terror.
Oh Pham, how I wish I could talk to you like before! She curled gently
in on herself, the way you can in zero gee. The sobs came softly, but
without hope. They had not exchanged a hundred words in the last five days.
They lived as if with guns at each others' heads. And that was the literal
truth -- she had made it so. When she and he and the Skroderiders had been
together, at least the danger had been a shared burden. Now they were split
apart and their enemies were slowly gaining on them. What good could Pham's
godshatter be against a thousand enemy ships and the Blight behind them?
She floated for a timeless while, the sobs fading into despairing
silence. And again she wondered if what she'd done could possibly be right.
She had threatened Pham's life to protect Blueshell and Greenstalk and their
kind. In doing so, she had kept secret what might be the greatest treachery
in the history of the Known Net. Can one person make such a decision? Pham
had asked her that, and she had answered yes but....
The question toyed with her every day. And every day she tried to see
some way out. She wiped her face silently. She didn't doubt what Pham had
discovered.
There were some smug posters on the Net who argued that something as
vast as the Blight was simply a tragic disaster, and not an evil. Evil, they
argued, could only have meaning on smaller scales, in the hurt that one
sophont does to another. Before RIP, the argument had seemed a frivolous
playing with words. Now she saw that it was meaningful -- and dead wrong.
The Blight had created the Riders, a marvelous and peaceful race. Their
presence on a billion worlds had been a good. And behind it all was the
potential for converting the sovereign minds of friends into monsters. When
she thought of Blueshell and Greenstalk, and the fear welled up and she knew
the poison that was there -- even though they were good people -- then she
knew she'd glimpsed evil on the Transcendent scale.
She had gotten Blueshell and Greenstalk into this mission; they had not
asked for it. They were friends and allies, and she would not harm them
because of what they could become.
Maybe it was the latest news items. Maybe it was confronting the same
impossibilities for the n'th time: Ravna gradually straightened, looking at
those last messages. So. She believed Pham about the Skroderider threat. She
also believed these two were only enemies in potential. She had thrown away
everything to save them and their kind. Maybe it was a mistake, but take
what advantage there is in it. If they are to be saved because you think
they are allies, then treat them as allies. Treat them as the friends they
are. We are all pawns together.
Ravna pushed gently toward her cabin's doorway.
The Skroderiders' cabin was just behind the command deck. Since the
debacle at RIP, the two had not left it. As she drifted down the passage
toward their door, Ravna half-expected to see Pham's handiwork lurking in
the shadows. She knew he was doing his best to "protect himself". Yet there
was nothing unusual. What will he think of my visiting them?
She announced herself. After a moment Blueshell appeared. His skrode
was wiped clean of cosmetic stripes, and the room behind him was a jumble.
He waved her in with quick jerks of his fronds.
"My lady."
"Blueshell," she nodded at him. Half the time she cursed herself for
trusting the Riders; the other half, she was mortally embarrassed for having
left them alone. "H-how is Greenstalk?"
Surprisingly, Blueshell's fronds snapped together in a smile. "You
guessed? This is the first day with her new skrode.... I will show you, if
you'd like."
He threaded around equipment that was scattered in a lattice across the
room. It was similar to the shop equipment Pham had used to build his
powered armor. And if Pham had seen it, he might have lost all self-control.
"I've worked on it every minute since ... Pham locked us in here."
Greenstalk was in the other room. Her stalk and fronds rose from a
silver pot. There were no wheels. It looked nothing like a traditional
skrode. Blueshell rolled across the ceiling and extended a frond down to his
mate. He rustled something at her, and after a moment, she replied.
"The skrodeling is very limited, no mobility, no redundant power
supplies. I copied it off a Lesser Skroderider design, a simple thing
designed by Dirokimes. It's not meant for more than sitting in one place,
facing in one direction. But it provides her with short-term memory support,
and attention focusers.... She is back with me." He fussed around her, some
fronds caressing hers, others pointing to the gadget he had built for her.
"She herself was not badly injured. Sometimes I wonder -- whatever Pham
says, maybe at the last second he could not kill her."
He spoke nervously, as though afraid of what Ravna might say.
"The first few days I was very worried. But the surgeon is good. It
gave her plenty of time to stand in strong surf. To think slowly. Since I've
added on this skrodeling, she has practiced the calisthenics of memory,
repeating what the surgeon or I say to her. With the skrodeling, she can
hold on to a new memory for almost five hundred seconds. That's usually long
enough for her natural mind to commit a thought to long-term memory."
Ravna drifted close. There were some new creases in Greenstalk's
fronds. Those would be scars healing. Her visual surfaces followed Ravna's
approach. The Rider knew she was here; her whole posture was friendly.
"Can she talk Trisk, Blueshell? Do you have a voder hooked up?"
"What?" Buzz. He was forgetful or nervous, Ravna couldn't tell which.
"Yes, yes. Just give me a minute.... There was no need before. No one wanted
to talk to us." He fiddled with something on the home-made skrode.
After a moment, "Hello, Ravna. I ... recognize you." Her fronds rustled
in time with the words.
"I know you, too. We, I am glad that you are back."
The voder voice was faint, wistful? "Yes. It's hard for me to tell. I
do want to talk, but I'm not sure ... am I'm making sense?"
Out of Greenstalk's sight, Blueshell flicked a long tendril, a gesture:
say yes.
"Yes, I understand you, Greenstalk." And Ravna resolved never again to
get angry with Greenstalk about not remembering.
"Good." Her fronds straightened and she didn't say anything more.
"See?" came Blueshell's voder voice. "I am brightly cheerful. Even now,
Greenstalk is committing this conversation to long-term memory. It goes
slowly for now, but I am improving the skrodeling. I'm sure her slowness is
mainly emotional shock." He continued to brush at Greenstalk's fronds, but
she didn't say anything more. Ravna wondered just how brightly cheerful he
could be.
Behind the Riders were a set of display windows, customized now for the
Rider outlook. "You've been following the News?" Ravna asked.
"Yes, indeed."
"I-I feel so helpless." I feel so foolish, saying that to you.
But Blueshell didn't take offense. He seemed grateful for the change of
topic, preferring the gloom at a distance. "Yes. We certainly are famous
now. Three fleets chasing us down, my lady. Ha ha."
"They don't seem to be gaining very fast."
Frond shrug. "Sir Pham has turned out to be a competent ship's master.
I'm afraid things will change as we descend. The ship's higher automation
will gradually fail. What you call 'manual control' will become very
important. OOB was designed for my race, my lady. No matter what Sir Pham
thinks of us, at bottom we can fly it better than any. So bit by bit the
others will gain -- at least those who truly understand their own ships."
It was something she hadn't guessed, certainly something she would
never have found reading the Net. Too bad it's also bad news. "S-surely Pham
must know this?"
"I think he must. But he is trapped in his own fears. What can he do?
If not for you, My Lady Ravna, he might have killed us already. Maybe when
the choice comes down to dying in the next hour against trusting us, maybe
then there will be a chance."
"By then it will be too late. Look, even if he doesn't trust -- even
though he believes the worst of Riders -- there must still be a way." And it
came to her that sometimes you don't have to change the way people think, or
even whom they may hate. "Pham wants to get to the Bottom, to recover this
Countermeasure. He thinks you may be from the Blight, and after the same
thing. But up to a point -- " up to a point he can cooperate, postpone the
showdown he imagines till perhaps it won't matter.
Even as she started to say it, Blueshell was already shouting back at
her. "I'm am not of the Blight! Greenstalk is not! The Rider race is not!"
He swept around his mate, rolled across the ceiling till his fronds rattled
right before Ravna's face.
"I'm sorry. It's just the potential -- "
"Nonsense!" His voder buzzed off scale. "We ran in to an evil few.
Every race has such, people who will kill for trade. They forced Greenstalk,
substituted data at her voder. Pham Nuwen would kill our billions for the
sake of this fantasy." He waved, inarticulate. Something she had never seen
in a Skroderider: his fronds actually changed tone, darkened.
The motion ceased, yet he said nothing more. And then Ravna heard it, a
keening that might have come from a voder. The sound was steadily growing, a
howl that made all Blueshell's sound effects friendly nonsense. It was
Greenstalk.
The scream reached a threshold just below pain, then broke into choppy
Triskweline: "It's true! Oh, by all our trading, Blueshell, it's true...."
and staticky noise came from her voder. Her fronds started shaking, random
turning that must be like a human's eyes wildly staring, like a human's
mouth mumbling hysteria.
Blueshell was already back by the wall, reaching to adjust her new
skrode. Greenstalk's fronds brushed him away, and her voder voice continued,
"I was horror struck, Blueshell. I was horror struck, struck by horror. And
it would not stop...." the voice rattled quiet for just an instant, and this
time Blueshell made no move. "I remember everything up till the last five
minutes. And everything Pham says is true, dear love. Loyal as you are, and
I have seen that loyalty now for two hundred years, you would be turned in
an instant ... just as I was." Now that the dam broke, her words came
quickly, mostly making sense. The horrors she could remember were graven
deep, and she was finally coming out of ghastly shock. "I was right behind
you, remember, Blueshell? You were deep in your trading with the tusk-legs,
so deep you did not really see. I noticed the other Riders coming toward us.
No matter: a friendly meeting, so far from home. Then one touched my Skrode.
I -- " Greenstalk hesitated. Her fronds rattled and she began again, "horror
struck, horror struck ...."
After a moment: "It was like suddenly new memories in the skrode,
Blueshell. New memories, new attitudes. But thousands of years deep. And not
mine. Instantly, instantly. I never even lost consciousness. I thought just
as clearly, I remembered all I had before."
"And when you resisted?" Ravna said softly.
"... Resisted? My Lady Ravna, I did not resist. I was theirs.... No.
Not theirs, for they were owned, too. We were things, our intelligence in
service to another's goal. Dead, and alive to see our death. I would kill
you, I would kill Pham, I would kill Blueshell. You know I tried. And when I
did, I wanted to succeed. You could not imagine, Ravna. You humans speak of
violation. You could never know...." Long pause. "That's not quite right. At
the Top of the Beyond, within the Blight itself -- perhaps there, everyone
lives as I did."
