p. Yes. Desperate times, desperate measures. I want to try it, but
I fear.... I want there to be no accusations of Rider treachery, Sir Pham. I
want you to handle this."
Pham Nuwen smiled back. "My thought exactly."
"The Aniara Fleet." That's what some of the crews of Commercial
Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth,
older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the
asteroids of Earth's solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship
launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent
civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and
then over the following years -- as their ship fell out and out into the
endless dark -- died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing.
The image was a haunting one, which was probably the reason it was known
across millennia. With the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the escape of
Commercial Security, the story seemed suddenly come true.
But we will not play it to the end. Group Captain Kjet Svensndot stared
into the tracking display. This time the death of civilization had been a
murder, and the murderers were almost within vengeance's reach. For days,
fleet HQ had been maneuvering them to close with the Alliance. The display
showed that success was very, very near. The majority of Alliance and
Sjandra Kei ships were bound in a glowing ball of drive traces -- which also
included the third, silent fleet. From that display you might think that
battle was already possible. In fact, opposing ships were passing through
almost the same space -- sometimes less than a billion kilometers apart --
but still separated by milliseconds of time. All the vessels were on
ultradrive, jumping perhaps a dozen times a second. And even here at the
Bottom of the Beyond, that came to a measurable fraction of a light-year on
each jump. To fight an uncooperative enemy meant matching their jumps
perfectly and flooding the common space with weapon drones.
Group Captain Svensndot changed the display to show ships that had
exactly matched their pace with the Alliance. Almost a third of the fleet
was in synch now. Another few hours and.... "Damnation!" He slapped his
display board, sending it spinning across the deck.
His first officer retrieved the display, sent it sailing back. "Is this
a new damnation, or the usual?" Tirolle asked.
"It was the usual. Sorry." And he really was. Tirolle and Glimfrelle
had their own problems. No doubt there were still pockets of humanity in the
Beyond, hidden from the Alliance. But of the Dirokimes, there might be no
more than what was on Commercial Security's fleet. Except for adventurous
souls like Tirolle and Glimfrelle, all that was left of their kind had been
in the dream terranes at Sjandra Kei.
Kjet Svensndot had started with Commercial Security twenty-five years
before, back when the company had just been a small fleet of rentacops. He
had spent thousands of hours learning to be the very best combat pilot in
the organization. Only twice had he ever been in a shootout. Some might have
regretted that. Svensndot and his superiors took it as the reward for being
the best. His competence had won him the best fighting equipment in
Commercial Security's fleet, culminating with the ship he commanded now. The
Ølvira was purchased with part of the enormous premium that Sjandra
Kei paid out when the Alliance first started making threatening noises.
Ølvira was not a rebuilt freighter, but a fighting machine from the
keel out. The ship was equipped with the smartest processors, the smartest
ultra drive, that could operate at Sjandra Kei's altitude in the Beyond. It
needed only a three-person crew -- and combat could be managed by the pilot
alone with his AI associates. Its holds contained more than ten thousand
seeker bombs, each smarter than the average freighter's entire drive unit.
Quite a reward for twenty-five years of solid performance. They even let
Svensndot name his new ship.
And now.... Well, the true Ølvira was surely dead. Along with
billions of others they had been hired to protect, she had been at Herte, in
the inner system. Glow bombs leave no survivors.
And his beautiful ship with the same name, it had been a half
light-year out-system, seeking enemies that weren't there. In any honest
battle, Kjet Svensndot and this Ølvira could have done very well.
Instead they were chasing down into the Bottom of the Beyond. Every
light-year took them further from the regions Ølvira was built for.
Every light-year the processors worked a bit more slowly (or not at all).
Down here the converted freighters were almost an optimum design. Clumsy and
stupid, with crews of dozens, but they kept on working. Already
Ølvira was lagging five light-years behind them. It was the
freighters that would make the attack on the Alliance fleet. And once again
Kjet would stand powerless while his friends died.
