The idle thought bloomed into the music, giving the impetus to sudden action. Daring, true, but the Point thought it would make for a tasty atonalism. Complete Harmony was always more daring than True, even when, for the purposes of the moment, it took True Harmony’s methods for its own.
They had come to complete a species without even gauging it for leitmotif, after all. An abrupt and atonal chord should be given its place in the opening melody, even during stately moments of the dance. The Point, passing another rank of Huilek, smeared several of them across the floor with a hindleg. Across the chamber, Counterpoint immediately matched.
The Huilek ululation yammered response. There was something a bit hysterical in the sound, which pleased the Point. Even the dull-minded Huilek could sense that this was to be a great dance.
* * *
“The first one’s coming through,” came the voice in Kralik’s earphones. It was obvious from the tone that Aguilera was doing his best to stay calm, but was having a hard time of it.
So was Kralik, for that matter. Flying through a sun is not, all things considered, the best way to relax. Even leaving out of the equation the fact that a battle was looming that would likely kill all of them.
Kralik studied the screen in front of the tank commander’s seat, trying to block everything out of his mind except the image of an Ekhat warship emerging from the frame point. It was . . .
Difficult. The Jao technology that enabled a ship to exist at all inside a star’s surface—for a time, at least—also shielded it from the radiation and magnetism. But it couldn’t turn the actual visual imagery translated onto the screens into anything less frightening than it was. Nor, although the same Jao technology provided the ship with its own gravity field and thus protected everyone from being crushed by the sun’s gravity and the g-forces produced by their travel through the photosphere, could it eliminate the visual effects of that travel upon the human stomach. The former submarine was, in effect, swooping through a solar roller coaster. Rising and falling and veering this way and that depending upon the turbulence of the granular cells and the pilot’s skill at using them.
Aille himself was piloting Kralik’s vessel, and the young Jao leader was proving once again what a superb pilot he was. But not even a pilot as good as Aille could prevent the ship from being cast about like a woodchip in a maelstrom.
And “maelstrom” was what the ship was traveling through. The photosphere was the outermost layer of the sun except for the chromosphere, and was dominated by granular cells. Ever since Aille’s fleet of converted submarines had penetrated the photosphere, the ships had been swept into the vertical circulation of those cells. Normally, spacecraft emerging from a framepoint within a solar photosphere left as rapidly as possible in order to escape those granular cell currents. But there had been no way for Aille’s fleet to do so, given that they were trying to lay an ambush for the arriving Ekhat.
Most of them had survived. The Jao and human technicians, working together, had calculated that the converted submarines could withstand the stress of the granular cells. And, indeed, they had. But two of the submarines had gotten trapped at the bottom of the circuit, swept down into the supergranular cells that formed the sun’s convection zone. They were gone, and certainly destroyed by now. Jao technology was not magic, after all. Those supergranular cells would carry the ships all the way down to the radiation zone, over a hundred thousand miles below. Nothing material could possibly survive that passage, no matter how well shielded.
Still, twelve ships had survived. And now the Ekhat were coming through. Whether Aille’s fleet could survive the encounter with the Ekhat remained to be seen, of course. But at this point, Kralik found the prospect of a battle something of a relief.
He squinted into the screen, trying to spot the emerging enemy warship. He was unable to do so, which was not surprising. The image on his screen was produced by the same computer that provided Aille and Aguilera’s view, but the screen itself was of human design and neither as large nor as sophisticated as the holo tank in the submarine’s command deck.