Free Heirs of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Page B

dream go with the breath she’d been holding. It was a dream she had once cherished, of being part of a mind that spanned the galaxy, infinite in possibility and incomprehensible in form. Now she felt she’d be lucky to see out the month in one piece.
    “Do you know what a fovea is?”
    Kingsley Oborn’s voice came from behind her, followed by the sound of footsteps. She turned to face the biotechnician as he walked down into the pit of the Map Room.
    “I’m sorry, Kingsley?”
    “A fovea ,” he repeated. “Have you heard of the term?”
    She nodded, still confused. “It’s the part of the eye we look at things with, isn’t it? The part that takes in all the detail?”
    “That’s right. The rest of the cornea sees things only vaguely, which is why we move our eyes around a lot without knowing.” Oborn came to a halt in front of her. “The eye is constantly scanning our field of view, filling in the details. That movement is called a saccade. Both saccade and fovea evolved in different senses for a number of different animals, mainly in an attempt to keep the mass and complexity of the brain down. If every part of our cornea was as sensitive as the fovea, our heads would have to be fifty times larger to deal with all the information.”
    “I presume this is going somewhere.”
    He nodded significantly. “I think this is how the Starfish are sweeping the wake for anything—or anyone—we leave behind.”
    Hatzis frowned. “I’m not sure I follow.”
    Oborn seemed almost pleased with himself for having thought of something she hadn’t. “There’s no possible way the Starfish could sweep every cubic centimeter across such a vast front. It would take unimaginable resources to do such a thing. But they may have ways to conduct a low-level survey, looking for suspicious points, then focus in on those points with their equivalent of a fovea. This fovea confirms a suspicious sighting, then the cutters move in and get rid of it.”
    Her mind leapt ahead of him. “So if we want to fall behind and not be destroyed, we’re going to have to find a way to evade the fovea.”
    He nodded again. “There’s not much we can do about the low-level survey, because we have no idea how that’s being conducted. But the fovea, that’s a different story altogether. Look.”
    He held out a hand and she took it, accepting the data that flowed smoothly into her through their palms.
    “We’ve seen enough Starfish attacks now to recognize a pattern,” he continued. “There’s always an anomaly shortly beforehand somewhere in the system. See here—this weird radiant point.” He indicated several that had appeared in the previous weeks. “We’ve always assumed that these are symptomatic of the Starfish’s propulsion technology. The cutters come much faster, we suspect, than the hole ship drives would allow; that they are preceded by some sort of reverse echo doesn’t seem impossible. But it’s always bothered me. If the Starfish are so advanced, and so aggressive, then why would they allow something like this to give their arrival away? It doesn’t make sense.” He shook his head. “No. I think what we’re seeing are the fovea—the eyes of the Starfish watching the target as the swords approach. And if we can see them, then maybe we can learn not to be seen by them.”
    The images folded away, their job done. Oborn leaned back, looking even more self-satisfied than he had before. He had every right to be, too. Like his engram on Juno, Kingsley had been co-opted from other duties to be a leader of the research team probing the gifts for any kind of information or technology that might be of use to them in the battle against the Starfish. Although the Yuhl had been plumbing such knowledge for centuries, their access to the gifts was only secondhand, rarely stopping long enough to access the physical structures themselves and for the most part being forced to rely on recordings. An added complication was that the