The shuddering did not subside, but her gestures were no longer
aimless. The fronds were saying something in her own language, and brushing
gently against Blueshell.
"Our whole race, dear love. Just as Pham says it."
Blueshell wilted, and Ravna felt the sort of gut-tearing she had when
they learned of Sjandra Kei. That had been her worlds, her family, her life.
Blueshell was hearing worse.
Ravna pushed a little closer, near enough to run her hand up the side
of Greenstalk's fronds. "Pham says it's the greater skrodes that are the
cause." Sabotage hidden billions of years deep.
"Yes, it is mainly the skrodes. The 'great gift' we Riders love so....
It is a design for control, but I fear we were remade for it, too. When they
touched my skrode, I was converted instantly. Instantly, everything I cared
for was meaningless. We are like smart bombs, scattered by the trillions
through space that everyone thinks is safe. We will be used sparingly. We
are the Blight's hidden weapon, especially in the Low Beyond."
Blueshell twitched, and his voice came out jerkily: "And everything
Pham claims is correct."
"No, Blueshell, not everything." Ravna remembered that last chilling
standoff with Pham Nuwen. "He has the facts, but he weighs them wrong. As
long as your skrodes are not perverted, you are the same folk that I trusted
to fly me to the Bottom."
Blueshell angled his look away from her, an angry shrug. Greenstalk's
voice came instead. "As long as the skrode has not been perverted.... But
look how easy it was done, how sudden I became the Blight's."
"Yes, but could it happen except by direct touch? Could you be
'changed' by reading the Net News?" She meant the question as ghastly
sarcasm, but poor Greenstalk took it seriously:
"Not by a News item, nor by standard protocol messages. But accepting a
transmission targeted on skrode utilities might do it."
"Then we are safe here. You, because you no longer ride a greater
skrode, Blueshell because -- "
"Because I was never touched -- but how can you know that?" His anger
was still there deep within shame, but now it was a hopeless anger, directed
at something very far away.
"No, dear love, you have not been touched. I would know."
"Yes, but why should Ravna believe you?"
Everything could be a lie, thought Ravna, ... but I believe Greenstalk.
I believe we four are the only ones in all the Beyond who can hurt the
Blight. If only Pham could see it. And that brought her back to: "You say we
will start losing our lead?"
Blueshell waved an affirmative. "As soon as we are a little lower. They
should have us in a matter of weeks."
And then it won't matter who was perverted and who was not. "I think we
should have a little chat with Pham Nuwen." Godshatter and all.
Beforehand Ravna couldn't imagine how the confrontation would turn out.
Just possibly -- if he'd lost all touch with reality -- Pham might try to
kill them when they appeared on the command deck. More likely there would be
rage and argument and threats, and they would be back to square one.
Instead ... it was almost like the old Pham, from before Harmonious
Repose. He let them enter the command deck, he made no comment when Ravna
set herself carefully between himself and the Riders. He listened without
interruption, while Ravna explained what Greenstalk had said. "These two are
safe, Pham. And without their help we'll not make it to the Bottom."
He nodded, looked away at the windows. Some showed natural starscape;
most were ultratrace displays, the closest thing to a picture of the enemies
that were closing on the OOB. His calm expression broke for just an instant,
and the Pham that loved her seemed to stare out, desperate: "And you really
believe all this, Rav? How?" Then the lid was back on, his expression
distant and neutral. "Never mind. Certainly it's true: without all of us
working together we'll never make it to Tines' World. Blueshell, I accept
your offer. Subject to cautious safeguards, we work together." Till I can
safely dispose of you, Ravna could feel the unsaid words behind his
blandness. Showdown deferred.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
CHAPTER 33
They were less than eight weeks from Tines' World, both Pham and
Blueshell said. If the Zone conditions remained stable. If they were not
overtaken in the meantime.
Less than two months, after the six already voyaged. But the days were
not like before. Every one was a challenge, a standoff sometimes cloaked in
civility, sometimes flaring into threats of sudden death -- as when Pham
retrieved Blueshell's shop equipment.
Pham was living on the command deck now; when he left it, the hatch was
locked on his ID. He had destroyed, or thought he had destroyed, all other
privileged links to the ship's automation. He and Blueshell were in almost
constant collaboration ... but not like before. Every step was slow,
Blueshell explaining everything, allowed to demonstrate nothing. That's
where the arguments came closest to deadly force, when Pham must give in to
one peril or the other. For every day the pursuing fleets were a little bit
closer: two bands of killers, and what was left of Sjandra Kei. Evidently
some of the SjK Commercial Security fleet could still fight, wanted revenge
on the Alliance. Once Ravna suggested to Pham that they contact Commercial
Security, try to persuade them to attack the Blighter fleet. Pham had given
her a blank look. "Not yet, maybe not ever," he said, and turned away. In a
way his answer was a relief: Such a battle would be a suicidal long shot.
Ravna didn't want the last of her kinsfolk dying for her.
So the OOB might arrive at Tines' World before the enemy, but with what
little time to spare! Some days Ravna withdrew in tears and despair. What
brought her back was Jefri and Greenstalk. They both needed her, and for a
few weeks more she could still help.
Mr. Steel's defense plans were proceeding. The Tines were even having
some success with their wideband radio. Steel reported that Woodcarver's
main force was on its way north; there was more than one race against time.
She spent many hours with the OOB's library, devising more gifts for the
Jefri's friends. Some things -- like telescopes -- were easy, but others....
It wasn't wasted effort. Even if the Blight won, its fleet might ignore the
natives, might settle for killing the OOB and winning back the
Countermeasure.
Greenstalk was slowly improving. At first Ravna was afraid the
improvement might be in her own imagination. Ravna was spending a good part
of each day sitting with the Rider, trying to see progress in her responses.
Greenstalk was very "far away", almost like a human with stroke damage and
prosthesis. In fact, she seemed regressed from the articulate horror of her
first conversations. Maybe her recent progress was just a mirror to Ravna's
sensitivity, to the fact that Ravna was with her so much. Blueshell insisted
there was progress, but with that stubborn inflexibility of his. Two weeks,
three -- and there was no doubt: something was healing at the boundary
between Rider and skrodeling. Greenstalk consistently made sense,
consistently committed important rememberings.... Now as often as not it was
she helping Ravna. Greenstalk saw things that Ravna had missed: "Sir Pham
isn't the only one who is afraid of us Skroderiders. Blueshell is frightened
too, and it is tearing him apart. He can't admit it even to me, but he
thinks it's possible that we're infected independently of our skrodes. He
desperately wants to convince Pham that this is not true -- and so to
convince himself." She was silent for a long moment, one frond brushing
against Ravna's arm. Sea sounds surrounded them in the cabin, but ship's
automation could no longer produce surging water. "Sigh. We must pretend the
surf, dear Ravna. Somewhere it will always be, no matter what happened at
Sjandra Kei, no matter what happens here."
Blueshell was hearty gentleness around his mate, but alone with Ravna
his rage showed through: "No, no, I don't object to Sir Pham's navigation,
at least not now. Perhaps we could be a little further ahead with me
directly at the helm, but the fastest ships behind us would still be
closing. It's the other things, my lady. You know how untrustworthy our
automation is down here. Pham is hurting it further. He's written his own
security overrides. He's turning the ship's environment automation into a
system of boobytraps."
Ravna had seen evidence of this. The areas around OOB's command deck
and ship's workshop looked like military checkpoints. "You know his fears.
If this makes him feel safer -- "
"That's not the point, My Lady. I would do anything to persuade him to
accept my help. But what he's doing is deadly dangerous. Our Bottom
automation is not reliable, and he's making it actively worse. If we get
some sudden stress, the environment programs will likely have a bizarre
crash -- atmosphere dump, thermal runaway, anything."
"I -- "
"Doesn't he understand? Pham controls nothing." His voder broke into a
nonlinear squawk. "He has the ability to destroy, but that is all. He needs
my help. He was my friend. Doesn't he understand?"
Pham understood ... oh, Pham understood. He and Ravna still talked.
Their arguments were the hardest thing in her life. And sometimes they
didn't exactly argue; sometimes it was almost like rational discussion:
"I haven't been taken over, Ravna. Not like the Blight takes over
Riders, anyway. I still have charge of my soul." He turned away from the
console and flashed a wan smile in her direction, acknowledging the flaw in
such self-conviction. And from things like that smile, Ravna was convinced
that Pham Nuwen still lived, and sometimes spoke.
"What about the godshatter state? I see you for hours, just staring at
the tracking display, or mucking around in the library and the News,"
scanning faster than any human could consciously read.
Pham shrugged. "It's studying the ships that are chasing us, trying to
figure out just what belongs to whom, just what capabilities each might
have. I don't know the details. Self-awareness is on vacation then," when
all Pham's mind was turned into a processor for whatever programs Old One
had downloaded. A few hours of fugue state might yield an instant of
Power-grade thought -- and even that he didn't consciously remember. "But I
know this. Whatever the godshatter is, it's a very narrow thing. It's not
alive; in some ways it may not even be very smart. For everyday matters like
ship piloting, there's just good old Pham Nuwen."
"... there's the rest of us, Pham. Blueshell would like to help," Ravna
spoke softly. This was the place where Pham would close into icy silence --
or blow up in rage. This day, he just cocked his head. "Ravna, Ravna. I know
I need him.... And, and I'm glad I need him. That I don't have to kill him."
Yet. Pham's lips quivered for a second, and she thought he might start
crying.
"The godshatter can't know Blueshell -- "
"Not the godshatter. It's not making me act this way -- I'm doing what
any person should do when the stakes are this high." The words were spoken
without anger. Maybe there was a chance. Maybe she could reason:
"Blueshell and Greenstalk are loyal, Pham. Except at Harmonious Repose
-- "
Pham sighed, "Yeah. I've thought about that a lot. They came to Relay
from Straumli Realm. They got Vrinimi looking for the refugee ship. That
smells of setup, but probably unknowing -- maybe even a setup by something
opposing the Blight. In any case they were innocent then, else the Blight
would have known about Tines world right from the beginning. The Blight knew
nothing till RIP, till Greenstalk was converted. And I know Blueshell was
loyal even then. He knew things about my armor -- the remotes, for instance
-- that he could have warned the others about."