For the hundredth time, Svensndot glared at the trace display and
contemplated mutiny. There were Alliance stragglers too -- "high
performance" vehicles left behind the central pack. But his orders were to
maintain position, to be a tactical coordinator for the fleet's swifter
combatants. Well, he would do as he was hired ... this one last time. But
when the battle was done, when the fleet was dead, with as many of the
Alliance that they could take with them -- then he would think of his own
revenge. Some of that depended on Tirolle and Glimfrelle. Could he persuade
them to leave the remnants of the Alliance fleet and ascend to the Middle
Beyond, up where the Ølvira was the best of her kind? There was good
evidence now about which star systems were behind the "Alliance for the
Defense". The murderers were boasting to the news. Apparently they thought
that would bring them new support. It might also bring them visitors like
Ølvira. The bombs in her belly could destroy worlds, though not as
swiftly sure as what had been used on Sjandra Kei. And even now Svensndot's
mind shrank from that sort of revenge. No. They would choose their targets
carefully: ships coming to form new Alliance fleets, underprotected convoys.
Ølvira might last a long time if he always struck from ambush and
never left survivors. He stared and stared at the display, and ignored the
wetness that floated at the corners of his eyes. All his life, he had lived
by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge.... And now
revenge was all that life had left for him.
"I'm getting something peculiar, Kjet." Glimfrelle was monitoring
signals this watch. It was the sort of thing that should have been totally
automated -- and had been in Ølvira's natural environment, but which
was now a boring and exhausting enterprise.
"What? More Net lies?" said Tirolle.
"No. This is on the bearing of that bottom-lugger everyone is chasing.
It can't be anyone else."
Svensndot's eyebrows rose. He turned on the mystery with enormous,
scarcely realized, pleasure. "Characteristics?"
"Ship's signal processor says it's probably a narrow beam. We are its
only likely target. The signal is strong and the bandwidth is at least
enough to support flat video. If our snarfling DSP was working right, I'd
know -- " 'Frelle sang a little song that was impatient humming among his
kind. "-- Iiae! It's encrypted, but at a high layer. This stuff is syntax 45
video. In fact, it claims to be using one third of a cipher the Company made
a year back." For an instant, Svensndot thought 'Frelle was claiming the
message itself was smart; that should be absolutely impossible here at the
Bottom. The second officer must have caught his look: "Just sloppy language,
Boss. I read this out of the frame format...." Something flashed on his
display. "Okay, here's the story on the cipher: the Company made it and its
peers to cover shipping security." Back before the Alliance, that had been
the highest crypto level in the organization. "This is the third that never
got delivered. The whole was assumed compromised, but miracle of miracles,
we still have a copy." Both 'Frelle and 'Rolle were looking at Svensndot
expectantly, their eyes large and dark. Standard policy -- standard orders
-- were that transmissions on compromised keys were to be ignored. If the
Company's signals people had been doing a proper job, the rotted cipher
wouldn't even have been aboard and the policy would have enforced itself.
"Decrypt the thing," Svensndot said shortly. The last weeks had
demonstrated that his company was a dismal failure when it came to military
intelligence and signals. They might as well get some benefit from that
incompetence.
"Yes sir!" Glimfrelle tapped a single key. Somewhere inside
Ølvira's signal processor, a long segment of "random" noise was
broken into frames and laid precisely down on the "random" noise in the data
frames incoming. There was a perceptible pause (damn the Bottom) and then
the comm window lit with a flat video picture.
"-- fourth repetition of this message." The words were Samnorsk, and a
dialect of pure Herte i Sjandra. The speaker was ... for a heartstopping
instant he was seeing Ølvira again, alive. He exhaled slowly, trying
to relax. Black-haired, slim, violet-eyed -- just like Ølvira. And
just like a million other women of Sjandra Kei. The resemblance was there,
but so vague he would never have been taken by it before. For an instant he
imagined a universe beyond their lost fleet, and goals beyond vengeance.
Then he forced his attention back to business, to seeing everything he could
in the images in the window.
