A Fire Upon the Deep (19 page)

Ravna watched a few moments more, till the figure became one more commuter in the indigo sky.
Damn. Damn. Damn.

Behind her there was the sound of wheels crunching across sand. Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled out of the water. Wetness glistened on the sides of their skrodes, transforming their cosmetic stripes into jagged rainbows. Ravna walked down to meet them.
How do I tell them there's no help coming?

With someone like Pham Nuwen fronting for it, Old One had seemed so different from what she imagined in her classes back at Sjandra Kei. She'd almost thought she could make a difference just by talking. What a joke. She had caught a glimpse just now, behind the front: of a being who could play with souls the way a programmer plays with a clever graphic, a being so far beyond her that only its indifference could protect her.
Be happy, little Ravna moth. You were only dazzled by the flame.

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

The next few weeks went surprisingly well. Despite the Pham Nuwen debacle, Blueshell and Greenstalk were still willing to fly the rescue. Vrinimi Org even kicked in some extra resources. Every day, Ravna took a tele-excursion out to the repair yards. The
Out of Band II
might not be getting any Transcendent enhancements, but when the refitting was complete, the ship would be something extraordinary: Now it floated in a golden haze of structors, billions of tiny robots regrowing sections of the hull into the characteristic form of a bottom lugger. Sometimes the ship seemed to Ravna like a fragile moth ... and sometimes an abyssal fish. The rebuilt ship could survive across a range of environments: It had the spines of an ultradrive craft, but the hull was streamlined and wasp-waist -- the classic form of a ramscoop ship. Bottom-luggers must troll dangerously near the Slow Zone. The zone surface was hard to detect from a distance, even harder to map; and there were short-term position changes. It was not impossible for a lugger to be trapped a light-year or two within the Slowness. It was then you'd thank goodness for the ramscoop and the coldsleep facilities. Of course, by the time you returned to civilization, you might be completely out of date, but at least you could get back.

Ravna floated her viewpoint through the drive spines that spread out from the hull. They were broader than on most ships that came to Relay. They weren't optimal for the Middle or High Beyond, but with appropriate (i.e., Low Beyond) computers, the ship would fly as fast as anything when it reached the Bottom.

Grondr let her spend half-time on the project, and after a few days Ravna realized this was not just a favor. She
was
the best person for this job. She knew humans, and she knew archive management. Jefri Olsndot needed reassurance every day. And the things Jefri was telling her were immediately important. Even if everything went according to plan -- even if the Perversion stayed completely out of it -- this rescue was going to be tricky. The kid and his ship seemed to be in the middle of a bloody war. Extracting them would mean making instantly correct decisions and acting on them. They would need an effective onboard database and strategy program. But not much could be expected to work at the Bottom, and memory capacity would be limited. It was up to Ravna to decide what library materials to move to the ship, to balance the ease of local availability against the greater resources that would be accessible over the ultrawave from Relay.

Grondr was available on the local net, and often in real time. He wanted this to work: "Don't worry, Ravna. We'll dedicate part of R00 to this mission. If their antenna swarm works properly, the Riders should have have a thirty Kbps link to Relay. You'll be their prime contact here, and you'll have access to our best strategists. If nothing ... interferes, you should have no trouble managing this rescue."

Even four weeks ago, Ravna wouldn't have dared to ask for more. Now: "Sir, I have a better idea. Send me with the Skroderiders."

All of Grondr's mouth parts clapped together at once. She'd seen that much surprise in people like Egravan, but never in the staid Grondr. He was silent for a moment. "No. We need you here. You are our best sanity check when it comes to questions about humankind." The newsgroups interested in the Straumli Perversion carried more than one hundred thousand messages a day, about a tenth of that human-related. Thousands of messages were old ideas rehashed, or patent absurdities, or probable lies. Marketing's automation was fairly good at filtering out the redundancy and some of the absurdity, but when it came to questions on human nature Ravna was without equal. About half her time was spent guiding that analysis and handling queries about humankind at the archives. All that would be next to impossible if she left with the Skroderiders.

