by Vernor Vinge
“A little browner than last tenday. I don’t see any soldiers out there.” Relayed sound of a cannon firing. “Yipes. We’re shooting though… It hit just on this side of the crest. There’s someone out there, just below my line of sight.” Woodcarver, come at last. Jefri shivered, angry that he couldn’t see, frightened of what might be seen. He often had nightmares about what Woodcarver must truly be, how she had done it to Mom and Dad and Johanna. Images never fully formed … yet almost memories. Mister Steel will get Woodcarver.
“Oh, oh. Old Tyrathect is coming across the castle yard this way.” Thumping sounds came from the hole as Amdi blundered back down. No point in letting Tyrathect know that there was a tunnel hidden in the wall. He’d probably just order them to stay away from it. One, two, three, four—half of Amdi popped out of the wall. The four wandered around a little dazedly. Jefri couldn’t tell if it was because of their stretched-out experience or if they were temporarily split from the other half of the pack. “Act natural. Act natural.”
Then the other four arrived, and Amdi began to settle down. He led Jefri away from the wall at a fast trot. “Let’s get the commset. We’ll pretend we’ve been trying to raise Ravna with it.” Amdi knew well that the starship couldn’t be back for another thirty minutes or so. In fact, he had been the one who verified the math for Mister Steel. Nevertheless, he chased up the ship’s steps and dragged down the radio. The two were already plugging the antenna into a signal booster when the public doors on the west side of the dome were unlatched. Silhouetted against the daylight were parts of a guard pack, and a single member of Tyrathect. The guard retired, sliding the doors shut, and the Cloak walked slowly across the moss towards them.
Amdi rushed over and chattered about their attempts to use the radio. It was a little forced, Jefri thought. The puppies were still confused by their trip through the walls.
The singleton looked at the powdering of mortar dust on Amdi’s pelt. “You’ve been climbing in the walls, haven’t you?”
“What?” Amdi looked himself over, noticed the dust. Usually he was more clever. “Yes,” he said shamefacedly. He brushed the powder away. “You won’t tell, will you?”
Fat chance he’ll help us, thought Jefri. Mr. Tyrathect had learned Samnorsk even better than Mr. Steel, and besides Steel was the only one who had much time to talk with them. But even before the radio cloaks, he’d been a short-tempered, bossy sort. Jefri had had baby-sitters like him. Tyrathect was nice up to a point, and then would get sarcastic or say something mean. Lately that had improved, but Jefri still didn’t like him much.
But Mr. Tyrathect didn’t say anything right away. He sat down slowly, as if his rump hurt. “…No, I won’t tell.”
Jefri exchanged a surprised glance with one of Amdi. “What is the tunnel for?” he asked timidly.
“All castles have hidden tunnels, especially in my … in the domain of Mr. Steel. You want ways to escape, ways to spy on your enemies.” The singleton shook its head. “Never mind. Is your radio properly receiving, Amdijefri?”
Amdi cocked a head at the comm’s display. “I think so, but there’s nothing yet to receive. See, Ravna’s ship had to decelerate and um, I could show you the arithmetic…?” But Mr. Tyrathect was obviously not interested in playing with chalk boards. “…well, depending on their luck with the ultradrive, we should have radio with them real soon.”
But the little window on the comm showed no incoming signal. They watched it for several minutes. Mr. Tyrathect lowered his muzzle and seemed to sleep. Every few seconds his body twitched as with a dream. Jefri wondered what the rest of him was doing.
Then the comm window was glowing green. There was a garble of sound as it tried to sort signal from background noise. “…over you in five minutes,” came Ravna’s voice. “Jefri? Are you listening?”
“Yes! We’re here.”
“Let me talk to Mr. Steel, please.”
Mr. Tyrathect stepped nearer to the comm. “He is not here now, Ravna.”
“Who is this?”
Tyrathect’s laugh was a giggle; he had never heard any other kind. “I?” He made the Tinish chord that sounded like “Tyrathect” to Jefri. “Or do you mean a taken name, like Steel? I don’t know the exact word. You may call me … Mr. Skinner.” Tyrathect laughed again. “For now, I can speak for Steel.”
“Jefri, are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. Listen to Mr. Skinner.” What a strange name.
