A Fire Upon the Deep (54 page)

Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been hit at known locations, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space.

Finally the time for miracle rescues and sad discoveries was passed. The SjK commanders gathered on a common channel to decide a common future. It might better have been a wake -- for Sjandra Kei and Aniara fleet. Part way through the meeting, a new window appeared, a view onto the bridge of the
Out of Band
. Ravna Bergsndot watched the proceedings silently. The erstwhile "godshatter" was nowhere in evidence.

"What more to do?" said Johanna Haugen. "The damn Butterflies are long gone."

"Are we sure we have rescued everyone?" asked Jan Trenglets. Svensndot bit back an angry reply. The commander of
Trance
had become a recording loop on that issue. He had lost too many friends in the battle; all the rest of his life Jan Trenglets would live with nightmares of ships slowly dying in the deep night.

"We've accounted for everything, even to vapor," Haugen spoke as gently as the words allowed. "The question is where to go now."

Ravna made a small throat-clearing sound, "Gentlemen and Ladies, if --"

Trenglets looked up at her transceived image. All his hurt transformed into a blaze of anger. "We're not
your
gentlemen, slut! You're not some princess we happily die for. You deserve our deadly fire now, nothing more."

The woman shrank from Trenglets rage. "I --"

"
You
put us into this suicidal battle," shouted Trenglets. "You made us attack secondary targets. And then you did nothing to help. The Blight is locked on you like a dumshark on a squid. If you had just altered your course the tiniest fraction, you could have thrown the Blighters off our path."

"I doubt that would have helped, sir," said Ravna. "The Blight seems most interested in where we're bound." The solar system just fifty-five light-years beyond the
Out of Band
. The fugitives would arrive there just over two days before their pursuers.

Jo Haugen shrugged. "You must realize what your friend's crazy battle plan has done. If we had attacked rationally, the enemy would be a fraction of its present size. If it chose to continue, we might have been able to protect you at this, this Tines' world." She seemed to taste the strange name, wondering at its meaning. "Now ... no way am I going to chase them there. What's left of the enemy could wipe us out." She glanced at Svensndot's viewpoint. Kjet forced himself to look back. No matter who might blame
Out of Band
, it had been Group Captain Kjet Svensndot's word that had persuaded the fleet to fight as they did. Aniara's sacrifice had been ill-spent, and he wondered that Haugen and Trenglets and the others talked to him at all now. "Suggest we continue the business meeting later. Rendezvous in one thousand seconds, Kjet."

"I'll be ready."

"Good." Jo cut the link without saying anything more to Ravna Bergsndot. Seconds later, Trenglets and the other commanders were gone. It was just Svensndot and the two Dirokimes -- and Ravna Bergsndot looking out her window from
Out of Band
.

Finally, Bergsndot said, "When I was a little girl on Herte, sometimes we would play kidnappers and Commercial Security. I always dreamed of being rescued by your company from fates worse than death."

Kjet smiled bleakly, "Well, you got the rescue attempt," and you not even a currently subscribed customer. "This was far the biggest gun fight we've ever been in."

"I'm sorry, Kje -- Group Captain."

He looked into her dark features. A lass from Sjandra Kei, down to the violet eyes. No way this could be a simulation, not here. He had bet everything that she was not; he still believed she was not. Yet -- "What does your friend say about all this?" Pham Nuwen had not been seen since his so-impressive godshatter act at the beginning of the battle.

Ravna's glance shifted to something off-camera. "He's not saying much, Group Captain. He's wandering around even more upset than your Captain Trenglets. Pham remembers being absolutely convinced he was demanding the right thing, but now he can't figure out why it was right."

"Hmm." A little late for second thoughts. "What are you going to do now? Haugen is right, you know. It would be useless suicide for us to follow the Blighters to your destination. I daresay it's useless suicide for you, too. You'll arrive maybe fifty-five hours before them. What can you do in that time?"

Ravna Bergsndot looked back at him, and her expression slowly collapsed into sobbing grief. "I don't know. I ... don't know." She shook her head, her face hidden behind her hands and a sweep of black hair. Finally she looked up and brushed back her hair. Her voice was calm but very quiet. "But we are going ahead. It's what we came for. Things could still work out.... You know there's something down there, something the Blight wants desperately. Maybe fifty-five hours is enough to figure out what it is and tell the Net. And ... and we'll still have Pham's godshatter."

Your worst enemy?
Quite possibly this Pham Nuwen was a construct of the Powers. He certainly
looked
like something built from a second-hand description of humanity. But how can you tell godshatter from simple nuttery?

She shrugged, as if acknowledging the doubts -- and accepting them. "So what will you and Commercial Security do?"

