Babel-17 Part 3, Chapter 5: Battle, Escape, and the End of Jebel Tarik

Part 3 ends with a bang. Several bangs, actually. A massive space battle, hand-to-hand combat on the hull of a ship, the destruction of Jebel Tarik, and Rydra finally breaking under the strain of Babel-17. This chapter is a wild ride.

Invaders at the Tip of the Tongue

They’re almost at the tip of the Dragon’s Tongue, close to Administrative Alliance Headquarters. The Ciribian ship has been following them for days, just hanging nearby. And then Jebel’s voice comes over the loudspeakers: “Ready Tarik for immediate defense.”

Invaders. Twelve degrees off galactic center. This close to Alliance Headquarters. And they’re bigger than Tarik.

The Butcher gives Rydra the situation. If Tarik doesn’t attack first, they’re done. The Invaders will run right into them. Jebel has to go on the offensive.

“Then come on, let’s attack,” Rydra says.

“You are going with me?”

“I’m a master strategist, remember?”

She loads her entire crew onto the Butcher’s spider-boat. Brass on navigation. The discorporate trio on sensors. Slug and the platoon kids. Everyone. It’s a smaller ship than the Rimbaud, ten feet shorter, but the same basic setup. And if things go badly, she wants to be able to break away and run for Headquarters.

The Spider-Boat Launches

Jebel sets up his formations. This time the code is woodworking. Hacksaws, ripsaws, crosscut blades, drill presses, lathes. “Power tools commence operations. Hand tools mark out for finishing work.”

The spider-boats launch into darkness. Through the underspeakers, the crews chatter with Tarik’s navigators.

“This is gonna be a rough one.”

“She’s right in front of me. A big mother.”

The Invader is ugly, snub-snouted, rooting toward them. The Butcher confirms the tactical problem. Jebel will smash what he can at the ejector ports, but if the Invaders still outnumber them after the surprise wears off, that’s it. Fist strikes palm in the darkness.

“You can’t just lob a gross, uncivilized atom bomb at them?” Rydra asks.

“They have deflectors that would explode it in Jebel’s hands.”

So it comes down to spider-boats and strategy.

The Ciribian Trick

The attack begins fast. Five hacksaws slip within a hundred yards and blast the Invader’s ejector ports. Red beetles scatter across the hull. The remaining twenty-seven ejectors open and spit out cruisers. The Invaders are fighting back.

And Rydra is already thinking in Babel-17.

Through her distended time sense she sees what they need. Help. And in Babel-17, the articulation of the need is also the answer.

“Break strategy, Butcher. Follow me with ten ships.”

She takes her crew off remote control and flies the spider-boat herself. Well, Brass flies it. She directs. They swing at right angles to the battle, drive behind the first sheet of Invader cruisers, and herd them toward the Ciribian ship.

Remember the Ciribians? Alliance-friendly aliens who won’t fight unless directly attacked? Part of the treaty signed in ‘47. They have a heat ray that vaporizes ships in seconds. But they’ll only use it in self-defense.

So Rydra makes the Invaders attack them.

She drives enemy cruisers toward the Ciribian ship. At least one Invader fires on the weird triple-yoked poached-egg vessel. And the Ciribians respond. The cruiser turns into white-hot smoke. Then another. Then three more. Then three more.

“Out of here, Brass!” And they swing away.

They do it again. And again. Each time, driving Invader cruisers into the Ciribians’ defensive perimeter, forcing them to fire first, letting the heat ray do the work.

Jebel’s voice comes through: “What are you doing?”

“It’s working, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But you’ve left a hole in our defenses ten miles across.”

“Fight like hell,” Rydra tells him. They’ll plug the hole in sixty seconds.

Hand-to-Hand in the Vacuum

But the Invaders figure out that Rydra’s spider-boat is the spearhead. Six cruisers get on their tail. Brass shakes most of them, but one grapples. Clannnggg through the bones of the ship. The enemy wants to board and fight hand-to-hand.

The Butcher grins. “Now to fighting hand-to-hand.”

“Where are you going?”

“With you,” Rydra says.

He cranks the gravity inductor to full field. This creates a breathable atmosphere and some heat around both ships. About twenty feet out from the surface. Beyond that, vacuum.

“It’s about ten degrees below zero out there,” he tells her.

She has a vibra-gun and a six-inch vanadium wire. He has his holster and nothing else. Not even clothes. He abandoned his breeches days ago.

They pop the hatch. Cold rushes in. Something flies over their heads. A grenade, missing the hatch by inches. It explodes. Light bleaches the Butcher’s face. He leaps onto the hull.