The sounds from the comm became muffled. There was a male voice, arguing. Then Ravna was back, her voice kind of tight, like Mom when she was mad. “Jefri … what’s the volume of a ball ten centimeters across?”
Amdi had been fidgeting impatiently through the conversation. All through the last year he had been hearing stories of humans from Jefri, and dreaming what Ravna might really be like. Now he had a chance to show off. He jumped for the comm, and grinned at Jefri. “That’s easy, Ravna.” His voice was perfect Jefri—and completely fluent. “It’s 523.598 cubic centimeters … or do you want more digits?”
Muffled conversation. “…No, that’s fine. Okay, Mr. Skinner. We have pictures from our earlier pass and a general radio fix. Where exactly are you?”
“Under the castle dome at top of Starship Hill. It’s right at the coast by a—”
A man’s voice cut in. Pham? He had a funny accent. “I got it on the map. We still can’t see you direct. Too much haze.”
“That’s smoke,” said the Cloak. “The enemy is almost upon us from the south. We need your help immediately—” The singleton lowered its head from the commset. Its eyes closed and opened a couple of times. Thinking? “Hmm, yes. Without your help, we and Jefri and this ship are lost. Please land within the castle courtyard. You know we’ve specially reinforced it for your arrival. Once down we can use your weapons to—”
“No way,” the guy replied immediately. “Just separate the friendlies from the bad guys and let us take care of things.”
Tyrathect’s voice took on a wheedling tone, like a little kid complaining. He really has been studying us.“No, no, didn’t mean to be impolite. Certainly, do it your own way. About the enemy force: everyone close to the castle on the south side of the hill are enemy. A single pass with your ship’s … um, torch … would send them running.”
“I can’t fly that torch inside an atmosphere. Did your Pop really land with the main jet, Jefri? No agrav?”
“Yes, sir. All we had was the jet.”
“He was a lucky genius.”
Ravna: “Maybe we could just float across, a few thousand meters up. That might scare them away.”
Tyrathect began, “Yes, that might—”
The public doors on the north side of the dome slid open. Mr. Steel stood silhouetted against the daylight beyond. “Let me talk to them,” he said.
The goal of all their voyaging lay just twenty kilometers below OOB. They were so close, yet those twenty thousand meters might be as hard to bridge as the twenty thousand light-years they had come so far.
They floated on agrav directly over “Starship Hill”. OOB‘s multispectral wasn’t working very well, but where smoke did not obscure, the ship’s optics could count the needles on the trees below. Ravna could see the forces of “Woodcarver” ranged across the slopes south of the castle. There were other troops, and apparently cannon, hidden in the forests that lined the fjord south of that. Given a little more time they would be able to locate them too. Time was the one thing they did not have.
Time and trust.
“Forty-eight hours, Pham. Then the fleet will be here, all around us.” Maybe, maybe godshatter could work a miracle; they’d never know stewing about it up here. Try: “You’ve got to trust somebody, Pham.”
Pham glared back at her, and for an instant she feared he might go completely to pieces. “You’d land in the middle of that castle? Medieval villains are just as smart as any you’ve seen in the Beyond, Rav. They could teach the Butterflies a thing or two. An arrow in the head will k
ill you as sure as an antimatter bomb.”
More fake memories? But Pham was right on this: She thought about the just-concluded conversation. The second pack—Steel—had been a bit too insistent. He had been good to Jefri, but he was clearly desperate. And she believed him when he said that a high fly-by wouldn’t scare the Woodcarvers off. They needed to come down near the ground with firepower. Just now, about all the firepower they had was Pham’s beam gun. “Okay, then! Do what you and Steel talked about. Fly the lander past Woodcarver’s lines, laser blast them.”
“God damn it, you know I can’t fly that. The landing boat is like nothing either of us know, and without the automation I—”
Softly: “Without the automation, you need Blueshell, Pham.” There was horror on Pham’s face. She reached out to him. He was silent for a long moment, not seeming to notice.
“Yeah.” His voice was low, strangled. Then: “Blueshell! Get up here.”