Over the next few days, Ravna kept pushing her boss on the question. Whoever flew the rescue would need instant rapport with humans -- human children, in fact. Very likely Jefri Olsndot had never even met a Skroderider. The point was a good one, and it was gradually driving her to desperation -- but by itself it would not have changed old Grondr's mind. It took some outside events to do that: As the weeks passed, the Blight's expansion slowed. Just as conventional wisdom (and Old One via Pham Nuwen) claimed, there seemed to be natural limits to how far the Perversion could extend its interests. The abject panic slowly disappeared from High Beyond communication traffic. Rumors and refugees from the absorbed volumes dribbled toward zero. The people in the Blighted spaces were gone, but now it was more like death in a graveyard than death from contagious rot. Blight-related newsgroups continued to babble about the catastrophe, but the level of nonproductive rehashing was steadily increasing. There simply was very little new going on. Over the next ten years, physical death would spread through the Blighted region. Colonization would begin again, cautiously probing through the ruins and informational traps, and residue races. But all of that was a ways off, and for the moment Relay's Blight "windfall" was a shrinking affair.

... And Marketing was even more interested in the Straumli refugee ship. None of the strategy programs -- much less Grondr -- believed the ship's secret could hurt the Blight, but there was a good chance it might bring commercial advantage when the Perversion finally got tired of its Transcendent game. And the Tines pack-minds had caught their interest. It was very appropriate that a maximum effort be made, that Ravna give up her Docks job and go to the field.

So, for a wonder, her childhood fantasy of rescue and questing adventure would actually come true.
And even more surprising, I'm only half-terrified by the prospect!

Target[56]: Im sorry I diddnt anser for a while. I dont feel good a lot. Mister Steel says I should talk to you. He says I need more friends to make me feel better. Amdi says so too and hes my best friend of all.... like packs of dogs but smart and fun. I wish I could send pictures. Mister Steel will try to get ansers for all your questions. He is doing everything he can to help, but the bad packs will be back. Amdi and I tried the stuff you said with the ship. I am sorry, it still doesnt work.... I hate this dumb keybord....

Org[57]: Hi, Jefri. Amdi and Mr. Steel are right. I always like to talk, and it will make you feel better.... There are inventions that might help Mister Steel. We've thought of some improvements for his bows and flamethrowers. I'm also sending down some fortress design information. Please tell Mister Steel that we can't tell him how to fly the ship. It would be dangerous even for an expert pilot to try....

Target[57]: Ya, even Daddy had a hard time landing it. ikocxljikersw89iou43e5 I think Mister Steel just doesnt understand, and hes getting sorta disparate.... Isnt there other stuff, though, like they had in oldendays. You know, bombs and airplanes that we could make?...

Org[58]: There are other inventions, but it would take time for Mister Steel to make them. Our star ship is leaving Relay soon, Jefri. We'll be there long before other inventions would help....

Target[58]: Your coming? Your finally coming!!! When do you leave? When will you get here???

Ordinarily Ravna composed her messages to Jefri on a keyboard -- it gave her some feeling for the kid's situation. He seemed to be holding up, though there were still days when he didn't write (it was strange to think of "mental depression" having any connection with an eight-year-old). Other times he seemed to have a tantrum at the keyboard, and across twenty-one thousand light-years she saw evidence of small fists slamming into keys.

Ravna grinned at the display. Today she finally had something more than nebulous promises for him: she had a positive departure time. Jefri was going to like message [59]. She typed: "We're scheduled to leave in seven more days, Jefri. Travel time will be about thirty days." Should she qualify that? Latest postings on the Zone boundary newsgroups said the Bottom was unusually active. The Tines World was so close to the Slow Zone ... If the "storm" worsened, travel time would suffer. There was about a one percent chance the voyage would take more than sixty days. She leaned back from the keyboard. Did she really want to say that? Damn. Better be frank; these dates could affect the locals who were helping Jefri. She explained the "ifs" and "buts", then went on to describe the ship and the wonderful things they would bring. The boy usually didn't write at great length (except when he was relaying information from Steel), but he really seemed to like long letters from her.

