d that shipping in the volume be suspended. The time line is
probably too short to admit feasible rescue plans for the civilizations at
risk. Our long-range prediction (probably the least uncertain of all): The
million-year-scale secular shrinkage will not be affected at all. The next
hundred thousand years will however show a retardation in the shrinkage of
the Slow Zone boundary in this portion of the galaxy.
Finally, a philosophical note. We of Zonographic Eidolon watch the zone
boundary and the orbits of border stars. For the most part, the zone changes
are very slow: 700 meters per second in the case of the long-term secular
shrinkage. Yet these changes together with orbital motion affect billions of
lives each year. Just as the glaciers and droughts of a pretechnical world
must affect a people, so must we accept these long-term changes. Storms and
surges are obvious tragedies, near-instant death for some civilizations. Yet
these are as far beyond our control as the slower movements. Over the last
few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets,
of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such -- and those living
more peaceably around them -- we say: Look out on the universe. It does not
care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not
avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort
from this, that there is a universe to admire that can not be twisted to
villainy or good, but which simply is.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Ølvira shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Arbwyth->Trade24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK
units
From: Twirlip of the Mists [Who knows what this is, though probably not
a propaganda voice. Very sparse priors.]
Subject: The cause of the recent Great Surge
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, Great Secrets of Creation, Zonometric Interest Group
Date: 66.47 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Zone Instability and the Blight, Hexapodia as the key
insight
Text of message:
Apologies if I am repeating obvious conclusions. My only gateway onto
the Net is very expensive, and I miss many important postings. The Great
Surge now in progress appears by all accounts to be an event of cosmic scope
and rarity. Furthermore, the other posters put its epicenter less than 6,000
light-years from recent warfare related to the Blight. Can this be mere
coincidence? As has long been theorized [citations from various sources,
three known to Ølvira; the theories cited are of long standing and
nondisprovable] the Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by
something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms, or
[hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores.
Now for the first time in Net history we have a Transcendent form, the
Blight, that can effectively dominate the Beyond. Many on the Net [cites
Hanse and Sandor at the Zoo] believe that it is searching for an artifact
near the Bottom. Is it no wonder that this could upset the Natural Balance
and provoke the recent Event?
Please write to me and tell me what you think. I don't get much mail.
-=*=-
Crypto: 0
As received by: Ølvira shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed union of five empires below
Straumli Realm. No references prior to the Fall of the Straumli Realm.
Numerous counter claims (including from Out of Band II) that this Alliance
is a front for the old Aprahant Hegemony. Cf, Butterfly Terror.]
Subject: Courageous Mission Accomplished
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 67.07 days since Fall of Sjandra Kei
Key phrases: Action, not talk
Text of message:
Subsequent to our action against the human nest at [Sjandra Kei] a part
of our fleet pursued human and other Blight-controlled forces toward the
Bottom of the Beyond. Evidently, the Perversion hoped to protect these
forces by putting them in an environment too dangerous to challenge. That
thinking did not count on the courage of Alliance commanders and crews. We
can now report the substantial destruction of those escaping forces.
The first major operation of your Alliance has been an enormous
success. With the extermination of their most important supporters, Blight
encroachment on the Middle Beyond has been brought to a standstill. Yet much
remains to be done:
The Alliance Fleet is returning to the Middle Beyond. We've suffered
some casualties and need substantial reprovisioning. We know that there are
still scattered pockets of humanity in the Beyond, and we've identified
secondary races that are aiding humanity. The defense of the Middle Beyond
must be the goal of every sophont of good will. Elements of your Alliance
Fleet will soon visit systems in the volume [parameter specification]. We
ask for your aid and support against what is left of this terrible enemy.
Death to vermin.
-=*=-
CHAPTER 36
Kjet Svensndot was alone on Ølvira's bridge when the Surge
passed. They had long since done all the preparations that were meaningful,
and the ship had no realistic means of propulsion in the Slowness that
surrounded it. Yet the Group Captain spent much of his time up here, trying
to program some sort of responsiveness into the automation that remained.