OOB‘s lander had more than enough room for the Skroderider and Pham Nuwen. The craft had been built specifically for Rider use. With higher automation working, it would have been easy for Pham—for even a child—to fly. Now, the craft could not provide stable flight, and the “manual” controls were something that gave even Bluseshell a hard time. Damn automation. Damn optimization. For most of his adult life Pham had lived in the Slowness. All those decades, he had managed spacecraft and weapons that could have reduced the feudal empire below to slag. Yet now, with equipment that should have been enormously more powerful, he couldn’t even fly a damn landing boat.
Across the crew compartment, Blueshell was at the pilot’s position. His fronds stretched across a web of supports and controls. He had turned off all display automation; only the main window was alive, a natural view from the boat’s bow camera. OOB floated some hundred meters ahead, drifting up and out of view as their craft slid backwards and down.
Blueshell’s fidgety nervousness—furtiveness, it seemed to Pham—had disappeared as he got into piloting the craft. His voder voice became terse and preoccupied, and the edges of his fronds writhed across the controls, an exercise that would have been impossible to Pham even if he had a lifetime of experience with the gear. “Thank you, Sir Pham… I’ll prove you can trust…” The nose lurched downwards and they were staring almost straight into the fjord-carven coastline twenty kilometers below. They fell free for half a minute while the rider’s fronds writhed on their supports. Hot piloting? No: “Sorry, sorry.” Acceleration, and Pham sank into his restraints under a grav load that wobbled between a tenth gee and an intolerable crush. The landscape rotated and they had a brief glimpse of OOB, now like a tiny moth above them.
“Is it necessary to kill, Sir Pham? Perhaps simply our appearance over the battle…”
Nuwen gritted his teeth. “Just get us down.” The Steel creature had been adamant that they fry the entire hillside. Despite all Pham’s suspicions, the pack might be right on that. They were up against a crew of murderers that had not hesitated to ambush a starship; the Woodcarvers needed a real demonstration.
Their boat fluttered down the kilometers. Steel’s fortifications were clearly visible even in the natural view: the rough polygon that guarded the refugee ship, the much larger structure that rambled across an island several kilometers westward. I wonder if this is how my Father’s castle looked to the Qeng Ho landers? Those walls were high and unsloping. Clearly the Tines had had no idea of gunpowder till Ravna had clued them to it.
The valley south of the castle was a blot of dark smoke smoothly streaming toward the sea. Even without data enhancement, he could see hot spots, fringes of orange edging the black.
“You’re at two thousand meters,” came Ravna’s voice. “Jefri says he can see you.”
“Patch me through to them.”
“I will try, Sir Pham.” Blueshell fiddled, his lack of attention spinning the boat through a complete loop. Pham had seen falling leaves with more control.
A child’s piping voice: “A-are you okay? Don’t crash!”
And then the Steel pack’s hybrid of Ravna and the kid: “South to go! South to go! Use fire gun. Burn them quick.”
Blueshell was entirely too cooperative to this direction. He had them down in the smoke already. For seconds they were flying blind. A break in the smoke showed the hillside less than two hundred meters off, coming up fast. Before Pham could curse at Blueshell, the Rider had turned them around and floated the boat into clearer air. Then he pitched over so they might see directly down.
After thirty weeks of talk and planning, Pham had his first glimpse of the Tines. Even from here, it was obvious they were different from any sophonts Pham had encountered: Clusters of four or five or six members hung together so close they seemed a single spiderlike being. And each pack stood separated from the others by ten or fifteen meters.
A cannon flashed in the murk. The pack crewing it moved like a single, coordinated hand to rock the barrel back and ram another charge down the muzzle.
“But if these are the enemy, Sir Pham, where did they get the guns?”
“They stole’em.”But muzzle loaders? He didn’t have time to pursue the thought.
“You’re right over them, Pham! I can see you in and out of the smoke. You’re drifting south at fifteen meters per second, losing altitude.” It was the kid, speaking with his usual incredible precision.
“Kill them! Kill them!”
Pham wriggled out of his restraints and crawled back to the hatch where they had mounted his beam gun. It was about the only thing salvaged from the workshop fire, but by God this was something he could operate.
“Keep us steady, Blueshell. Bounce me around and I’ll fry you as likely as anything!” He pushed open the hatch, and gagged on spicy smoke. Then Blueshell’s agravs wafted them into a clear space and Pham lined the beamer down the ranks of packfolk.
