A Fire Upon the Deep (53 page)

During the next five hours,
Ølvira
's crew watched the Alliance fleet race helter-skelter for the higher spaces. It could not even be called a retreat, more a panicked dissolution. Great opportunists, they had not hesitated to kill by treachery, and to give chase when they thought there might be treasure at the end. Now that they were confronted with the possibility of being trapped in the Slowness, of dying between the stars, they raced for their separate safety. Their bulletins to the newsgroups were full of bravado, but their maneuver couldn't be disguised. Former neutrals pointed to the discrepancy; more and more it was accepted that the Alliance was built around the Aprahanti Hegemony and perhaps had other motives than altruistic opposition to the Blight. There was nervous speculation about who might next receive Alliance attention.

Major transceivers still targeted the fleets. They might as well have been on a network trunk. The news traffic was a vast waterfall, totally beyond
Ølvira
's present ability to receive. Nevertheless, Svensndot kept an eye on it. Somewhere there might be some clue, some insight.... The majority of War Trackers and Threats seemed to have little interest in the Alliance or the death of Sjandra Kei, per se. Most were terrified of the Blight that was still spreading through the Top of the Beyond. None of the Highest had successfully resisted, and there were rumors that two more interfering Powers had been destroyed. There were some (secret mouths of the Blight?) who welcomed the new stability at the Top, even one based on permanent parasitization.

In fact, the chase down here at the Bottom, the flight of the
Out of Band
and its pursuers, seemed the only place where the Blight was not completely triumphant. No wonder they were the subject of 10,000 messages an hour.

The geometry of emergence was enormously favorable to
Ølvira
. They had been on the outskirts of the action, but now they had hours headstart on the main fleets. Glimfrelle and Tirolle were busier than they had ever been in their lives, monitoring the fleets' emergence and establishing
Ølvira
's identity with the other vessels of Commercial Security. Until Scrits and Limmende emerged from the Slowness, Kjet Svensndot was the ranking officer of the organization. Furthermore, he was personally known to most of the commanders. Kjet had never been the admiral type; his Group Captaincy had been a reward for piloting skills, in a Sjandra Kei at peace. He had always been content to defer to his employers. But now...

The Group Captain used his ranking status. The Alliance vessels were not pursued. ("Wait till we can all act together," ordered Svensndot.) Possible game plans bounced back and forth across the emerging fleet, including schemes that assumed HQ was destroyed. With certain commanders, Kjet hinted that this last might be the case, that Limmende's flag ship was in enemy hands, and that the Alliance was somehow just a side effect of that true enemy. Very soon, Kjet would be committed to the "treason" he planned.

The Limmende flag ships and the core of the Blighter fleet came out of the Slowness almost simultaneously. Comm alarms went off across
Ølvira
's deck as priority mail arrived and passed through the ship's crypto. "Source: Limmende at HQ. Star Breaker Priority," said the ship's voice.

Glimfrelle put the message on the main window, and Svensndot felt a chill certainty spread up his neck.

Order of Battle was simple, even by Commercial Security standards. Limmende wanted them to split up and be gone, staying only long enough to destroy "masqueraders". Kjet said to Glimfrelle, "How about the validation codes?"

The Dirokime seemed his usual self again: "They're clean. We wouldn't be receiving the message at all unless the sender had today's one-time pad.... We're beginning to receive queries from the others, Boss. Audio and video channels. They want to know what to do."

If he hadn't prepared the ground during the last few hours, Kjet's mutiny wouldn't have had a chance. If Commercial Security had been a real military organization, the Limmende order might have been obeyed without question. As it was, the other commanders pondered the questions that Svensndot had raised: At these ranges, video communication was easy and the fleet had one-time ciphers large enough to support enormous amounts of it. Yet "Limmende" had chosen printed mail for her priority message. It made perfect military sense given that the encryption was correct, but it was also what Svensndot had predicted: The supposed HQ was not quite willing to show its face down here where perfect visual masquerades were not possible. Their commands would be by mail, or evocations that a sharp observer might suspect.

Such a slender thread of reason Kjet and his friends were hanging from.

Kjet eyed the knot of light that represented the Blighter fleet.
It
was suffering from no indecision. None of
its
vessels were straggling back toward safer heights. Whatever commanded there had discipline beyond most human militaries. It would sacrifice everything in its single-minded pursuit of one small starship.
What next, Group Captain?

