Webdancers by Brian Herbert

tunic and stared at his muscular abdomen, the place where she had struck. The vein of his morphing, gray-and-black skin had started on his chest, but not at that spot beside his belly button. Even so, there might be a time correlation. The physical changes had begun a short while after her attack, and now included the place she had stabbed him, a small oblong area that was darker than the rest of the altered skin.
    He paused and fixed his gaze on the open doorway, the gray-green natural light out in the corridor, and the mottled gray skin of the podship. Just focusing on various sections of the sentient vessel seemed to have a strange fascination for him, reminding him of how he felt as a small boy when he stared transfixed into pools of water, hypnotized by the changes in light and ripples of liquid motion. The interior of each Aopoddae vessel was like that in a sense, as he detected tiny shiftings in the illumination and skin surfaces all the time, subtle differences in hue and texture that he didn’t think the other passengers noticed.
    Perhaps Tesh, as the Parvii pilot, could see such things. It might be possible. Beautiful Tesh . His thoughts drifted toward her, and then away again.
    Abruptly, he found himself plunging outward, beyond the confines of the podship and into space. As he hurtled into the frozen void he saw Webdancer and the rest of the huge fleet behind him, with porthole lights visible along their hulls. Quickly, the fleet vanished from view, and a new awareness came over him.
    Noah’s motion stabilized, and he found himself standing motionless inside the sectoid chamber of yet another podship, piloting it in the Tulyan manner along the decaying infrastructure at much higher speeds than Webdancer had ever been able to attain. He changed course repeatedly, finding optimum strands for the ship to utilize. In a state of hyper awareness, Noah realized that it was not his Human body in the sectoid chamber. Rather, he had become a metallic green mist within an amorphous, unidentifiable shape, perhaps the form he had been evolving into before this happened.
    But, as if in contradiction of that, on the prow of the vessel he saw—somehow—his own Human face in an enlarged form, suggesting that he had discovered a modified Tulyan method of piloting the craft. Did the form of the pilot lose its separate features inside the sectoid chamber when its energy merged into the podship flesh?
    Another question without an answer.
    Far off in the distance, he recognized some of the major planetary systems of the Merchant Prince Alliance, and as he flew on he made out the galactic sectors of other races. He made his way toward some of the regions that he recognized. But soon he found, strangely, that he was flying right through them as if they were no more than holo images. On previous excursions into Timeweb he had been able to see activity in the galaxy, particularly other ships as they negotiated the podways. Now it was different. He could not make out details such as that, only increasingly blurry views as he neared and passed through the systems.
    And he sensed—but could not see—a great but undefined danger out in the galaxy, beyond the crumbling infrastructure that everyone knew about. As he turned around and went back in the direction he had come, he wondered what the feeling meant.
    On the way Noah recalled an earlier venture into the paranormal realm in which he saw Hibbil and Adurian soldiers inside strange podships that were piloted by Hibbils using computerized navigation units. It had been peculiar and unexplained, and he had reported it to Tesh Kori and Doge Anton.
    Alas, with no way of reentering the web at will, and no way of verifying what he had seen, Noah never could tell if that startling vision had been real or not. It had not made any sense at all, since Hibbils were aligned with Humans, and Adurians were the long-time allies of Mutatis. Since then, there had been no other sightings of the odd