The
Out of Band II
was undergoing final consistency checks. Its ultradrive was rebuilt and tested; the Skroderiders had taken it out a couple of thousand light-years to check the antenna swarm. The swarm worked great, too. She and Jefri would be able to talk through most of the voyage. As of yesterday, the ship was stocked with consumables. (That sounded like something out of medieval adventure. But you had to take some supplies when you were headed so far down that reality graphics couldn't be trusted.) Sometime tomorrow, Grondr's people would be loading the ship's hold with gadgets that might be real handy for a rescue. Should she mention those? Some of them might sound a bit intimidating to Jefri's local friends.

That evening, she and the Skroderiders had a beach party. That's what they called it, though it was much more like the human version than an authentic Rider one. Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled well back from the water, to where the sand lay dry and warm. Ravna laid out refreshments on Blueshell's cargo scarf. They sat on the sand and admired the sunset.

It was mostly a celebration -- that Ravna had gotten permission to go with the
OOB
, that the ship was almost ready to depart. But, "Are you really happy to be going, my lady?" asked Blueshell. "We two will make very good money, but you --"

Ravna laughed. "I'll get a travel bonus." She had argued and argued for permission to go; there wasn't much room left to haggle about the pay. "And yes. This is what I really want."

"I am glad," said Greenstalk.

"I am laughing," said Blueshell. "My mate is especially pleased that our passenger will not be surly. We almost lost our love for bipeds after shipping with the certificants. But there is nothing to be frightened of now. Have you read Threats Group in the last fifteen hours? The Blight has stopped growing, and its edges have become sharply defined. The Perversion is settling into middle age. I'm ready to leave right now."

Blueshell was full of speculations about the Tinish "packs", and possible schemes for extracting Jefri and any other survivors. Greenstalk interjected a thought here and there. She was less shy than before, but still seemed softer, more diffident than her mate. And her confidence was a bit more realistic. She was glad they weren't leaving for another week. There were still the final consistency checks to run on the
OOB
-- and Grondr had gotten Org financing for a small fleet of decoy ships. Fifty were complete so far. A hundred would be ready by the end of the week.

The Docks drifted into night. With its shallow atmosphere, twilight was short, but the colors were spectacular. The beach and the trees glistened in the horizontal rays. The scent of evening flowers mixed with the tang of sea salt. On the far side of the sea, all was stark bright and dark, silhouettes that might have been Vrinimi fancies or functional dock equipage -- Ravna had never learned which. The sun slid behind the sea. Orange and red spread along the aft horizon, topped by a wider band of green, probably ionized oxygen.

The Riders didn't turn their skrodes for a better view -- for all she knew, they had been looking that way all along -- but they stopped talking. As the sun set, the breakers shattered it into a thousand images, glints of green and yellow through the foam. She guessed the two would have preferred to be out there just now. She had seen them often enough around sunset, deliberately sitting where the surf was hardest. When the water drew back, their stalks and fronds were like supplicants' arms, upstretched. At times like these she could almost understand the Lesser Skroderiders; they spent their whole lives memorizing such repeated moments. She smiled in the greenish twilight. There would always be time enough later to worry and plan.

They must have sat like that for twenty minutes. Along the curving line of the beach, she saw tiny fires in the gathering dark: office parties. Somewhere very nearby there was the
crunch crunch
of feet on sand. She turned and saw that it was Pham Nuwen. "Over here," she called.

Pham ambled toward them. He'd been very scarce since their last confrontation; Ravna guessed that some of her jibes had struck deep.
This once, I hope Old One made him forget.
Pham Nuwen had the potential to be a real person; it hadn't been right to hurt him because his principal was beyond reach.

"Have a seat. Galaxy-rise in a half hour." The Skroderiders rustled, so deep into the sunset that they were only now noticing the visitor.

Pham Nuwen walked a pace or two beyond Ravna and stood arms akimbo, staring across the sea. He glanced back at her, and the green twilight gave his face an eerie fierceness. He flashed his old, lopsided smile. "I think I owe you an apology."

Old One's gonna let you join the human race after all?
But Ravna was touched. She dropped her eyes from his. "I guess I owe you one too. If Old One won't help, he won't help; I shouldn't have lost my temper."

Pham Nuwen laughed softly, "Yours was certainly the lesser error. I'm still trying to figure out where I went wrong, and ... I don't think I have time now to learn."

