by Vernor Vinge
There had never been much question about the targets. They were the ones Underhill had originally imagined, the ones that Victory Smith came up with that first afternoon at Lands Command. If somehow they could reach the Deepest Dark, four soldiers and some explosives could do various damage to fuel dumps, to the shallow deepnesses of surface troops, perhaps even to Tiefstadt’s general staff. Even these targets could not justify the research investment that Underhill was demanding.
Yet there was an obvious choke point. Just as the modern military machine endeavored to gain advantage at the beginning of the Dark by fighting longer to outmaneuver a sleeping enemy, so at the beginning of the New Sun, the first armies that were effectively back in the field would win a decisive advantage.
Both sides had built large stockpiles for that time, but with a strategy quite different from that of the Waning Years and the beginning of the Dark. As far as science could determine, the New Sun grew to its immense brightness in a space of days, perhaps of hours. For a few days it was a searing monster, more than a hundred times brighter than during the Middle and Waning Years. It was that explosion of brightness—not the cold of the Dark—that destroyed all but the sturdiest structures of each generation.
This ramp led to a Tiefer outreach depot. There were others along the front, but this was the rear-echelon depot that would support their maneuver force. Without it, the best of the Tiefer troops would be compelled to stay out of combat. Tiefer forward elements at the point of the Crown’s advance would have no backup. Lands Command figured that destroying the depot would force a favorable armistice, or a string of easy victories for the Crown’s armies. Four soldiers and some subtle vandalism might just be enough to do it.
…If they didn’t freeze trying to get down this ramp. There were wisps of airsnow on the steps, and an occasional shred of brush that had grown between the flags, but that was all. Now when they stopped, it was to pass forward pails of sludge from the sled that Nizhnimor and Unnerby were pulling. The darkness closed in tight around them, lit only by an occasional gleam of spilled exotherm. Intelligence reports claimed the ramp extended less than two hundred yards…
Up ahead glowed an oval of light. The end of the tunnel. The Team staggered off the ramp onto a field that had been open once, but that was now shielded from the sky by silvery sunblinds. A forest of tent poles stretched off all around them. In places the fall of airsnow had torn the structure, but most of it was intact. In the dim, slatted patches of light, they could see the forms of steam locomotives, rail layers, machine-gun cars, and armored automobiles. Even in the dimness, there was a glint of silver paint in the airsnow. When the New Sun lit, this gear would be ready. While ice steamed and melted, and flowed torrents down the channels that webbed this field, Tiefer combateers would come out of the nearby deepnesses and run for the safety of their vehicles. The waters would be diverted into holding tanks, and the cooling sprays started. There would be a few hours of frantic checking of inventories and mechanical status, a few hours more to repair the failures of two centuries of Dark and the hours of new heat. And then they would be off on whichever rail path their commanders thought led to victory. This was the culmination of generations of scientific research into the nature of the Dark and the New Sun. Intelligence estimated that in many ways it was more advanced than the Crown’s own quartermaster science.
Hrunkner gathered them together, so they could all hear him. “I’ll bet they’ll have forward guards out here within an hour of First Sunlight, but now it’s just ours for the taking…Okay, we top off our panniers and split up per plan. Gil, are you up to this?”
Gil Haven had weaved his way down the steps like a drunkard with broken feet. It looked to Sherkaner that his suit failure had extended back to his walking feet. But he straightened at Unnerby’s words, and his voice seemed almost normal. “Sergeant, I didn’t come all this way to sit an’ watch you cobbers. I can handle my part.”
And so they had come to the point of it all. They disconnected their audio cables, and each gathered up his appointed explosives and dye-black. They had practiced this often enough. If they double-timed between each action point, if they didn’t fall into a drainage ditch and break some legs, if the maps they had memorized were accurate, there would be time to do it all and still not freeze. They moved off in four directions. The explosives they set beneath the sunblinds were scarcely more than hand grenades. They made silent flashes as they went off—and collapsed strategic sections of the canopy. The dye-black mortars followed, completely unimpressive, but working just as all the Materials Research work had predicted they would. The length and breadth of the outreach depot lay in mottled black, awaiting the kiss of the New Sun.
