no way OOB could fit, but I think we should play along, tell Jefri
that we can separate from our ultradrive, something like his container ship.
Let Steel concentrate on building harmless traps...."
He hummed one of his strange little "marching" tunes. "About the radio
thing: why don't we compliment the Tines real casually for improving our
design. I wonder what they'd say?"
Pham Nuwen got his answer less than three days later. Jefri Olsndot
said that he had done the optimization. So if you believed the kid, there
was no evidence for hidden computers. Pham was not at all convinced: "So
just by coincidence, we have Isaac Newton on the other end of the line?"
Ravna didn't argue the point. It was an enormous bit of luck, yet.... She
went over the earlier messages. In language and general knowledge, the boy
seemed very ordinary for his age. But occasionally there were situations
involving mathematical insight -- not formal, taught math -- where Jefri
said striking things. Some of those conversations had been under fine
conditions, with turnaround times of less than a minute. It all seemed too
consistent to be the lie Pham Nuwen thought.
Jefri Olsndot, you are someone I want very much to meet.
There was always something: problems with the Tines' developments,
fears that the murderous Woodcarvers might attack Mr. Steel, worries about
the steadily degrading drive spines and Zone turbulence that slowed OOB's
progress even further. Life was by turns and at once frustrating, boring,
frightening. And yet ...
One night about four months into the flight, Ravna woke in the cabin
she had come to share with Pham. Maybe she had been dreaming, but she
couldn't remember anything except that it had been no nightmare. There was
no special noise in the room, nothing to wake her. Beside her, Pham was
sleeping soundly in their hammock net. She eased her arm down his back,
drawing him gently toward her. His breathing changed; he mumbled something
placid and unintelligible. In Ravna's opinion, sex in zero-gee was not the
experience some people bragged it up to be; but really sleeping with someone
... that was much nicer in free fall. An embrace could be light and enduring
and effortless.
Ravna looked around the dimly-lit cabin, trying to imagine what had
woken her. Maybe it had just been the problems of the day -- Powers knew
there had been enough of those. She nestled her face against Pham's
shoulder. Yes, always problems, but ... in a way she more content than she
had been in years. Sure there were problems. Poor Jefri's situation. All the
people lost at Straum and Relay. But she had three friends, and a love.
Alone in a tiny ship bound for the Bottom, she was less lonely than she'd
been since leaving Sjandra Kei. More than ever in her life, maybe she could
do something to help with the problems.
And then she guessed, part in sadness, part in joy, that years from now
she might look back on these months as goldenly happy.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
CHAPTER 26
And finally, almost five months out, it was clear there was no hope of
going on without repairing the drive spines. The OOB was suddenly doing only
a quarter of a light-year per hour in a volume that tested good for two. And
things were getting worse. They would have no trouble making it to
Harmonious Repose, but beyond that ...
Harmonious Repose. An ugly name, thought Ravna. Pham's "light-hearted"
translation was worse: Rest In Peace. In the Beyond, almost everything
habitable was in use. Civilizations were transient and races faded ... but
there were always new people moving up from Below. The result was most often
patchwork, polyspecific systems. Young races just up from the Slowness lived
uneasily with the remnants of older peoples. According to the ship's
library, RIP had been in the Beyond for a long time. It had been
continuously inhabited for at least two hundred million years, time for ten
thousand species to call it home. The most recent notes showed better than
one hundred racial terranes. Even the youngest was the residue of a dozen
emigrations. The place should be peaceful to the point of being moribund.
So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were
flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they'd be able to listen to the
News the whole way in.
Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external
goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious,
hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the
creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from
just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users.
Too bad we can't follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in
Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible
methods of payment.
Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in:
Crypto: 0
As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Call to action
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay
Key phrases: Action, not talk
Text of message:
Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the
Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment
we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will
need support services including free Net time.
In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports
our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the
human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of
victory -- or wait, and be destroyed.
Death to vermin.
There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about
who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There
were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the
fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups.
Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still
making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that
way.
Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers
generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than
conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a
single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they
do after all?"
Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are
hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have
taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began.... By the Powers,
I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since
she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something
from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than
she realized. Now....