Hope came as a surprise to Ravna. He really had thought things out, and
-- "It's just the skrodes, Pham. They're traps waiting to be sprung. But
we're isolated here, and you destroyed the one that Greenstalk -- "
Pham was shaking his head. "It's more than the skrodes. The Blight had
its hand in Rider design, too, at least to some degree. I can't imagine the
takeover of Greenstalk's being so smooth otherwise."
"Y-yes. A risk. A very small risk compared to -- "
Pham didn't move, but something in him seemed to draw away from her,
denying the support she could offer. "A small risk? We don't know. The
stakes are so high. I'm walking a tightrope. If I don't use Blueshell now,
we'll be shot out of space by the Blighter fleet. If I let him do too much,
if I trust him, then he or some part of him could betray us. All I have is
the godshatter, and a bunch of memories that ... that may be the biggest
fakes of all." These last words were nearly inaudible. He looked up at her,
a look that was both cold and terribly lost. "But I'm going to use what I
have, Rav, and whatever it is I am. Somehow I'm going to get us to Tines'
World. Somehow I'm going to get Old One's godshatter to whatever is there."
It was another three weeks before Blueshell's predictions came true.
The OOB had seemed a sturdy beast up in the Middle Beyond; even its
damaged ultradrive had failed gracefully. Now the ship was leaking bugs in
all directions. Much of it had nothing to do with Pham's meddling. Without
those final consistency checks, none of the OOB's Bottom automation was
really trustworthy. But its failures were compounded by Pham's desperate
security hacks.
The ship's library had source code for generic Bottom automation. Pham
spent several days revising it for the OOB. All four of them were on the
command deck during the installation, Blueshell trying to help, Pham
suspiciously examining every suggestion. Thirty minutes into the
installation, there were muffled banging noises down the main corridor.
Ravna might have ignored them, except that she'd never heard the like aboard
the OOB.
Pham and the Riders reacted with near panic; spacers don't like
unexplained bumps in the night. Blueshell raced to the hatch, floated
fronds-first through the hole. "I see nothing, Sir Pham."
Pham was paging quickly through the diagnostic displays, mixed format
things partly from the new setup. "I've got some warning lights here, but --
"
Greenstalk started to say something, but Blueshell was back and talking
fast: "I don't believe it. Anything like this should make pictures, a
detailed report. Something is terribly wrong."
Pham stared at him a second, then returned to his diagnostics. Five
seconds passed. "You're right. Status is just looping through stale
reports." He began grabbing views from cameras all over the OOB's interior.
Barely half of them reported, but what they showed...
The ship's water reservoir was a foggy, icy cavern. That was the
banging sound -- tonnes of water, spaced. A dozen other support services had
gone bizarre, and --
-- the armed checkpoint outside the workshop had slagged down. The
beamers were firing continuously on low power. And for all the destruction,
the diagnostics still showed green or amber or no report. Pham got a camera
in the workshop itself. The place was on fire.
Pham jumped up from his saddle and bounced off the ceiling. For an
instant she thought he might go racing off the bridge. Then he tied himself
down and grimly began trying to put out the fire.
For the next few minutes, the bridge was almost quiet, just Pham
quietly swearing as none of the obvious things worked. "Interlocking
failures," he mumbled the phrase a couple of times. "The firesnuff
automation is down.... I can't dump atmosphere from the shop. My beamers
have melted everything shut."
Ship fire. Ravna had seen pictures of such disasters, but they had
always seemed an improbable thing. In the midst of universal vacuum, how
could a fire survive? And in zero-gee, surely a fire would choke itself even
if the crew couldn't dump atmosphere. The workshop camera had a hazy view on
the real thing: True, the flames ate the oxygen around them. There were
sheets of construction foam that were only lightly scorched, protected for
the moment by dead air. But the fire spread out, moving steadily into
still-fresh air. In places, heat-driven turbulence enriched the mix, and
previously burned areas blazed up.
"It's still got ventilation, Sir Pham."
"I know. I can't shut it. The vents must be melted open."
"It's as likely software." Blueshell was silent for a second. "Try this
-- " the directions were meaningless to Ravna, some low-level workaround.
But Pham nodded, and his fingers danced across the console.
In the workshop, the surface-hugging flames crept farther across the
construction foam. Now they licked at the innards of the armor Pham had
spent so much time on. This latest revision was only half finished. Ravna
remembered he was working on reactive armor now .... There would be
oxidizers there. "Pham, is the armor sealed -- "
The fire was sixty meters aft and behind a dozen bulkheads. The
explosion came as a distant thump, almost innocent. But in the camera view,
the armor dismembered itself, and the fire blazed triumphant.
Seconds later, Pham got Blueshell's suggestion working, and the
workshop's vents closed. The fire in the wrecked armor continued for another
half hour, but did not spread beyond the shop.
It took two days to clean up, to estimate the damage, and have some
confidence that no new disaster was on the way. Most of the workshop was
destroyed. They would have no armor on Tines world. Pham salvaged one of the
beamers that had been guarding the entrance to the shop. Disaster was
scattered all across the ship, the classic random ruin of interlocking
failures: They had lost fifty percent of their water. The ship's landing
boat had lost its higher automation.
OOB's rocket drive was massively degraded. That was unimportant here in
interstellar space, but their final velocity matching would be done at only
0.4 gees. Thank goodness the agrav worked; they would have no trouble
maneuvering in steep gravitational wells -- that is, landing on Tines world.
Ravna knew how close they were to losing the ship, but she watched Pham
with even greater dread. She was so afraid that he would take this as final
evidence of Rider treachery, that this would drive him over the edge.
Strangely, almost the opposite happened. His pain and devastation were
obvious, but he didn't lash out, just doggedly went about gathering up the
pieces. He was talking to Blueshell more now, not letting him modify the
automation, but cautiously accepting more of his advice. Together they
restored the ship to something like its pre-fire state.
She asked Pham about it. "No change of heart," he finally said. "I had
to balance the risks, and I messed up.... And maybe there is no balance.
Maybe the Blight will win."
The godshatter had bet too much on Pham's doing it all himself. Now it
was turning down the paranoia a little.
Seven weeks out from Harmonious Repose, less than one week from
whatever waited at Tines' world, Pham went into a multiday fugue. Before he
had been busy, a futile attempt to run handmade checks on all the automation
they might need at Tines' World. Now -- Ravna couldn't even get him to eat:
The nav display showed the three fleets as identified by the News and
Pham's intuition: the Blight's agents, the Alliance for the Defense, and
what was left of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. Deadly monsters and the
remains of a victim. The Alliance still proclaimed itself with regular
bulletins on the News. SjK Commercial Security had posted a few terse
refutations, but was mostly silent; they were unused to propaganda, or -- as
likely -- uninterested in it. A private revenge was all that remained to
Commercial Security. And the Blighter fleet? The News hadn't heard anything
from them. Piecing together departures and lost ships, War Trackers
Newsgroup concluded they were a wildly ad hoc assembly, whatever the Blight
had controlled down here at the time of the RIP debacle. Ravna knew that the
War Trackers analysis was wrong about one thing: The Blighter fleet was not
silent. Thirty times over the last weeks, they had sent messages at the OOB
... in skrode maintenance format. Pham had had the ship reject the messages
unread -- and then worried about whether the order was really followed.
After all, the OOB was of Rider design.
But now the torment in him was submerged. Pham sat for hours, staring
at the display. Soon Sjandra Kei would close with the Alliance fleet. At
least one set of villains would pay. But the Blighter fleet and at least
part of the Alliance would survive.... Maybe this fugue was just godshatter
getting desperate.
Three days passed; Pham snapped out of it. Except for the new thinness
in his face, he seemed more normal than he had in weeks. He asked Ravna to
bring the Riders up to the bridge.
Pham waved at the ultradrive traces that floated in the window. The
three fleets were spread through a rough cylinder, five light-years deep and
three across. The display captured only the heart of that volume, where the
fastest of the pursuers had clustered. The current position of each ship was
a fleck of light trailing an unending stream of fainter lights -- the
ultradrive trace left by that vehicle's drive. "I've used red, blue, and
green to mark my best guess as to the fleet affiliation of each trace." The
fastest ships were collected in a blob so dense that it looked white at this
scale, but with colored streamers diverging behind. There were other tags,
annotations he had set but which he admitted once to Ravna he didn't
understand.
"The front edge of that mob -- the fastest of the fast -- is still
gaining."
Blueshell said hesitantly. "We might get a little more speed if you
would grant me direct control. Not much, but -- "
Pham's response was civil at least. "No, I'm thinking of something
else, something Ravna suggested a while back. It's always been a possibility
and ... I ... think the time may have come for it."
Ravna moved closer to the display, stared at the green traces. Their
distribution was in near agreement with what the News claimed to be the
remnants of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. All that's left of my people.
"They've been trying to engage with the Alliance for a hundred hours now."
Pham's glance touched hers. "Yeah," he said softly. "Poor bastards.
They're literally the fleet from Port Despair. If I were them, I'd -- " His
expression smoothed over again. "Any idea how well-armed they are?" That was
surely a rhetorical question, but it put the topic on the table.
"War Trackers thinks that Sjandra Kei had been expecting something
unpleasant ever since the Alliance started talking 'death to vermin'.
Commercial Security was providing deep space defense. Their fleet is
converted freighters armed with locally-designed weapons. War Trackers
claims they weren't really a match for what the other side could field, if
the Alliance was willing to take some heavy casualties. Trouble is, Sjandra
Kei never expected the planet-smasher attack. So when the Alliance fleet
showed up, ours moved out to meet it -- "
"-- and meantime the KE bombs were coming straight in to the heart
spaces of Sjandra Kei."
Into my heart spaces. "Yes. The Alliance must have been running those
bombs for weeks."
Pham Nuwen laughed shortly. "If I were shipping with the Alliance
fleet, I'd be a bit nervous now. They're down in numbers, and those retread
freighters seem about as fast as anything here.... I'll bet every pilot out
of Sjandra Kei is dead set on revenge." The emotion faded. "Hmm. There's no
way they could kill all the Alliance ships or all the Blight's, much less
all of both. It would be pointless to ...
His gaze abruptly focused on her. "So if we leave things as they are,
the Sjandra Kei fleet will eventually match position with the Alliance and
try to blow them out of existence."
