to be teetering on the edge of a precipice—the cavern dug by its own tall drill-tree, ready to swallow the entire fortress when the undermining was done.
The sled’s engine hummed hypnotically. Keeping track of his instruments was too simple a task to keep Toshio’s mind busy. Without really wishing to, he found himself thinking. Remembering.
A simple adventure, that’s what it had seemed when they had asked him to come along on the space voyage. He had already taken the Jumpers’ Oath, so they knew he was ready to leave his past behind. And they needed a midshipman to help with hand-eye work on the new dolphin ship.
Streaker was a small exploratory vessel of unique design. There weren’t many finned, oxygen-breathing races flying ships in interstellar space. Those few used artificial gravity for convenience, and leased members of some client species to act as crafters and handmen.
But the first dolphin-crewed starship had to be different. It was designed around a principle which had guided Earthlings for two centuries: “Whenever possible, keep it simple. Avoid using the science of the Galactics when you don’t understand it.”
Two hundred and fifty years after contact with Galactic civilization, mankind was still struggling to catch up. Species which had been using the aeons-old Library since before mammals appeared on Earth—adding to that universal compendium with glacial slowness—had seemed almost god-like to primitive Earthmen in their early, lumbering slowships. Earth had a branch Library, now, supposedly giving her access to all wisdom accumulated over Galactic history. But only in recent years had it proven more help than a confusing hindrance.
Streaker, with its complex arrangements of centrifugally held pools and weightless workshops, must have seemed incredibly archaic to the aliens who looked it over just before launch. Still, to Earth’s neo-dolphin communities, she was an object of pride.
After her shakedown cruise, Streaker stopped at the small human-dolphin colony of Calafia to pick up the best graduates of its tiny academy. It was to be Toshio’s first, and possibly last, visit to old Earth.
“Old Earth” was still home to ninety percent of humanity, not to mention the other terrestrial sapient races. Galactic tourists still thronged in to gawk at the home of the enfants terribles who had caused such a stir in a few brief centuries. They were open in their wagering over how long Mankind would survive without the protection of a patron.
All species had patrons, of course. Nobody reached spacefaring intelligence without intervention by another, older race. Had not men done this for chimps and dolphins? All the way back to the time of the mythical Progenitors, every species that spoke and flew spaceships had been raised up by a predecessor. None still survived from that distant era, but the civilization the Progenitors established, with its all-encompassing Library, went on.
Toshio wondered, as just about everyone had for three centuries, what the patrons of Man might have been like. If they ever existed. Might they even be one of the species of fanatics that had ambushed the unsuspecting Streaker, and even now sought her out like hounds after a fox?
It wasn’t a pleasant line of thought, considering what the Streaker had discovered.
The Terragens Council had sent her to join a scattered fleet of exploration vessels, checking the veracity of the Library. So far only a few minor gaps had been found in its thoroughness. Here a star misplaced. There a species miscatalogued. It was like finding someone had written a list describing every grain of sand on a beach. You could never check the complete list in a thousand lifetimes of a race, but you could take a random sampling.
Streaker had been poking through a small gravitational tide pool, fifty thousand parsecs off the galactic plane, when she found the fleet.
Toshio sighed at the unfairness of it. One hundred and fifty dolphins, seven humans, and a chimpanzee; how could we have known what we found?
Why did we have to find it?
Fifty thousand ships, each the size of a moon. That’s what they found. The dolphins had been thrilled by their discovery—the biggest derelict fleet ever encountered, apparently incredibly ancient. Captain Creideiki had psicast to Earth for instructions.
Dammit! Why did he call Earth? Couldn’t the report have waited until we’d gone home? Why let the whole eavesdropping galaxy know you’d found a Sargasso of ancient hulks in the middle of nowhere?
The Terragens Council had answered in code.
“Go into hiding. Await orders. Do not reply.”
Creideiki obeyed, of course. But not before half the patron-lines in the galaxy had sent out