The woman was saying, "We'll repeat three more times. If by then you
have still not responded, we will attempt a different target." She pushed
back from the camera pickup, giving them a view of the room behind her. It
was low-ceilinged, deep. An ultradrive trace display dominated the
background, but Svensndot paid it little attention. There were two
Skroderiders in the background. One wore stripes on its skrode that meant a
trade history with Sjandra Kei. The other must be a lesser Rider; its skrode
was small and wheelless. The pickup turned, centered on the fourth figure.
Human? Probably, but of no Nyjoran heritage. In another time, his appearance
would have been big news across all human civilizations in the Beyond. Now
the point only registered on Svensndot's mind as another cause for
suspicion.
The woman continued, "You can see that we are human and Rider. We are
the entire crew of the Out of Band II. We are not part of the Alliance for
the Defense nor agents of the Blight.... But we are the reason their fleets
are down here. If you can read this, we're betting that you are of Sjandra
Kei. We must talk. Please reply using the tail of the pad that is decrypting
this message." The picture jigged and the woman's face was back in the
foreground. "This is the fifth repetition of this message," she said. "We'll
repeat two more -- "
Glimfrelle cut the audio. "If she means it, we have about one hundred
seconds. What next, Captain?"
Suddenly the Ølvira was not an irrelevant straggler. "We talk,"
said Svensndot.
Response and counter-response took a matter of seconds. After that ...
five minutes of conversation with Ravna Bergsndot was enough to convince
Kjet that what she had to say must be heard by Fleet Central. His ship would
be a mere relay, but at least he had something very important to pass on.
Fleet Central refused the full video link coming from the Out of Band.
Someone on the flagship was dead set on following standard procedures -- and
using compromised cipher keys stuck in their craw. Even Kjet had to settle
for a combat link: The screen showed a color image with high resolution.
Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation....
Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they
looked several years out of style. Ølvira was matching old video with
the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less
that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
God only knew what they were seeing as the evocation of Pham Nuwen. The
smokey-skinned human had already explained his point several times. He was
having as little success as Ravna Bergsndot before him. His cool manner had
gradually deserted him. Desperation was beginning to show on his face. "--
and I'm telling you, they are both your enemies. Sure, Alliance for the
Defense destroyed Sjandra Kei, but the Blight is responsible for the
situation that made that possible."
The half-cartoonish figure of Jan Skrits glanced at Owner Limmende.
Lord, evocations are crappy at the Bottom, Svensndot thought to himself.
When Skrits spoke, his voice didn't even match his lip movements: "We do
read Threats, Mr. Nuwen. The threat of the Blight was used as an excuse to
destroy our worlds. We will not go on random killing sprees, especially
against an organization that is clearly the enemy of our enemy.... Or are
you claiming the Blight is secretly in league with the Alliance for the
Defense?"
Pham gave an angry shrug. "No. I have no idea how the Blight regards
the Alliance. But you should know the evil the Blight has been up to, things
on a scale far grander than this 'Alliance'."
"Ah yes. That's what it says on the Net, Mr. Nuwen. But those events
are thousands of light-years away. They've been through multiple hops and
unknown interpretations before they ever arrive in the Middle Beyond -- even
if the stories were true to begin with. It is not called the Net of a
Million Lies for nothing."
The stranger's face darkened. He said something loud and angry, in a
language that was totally unlike anything from Nyjora. The tones jumped up
and down, almost like Dirokime twittering. He calmed himself with a visible
effort, but when he continued his Samnorsk was even more heavily accented
than before. "Yes. But I'm telling you. I was at the Fall of Relay. The
Blight is more than the worst horrors you've heard. The murder of Sjandra
Kei was its smallest side-effect. Will you help us against the Blighter
fleet?"
Owner Limmende pushed her massive form back into her chair webbing. She
looked at her chief of staff and the two talked inaudibly. Kjet's gaze
drifted beyond them; the flagship's command deck extended a dozen meters
behind Limmende. Underofficers moved quietly about, some watching the
conversation. The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it
was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people
Kjet knew had been transferred before the fall of Sjandra Kei. The
processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from
Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background
and evoking the image shown. No more evocations after this, Svensndot
promised himself, at least while we're down here.