Half- assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to
the beginning of the human experience.
Of course, the actual transition out of Slowness would have been
totally unnoticed if not for all the alarms he and the Dirokimes had
installed. As it was, the noise and lights blew him out of a half-drowse
into hair-raised wakefulness. He punched the ship's comm: "Glimfrelle!
Tirolle! Get your tails up here."
By the time the brothers reached the command deck, preliminary nav
displays had been computed, and a jump sequence was awaiting confirmation.
The two were grinning from ear to ear as they bounced in, and strapped
themselves down at action posts. For a few moments there was little
chitchat, only an occasional whistle of pleasure from the Dirokimes. They
had rehearsed this over and over during the last hundred plus hours, and
with the poor automation there was a lot for them to do. Gradually the view
from the deck's windows sharpened. Where at first there had only been vague
blurs, the ultrawave sensors were posting individual traces with steadily
improving information on range and rates. The communication window showed
the queue of fleet comm messages getting longer and longer.
Tirolle looked up from his work "Hei, Boss, these jump figures look
okay -- at least as a first cut."
"Good. Commit and allow autocommit." In the hours after the Surge, they
had decided that their initial priority should be to continue with the
pursuit. What they did then ... they had talked long on that, and Group
Captain Svensndot had thought even longer. Nothing was routine any more.
"Yes, sir!" The Dirokime's longfingers danced across the controls, and
'Rolle added some verbal control. "Bingo!"
Status showed five jumps completed, ten. Kjet stared out the true-view
window for a few seconds. No change, no change ... then he noticed that one
of the brightest stars in the field had moved, was sliding imperceptibly
across the sky. Like a juggler getting her pace, Ølvira was coming up
to speed.
"Hei, hei!" Glimfrelle leaned over to see his brother's work. "We're
making 1.2 light-years per hour. That's better than before the Surge."
"Good. Comm and Surveillance?" Where was everybody else and what were
they up to?
"Yup. Yup. I'm on it." Glimfrelle bent his slender frame back to the
console. For some seconds, he was almost silent. Svensndot began paging
through the mail. There was nothing yet from Owner Limmende. Twenty-five
years Kjet had worked for Limmende and SjK Commercial Security. Could he
mutiny? And if he did, would any follow?
"Okay. Here's the situation, Boss." Glimfrelle shifted the main window
to show his interpretation of the ship's reports. "It's like we guessed,
maybe a little more extreme." They had realized almost from the beginning
that the surge was bigger than anything in recorded history; that's not what
the Dirokime meant by "extreme". He swept his shortfingers down, making a
hazy blue line across the window. "We guessed that the leading edge of the
Surge moved normal to this line. That would account for it taking Boss
Limmende out four hundred seconds before it hit the Out of Band, and hitting
us ten seconds after that.... Now if the trailing edge were similar to
ordinary surges" -- upgraded a million times -- "then we, and then the rest
of the pursuing fleets should come out well before Out of Band." He pointed
at a single glowing dot that represented the Ølvira. Around and just
ahead of it dozens of points of light were popping into existence as the
ship's detectors reported seeing the initiation of ultradrive jumps. It was
like a cold fire sweeping away from them into the darkness. Eventually
Limmende and the heart of the anonymous fleet would all be back in business.
"Our pickup log shows that's about what happened. Most all the pursuing
fleets will be out of the surge before the Out of Band."
"Hm. So it'll lose part of its lead."
"Yup. But if it's going where we think -- " a G-star eighty light-years
ahead "-- it'll still get there before they kill it." He paused, pointed at
a haze that was spreading sideways from the growing knot of light. "Not
everybody is still chasing."
"Yeah...." Svensndot had been reading the News even as he listened to
'Frelle's summary. "... according to the Net, that's the Alliance for the
Defense departing the battle field, victorious."
"Say what?" Tirolle twisted abruptly in his harness. His large, dark
eyes held none of their usual humor.