Ravna just nodded. "In twelve hours or so, they say."
"And then all that will be left is the Blight's own fleet on our tail.
But if we could talk your people into fighting the right enemies..."
It was Ravna's nightmare scheme. All that was left of Sjandra Kei dying
to save the OOB ... trying to save them. There was little chance the Sjandra
Kei fleet could destroy all the Blighter ships. But they're here to fight.
Why not a vengeance that means something? That was the nightmare's message.
Now somehow it fit godshatter's plans. "There are problems. They don't know
what we're doing or the purpose of the third fleet. Anything we shout back
to them will be overheard." Ultrawave was directional, but most of their
pursuers were closely mingled.
Pham nodded. "Somehow we have to talk to them, and them alone. Somehow
we have to persuade them to fight." Faint smile. "And I think we may have
just the ... equipment ... to do all that. Blueshell: Remember that night on
the High Docks. You told us about your 'rotted cargo' from Sjandra Kei?"
"Indeed, Sir Pham. We carried one third of a cipher generated by SjK
Commercial Security for their long-range communications. It's still in the
ship's safe, though worthless without the other two thirds." Gram for gram,
crypto materials were about the most valuable thing shipped between the
stars -- and once compromised, about the most valueless. Somewhere in Out of
Band's cargo files there was an SjK one-time communications pad. Part of a
pad.
"Worthless? Maybe not. Even one third would provide us with secure
communications."
Blueshell dithered. "I must not mislead you. No competent customer
would accept such. Certainly, it provides secure communication, but the
other side has no verification that you are who you claim."
Pham's glance slid sideways, toward Ravna. There was that smile again.
"If they'll listen, I think we can convince them.... The hard part is, I
only want one of them to hear us." Pham explained what he had in mind. The
Riders' rustled faintly behind Pham's words. After all their time together,
Ravna could almost get some sense of their talk -- or maybe she just
understood their personalities. As usual, Blueshell was worrying about how
impossible the idea was, and Greenstalk was urging him to listen.
But when Pham finished, the large rider did not launch into objections.
"Across seventy light-years, ultrawave comm between ships is practical, even
without our antenna swarm; we could even have live video. But you are right,
the beam spread would include all the ships in the central cluster of
fleets. If we could reliably identify an outlying vessel as belonging to
Sjandra Kei, then what you are asking might be done; that ship could use
internal fleet codes to relay to the others. But in honesty I must warn
you," continued Blueshell, brushing back Greenstalk's gentle remonstrance,
"professional communications folk would not honor your request for talk --
would probably not even recognize it as such."
"Silly." Greenstalk finally spoke, her voder-voice gentle but clear.
"You always say things like that -- except when we are talking to paying
customers."
"Brap. Yes. Desperate times, desperate measures. I want to try it, but
I fear.... I want there to be no accusations of Rider treachery, Sir Pham. I
want you to handle this."
Pham Nuwen smiled back. "My thought exactly."
"The Aniara Fleet." That's what some of the crews of Commercial
Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth,
older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the
asteroids of Earth's solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship
launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent
civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and
then over the following years -- as their ship fell out and out into the
endless dark -- died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing.
The image was a haunting one, which was probably the reason it was known
across millennia. With the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the escape of
Commercial Security, the story seemed suddenly come true.
But we will not play it to the end. Group Captain Kjet Svensndot stared
into the tracking display. This time the death of civilization had been a
murder, and the murderers were almost within vengeance's reach. For days,
fleet HQ had been maneuvering them to close with the Alliance. The display
showed that success was very, very near. The majority of Alliance and
Sjandra Kei ships were bound in a glowing ball of drive traces -- which also
included the third, silent fleet. From that display you might think that
battle was already possible. In fact, opposing ships were passing through
almost the same space -- sometimes less than a billion kilometers apart --
but still separated by milliseconds of time. All the vessels were on
ultradrive, jumping perhaps a dozen times a second. And even here at the
Bottom of the Beyond, that came to a measurable fraction of a light-year on
each jump. To fight an uncooperative enemy meant matching their jumps
perfectly and flooding the common space with weapon drones.
Group Captain Svensndot changed the display to show ships that had
exactly matched their pace with the Alliance. Almost a third of the fleet
was in synch now. Another few hours and.... "Damnation!" He slapped his
display board, sending it spinning across the deck.
His first officer retrieved the display, sent it sailing back. "Is this
a new damnation, or the usual?" Tirolle asked.
"It was the usual. Sorry." And he really was. Tirolle and Glimfrelle
had their own problems. No doubt there were still pockets of humanity in the
Beyond, hidden from the Alliance. But of the Dirokimes, there might be no
more than what was on Commercial Security's fleet. Except for adventurous
souls like Tirolle and Glimfrelle, all that was left of their kind had been
in the dream terranes at Sjandra Kei.
Kjet Svensndot had started with Commercial Security twenty-five years
before, back when the company had just been a small fleet of rentacops. He
had spent thousands of hours learning to be the very best combat pilot in
the organization. Only twice had he ever been in a shootout. Some might have
regretted that. Svensndot and his superiors took it as the reward for being
the best. His competence had won him the best fighting equipment in
Commercial Security's fleet, culminating with the ship he commanded now. The
Ølvira was purchased with part of the enormous premium that Sjandra
Kei paid out when the Alliance first started making threatening noises.
Ølvira was not a rebuilt freighter, but a fighting machine from the
keel out. The ship was equipped with the smartest processors, the smartest
ultra drive, that could operate at Sjandra Kei's altitude in the Beyond. It
needed only a three-person crew -- and combat could be managed by the pilot
alone with his AI associates. Its holds contained more than ten thousand
seeker bombs, each smarter than the average freighter's entire drive unit.
Quite a reward for twenty-five years of solid performance. They even let
Svensndot name his new ship.
And now.... Well, the true Ølvira was surely dead. Along with
billions of others they had been hired to protect, she had been at Herte, in
the inner system. Glow bombs leave no survivors.
And his beautiful ship with the same name, it had been a half
light-year out-system, seeking enemies that weren't there. In any honest
battle, Kjet Svensndot and this Ølvira could have done very well.
Instead they were chasing down into the Bottom of the Beyond. Every
light-year took them further from the regions Ølvira was built for.
Every light-year the processors worked a bit more slowly (or not at all).
Down here the converted freighters were almost an optimum design. Clumsy and
stupid, with crews of dozens, but they kept on working. Already
Ølvira was lagging five light-years behind them. It was the
freighters that would make the attack on the Alliance fleet. And once again
Kjet would stand powerless while his friends died.
For the hundredth time, Svensndot glared at the trace display and
contemplated mutiny. There were Alliance stragglers too -- "high
performance" vehicles left behind the central pack. But his orders were to
maintain position, to be a tactical coordinator for the fleet's swifter
combatants. Well, he would do as he was hired ... this one last time. But
when the battle was done, when the fleet was dead, with as many of the
Alliance that they could take with them -- then he would think of his own
revenge. Some of that depended on Tirolle and Glimfrelle. Could he persuade
them to leave the remnants of the Alliance fleet and ascend to the Middle
Beyond, up where the Ølvira was the best of her kind? There was good
evidence now about which star systems were behind the "Alliance for the
Defense". The murderers were boasting to the news. Apparently they thought
that would bring them new support. It might also bring them visitors like
Ølvira. The bombs in her belly could destroy worlds, though not as
swiftly sure as what had been used on Sjandra Kei. And even now Svensndot's
mind shrank from that sort of revenge. No. They would choose their targets
carefully: ships coming to form new Alliance fleets, underprotected convoys.
Ølvira might last a long time if he always struck from ambush and
never left survivors. He stared and stared at the display, and ignored the
wetness that floated at the corners of his eyes. All his life, he had lived
by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge.... And now
revenge was all that life had left for him.
"I'm getting something peculiar, Kjet." Glimfrelle was monitoring
signals this watch. It was the sort of thing that should have been totally
automated -- and had been in Ølvira's natural environment, but which
was now a boring and exhausting enterprise.
"What? More Net lies?" said Tirolle.
"No. This is on the bearing of that bottom-lugger everyone is chasing.
It can't be anyone else."
Svensndot's eyebrows rose. He turned on the mystery with enormous,
scarcely realized, pleasure. "Characteristics?"
"Ship's signal processor says it's probably a narrow beam. We are its
only likely target. The signal is strong and the bandwidth is at least
enough to support flat video. If our snarfling DSP was working right, I'd
know -- " 'Frelle sang a little song that was impatient humming among his
kind. "-- Iiae! It's encrypted, but at a high layer. This stuff is syntax 45
video. In fact, it claims to be using one third of a cipher the Company made
a year back." For an instant, Svensndot thought 'Frelle was claiming the
message itself was smart; that should be absolutely impossible here at the
Bottom. The second officer must have caught his look: "Just sloppy language,
Boss. I read this out of the frame format...." Something flashed on his
display. "Okay, here's the story on the cipher: the Company made it and its
peers to cover shipping security." Back before the Alliance, that had been
the highest crypto level in the organization. "This is the third that never
got delivered. The whole was assumed compromised, but miracle of miracles,
we still have a copy." Both 'Frelle and 'Rolle were looking at Svensndot
expectantly, their eyes large and dark. Standard policy -- standard orders
-- were that transmissions on compromised keys were to be ignored. If the
Company's signals people had been doing a proper job, the rotted cipher
wouldn't even have been aboard and the policy would have enforced itself.
"Decrypt the thing," Svensndot said shortly. The last weeks had
demonstrated that his company was a dismal failure when it came to military
intelligence and signals. They might as well get some benefit from that
incompetence.
"Yes sir!" Glimfrelle tapped a single key. Somewhere inside
Ølvira's signal processor, a long segment of "random" noise was
broken into frames and laid precisely down on the "random" noise in the data
frames incoming. There was a perceptible pause (damn the Bottom) and then
the comm window lit with a flat video picture.
"-- fourth repetition of this message." The words were Samnorsk, and a
dialect of pure Herte i Sjandra. The speaker was ... for a heartstopping
instant he was seeing Ølvira again, alive. He exhaled slowly, trying
to relax. Black-haired, slim, violet-eyed -- just like Ølvira. And
just like a million other women of Sjandra Kei. The resemblance was there,
but so vague he would never have been taken by it before. For an instant he
imagined a universe beyond their lost fleet, and goals beyond vengeance.