Owner Limmende looked back at the camera. "Forgive a paranoid old cop,
but I think it's possible that you might be of the Blight." Limmende raised
her hand as if to ward off interruptions, but the redhead just gaped in
surprise. "If we believe you, then we must accept that there is something
useful and dangerous on the star system we're all heading towards.
Furthermore, we must accept that both you and the 'Blighter fleet' are
peculiarly qualified to take advantage of this prize. If we fight them as
you ask, there will likely be few of us alive afterwards. You alone will
have the prize. We fear what you might turn out to be."
For a long moment, Pham Nuwen was silent. The wildness slowly left his
face. "You have a point, Owner Limmende. And a dilemma. Is there any way
out?"
"Skrits and I have been discussing it. No matter what we do, both we
and you must take big chances.... It's only the alternatives that are more
terrible. We are willing to accept your guidance in battle, if you will
first maneuver your ship back toward us and allow us to board."
"Give up the lead in this chase, you mean?"
Limmende nodded.
Pham's mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. He seemed to be
having trouble breathing. Ravna said, "Then if you don't succeed, everything
is lost. At least now, we have a sixty-hour lead. That might be enough to
get word out about this artifact, even if the Blighter fleet survives."
Skrits' face twisted, a cartoonish smile. "You can't have it both ways.
You want us to risk everything on your assurance of competence. We are
willing to die for this, but not to be pawns in a game of monsters." The
last words had a strange tone, the angry delivery shading away. There had
been no motion in the picture from Fleet Central except for ill-synched lip
movement. Glimfrelle caught Svensndot's eye and pointed at the failure
lights on his comm panel.
Skrits' voice continued, "And Group Captain Svensndot: It's imperative
that all further communications with this unknown vessel be channeled -- "
the image froze, and there were no more words.
Ravna: "What happened?"
Glimfrelle made a twitter-snort. "We're losing the link with Fleet
Central. Our effective bandwidth is down to twenty bits per second, and
dropping. Skrits' last transmission was scarcely a hundred bits," padded out
to apparent legibility by the Ølvira's software.
Kjet waved angrily at the screen. "Cut the damn thing off." At least he
wouldn't have to put up with the evocation any further. And he didn't want
to hear what he guessed was Jan Skrits' last order.
Tirolle said, "Hei, why not leave it on? We might not notice much
difference." Glimfrelle's snickered at his brother's wit, but his
longfingers danced across the comm panel, and the display became a window on
the stars. The two Dirokimes had a thing about bureaucrats.
Svensndot ignored them and looked at the remaining comm window. The
channel to Pham and Ravna was wideband video with scarcely any
interpretation; there would be no perverse subtleties if it went down.
"Sorry about that. The last few days, we've had a lot of problems with comm.
Apparently, this Zone storm is the worst in centuries." In fact, it was
getting still worse: the starboard ultratrace displays were showing random
garbage.
"You've lost contact with your command?" asked Ravna.
"For the moment...." He glanced at Pham. The redhead's eyes were still
a bit glassy. "Look ... I'm even more sorry about how things have turned
out, but Limmende and Skrits are bright people. You can see their point of
view."
"Strange," interrupted Pham. "The pictures were strange," his tone was
drifty.
"You mean our relay from Fleet Central?" Svensndot explained about the
narrow bandwidth and the crummy performance of his ship's processors down
here at the Bottom.
"And so their picture of us must have been equally bad.... I wonder
what they thought I was?"
"Unh ..." Good question. Consider Pham Nuwen: bristly red hair,
smoke-gray skin, singsong voice. If cues such as those were sent, like as
not the display at Fleet Central would show something quite different from
the human Kjet saw. "... wait a minute. That's not how evocations work. I'm
sure they got a pretty clear view of you. See, a few high-resolution pics
would get sent at the beginning of the session. Then those would be used as
the base for the animation."
Pham stared back lumpishly, almost as though he didn't buy it and was
daring Kjet to think things through. Well damn it, the explanation was
correct; there was no doubt that Limmende and Skrits had seen the redhead as
a human. Yet there was something here that bothered Kjet ... Limmende and
Skrits had both looked out of date.
