A Fire Upon the Deep (44 page)

Beforehand Ravna couldn't imagine how the confrontation would turn out. Just possibly -- if he'd lost all touch with reality -- Pham might try to kill them when they appeared on the command deck. More likely there would be rage and argument and threats, and they would be back to square one.

Instead ... it was almost like the old Pham, from before Harmonious Repose. He let them enter the command deck, he made no comment when Ravna set herself carefully between himself and the Riders. He listened without interruption, while Ravna explained what Greenstalk had said. "These two are safe, Pham. And without their help we'll not make it to the Bottom."

He nodded, looked away at the windows. Some showed natural starscape; most were ultratrace displays, the closest thing to a picture of the enemies that were closing on the
OOB
. His calm expression broke for just an instant, and the Pham that loved her seemed to stare out, desperate: "And you really believe all this, Rav?
How?
" Then the lid was back on, his expression distant and neutral. "Never mind. Certainly it's true: without all of us working together we'll never make it to Tines' World. Blueshell, I accept your offer. Subject to cautious safeguards, we work together."
Till I can safely dispose of you,
Ravna could feel the unsaid words behind his blandness. Showdown deferred.

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

They were less than eight weeks from Tines' World, both Pham and Blueshell said. If the Zone conditions remained stable. If they were not overtaken in the meantime.

Less than two months, after the six already voyaged. But the days were not like before. Every one was a challenge, a standoff sometimes cloaked in civility, sometimes flaring into threats of sudden death -- as when Pham retrieved Blueshell's shop equipment.

Pham was living on the command deck now; when he left it, the hatch was locked on his ID. He had destroyed, or thought he had destroyed, all other privileged links to the ship's automation. He and Blueshell were in almost constant collaboration ... but not like before. Every step was slow, Blueshell explaining everything, allowed to demonstrate nothing. That's where the arguments came closest to deadly force, when Pham must give in to one peril or the other. For every day the pursuing fleets were a little bit closer: two bands of killers, and what was left of Sjandra Kei. Evidently some of the SjK Commercial Security fleet could still fight, wanted revenge on the Alliance. Once Ravna suggested to Pham that they contact Commercial Security, try to persuade them to attack the Blighter fleet. Pham had given her a blank look. "Not yet, maybe not ever," he said, and turned away. In a way his answer was a relief: Such a battle would be a suicidal long shot. Ravna didn't want the last of her kinsfolk dying for her.

So the
OOB
might arrive at Tines' World before the enemy, but with what little time to spare! Some days Ravna withdrew in tears and despair. What brought her back was Jefri and Greenstalk. They both needed her, and for a few weeks more she could still help.

Mr. Steel's defense plans were proceeding. The Tines were even having some success with their wideband radio. Steel reported that Woodcarver's main force was on its way north; there was more than one race against time. She spent many hours with the
OOB
's library, devising more gifts for the Jefri's friends. Some things -- like telescopes -- were easy, but others.... It wasn't wasted effort. Even if the Blight won, its fleet might ignore the natives, might settle for killing the
OOB
and winning back the Countermeasure.

Greenstalk was slowly improving. At first Ravna was afraid the improvement might be in her own imagination. Ravna was spending a good part of each day sitting with the Rider, trying to see progress in her responses. Greenstalk was very "far away", almost like a human with stroke damage and prosthesis. In fact, she seemed regressed from the articulate horror of her first conversations. Maybe her recent progress was just a mirror to Ravna's sensitivity, to the fact that Ravna was with her so much. Blueshell insisted there was progress, but with that stubborn inflexibility of his. Two weeks, three -- and there was no doubt: something was healing at the boundary between Rider and skrodeling. Greenstalk consistently made sense, consistently committed important rememberings.... Now as often as not it was
she
helping Ravna. Greenstalk saw things that Ravna had missed: "Sir Pham isn't the only one who is afraid of us Skroderiders. Blueshell is frightened too, and it is tearing him apart. He can't admit it even to me, but he thinks it's possible that we're infected independently of our skrodes. He desperately wants to convince Pham that this is not true -- and so to convince himself." She was silent for a long moment, one frond brushing against Ravna's arm. Sea sounds surrounded them in the cabin, but ship's automation could no longer produce surging water. "Sigh. We must pretend the surf, dear Ravna. Somewhere it will always be, no matter what happened at Sjandra Kei, no matter what happens here."