Then he forced his attention back to business, to seeing everything he could
in the images in the window.
The woman was saying, "We'll repeat three more times. If by then you
have still not responded, we will attempt a different target." She pushed
back from the camera pickup, giving them a view of the room behind her. It
was low-ceilinged, deep. An ultradrive trace display dominated the
background, but Svensndot paid it little attention. There were two
Skroderiders in the background. One wore stripes on its skrode that meant a
trade history with Sjandra Kei. The other must be a lesser Rider; its skrode
was small and wheelless. The pickup turned, centered on the fourth figure.
Human? Probably, but of no Nyjoran heritage. In another time, his appearance
would have been big news across all human civilizations in the Beyond. Now
the point only registered on Svensndot's mind as another cause for
suspicion.
The woman continued, "You can see that we are human and Rider. We are
the entire crew of the Out of Band II. We are not part of the Alliance for
the Defense nor agents of the Blight.... But we are the reason their fleets
are down here. If you can read this, we're betting that you are of Sjandra
Kei. We must talk. Please reply using the tail of the pad that is decrypting
this message." The picture jigged and the woman's face was back in the
foreground. "This is the fifth repetition of this message," she said. "We'll
repeat two more -- "
Glimfrelle cut the audio. "If she means it, we have about one hundred
seconds. What next, Captain?"
Suddenly the Ølvira was not an irrelevant straggler. "We talk,"
said Svensndot.
Response and counter-response took a matter of seconds. After that ...
five minutes of conversation with Ravna Bergsndot was enough to convince
Kjet that what she had to say must be heard by Fleet Central. His ship would
be a mere relay, but at least he had something very important to pass on.
Fleet Central refused the full video link coming from the Out of Band.
Someone on the flagship was dead set on following standard procedures -- and
using compromised cipher keys stuck in their craw. Even Kjet had to settle
for a combat link: The screen showed a color image with high resolution.
Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation....
Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they
looked several years out of style. Ølvira was matching old video with
the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less
that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
God only knew what they were seeing as the evocation of Pham Nuwen. The
smokey-skinned human had already explained his point several times. He was
having as little success as Ravna Bergsndot before him. His cool manner had
gradually deserted him. Desperation was beginning to show on his face. "--
and I'm telling you, they are both your enemies. Sure, Alliance for the
Defense destroyed Sjandra Kei, but the Blight is responsible for the
situation that made that possible."
The half-cartoonish figure of Jan Skrits glanced at Owner Limmende.
Lord, evocations are crappy at the Bottom, Svensndot thought to himself.
When Skrits spoke, his voice didn't even match his lip movements: "We do
read Threats, Mr. Nuwen. The threat of the Blight was used as an excuse to
destroy our worlds. We will not go on random killing sprees, especially
against an organization that is clearly the enemy of our enemy.... Or are
you claiming the Blight is secretly in league with the Alliance for the
Defense?"
Pham gave an angry shrug. "No. I have no idea how the Blight regards
the Alliance. But you should know the evil the Blight has been up to, things
on a scale far grander than this 'Alliance'."
"Ah yes. That's what it says on the Net, Mr. Nuwen. But those events
are thousands of light-years away. They've been through multiple hops and
unknown interpretations before they ever arrive in the Middle Beyond -- even
if the stories were true to begin with. It is not called the Net of a
Million Lies for nothing."
The stranger's face darkened. He said something loud and angry, in a
language that was totally unlike anything from Nyjora. The tones jumped up
and down, almost like Dirokime twittering. He calmed himself with a visible
effort, but when he continued his Samnorsk was even more heavily accented
than before. "Yes. But I'm telling you. I was at the Fall of Relay. The
Blight is more than the worst horrors you've heard. The murder of Sjandra
Kei was its smallest side-effect. Will you help us against the Blighter
fleet?"
Owner Limmende pushed her massive form back into her chair webbing. She
looked at her chief of staff and the two talked inaudibly. Kjet's gaze
drifted beyond them; the flagship's command deck extended a dozen meters
behind Limmende. Underofficers moved quietly about, some watching the
conversation. The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it
was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people
Kjet knew had been transferred before the fall of Sjandra Kei. The
processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from
Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background
and evoking the image shown. No more evocations after this, Svensndot
promised himself, at least while we're down here.
Owner Limmende looked back at the camera. "Forgive a paranoid old cop,
but I think it's possible that you might be of the Blight." Limmende raised
her hand as if to ward off interruptions, but the redhead just gaped in
surprise. "If we believe you, then we must accept that there is something
useful and dangerous on the star system we're all heading towards.
Furthermore, we must accept that both you and the 'Blighter fleet' are
peculiarly qualified to take advantage of this prize. If we fight them as
you ask, there will likely be few of us alive afterwards. You alone will
have the prize. We fear what you might turn out to be."
For a long moment, Pham Nuwen was silent. The wildness slowly left his
face. "You have a point, Owner Limmende. And a dilemma. Is there any way
out?"
"Skrits and I have been discussing it. No matter what we do, both we
and you must take big chances.... It's only the alternatives that are more
terrible. We are willing to accept your guidance in battle, if you will
first maneuver your ship back toward us and allow us to board."
"Give up the lead in this chase, you mean?"
Limmende nodded.
Pham's mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. He seemed to be
having trouble breathing. Ravna said, "Then if you don't succeed, everything
is lost. At least now, we have a sixty-hour lead. That might be enough to
get word out about this artifact, even if the Blighter fleet survives."
Skrits' face twisted, a cartoonish smile. "You can't have it both ways.
You want us to risk everything on your assurance of competence. We are
willing to die for this, but not to be pawns in a game of monsters." The
last words had a strange tone, the angry delivery shading away. There had
been no motion in the picture from Fleet Central except for ill-synched lip
movement. Glimfrelle caught Svensndot's eye and pointed at the failure
lights on his comm panel.
Skrits' voice continued, "And Group Captain Svensndot: It's imperative
that all further communications with this unknown vessel be channeled -- "
the image froze, and there were no more words.
Ravna: "What happened?"
Glimfrelle made a twitter-snort. "We're losing the link with Fleet
Central. Our effective bandwidth is down to twenty bits per second, and
dropping. Skrits' last transmission was scarcely a hundred bits," padded out
to apparent legibility by the Ølvira's software.
Kjet waved angrily at the screen. "Cut the damn thing off." At least he
wouldn't have to put up with the evocation any further. And he didn't want
to hear what he guessed was Jan Skrits' last order.
Tirolle said, "Hei, why not leave it on? We might not notice much
difference." Glimfrelle's snickered at his brother's wit, but his
longfingers danced across the comm panel, and the display became a window on
the stars. The two Dirokimes had a thing about bureaucrats.
Svensndot ignored them and looked at the remaining comm window. The
channel to Pham and Ravna was wideband video with scarcely any
interpretation; there would be no perverse subtleties if it went down.
"Sorry about that. The last few days, we've had a lot of problems with comm.
Apparently, this Zone storm is the worst in centuries." In fact, it was
getting still worse: the starboard ultratrace displays were showing random
garbage.
"You've lost contact with your command?" asked Ravna.
"For the moment...." He glanced at Pham. The redhead's eyes were still
a bit glassy. "Look ... I'm even more sorry about how things have turned
out, but Limmende and Skrits are bright people. You can see their point of
view."
"Strange," interrupted Pham. "The pictures were strange," his tone was
drifty.
"You mean our relay from Fleet Central?" Svensndot explained about the
narrow bandwidth and the crummy performance of his ship's processors down
here at the Bottom.
"And so their picture of us must have been equally bad.... I wonder
what they thought I was?"
"Unh ..." Good question. Consider Pham Nuwen: bristly red hair,
smoke-gray skin, singsong voice. If cues such as those were sent, like as
not the display at Fleet Central would show something quite different from
the human Kjet saw. "... wait a minute. That's not how evocations work. I'm
sure they got a pretty clear view of you. See, a few high-resolution pics
would get sent at the beginning of the session. Then those would be used as
the base for the animation."
Pham stared back lumpishly, almost as though he didn't buy it and was
daring Kjet to think things through. Well damn it, the explanation was
correct; there was no doubt that Limmende and Skrits had seen the redhead as
a human. Yet there was something here that bothered Kjet ... Limmende and
Skrits had both looked out of date.
"Glimfrelle! Check the raw stream we got from Central. Did they send us
any sync pictures?"
It took Glimfrelle only seconds. He whistled a sharp tone of surprise.
"No, Boss. And since it was all properly encrypted, our end just made do
with old ad animation." He said something to Tirolle, and the two twittered
rapidly. "Nothing seems to work down here. Maybe this is just another bug."
But Glimfrelle didn't sound very confident of the assertion.
Svensndot turned back to the picture from the Out of Band. "Look. The
channel to Fleet Central was fully encrypted, using one- time schemes I
trust more than what we're talking with now. I can't believe it was a
masquerade." But nausea was creeping up Kjet's guts. This was like the first
minutes of the Battle for Sjandra Kei, when he guessed how thoroughly they
had been outmaneuvered, when he realized that everyone he was trying to
protect would be murdered. "Hei, we'll contact other vessels. We'll verify
Central's location -- "
Pham Nuwen raised an eyebrow. "Maybe it wasn't a masquerade." Before he
could say more, one of the Riders -- the one with the greater skrode -- was
shouting at them. It rolled across the room's apparent ceiling, pushing the
humans aside to get close to the camera. "I have a question!" The voder
speech was burred, nearly unintelligible. The creature's tendrils rattled
dryly against each other, as distressed as Kjet Svensndot had ever heard.
"My question: Are there Skroderiders aboard your fleet's command vessel?"
"Why do you -- "
"Answer the question!"
"How should I know?" Kjet tried to think. "Tirolle. You have friends on
Skrits' staff. Are there any Riders aboard?"
Tirolle stuttered a few bars, "A'a'a'a. Yes. Emergency hires -- rescues
actually -- right after the battle."
"That's the best we can do, friend."
The Skroderider trembled, unspeaking. Then its tendrils seemed to wilt.
