Infinity's Shore

You grow up depending on traeki-secreted chemicals to make native foods edible, and traeki-distilled alcohol to liven celebrations. A traeki pharmacist makes your medicine in a chem-synth ring. Yet you’re revolted by the thought of putting one of these things in your mouth.

It tasted like a slimy tallow candle.

Across the narrow chamber, Ling and Rann adjusted quickly to this Jijoan novelty. Of course they had no history to overcome, associating traekis with mulch and rotting garbage.

“Come on,” Jeni chided in a low voice that burned his ears. “Don’t gag on me, man. You’re a sage now. Others are watchin’!”

He nodded — two quick head jerks — and tried again. Fitting his teeth around the tube, Lark bit down as she had taught. The burst of air did not stink as bad as expected. Perhaps it contained a mild relaxant. The pharmacist designers were clever about such things.

Let’s hope their star-god cousins don’t think of this, as well.

That assumption underlay Lark’s plan. Jophur commanders might be wary against direct subterranean assault. But where the buried route combined with water, the invaders might not expect trouble.

The Rothen underestimated us. By Ifni and the Egg, the Jophur may do the same.

Each diver also wore a rewq symbiont to protect the eyes and help them see by the dim light of hand-carried phosphors. Webbed gloves and booties completed the ensemble.

Ling’s tripping laughter made him turn around, and Lark saw she was pointing at him as she guffawed.

“You should talk,” he retorted at the ungainly creature she had become, more monstrous than an unmasked Rothen. Hoons paused from laying down cargo by the waterline, and joined in the mirth, umbling good-naturedly while their pet noors grinned with needlelike teeth.

Lark pictured the scene up above, past overlying layers of rock, in the world of light. The Jophur dreadnought squatted astride the mountain glen, thwarting the glade stream in its normal seaward rush. The resulting lake now stretched more than a league uphill.

Water seeks its own level. We must now be several arrowflights from shore. That’s a long way to swim before we get to the lake itself.

It couldn’t be helped. Their goal was hard to reach, in more ways than one.

Bubbles in the pool. One qheuen cupola broached the surface, followed by another. The young blues crawled ashore, breathing heavily through multiple leg vents, reporting in excited GalSix.

“The way to open water — it is clear. Good time — this we made. To the target — we shall now escort you.”

Cheers lifted from the hoons and urs, but Lark felt no stirring.

They weren’t the ones who would have to go the rest of the way.

Water transformed the cavities and grottoes. Flippers kicked up clouds of silt, filling the phosphor beams with a myriad of distracting speckles. Lark’s trusty rewq pulled tricks with polarization, transforming the haze to partial clarity. Still, it took concentration to avoid colliding with jagged limestone outcrops. The guide rope saved him from getting lost.

Cave diving felt a lot like being a junior sage of the Commons — an experience he never sought or foresaw in his former life as a scientist heretic.

How ungainly swimming humans appeared next to the graceful young qheuens, who seized the rugged walls with flashing claws, propelling themselves with uncanny agility, nearly as at-home in freshwater as on solid ground.

His skin grew numb where the skink coverings pulled loose. Other parts grew hot from exertion. More upsetting was the squirmy traeki tentacle in his mouth, anticipating his needs in unnerving ways. It would not let him hold his breath, as a man might do while concentrating on some near-term problem, but tickled his throat to provoke an exhalation. The first time it happened, he nearly retched. (What if he chucked up breakfast? Would he and the ring both asphyxiate? Or would it take his gift as a tasty, predigested bonus?)

Lark was so focused on the guide rope that he missed the transition from stony catacombs to a murky plain of sodden meadows, drowned trees, and drifting debris. But soon the silty margins fell behind as daylight transformed the Glade of Gathering — now the bottom of an upland lake — giving commonplace shapes macabre unfamiliarity.

The guide rope passed near a stand of lesser boo whose surviving stems were tall enough to reach the surface, far overhead. Qheuens gathered around one tube, sucking down drafts of air. When sated, they spiraled around Lark and the humans, nudging them toward the next stretch of guide rope.

Long before details loomed through the silty haze, he made out their target by its glow. Rann and Ling thrashed flippers, passing Jeni in their haste. By the time Lark caught up, they were pressing hands against a giant slick sarcophagus, the hue of yellow moonrise. Within lay a cigar-shaped vessel, the Rothen ship, their home away from home, now sealed in a deadly trap.