"Glimfrelle! Check the raw stream we got from Central. Did they send us
any sync pictures?"
It took Glimfrelle only seconds. He whistled a sharp tone of surprise.
"No, Boss. And since it was all properly encrypted, our end just made do
with old ad animation." He said something to Tirolle, and the two twittered
rapidly. "Nothing seems to work down here. Maybe this is just another bug."
But Glimfrelle didn't sound very confident of the assertion.
Svensndot turned back to the picture from the Out of Band. "Look. The
channel to Fleet Central was fully encrypted, using one- time schemes I
trust more than what we're talking with now. I can't believe it was a
masquerade." But nausea was creeping up Kjet's guts. This was like the first
minutes of the Battle for Sjandra Kei, when he guessed how thoroughly they
had been outmaneuvered, when he realized that everyone he was trying to
protect would be murdered. "Hei, we'll contact other vessels. We'll verify
Central's location -- "
Pham Nuwen raised an eyebrow. "Maybe it wasn't a masquerade." Before he
could say more, one of the Riders -- the one with the greater skrode -- was
shouting at them. It rolled across the room's apparent ceiling, pushing the
humans aside to get close to the camera. "I have a question!" The voder
speech was burred, nearly unintelligible. The creature's tendrils rattled
dryly against each other, as distressed as Kjet Svensndot had ever heard.
"My question: Are there Skroderiders aboard your fleet's command vessel?"
"Why do you -- "
"Answer the question!"
"How should I know?" Kjet tried to think. "Tirolle. You have friends on
Skrits' staff. Are there any Riders aboard?"
Tirolle stuttered a few bars, "A'a'a'a. Yes. Emergency hires -- rescues
actually -- right after the battle."
"That's the best we can do, friend."
The Skroderider trembled, unspeaking. Then its tendrils seemed to wilt.
"Thank you," it said softly. It rolled back and out of camera range.
Pham Nuwen disappeared from view. Ravna looked wildly around, "Wait
please!" she said to the camera, and Kjet was looking at the abandoned
command deck of the Out of Band. At the limit of the pickup's hearing came
sounds of mumbled conversation, voder and human. Then she was back.
"What was that all about?" Svensndot to Ravna.
"N-Nothing any of us can help anymore.... Captain Svensndot, it looks
to me like your fleet is no longer run by the people you think."
"Maybe." Probably. "It's something I've got to think about."
She nodded. For a moment they looked at each other, unspeaking. So
strange, so far from home and after all the heartbreak ... to see someone so
familiar. "You were truly at Relay?" the question sounded stupid in his
ears. Yet in a way she was a bridge from what he knew and trusted to the
deadly weirdness of the present situation.
Ravna Bergsndot nodded. "Yes ... and it was like everything you've
read. We even had direct contact with a Power.... And yet it was not enough,
Group Captain. The Blight destroyed it all. That part of the News is no
lie."
Tirolle pushed back from his nav station. "Then how can anything you do
down here hurt the Blight?" The words were blunt, but 'Rolle's eyes were
wide and serious. In fact, he was pleading for some sense behind all the
death. Dirokimes had not been the greatest part of the Sjandra Kei
civilization, but they had been by far its oldest member race. A million
years ago they had burst out of the Slow Zone, colonizing the three systems
that humans one day would call Sjandra Kei. Long before the humans arrived,
they were a race of inward dreamers. They protected their star systems with
ancient automation and friendly younger races. Another half million years
and their race might be gone from the Beyond, extinct or evolved into
something else. It was a common pattern, something like death and old age,
but gentler.
There is a common misconception about such senescent races, that their
members are senescent too. In any large population, there will be variation.
There will always be those who want to see the outside world and play there
for a while. Humankind had gotten on very well with the likes of Glimfrelle
and Tirolle.
And Bergsndot seemed to understand. "Have any of you heard of
godshatter?"
Kjet said, "No," then noticed that both Dirokimes had started. They
whistled at each other for several seconds in some kind of surprise dialect.
"Yes," 'Rolle spoke at last in Samnorsk, his voice as close to awe as Kjet
had ever heard. "You know we Dirokimes have been in the Beyond for a long
time. We've sent many colonies into the Transcend; some became Powers....