"You heard me." Kjet put the item where the brothers could see it. The
two read rapidly, 'Frelle mumbling phrases aloud, "... courage of Alliance
commanders.... substantial destruction of escaping forces...."
Glimfrelle shuddered, all flippancy departed. "They don't even mention
the Surge. Everything they say is a cowardly lie!" His voice shifted up to
its normal speaking range and he continued in his own language. Kjet could
understand parts of it. The Dirokimes that left their dream habitats were
normally light-hearted folk, full of whimsy and gentle sarcasm. Glimfrelle
sounded almost that way now, except for the high edges to his whistling and
the insults more colorful than Svensndot had ever heard from them: "... get
from a verminous cow-pie ... killers of innocent dreams ..." even in
Samnorsk the words were strong, but in Dirokime "verminous cow-pie" was
drenched in explicit imagery that almost brought the smell of such a thing
into the room. Glimfrelle's voice went higher and higher, then beyond the
human register. Abruptly, he collapsed, shuddering and moaning low.
Dirokimes could cry, though Svensndot had never seen such a thing before.
Glimfrelle rocked in his brother's arms.
Tirolle looked over Glimfrelle's shoulder at Kjet. "Where does revenge
take us now, Group Captain?"
For a moment, Kjet looked back silently. "I'll let you know,
Lieutenant." He looked at the displays. Listen and watch a little longer,
and maybe we'll know. "Meantime, get us nearer the center of pursuit," he
said gently.
"Aye, sir." Tirolle patted his brother's back gently and turned back to
the console.
During the next five hours, Ølvira's crew watched the Alliance
fleet race helter-skelter for the higher spaces. It could not even be called
a retreat, more a panicked dissolution. Great opportunists, they had not
hesitated to kill by treachery, and to give chase when they thought there
might be treasure at the end. Now that they were confronted with the
possibility of being trapped in the Slowness, of dying between the stars,
they raced for their separate safety. Their bulletins to the newsgroups were
full of bravado, but their maneuver couldn't be disguised. Former neutrals
pointed to the discrepancy; more and more it was accepted that the Alliance
was built around the Aprahanti Hegemony and perhaps had other motives than
altruistic opposition to the Blight. There was nervous speculation about who
might next receive Alliance attention.
Major transceivers still targeted the fleets. They might as well have
been on a network trunk. The news traffic was a vast waterfall, totally
beyond Ølvira's present ability to receive. Nevertheless, Svensndot
kept an eye on it. Somewhere there might be some clue, some insight.... The
majority of War Trackers and Threats seemed to have little interest in the
Alliance or the death of Sjandra Kei, per se. Most were terrified of the
Blight that was still spreading through the Top of the Beyond. None of the
Highest had successfully resisted, and there were rumors that two more
interfering Powers had been destroyed. There were some (secret mouths of the
Blight?) who welcomed the new stability at the Top, even one based on
permanent parasitization.
In fact, the chase down here at the Bottom, the flight of the Out of
Band and its pursuers, seemed the only place where the Blight was not
completely triumphant. No wonder they were the subject of 10,000 messages an
hour.
The geometry of emergence was enormously favorable to Ølvira.
They had been on the outskirts of the action, but now they had hours
headstart on the main fleets. Glimfrelle and Tirolle were busier than they
had ever been in their lives, monitoring the fleets' emergence and
establishing Ølvira's identity with the other vessels of Commercial
Security. Until Scrits and Limmende emerged from the Slowness, Kjet
Svensndot was the ranking officer of the organization. Furthermore, he was
personally known to most of the commanders. Kjet had never been the admiral
type; his Group Captaincy had been a reward for piloting skills, in a
Sjandra Kei at peace. He had always been content to defer to his employers.
But now...
The Group Captain used his ranking status. The Alliance vessels were
not pursued. ("Wait till we can all act together," ordered Svensndot.)