Rydra follows, thinking in Babel-17. Everything in slow motion. She fires at someone ducking behind an outrigger. Doesn’t wait to see if she hit. Keeps spinning. The Butcher makes for the enemy’s grapple column.

It’s fast and brutal. Vibra-guns hissing in the dark. Shadows moving on the hull. Stars overhead. The galaxy spiraling K-ward. She’s firing from on top of the Invader cruiser while they haven’t even realized she and the Butcher are outside.

Then Brass’s voice from the hatch: “All right, all right already. You got them, Captain!”

He’s holding two limp bodies. “Actually this one’s mine. He was trying to crawl back into the ship, so I stepped on his head.”

He tells them Diavalo has made Irish whiskey. Or hot buttered rum if they prefer.

“Rum,” the Butcher says. “No butter and not hot. Just rum.”

Brass drapes one arm around Rydra, the other around the Butcher. She realizes he’s half-carrying both of them.

Jebel is Dead

They cut the grapples loose and check in. The battle is over. But not well.

“How’s Tarik?”

“About half of Tarik is… discorporate.”

The Ciribians finally got the idea, roasted the big Invader ship with their heat ray, and took off. But not before Tarik got a hole in its side big enough to put three spider-boats through sideways. Everyone still alive is sealed in one quarter of the ship. No running power.

“What about Jebel?” the Butcher asks.

“Dead,” Brass says.

Then static on the speaker. “Butcher, we just saw you cast off the Invader’s cruiser. So, you got out alive.”

And it’s Jebel’s voice.

“Some people have all the luck. Captain Wong, I expect you to write me an elegy.”

He’s alive. Barely. Tarik is wrecked. But the old pirate is alive.

Rydra promises to come back with help. They’re heading to Administrative Alliance Headquarters. Brass says they’re about eighteen to twenty hours away. Right at the tip of the Dragon’s Tongue.

The Crash

The stasis generators cut in. And with the relaxation, everything Rydra has been holding back crashes down.

The sickness from Babel-17 starts climbing her body. She’s nervous. Shaking. Doubting everything. “I begin to think I’m not me anymore,” she says.

“I am,” the Butcher says softly, “and you are.”

But the hysteria has a blister in it. She smacks the rum bottle from the Butcher’s hand. “Don’t drink that! Diavalo, he might poison us!” She’s stammering. Stuttering. The childhood stutter is back, the one she thought she’d beaten years ago.

“…to kill… something to kill… so no you, no…”

She’s trying to say something about the spy on her crew. About the danger. About Babel-17 taking her apart from the inside. But the words won’t come.

And then she does it. The thing the Butcher told her to do only as a last resort.

He said: if you are ever in danger, go into my brain, see what is there, use whatever you need.

She goes in.

An image without words. A memory of a barroom brawl. She caught a punch, staggered back. Someone threw the bar mirror at her. Her own terrified face came screaming toward her and smashed over her outstretched hand. That’s what it feels like when she enters the Butcher’s mind.

And that’s where Part 3 ends.

Looking Back at Part 3

Okay. Let me step back and look at what Delany did across these five chapters.

Part 3 is where Babel-17 transforms from a mystery novel with spaceships into something completely different. The setting changes. The Rimbaud is gone. Jebel Tarik is a floating world with its own culture, its own rules, its own language of codes and courtesies. And in this new setting, Rydra doesn’t just study Babel-17. She becomes it.

Think about what she does in Part 3. She breaks a web by naming it. She destroys a military formation by recognizing the same pattern. She reads minds. She weaponizes poetry. She outmaneuvers an Invader fleet by tricking aliens into fighting for her. She fights hand-to-hand on the hull of a ship in near-vacuum.

All because of a language.

But each time she uses it, she pays more. The sickness gets worse. Her stutter comes back. She starts losing her sense of self. “I begin to think I’m not me anymore.” She’s becoming the most capable person in the story, and simultaneously falling apart.

And then there’s the Butcher. A man with no “I” learning to have one. A killer who tries to save babies. Someone who confuses “you” and “I” because, in the deepest sense, he can’t tell where he ends and other people begin.

Rydra teaches him what “I” means. He offers her his brain to use as a weapon. They’re mirror images of each other. She has too much self-awareness and it’s being eroded by Babel-17. He has none and is trying to build it. They meet in the middle, in a language they’re making up as they go.

Part 3 is the heart of this book. Everything before it was setup. Everything after will be payoff. And right now, at the end of chapter 5, Rydra is inside the Butcher’s mind, staring at a mirror image of her own terrified face.

Next up: Part 4. The Butcher gets his own section. And some of these questions finally get answers.

This is post 14 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

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