And once ... Something came back. It wasn't a Power of course. In fact, it
was more like a mind- crippled Dirokime. But it knew things and did things
that made great changes for us."
"Fentrollar?" Kjet asked wonderingly, suddenly recognizing the story.
It had happened one hundred thousand years before humankind arrived at
Sjandra Kei, yet it was a central contradiction of the Dirokime terranes.
"Yes." Tirolle said. "Even now people don't agree if Fentrollar was a
gift or a curse, but he founded the dream habitats and the Old Religion."
Ravna nodded, "That's the case most familiar to us of Sjandra Kei.
Maybe it's not a happy example considering all its effects...." and she told
them about the fall of Relay, what had happened to Old One, and what had
become of Pham Nuwen. The Dirokimes side chat dwindled to zero and they were
very still.
Finally Kjet said, "So what does Nu-- " he stumbled over the name, as
strange as everything else about this fellow, "Nuwen know about the thing
you seek at the Bottom? What can he do with it?"
"I-I don't know, Group Captain. Pham Nuwen himself doesn't know. A
little bit at a time, the insight comes. I believe, because I was there for
some of it ... but I don't know how to make you believe." She drew a
shuddering breath. Kjet suddenly guessed what a strange, tortured place the
Out of Band must be. Somehow that made the story more credible. Anything
that really could destroy the Blight would be unwholesomely weird. Kjet
wondered how he would do, locked up with such a thing.
"My Lady Ravna," he said, the words stilted and formal. After all, I'm
suggesting treason. "I, uh, I've got a number of friends in the Commercial
Security fleet. I can check on the suspicions you've raised, and ..." say
it! "it's possible we can give you support in spite of my HQ."
"Thank you, sir. Thank you."
Glimfrelle broke the silence. "We're getting a poor signal on the Out
of Band's channel now."
Kjet eyes swept the windows. All the ultratrace displays looked like
random noise. Whatever this storm was, it was bad.
"Looks like we won't be talking much longer, Ravna Bergsndot."
"Yes. We're losing signal.... Group Captain, if none of this works, if
you can't fight for us.... Your people are all that's left of Sjandra Kei.
It's been good to see you and the Dirokimes.... after so long to see
familiar faces, people I really understand. I -- " as she spoke, her image
square-blurred into low-frequency components.
"Huui!" said Glimfrelle. "Bandwidth just dropped through the floor."
There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the Out of Band. Given
communications problems, the ship's processors just switched to low-rate
coding.
"Hello, Out of Band. We've got problems on this channel now. Suggest we
sign off."
The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it:
Yes. It is more than a communicati
Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. "Zip. Zero," he said. "No detectable
signal."
Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. "This is a lot more than a
communications problem. Our computers haven't been able to commit on an
ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds." They had been doing five jumps
a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now....
Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. "Hei -- so welcome to the Slow
Zone."
The Slow Zone. Ravna Bergsndot looked across the deck of the Out of
Band II. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always had a vision of
the Slowness as a stifling darkness lit at best by torches, the domain of
cretins and mechanical calculators. In fact, things didn't look much
different from before. The ceilings and walls glowed just as before. The
stars still shone through the windows (only now, it might be a very long
time before any of them moved).
It was on the OOB's other displays that the change was most obvious.
The ultratrace tank blinked monotonously, a red legend displaying elapsed
time since the last update. Navigation windows were filled with output from
the diagnostics exercising the drive processors. An audible message in
Triskweline was repeating over and over, "Warning. Transition to Slowness
detected. Execute back jump at once! Warning. Transition to Slowness
detected. Execute...."
"Turn that off!" Ravna grabbed a saddle and strapped herself down. She
was actually feeling dizzy, though that could only be (a very natural)
panic. "Some bottom lugger this is. We run right into the Slow Zone, and all
it can do is spout warnings after the fact!"
Greenstalk drifted closer, "tiptoeing" off the ceiling with her
tendrils. "Even bottom luggers can't avoid things like this, My Lady Ravna"
Pham said something at the ship and most of the displays cleared.