"Thank you," it said softly. It rolled back and out of camera range.
Pham Nuwen disappeared from view. Ravna looked wildly around, "Wait
please!" she said to the camera, and Kjet was looking at the abandoned
command deck of the Out of Band. At the limit of the pickup's hearing came
sounds of mumbled conversation, voder and human. Then she was back.
"What was that all about?" Svensndot to Ravna.
"N-Nothing any of us can help anymore.... Captain Svensndot, it looks
to me like your fleet is no longer run by the people you think."
"Maybe." Probably. "It's something I've got to think about."
She nodded. For a moment they looked at each other, unspeaking. So
strange, so far from home and after all the heartbreak ... to see someone so
familiar. "You were truly at Relay?" the question sounded stupid in his
ears. Yet in a way she was a bridge from what he knew and trusted to the
deadly weirdness of the present situation.
Ravna Bergsndot nodded. "Yes ... and it was like everything you've
read. We even had direct contact with a Power.... And yet it was not enough,
Group Captain. The Blight destroyed it all. That part of the News is no
lie."
Tirolle pushed back from his nav station. "Then how can anything you do
down here hurt the Blight?" The words were blunt, but 'Rolle's eyes were
wide and serious. In fact, he was pleading for some sense behind all the
death. Dirokimes had not been the greatest part of the Sjandra Kei
civilization, but they had been by far its oldest member race. A million
years ago they had burst out of the Slow Zone, colonizing the three systems
that humans one day would call Sjandra Kei. Long before the humans arrived,
they were a race of inward dreamers. They protected their star systems with
ancient automation and friendly younger races. Another half million years
and their race might be gone from the Beyond, extinct or evolved into
something else. It was a common pattern, something like death and old age,
but gentler.
There is a common misconception about such senescent races, that their
members are senescent too. In any large population, there will be variation.
There will always be those who want to see the outside world and play there
for a while. Humankind had gotten on very well with the likes of Glimfrelle
and Tirolle.
And Bergsndot seemed to understand. "Have any of you heard of
godshatter?"
Kjet said, "No," then noticed that both Dirokimes had started. They
whistled at each other for several seconds in some kind of surprise dialect.
"Yes," 'Rolle spoke at last in Samnorsk, his voice as close to awe as Kjet
had ever heard. "You know we Dirokimes have been in the Beyond for a long
time. We've sent many colonies into the Transcend; some became Powers....
And once ... Something came back. It wasn't a Power of course. In fact, it
was more like a mind- crippled Dirokime. But it knew things and did things
that made great changes for us."
"Fentrollar?" Kjet asked wonderingly, suddenly recognizing the story.
It had happened one hundred thousand years before humankind arrived at
Sjandra Kei, yet it was a central contradiction of the Dirokime terranes.
"Yes." Tirolle said. "Even now people don't agree if Fentrollar was a
gift or a curse, but he founded the dream habitats and the Old Religion."
Ravna nodded, "That's the case most familiar to us of Sjandra Kei.
Maybe it's not a happy example considering all its effects...." and she told
them about the fall of Relay, what had happened to Old One, and what had
become of Pham Nuwen. The Dirokimes side chat dwindled to zero and they were
very still.
Finally Kjet said, "So what does Nu-- " he stumbled over the name, as
strange as everything else about this fellow, "Nuwen know about the thing
you seek at the Bottom? What can he do with it?"
"I-I don't know, Group Captain. Pham Nuwen himself doesn't know. A
little bit at a time, the insight comes. I believe, because I was there for
some of it ... but I don't know how to make you believe." She drew a
shuddering breath. Kjet suddenly guessed what a strange, tortured place the
Out of Band must be. Somehow that made the story more credible. Anything
that really could destroy the Blight would be unwholesomely weird. Kjet
wondered how he would do, locked up with such a thing.
"My Lady Ravna," he said, the words stilted and formal. After all, I'm
suggesting treason. "I, uh, I've got a number of friends in the Commercial
Security fleet. I can check on the suspicions you've raised, and ..." say
it! "it's possible we can give you support in spite of my HQ."
"Thank you, sir. Thank you."
Glimfrelle broke the silence. "We're getting a poor signal on the Out
of Band's channel now."
Kjet eyes swept the windows. All the ultratrace displays looked like
random noise. Whatever this storm was, it was bad.
"Looks like we won't be talking much longer, Ravna Bergsndot."
"Yes. We're losing signal.... Group Captain, if none of this works, if
you can't fight for us.... Your people are all that's left of Sjandra Kei.
It's been good to see you and the Dirokimes.... after so long to see
familiar faces, people I really understand. I -- " as she spoke, her image
square-blurred into low-frequency components.
"Huui!" said Glimfrelle. "Bandwidth just dropped through the floor."
There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the Out of Band. Given
communications problems, the ship's processors just switched to low-rate
coding.
"Hello, Out of Band. We've got problems on this channel now. Suggest we
sign off."
The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it:
Yes. It is more than a communicati
Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. "Zip. Zero," he said. "No detectable
signal."
Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. "This is a lot more than a
communications problem. Our computers haven't been able to commit on an
ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds." They had been doing five jumps
a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now....
Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. "Hei -- so welcome to the Slow
Zone."
The Slow Zone. Ravna Bergsndot looked across the deck of the Out of
Band II. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always had a vision of
the Slowness as a stifling darkness lit at best by torches, the domain of
cretins and mechanical calculators. In fact, things didn't look much
different from before. The ceilings and walls glowed just as before. The
stars still shone through the windows (only now, it might be a very long
time before any of them moved).
It was on the OOB's other displays that the change was most obvious.
The ultratrace tank blinked monotonously, a red legend displaying elapsed
time since the last update. Navigation windows were filled with output from
the diagnostics exercising the drive processors. An audible message in
Triskweline was repeating over and over, "Warning. Transition to Slowness
detected. Execute back jump at once! Warning. Transition to Slowness
detected. Execute...."
"Turn that off!" Ravna grabbed a saddle and strapped herself down. She
was actually feeling dizzy, though that could only be (a very natural)
panic. "Some bottom lugger this is. We run right into the Slow Zone, and all
it can do is spout warnings after the fact!"
Greenstalk drifted closer, "tiptoeing" off the ceiling with her
tendrils. "Even bottom luggers can't avoid things like this, My Lady Ravna"
Pham said something at the ship and most of the displays cleared.
Blueshell: "Even a huge Zone storm doesn't normally extend more than a
few light-years. We were two hundred light-years above the Zone boundary.
What hit us must be a monster surge, the sort of thing you only read about
in archives."
Small consolation. "We knew something like this could happen," Pham
said. "Things have been getting awfully rough the last few weeks." For a
change, he didn't seem too upset.
"Yes," she said. "We expected a slowing maybe, but not The Slowness."
We are trapped. "Where's the nearest habitable system? Ten light-years?
Fifty?" The vision of darkness had a new reality, and the starscape beyond
the ship's walls was no longer a friendly, steadying thing. Surrounded by
unending nothingness, moving at some vanishing fraction of the speed of
light ... entombed. All the courage of Kjet Svensndot and his fleet, for
nothing. Jefri Olsndot, forever unrescued.
Pham's hand touched her shoulder, the first touch in ... days? "We can
still make it to the Tines' world. This is a bottom lugger, remember? We are
not trapped. Hell, the ramscoop on this buggy is better than anything I ever
had in the Qeng Ho. And I thought I was the freest man in the universe back
then."
Decades of travel time, mostly in coldsleep. Such had been the world of
the Qeng Ho, the world of Pham's memories. Ravna let out a shuddering breath
that ended in weak laughter. For Pham, the terrible pressure was abated, at
least temporarily. He could be human.
"What's so funny?" said Pham.
She shook her head. "All of us. Never mind." She took a couple of slow
breaths. "Okay. I think I can make rational conversation. So the Zone has
surged. Something that normally takes a thousand years -- even in a storm --
to move a single light-year, has suddenly shifted two hundred. Hunh!
There'll be people a million years from now reading about this in the
archives. I'm not sure I want the honor.... We knew there was a storm, but I
never expected to be drowned," buried light-years deep beneath the sea.
"The sea storm analogy is not perfect," said Blueshell. The Skroderider
was still on the far side of the deck, where he had retreated after
questioning the Sjandra Kei captain. He still looked upset, though he was
back to sounding precise and picky. Blueshell was studying a nav display,
evidently a recording from right before the surge. He dumped the picture to
a display flat and rolled slowly across the ceiling toward them.
Greenstalk's fronds brushed him gently as he passed.
He sailed the display flat into Ravna's hands, and continued in a
lecturing tone. "Even in a sea storm, the water's surface is never as roiled
as in a big interface disturbance. The most recent News reports showed it as
a fractal surface with dimension close to three.... Like foam and spray."
Even he could not avoid the storm analogy. The starscapes hung serene beyond
crystal walls, and the loudest sound was a faint breeze from the ship's
ventilators. Yet they had been swallowed in a maelstrom. Blueshell waved a
frond at the display flat. "We could be back in the Beyond in a few hours."
"What?"
"See. The plane of the display is determined by the positions of the
supposed Sjandra Kei command vessel, the outflying craft that we contacted
directly, and ourselves." The three formed a narrow triangle, the Limmende
and Svensndot vertices close together. "I've marked the times that contact
was lost with the others. Notice: the link to Commercial Security HQ went
down 150 seconds before we were hit. From the incoming signal and its
requests for protocol changes, I believe that both we and the outflyer were
enveloped and at about the same time."
Pham nodded. "Yeah. The most distant sites losing contact last. That
must mean the surge moved in from the side."
"Exactly!" From his perch on the ceiling, Blueshell reached to tap the
display. "The three ships were like probes in the standard Zone mapping
technique. Replaying the trace displays will no doubt confirm the
conclusion."
Ravna looked at the plot. The long point of the triangle -- tipped by
the OOB -- pointed almost directly toward the heart of the galaxy. "It must
have been a huge, clifflike thing perpendicular to the rest of the surface."
"A monster wave sweeping sideways!" said Greenstalk. "And that's also
why it won't last long."
"Yes. It's the radial changes that are most often long term. This thing
must have a trailing edge. We should pass through it in a few hours -- and
back into the Beyond."
