They just gaped at Karl. He had a chance to check their teeth and noted that Beth had an incisor with some ragged damage and stains. Beth let out a breath. “I flew us up the jet, remember? Remember? It was like taking a sailing ship through a hurricane. Do that again?”

For a long moment Redwing watched the naked fear play across her face. He recalled the long hours of strain and sweat as the ship popped and creaked, the racking uncertainty Beth had showed as she stayed with it through surges and awful wrenching turns. All the crew had worked to the limits of their endurance. That had been their only real choice. Through it all he showed no uncertainty. That was his job. And in the end he did not regret it.

But this was not a necessity. They could coast here and play for time. But they could not leave. And they were eating their provisions while Cliff’s team was in constant danger.

He said slowly, “I think we need to show them that we are not going along with their agenda. That we will not be docile members of their big club.”

A long silence. Their faces tightened and mouths compressed to thin white lines: startled fright, worry, puzzlement. Karl then said, “I wasn’t thawed when you danced through the Knothole, Beth, but I checked this out with Fred. The physics is fairly straightforward. It won’t last long, maybe ten hours.”

Redwing could see they were too stunned to take it in.

“We’ll leave the technical aspects for later. There will be three crew rated to pilot on the bridge at all times. In fact, all crew present. Warn the finger snakes to anchor themselves.”

Karl said formally, “I want you all to know I have done calculations and simulations. There is a broad parameter range of what we might face. The Navigation Artilects have been working full bore to study trajectories, the back-reaction of the jet plasma flow on our mag throat. It compresses our prow fields and alters our uptake—but that’s mostly good news, because we get more thrust from the plasma. There’ll be plenty of ions to fuel our fusion burn. I think—”

“Yes, technical aspects come later.” Redwing smiled and tried to look confident. “Thanks, Karl.”

Beth looked him straight in the eye. “We don’t understand the Folk worth a damn, sir.”

“Indeed.”

“I have no idea how they’ll respond.” Beth looked worried, and her eyes jerked around the table, looking for support.

“They understand negotiation, that’s clear from our conversation through Tananareve. They’ve killed our coins and now our probe. Let’s show them we know tit for tat, too.”

They looked hard at him. Ayaan Ali still had her slightly wide-eyed, shocked gaze. Fred wore his usual expectant fixed stare. Karl was trying to look confident. Beth’s face was pale and strained, eyes fixed on him.

He stood. “I want you all to know we’ll reply to the Folk. But while doing so, we’ll navigate toward the jet and make preparations.”

They left quietly. None of them looked back at him except Beth. She waited until the others were gone and closed the door. “I have to admit it feels good to be doing something. I didn’t like being in their prison. Even when we got out, it was into a bigger prison.”

Redwing blinked. “One the size of a whole damn solar system?”

She laughed, gave him the high sign, and left.

PART IX

ON THE RUN

Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.

—TOBIAS SMOLLETT

TWENTY-SEVEN

Cliff was tired of traveling. The immense distances of the Bowl took a steady toll that could not be erased by dozing in uncomfortable seats designed for another species, or indifferent food gotten from dispensers along the way, or headphones that tuned out the drones and rattles of endless long transport. The Bowl was built on the scale of solar systems, but humans were built to smaller perspectives.

Quert and the other Sils had brought Cliff’s team through a twisting labyrinth of tunnels, moving away from the hull where the Ice Minds dwelled. Then a mag-train. More tunnels. Occasional glimpses of odd landscapes seen through huge quartz sheets that glided by as they took barely curved speed ramps at planetary velocities.

He had felt the surges and high speeds, but after a while they did not register as distinct events, just a long symphony of lurches. At times he felt he knew where they were in an astronomical sense—alignments of star and jet and horizon, glimpsed through flickering windows. But those got confused as soon as he looked again, hours later, after being pummeled and spun.

Now they ventured out, on foot, into a terrain that reminded him of California deserts—low scrub brush, gullied tan terrain, hazy sky, occasional zigzag trees. Those seemed to grow everywhere on the Bowl. Gravity was different here, a lot less. He felt a slight tilt to his weight, too. They were closer to the Knothole, had to be.

Curious blocky buildings visible through some dust haze in the distance, maybe ten kilometers away, a tapered tower at its center. Cliff drew in hot dry air with a crisp, nose-tingling flavor and basked in the raw sunlight. It was good to be still and on your feet in sunlight. Always sunlight.

Quert beckoned the others out of the well-disguised hatch that led into the hull system. For many hours they had crawled through some conduits and once had to wade through a sewer to get onto a fast-moving slideway. Then a train. The Bowl’s constant daylight threw off their sleep cycles. He’d measured this, and found that the team had shifted to a thirty-hour waking cycle. The welcome dark of the night-side hull had helped fix that. But they were worn down.

“Think we’re okay here?” Irma asked Quert.

“Need go farther,” Quert said, looking around. “Not safe here.” The other Sil shifted uneasily and looked at the zigzag trees.

“What’s the danger? At least it’s warm.” Irma had not liked the cold and had hugged one or the other of the men in the night, seeking warmth. Nobody thought anything of it; they were all in a pile most of the time, dead to the world.

“The Kahalla. In shape they are more like you than we. An old kind of Adopted. Loyal to Folk.”

Irma frowned. “So what do we do?”

“Find…” Quert paused, as if translating from his language. “Tadfish. You would say. Maybe.”

“There’s shelter over there.” Terry pointed at the low hills to their left. He seemed more alert and energetic now, Cliff noted.

“We go past that,” Quert said, but the other Sil around him rustled with unease. This was the first sign Cliff had seen that they all could understand Anglish. Plainly they were worried, their legs shifting and heads jerking around as if looking for threats.

“So let’s do this fast,” Aybe said. He, too, looked refreshed. They all had skins worn from constant sun but not deeply tanned. There wasn’t a lot of UV in this star’s spectrum.

They set off at a long lope made graceful by the lower gravity. Cliff got into his stride easily, enjoying the sensation of hanging a second or two longer at the apex while his legs stretched out. As much as he had liked the dark of the hull labyrinth, the sunlit open was more his style.

“Kahalla!” one of the Sil cried. Quert stopped and turned and so did they all. Some fast shapes flitted through a distant stand of zigzags and heavy brush.

At first Cliff thought these were four-legged creatures, but as one of them sped across a gap in the rust-colored brush, he saw they had two legs. Their gait leaned forward and hinged oddly. Big angular heads.

“Here Kahalla live,” Quert said.

“What should we do? Deal with them?”

“Do not know.” Quert and the other Sil looked carefully at the Kahalla. There were many of them.

They all began to run again. Quert waved them away from the zigzag trees where the moving figures were and toward the buildings several kilometers away across a dusty plain. It seemed to Cliff they were needlessly exposed there but then Quert, who was in the lead, took them behind a rise and into a slight gully that was enough to shield them from direct fire. Dust from their running stung his nose. They were all running flat out. His team had their lasers and Quert their own weaponry, but they were vastly outnumbered. Until now he had not thought much about how lightly armed Bowl natives were. That seemed to imply little overt conflict despite the vast and horrible damage the Folk had dealt out to the Sil. There was an odd Zen-like grace to them in the face of horror.