Heaven's Reach by David Brin

desolate world of his youth. Horst ribbed his memory. Its wind in the dry grass. Smells that assailed your nose, sinking claws into your sinuses. And images the shaman painted in your mind, like arcs of multicolored sand, falling in place to convey
deer
, or
loper-beast
, or
spearhunter.
    Even as an official of Galactic civilization, representing the oxygen order on a weird plane of reality where allaphors shimmered in each window like reject Dali images, Harry still saw funnels of sparkling heat rising from smoky campfires, vainly seeking union with aloof stars.

Lark
    N OT THAT WAY!” LING SHOUTED.
    Her cry made Lark stumble to a halt, a few meters down a new corridor.
    â€œBut I’m sure this is the best route back to our nest.” Lark pointed along a dim, curved aisle, meandering between gray ceramic walls. Strong odors wafted from each twisty, branching passageway aboard the mazelike Jophur ship. This one beckoned with distinct flavors of GREEN and SANCTUARY .
    â€œI believe you.” Ling nodded. “That’s why we mustn’t go there. In case we’re still being followed.”
    She didn’t look much like a star god anymore, with her dark hair hacked short and pale skin covered with soot. Wearing just a torn undertunic from her once shiny uniform, Ling now seemed far wilder than the Jijoan natives she once called “savages.” In a cloth sling she carried a crimson torus that leaked gore like a wounded sausage.
    Lark saw her meaning. Ever since they had tried sabotaging the dreadnought’s control chamber, giant Jophur and their robot servants had chased them across the vastvessel. As fugitives, the humans mustn’t lead pursuers to the one place offering food and shelter.
    â€œWhere to then?” Lark hated being in the open. He grasped their only weapon, a circular purple tube. Larger and healthier than the red one, it was their sole key to get past locked doors and unwary guardians.
    Ling knew starships far better than he. But this behemoth warship was different. She peered up one shadowy tunnel, a curled shaft that seemed more organic than artificial.
    â€œJust pick a direction. Quickly. I hear someone coming.”
    With a wistful glance toward their “nest,” Lark took her hand and plunged away at right angles, into another passageway.
    The walls glistened with an oily sheen, each passage or portal emitting its own distinct aroma, partly making up for the lack of written signs. Although he was just a primitive sooner, Lark did know traeki. Those cousins of the Jophur had different personalities, but shared many physical traits. As a Jijoan native, he could grasp many nuances in the shipboard scent language.
    Despite the eerie hall curvature, he was starting to get a mental picture of the huge vessel—an oblate spheroid, studded with aggressive weaponry and driven by engines mighty enough to warp space in several ways. The remaining volume was a labyrinth of workshops, laboratories, and enigmatic chambers that puzzled even the star sophisticate, Ling. Since barely escaping the Jophur command center, they had worked their way inward, back toward the tiny eden where they had hidden after escaping their prison cell.
    The place where they first made love.
    Only now the greasy ring stacks had shut down all the axial drop tubes, blocking easy access along the
Polkjhy
’s north-south core.
    â€œIt makes the whole ship run inefficiently,”
Ling had explained earlier, with some satisfaction.
“They can’t shift or reassign crew for different tasks. We’re still hurting them, Lark, as long as we’re free!”
    He appreciated her effort to see a good side to theirpredicament. Even if the future seemed bleak, Lark felt content to be with her for as much time as they had left.
    Glancing backward, Ling gripped his arm. Heightened rustling sounds suggested pursuit was drawing near. Then Lark also heard something from the opposite direction,