Blueshell: "Even a huge Zone storm doesn't normally extend more than a
few light-years. We were two hundred light-years above the Zone boundary.
What hit us must be a monster surge, the sort of thing you only read about
in archives."
Small consolation. "We knew something like this could happen," Pham
said. "Things have been getting awfully rough the last few weeks." For a
change, he didn't seem too upset.
"Yes," she said. "We expected a slowing maybe, but not The Slowness."
We are trapped. "Where's the nearest habitable system? Ten light-years?
Fifty?" The vision of darkness had a new reality, and the starscape beyond
the ship's walls was no longer a friendly, steadying thing. Surrounded by
unending nothingness, moving at some vanishing fraction of the speed of
light ... entombed. All the courage of Kjet Svensndot and his fleet, for
nothing. Jefri Olsndot, forever unrescued.
Pham's hand touched her shoulder, the first touch in ... days? "We can
still make it to the Tines' world. This is a bottom lugger, remember? We are
not trapped. Hell, the ramscoop on this buggy is better than anything I ever
had in the Qeng Ho. And I thought I was the freest man in the universe back
then."
Decades of travel time, mostly in coldsleep. Such had been the world of
the Qeng Ho, the world of Pham's memories. Ravna let out a shuddering breath
that ended in weak laughter. For Pham, the terrible pressure was abated, at
least temporarily. He could be human.
"What's so funny?" said Pham.
She shook her head. "All of us. Never mind." She took a couple of slow
breaths. "Okay. I think I can make rational conversation. So the Zone has
surged. Something that normally takes a thousand years -- even in a storm --
to move a single light-year, has suddenly shifted two hundred. Hunh!
There'll be people a million years from now reading about this in the
archives. I'm not sure I want the honor.... We knew there was a storm, but I
never expected to be drowned," buried light-years deep beneath the sea.
"The sea storm analogy is not perfect," said Blueshell. The Skroderider
was still on the far side of the deck, where he had retreated after
questioning the Sjandra Kei captain. He still looked upset, though he was
back to sounding precise and picky. Blueshell was studying a nav display,
evidently a recording from right before the surge. He dumped the picture to
a display flat and rolled slowly across the ceiling toward them.
Greenstalk's fronds brushed him gently as he passed.
He sailed the display flat into Ravna's hands, and continued in a
lecturing tone. "Even in a sea storm, the water's surface is never as roiled
as in a big interface disturbance. The most recent News reports showed it as
a fractal surface with dimension close to three.... Like foam and spray."
Even he could not avoid the storm analogy. The starscapes hung serene beyond
crystal walls, and the loudest sound was a faint breeze from the ship's
ventilators. Yet they had been swallowed in a maelstrom. Blueshell waved a
frond at the display flat. "We could be back in the Beyond in a few hours."
"What?"
"See. The plane of the display is determined by the positions of the
supposed Sjandra Kei command vessel, the outflying craft that we contacted
directly, and ourselves." The three formed a narrow triangle, the Limmende
and Svensndot vertices close together. "I've marked the times that contact
was lost with the others. Notice: the link to Commercial Security HQ went
down 150 seconds before we were hit. From the incoming signal and its
requests for protocol changes, I believe that both we and the outflyer were
enveloped and at about the same time."
Pham nodded. "Yeah. The most distant sites losing contact last. That
must mean the surge moved in from the side."
"Exactly!" From his perch on the ceiling, Blueshell reached to tap the
display. "The three ships were like probes in the standard Zone mapping
technique. Replaying the trace displays will no doubt confirm the
conclusion."
Ravna looked at the plot. The long point of the triangle -- tipped by
the OOB -- pointed almost directly toward the heart of the galaxy. "It must
have been a huge, clifflike thing perpendicular to the rest of the surface."
"A monster wave sweeping sideways!" said Greenstalk. "And that's also
why it won't last long."
"Yes. It's the radial changes that are most often long term. This thing
must have a trailing edge. We should pass through it in a few hours -- and
back into the Beyond."
So there was still a race to be won or lost.
