Aybe said, “I never thought we could—it was so fast!”

Irma said, “That magcar is better than this damn sailer. Let’s go.”

Terry started, “I wonder—”

“Think later,” Cliff said. “Act now.”

They all looked up at him from below, faces scared and joyous at the same time. Seconds passed. Then, as if some unspoken agreement had been reached, they scattered to their tasks.

Howard came climbing up, and the two of them inspected the bodies. Their lasers had punched holes in vital organs, bringing shock, and then the aliens had bled out. Together they tried to detect signs of life. No pulse, and certainly there would have to be a heart. No reactions, no breathing, eyes blank and staring.

“Turd-ugly, aren’t they?” Terry said, and kicked a body. “Solid, too.”

There were many facets of these aliens Cliff wanted to explore, but there wasn’t time. They got the harnesses off the bulky bodies before he and Howard pitched two Birds overboard. Cliff kept the one less damaged. Aybe started to argue with him and then shrugged.

By this time the rest were passing up gear. Howard said, “If they did set off some alarm, we’d better get away.”

Everybody agreed, and voted Aybe into the pilot’s chair, since he had flying experience. The chair was too big for humans, but the seat wrapped anyone who sat in it with a gauzy strap restrainer, and Aybe managed to settle into it. He set to work systematically learning the control panel.

Cliff climbed down to check the bodies he had tossed out. Autopsies are best done fresh, and he learned a good deal in half an hour of cutting. Aybe shouted, “Hey, look!” and made the magcar perform some maneuvers. To their applause he announced in a stentorian voice, “Flight is leaving, folks.”

They all laughed hard, letting the tensions out.

He helped Irma carry some gear from the sailer. She whispered, “Great attack! I knew you could do it.”

“Well, that makes one of us.”

THIRTY-ONE

The hell of it was, Redwing thought, that SunSeeker’s magscoop seemed to act better as a brake than as an accelerator.

The deck veered and flexed under his feet, seams groaned, a low rumble echoed. The magscoop expanded, breathing like a lung, and SunSeeker slowed. Contract, and the ship accelerated.

Redwing hated the rumbles and surges, maybe because they echoed his own anxieties. To maintain flight control and keep their magnetic fields up and running, SunSeeker had to feed its engines with plasma. But the plasma density here was low and the ship had to keep flexing its magnetic screens to stay in burn equilibrium. So the whole ship followed a troubled orbit, skimming along above the Bowl and trying to pick up weak signals from their teams.

“Jam, can’t we smooth this out?” he asked.

The slender man stared intently at the control boards and just shook his head. “I am trying, sir. Ayaan’s array is slewing as we change velocity.”

Ayaan herself called from a nearby control pod, “I can’t get coherence! My antennas cannot focus.”

Redwing felt frustrated, out of his depth technically. A ramscoop of SunSeeker class was an intricate self-regulating system, and no one could master even a fraction of its labyrinthian technology. It was not so much a ship as a self-tech entity, with artificial intelligences embedded in every subsystem. It behaved less as a ship than as an electromagnetically structured metallic can run by a dispersed mind, itself electromagnetic.

Beside it, an ancient automobile was an idiot savant, working because analog feedbacks and what the techs called “self-regulating networks” operated well enough, arrived at by incessant trials and some considerable deaths. Autos arose through a form of driven evolution. SunSeeker came from a two-century-long evolution of directed intelligences, none individually of great capability. Indeed, the subminds embedded in SunSeeker were no better than ordinary human intelligence, and some much lesser. But the sum of these subminds, as with whole human cultures, was greater than linear. Modern human civilization was surely of lesser station than its greatest intelligences, such as Gödel and Heinschlicht. So was SunSeeker an anthology of self-critical and disciplined minds. Each mind lived its life with a reward system and constraints, dwelling in a community of diverse talents. All that properly propelled SunSeeker into a social intelligence, one that ran beyond what the ship could entirely comprehend. In this it was much like human societies. While it nominally served Earthly society, the ship also had evolved over the centuries of its flight into its own, original society. Smart networks had to.

It could innovate, too.

“Cap’n! Our subsystems found a way to amp the coherence,” Ayaan called out. “I’ve never seen it do that before.”

Redwing walked behind her acceleration couch and watched the screens display a dazzling graphic. It showed linked armories of smart systems, adjusting in milliseconds to the fits and snarls of SunSeeker’s trajectory. The hundreds of elements in Ayaan’s array glided to compensate, like a retina that caressed the light falling on it.

The signal grid shifted, its colors cohering. Suddenly, a strong pulse came through. “It’s from Aybe’s phone,” Ayaan said, excited.

“Send Beth’s bio data as soon as you can.”

“Got it inserted already, right behind the carrier signature,” Ayaan said crisply.

“What’s their situation?”

“Here’s their text.”

GOT FREE OF ALIENS. MAKING OUR WAY ACROSS THICKLY WOODED TERRAIN. HEADED OUT OF DESERT ZONE.

“That’s it?”

“I had to synthesize their signal three times to get even that.”

“Can’t they send up some detail?”

“I’ll ask them to use store and transmit. That lets them set the phone so when it acquires us, it sends a squirt at optimal rates.”

“No audio?”

“Too noisy for that. I squeezed this out of repeated text messages. Lucky it got through, considering.”

“Considering what?”

“How weak their signal is, how fast we’re moving, the whole problem of using a dispersed antenna—”

“I get it,” Redwing said. “Outstanding work, Lieutenant.”

She smiled and added, “I’ll send what text I get to your address.”

“I wish we had more people to analyze this,” Redwing said suddenly, feeling his isolation.

Again, Ayaan smiled kindly. “Our experts are on the ground, gathering information.”

He nodded, then lifted his head a bit. He shouldn’t let the crew see his uncertainty. An old rule: If people can see up your nostrils, you’re keeping your chin at the appropriate alpha angle.

“Has Aybe got the food stuff?”

“Just did. Sent back an acknowledgment—whoops, there goes the connection. Damn.”

Redwing paced and turned back to her. “Y’know, just before they went down, Cliff was afraid they wouldn’t be able to digest any of the food down there. Kind of funny. Now we’re sending him menus.”

Ayaan chuckled. “It’s a major discovery, I should think.”

“Really? Still seems like common sense to me. Food is food.”

“Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed, while our amino acids are left-handed. It could easily have been the other way round.”

Redwing blinked. He kept forgetting that crew were multiskilled, so the loss of one specialist couldn’t crimp them a lot.

“Well, turns out otherwise,” he said. “Beth’s team said they had some dysentery at first, but some of their med supplies put them right. Prob’ly Cliff’s did, too.”

“Beth’s text messages said she got most of her lore from the aliens.”

Redwing nodded once more. “They knew the poisons, and maybe those are pretty near universal? Interesting idea.”

Ayaan was observing him closely, he noted. “Sir, I understood Cliff’s point, and indeed, I agreed with it. Particularly his suggestion that they do thorough sampling of the alien air, to see if it would be dangerous to us.”