Three hours later they were almost a mile north of the depot. Unnerby had pushed them hard after they left the depot, pushed them to accomplish a final, ancillary goal: survival.
They had almost made it. Almost. Gil Haven was delirious and strangely frantic when they finished at the depot. He tried to leave the depot on his own. “Gotta find a place to dig.” He said the words again and again, struggling against Nizhnimor and Unnerby as they tied him back into the row of safety lines.
“That’s where we’re going now, Gil. Hang on.” Unnerby released Haven to Amber, and for a moment Hrunkner and Sherk could hear only each other.
“He’s got more spirit than before,” said Sherkaner. Haven was bouncing around like a cobber on wooden legs.
“I don’t think he can feel the pain anymore.” Hrunk’s reply was faint but clear. “That’s not what worries me. I think he’s sliding into Wanderdeep.”
Rapture of the Dark. It was the mad panic that took cobbers when the inner core of their minds realized that they were trapped outside. The animal mind took over, driving the victim to find some place, any place, that might serve as a deepness.
“Damn.” The word was muffled, chopped as Unnerby broke contact and tried to get them all moving. They were only hours from probable safety. And yet…watching Gil Haven struggle woke primeval reflexes in all of them. Instinct was such a marvelous thing—but if they gave in to it now, it would surely lead them to death.
After two hours, they had barely reached the hills beyond the depot. Twice, Gil had broken free, each time more frantic, to run toward the false promise of the steep defiles alongside their path. Each time, Amber had dragged him back, tried to reason with him. But Gil didn’t know where he was anymore, and his thrashing had torn his suit in several places. Parts of him were stiff and frozen.
The end had come when they reached the first of the hard climbs. They had to leave the sled behind; the rest of the way would be with just the air and exotherms they could carry in their panniers. A third time, Gil ripped free of the safety line. He fled with a strange, bounding stagger. Nizhnimor took off after him. Amber was a large woman, and until now she’d had little trouble handling Gil Haven. This time was different. Gil had reached the final desperation of Wanderdeep. As she pulled him back from the edge, he turned on her, stabbing with the points of his hands. Amber staggered back, releasing him. Hrunk and Sherkaner were right behind her, but it was too late. Haven’s arms flailed in all directions and he tumbled off the path into the shadows below.
The three of them stood in stupefied paralysis for a moment; then Amber began to sidle over the edge, her legs feeling down through the airsnow for some purchase on the rocks beneath. Unnerby and Underhill grabbed her, pulled her back.
“No, let me go! Frozen he has a chance. We just have to carry him with us.”
Underhill leaned over the drop-off, took a long look below. Gil had hit naked rocks on his way down. The body lay still. If he wasn’t already dead, desiccation and partial freezing would kill him before they could even get the body back to the path.
Hrunkner must have seen it too. “He’s gone, Amber,” he said gently. Then his sergeant’s voice returned. “And we still have a mission.”
After a moment, Amber’s free hands curled in assent, but Sherk could no
t hear that she said a word. She climbed back to the path and helped to refasten their safety lines and audio.
The three of them continued up the climb, moving faster now.
They had only a few quarts of living exotherms by the time they reached their goal. Before the Dark, these hills had been a lush traumtree forest, part of a Tiefer nobleman’s estate, a game preserve. Behind them was a cleft in the rocks, the entrance to a natural deepness. In any wilderness with big game, there would have to be animal deepnesses. In settled lands, such were normally taken over and expanded for the use of people—or they fell into disuse. Sherkaner couldn’t imagine how Accord Intelligence knew about this one unless some Tiefers on this estate were Accord agents. But this was no prepped safe-hole; it looked as wild and real as anything in Far Brunlargo.
Nizhnimor was the only real hunter on the Team. She and Unnerby cut through three spitsilk barriers and climbed all the way down. Sherkaner hung above them, feeding warmth and light downward. “I see five pools…two adult tarants. Give us a little more light.”