The first hours were strange. "A few hours," had been Blueshell's
estimate of when they would be back in the Beyond. They hung around the
bridge, alternately watching the clock and stewing about the strange
conversations just completed. Pham was building himself back to trigger
tension. Any time now, they would be back in the Beyond. What to do then? If
only a few ships were perverted, perhaps Svensndot could still coordinate an
attack. Would that do any good? Pham played the ultratrace recordings over
and over, studying every detectable ship in all the fleets. "But when we get
out, when we get out ... I'll know what to do. Not why I must do it, but
what." And he couldn't explain more.
Any time now.... There was scarcely any reason to do much about
resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.
But after eight hours: "It really could be longer, even a day." They
had been scrounging around in the historical literature. "Maybe we should do
a little housekeeping." The Out of Band II had been designed for both the
Beyond and the Slowness, but that second environment was regarded as an
unlikely, emergency one. There were special-purpose processors for the Slow
Zone, but they hadn't come up automatically. With Blueshell's advice, Pham
took the high-performance automation off-line; that wasn't too difficult,
except for a couple of voice-actuated independents that were no longer
bright enough to understand the quitting commands.
Using the new automation gave Ravna a chill that, in a subtle way, was
almost as frightening as the original loss of the ultradrive. Her image of
the Slowness as darkness and torchlight -- that was just nightmare fantasy.
On the other hand, the Slowness as the domain of cretins and mechanical
calculators, there was something to that. The OOB's performance had degraded
steadily during their voyage to the Bottom, but now ... Gone were the
voice-driven graphics generators; they were just a bit too complex to be
supported by the new OOB, at least in full interpretive mode. Gone were the
intelligent context analyzers that made the ship's library almost as
accessible as one's own memories. Eventually, Ravna even turned off the art
and music units; without mood and context response, they seemed so wooden
... constant reminders that there were no brains behind them. Even the
simplest things were corrupted. Take voice and gesture controls: They no
longer responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang. It took a certain
discipline to use them effectively. (Pham actually seemed to like this. It
reminded him of the Qeng Ho.)
Twenty hours. Fifty. Everyone was still telling each other there was
nothing to worry about. But now Blueshell said that talk of "hours" had been
unrealistic. Considering the height of the "tsunami" (at least two hundred
light-years), it would likely be several hundred light-years across -- that
in keeping with the scaling laws of historical precedent. There was only one
trouble with this reasoning: they were beyond all precedent. For the most
part, zone boundaries followed galactic mean density. There was virtually no
change from year to year, just the aeons' long shrinkage that might someday
-- after the death of all but the smallest stars -- expose the galactic core
to the Beyond. At any given time, perhaps one billionth of that boundary
might qualify as being in a "storm state". In an ordinary storm, the surface
might move in or out a light-year in a decade or so. Such storms were common
enough to affect the fortunes of many worlds every year.
Much rarer -- perhaps once in a hundred thousand years in the whole
galaxy -- there would be a storm where the boundary became seriously
distorted, and where surges might move at a high multiple of light speed.
These were the transverse surges that Pham and Blueshell made their scale
estimates from. The fastest moved at about a light-year per second, across a
distance of less than three lights; the largest were thirty light-years high
and moved at scarcely a light-year per day.
So what was known of monsters like the thing that had engulfed them?
Not much. Third-hand stories in the Ship's library told of surges perhaps as
big as theirs, but the quoted dimensions and propagation rates were not
clear. Stories more than a hundred million years old are hard to trust;
there are scarcely any intermediate languages. (And even if there were, it
wouldn't have helped. The new, dumb version of the OOB absolutely could not
do mechanical translation of natural languages. Dredging the library was
pointless.)
When Ravna complained about this to Pham, he said, "Things could be
worse. What was the Ur-Partition really?"
Five billion years ago. "No one's sure."
Pham jerked a thumb at his library display. "Some people think it was a
'super supersurge', you know. Something so big it swallowed the races that
might have recorded it. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at
all -- no one's around to write horror stories."
Great.
"I'm sorry, Ravna. Honestly, if we're in anything li