"There is no Commercial Security anymore. Virtually all our customers got shot out from under us. Now we've killed our company's owner -- or at least destroyed her ship and those supporting her. We are Aniara Fleet now." It was the official name chosen at the fleet conference just ended. There was a certain grim pleasure in embracing it, the ghost from before Sjandra Kei and before Nyjora, from the earliest times of the human race. For they were truly cast away now, from their worlds and their customers and their former leaders. One hundred ships bound for.... "We talked it over. A few still wanted to follow you to Tines' world. Some of the crews want to return to Middle Beyond, spend the rest of their lives killing Butterflies. The majority want to start the races of Sjandra Kei over again, some place where we won't be noticed, some place where no one cares if we live."

And the one thing everyone agreed on was that Aniara must be split no further, must make no further sacrifices outside of itself. Once that was clear, it was easy to decide what to do. In the wake of the Great Surge, this part of the Bottom was an incredible froth of Slowness and Beyond. It would be centuries before the zonographic vessels from above had reasonable maps of the new interface. Hidden away in the folds and interstices were worlds fresh from the Slowness, worlds where Sjandra Kei could be born again.
Ny Sjandra Kei?

He looked across the bridge at Tirolle and Glimfrelle. They were busy bringing the main navigation processors out of suspension. That wasn't absolutely necessary for the rendezvous with
Lynsnar
, but things would be a lot more convenient if both ships could maneuver. The brothers seemed oblivious to Kjet's conversation with Ravna. And maybe they weren't paying attention. In a way, the Aniara decision meant more to them than to the humans of the fleet: No one doubted that millions of humans survived in the Beyond (and who knew how many human worlds might still exist in the Slowness, distant cousins of Nyjora, distant children of Old Earth). But this side of the Transcend, the Dirokimes of Aniara were the only ones that existed. The dream habitats of Sjandra Kei were gone, and with them the race. There were at least a thousand Dirokimes left aboard Aniara, pairs of sisters and brothers scattered across a hundred vessels. These were the most adventurous of their race's latter days, and now they were faced with their greatest challenge. The two on
Ølvira
had already been scouting among the survivors, looking for friends and dreaming a new reality.

Ravna listened solemnly to his explanations. "Group Captain, zonography is a tedious thing ... and your ships are near their limits. In this froth you might search for years and not find a new home."

"We're taking precautions. We're abandoning all our ships except the ones with ramscoop and coldsleep capability. We'll operate in coordinated nets; no one should be lost for more than a few years." He shrugged. "And if we never find what we seek --"
if we die between the stars as our life support finally fails
"-- well then, we will have still lived true to our name."
Aniara.
"I think we have a chance." More than can be said for you.

Ravna nodded slowly. "Yes, well. It ... helps me to know that."

They talked a few minutes more, Tirolle and Glimfrelle joining in. They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings.

"Rendezvous
Lynsnar
two hundred seconds," said the ship's voice.

Ravna heard it, nodded. She raised her hand. "Fare you well, Kjet Svensndot and Tirolle and Glimfrelle."

The Dirokimes whistled back the common farewell, and Svensndot raised his hand. The window on Ravna Bergsndot closed.

... Kjet Svensndot remembered her face all the rest of his life, though in later years it seemed more and more to be the same as Ølvira's.

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

PART III

"Tines' world. I can
see
it, Pham!"

The main window showed a true view upon the system: a sun less than two hundred million kilometers off, daylight across the command deck. The positions of identified planets were marked with blinking red arrows. But one of those -- just twenty million kilometers off -- was labeled "terrestrial". Coming off an interstellar jump, you couldn't get positioning much better than that.

Pham didn't reply, just glared out the window as if there were something wrong with what they were seeing. Something had broken in him after the battle with the Blight. He'd been so sure of his godshatter -- and so bewildered by the consequences. Afterwards he had retreated more than ever. Now he seemed to think that if they moved fast enough, the surviving enemy could do them no harm. More than ever he was suspicious of Blueshell and Greenstalk, as if somehow they were greater threats than the ships that still pursued.

"
Damn
," Pham said finally. "Look at the relative velocity." Seventy kilometers per second.

Position matching was no problem, but "Matching velocities will cost us time, Sir Pham."

Pham's stare turned on Blueshell. "We talked this out with the locals three weeks ago, remember? You managed the burn."

"And you checked my work, Sir Pham. This must be another nav system bug ... though I didn't expect anything was wrong in simple ballistics." A sign inverted, seventy klicks per second closing velocity instead of zero. Blueshell drifted toward the secondary console.

"Maybe," said Pham. "Just now, I want you off the deck, Blueshell."

"But I can help! We should be contacting Jefri, and rematching velocities, and --"

"
Get off the deck, Blueshell.
I don't have time to watch you anymore," Pham dived across the intervening space and was met by Ravna, just short of the Rider.