Sherkaner swung lower, putting most of his weight on the spitsilk. The light in his lowest hands shone all the way to the back of the cave. Now he could see two of the pools. They were almost clear of airsnow. The ice was typical of a hibernating pool—clear of all bubbles. Beneath the ice, he had a glimpse of the creature, its frozen eyes gleaming in the light. God, it was big! Even so, it must be a male; it was covered with dozens of baby welts.
“The other pools are all food stash. Fresh kills like you’d expect.” In the first year of the New Sun, such a tarant pair would stay in their deepness, sucking off the fluids of their stash, the babies growing to a size where they could learn to hunt when the fires and storms gentled. Tarants were pure carnivores and not nearly as bright as thracts, but they looked very much like real people. Killing them and stealing their food was necessary, but it seemed more like deepness-murder than hunting.
The work took another hour, and used almost all the remaining exotherms. They climbed back to the surface one last time, to reanchor the spitsilk barrier as best they could. Underhill was numb in several shoulder joints, and he couldn’t feel the tips of his left hands. Their suits had been through a lot the last few hours, been punctured and patched. Some of the wrist joints in Amber’s suit had burned away, victims of too much contact with airsnow and exotherms. They’d been forced to let the limbs freeze. She would likely lose some hands. Nevertheless, all three of them stood a moment more.
Finally Amber said, “This counts as triumph, doesn’t it?”
Unnerby’s voice was strong. “Yes. And you know damn well that Gil would agree.”
They reached together in a somber clasp, almost a perfect replay of Gokna’s Reaching for Accord; there was even a Missing Companion.
Amberdon Nizhnimor retreated through the cleft in the rocks. Green-glowing mist spurted from the spitsilk as she passed through; down below, she would mix the exotherms into pools. The water would be cold slush, but they could burrow in it. If they opened their suits wide, hopefully they could get a uniform freeze. Against this last great peril, there was little more they could do.
“Take a last look, Sherkaner. Your handiwork.” The certainty was gone from Unnerby’s voice. Amber Nizhnimor was a soldier; Unnerby had done his duty by her. Now he seemed to be out of combat mode, and so tired that he barely held his belly clear of the airsnow.
Underhill looked out. They were standing a couple of hundred feet above the level of the Tiefer depot. The aurora had faded; the moving points of light, the sky flashes—all were long gone. In that faded light, the depot was a field of splotchy black amid the starlit gray. But the black wasn’t shadow. It was the powdered dye they had blasted all across the installation.
“Such a small thing,” said Unnerby, “a few hundred pounds of dye-black. You really think it’ll work?”
“Oh yes. The first hours of the New Sun are something out of hell. That powder black will make their gear hotter than any design tolerance. You know what happens in that kind of a flash.” In fact, Sergeant Unnerby had managed those tests himself. A hundred times the light of a middle-Brightness sun shining on dye-black on metal: In minutes, metal contact points were spot-welded, bearings to sleeves, pistons to cylinders, wheels to rails. The enemy troops would have to retreat underground, their most important outreach depot on the front effectively a loss.
“This is the first and last time your trick will ever work, Sherkaner. A few barriers, a few mines, and we would have been stopped dead.”
“Sure. But other things will change, too. This is the last Dark that Spiderkind will ever sleep through. Next time, it won’t be just four cobbers in airsuits. All civilization will stay awake. We’re going to colonize the Dark, Hrunkner.”
Unnerby laughed, obviously disbelieving. He waved Underhill toward the cleft in the rock, and the deepness below. Tired as he was, the sergeant would be the last one down, the setter-of-final-barriers.
Sherkaner had one last glimpse of the gray lands, and the curtains of impossible aurora hanging above. So high, so low, so many things to know.
NINE
Ezr Vinh’s childhood had generally been a protected and safe one. Only one time had his life been in real jeopardy, and that had been a criminally silly accident.