Blueshell was hearty gentleness around his mate, but alone with Ravna his rage showed through: "No, no, I don't object to Sir Pham's navigation, at least not now. Perhaps we could be a little further ahead with me directly at the helm, but the fastest ships behind us would still be closing. It's the other things, my lady. You know how untrustworthy our automation is down here. Pham is hurting it further. He's written his own security overrides. He's turning the ship's environment automation into a system of boobytraps."

Ravna had seen evidence of this. The areas around
OOB
's command deck and ship's workshop looked like military checkpoints. "You know his fears. If this makes him feel safer --"

"That's not the point, My Lady. I would do anything to persuade him to accept my help. But what he's doing is deadly dangerous. Our Bottom automation is not reliable, and he's making it actively worse. If we get some sudden stress, the environment programs will likely have a bizarre crash -- atmosphere dump, thermal runaway, anything."

"I --"

"Doesn't he understand? Pham controls
nothing
." His voder broke into a nonlinear squawk. "He has the ability to destroy, but that is all. He needs my help. He was my friend. Doesn't he understand?"

Pham understood ... oh, Pham understood. He and Ravna still talked. Their arguments were the hardest thing in her life. And sometimes they didn't exactly argue; sometimes it was almost like rational discussion:

"I haven't been taken over, Ravna. Not like the Blight takes over Riders, anyway. I still have charge of my soul." He turned away from the console and flashed a wan smile in her direction, acknowledging the flaw in such self-conviction. And from things like that smile, Ravna was convinced that Pham Nuwen still lived, and sometimes spoke.

"What about the godshatter state? I see you for hours, just staring at the tracking display, or mucking around in the library and the News," scanning faster than any human could consciously read.

Pham shrugged. "It's studying the ships that are chasing us, trying to figure out just what belongs to whom, just what capabilities each might have. I don't know the details. Self-awareness is on vacation then," when all Pham's mind was turned into a processor for whatever programs Old One had downloaded. A few hours of fugue state might yield an instant of Power-grade thought -- and even that he didn't consciously remember. "But I know this. Whatever the godshatter is, it's a very narrow thing. It's not alive; in some ways it may not even be very smart. For everyday matters like ship piloting, there's just good old Pham Nuwen."

"... there's the rest of us, Pham. Blueshell would like to help," Ravna spoke softly. This was the place where Pham would close into icy silence -- or blow up in rage. This day, he just cocked his head. "Ravna, Ravna. I know I need him.... And, and I'm glad I need him. That I don't have to kill him."
Yet.
Pham's lips quivered for a second, and she thought he might start crying.

"The godshatter can't know Blueshell --"

"
Not
the godshatter. It's not making me act this way -- I'm doing what any person should do when the stakes are this high." The words were spoken without anger. Maybe there was a chance. Maybe she could reason:

"Blueshell and Greenstalk are loyal, Pham. Except at Harmonious Repose --"

Pham sighed, "Yeah. I've thought about that a lot. They
came
to Relay from Straumli Realm. They got Vrinimi looking for the refugee ship. That smells of setup, but probably unknowing -- maybe even a setup by something opposing the Blight. In any case they were innocent then, else the Blight would have known about Tines world right from the beginning. The Blight knew nothing till RIP, till Greenstalk was converted. And I know Blueshell was loyal even then. He knew things about my armor -- the remotes, for instance -- that he could have warned the others about."

Hope came as a surprise to Ravna. He really had thought things out, and -- "It's just the skrodes, Pham. They're traps waiting to be sprung. But we're isolated here, and you destroyed the one that Greenstalk --"

Pham was shaking his head. "It's more than the skrodes. The Blight had its hand in Rider design, too, at least to some degree. I can't imagine the takeover of Greenstalk's being so smooth otherwise."

