"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 Olvira was purchased with part of the enormous premium that Sjandra Kei paid out when the Alliance first started making threatening noises. Olvira 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 Olvira 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 Olvira 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 Olvira 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 Olvira 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 Olvira 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 Olvira. 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. Olvira 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 Olvira'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 Olvira'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 Olvira again, alive. He exhaled slowly, trying to relax. Black-haired, slim, violet-eyed — just like Olvira. 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 Olvira 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. Olvira 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 Olvira 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 Olvira'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.