A Fire Upon the Deep (20 page)

"The sea is falling!" shouted Greenstalk. Water's edge had pulled back a hundred meters, two hundred. The green-limned horizon was
dipping
.

"Ship's still fifty seconds out. We'll fly to meet it. Come, Ravna!"

Ravna's own courage died cold that second. Grondr had said the Docks would fall! The near sky was crowded now as dozens of people raced for safety. A hundred meters away the sand itself was shifting, an avalanche tilting toward the abyss. She remembered something Old One had said, and suddenly she knew the fliers were making a terrible mistake. The thought cut through her terror. "No! Just head for higher ground."

The night was silent no more. A bell-like moaning came from the sea. The sound spread. The sunset breeze grew to a gale that twisted the trees toward the water, sending branches and sand sweeping past them.

Ravna was still on her knees, her hands pressing down on Pham's limp arms. No breath, no pulse. The eyes stared sightlessly. Old One's gift to her. Damn all the Powers! She grabbed Pham Nuwen under the shoulders and rolled him onto her back.

She gagged, almost lost her grip. Underneath his shirt she felt cavities where there should be solid flesh. Something wet and rank dripped around her sides. She struggled up from her knees, half-carrying and half-dragging the body.

Blueshell was shouting, "-- take hours to roll anywhere." He drifted off the ground, driving his agrav against the wind. Skrode and Rider twisted drunkenly for an instant ... and then he was slammed back to the ground, tumbled willy-nilly toward the wind's destination, the moaning hole that had been the sea. Greenstalk raced to his seaward side, blocking his progress toward destruction. Blueshell righted himself and the two rolled back toward Ravna. The Rider's voice was faint in the wind: "... agrav ... failing!" And with it the very structure of the Docks.

They walked and wheeled their way back from the sucking sea. "Find a place to land the
OOB
."

The tree line was a jagged range of hills now. The landscape changed before their eyes and under her feet. The groaning sound was everywhere, some places so loud it buzzed through Ravna's shoes. They avoided sagging terrain, the sink holes that opened on all sides. The night was dark no more. Whether it was emergency lighting or a side-effect of the agrav failure, blue glowed along the holes. Through those holes they saw the cloud-decked night of Groundside a thousand kilometers below. The space between was not empty. There were shimmering phantoms: billions of tonnes of water and earth ... and hundreds of dying fliers. Vrinimi Org was paying the price for building their Docks on agrav instead of inertial orbit.

Somehow the three were making progress. Pham Nuwen was almost too heavy to carry/drag; she staggered left and right almost as much as she moved forward. Yet he was lighter that she would have guessed. And that was terrifying in its own way: was even the high ground failing?

Most of the agravs died by failure, but some suffered destructive runaway: clumps of trees and earth ripped free from the tops of hillocks and accelerated upwards. The wind shifted back and forth, up and down ... but it was thinner now, the noise remote. The artificial atmosphere that clothed the Docks would soon be gone. Ravna's pocket pressure suit worked for a few minutes, but now it was fading. In a few minutes it would be as dead as her agravs ... as dead as she would be. She wondered vaguely how the Blight had managed this. Like the Old One, she would likely die without ever knowing.

She saw torch flares; there were ships. Most had boosted for inertial orbits or gone directly into ultradrive, but a few hung over the disintegrating landscape. Blueshell and Greenstalk led the way. The two used their third axles in ways Ravna had never guessed at, lifting and pushing to clamber up slopes that she could scarcely negotiate with Pham's weight dragging from her back.

They were on a hilltop, but not for long. This had been part of the office forest. Now the trees stuck out in different directions, like hair on a mangy dog. She felt the ground throbbing beneath her feet. What next? The Skroderiders rolled from one side of the peak to another. They would be rescued here or nowhere. She went to her knees, resting most of Pham's weight on the ground. From here you could see a long ways. The Docks looked like a slowly flapping flag, and every immense whip of the fabric broke fragments loose. As long as some consensus remained among the agrav units, it still had planar aspect. That was disappearing. There were sink holes all around their little knob of forest. On the horizon, Ravna saw the far edge of the Docks detach itself and turn slowly sideways: a hundred kilometers long, ten wide, it swept down on would-be rescue ships.

Blueshell brushed against her left side, Greenstalk against her right. Ravna twisted, laying some of Pham's weight on the skrode hulls. If all four merged their pressure suits, there would be a few more moments of consciousness. "The
OOB
: I'm flying it down!" he said.

Something
was coming down. A ship's torch lit the ground blue white, with shadows stark and shifting. It's not a healthy thing to be around a rocket drive hovering in a near-one-gee field. An hour earlier the maneuver would have been impossible, or a capital offense if accomplished. Now it didn't matter if the torch punched through the Docks or fried a cargo from halfway across the galaxy.

