Startide Rising (The Uplift Saga, #2) - David Brin Page 0,6

the leaf blinders *

Hikahi calling.

Above the churning of his struggle and the hoarseness of his breath, Toshio could hear combat sounds of dolphin teamwork. Quick trills of Trinary, unslowed for human ears except that one brief command, and the whining of their harnesses.

“Here! Here I am!” He slashed at a vine that threatened his air hose, barely missing the hose itself. He licked his lips and tried to whistle in Trinary.

* Holding off—the sea-squid’s beak *

* Suckers tight—and outlook bleak *

* Havoc done—on Ssassia wreaked! *

Lousy form and rhythm, but the fins would hear it better than a shout in Anglic. After just forty generations of sapience, they still thought better in an emergency when using whistle rhyme.

Toshio could hear the sounds of combat coming closer. But, as if hurried by the threat, the tentacles began drawing him back more rapidly, toward the gash. Suddenly a sucker-covered strand wrapped itself around his right arm. Before he could shift his grip, one of the burning knots reached his hand. He screamed and tore the tendril away, but the knife was lost to darkness.

Other filaments were falling all about him. At that moment Toshio became distantly aware that someone was talking to him, slowly, and in Anglic!

“… says there are ships out there! Vice-Captain Takkata-Jim wants to know why Hikahi hasn’t sent a monopulse confirmation …”

It was Akki’s voice, calling from the ship! Toshio couldn’t answer his friend. The switch for the sled radio was out of reach, and he was preoccupied.

“Don’t respond to this message,” Akki went on obligingly. Toshio moaned at the irony as he tried to pry a tendril off his facemask without doing further insult to his hands. “Just transmit a monopulse and come on back-k, all of you. We think there’s a space battle going on over Kithrup. Probably those crazy ETs followed us here and are fighting over the right to capture us, just like at Morgran.

“Gotta c-close up, now. Radio silence. Get back as soon as you can. Akki out.”

Toshio felt a tendril seize hold of his air hose. A solid grip, this time.

“Sure, Akki, old friend,” he grunted as he pulled at it. “I’ll be going home just as soon as the universe lets me.”

The air hose crimped shut and there was nothing he could do. Fog filled his facemask. As he felt himself blacking out, Toshio thought he saw the rescue party arrive, but he couldn’t be sure if it was real or a hallucination. He wouldn’t have expected Keepiru to lead the charge, for instance, or for that fin to have such a ferocious demeanor, heedless of the burning suckers.

In the end, he decided it was a dream. The laser flashes were too bright, the saser tones too clear. And the party came toward him with pennants waving in their wake like the cavalry that five centuries of Anglic-speaking man had come to associate with the image of rescue.

2

Galactics

On a ship in the center of a fleet of ships, a phase of denial was passing.

Giant cruisers spilled out of a rent in space, to fall toward the pinpoint brilliance of a non-descript reddish sun. One by one, they tumbled from the luminous tear. With them came diffracted starlight from their point of departure, hundreds of parsecs away.

There were rules that should have prevented it. The tunnel was an unnatural way to pass from place to place. It took a strong will to deny nature and call into being such an opening in space.

The Episiarch, in its outraged rejection of What Is, had created the passage for its Tandu masters. The opening was held by the adamant power of its ego—by its refusal to concede anything at all to Reality.

When the last ship was through, the Episiarch was purposely distracted, and the hole collapsed with soundless violence. In moments, only instruments could tell that it had ever been. The affront to physics was erased.

The Episiarch had brought the Tandu armada to the target star well ahead of the other fleets, those who would challenge the Tandu for the right to capture the Earth ship. The Tandu sent impulses of praise to the Episiarch’s pleasure centers. It howled and waved its great furry head in gratitude.

To the Tandu, an obscure and dangerous form of travel had once again proved worth the risks. It was good to arrive on the battlefield before the enemy. The added moments would give them a tactical edge.

The Episiarch only wanted things to deny. Its task now finished, it was