Possible game plans bounced back and forth across the emerging fleet,
including schemes that assumed HQ was destroyed. With certain commanders,
Kjet hinted that this last might be the case, that Limmende's flag ship was
in enemy hands, and that the Alliance was somehow just a side effect of that
true enemy. Very soon, Kjet would be committed to the "treason" he planned.
The Limmende flag ships and the core of the Blighter fleet came out of
the Slowness almost simultaneously. Comm alarms went off across
Ølvira's deck as priority mail arrived and passed through the ship's
crypto. "Source: Limmende at HQ. Star Breaker Priority," said the ship's
voice.
Glimfrelle put the message on the main window, and Svensndot felt a
chill certainty spread up his neck.
... All units are to pursue fleeing vessels. These are the enemy, the
killers of our people. WARNING: Masquerades suspected. Destroy any vessels
countermanding these orders. Order of Battle and validation codes follow....
Order of Battle was simple, even by Commercial Security standards.
Limmende wanted them to split up and be gone, staying only long enough to
destroy "masqueraders". Kjet said to Glimfrelle, "How about the validation
codes?"
The Dirokime seemed his usual self again: "They're clean. We wouldn't
be receiving the message at all unless the sender had today's one-time
pad.... We're beginning to receive queries from the others, Boss. Audio and
video channels. They want to know what to do."
If he hadn't prepared the ground during the last few hours, Kjet's
mutiny wouldn't have had a chance. If Commercial Security had been a real
military organization, the Limmende order might have been obeyed without
question. As it was, the other commanders pondered the questions that
Svensndot had raised: At these ranges, video communication was easy and the
fleet had one-time ciphers large enough to support enormous amounts of it.
Yet "Limmende" had chosen printed mail for her priority message. It made
perfect military sense given that the encryption was correct, but it was
also what Svensndot had predicted: The supposed HQ was not quite willing to
show its face down here where perfect visual masquerades were not possible.
Their commands would be by mail, or evocations that a sharp observer might
suspect.
Such a slender thread of reason Kjet and his friends were hanging from.
Kjet eyed the knot of light that represented the Blighter fleet. It was
suffering from no indecision. None of its vessels were straggling back
toward safer heights. Whatever commanded there had discipline beyond most
human militaries. It would sacrifice everything in its single-minded pursuit
of one small starship. What next, Group Captain?
Just ahead of that cold smear of light, a single tiny gleam appeared.
"The Out of Band!" said Glimfrelle. "Sixty-five light-years out now."
"I'm getting encrypted video from them, Boss. The same half-crocked xor
pad as before." He put the signal on the main window without waiting for
Kjet's direction.
It was Ravna Bergsndot. The background was a jumble of motion and
shouting, the strange human and a Skroderider arguing. Bergsndot was facing
away from the pickup, and doing her share of shouting. Things looked even
worse than Kjet's recollection of the first moments of his ship's emergence.
"It doesn't matter just now, I tell you! Let him be. We've got to
contact -- " she must have seen the signal Glimfrelle was sending back to
her. "They're here! By the Powers, Pham, please -- " She waved her hand
angrily and turned to the camera. "Group Captain. We're -- "
"I know. We've been out of the surge for hours. We're near the center
of the pursuit now."
She caught her breath. Even with a hundred hours of planning, events
were moving too fast for her. And for me too. "That's something," she said
after an instant. "Everything we said before holds, Group Captain. We need
your help. That's the Blight that's coming behind us. Please!"
Svensndot noticed a telltale by the window. Sassy Glimfrelle was
retransmitting this to all the fleet they could trust. Good. He had talked
about the situation with the others these last hours, but it meant something
more to see Ravna Bergsndot on the comm, to see someone from Sjandra Kei who
still survived and needed their help. You can spend the rest of your life
chasing revenge in the Middle Beyond, but all you kill will be the vultures.
What's chasing Ravna Bergsndot may be the first cause.