Just ahead of that cold smear of light, a single tiny gleam appeared. "The
Out of Band
!" said Glimfrelle. "Sixty-five light-years out now."

"I'm getting encrypted video from them, Boss. The same half-crocked xor pad as before." He put the signal on the main window without waiting for Kjet's direction.

It was Ravna Bergsndot. The background was a jumble of motion and shouting, the strange human and a Skroderider arguing. Bergsndot was facing away from the pickup, and doing her share of shouting. Things looked even worse than Kjet's recollection of the first moments of his ship's emergence.

"It doesn't
matter
just now, I tell you! Let him be. We've got to contact --" she must have seen the signal Glimfrelle was sending back to her. "They're here! By the Powers, Pham, please --" She waved her hand angrily and turned to the camera. "Group Captain. We're --"

"I know. We've been out of the surge for hours. We're near the center of the pursuit now."

She caught her breath. Even with a hundred hours of planning, events were moving too fast for her.
And for me too.
"That's something," she said after an instant. "Everything we said before holds, Group Captain. We need your help. That's the Blight that's coming behind us. Please!"

Svensndot noticed a telltale by the window. Sassy Glimfrelle was retransmitting this to all the fleet they could trust.
Good.
He had talked about the situation with the others these last hours, but it meant something more to see Ravna Bergsndot on the comm, to see someone from Sjandra Kei who still survived and needed their help.
You can spend the rest of your life chasing revenge in the Middle Beyond, but all you kill will be the vultures. What's chasing Ravna Bergsndot may be the first cause.

The Butterflies were long gone, still singing their courage across the Net. Less than one percent of Commercial Security had followed "Limmende's" order to chase after them. Those were not the problem: it was the ten percent that stayed behind and arrayed themselves with the Blight's forces that bothered Kjet Svensndot. Some of those ships might not be subverted, might simply be loyal to orders they believed. It would be very hard to fire on them.

And there would be fighting, no doubt of that. Maneuvering for conflict while under ultradrive was difficult -- if the other side attempted to evade. But Blight's fleet was unwavering in its pursuit of the
Out of Band
. Slowly, slowly the two fleets were coming to occupy the same volume. At present they were scattered across cubic light-years, but with every jump, the Group Captain's Aniara fleet was more finely tuned to the stutter of their quarries' drives. Some ships were actually within a few hundred million kilometers of the enemy -- or where the enemy had been or would be. Targeting tactics were set. First fire was only a few hundred seconds away.

"With the Aprahanti gone, we have numerical superiority. A normal enemy would back off now --"

"But of course, that is one thing the Blight fleet is
not
." It was the red-haired guy who was doing the talking now. It was a good thing Glimfrelle hadn't relayed
his
face to the rest of Svensndot's fleet. The guy acted edgy and alien most of the time. Just now, he seemed intent on bashing every idea Svensndot advanced. "The Blight doesn't care what its losses are as long as it arrives with the upper hand."

Svensndot shrugged. "Look, we'll do our best. First fire is seventy seconds off. If they don't have any secret advantage, we may win this one." He looked sharply at the other. "Or is that your point? Could the Blight --" Stories were still coming down about the Blight's progress across the Top of the Beyond. Without a doubt, it was a transhuman intelligence. An unarmed man might be outnumbered by a pack of dogs, yet still defeat them. So might the Blight...?

Pham Nuwen shook his head. "No, no, no. The Blight's tactics down here will probably be
inferior
to yours. Its great advantage is at the Top, where it can control its slaves like fingers on a hand. Its creatures down here are like badly-synched waldoes." Nuwen frowned at something off camera. "No, what we have to fear is its strategic cleverness." His voice suddenly had a detached quality that was more unsettling than the earlier impatience. It wasn't the calm of someone facing up to a threat; it was more the calm of the demented. "One hundred seconds to contact.... Group Captain, we have a chance, if you concentrate your forces on the right points." Ravna floated down from the top of the picture, put one hand on the redhead's shoulder. Godshatter, she said he was, their secret edge against the enemy. Godshatter, a Power's dying message; garbage or treasure, who really knew?

