers. He could have intimidated the brawlers with a growl.

K'tha-Jon was headed swiftly for the outlock, his expression intent.

Akki sighed.

Okay, maybe Creideiki had his reasons for keeping me around, after all. Now that Hikahi has left with the engineers, he needs help taking care of the dregs that are still aboard Streaker.

He nosed Sreekah-jo to keep him moving. The Stenos squawked an almost Primal curse, but obeyed.

At least I've got an excuse not to study astrogation, Akki thought, sardonically.

31 ::: Suessi "No! Stop it! Back off and try it again-this time more carefully!"

Hannes Suessi watched skeptically as the dolphin engineers reversed their heavy sleds and hauled the beam back out of the chamber.

It had been their third attempt to fit a supporting member into a gaping opening in the tail of the sunken Thennanin vessel. They had come closer to getting it right, but still the lead sled had hung back too long and almost let its end be driven into the inner wall of the battleship.

"There now, Olelo, here's how you avoid that beam." He addressed the pilot of the lead sled. His voice projected from the sled's hydrophones. "When you get to their hieroglyph thingie that looks like a two-headed jackal, lift your nose thusly!" He motioned with his arms.

The fin looked at him blankly, for a moment, then nodded vigorously.

Roger-I'll dodge her! *

Suessi grimaced at the flippancy. They wouldn't be fins if they weren't sarcastic one-half the time and over-eager the other half. Besides, they really had been working hard.

Still, it was a royal b.i.t.c.h working underwater. In comparison, doing construction in weightlessness was a pure joy.

Since the Twenty-first Century, men had learned a lot about building things in s.p.a.ce. They had found solutions to the problems of inertia and rotation that weren't even in the Library. Beings who'd had antigravity for a billion years had never needed to discover them.

There had been somewhat less experience, in the last three hundred years, doing heavy work underwater, even in Earth's dolphin communities, and none at all in repairing or looting s.p.a.cecraft at the bottom of an ocean.

If weightless inertia caused problems in orbit, what about the almost unpredictable buoyancies of submerged materials? The force it took to move a ma.s.sive object varied with the speed it was already traveling and with the cross-section it presented at any given moment. In s.p.a.ce there were no such complications.

As the fen reoriented the beam, Suessi looked inside the battleship to see how the other work was progressing. Flashing laser saws, as bright as the heliarc lamps, illuminated the slow dismemberment of the central cavity of the Thennanin battleship. Gradually, a great cylindrical opening was being prepared.

Lieutenant Tsh't was supervising that end of the work. Her workers moved in that unique neo-fin pattern. Each dolphin used his eyes or instruments for close work. But when approaching an object, the worker's head would bob in a circular motion, spraying narrow beams of sound from the bulbous "melon" that gave the Tursiops porpoise its highbrow look. The sound-sensitive tip of his lower jaw waved to build a stereoscopic image.

The chamber was filled with creaking sounds. Suessi never ceased to marvel that they made anything out of the cacophony at all.

They were noisy fellows, and he wished he had more of them.

Suessi hoped Hikahi would get here with those extra crewfen. Hikahi was supposed to bring the longboat or skiff with her, giving Suessi a place to dry off, and the others a chance to rest with good air to breathe. If his own gang weren't relieved soon, there would be accidents.

It was a devil of a plan Orley had proposed. Suessi had hoped that Creideiki and the ship's council would come up with an alternative, but those objecting to the plan had failed to offer anything better. Streaker would be moved as soon as the signal came from Thomas Orley.

Apparently Creideiki had decided that they all had little to lose.

A "Ker-runch!" sound carried through the water. Suessi winced and looked around. One end of a Thennanin quantum-brake hung limply, broken at the join by the end of Olelo's bracing beam. The usually impa.s.sive fin looked at him in obvious distress.

"Now, boys and girls," Suessi moaned, "how are we going to make this sh.e.l.l look like it's survived a fight if we ourselves do more harm than the enemy ever did? Who'd believe it could fly with all these holes in it?"

Olelo's tail slashed at the water. He let out mournful chirps.

Suessi sighed. After three hundred years, one still wanted to tread lightly with dolphins. Criticism tended to break them up. Positive reinforcement worked much better.

"All right. Let's try it again, hmm? Carefully. You came a lot closer that time."

Suessi shook his head and wondered what kind of lunacy had ever driven him to become an engineer.

32 ::: Galactics The battle had moved away from this region of s.p.a.ce; the Tandu feet had once again survived.

The Pthaca faction had joined with the Thennanin and Gubru, and the lot of the Soro remained dangerous. The Brothers of the Night had been almost destroyed.

The Acceptor perched in the center of its web and peeled back its shields in careful stages, as it had been trained to do. It had taken the Tandu masters millennia to teach its race to use mind shields at all, so loath were they to let anything pa.s.s unwitnessed.

As the barriers fell, the Acceptor eagerly probed nearby s.p.a.ce, caressing clouds of vapor and drifting wreckage. It lightly skirted over untriggered psi-traps and fields of unresolved probability. Battles were lovely to look at, but they were also dangerous.

Recognition of danger was another thing the Tandu had force-fed them. In secret, the Acceptor's species didn't take it very seriously. Could something that actually happened ever be bad? The Episiarch felt that way, and look how crazy it was!

The Acceptor noticed something it would normally have overlooked. If it had been free to espertouch the ships, planets, and missiles, it would have been too distracted to detect such a subtle nuance-thoughts of a single, disciplined mind.

Delighted, the Acceptor realized the sender was a Synthian! There was a Synthian here, and it was trying to communicate with the Earthlings!

It was an anomaly, and therefore beautiful. The Acceptor had never witnessed a daring Synthian before.

Neither were Synthians famed for their psychic skill, but this one was doing a creditable job of threading through the myriad psi detectors all sides had spread through nearby s.p.a.ce.

The feat was marvelous for its unexpectedness ... one more proof of the superiority of objective reality over the subjective, in spite of the ravings of the Episiarch! Surprise was the essence of life.

The Acceptor knew it would be punished if it spent much longer marveling at this event instead of reporting it.

That, too, was a source of wonder, this "punishment" by which the Tandu were able to make the Acceptor's people choose one path over another. For 40,000 years it had amazed them. Someday they might do something about it. But there was no hurry. By that day they might be patrons themselves. Another mere sixty thousand years would be an easy wait.

The signal from the Synthian spy faded. Apparently the fury of the battle was driving her farther from Kths.e.m.e.nee.