On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been
working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear
for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving
force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them
would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded
there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or
bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."
Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would
stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a
ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei
would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for
nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one
thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to
look like anything human."
And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of
Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders
went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances
that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded?
Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things
human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if
necessary.
Pham Nuwen checked what they did -- and found more than one slip-up.
For a barbarian programmer, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly
reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more
sophisticated than what he had known.
Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB
was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based
on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed
of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe
built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it.
RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check
and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to
match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and
"Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta
be honest, right?")
Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers
from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was
spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even
though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was
surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet.
The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural
view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet.
Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides,
hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects --
structures? -- sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast
needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed
more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt,
and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring
system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or
on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred
kilometers across ... but there appeared to be thousands of them.
At "Saint Rihndell's" direction they brought the ship down to the ring
plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big
impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. "Just like old, old
times," Pham Nuwen said.
In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it
looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were
objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of
icy froth -- gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly
motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In
the plane of the rings, they couldn't see more than a few hundred meters.
The debris blocked further views. And it wasn't all loose. Greenstalk
pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by
them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. "Looks like a single
structure," she said.
Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the
"frothy snowballs" sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks
long.... The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it
was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of
snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with
images from their approach, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better
than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered
along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure
could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart
briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was
vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time
Nyjoran railway.
Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc.
The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the
modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled
heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers,
they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths
were occupied.
Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell's business specs. "Hmm. Hm.
Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy." He angled some fronds back at the
ships in the exterior view.
Pham: "Maybe he's running a junkyard."
Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for
their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred
years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the
two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with "Saint
Rihndell".
"Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would
remember the type even if I'd never ridden a Skrode. But our business here
is not like anything we've done before."
Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his
cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic
stuff that protected what it covered.
This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring
systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly,
there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the
repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business
sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across
his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the
cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it
came to renting bandwidth -- or maybe it was simply cautious.
Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He
was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was
encrypted.
"Yes."
The Skroderiders passed through OOB's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc
habitat.
From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows
that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's
current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view,
but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat
swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central
fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of
a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow
surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like
food in a slow tidal surge.
The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body
plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The
tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment,
one such drifted out from the wall near the OOB's lock. It buzzed something
that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs
moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled
behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk,
"The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider
humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs -- evolved
from flippers or jaws or whatever -- were all very good for movement on
land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.
The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying
slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell
kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch
that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going?
What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at
Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term
memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.
Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to
understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller.... helper
creatures those are.... allies of big new customer..." Their guide's limited
speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more
than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of
Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in
Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or
Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important
questions: What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I
persuade you to part with it? Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out
the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and
ability.
It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell
chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's
recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of
others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could
work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And
this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above
would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore
articulated pressure suits -- the force-field suits of the High Beyond would
last only a few weeks down here.
They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks
circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of
meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there
was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane
beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a
thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had
seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed
against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on
their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration ... but she
doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be
clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.
Greenstalk had visited eight ring system civilizations in her life.
They were a common consequence of accidents and wars (and occasionally, of
deliberate habitat design). According to OOB's library, Harmonious Repose
had been a normal planetary system up till ten million years ago. Then
there'd been a real estate dispute: A young race from Below had thought to
colonize and exterminate the moribund inhabitants. The attack had been a
miscalculation, for the moribund could still kill and the system was reduced
to rubble. Perhaps the young race survived. But after ten million years, if
there were any of those young killers left they would now be the most frail
of the systems' elder races. Perhaps a thousand new races had passed through
in that time, and almost every one had done something to tailor the rings
and the gas cloud left from the debacle. What was left was not a ruin at
all, but old ... old. The ship's library claimed that no race had
transcended from Harmonious Repose in a thousand years. That fact was more
important than all the others. The current civilizations were in their
twilight, refining mediocrity. More than anything else, the system had the
feel of an old and beautiful tide pool, groomed and tended, shielded from
the exciting waves that might upset its bansai plumes. Most likely the
tusk-legs were the liveliest species about, perhaps the only one interested
in trade with the outside.