The Butterflies were long gone, still singing their courage across the
Net. Less than one percent of Commercial Security had followed "Limmende's"
order to chase after them. Those were not the problem: it was the ten
percent that stayed behind and arrayed themselves with the Blight's forces
that bothered Kjet Svensndot. Some of those ships might not be subverted,
might simply be loyal to orders they believed. It would be very hard to fire
on them.
And there would be fighting, no doubt of that. Maneuvering for conflict
while under ultradrive was difficult -- if the other side attempted to
evade. But Blight's fleet was unwavering in its pursuit of the Out of Band.
Slowly, slowly the two fleets were coming to occupy the same volume. At
present they were scattered across cubic light-years, but with every jump,
the Group Captain's Aniara fleet was more finely tuned to the stutter of
their quarries' drives. Some ships were actually within a few hundred
million kilometers of the enemy -- or where the enemy had been or would be.
Targeting tactics were set. First fire was only a few hundred seconds away.
"With the Aprahanti gone, we have numerical superiority. A normal enemy
would back off now -- "
"But of course, that is one thing the Blight fleet is not." It was the
red-haired guy who was doing the talking now. It was a good thing Glimfrelle
hadn't relayed his face to the rest of Svensndot's fleet. The guy acted edgy
and alien most of the time. Just now, he seemed intent on bashing every idea
Svensndot advanced. "The Blight doesn't care what its losses are as long as
it arrives with the upper hand."
Svensndot shrugged. "Look, we'll do our best. First fire is seventy
seconds off. If they don't have any secret advantage, we may win this one."
He looked sharply at the other. "Or is that your point? Could the Blight --
" Stories were still coming down about the Blight's progress across the Top
of the Beyond. Without a doubt, it was a transhuman intelligence. An unarmed
man might be outnumbered by a pack of dogs, yet still defeat them. So might
the Blight...?
Pham Nuwen shook his head. "No, no, no. The Blight's tactics down here
will probably be inferior to yours. Its great advantage is at the Top, where
it can control its slaves like fingers on a hand. Its creatures down here
are like badly-synched waldoes." Nuwen frowned at something off camera. "No,
what we have to fear is its strategic cleverness." His voice suddenly had a
detached quality that was more unsettling than the earlier impatience. It
wasn't the calm of someone facing up to a threat; it was more the calm of
the demented. "One hundred seconds to contact.... Group Captain, we have a
chance, if you concentrate your forces on the right points." Ravna floated
down from the top of the picture, put one hand on the red-head's shoulder.
Godshatter, she said he was, their secret edge against the enemy.
Godshatter, a Power's dying message; garbage or treasure, who really knew?
Damn. If the other guys are badly-synched waldoes, what does following
Pham Nuwen make us? But he motioned Tirolle to mark the targets Nuwen was
saying. Ninety seconds. Decision time. Kjet pointed at the red marks Tirolle
had scattered through the enemy fleet. "Anything special about those
targets, 'Rolle?"
The Dirokime whistled for a moment. Correlations popped up agonizingly
slowly on the windows before him. "The ships he's targeting aren't the
biggest or the fastest. It's gonna take extra time to position on them."
Command vessels? "One other thing. Some of 'em show high real velocities,
not natural residuals at all." Ships with ram drives? Planet busters?
"Hm." Svensndot looked at the display just a second more. Thirty
seconds and Jo Haugen's ship Lynsnar would be in contact, but not with one
of Nuwen's targets. "Get on the comm, Glimfrelle. Tell Lynsnar to back off,
retarget." Retarget everything.
The lights that were Aniara fleet slid slowly around the core of the
Blighter fleet, searching for their new targets. Twenty minutes passed, and
not a few arguments with the other captains. Commercial Security was not
built for military combat. What had made Kjet Svensndot's appeal successful
was also the cause of constant questioning and countersuggestions. And then
there were the threats that came from Owner Limmende's channel: kill the
mutineers, death to all those disloyal to the company. The encryption was
valid but the tone was totally alien to the mild, profit-oriented Giske
Limmende. Everyone could now see that disbelieving Limmende was one correct
decision, anyway.