So there was still a race to be won or lost.
The first hours were strange. "A few hours," had been Blueshell's
estimate of when they would be back in the Beyond. They hung around the
bridge, alternately watching the clock and stewing about the strange
conversations just completed. Pham was building himself back to trigger
tension. Any time now, they would be back in the Beyond. What to do then? If
only a few ships were perverted, perhaps Svensndot could still coordinate an
attack. Would that do any good? Pham played the ultratrace recordings over
and over, studying every detectable ship in all the fleets. "But when we get
out, when we get out ... I'll know what to do. Not why I must do it, but
what." And he couldn't explain more.
Any time now.... There was scarcely any reason to do much about
resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.
But after eight hours: "It really could be longer, even a day." They
had been scrounging around in the historical literature. "Maybe we should do
a little housekeeping." The Out of Band II had been designed for both the
Beyond and the Slowness, but that second environment was regarded as an
unlikely, emergency one. There were special-purpose processors for the Slow
Zone, but they hadn't come up automatically. With Blueshell's advice, Pham
took the high-performance automation off-line; that wasn't too difficult,
except for a couple of voice-actuated independents that were no longer
bright enough to understand the quitting commands.
Using the new automation gave Ravna a chill that, in a subtle way, was
almost as frightening as the original loss of the ultradrive. Her image of
the Slowness as darkness and torchlight -- that was just nightmare fantasy.
On the other hand, the Slowness as the domain of cretins and mechanical
calculators, there was something to that. The OOB's performance had degraded
steadily during their voyage to the Bottom, but now ... Gone were the
voice-driven graphics generators; they were just a bit too complex to be
supported by the new OOB, at least in full interpretive mode. Gone were the
intelligent context analyzers that made the ship's library almost as
accessible as one's own memories. Eventually, Ravna even turned off the art
and music units; without mood and context response, they seemed so wooden
... constant reminders that there were no brains behind them. Even the
simplest things were corrupted. Take voice and gesture controls: They no
longer responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang. It took a certain
discipline to use them effectively. (Pham actually seemed to like this. It
reminded him of the Qeng Ho.)
Twenty hours. Fifty. Everyone was still telling each other there was
nothing to worry about. But now Blueshell said that talk of "hours" had been
unrealistic. Considering the height of the "tsunami" (at least two hundred
light-years), it would likely be several hundred light-years across -- that
in keeping with the scaling laws of historical precedent. There was only one
trouble with this reasoning: they were beyond all precedent. For the most
part, zone boundaries followed galactic mean density. There was virtually no
change from year to year, just the aeons' long shrinkage that might someday
-- after the death of all but the smallest stars -- expose the galactic core
to the Beyond. At any given time, perhaps one billionth of that boundary
might qualify as being in a "storm state". In an ordinary storm, the surface
might move in or out a light-year in a decade or so. Such storms were common
enough to affect the fortunes of many worlds every year.
Much rarer -- perhaps once in a hundred thousand years in the whole
galaxy -- there would be a storm where the boundary became seriously
distorted, and where surges might move at a high multiple of light speed.
These were the transverse surges that Pham and Blueshell made their scale
estimates from. The fastest moved at about a light-year per second, across a
distance of less than three lights; the largest were thirty light-years high
and moved at scarcely a light-year per day.
So what was known of monsters like the thing that had engulfed them?
Not much. Third-hand stories in the Ship's library told of surges perhaps as
big as theirs, but the quoted dimensions and propagation rates were not
clear. Stories more than a hundred million years old are hard to trust;
there are scarcely any intermediate languages. (And even if there were, it
wouldn't have helped. The new, dumb version of the OOB absolutely could not
do mechanical translation of natural languages. Dredging the library was
pointless.)
When Ravna complained about this to Pham, he said, "Things could be
worse. What was the Ur-Partition really?"
Five billion years ago. "No one's sure."
Pham jerked a thumb at his library display. "Some people think it was a
'super supersurge', you know. Something so big it swallowed the races that
might have recorded it. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at
all -- no one's around to write horror stories."
Great.
"I'm sorry, Ravna. Honestly, if we're in anything like most past
disasters, we'll come out of it in another day or two. The best thing is to
plan for things that way. This is like a 'time-out' in the battle. Take
advantage of it to have a little peace. Figure out how to get the
unperverted parts of Commercial Security to help us."
"... Yeah." Depending on the shape of the surge's trailing edge the OOB
might have lost a good part of its lead.... But I'll bet the Alliance fleet
is completely panicked by all this. Such opportunists would likely run for
safety as soon as they're back in the Beyond.
The advice kept her busy for another twenty hours, fighting with the
half-witted things that claimed to be strategy planners on the new version
of the OOB. Even if the surge passed right this instant, it might be too
late. There were players in this game for whom the surge was not a time-out:
Jefri Olsndot and his Tinish allies. It had been seventy hours now since
their last contact; Ravna had missed three comm sessions with them. If she
were panicked, what must be like for Jefri? Even if Steel could hold off his
enemies, time -- and trust -- would be running out at Tines' world.
One hundred hours into the surge, Ravna noticed that Blueshell and Pham
were doing power tests on the OOB's ramscoop drive.... Some time-outs last
forever.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
CHAPTER 34
The summer hot spell broke for a time; in fact, it was almost chilly.
There was still the smoke and the air was still dry, but the winds seemed
less driven. Inside their cubby aboard the ship, Amdijefri weren't taking
much notice of the nice weather.
"They've been slow in answering before," said Amdi. "She's explained
how the ultrawave -- "
"Ravna's never been this late!" Not since the winter, anyway. Jefri's
tone hovered between fear and petulance. In fact, there was supposed to be a
transmission in the middle of the night, technical data for them to pass on
to Mr. Steel. It hadn't arrived by this morning, and now Ravna had also
missed their afternoon session, the time when normally they could just chat
for a bit.
The two children reviewed all the comm settings. The previous fall,
they had laboriously copied those and the first level diagnostics. It all
looked the same now ... except for something called "carrier detect". If
only they had a dataset, they might have looked up what that meant.
They had even very carefully reset some of the comm parameters ... then
nervously set them back when nothing happened. Maybe they hadn't given the
changes enough of a chance to work. Maybe now they had really messed
something up.
They stayed in the command cubby all through the afternoon, their minds
cycling trough fear and boredom and frustration. After four hours, boredom
had at least a temporary victory. Jefri was napping uneasily in his father's
hammock with two of Amdi curled up in his arms.
Amdi poked idly around the room, looked at the rocket controls. No ...
not even his self-confidence was up to playing with those. Another of him
jerked at the wall quilting. He could always watch the fungus grow for a
while. Things were that slow.
Actually, the gray stuff had spread a lot further than the last time he
looked. Behind the quilt, it was quite thick. He sent a chain of himself
squirreling back between the wall and the fabric. It was dark, but some
light spilled through the gap at the ceiling. In most places the mold was
scarcely an inch thick, but back here it was five or six -- wow. Just above
his exploring nose, a huge lump of it grew from the wall. This was as big as
some of the ornamental moss that decorated castle meeting halls. Slender
gray filaments grew down from the fungus. He almost called out to Jefri, but
the two of him in the hammock were so comfortable.
He brought a couple more heads close to the strangeness. The wall
behind it looked a little odd, too ... as though part of its substance had
been taken by the mold. And the gray itself: like smoke -- he felt the
filaments with his nose. They were solid, dry. His nose tickled. Amdi froze
in shocked surprise. Watching himself from behind, he saw that two of the
filaments had actually passed through his member's head! And yet there was
no pain, just that tickling feeling.
"What -- what?" Jefri had been jostled into wakefulness, as Amdi tensed
around him.
"I found something really strange, behind the quilts. I touched this
big hunk of fungus and -- "
As he spoke, Amdi gently backed away from thing on the wall. The touch
didn't hurt, but it made him more nervous than curious. He felt the
filaments sliding slowly out.
"I told you, we aren't supposed to play with that stuff. It's dirty.
The only good thing is, it doesn't smell." Jefri was out of the hammock. He
stepped across the cubby and lifted the quilting. Amdi's tip member lost its
balance and jerked away from the fungus. There was a snapping sound, and a
sharp pain in his lip.
"Geez, that thing is big!" Then, hearing Amdi's pain whistle, "You
okay?"
Amdi backed away from the wall. "I think so." The tip of one last
filament was still stuck in his lip. It didn't hurt as much as the nettles
he'd sampled a few days earlier. Amdijefri looked over the wound. What was
left of the smoky spine seemed hard and brittle. Jefri's fingers gently
worked it free. Then the two of them turned to wonder at the thing in the
wall.
"It really has spread. Looks like it's hurt the wall, too."
Amdi dabbed at his bloodied muzzle. "Yeah. I see why your folks told
you to stay away from it."
"Maybe we should have Mr. Steel scrub it all out."
The two spent half an hour crawling around behind all the quilting. The
grayness had spread far, but there was only the one marvelous flowering.
They came back to stare at it, even sticking articles of clothing into the
wisps. Neither risked fingers or noses on further contact.
Staring at the fungus on the wall was by far the most exciting thing
that happened that afternoon; there was no message from the OOB.
The next day the hot weather was back.
Two more days passed.... and still there was no word from Ravna.
Lord Steel paced the walls atop Starship Hill. It was near the middle
of the night, and the sun hung about fifteen degrees above the northern
horizon. Sweat filmed his fur; this was the warmest summer in ten years. The
drywind was into its thirtieth dayaround. It was no longer a welcome break
in the chill of the northland. The crops were dying in the fields. Smoke
from fjord fires was visible as brownish haze both north and south of the
castle. At first the reddish color had been a novelty, a welcome change from
the unending blue of sky and distance, and the whitish haze of the sea fogs.
Only at first. When fire struck East Streamsdell, the entire sky had been
dipped in red. Ash had rained all the dayaround, and the only smell had been
that of burning. Some said it was worse than the filthy air of the southern
cities.
The troops on the walls backed far out of his way. This was more than
courtesy, more than their fear of Steel. His troops were still not used to
the cloaked ones, and the cover story Shreck was spreading did nothing to
ease their minds: Lord Steel was accompanied by a singleton -- in the colors
of a Lord. The creature made no mind sounds. It walked incredibly close to
its master.