Their car slowed and spiraled into a small tower.
"By the Fleet, what I wouldn't give to be out there with them!" Pham
Nuwen waved at the views coming in from the skrode cameras. Ever since the
Riders left, he'd been at the windows, alternately gaping wide-eyed at the
ringscape and bouncing abstractedly between the command deck's floor and
ceiling. Ravna had never seen him so absorbed, so intense. However
fraudulent his memories of trading days, he truly thought he could make a
difference. And he may be right.
Pham came down from the ceiling, pulled close to the screen. It looked
like serious bargaining was about to begin. The Skroderiders had arrived in
a spherical room perhaps fifty meters across. Apparently they were floating
near the center of it. A forest grew inward from all directions, and the
Riders seemed to float just a few meters from the tree tops. Here and there
between the branches, they could see the ground, a mosaic of flowers.
Saint Rihndell's sales creatures were scattered all about the tallest
trees. They sat(?) with their ivory limbs twined about the tree tops.
Tusk-leg races were a common thing in the galaxy, but these were the first
Ravna had known. The body plan was totally unlike anything from home, and
even now she didn't have a clear idea of their appearance. Sitting in the
trees, their legs had more of the aspect of a skeletal fingers grasping
around the trunk. Their chief rep -- who claimed to be Saint Rihndell itself
-- had scrimshaw covering two-thirds of its ivory. Two of the windows showed
the carving close up; Pham seemed to think that understanding the artwork
might be useful.
Progress was slow. Triskweline was the common language, but good
interpreting devices didn't work this deep in the Beyond, and Saint
Rihndell's folk were only marginally familiar with the trade talk. Ravna was
used to clean translations. Even the Net messages she dealt with were
usually intelligible (though sometimes misleadingly so).
They'd been talking for twenty minutes and had only just established
that Saint Rihndell might have the ability to repair OOB. It was the usual
Riderly driftiness, and something more. The tedium seemed to please Pham
Nuwen, "Rav, this is almost like a Qeng Ho operation, face to face with
critters and scarcely a common language."
"We sent them a description of our repair problem hours ago. Why should
it take so long for a simple yes or no?"
"Because they're haggling," said Pham, his grin broadening. "'Honest'
Saint Rihndell here -- " he waved at the scrimshawed local, "-- wants to
convince us just how hard the job is.... Lord I wish I was out there."
Even Blueshell and Greenstalk seemed a little strange now. Their
Triskweline was stripped down, barely more complex than Saint Rihndell's.
And much of the discussion seemed very round about. Working for Vrinimi,
Ravna had had some experience with sales and trading. But haggling? You had
your pricing data bases and strategy support, and directions from Grondr's
people. You either had a deal or you didn't. What was going on between the
Riders and Saint Rihndell was one of the more alien things Ravna had ever
seen.
"Actually, things are going pretty well ... I think. You saw when we
arrived, the bone legs took away Blueshell's samples. By now they know
precisely what we have. There's something in those samples that they want.
"Yeah?"
"Sure. Saint Rihndell isn't bad-mouthing our stuff for his health."
"Damn it, it's possible we don't have anything on board they could
want. This was never intended to be a trade expedition." Blueshell and
Greenstalk had scavenged "product samples" from the ship's supplies, things
that the OOB could survive without. These included sensoria and some Low
Beyond computer gear. Some of that would be a serious loss. But one way or
another, we need those repairs.
Pham chuckled. "No. There's something there Saint Rihndell wants.
Otherwise he wouldn't still be jawing.... And see how he keeps needling us
about his 'other customers' needs'? Saint Rihndell is a human kind of a
guy."
Something like human song came over the link to the Riders. Ravna
phased Greenstalk's cameras toward the sound. From the forest "floor" on the
far side of Blueshell, three new creatures had appeared.
"Why ... they're beautiful. Butterflies," said Ravna.
"Huh?"
"I mean they look like butterflies. You know? Um. Insects with large
colored wings."