Johanna Haugen was the first to achieve synch with the new targets.
Glimfrelle opened the main window on the Lynsnar's data stream: The view was
almost natural, a night sky of slowly shifting stars. The target was less
than thirty million kilometers from Lynsnar, but about a millisecond out of
synch. Haugen was arriving just before or just after the other had jumped.
"Drones away," Haugen's voice said. Now they had a true view of Lynsnar
from a few meters away, from a camera aboard one of the first weapons drones
launched. The ship was barely visible, a darkness obscuring the stars beyond
-- a great fish in the depths of an endless sea. A fish that was now giving
spawn. The picture flickered, Lynsnar disappearing, reappearing, as the
drone lost synch momentarily. A swarm of blue lights spilled from the ship's
hold. Weapon drones. The swarm hung by Lynsnar, calibrating itself,
orienting on the enemy.
The light faded from around Lynsnar as the drones moving fractionally
out of synch in space and time. Tirolle opened a window on a hundred-million
klick sphere centered at Lynsnar. The target vessel was a red dot that
flickered around the sphere like a maddened insect. Lynsnar was stalking
prey at eight thousand times the speed of light. Sometimes the target
disappeared for a second, synch almost lost; other times Lynsnar and the
target merged for an instant as the two craft spent a tenth of a second at
less than a million kilometers remove. What could not be accurately
displayed was the disposition of the drones. The spawn diffused on a myriad
trajectories, their sensors extended for sign of the enemy ship.
"What about the target, is it swarming back? Do you need back up?" said
Svensndot. Tirolle gave a Dirokime shrug. What they were watching was three
light-years away. No way he could know.
But Jo Haugen replied, "I don't think my bogie is swarming. I've lost
only five drones, no more'n you'd expect from fratricide. We'll see -- " She
paused, but Lynsnar's trace and signal remained strong. Kjet looked out the
other windows. Five of Aniara were already engaged and three had completed
swarm deploy. Nuwen looked on silently from Out of Band. The godshatter had
had its way, and now Kjet and his people were committed.
And now good news and bad came in very fast:
"Got him!" from Jo Haugen. The red dot in Lynsnar's swarm was no more.
It had passed within a few thousand kilometers of one of the drones. In the
milliseconds necessary to compute a new jump, the drone had discovered its
presence and detonated. Even that would not have been fatal if the target
had jumped before the blast front hit it; there had been several near misses
in earlier seconds. This time the jump did not reach commit in time. A
mini-star was born, one whose light would be years in reaching the rest of
the battle volume.
Glimfrelle gave a rasping whistle, an untranslatable curse, "We just
lost Ablsndot and Holder, Boss. Their target must have counter-swarmed."
"Send in Gliwing and Trance." Something in the back of his head curled
up in horror. These were his friends who were dying. Kjet had seen death
before, but never like this. In police action, no one took lethal chances
except in a rescue. And yet... he turned from the field summary to order
more ships on a target that had acquired defending vessels. Tirolle was
moving in others on his own. Ganging up on a few nonessential targets might
lose in the long run, but in the short term ... the enemy was being hurt.
For the first time since the fall of Sjandra Kei, Commercial Security was
hurting someone back.
Haugen: "Powers, that guy was moving! Secondary drone got EM spectrum
on the kill. Target was going 15000 kps true speed." A rocket bomb ramping
up? Damn. They should be postponing those till after they controlled the
battlefield.
Tirolle: "More kills, far side of battle volume. The enemy is
repositioning. Somehow they've guessed which we're after -- "
Glimfrelle: Triumph whistle. "Get 'em, get 'em -- oops. Boss, I think
Limmende has figured we're coordinating things -- "
A new window had opened over Tirolle's post. It showed the five million
kilometers around Ølvira. Two other ships were there now: the window
identified them as Limmende's flag and one of the vessels that had not
responded to Svensndot's recruiting.
