Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  “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.

  It took two days to clean up, to estimate the damage, and have some confidence that no new disaster was on the way. Most of the workshop was destroyed. They would have no armor on Tines world. Pham salvaged one of the beamers that had been guarding the entrance to ths shop. Disaster was scattered all across the ship, the classic random ruin of interlocking failures: They had lost fifty percent of their water. The ship’s landing boat had lost its higher automation.

  OOB‘s rocket drive was massively degraded. That was unimportant here in interstellar space, but their final velocity matching would be done at only 0.4 gees. Thank goodness the agrav worked; they would have no trouble maneuvering in steep gravitational wells—that is, landing on Tines world.

  Ravna knew how close they were to losing the ship, but she watched Pham with even greater dread. She was so afraid that he would take this as final evidence of Rider treachery, that this would drive him over the edge. Strangely, almost the opposite happened. His pain and devastation were obvious, but he didn’t lash out, just doggedly went about gathering up the pieces. He was talking to Blueshell more now, not letting him modify the automation, but cautiously accepting more of his advice. Together they restored the ship to something like its pre-fire state.

  She asked Pham about it. “No change of heart,” he finally said. “I had to balance the risks, and I messed up… And maybe there is no balance. Maybe the Blight will win.”

  The godshatter had bet too much on Pham’s doing it all himself. Now it was turning down the paranoia a little.

  Seven weeks out from Harmonious Repose, less than one week from whatever waited at Tines’ world, Pham went into a multiday fugue. Before he had been busy, a futile attempt to run handmade checks on all the automation they might need at Tines’ World. Now—Ravna couldn’t even get him to eat:

  The nav display showed the three fleets as identified by the News and Pham’s intuition: the Blight’s agents, the Alliance for the Defense, and what was left of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. Deadly monsters and the remains of a victim. The Alliance still proclaimed itself with regular bulletins on the News. SjK Commercial Security had posted a few terse refutations, but was mostly silent; they were unused to propaganda, or—as likely—uninterested in it. A private revenge was all that remained to Commercial Security. And the Blighter fleet? The News hadn’t heard anything from them. Piecing together departures and lost ships, War Trackers Newsgroup concluded they were a wildly ad hoc assembly, whatever the Blight had controlled down here at the time of the RIP debacle. Ravna knew that the War Trackers analysis was wrong about one thing: The Blighter fleet was not silent. Thirty times over the last weeks, they had sent messages at the OOB… in skrode maintenance format. Pham had had the ship reject the messages unread—and then worried about whether the order was really followed. After all, the OOB was of Rider design.

  But now the torment in him was submerged. Pham sat for hours, staring at the display. Soon Sjandra Kei would close with the Alliance fleet. At least one set of villains would pay. But the Blighter fleet and at least part of the Alliance would survive… Maybe this fugue was just godshatter getting desperate.

  Three days passed; Pham snapped out of it. Except for the new thinness in his face, he seemed more normal than he had in weeks. He asked Ravna to bring the Riders up to the bridge.

  Pham waved at the ultradrive traces that floated in the window. The three fleets were spread through a rough cylinder, five light-years deep and three across. The display captured only the heart of that volume, where the fastest of the pursuers had clustered. The current position of each ship was a fleck of light trailing an unending stream of fainter lights—the ultradrive trace left by that vehicle’s drive. “I’ve used red, blue, and green to mark my best guess as to the fleet affiliation of each trace.” The fastest ships were collected in a blob so dense that it looked white at this scale, but with colored streamers diverging behind. There were other tags, annotations he had set but which he admitted once to Ravna he didn’t understand.

  “The front edge of that mob—the fastest of the fast—is still gaining.”

  Blueshell said hesitantly. “We might get a little more speed if you would grant me direct control. Not much, but—”

  Pham’s response was civil at least. “No, I’m thinking of something else, something Ravna suggested a while back. It’s always been a possibility and … I … think the time may have come for it.”

  Ravna moved closer to the display, stared at the green traces. Their distribution was in near agreement with what the News claimed to be the remnants of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. All that’s left of my people.“They’ve been trying to engage with the Alliance for a hundred hours now.”

  Pham’s glance touched hers. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Poor bastards. They’re literally the fleet from Port Despair. If I were them, I’d—” His expression smoothed over again. “Any idea how well-armed they are?” That was surely a rhetorical question, but it put the topic on the table.

  “War Trackers thinks that Sjandra Kei had been expecting something unpleasant ever since the Alliance started talking ‘death to vermin’. Commercial Security was providing deep space defense. Their fleet is converted freighters armed with locally-designed weapons. War Trackers claims they weren’t really a match for what the other side could field, if the Alliance was willing to take some heavy casualties. Trouble is, Sjandra Kei never expected the planet-smasher attack. So when the Alliance fleet showed up, ours moved out to meet it—”

  “—and meantime the KE bombs were coming straight in to the heart spaces of Sjandra Kei.”

  Into my heart spaces. “Yes. The Alliance must have been running those bombs for weeks.”