Giant butterflies, actually. The newcomers had a generally humanoid
body plan. They were about 150 centimeters tall and covered with
soft-looking brown fur. Their wings sprouted from behind their shoulder
blades. At full spread they were almost two meters across, soft blues and
yellows, some more intricately patterned than others. Surely they were
artificial, or a gengineered affectation; they would have been useless for
flying about in any reasonable gravity. But here in zero-gee.... The three
floated at the entrance for just a moment, their huge, soft eyes looking up
at the Riders. Then they swept their wings in measured sweeps, and drifted
gracefully into the air above the forest. The entire effect was like
something out of a children's video. They had pert, button noses, like pet
jorakorns, and eyes as wide and bashful as any human animator ever drew.
Their voices sounded like youngsters singing.
Saint Rihndell and his buddies sidled around their tree tops. The
tallest visitor sang on, its wings gently flexing. After a moment, Ravna
realized it was speaking fluent Trisk with a front end adapted to the
creature's natural speech:
"Saint Rihndell, greetings! Our ships are ready for your repairs. We
have made fair payment, and we are in a great hurry. Your work must begin at
once!" Saint Rihndell's Trisk specialist translated the speech for his boss.
Ravna leaned across Pham's back. "So maybe our friendly repairman
really is overbooked," she said.
"... Yeah."
Saint Rihndell came back around his treetop. His little arms picked at
the green needles as he made a reply. "Honored Customers. You made offer of
payment, not fully accepted. What you ask is in short supply, difficult to
... do."
The cuddly butterfly made a squeaking noise that might have passed for
joyous laughter in a human child. The sense behind its singing was
different: "Times are changing, Rihndell creature! Your people must learn:
We will not be stymied. You know my fleet's sacred mission. We count every
passing hour against you. Think on the fleet you will face if your lack of
cooperation is ever known -- is ever even suspected." There was a sweep of
blue and yellow wings, and the butterfly turned. Its dark, bashful eyes
rested on the Riders. "And these potted plants, they are customers? Dismiss
them. Till we are gone, you have no other customers."
Ravna sucked in a breath. The three had no visible weapons, but she was
suddenly afraid for Blueshell and Greenstalk.
"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
CHAPTER 27
According to the clock, it took less than half an hour for the
Skroderiders to make it back. It seemed a lot longer to Pham Nuwen, even
though he tried to keep up a casual front with Ravna. Maybe they were both
keeping up a front; he knew she still considered him a fragile case.
But the Riders' cameras showed no more signs of the killer butterflies.
Finally the cargo lock cracked open and Blueshell and Greenstalk were back.
"I was sure the wily tusk-legs was just pretending there was strong
demand," said Blueshell. He seemed as eager to rehash the story as Pham was.
"Yeah, I thought so too. In fact, I still think those butterflies might
just be part of an act. It's all too melodramatic."
Blueshell's fronds rattled in a way that Pham recognized as a kind of
shiver. "I wager not, Sir Pham. Those were Aprahanti. Just the look of them
fills you with dread, does it not? They're rare these days, but a star
trader knows the stories. Still ... this is a little much even for
Aprahanti. Their Hegemony has been on the wane for several centuries." He
rattled something at the ship, and the windows were filled with views of
nearby berths in the repair harbor. There was more Rider rattling, this time
between Greenstalk and Blueshell. "Those other ships are a uniform type, you
know. A High Beyond design like ours, but more, um, ... militant."
Greenstalk moved close to a window. "There are twenty of them. Why
would so many need drive repairs all at once?"
Militant? Pham looked at the ships with a critical eye. He knew the
major features of Beyonder vessels by now. These appeared to have rather
large cargo capacity. Elaborate sensoria too. Hm. "Okay, so the Butterflies
are hard types. How scared is Saint Rihndell and company?"
The Skroderiders were silent for a long moment. Pham couldn't tell if
his question was being given serious consideration or if they had
simultaneously lost track of the conversation. He looked at Ravna. "How
about the local net? I'd like to get some background."