"Y-yes. A risk. A very small risk compared to --"

Pham didn't move, but something in him seemed to draw away from her, denying the support she could offer. "A small risk? We don't know. The stakes are so
high
. I'm walking a tightrope. If I don't use Blueshell now, we'll be shot out of space by the Blighter fleet. If I let him do too much, if I trust him, then he or some part of him could betray us. All I have is the godshatter, and a bunch of memories that ... that may be the biggest fakes of all." These last words were nearly inaudible. He looked up at her, a look that was both cold and terribly lost. "But I'm going to use what I have, Rav, and whatever it is I am. Somehow I'm going to get us to Tines' World. Somehow I'm going to get Old One's godshatter to whatever is there."

It was another three weeks before Blueshell's predictions came true.

The
OOB
had seemed a sturdy beast up in the Middle Beyond; even its damaged ultradrive had failed gracefully. Now the ship was leaking bugs in all directions. Much of it had nothing to do with Pham's meddling. Without those final consistency checks, none of the
OOB
's Bottom automation was really trustworthy. But its failures were compounded by Pham's desperate security hacks.

The ship's library had source code for generic Bottom automation. Pham spent several days revising it for the
OOB
. All four of them were on the command deck during the installation, Blueshell trying to help, Pham suspiciously examining every suggestion. Thirty minutes into the installation, there were muffled banging noises down the main corridor. Ravna might have ignored them, except that she'd never heard the like aboard the
OOB
.

Pham and the Riders reacted with near panic; spacers don't like unexplained bumps in the night. Blueshell raced to the hatch, floated fronds-first through the hole. "I see nothing, Sir Pham."

Pham was paging quickly through the diagnostic displays, mixed format things partly from the new setup. "I've got some warning lights here, but --"

Greenstalk started to say something, but Blueshell was back and talking fast: "I don't believe it. Anything like this should make pictures, a detailed report. Something is terribly wrong."

Pham stared at him a second, then returned to his diagnostics. Five seconds passed. "You're right. Status is just looping through stale reports." He began grabbing views from cameras all over the
OOB
's interior. Barely half of them reported, but what they showed...

The ship's water reservoir was a foggy, icy cavern. That was the banging sound -- tonnes of water, spaced. A dozen other support services had gone bizarre, and --

-- the armed checkpoint outside the workshop had slagged down. The beamers were firing continuously on low power. And for all the destruction, the diagnostics still showed green or amber or no report. Pham got a camera in the workshop itself.
The place was on fire.

Pham jumped up from his saddle and bounced off the ceiling. For an instant she thought he might go racing off the bridge. Then he tied himself down and grimly began trying to put out the fire.

For the next few minutes, the bridge was almost quiet, just Pham quietly swearing as none of the obvious things worked. "Interlocking failures," he mumbled the phrase a couple of times. "The firesnuff automation is down.... I can't dump atmosphere from the shop. My beamers have melted everything shut."

Ship fire. Ravna had seen pictures of such disasters, but they had always seemed an improbable thing. In the midst of universal vacuum, how could a fire survive? And in zero-gee, surely a fire would choke itself even if the crew couldn't dump atmosphere. The workshop camera had a hazy view on the real thing: True, the flames ate the oxygen around them. There were sheets of construction foam that were only lightly scorched, protected for the moment by dead air. But the fire spread out, moving steadily into still-fresh air. In places, heat-driven turbulence enriched the mix, and previously burned areas blazed up.

"It's still got ventilation, Sir Pham."

"I
know
. I can't shut it. The vents must be melted open."

"It's as likely software." Blueshell was silent for a second. "Try this --" the directions were meaningless to Ravna, some low-level workaround.

But Pham nodded, and his fingers danced across the console.

In the workshop, the surface-hugging flames crept farther across the construction foam. Now they licked at the innards of the armor Pham had spent so much time on. This latest revision was only half finished. Ravna remembered he was working on reactive armor now ....
There would be oxidizers there
. "Pham, is the armor sealed --"

The fire was sixty meters aft and behind a dozen bulkheads. The explosion came as a distant thump, almost innocent. But in the camera view, the armor dismembered itself, and the fire blazed triumphant.

Seconds later, Pham got Blueshell's suggestion working, and the workshop's vents closed. The fire in the wrecked armor continued for another half hour, but did not spread beyond the shop.