Steel said to the singleton, "Success is a matter of meeting a
schedule. I remember you teaching me that," cutting it into me, in fact.
The member looked back at him, cocked its head. "As I remember, I said
that success was a matter of adapting to changes in schedules." The words
were perfectly articulated. There were singletons that could talk that well
-- but even the most verbal could not carry on intelligent conversation.
Shreck had had no trouble convincing the troops that Flenser science had
created a race of superpacks, that the cloaked ones were individually as
smart as any ordinary pack. It was a good cover for what the cloaks really
were. It both inspired fear and obscured the truth.
The member stepped a little closer -- nearer to Steel than anyone had
been except during murders and rapes and the beatings of the past.
Involuntarily, Steel licked his lips and spread out from around the threat.
Yet in some ways the dark-cloaked one was like a corpse, without a trace of
mind sound. Steel snapped his jaws shut and said, "Yes. The genius is in
winning even when the schedules have fallen down the garderobe." He looked
all away from the Flenser member and scanned the red-shrouded southern
horizon. "What's the latest estimate of Woodcarver's progress?"
"She's still camped about five days southeast of here."
"The damned incompetent. It's hard to believe she's your parent!
Vendacious made things so easy for her; her soldiers and toy cannon should
have been here almost a tenday past -- "
"And been well-butchered, on schedule."
"Yes! Long before our sky friends arrived. Instead, she wanders inland
and then balks."
The Flenser member shrugged in its dark cloak. Steel knew the radio was
as heavy as it looked. It consoled him that the other was paying a price for
his omniscience. Just think, in heat like this, to have every part of
oneself muffled to the tympana. He could imagine the discomfort.... Indoors,
he could smell it.
They walked past one of the wall cannon. The barrel gleamed of layered
metal. The thing had thrice the range of Woodcarver's pitiful invention.
While Woodcarver had been working with Dataset and a human child's
intuition, he had had the direct advice of Ravna and company. At first he'd
feared their largesse, thinking it meant the Visitors were superior beyond
need for care. Now ... the more he heard of Ravna and the others, the more
clearly he understood their weakness. They could not experiment with
themselves, improve themselves. Inflexible, slow-changing dullards.
Sometimes they showed a low cunning -- Ravna's coyness about what she wanted
from the first starship -- but their desperation was loud in all their
messages, as was their attachment to the human child.
Everything had been going so well till just a few days ago. As they
walked out of earshot of the gunner pack, Steel said to the Flenser member,
"And still no word from our 'rescuers'."
"Quite so," That was the other botched schedule, the important one,
which they could not control. "Ravna has missed four sessions. Two of me is
down with Amdijefri right now." The singleton jabbed its snout toward the
dome of the inner keep. The gesture was an awkward abortion. Without other
muzzles and other eyes, body language was a limited thing. We just aren't
built to wander around a piece here, a piece there. "Another few minutes and
the space folk will have missed a fifth talk session. The children are
getting desperate, you know."
The member's voice sounded sympathetic. Almost unconsciously, Lord
Steel sidled a little farther out from around it. Steel remembered that tone
from his own early existence. He also remembered the cutting and death that
had always followed. "I want them kept happy, Tyrathect. We're assuming
communication will resume; when it does we'll need them." Steel bared six
pairs of jaws at the surrounded singleton. "None of your old tricks."
The member flinched, an almost imperceptible twitch that pleased Steel
more than the grovelling of ten thousand. "Of course not. I'm just saying
that you should visit them, try to help them with their fear."
"You do it."
"Ah ... they don't fully trust me. I've told you before, Steel; they
love you."
"Ha! And they've seen through to your meanness, eh?" The situation made
Steel proud. He had succeeded where Flenser's own methods would have failed.
He had manipulated without threats or pain. It had been Steel's craziest
experiment, and certainly his most profitable. But "-- Look, I don't have
time to wetnurse anyone. It's a tiresome thing to talk to those two." And it
was very tiresome to hold his temper, to suffer Jefri's "petting" and Amdi's
pranks. In the beginning, Steel had insisted that no one else have close
contact with the children. They were too important to expose to others; the
most casual slipup might show them the truth and ruin them. Even now,
Tyrathect was the only pack besides himself who had regular contact. But for
Steel, every meeting was worse than the last, an ultimate test of his self
control. It was hard to think straight in a killing rage, and that's how
almost every conversation with them ended for Steel. How wonderful it would
be when the space folk landed. Then he could use the other end of the tool
that was Amdijefri. Then there would be no need to have their trust and
friendship. Then he would have a lever, something to torture and kill to
enforce his demands.
Of course, if the aliens never landed, or if.... "We must do something!
I will not be flotsam on the wave of the future." Steel lashed at the
scaffolding that ran along the inner side of the parapet, shredding the wood
with his gleaming tines. "We can't do anything about the aliens, so let's
deal with Woodcarver. Yes!" He smiled at the Flenser member. "Ironic, isn't
it? For a hundred years, you sought her destruction. Now I can succeed. What
would have been your great triumph is for me just an annoying detour,
undertaken because greater projects are temporarily delayed."
The cloaked one did not look impressed. "There is a little matter of
gifts falling out of the sky."
"Yes, into my open jaws. And that is my good fortune, isn't it?" He
walked on several paces, chuckling to himself. "Yes. It's time to have
Vendacious bring his trusting Queen in for the slaughter. Maybe it will
interfere with other events, but.... I know, we'll have the battle east of
here."
"The Margrum Climb?"
"Correct. Woodcarver's forces should be well concentrated coming up the
defile. We'll move our cannon over there, set them behind the ridgeline at
the top of the Climb. It will be easy to destroy all her people. And it's
far enough from Starship Hill; even if the space folk arrive at the same
time, we can keep the two projects separate." The singleton didn't say
anything, and after a moment Steel glared at him. "Yes dear teacher, I know
there is a risk. I know it splits our forces. But we've got an army sitting
on our doorstep. They've arrived inconveniently late, but even Vendacious
can't make them turn around and go home. And if he tries to stall things,
the Queen might... Can you predict just what she would do?"
"... No. She has always had a way with the unexpected."
"She might even see through Vendacious' fraud. So. We take a small
chance, and destroy her now. You are with Farscout Rangolith?"
"Yes. Two of me."
"Tell him to get word to Vendacious. He is to have the Queen's army
coming up Margrum Climb not less than two days from now. Feel free to
elaborate; you know the region better than I. We'll work out final details
when both sides are in position." It was a wonderful thing to be the
effective commander of both sides in a battle! "One more thing. It's
important and Vendacious must see to it within the dayaround: I want
Woodcarver's human dead."
"What harm can she do?"
"That's a stupid question," especially coming from you. "We don't know
when Ravna and Pham may reach us. Till we have them safe in our jaws, the
Johanna creature is a dangerous thing to have nearby. Tell Vendacious to
make it look like an accident, but I want that Two-Legs dead."
Flenser was everywhere. It was a form of godhood he'd dreamed of since
he'd been Woodcarver's newby. While one of him talked to Steel, two others
lounged about the Starship with Amdijefri, and two more padded through light
forest just north of Woodcarver's encampment.
Paradise can also be an agony, and each day the torment was a little
harder to bear. In the first place, this summer was as insufferably hot as
any in the North. And the radio cloaks were not merely hot and heavy. They
necessarily covered his members' tympana. And unlike other uncomfortable
costumes, the price of taking these off for even a moment was mindlessness.
His first trials had lasted just an hour or two. Then had come a five-day
expedition with Farscout Rangolith, providing Steel with instant information
and instant command of the country around Starhip Hill. It had taken a
couple of dayarounds to recover from the sores and aches of the radio
cloaks.
This latest exercise in omniscience had lasted twelve days. Wearing the
cloaks all the time was impossible. Every day in a rotation, one of his
members threw off its radio, was bathed, and had its cloak's liner changed.
It was Flenser's hour of daily madness, when sometimes the weak-willed
Tyrathect would come back to mind, vainly trying to reestablish her
dominance. It didn't matter. With one of his members disconnected, the
remaining pack was only four. There are foursomes of normal intelligence,
but none existed in Flenser/Tyrathect. The bathing and recloaking were all
done in a confused haze.
And of course, even though Flenser was "everywhere at once", he wasn't
any smarter than before. After the first jarring experiments, he got the
hang of seeing/hearing scenes that were radically different -- but it was as
difficult as ever to carry on multiple conversations. When he was bantering
with Steel, his other members had very little to say to Amdijefri or to
Rangolith's scouts.
Lord Steel was done with him. Flenser walked along the parapets with
his former student, but if Steel had said anything to him it would have
taken him away from his current conversation. Flenser smiled (carefully so
the one with Steel would not show it). Steel thought he was talking to
Farscout Rangolith just now. Oh, he would do that ... in a few minutes. One
advantage of his situation was that no one could know for sure everything
Flenser was up to. If he was careful, he would eventually rule here again.
It was a dangerous game, and the cloaks were themselves dangerous devices.
Keep a cloak out of sunlight for a few hours and it lost power, and the
member wearing it was cut off from the pack. Worse was the problem of static
-- that was a mantis word. The second set of cloaks had killed its user, and
the Spacers weren't sure of the cause, except that it was some sort of
"interference" problem.
Flenser had experienced nothing so extreme. But sometimes on his
farthest hikes with Rangolith, or when a cloak's power faded ... there was
an incredible shrieking in his mind, like a dozen packs crowding close,
sounds that scaled between sex madness and killing frenzy. Tyrathect seemed
to like times like that; she'd come bounding out of the confusion, swamping
him with her soft hate. Normally she lurked around the edges of his
consciousness, tweaking a word here, a motive there. After the static, she
was much worse; on one occasion she'd held control for almost a dayaround.
Given a year without crises, Flenser could have studied Ty and Ra and Thect
and done a proper excision. Thect, the member with the white-tipped ears,
was probably the one to kill: it wasn't bright, but it was likely the
capstone of the trio. With a precisely crafted replacement, Flenser might be
even greater than before the massacre at Parliament Bowl. But for now,
Flenser was stuck; soul surgery on one's self was an awesome challenge --
even to The Master.
So. Careful. Careful. Keep the cloaks well charged, ta