“We’re getting back pressure.” Her hands flew over the command board. A long, wrenching wave ran through the ship. Redwing sat at last in a deck chair—just in time, as a rumbling sound built in the walls and surges of acceleration shook the ship.
The aft picture worsened. They saw from two angles looking aft that the plume was bunching up, as if rippling around some unseen obstacle. The logjam thickened as they watched. Rolling waves came through the deck, all the way from hundreds of meters down the long stack.
“Getting a lot of strange jitter,” Beth said. She was in uniform, crisply turned out.
Redwing looked around. “It’s your sleep time.”
“Who could sleep through this? Captain, it’s building up.”
“You’re to take the chief pilot’s chair in three hours—”
“Aft ram pressure is inverting profile,” Ayaan Ali said crisply. “Never happens, this. Not even in simulations.”
“I can feel it,” Beth said. “This much vibration, the whole config must be—”
“Too much plasma jamming back into the throat.” Ayaan Ali gestured to the screen profiling the engine, its blue magnetic hourglass-shaped throat. Its pinch-and-release flaring geometry was made of fields, so could adjust at the speed of light to the furious ion pressures that rushed down it, fresh from their fusion burn. But it could only take so much variation before snarling, choking—and blowing a hole in the entire field geometry. That would direct hot plasma on the ship wall itself, a cutting blowtorch.
As they watched, the orange flow in its blue field-line cage curled and snarled. “It’s under pressures from outside the ship,” Ayaan Ali said, voice tight and high.
“If it gets close to critical pressures, shut down,” Redwing said. He was surprised his own voice sounded calm.
Beth said, “But we’ll—”
“Go to reserve power if we have to,” Clare said.
“That won’t last long,” Karl said. “And this external pressure on our magscoop could crumple it.”
A long, low note rang through the ship—a full system warning. No one had heard that sound since training. The drive had not been off since they left Earthside.
“I’m going to spin us,” Ayaan Ali said. “Outrace the pressure.”
She ran the helm hard over and the magscoop responded, canting its mouth. Next she flared the magnetic nozzle at the very aft end of the ship, clearing it of knotted plasma. That took two seconds. Then she flexed the field back down and ran the fusion chamber to its max. Redwing could follow this, but her speed and agility were what made her a standout. They were all hanging on as the entire ship spun about its radial axis. Redwing closed his eyes and let the swirl go away from him, listening to the ship. The pops and groans recalled the drastic maneuvers they’d run SunSeeker through, during the years-long Oort cloud trials. He trusted his ears more than the screen displays of magnetic stresses.
The rumbles ebbed away. When the spin slowed, he opened his eyes again. The screens showed milder conditions around the ship. “I broke us out of that magnetic pinch,” Ayaan Ali said. “We got caught in a sausage instability. Had to flex our scoop pretty hard.”
Redwing recalled that meant the radial squeezing the jet sometimes displayed. Karl had said the jet narrowing looked like some sort of sausage mode, which took it through the Knothole and made it flare out once it was well beyond. But they weren’t that close to the Knothole. That was the point—the kink instability took a while to develop while the jet was arrowing in toward the Bowl.
Redwing thought it strange that the pinch effect had been so strong. He asked Karl if the magnetic pressures on their magnetic nozzle could be so strong, but before Karl could answer he felt a prickly sensation play fretfully across his skin. Everyone looked around, sensing it also.
Abruptly a yellow arc cut through the air above the deck. It crackled and snaked as it moved, but turned aside whenever it met a metal barrier. They all bailed out of their couches. Redwing lay flat on the deck as the snapping, curling discharge twisted in the air above him. The crackling thing snarled around itself. Sparks hissed into the air. Yellow coils flexed, spitting light. The discharge arched and twisted and abruptly split, shaped into an extended cup shape that spun.
“It’s shaping the … the Bowl,” Beth said.
The yellow arc made a bad cartoon, snapping and writhing, never holding true for long.
Redwing felt his heart thump. “Something is out there. Making trouble for us.”
Beth said, “Something we can’t see.”
Redwing recalled that in their discussions he had asked, What could I be missing? Well, here it was.
Beth had once said that flying into the jet could give them an edge, all right—but there were huge unknowns. Unknown unknowns were like a double-edged sword, she had said, with no handle. You didn’t know which way the edge would cut.
THIRTY-FIVE
Asenath made a show of her entrance. She gave the assembled crew and servants a traditional bronze-golden chest display, then unfurled side arrow lances, ending in brilliant purple fan crescents. Her cycle-shaped tail laces coiled out with a snap, their flourish attracting attention first to tail, then with a flurry, to breast. Even the sub-Folk knew this strategy, though without nuance or passion. Crowds of them in the big bay of the skyfish clustered and tittered as Asenath presented. Memor watched with glazed eyes, Bemor at her side and the primate crouched nearby.
The grand bang and rattle caught many eyes, so she followed with a sharp pop. Yellow patch flares then ignited their tips, flavoring the already fragrant air. Quills rattled at incessant pace, rolls and frissons, japes and jars. All this was a part of the eternal status-flurry that kept order across the great stretches of the Bowl.
“What’s all this for?” the primate said.
The impudence of this question, coming at the climax of Asenath’s display, angered both Memor and, she could see, Bemor. The primate was about to become very useful, so Memor decided to discipline her in full view of all. As she turned, Bemor clasped her shoulder in a restraining grasp. “Do not. It will disturb this creature more than you know.”
“I have spent more time with her than—”
“Than I have, yes. But indulge me this once.”
Memor explained to the primate that such social rituals shored up the hierarchy needed to manage the entire Bowl society. Whenever the Folk visited a local venue of use, such as this skyfish, they reminded all of how the vast world worked, by showing ancient rituals. “Making the past come into their present, and so reside for their futures.”
“It’s just a dance with feathers, incense, songs, and whatever drug is floating in this air,” Tananareve Bailey said. “I can sense it creeping in through my pores.”
“I will be most surprised if it affects your chemistry. It is tuned for these Kahalla and their minions, plus adjacent evolved subspecies.”
Tananareve coughed. “Stinks, too.”
Memor rankled at this but said, “The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival, operating on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully, but the unit of survival is different at each of the six time ranges. On intervals of what you would term years, or orbital periods, the unit surviving is the individual. On a time scale of decades of orbitals, the unit is the family. On a scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation—such as this district of the Kahalla. On a time range of millennia, the unit is the culture. The Kahalla culture is widespread. So they may lend that gracious stability to vagrant districts. On a time scale of tens or more of millennia, the surviving unit is the species. Some cultures do survive that long, and we encourage that. On the range of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our Bowl.” Memor made a signifying fan-rattle to conclude and for punctuation gave a sweet aroma-belch from her neck.