  Pham Nuwen laughed shortly. “If I were shipping with the Alliance fleet, I’d be a bit nervous now. They’re down in numbers, and those retread freighters seem about as fast as anything here… I’ll bet every pilot out of Sjandra Kei is dead set on revenge.” The emotion faded. “Hmm. There’s no way they could kill all the Alliance ships or all the Blight’s, much less all of both. It would be pointless to …

  His gaze abruptly focussed on her. “So if we leave things as they are, the Sjandra Kei fleet will eventually match position with the Alliance and try to blow them out of existence.”

  Ravna just nodded. “In twelve hours or so, they say.”

  “And then all that will be left is the Blight’s own fleet on our tail. But if we could talk your people into fighting the right enemies…”

  It was Ravna’s nightmare scheme. All that was left of Sjandra Kei dying to save the OOB… trying to save them. There was little chance the Sjandra Kei fleet could destroy all the Blighter ships. But they’re here to fight. Why not a vengeance that means something? That was the nightmare’s message. Now somehow it fit godshatter’s plans. “There are problems. They don’t know what we’re doing or the purpose of the third fleet. Anything we shout back to them will be overheard.” Ul
trawave was directional, but most of their pursuers were closely mingled.

  Pham nodded. “Somehow we have to talk to them, and them alone. Somehow we have to persuade them to fight.” Faint smile. “And I think we may have just the … equipment … to do all that. Blueshell: Remember that night on the High Docks. You told us about your ‘rotted cargo’ from Sjandra Kei?”

  “Indeed, Sir Pham. We carried one third of a cipher generated by SjK Commercial Security for their long-range communications. It’s still in the ship’s safe, though worthless without the other two thirds.” Gram for gram, crypto materials were about the most valuable thing shipped between the stars—and once compromised, about the most valueless. Somewhere in Out of Band‘s cargo files there was an SjK one-time communications pad. Part of a pad.

  “Worthless? Maybe not. Even one third would provide us with secure communications.”

  Blueshell dithered. “I must not mislead you. No competent customer would accept such. Certainly, it provides secure communication, but the other side has no verification that you are who you claim.”

  Pham’s glance slid sideways, toward Ravna. There was that smile again. “If they’ll listen, I think we can convince them… The hard part is, I only want one of them to hear us.” Pham explained what he had in mind. The Riders’ rustled faintly behind Pham’s words. After all their time together, Ravna could almost get some sense of their talk—or maybe she just understood their personalities. As usual, Blueshell was worrying about how impossible the idea was, and Greenstalk was urging him to listen.

  But when Pham finished, the large rider did not launch into objections. “Across seventy light-years, ultrawave comm between ships is practical, even without our antenna swarm; we could even have live video. But you are right, the beam spread would include all the ships in the central cluster of fleets. If we could reliably identify an outlying vessel as belonging to Sjandra Kei, then what you are asking might be done; that ship could use internal fleet codes to relay to the others. But in honesty I must warn you,” continued Blueshell, brushing back Greenstalk’s gentle remonstrance, “professional communications folk would not honor your request for talk—would probably not even recognize it as such.”

  “Silly.” Greenstalk finally spoke, her voder-voice gentle but clear. “You always say things like that—except when we are talking to paying customers.”

  “Brap. Yes. Desperate times, desperate measures. I want to try it, but I fear… I want there to be no accusations of Rider treachery, Sir Pham. I want you to handle this.”

  Pham Nuwen smiled back. “My thought exactly.”

  “The Aniara Fleet.” That’s what some of the crews of Commercial Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth, older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the asteroids of Earth’s solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and then over the following years—as their ship fell out and out into the endless dark—died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing. The image was a haunting one, which was probably the reason it was known across millennia. With the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the escape of Commercial Security, the story seemed suddenly come true.

  But we will not play it to the end. Group Captain Kjet Svensndot stared into the tracking display. This time the death of civilization had been a murder, and the murderers were almost within vengeance’s reach. For days, fleet HQ had been maneuvering them to close with the Alliance. The display showed that success was very, very near. The majority of Alliance and Sjandra Kei ships were bound in a glowing ball of drive traces—which also included the third, silent fleet. From that display you might think that battle was already possible. In fact, opposing ships were passing through almost the same space—sometimes less than a billion kilometers apart—but still separated by milliseconds of time. All the vessels were on ultradrive, jumping perhaps a dozen times a second. And even here at the Bottom of the Beyond, that came to a measurable fraction of a light-year on each jump. To fight an uncooperative enemy meant matching their jumps perfectly and flooding the common space with weapon drones.

  Group Captain Svensndot changed the display to show ships that had exactly matched their pace with the Alliance. Almost a third of the fleet was in synch now. Another few hours and… “Damnation!” He slapped his display board, sending it spinning across the deck.

  His first officer retrieved the display, sent it sailing back. “Is this a new damnation, or the usual?” Tirolle asked.