There was an instant of stillness on Ølvira's command deck. The
voices of triumph and panic coming from the rest of the fleet seemed
suddenly far away. Svensndot and his crew were looking at death close up.
"Tirolle! How long till swarm -- "
"They're on us already -- just missed a drone by ten milliseconds."
"Tirolle! Finish running current engagements. Glimfrelle, tell Lynsnar
and Trance to chain command if we lose contact." Those ships had already
spent their drones, and Jo Haugen was known to all the other captains.
Then the thought was gone, and he was busy coordinating Ølvira's
own battle swarm. The local tactics window showed the cloud dissipating,
taking on colors coded by whether they were lagging or leading in time
relative to Ølvira.
Their two attackers had matched pseudospeeds perfectly. Ten times per
second all three ships jumped a tiny fraction of a light-year. Like rocks
skipping across the surface of a pond, they appeared in real space in
perfectly measured hops -- and the distance between them at every emergence
was less that five million kilometers. The only thing that separated them
now was millisecond differences in jump times, and the fact the light itself
could not pass between them in the brief time they spent at each jump point.
Three actinic flashes lit the deck, casting shadows back from Svensndot
and the Dirokimes. It was second-hand light, the display's emergency signal
of nearby detonation. Run like hell was the message any rational person
should take from that awful light. It would be easy enough to break synch
... and lose tactical control of Aniara fleet. Tirolle and Glimfrelle bent
their heads away from the local window, shying from the glare of nearby
death. Their whistling voices scarcely broke cadence, and the commands from
Ølvira to the others continued. There were dozens of other battles
going on out there. Just now Ølvira was the only source of precision
and control available to their side. Every second they remained on station
meant protection and advantage to Aniara. Breaking off would mean minutes of
chaos till Lynsnar or Trance could pick up control.
Nearly two thirds of Pham Nuwen's targets were destroyed now. The price
had been high, half of Svensdot's friends. The enemy had lost much to
protect those targets, yet much of its fleet survived.
An unseen hand smashed Ølvira, driving Svensndot hard against
his combat harness. The lights went out, even the glow from the windows.
Then dim red light came from the floor. The Dirokimes were silhouetted by
one small monitor. 'Rolle whistled softly, "We're out of the game, Boss,
least while it counts. I didn't know you could get misses that near."
Maybe it wasn't a miss. Kjet scrambled out of his harness and boosted
across the room to float head-down over the tiny monitor. Maybe we're
already dead. Somewhere very close by a drone had detonated, the wave front
reaching Ølvira before she jumped. The concussion had been the outer
part of the ship's hull exploding as it absorbed the soft-xray component of
the enemy ordnance. He stared at the red letters marching slowly across the
damage display. Most likely, the electronics was permanently dead; chances
were they had all received a fatal dose of gamma. The smell of burnt
insulation floated across the room on the ventilator's breeze.
"Iiya! Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn't have been
clipped at all. We actually committed the jump after the front hit!" And
somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The
gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would
slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship's
surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the Ølvira's
automation ...
Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice
recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across
the screen. "Central automation suspended. Display management suspended.
Drive computation suspended." Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. "Hei,
'Frelle, it looks like 'Vira managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most
of this back!"
Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case
Tirolle wasn't far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had
been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the
next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor's hardened
processor, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were
beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and
the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted.
(Absurdly, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that
should have been disabled along with all the rest of Ølvira's
automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet.
... and there was still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was
smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was
long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four
light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with
numerical superiority. If they'd fought properly, they might have won.
Instead they'd destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities -- and
knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels
survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than
four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained
of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit,
and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy's behavior.
Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and
trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had
lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been
hit at known locations, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms
to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual
exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were
as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space.
Finally the time for miracle rescues and sad discoveries was passed.
The SjK commanders gathered on a common channel to decide a common future.
It might better have been a wake -- for Sjandra Kei and Aniara fleet. Part
way through the meeting, a new window appeared, a view onto the bridge of
the Out of Band. Ravna Bergsndot watched the proceedings silently. The
erstwhile "godshatter" was nowhere in evidence.