She was already running comm routines. "They weren't accessible
earlier. We couldn't even get the News." That was something Pham could
understand, even if it was damned irritating. The "local net" was a RIP-wide
ultrawave computer and communication network, perhaps a billion times more
complex than anything Pham had known -- but conceptually similar to
organizations in the Slow Zone. And Pham Nuwen had seen what vandals could
do to such structures; Qeng Ho had dealt with at least one obnoxious
civilization by perverting its computer net. Not surprisingly, Saint
Rihndell hadn't provided them with links to the RIP net. And as long as they
were in harbor, the OOB's antenna swarm was necessarily down, so they were
also cut off from the Known Net and the newsgroups.
A grin lit Ravna's face. "Hei! Now we've got read access, maybe more.
Greenstalk. Blueshell. Wake up!"
Rattle. "I wasn't asleep," claimed Blueshell, "just thinking on Sir
Pham's question. Saint Rihndell is obviously afraid."
As usual, Greenstalk didn't make excuses. She rolled around her mate to
get a better look at Ravna's newly opened comm window. There was an
iterated-triangle design with Trisk annotations. It meant nothing to Pham.
"That's interesting," said Greenstalk.
"I am chuckling," said Blueshell. "It is more than interesting. Saint
Rihndell is a hard-trading type. But look, he is making no charge for this
service, not even a percentage of barter. He is afraid, but he still wants
to deal with us."
Hmm, so something from their High Beyond samples was enough to make him
risk Aprahanti violence. Just hope it's not something we really need too.
"Okay. Rav, see if -- "
"Just a second," the woman replied. "I want to check the News." She
started a search program. Her eyes flickered quickly across her console
window ... and after a second she choked, and her face paled. "By the
Powers, no!"
"What is it?"
But Ravna didn't reply, or put the news to a main window. Pham grabbed
the rail in front of her console and pulled himself around so he could see
what she was reading:
Crypto: 0
As received by: Harmonious Repose Communication Synod
Language path: Baeloresk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five
polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of
existence before the Fall of the Realm.]
Subject: Bold victory over the Perversion
Distribution:
Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group
Date: 159.06 days since fall of Relay
Key phrases: Action, not talk; A promising beginning
Text of message:
One hundred seconds ago, Alliance Forces began action against the tools
of the Blight. By the time you read this, the Homo Sapiens worlds known as
Sjandra Kei will have been destroyed.
Note well: for all the talk and theories that have flown about the
Blight, this is the first time anyone has successfully acted. Sjandra Kei
was one of only three systems outside of Straumli Realm known to harbor
humans in any numbers. In one stroke we have destroyed a third of the
Perversion's potential for expansion.
Updates will follow.
Death to vermin.
There was one other message in the window, an update of sorts, but not
from Death to Vermin:
Crypto: 0
Billing: charity/general interest
As received by: Harmonious Repose Communication Synod
Language path: Samnorsk->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Commercial Security, Sjandra Kei [Note from lower protocol layer:
This message was received at Sneerot Down along the Sjandra Kei bearing. The
transmission was very weak, perhaps from a shipboard transmitter]
Subject: Please help
Distribution:
Threats Interest Group
Date: 5.33 hours since disaster at Sjandra Kei
Text of message:
Earlier today, relativistic projectiles struck our main habitations.
Fatalities cannot be less than twenty-five billion. Three billion may still
live, in transit and in smaller habitats.
We are still under attack.
Enemy craft are in the inner system. We see glow bombs. They are
killing everyone.
Please. We need help.
"Nei nei nei!" Ravna drove up against him, her arms tight around him,
her face buried in his shoulder. She sobbed incoherent Samnorsk. Her whole
body shuddered against him. He felt tears coming to his own eyes. So
strange. She had been the strong one, and he the fragile crazy. Now it was
turned all around, and what could he do? "Father, mother, sister -- gone,
gone."
It was the disaster they thought could not happen, and now it had. In
one minute she had lost everything she grew up with, and was suddenly alone
in the universe. For me, that happened long ago, the thought came strangely
dispassionate. He hooked a foot into the deck and gently rocked Ravna back
and forth, trying to comfort her.
The sounds of grief gradually quieted, though he could still feel her
sobs through his chest. She didn't raise her face from the tear-soaked place
on his shirt. Pham looked over her head at Blueshell and Greenstalk. Their
fronds looked strange ... almost wilted.