Originally Woodcarver had demanded Johanna stay at the base camp. Johanna’s response had been explosive. Even now the girl was a little surprised at herself. Not since the first days on Tines world had she come so close to attacking a pack. No way was anyone going to keep her from finding out about Jefri. In the end they had compromised: Johanna would accept Pilgrim as her guard. She could follow the army into the field, as long as she obeyed his direction.
Johanna looked up through the drifting smoke. Damn. Pilgrim was always such a carefree joker. By his own telling, he had gotten himself killed over and over again through the years. And now he wouldn’t even let her up to Scrupilo’s cannons. The two of them paced across a terrace in the hillside. The brush fire had swept through here hours before, and the spicy smell of moss ash was thick around them. And with that smell came the bright memory of horror, of a year ago, right here…
Trusted guard packs paced their course twenty meters on either side. This area was supposedly safe from infiltration, and there had been no artillery fire from the Flenserists for hours. But Peregrine absolutely refused to let her get any closer.
It’s nothing like last year. Then all had been sunny blue skies and clean air—and her parents’ murder. Now she and Pilgrim had returned, and the blue sky was yellow-gray and the sweeps of mossy hillside were black. And now the packs around her were fighting with her. And now there was a chance…
“Lemme closer, damn it! Woodcarver will have the Oliphaunt no matter what happens to me.”
Peregrine shook himself, a Tinish negative. One of his puppies reached out from a jacket pouch to catch at her sleeve. “A little longer,” Pilgrim said for the tenth time. “Wait for Woodcarver’s messenger. Then we can—”
“I want to be up there! I’m the only one who knows the ship!”Jefri, Jefri. If only Vendacious was right about you…
She was twisting about to slap at Scarbutt when it happened: A glare of heat on her back, and the smoke flashed bright. Again. Again. And then the impact of rapid thunder.
Pilgrim shuddered against her. “That’s not gunfire!” he shouted. “Two of me are almost blinded. C’mon.”
He surrounded her, almost knocking her off her feet as he pushed/dragged her down the hill.
For a second Johanna went along, more dazed than cooperative. Somehow they had lost their escort.
From up the hill the shouts of battle had stopped. The sharp thunder had silenced all. Where the smoke thinned she could see one of Scrupilo’s cannons, the barrel extending from a puddle of melted steel. The cannoneer had been blown to bits. Not gunfire. Johanna spasmed out of Pilgrim’s grip. Not gunfire.
“Spacers! Pilgrim, that must be a drive torch.”
Peregrine grabbed her, continuing down the hill. “Not a drive torch! That I’ve heard. This is quieter—and somebody’s aiming it.”
There had been a long stutter of separate blasts. How many of Woodcarver’s people had just died? “They must think we’re attacking the ship, Pilgrim. If we don’t do something, they’ll wipe out everyone.”
His jaws eased their grip on her sleeves and pants. “What can we do? Hanging around here will just get us killed.”
Johanna stared into the sky. No sign of fliers, but there was so much smoke. The sun was a dull bloody ball. If only the rescuers knew they were killing her friends. If only they could see. She dug her feet into the ground. “Let go of me, Pilgrim! I’m going uphill, out of the smoke.”
He’d stopped moving but his grip was fiercely tight. Four adult faces and two puppy ones looked up at her, and indecision was in every look. “Please, Pilgrim. It’s the only way.” Packs were straggling down, some bleeding, some in fragments.
His frightened eyes stared at her an instant longer. Then he let go and touched her hand with a nose. “I guess this hill will always be the death of me. First Scriber, now you—you’re all crazy.” The old Pilgrim smile flickered across his members. “Okay. Let’s try it!” The two without puppies went up the hillside, scouting for the safest route.
Johanna and the rest of him followed. They were moving across a sloping terrace. The summer drought had drained the chill swamp water she remembered from the landing, and the blackened moss was firm under her. The going should have been easy, but Peregrine wound through the deepest hummocks, hunkering down every few seconds to look in all directions. They reached the end of the terrace and began climbing. There were places so steep she had to grab the epaulet stirrups on two of Peregrine and let him hoist her up. They passed the nearest cannon, what was left of it. Johanna had never seen weapons fired except in stories, but the splash of metal and the carbonized flesh could only mean some kind of beam weapon. Running across the hill were similar craters, destruction punched into the already burned land.