Still ... where could Blueshell land the thing? They were surrounded by sinkholes and moving cliffs. She closed her eyes as the burning light drifted down before them ... and then dimmed. Blueshell's shout was thin in their shared atmosphere. "Let's go together!"

She held tight to the Riders, and they crawled/wheeled down from their little hill. The
Out of Band II
was hovering in the middle of a sinkhole. Its torch was hidden from view, but the glare off the sides of the hole put the ship in sharp silhouette, turned its ultradrive spines into feathery white arcs. A giant moth with glowing wings ... and just out of reach.

If their suits held, they could make it to the edge of the hole. Then what? The spines kept the ship from getting closer than a hundred meters. An able-bodied (and crazy) human might try to grab a spine and crawl down it.

But Skroderiders had their own brand of insanity: Just as the light -- the reflected light -- became too much to bear ... the torch winked out. The
OOB
fell through the hole. This didn't stop the Riders' advance. "
Faster!
" said Blueshell. And now she guessed what they planned. Quickly for such an awkward jumble of limbs and wheels, they moved up to the edge of the darkened hole. Ravna felt the dirt giving way beneath her feet, and then they were falling.

The Decks were hundreds -- in places, thousands -- of meters thick. They fell past them now, past dim eerie flickers of internal destruction.

Then they were through, still falling. For a moment the feeling of wild panic was gone. After all this was simply free fall, a commonplace, and a damnsight more peaceful than the disintegrating Docks. Now it was easy to hold onto the Riders and Pham Nuwen, and even their commensal atmosphere seemed a little thicker than before. There was something to be said for hard vacuum and free fall. Except for an occasional rogue agrav, everything was coming down at the same acceleration, ruins peacefully settling. And four or five minutes from now they would hit Groundside's atmosphere, still falling almost straight downwards.... Entry velocity only three or four kilometers per second. Would they burn up? Maybe. Flashes pricked bright above the cloud-decks.

The junk around them was mostly dark, just shadows against the sky show above. But the wreckage directly below was large and regular ... the
OOB
, bow on! The ship was falling with them. Every few seconds a trim jet fired, a faint reddish glow. The ship was closing with them. If it had a nose hatch, they would land right on it.

Its docking lights flicked on, bright upon them. Ten meters separation. Five. There
was
a hatch, and open! She could see a very ordinary airlock within....

Whatever hit them was big. Ravna saw a vague expanse of plastic rising over her shoulder. The rogue was slowly turning, and it scarcely brushed them -- but that was enough. Pham Nuwen was jarred from her grasp. His body was lost in shadow, then suddenly bright lit as the ship's spotlight tracked after him. Simultaneously the air gusted out of Ravna's lungs. They were down to three pocket pressure fields now, failing fields; it was not enough. Ravna could feel consciousness slipping away, her vision tunneling. So
close
.

The Riders unlatched from each other. She grabbed at the skrode hulls and they drifted, strung out, over the ship's lock. Blueshell's skrode jerked against her as the he made fast to the hatch. The jolt twisted her around, whipping Greenstalk upwards. Things were getting dreamy now. Where was panic when you needed it?
Hold tight, hold tight, hold tight,
sang the little voice, all that was left of consciousness. Bump, jerk. The Riders pushed and pulled at her. Or maybe it was the ship jerking all of them around. They were puppets, dancing off a single string.

... Deep in the tunnel of her vision, a Rider grabbed at the tumbling figure of Pham Nuwen.

Ravna wasn't aware of losing consciousness, but the next she knew she was breathing air and choking on vomit -- and was inside the airlock. Solid green walls closed in comfortingly on all sides. Pham Nuwen lay on the far wall, strapped into a first aid canister. His face had a bluish cast.

She pushed awkwardly across the lock toward Pham Nuwen's wall. The place was a confused jumble, unlike the passenger and sporting ships she'd been on before. Besides, this was a Rider design. Stickem patches were scattered around the walls; Greenstalk had mounted her skrode on one cluster.

They were accelerating, maybe a twentieth of a gee. "We're still going down?"

"Yes. If we hover or rise, we'll crash,"
into all the junk that still rains from above
. "Blueshell is trying to fly us out." They were falling with the rest, but trying to drift out from under -- before they hit Groundside. There was an occasional rattle/ping against the hull. Sometimes the acceleration ceased, or shifted in a new direction. Blueshell was actively avoiding the big pieces.

... Not with complete success. There was long, rasping sound that ended with a bang, and the room turned slowly around her. "
Brrap!
Just lost an ultradrive spine," came Blueshell's voice. "Two others already damaged. Please strap down, my lady."

