Startide Rising by David Brin Read Free Book Online Page A

staff evaluated developments, including the new alliance between the Abdicator and Transcendor forces.
    A Paha sub-officer poked its head out of detection sector. Under hooded eyes, Krat watched it dash to a food station, snatch a steaming mug of amoklah, and hurry back to its post.
    The Paha race had been allowed more racial diversity than the Forski, to enhance their value as ritual warriors. It left them less tractable than suited her, but it was a price one paid for good fighters. Krat decided to ignore the incident. She listened to the little Forski sing of the coming victory—of the glory that would be Krat’s when she captured the Earthlings, and finally squeezed their secrets out of them.
    Klaxons shrieked. The Forski leapt into the air in alarm and fled to its cubbyhole. Suddenly there were running Paha everywhere.
    “Tandu raider!” the tactical officer shouted. “Ships two through twelve, it has appeared in your midst! Take evasive maneuvers! Quickly!”
    The flagship bucked as it, too, went into a wild turn to avoid a spread of missiles. Krat’s screens showed a pulsing, danger-blue dot—the daring Tandu cruiser that had popped into being within her fleet—which was even now pouring fire into the Soro ships!
    Curse their damnable probability drives! Krat knew that nobody else could move about as quickly as the Tandu, because no other species was willing to take such chances!
    Krat’s mating claw throbbed in irritation. Her Soro ships were so busy avoiding missiles, nobody was firing back!
    “Fools!” Krat hissed into her communicator. “Ships six and ten, hold your ground and concentrate your fire on the obscenity!”
    Then, before her words reached her sub-captains, before any Soro even fired back, the terrible Tandu ship began to dissolve on its own! One moment it was there, ferocious and deadly, ranging in on a numerous but helpless foe. The next instant the spindly destroyer was surrounded by a coruscating, discolored halo of sparks. Its shield folded, and the cruiser fell into itself like a collapsing tower of sticks.
    With a brilliant flash, the Tandu vanished, leaving a cloud of ugly vapor behind. Through her own ship’s shields, Krat could feel an awful psychic roar.
    We were lucky, Krat realized as the psi-noise slowly faded. It was not without reason that other races avoided the Tandus’ methods. But if that ship had lasted a few moments longer …
    No harm was done, and Krat noted that her crew had all done their jobs. Some of them were slow, however, and these must be punished …
    She beckoned the chief tactician, a tall, burly Paha. The warrior stepped toward her. He tried to maintain a proud bearing, but his drooping cilia told that he knew what to expect. Krat rumbled deep in her throat.
    She started to speak, but in the emotion of the moment, the Soro commander felt a churning pressure within. Krat grunted and writhed, and the Paha officer fled as she panted on the vletoor cushion. Finally she howled and found relief. After a moment, she bent forward to retrieve the egg she had laid.
    She picked it up, punishments and battles temporarily banished from her mind. In an instinct that predated her species uplift by the timid Hul, two million years before, she responded to the smell of pheromones and licked the birthing slime from the tiny air-cracks which seamed the leathery surface of the egg.
    Krat licked it a few extra times for pleasure. She rocked the egg slowly in an ancient, untampered reflex of motherhood.
     

----
::: Toshio
    « ^ »
    T here was a ship involved, of course. All of his dreams since the age of nine had dealt with ships. Ships, at first, of plasteel and jubber, sailing the straits and archipelagos of Calafia, and later ships of space. Toshio had dreamt of ships of every variety, including those of the powerful Galactic patron races, which he had hoped one day to see.
    Now he dreamt of a dinghy.
    The tiny human-dolphin colony of his homeworld had sent him out with