"What more to do?" said Johanna Haugen. "The damn Butterflies are long
gone."
"Are we sure we have rescued everyone?" asked Jan Trenglets. Svensndot
bit back an angry reply. The commander of Trance had become a recording loop
on that issue. He had lost too many friends in the battle; all the rest of
his life Jan Trenglets would live with nightmares of ships slowly dying in
the deep night.
"We've accounted for everything, even to vapor," Haugen spoke as gently
as the words allowed. "The question is where to go now."
Ravna made a small throat-clearing sound, "Gentlemen and Ladies, if --
"
Trenglets looked up at her transceived image. All his hurt transformed
into a blaze of anger. "We're not your gentlemen, slut! You're not some
princess we happily die for. You deserve our deadly fire now, nothing more."
The woman shrank from Trenglets rage. "I -- "
"You put us into this suicidal battle," shouted Trenglets. "You made us
attack secondary targets. And then you did nothing to help. The Blight is
locked on you like a dumshark on a squid. If you had just altered your
course the tiniest fraction, you could have thrown the Blighters off our
path."
"I doubt that would have helped, sir," said Ravna. "The Blight seems
most interested in where we're bound." The solar system just fifty-five
light-years beyond the Out of Band. The fugitives would arrive there just
over two days before their pursuers.
Jo Haugen shrugged. "You must realize what your friend's crazy battle
plan has done. If we had attacked rationally, the enemy would be a fraction
of its present size. If it chose to continue, we might have been able to
protect you at this, this Tines' world." She seemed to taste the strange
name, wondering at its meaning. "Now ... no way am I going to chase them
there. What's left of the enemy could wipe us out." She glanced at
Svensndot's viewpoint. Kjet forced himself to look back. No matter who might
blame Out of Band, it had been Group Captain Kjet Svensndot's word that had
persuaded the fleet to fight as they did. Aniara's sacrifice had been ill-
spent, and he wondered that Haugen and Trenglets and the others talked to
him at all now. "Suggest we continue the business meeting later. Rendezvous
in one thousand seconds, Kjet."
"I'll be ready."
"Good." Jo cut the link without saying anything more to Ravna
Bergsndot. Seconds later, Trenglets and the other commanders were gone. It
was just Svensndot and the two Dirokimes -- and Ravna Bergsndot looking out
her window from Out of Band.
Finally, Bergsndot said, "When I was a little girl on Herte, sometimes
we would play kidnappers and Commercial Security. I always dreamed of being
rescued by your company from fates worse than death."
Kjet smiled bleakly, "Well, you got the rescue attempt," and you not
even a currently subscribed customer. "This was far the biggest gun fight
we've ever been in."
"I'm sorry, Kje -- Group Captain."
He looked into her dark features. A lass from Sjandra Kei, down to the
violet eyes. No way this could be a simulation, not here. He had bet
everything that she was not; he still believed she was not. Yet -- "What
does your friend say about all this?" Pham Nuwen had not been seen since his
so-impressive godshatter act at the beginning of the battle.
Ravna's glance shifted to something off-camera. "He's not saying much,
Group Captain. He's wandering around even more upset than your Captain
Trenglets. Pham remembers being absolutely convinced he was demanding the
right thing, but now he can't figure out why it was right."
"Hmm." A little late for second thoughts. "What are you going to do
now? Haugen is right, you know. It would be useless suicide for us to follow
the Blighters to your destination. I daresay it's useless suicide for you,
too. You'll arrive maybe fifty-five hours before them. What can you do in
that time?"
Ravna Bergsndot looked back at him, and her expression slowly collapsed
into sobbing grief. "I don't know. I ... don't know." She shook her head,
her face hidden behind her hands and a sweep of black hair. Finally she
looked up and brushed back her hair. Her voice was calm but very quiet. "But
we are going ahead. It's what we came for. Things could still work out....
You know there's something down there, s