They touched atmosphere a hundred seconds later. The sound was a barely perceptible humming beyond the hull. It was the sound of death for a ship like this. It could no more aerobrake than a dog could jump over the moon. The noise came louder. Blueshell was actually
diving
, trying to get deep enough to shed the junk that surrounded the ship. Two more spines broke. Then came a long surge of main axis acceleration.
Out of Band II
arced out of the Docks' death shadow, drove out and out, into inertial orbit.

Ravna looked over Blueshell's fronds at the outside windows. They had just passed Groundside's terminator, and were flying an inertial orbit. They were in free fall again, but
this
trajectory curved back on itself without whacking into big hard things -- like Groundside.

Ravna didn't know much more about space travel than you'd expect of a frequent passenger and an adventure fan. But it was obvious that Blueshell had pulled off a near miracle. When she tried to thank him, the Rider rolled back and forth across the stick-patches, buzzing faintly to himself. Embarrassed? or just Riderly inattentive?

Greenstalk spoke, sounding a little shy, a little proud: "Far trading is our life, you know. If we are cautious, life will be mostly safe and placid, but there will be close passages. Blueshell practices all the time, programming his skrode with every wit he can imagine. He is a master." In everyday life, indecision seemed to dominate the Riders. But in a crunch, they didn't hesitate to bet everything. She wondered how of that was the skrode overriding its rider?

"Grump," said Blueshell. "I have simply postponed the close passage. I broke several of our drive spines. What if they do not self-repair? What do we do then? Everything around Groundside is destroyed. There is junk everywhere out to a hundred radii. Not dense like around the Docks, but of much higher velocity." You can't inject billions of tonnes of wreckage into buckshot orbits and expect safe navigation. "And any second, the Perversion's creatures will be here, eating whoever survives."

"Urk." Greenstalk's tendrils froze in comical disarray. She chittered to herself for a second. "You're right ... I forgot. I thought we had found an open space, but ..."

Open space all right, but in a shooting gallery.
Ravna looked back at the command deck windows. They were on the dayside now, perhaps five hundred kilometers above Groundside's principal ocean. The space above the hazy blue horizon was free of flash and glow. "I don't see any fighting," Ravna said hopefully.

"Sorry." Blueshell switched the windows to a more significant view. Most of it was navigation and ultratrace information, meaningless to Ravna. Her eye caught on a medstat: Pham Nuwen was breathing again. The ship's surgeon thought it could save him. But there was also a communication status window; on it, the attack was dreadfully clear. The local net had broken into hundreds of screaming fragments. There were only automatic voices from the planetary surface, and they were calling for medical aid. Grondr had been down there. Somehow she suspected that not even his Marketing ops people had survived. Whatever hit Groundside was even deadlier than the failures at the Docks. In near planetary space, there were a few survivors in ships and fragments of habitats, most on doomed trajectories. Without massive and coordinated help, they would be dead in minutes -- hours at the outside. The directors of Vrinimi Org were gone, destroyed before they ever figured out quite what had happened.

Go,
Grondr had said,
go.

Out-system, there was fighting. Ravna saw message traffic from Vrinimi defense units. Even without control or coordination, some still opposed the Perversion's fleet. The light from their battles would arrive well after the defeat, well after the enemy arrived here in person.
How long do we have? Minutes?

"
Brrap.
Look at those traces," said Blueshell. "The Perversion has almost four thousand vessels. They are bypassing the defenders."

"But now there is scarcely anyone left out there," said Greenstalk. "I hope they're not all dead."

"Not all. I see several thousand ships departing, everyone with the means and any sense." Blueshell rolled back and forth. "Alas! We have the good sense ... but look at this repair report." One window spread large, filled with colored patterns that meant less than zip to Ravna. "Two spines still broken, unrepairable. Three partially repaired. If they don't heal, we'll be stuck here.
This is unacceptable!
" His voder voice buzzed up shrilly. Greenstalk drove close to him, and they rattled their fronds at each other.

Several minutes passed. When Blueshell spoke Samnorsk again, his voice was quieter. "One spine repaired. Maybe, maybe, maybe...." He opened a natural view. The
OOB
was coasting across Groundside's south pole, back into night. Their orbit should take them over the worst of the Docks junk, but the ride was a constant jigging as the ship avoided other debris. The cries of battle horror from out-system dwindled. The Vrinimi Organization was one vast, twitching corpse ... and very soon its killer would come snuffling.

"Two repaired." Blueshell became very quiet.... "Three! Three are repaired! Fifteen seconds to recalibrate and we can jump!"

It seemed longer ... but then all the windows changed to a natural view. Groundside and its sun were gone. Stars and dark stretched all around.