He looked back at the sea. After a moment, Ravna stood and stepped toward him. Up close, his stare looked glassy. "What's wrong?"
Damn you, Old One. If you're going to abandon him, don't do it in pieces!

"You're the great expert on Transcendent Powers, eh?"

More sarcasm. "Well --"

"Do the big boys have wars?"

Ravna shrugged. "You can find rumors of everything. We think there's conflict, but something too subtle to call war."

"You're pretty much right. There is struggle, but it has more angles than anything down here. The benefits of cooperation are normally so great that.... That's part of the reason I didn't take the Perversion seriously. Besides, the creature is pitiful: a wimpy cur that fouls its own den. Even if it wanted to kill other Powers, something like that never could. Not in a billion years...."

Blueshell rolled up beside them. "Who is this, my lady?"

It was the sort of Riderish conversation-stopper that she was only just getting used to. If Blueshell would just get in synch with his skrode memory, he'd know. Then the question truly hit her. Who
is
this? She glanced at her dataset. It was showing transceiver status, had been ever since Pham Nuwen arrived. And ... by the Powers,
three
transceivers had been grabbed by a single customer!

She took a quick step backwards. "You!"

"Me! Face to face once more, Ravna." The leer was a parody of Pham's self-assured smile. "Sorry I can't be charming tonight." He slapped his chest awkwardly. "I'm using this thing's underlying instincts.... I'm too busy trying to stay alive."

There was drool coming down his chin. Pham's eyes would focus on her and then drift.

"What are you doing to Pham!"

The Emissary Device stepped toward her, stumbled. "Making room," came Pham Nuwen's voice.

Ravna spoke Grondr's phone code. There was no response.

The Emissary Device shook its head. "Vrinimi Org is very busy right now, trying to convince me to get off their equipment, trying to screw up their courage and force me off. They don't believe what I'm telling them" He laughed, a quick choking sound. "Doesn't matter. I see now that the attack here was just a deadly diversion.... How about that, Little Ravna? See, the Blight is not a Class Two perversion. In the time I have left, I can only guess what it is.... Something very old, very big. Whatever it is, I'm being eaten alive."

Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled close to Ravna. Their fronds made faint skritching noises. Some thousands of light-years away, well into the Transcend, a Power was fighting for its life. And all they saw of it was one man turned into a slobbering lunatic.

"So that's my apology, Little Ravna. Helping you probably wouldn't have saved me." His voice strangled on itself, and he took a gasping breath. "But helping you now will be a measure of -- vengeance is a motive you would understand. I've called your ship down. If you move fast and don't use agrav, you may survive the next hour."

Blueshell's voice was timid and blustery at the same time. "Survive? Only a conventional attack could work down here, and there is no sign of one."

A maniac surrounded by the soft, quiet night. Ravna's dataset showed nothing strange except for the diversion of bandwidth to Old One.

Pham Nuwen made a coughing laugh. "Oh, it's conventional enough, but very clever. A few grams of replicant disorder, wafted in over weeks. It's blossoming now, timed with the attack you see.... The growth will die in a matter of hours, after it kills all of Relay's precious High automation.... Ravna! Take the ship, or die in the next thousand seconds. Take the ship. If you survive, go to the Bottom. Get the...." the Emissary Device pulled itself straighter, and smiled its greenish smile a last time. "And here is my gift to you, the best help I have left to give."

The smile disappeared. The glassy look was replaced by a wonder ... and then mounting terror. Pham Nuwen dragged in a great breath, and had time for one barking scream before he collapsed. He landed face down, twitching and choking in the sand.

Ravna shouted Grondr's code again, and ran to Pham Nuwen. She pulled him over on his back and tried to clear his mouth. The fit lasted several seconds, Pham's limbs flailing randomly about. Ravna collected several solid hits as she tried to steady him. Then Pham went limp, and she could barely feel his breath.

Blueshell was saying, "Somehow he's grabbed the
OOB
. It's four thousand kilometers out, coming straight for the Docks. Wail. We're ruined." Unauthorized flight close to the Docks was cause for confiscation.

Somehow Ravna didn't think it mattered anymore. "Is there any sign of attack?" she said over her shoulder. She eased Pham's head back, made sure he had a clear breathing passage.