She floated between the two, talking fast, hoping whatever she said would both make sense and make peace. "It's okay, Pham. He'll go." She brushed her hand across one of Blueshell's wildly vibrating fronds. After a second, Blueshell wilted. "I'll go. I'll go." She kept an encouraging touch on him -- and kept herself between him and Pham, as the Skroderider made a dejected exit.

When the Rider was gone, she turned to Pham. "Couldn't it have been a nav bug, Pham?"

The other didn't seem to hear the question. The instant the hatch had closed, he had returned to the command console.
OOB
's latest estimate put the Blight's arrival less than fifty-three hours away. And now they must waste time redoing a velocity match supposedly accomplished three weeks earlier. "Somebody, something, screwed us over ..." Pham was muttering, even as he finished with the control sequence, "Maybe it was a bug. This next damn burn is going to be as manual as it can be." Acceleration alarms echoed down the core of the
OOB
. Pham flipped through monitor windows, searching for loose items that might be big enough to be dangerous. "You tie down, too." He reached out to override the five minute timer.

Ravna dived back across the deck, unfolding the free-fall saddle into a seat and strapping in. She heard Pham speaking on the general announce channel, warning of the timer override. Then the impulse drive cut in, a lazy pressure back into the webbing. Four tenths of a gee -- all the poor
OOB
could still manage.

When Pham said manual, he meant it. The main window appeared to be bore-centered now. The view didn't drift at the whim of the pilot, and there were no helpful legends and schematics. As much as possible, the were seeing true view along
OOB
's main axis. Peripheral windows were held in fixed geometry with main. Pham's eyes flickered from one to another, as his hands played over the command board. As near as could be, he was flying by his own senses, and trusting no one else.

But Pham still had use for the ultradrive. They were twenty million klicks off target, a submicroscopic jump. Pham Nuwen fiddled with the drive parameters, trying to make an accurate jump smaller than the standard interval. Every few seconds the sunlight would shift a fraction, coming first over Ravna's left shoulder and then her right. It made reestablishing comm with Jefri nearly impossible.

Suddenly the window below their feet was filled by a world, huge and gibbous, blue and swirling white. The Tines' world was as Jefri Olsndot advertised, a normal terrestrial planet. After the months aspace and the loss of Sjandra Kei, the sight caught Ravna short. Ocean, the world was mostly ocean, but near the terminator there were the darker shades of land. A single tiny moon was visible beyond the limb.

Pham sucked in his breath. "It's about ten thousand kilometers off. Perfect. Except we're closing at seventy klicks per second." Even as she watched, the world seemed to grow, falling toward them. Pham watched it for few seconds more. "Don't worry, we're going to miss, fly right past the, um, north limb."

The globe swelled below them, eclipsing the moon. She had always loved the appearance of Herte at Sjandra Kei. But that world had smaller oceans, and was crisscrossed with Dirokime accidents. This place was as beautiful as Relay, and seemed truly untouched. The small polar cap was in sunlight, and she could follow the coastline that came south from it toward the terminator.
I'm seeing the northwest coast. Jefri's right down there!
Ravna reached for her keyboard, asked the ship to attempt both ultrawave comm and a radio link.

"Ultrawave contact," she said after a second.

"What does it say?"

"It's garbled. Probably just a ping response," acknowledgment to
OOB
's signal. Jefri was housed very near the ship these days; sometimes she had gotten responses almost immediately, even during his night time. It would be good to talk to him again, even if ...

Tines' world filled the entire aft and side windows now, its limb a barely curving horizon. Sky colors stood before them, fading to the black of space. Icecap and icebergs showed detail within detail against the sea. She could see cloud shadows. She followed the coast southwards, islands and peninsulas so closely fit that she could not be sure of one from the other. Blackish mountains and black-striped glaciers. Green and brown valleys. She tried to remember the geography they had learned from Jefri.
Hidden Island?
But there were so many islands.

"I have radio contact from planet's surface," came the ship's voice. Simultaneously a blinking arrow pointed at a spot just in from the coast. "Do you want the audio in real time?"

"Yes. Yes!" said Ravna, then punched at her keyboard when the ship did not respond immediately.

"Hei, Ravna. Oh, Ravna!" The little boy's voice bounced excitement around the deck. He sounded just as she had imagined.

Ravna keyed in a request for two-way. They were less than five thousand klicks from Jefri now, even if they were sweeping by at seventy kilometers per second. Plenty close enough for a radio conversation. "Hei, Jefri!" she said. "We're here at last, but we need --"
we need all the cooperation your four-legged friends can give us. How to say that quickly and effectively?

But the boy on the ground already had an agenda: "-- need help
now
, Ravna! The Woodcarvers are attacking
now
."

There was a thumping, as if the transmitter was bouncing around. Another voice spoke, high-pitched and weirdly inarticulate. "This Steel, Ravna. Jefri right. Woodcarver --" the almost human voice dissolved into a hissing gobble. After a moment she heard Jefri's voice: "'Ambush', the word is 'ambush'."

