Starplex

Next, 112 hastily constructed buoys, each consisting of a hollowed-out watson casing with special equipment mounted inside, were popped through the shortcut from Starplex. The two probeships used their tractor beams to array them in interlocking orbits around the baby.

On one of his tall, thin monitor screens aboard the Rum Runner, Jag displayed a hyperspatial map showing the steep local gravity well with the star at the bottom. The sides of the well were almost perpendicular this close to the star; they only began to flare out just before the orbiting darmat was encountered. The baby made a second, smaller well of its own.

Once the buoys were in place, the PDQ headed off, moving past the shortcut without going through it, and continuing on for half a day.

Finally, they were all lined up in a neat row. At one end was the Rum Runner. Next to it was the darmat baby. Forty million kilometers beyond the baby was the fiery blue star. Three hundred million kilometers farther on was the shortcut, and a billion kilometers beyond that was the PDQ — Melondent was now a total of seventy-two light-minutes from the star, far enough away that her local space was now reasonably flat.

"Ready?" barked Jag to Longbottle, in the Rum Runner's piloting tank.

"Ready," the dolphin barked back in Waldahudar.

Jag touched a control, and the lattice of buoys surrounding the darmat baby sprang to life. Each buoy contained an artificial-gravity generator, powered by solar energy stolen from the very star they were trying to fight. Slowly, in unison, the buoys increased their output, and just as slowly, a flattening pocket began to develop in one wall of the star's steep gravity well.

"Gently," said Jag, under his breath, watching his hyperspace map. "Gently."

The pocket continued to grow more and more flat. Great care had to be taken not to flatten out the darmat's own gravity well: if the effects of the baby's own mass were suppressed — which, after all, was what was holding it together — it would lose cohesion, and expand like a balloon.

The buoys' output continued to grow and the curvature of spacetime continued to diminish, until, until — Flatness, like a plateau jutting from the side of the well.

It was as if the darmat were in interstellar space, not spitting distance from a star.

"Isolation complete," said Jag. "Now let's get it out of there."

"Activating hyperdrives," said Longbottle.

The antigrav buoys made up points on a sphere around the baby, but now, as their individual hyperspace field generators came on, that whole sphere seemed to mirror over, as if it were a glob of mercury floating freely in space.

In a matter of seconds, the glob shrank to nothingness and disappeared.

The buoys were preprogrammed to move the darmat baby away from the blue star as fast as possible. The PDQ was waiting near the point at which the darmat should emerge from hyperspace, far enough from the star that the hyperdrive field should collapse without difficulty.

The Rum Runner set out for the same location, traveling under thruster power. As they passed near the shortcut point, a radio message from Melondent came through, blueshifted because of the Rum Runner's acceleration toward her ship.

"PDQ to Longbottle and Jag. Arrived has darmat baby; popped into normal space it did right in front of my eyes. Hyperdrive field collapse uneventful was. But baby shows still no signs of life, and responds does not to my hails."

Jag's fur moved pensively. No one had known for sure whether the baby would survive unprotected during its brief journey through hyperspace.

Even if it had been alive beforehand, that might have killed it.

Maddeningly, there was no way to tell.

The space-flattening technique was risky. Rather than use it themselves so that Longbottle could engage the Rum Runner's hyperdrive, they flew out to their rendezvous with the PDQ under thruster power.

To fill the time, and to get his mind off of the fate of the baby, Jag spoke with Longbottle, who, to his credit, was piloting the ship in an absolutely straight line.

"You dolphins," said Jag, "like the humans."

"Mostly," said Longbottle in high-pitched Waldahudar.

He let the piloting drones disengage from his fins, and put the ship on automatic.

"Why?" barked Jag sharply. "I have read Earth history. They polluted the oceans you swam in, captured you and put you in tanks, caught you in fishing nets."

"No one of them has done any of that to me," said Longbottle.

"No, but—"

"It is the difference: we generalize do not. Specific bad humans did specific bad things; those humans do we not like. But the rest of humanity we judge one by one."

"But surely once they discovered you were intelligent, they should have treated you better."

"Humans discovered intelligent we were before we discovered that they were."

"What?" said Jag. "But surely it was obvious. They had built cities and roads, and—"

"Saw none of that."

"No, I suppose not. But they sailed in boats, they built nets, they wore clothes."