Damn. If the other guys are badly-synched waldoes, what does following Pham Nuwen make us?
But he motioned Tirolle to mark the targets Nuwen was saying. Ninety seconds. Decision time. Kjet pointed at the red marks Tirolle had scattered through the enemy fleet. "Anything special about those targets, 'Rolle?"

The Dirokime whistled for a moment. Correlations popped up agonizingly slowly on the windows before him. "The ships he's targeting aren't the biggest or the fastest. It's gonna take extra time to position on them." Command vessels? "One other thing. Some of 'em show high real velocities, not natural residuals at all." Ships with ram drives? Planet busters?

"Hm." Svensndot looked at the display just a second more. Thirty seconds and Jo Haugen's ship
Lynsnar
would be in contact, but not with one of Nuwen's targets. "Get on the comm, Glimfrelle. Tell
Lynsnar
to back off, retarget." Retarget everything.

The lights that were Aniara fleet slid slowly around the core of the Blighter fleet, searching for their new targets. Twenty minutes passed, and not a few arguments with the other captains. Commercial Security was not built for military combat. What had made Kjet Svensndot's appeal successful was also the cause of constant questioning and countersuggestions. And then there were the threats that came from Owner Limmende's channel: kill the mutineers, death to all those disloyal to the company. The encryption was valid but the tone was totally alien to the mild, profit-oriented Giske Limmende. Everyone could now see that disbelieving Limmende was one correct decision, anyway.

Johanna Haugen was the first to achieve synch with the new targets. Glimfrelle opened the main window on the
Lynsnar
's data stream: The view was almost natural, a night sky of slowly shifting stars. The target was less than thirty million kilometers from
Lynsnar
, but about a millisecond out of synch. Haugen was arriving just before or just after the other had jumped.

"Drones away," Haugen's voice said. Now they had a true view of
Lynsnar
from a few meters away, from a camera aboard one of the first weapons drones launched. The ship was barely visible, a darkness obscuring the stars beyond -- a great fish in the depths of an endless sea. A fish that was now giving spawn. The picture flickered,
Lynsnar
disappearing, reappearing, as the drone lost synch momentarily. A swarm of blue lights spilled from the ship's hold. Weapon drones. The swarm hung by
Lynsnar
, calibrating itself, orienting on the enemy.

The light faded from around
Lynsnar
as the drones moving fractionally out of synch in space and time. Tirolle opened a window on a hundred-million klick sphere centered at
Lynsnar
. The target vessel was a red dot that flickered around the sphere like a maddened insect.
Lynsnar
was stalking prey at eight thousand times the speed of light. Sometimes the target disappeared for a second, synch almost lost; other times
Lynsnar
and the target merged for an instant as the two craft spent a tenth of a second at less than a million kilometers remove. What could not be accurately displayed was the disposition of the drones. The spawn diffused on a myriad trajectories, their sensors extended for sign of the enemy ship.

"What about the target, is it swarming back? Do you need back up?" said Svensndot. Tirolle gave a Dirokime shrug. What they were watching was three light-years away. No way he could know.

But Jo Haugen replied, "I don't think my bogie is swarming. I've lost only five drones, no more'n you'd expect from fratricide. We'll see --" She paused, but Lynsnar's trace and signal remained strong. Kjet looked out the other windows. Five of Aniara were already engaged and three had completed swarm deploy. Nuwen looked on silently from
Out of Band
. The godshatter had had its way, and now Kjet and his people were committed.

And now good news and bad came in very fast:

"Got him!" from Jo Haugen. The red dot in
Lynsnar
's swarm was no more. It had passed within a few thousand kilometers of one of the drones. In the milliseconds necessary to compute a new jump, the drone had discovered its presence and detonated. Even that would not have been fatal if the target had jumped before the blast front hit it; there had been several near misses in earlier seconds. This time the jump did not reach commit in time. A mini-star was born, one whose light would be years in reaching the rest of the battle volume.

Glimfrelle gave a rasping whistle, an untranslatable curse, "We just lost
Ablsndot
and
Holder
, Boss. Their target must have counter-swarmed."

"Send in
Gliwing
and
Trance
." Something in the back of his head curled up in horror. These were his friends who were dying. Kjet had seen death before, but never like this. In police action, no one took lethal chances except in a rescue. And yet... he turned from the field summary to order more ships on a target that had acquired defending vessels. Tirolle was moving in others on his own. Ganging up on a few nonessential targets might lose in the long run, but in the short term ... the enemy was being hurt. For the first time since the fall of Sjandra Kei, Commercial Security was hurting someone back.