"Yes ... Woodcarver has done big, big ambush. They all around now. We die in hours if you not help."

Woodcarver had never wanted to be a warrior. But ruling for half a thousand years requires a range of skills, and she had learned about making war. Some of that -- such as trusting to staff -- she had temporarily
un
learned these last few days. There had indeed been an ambush on Margrum Climb, but not the one that Lord Steel had planned.

She looked across the tented field at Vendacious. That pack was half-hidden by noise baffles, but she could see he wasn't so jaunty as before. Being put to the question will loosen anyone's control. Vendacious knew his survival now depended on her keeping a promise. Yet ... it was awful to think that Vendacious would live after he had killed and betrayed so many. She realized that two of herself were keening rage, lips curled back from clenched teeth. Her puppies huddled back from threats unseen. The tented area stank of sweat and the mindnoise of too many people in too small a space. It took a real effort of will to calm herself. She licked the puppies, and daydreamed peaceful thoughts for a moment.

Yes, she would keep her promises to Vendacious. And maybe it would be worth the price. Vendacious had only speculations about Steel's inner secrets, but he had learned far more about Steel's tactical situation than the other side could have guessed. Vendacious had known just where the Flenserists were hiding and in what numbers. Steel's folk had been overconfident about their super guns and their secret traitor. When Woodcarver's troops surprised them, victory had been easy -- and now the Queen had some of these marvelous guns.

From behind the hills, those cannons were still pounding away, eating through the stocks of ammunition the captured gunners had revealed. Vendacious the traitor had cost her much, but Vendacious the prisoner might yet bring her victory.

"Woodcarver?" It was Scrupilo. She waved him closer. Her chief gunner edged out of the sun, sat down an intimate twenty-five feet away. Battle conditions had blown away all notions of decorum.

Scrupilo's mind noise was an anxious jumble. He looked by parts exhausted and exhilarated and discouraged. "It's safe to advance up the castle hill, Your Majesty," he said. "Answering fire is almost extinguished. Parts of the castle walls have been breached. There is an end to castles here, My Queen. Even our own poor cannons would make it so."

She bobbed agreement. Scrupilo spent most of his time with Dataset in learning to
make
-- cannons in particular. Woodcarver spent her time learning what those inventions ultimately created. By now she knew far more than even Johanna about the social effects of weapons, from the most primitive to ones so strange that they seemed not weapons at all. A thousand million times, castle technologies had fallen to things like cannon; why should her world be different?

"We'll move up then --"

From beyond the shade of the tent there was a faint whistle, a rare, incoming round. She folded the puppies within herself, and paused a moment. Twenty yards away, Vendacious shrank down in a great cower. But when it came, the explosion was a muffled thump above them on the hill.
It might even have been one of our own.
"Now our troops must take advantage of the destruction. I want Steel to know that the old games of ransom and torture will only win him worse."
We'll most likely win the starship and the child.
The question was, would either be alive when they got them? She hoped Johanna would never know the threats and the risks she planned for the next few hours.

"Yes, Majesty." But Scrupilo made no move to depart, and suddenly seemed more bedraggled and worried than ever. "Woodcarver, I fear ..."

"What? We have the tide. We must rush to sail on it."

"Yes, Majesty.... But while we move forward, there are serious dangers coming up on our flanks and rear. The enemy's far scouts and the fires."

Scrupilo was right. The Flenserists who operated behind her lines were deadly. There weren't many of them; the enemy troops at Margrum Climb had been mostly killed or dispersed. The few that ate at Woodcarver's flanks were equipped with ordinary crossbows and axes ... but they were extraordinarily well-coordinated. And their tactics were brilliant; she saw the snouts and tines of Flenser himself in that brilliance. Somehow her evil child lived. Like a plague of years past, he was slipping back upon the world. Given time, those guerrilla packs would seriously hurt Woodcarver's ability to supply her forces. Given time. Two of her stood and looked Scrupilo in the eyes, emphasizing the point: "All the more reason to move now, my friend. We are the ones far from home. We are the ones with limited numbers and food. If we don't win soon, then we will be cut up a bit at a time."
Flensed.

Scrupilo stood up, nodding submission. "That's what Peregrine says, too. And Johanna wants to chase right through the castle walls.... But there's something else, Your Majesty. Even if we must lunge all forward: I worked for a ten of tendays, using every clue I could understand from Dataset, to make our cannon. Majesty,
I know
how hard it is to do such. Yet the guns we captured on Margrum have three times the range and one quarter the weight.
How could they do it?
" There were chords of anger and humiliation in his voice. "The traitor," Scrupilo jerked a snout in the direction of Vendacious, "thinks they may have Johanna's brother, but Johanna says they have nothing like Dataset. Majesty, Steel has some advantage we don't yet know."