  “It was the usual. Sorry.” And he really was. Tirolle and Glimfrelle had their own problems. No doubt there were still pockets of humanity in the Beyond, hidden from the Alliance. But of the Dirokimes, there might be no more than what was on Commercial Security’s fleet. Except for adventurous souls like Tirolle and Glimfrelle, all that was left of their kind had been in the dream terranes at Sjandra Kei.

  Kjet Svensndot had started with Commercial Security twenty-five years before, back when the company had just been a small fleet of rentacops. He had spent thousands of hours learning to be the very best combat pilot in the organization. Only twice had he ever been in a shootout. Some might have regretted that. Svensndot and his superiors took it as the reward for being the best. His competence had won him the best fighting equipment in Commercial Security’s fleet, culminating with the ship he commanded now. The Ølvira was purchased with part of the enormous premium that Sjandra Kei paid out when the Alliance first started making threatening noises. Ølvira was not a rebuilt freighter, but a fighting machine from the keel out. The ship was equipped with the smartest processors, the smartest ultra drive, that could operate at Sjandra Kei’s altitude in the Beyond. It needed only a three-person crew—and combat could be managed by the pilot alone with his AI associates. Its holds contained more than ten thousand seeker bombs, each smarter than the average freighter’s entire drive unit. Quite a reward for twenty-five years of solid performance. They even let Svensndot name his new ship.

  And now… Well, the true Ølvira was surely dead. Along with billions of others they had been hired to protect, she had been at Herte, in the inner system. Glow bombs leave no survivores.

  And his beautiful ship with the same name, it had been a half light-year out-system, seeking enemies that weren’t there. In any honest battle, Kjet Svensndot and this Ølvira could have done very well. Instead they were chasing down into the Bottom of the Beyond. Every light-year took them further from the regions Ølvira was built for. Every light-year the processors worked a bit more slowly (or not at all). Down here the converted freighters were almost an optimum design. Clumsy and stupid, with crews of dozens, but they kept on working. Already Ølvira was lagging five light-years behind them. It was the freighters that would make the attack on the Alliance fleet. And once again Kjet would stand powerless while his friends died.

  For the hundredth time, Svensndot glared at the trace display and contemplated mutiny. There were Alliance stragglers too—“high performance” vehicles left behind the central pack. But his orders were to maintain position, to be a tactical coordinator for the fleet’s swifter combatants. Well, he would do as he was hired … this one last time. But when the battle was done, when the fleet was dead, with as many of the Alliance that they could take with them—then he would think of his own revenge. Some of that depended on Tirolle and Glimfrelle. Could he persuade them to leave the remnants of the Alliance fleet and ascend to the Middle Beyond, up where the Ølvira was the best of her kind? There was good evidence now about which star systems were behind the “Alliance for the Defense”. The murderers were boasting to the news. Apparently they thought that would bring them new support. It might also bring them visitors like Ølvira. The bombs in her belly could destroy worlds, though not as swiftly sure as what had been used on Sjandra Kei. And even now Svensndot’s mind shrank from that sort of revenge. No. They would choose thei
r targets carefully: ships coming to form new Alliance fleets, underprotected convoys. Ølvira might last a long time if he always struck from ambush and never left survivors. He stared and stared at the display, and ignored the wetness that floated at the corners of his eyes. All his life, he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge… And now revenge was all that life had left for him.

  “I’m getting something peculiar, Kjet.” Glimfrelle was monitoring signals this watch. It was the sort of thing that should have been totally automated—and had been in Ølvira‘s natural environment, but which was now a boring and exhausting enterprise.

  “What? More Net lies?” said Tirolle.

  “No. This is on the bearing of that bottom-lugger everyone is chasing. It can’t be anyone else.”

  Svensndot’s eyebrows rose. He turned on the mystery with enormous, scarcely realized, pleasure. “Characteristics?”

  “Ship’s signal processor says it’s probably a narrow beam. We are its only likely target. The signal is strong and the bandwidth is at least enough to support flat video. If our snarfling DSP was working right, I’d know—” ‘Frelle sang a little song that was impatient humming among his kind. “—Iiae! It’s encrypted, but at a high layer. This stuff is syntax 45 video. In fact, it claims to be using one third of a cipher the Company made a year back.” For an instant, Svensndot thought ‘Frelle was claiming the message itself was smart; that should be absolutely impossible here at the Bottom. The second officer must have caught his look: “Just sloppy language, Boss. I read this out of the frame format…” Something flashed on his display. “Okay, here’s the story on the cipher: the Company made it and its peers to cover shipping security.” Back before the Alliance, that had been the highest crypto level in the organization. “This is the third that never got delivered. The whole was assumed compromised, but miracle of miracles, we still have a copy.” Both ‘Frelle and ‘Rolle were looking at Svensndot expectantly, their eyes large and dark. Standard policy—standard orders—were that transmissions on compromised keys were to be ignored. If the Company’s signals people had been doing a proper job, the rotted cipher wouldn’t even have been aboard and the policy would have enforced itself.