Even by Qeng Ho standards, the Vinh.23 Family was a very extended one. There were branches of the Family that hadn’t touched hands for thousands of years. Vinh.23.4 and Vinh.23.4.1 had been halfway across Human Space for much of that time, making their own fortunes, evolving their own mores. Perhaps it would have been a better thing not to attempt a synch after all that time—except that blessed chance had brought so many of all three branches together at Old Kielle, and all at the same time. So they tarried some years, built temps that most sessile civilizations would call palace-habitats, and tried to figure out what had become of their common background. Vinh.23.4.1 was a consensual demarchy. That didn’t affect their trading relations, but Aunt Filipa had been scandalized. “No one’s going to vote my property rights away,” little Ezr remembered her saying. Vinh.23.4 seemed much closer to the branches Ezr’s parents knew, though their dialect of Nese was almost unintelligible. The 23.4 Family hadn’t bothered to track the broadcast standards faithfully. But the standards—even more than the blacklists—were important things. On a picnic, one checked the children’s suits, and one’s automation double-checked them; but one didn’t expect that “atmosphere-seconds” meant something different for your cousins’ air than for your own. Ezr had climbed around a small rock that orbited the picnic asteroid; he was charmed by the way he could make his own little world move under his hands and feet, rather than the other way around. But when his air ran out, his playmates had already found their own worlds in the rock cloud. The picnic monitor ignored his suit’s cries for help until the child within was nearly flatlined.
Ezr only remembered waking in a new, specially made nursery. He had been treated like a king for uncounted Ksecs afterward.
So Ezr Vinh had always come out of coldsleep in a happy mood. He suffered the usual disorientation, the usual physical discomfort, but childhood memories assured him that wherever he was things would be good.
At first, this time was no different, except perhaps gentler than usual. He was lying in near zero gee, snug in a warm bed. He had the impression of space, a high ceiling. There was a painting on the wall beyond the bed…so meticulously rendered; it might have been a photo. Trixia loathed those pictures. The thought popped up, fixed some context on this waking. Trixia. Triland. The mission to the OnOff star. And this was not the first waking there. There had been some very bad times, the Emergent ambush. How had they won over that? The very last memories before this sleep, what were they? Floating through darkness in a crippled lander. Park’s flagship destroyed. Trixia…
“I think that brought him out of it, Podmaster.” A woman’s voice.
Almost unwillingly, he turned his head toward the voice. Anne Reynolt s
at at his bedside, and next to her was Tomas Nau.
“Ah, Apprentice Vinh. I am pleased to see you back among the living.” Nau’s smile was concerned and solemn.
It took Ezr a couple of tries to gargle up something intelligible: “Wha’s…What’s happening? Where am I?”
“You’re aboard my principal residence. It’s about eight days since your fleet attempted to destroy mine.”
“Guh?” We attacked you?
Nau cocked his head quizzically at Vinh’s incoherence. “I wanted to be here when we woke you. Director Reynolt will fill you in on the details, but I just wanted to assure you of my support. I’m appointing you Fleet Manager of what’s left of the Qeng Ho expedition.” He stood, patted Vinh gently on the shoulder. Vinh’s gaze followed the Emergent out of the room. Fleet Manager?
Reynolt brought Vinh a book of windows with more hard facts than he could easily absorb. They could not all be lies…Fourteen hundred Qeng Ho had died, almost half the fleet’s complement. Four of the seven Qeng Ho starships had been destroyed. The ramscoops on the rest were disabled. Most of the smaller vehicles had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Nau’s people were busy cleaning up the orbital flotsam of the firefights. They quite intended to continue the “joint operation.” The volatiles and ores that had been lifted from Arachna would support habitats the Emergents were building at the L1 point of the sun/planet system.
And she let him see the crew lists. The Pham Nuwen had been lost with all hands. Captain Park and several members of the Trading Committee were dead. Most people on the surviving ships still lived, but the senior ones were being held in coldsleep.
The killing headache of his last few moments on the lander was gone. Ezr had been cured of the “unfortunate contagion,” Reynolt said. But only an engineered disease could have such a convenient and universal time of onset. The Emergent lies were scarcely more than an excuse for civility. They had planned the ambush from the beginning, and down to the last second.