"Look, I want to take Ravna away for a bit. Learn what you can, and
I'll be back."
"Yes, Sir Pham." And they seemed to droop even more.
It was an hour before Pham returned to the command deck. When he did,
he found the Riders deep in rattling conference with OOB. All the windows
were filled with flickering strangeness. Here and there Pham recognized a
pattern or a printed legend, enough to guess that he was seeing ordinary
ship displays, but optimized to Rider senses.
Blueshell noticed him first; he rolled abruptly toward him and his
voder voice came out a little squeaky. "Is she all right?"
Pham gave a little nod. "She's sleeping now." Sedated, and with the
ship watching her in case I've misjudged her. "Look, she'll be okay. She's
been hit hard ... but she's the toughest one of us all."
Greenstalk's fronds rattled a smile. "I have often thought that."
Blueshell was motionless for an instant. Then, "Well, to business, to
business." He said something to the ship, and the windows reformatted in the
compromise usable by both humans and Riders. "We've learned a lot while you
were gone. Saint Rihndell indeed has something to fear. The Aprahanti ships
are a small fragment of the Death to Vermin extermination fleets. These are
stragglers still on their way to Sjandra Kei!"
All dressed up for a massacre, and no place to go. "So now they want
some action of their own."
"Yes. Apparently Sjandra Kei put up some resistance and there were some
escapes. The commander of this fleetlet thinks he can intercept some of
these -- if he can get prompt repairs."
"What kind of extortion is really possible? Could these twenty ships
destroy RIP?"
"No. It's the reputation of the greater force these ships are part of
-- and the great killing at Sjandra Kei. So Saint Rihndell is very timid
with them, and what they need for repairs is the same class of regrowth
agent that we need. We really are in competition with them for Rihndell's
business." Blueshell's fronds slapped together, the sort of "go get'em"
enthusiasm he displayed when a hot deal was remembered. "But it turns out we
have something Saint Rihndell really, really wants, something he'll even
risk tricking the Aprahanti to get." He paused dramatically.
Pham thought back over the things they had offered the RIPers. Lord,
not the low zone ultrawave gear. "Okay, I'll bite. What do we have to
give'em?"
"A set of flamed trellises! Hah hah."
"Huh?" Pham remembered the name from the list of odds and ends the
Skroderiders had scrounged up. "What's a 'flamed trellis'?"
Blueshell poked a frond into his satchel and extended something stubby
and black to Pham: an irregular solid, about forty centimeters by fifteen,
smooth to the touch. For all its size, it didn't mass more than a couple of
grams. An artfully smoothed ... cinder. Pham's curiosity triumphed over
greater concerns: "But what's it good for?"
Blueshell dithered. After a moment, Greenstalk said a little shyly,
"There are theories. It's pure carbon, a fractal polymer. We know it's very
common in Transcendent cargoes. We think it's used as packing material for
some kinds of sentient property."
"Or perhaps the excrement of such property," Blueshell buzz-muttered.
"Ah, but that's not important. What is, is that occasional races in the
Middle Beyond prize them. And why that? Again, we don't know. Saint
Rihndell's folk are certainly not the final user. The Tusk-legs are far too
sensible to be ordinary trellis customers. So. We have three hundred of
these wonderful things ... more than enough to overcome Saint Rihndell's
fears of the Aprahanti."
While Pham had been away with Ravna, Saint Rihndell had come up with a
plan. Applying the regrowth agent would be too obvious in the same harbor
with the Aprahanti ships. Besides, the chief Butterfly had demanded the OOB
move out. Saint Rihndell had a small harbor about sixteen million klicks
around the RIP system. The move was even plausible, for it happened that
there was a Skroderider terrane in the Harmonious Repose system -- and
currently it was just a few hundred kilometers from Rihndell's second
harbor. They would rendezvous with the tusk-legs, exchanging repairs for two
hundred seventeen flamed trellises. And if the trellises were perfectly
matched, Rihndell promised to throw in an agrav refit. After the Fall of
Relay, that would be very welcome.... Hunh. Ol' Blueshell just never st