Random rustling between the Skroderiders. Greenstalk: "Something is strange. We have service suspension on the main transceivers."
So Old One is still transmitting?
"The local net is very clogged. Much automation, many employees being called to special duty."

Ravna rocked back. The sky was night dark, punctuated by a dozen bright points of light -- ships guiding for the Docks. All very normal. But her own dataset was showing what Greenstalk reported.

"Ravna, I can't talk right now." Grondr's clickety voice sounded out of the air beside her. This would be his associate program. "Old One has taken most of Relay. Watch out for the Emissary Device."
A little late, that!
"We've lost contact with the surveillance fence beyond the transceivers. We are having program and hardware failures. Old One claims we are being attacked." A five second pause. "We see evidence of fleet action at the domestic defense boundary." That was just a half light-year out.

"Brap!"
From Blueshell. "At the domestic defense boundary! How could you miss them coming in?" He rolled back and forth, pivoted.

Grondr's associate ignored the question. "Minimum three thousand ships. Destruction of transceivers immin --"

"Ravna, are the Skroderiders with you?" It was still Grondr's voice, but more staccato, more
involved
. This was the real guy.

"Y-yes."

"The local network is failing. Life support failing. The Docks will fall. We would be stronger than the attacking fleet, but we're rotting from the inside.... Relay is dying." His voice sharpened, clattering, "but Vrinimi will not die, and a contract is a contract! Tell the Riders, we
will
pay them ... somehow, someday. We
require
... plead ... they fly the mission we contracted. Ravna?"

"Yes. They hear."

"Then go!" And the voice was gone.

Blueshell said, "
OOB
will be here in two hundred seconds."

Pham Nuwen had calmed, and his breathing was easier. As the two Riders chittered back and forth, Ravna looked around -- and suddenly realized that all the death and destruction had been reports from afar. The beach and the sky were almost as placid as ever. The last of the sun's rays had left the waves. The foam was a dim band in the low green light. Here and there, yellow lights glowed in the trees and the farther towers.

Yet the alarum had clearly spread. She could hear datasets coming on. Some of the beach fires guttered out, and the figures around them ran into the trees or drifted upwards, headed for farther offices. Now starships floated up from their berths across the sea, falling higher and higher till they glittered in the departed sunlight.

It was Relay's last moment of peace.

A patch of glowing dark spread across the sky. She gasped at light so
twisted
it should have gone unseen. It shone more in the back of her head than in her eyes. Afterwards she couldn't think what made it objectively different from blackness.

"There's another!" said Blueshell. This one was near the Decks' horizon, a blot of darkness perhaps a degree across. The edges were an indistinct bleeding of black into black.

"What
is
it?" Ravna was no war freak, but she'd read her share of adventure stories. She knew about antimatter bombs and relativistic KE slugs. From a distance such weapons were bright spots of light, sometimes an orchestrated flickering. Or closer: a world-wrecker would glow incandescent across the curve of a planet, splashing the globe itself like a drop of water, but slow, slow. Those were the images her reading had prepared her for. What she saw now was more like a defect in her eyesight than a vision of war.

Powers only knew what the Skroderiders saw, but: "Your main transceivers ... vaping out, I think," said Blueshell.

"Those are light-years out! There's no way we could see --" Another splotch appeared, not even in her field of view. The color floated, placeless. Pham Nuwen spasmed again, but weakly. She had no trouble holding him still, but ... blood dribbled from his mouth. The back of his shirt was wet with something that stank of decay.

"
OOB
will be here in one hundred seconds. Plenty of time, there's plenty of time." Blueshell rolled back and forth around them, talking reassurance that just showed how nervous he was. "Yes, my lady, light-years out. And years from now, the flash of their going will light the sky for anyone still alive here. But only a fraction of the vape-out is making light. The rest is an ultrawave surge so great that ordinary matter is affected.... Optic nerves tickled by the overflow.... So much that your own nervous system becomes a receiver." He spun around. "But don't worry. We're tough and quick. We've squeezed through close spots before." There was something absurd about a creature with no short-term memory bragging up its lightning reflexes. She hoped his skrode was up to this.

Greenstalk's voice buzzed painfully loud. "
Look!
"

The surf line was drawing back, further than she had ever seen it.