Haugen: "Powers, that guy was moving! Secondary drone got EM spectrum on the kill. Target was going 15000 kps true speed." A rocket bomb ramping up? Damn. They should be postponing those till
after
they controlled the battlefield.

Tirolle: "More kills, far side of battle volume. The enemy is repositioning. Somehow they've guessed which we're after --"

Glimfrelle:
Triumph whistle.
"Get 'em, get 'em -- oops. Boss, I think Limmende has figured we're coordinating things --"

A new window had opened over Tirolle's post. It showed the five million kilometers around
Ølvira
. Two other ships were there now: the window identified them as Limmende's flag and one of the vessels that had not responded to Svensndot's recruiting.

There was an instant of stillness on
Ølvira
's command deck. The voices of triumph and panic coming from the rest of the fleet seemed suddenly far away. Svensndot and his crew were looking at death close up. "Tirolle! How long till swarm --"

"They're on us already -- just missed a drone by ten milliseconds."

"Tirolle! Finish running current engagements. Glimfrelle, tell
Lynsnar
and
Trance
to chain command if we lose contact." Those ships had already spent their drones, and Jo Haugen was known to all the other captains.

Then the thought was gone, and he was busy coordinating
Ølvira
's own battle swarm. The local tactics window showed the cloud dissipating, taking on colors coded by whether they were lagging or leading in time relative to
Ølvira
.

Their two attackers had matched pseudospeeds perfectly. Ten times per second all three ships jumped a tiny fraction of a light-year. Like rocks skipping across the surface of a pond, they appeared in real space in perfectly measured hops -- and the distance between them at every emergence was less that five million kilometers. The only thing that separated them now was millisecond differences in jump times, and the fact the light itself could not pass between them in the brief time they spent at each jump point.

Three actinic flashes lit the deck, casting shadows back from Svensndot and the Dirokimes. It was second-hand light, the display's emergency signal of nearby detonation.
Run like hell
was the message any rational person should take from that awful light. It would be easy enough to break synch ... and lose tactical control of Aniara fleet. Tirolle and Glimfrelle bent their heads away from the local window, shying from the glare of nearby death. Their whistling voices scarcely broke cadence, and the commands from
Ølvira
to the others continued. There were dozens of other battles going on out there. Just now
Ølvira
was the only source of precision and control available to their side. Every second they remained on station meant protection and advantage to Aniara. Breaking off would mean minutes of chaos till
Lynsnar
or
Trance
could pick up control.

Nearly two thirds of Pham Nuwen's targets were destroyed now. The price had been high, half of Svensdot's friends. The enemy had lost much to protect those targets, yet much of its fleet survived.

An unseen hand smashed
Ølvira
, driving Svensndot hard against his combat harness. The lights went out, even the glow from the windows. Then dim red light came from the floor. The Dirokimes were silhouetted by one small monitor. 'Rolle whistled softly, "We're out of the game, Boss, least while it counts. I didn't know you could get misses that near."

Maybe it wasn't a miss.
Kjet scrambled out of his harness and boosted across the room to float head-down over the tiny monitor.
Maybe we're already dead.
Somewhere very close by a drone had detonated, the wave front reaching
Ølvira
before she jumped. The concussion had been the outer part of the ship's hull exploding as it absorbed the soft-xray component of the enemy ordnance. He stared at the red letters marching slowly across the damage display. Most likely, the electronics was permanently dead; chances were they had all received a fatal dose of gamma. The smell of burnt insulation floated across the room on the ventilator's breeze.

"
Iiya!
Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn't have been clipped at all. We actually committed the jump
after
the front hit!" And somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship's surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the
Ølvira
's automation ...

Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across the screen. "Central automation suspended. Display management suspended. Drive computation suspended." Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. "Hei, 'Frelle, it looks like
'Vira
managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most of this back!"

Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case Tirolle wasn't far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor's hardened processor, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted. (Absurdly, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that should have been disabled along with all the rest of
Ølvira
's automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet.

... and there
was
still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with numerical superiority. If they'd fought properly, they might have won. Instead they'd destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities -- and knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit, and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy's behavior.