by Vernor Vinge
And finally, humans stood within the OnOff system, and watched the seconds tick down toward a new Relighting.
Tomas Nau gave a little speech, ending with: “It will be an interesting show.” They were using the temp’s largest meeting room to watch the Relight. Just now it was crowded, sagging in the microgravity at the rockpile’s surface. Over in Hammerfest, Emergent specialists were overseeing the operation. There were also skeleton crews aboard the starships. But Ezr knew that most of the Qeng Ho and all of the off-duty Emergents were here. The two sides were almost sociable, almost friendly. It was forty days since the ambush. Rumors were that Emergent security would ease up significantly after the Relight.
Ezr had latched on to a spot near the ceiling. Without huds, the only view was through the room’s wallpaper. Hanging from here, he could see the three most interesting windows—at least when other people weren’t coasting across his line of sight. One was a full-disk view of the OnOff star. Another window looked out from one of the microsats in low orbit around the OnOff star. Even from five hundred kilometers, the star’s surface did not look threatening. The view might have been from an aircraft flying over a glowing cloud deck. If it weren’t for the surface gravity, humans could almost have landed on it. The “clouds” slid slowly past the microsat’s view, glimmers of glowing red showing up between them. It was the sullen red of a brown dwarf, a black-body redness. There was no sign of the cataclysm that was due to arrive in another…six hundred seconds.
Nau and his senior flight technician came up to join Ezr. Brughel was nowhere to be seen. You could always tell when Nau wanted mellow feelings—just check for the absence of Ritser Brughel. The Podmaster grabbed a spot next to Vinh. He was smiling like some Customer politician. “Well, Fleet Manager, are you still nervous about this operation?”
Vinh nodded. “You know my committee’s recommendation. For this Relight, we should have moved the volatiles behind a single rock and taken it further out. We should be in the outer system for this.” The ships of both fleets and all the habitats were moored to one side of the largest diamond rock. They would be shielded from the Relight, but if things started shifting…
Nau’s technician shook his head. “We’ve got too much on the ground here. Besides, we’re running on empty; we’d have to use a lot of our volatiles to go flying around the system.” The tech, Jau Xin, looked almost as young as Ezr. Xin was pleasant enough, but did not have quite the edge of competence that Ezr was used to in senior Qeng Ho. “I’ve been very impressed by your engineers.” Xin nodded at the other windows. “They’re much better than we would be at handling the rockpile. It’s hard to see how they could be this sharp without zip…” His voice trailed off. There were still secrets; that might change sooner than the Emergents expected.
Nau smoothly filled the pause in Xin’s speech. “Your people are good, Ezr. Really, I think that’s why they complained about this plan so much; they aim for perfection.” He looked out the window on the OnOff star. “Think of all the history that comes together here.”
Around and below them, the crowd was clustered into groups of Emergents and Qeng Ho, but discussion was going on in all directions. The window on the far wall looked out onto the exposed surface of the rockpile. Jimmy Diem’s work crew was spreading a silvery canopy over the tops of icy boulders. Nau frowned.
“That’s to cover the water ice and airsnow, sir,” said Vinh. “The tops are in line of sight of OnOff. The curtains should cut down on boil-off.”
“Ah.” Nau nodded.
There were more than a dozen figures out there on the surface. Some were tethered, others maneuvered free. Surface gravity was virtually nonexistent. They sailed the ties over the tops of the icy mountains with the ease of a lifetime of outside operations—and millennia of Qeng Ho experience beyond that. He watched the figures, trying to guess who was who. But they wore thermal jackets over their coveralls, and all Vinh could see were identical forms dancing above the dark landscape. Ezr didn’t know the details of what the conspiracy planned, but Jimmy had set him certain errands and Ezr had his guesses. They might never have an opportunity this good again: They had access to the ejets aboard the Brisgo Gap. They had almost unlimited access to the outside, in places free of Emergent observers. In the seconds following the Relighting, some chaos was to be expected—and with Qeng Ho in charge of the stationkeeping operation, they could fine-tune that chaos to support the conspiracy. But all I can do is stand here with Tomas Nau…and be a good actor.
Ezr smiled at the Podmaster.
Qiwi Lisolet flounced out of the airlock in a rage. “Damn! Damn and fuck damn and—” She swore up and down as she ripped off her thermal jacket and pants. Somewhere in the back of her mind she made a note to spend more time with Gonle Fong. Surely there must be more offensive things she could say when things got this messed up. She threw the thermals into a locker and dived down the axis tunnel without taking off her coveralls and hood.
Lord of Trade, how could they do this to her? She’d been kicked indoors to stand around with her finger up her nose, while the work she should be doing was taken over by Jimmy Diem!
Pham Trinli floated thirty meters above the insulation canopy they were tying across the iceberg. Trinli was official head of stationkeeping operations, though he made sure that any orders he gave were blustery generalities. It was Jimmy Diem who made most things happen. And surprisingly, it was little Qiwi Lisolet who had the best ideas about where to place the electric thrusters and how to run the stationkeeping programs. If they had followed all her recommendations, the Relight might go without a hitch.
And that would not be a good thing at all.
Pham Trinli was a member of the “great conspiracy.” A very minor member, and not to be trusted with any critical part of the plan. All that was fine with Pham Trinli. He tipped around so that now his back was to the moonlike glow of the OnOff star, and the rockpile hung almost over his head. In the deep shadows of the rockpile, there was a further jumble: the lashed-down ships and temps and volatiles refineries, hiding against the light that would soon storm out of the sky. One of the habitats, Hammerfest, was a rooted design; it would have had a certain bizarre grace if not for all the gear around it. The Trader temp just looked like a big balloon tied to the surface. Inside it were all the waking Qeng Ho and a big hunk of the Emergent population.
Beyond the habitats, partly hidden by the shoulder of Diamond One, were the moored ramscoops. A grim sight indeed. Starships should not be tied together like that, and never so close to a jumble of loose rocks. A memory floated up: piles of dead whales rotting in a sexual embrace. This was no way to run a shipyard. But then this was more a junkyard than anything else. The Emergents had paid dearly for their ambush. After Sammy’s flagship was destroyed, Pham had drifted for most of a day in a wrecked taxi—but plugged into all the remaining battle automation. Presumably Podmaster Nau never figured out who was coordinating the battle. If he had, Pham would have ended up dead, or in frozen sleep with the other surviving armsmen on the Far Treasure.
Even ambushed, the Qeng Ho had come close to victory. We would have won if the damn Emergent mindrot hadn’t wiped us all. It was enough to teach a body caution. An expensive victory had been turned into something close to mutual suicide: There were perhaps two starships that were still capable of ramscoop flight; a couple more might be repaired by scavenging the other wrecks. From the looks of the volatiles distillery, it would be a long time before they had enough hydrogen to boost even one vehicle up to ram speed.
Less than five hundred seconds till Relight. Pham drifted slowly upward toward the rocks, until the junkyard was blocked from view by the insulation canopy. Across the surface of the rockpile, his people—Diem and Do and Patil, now that they had sent Qiwi indoors—were supposedly doing final checks on the ejet arrays. Jimmy Diem’s voice came calmly over the work-crew channel, but Pham knew that was a recording. Behind the canopy, Diem and others had disappeared around the far side of the rockpile. All
three were armed now; it was amazing what you could do with an electric jet, especially a Qeng Ho model.
And so Pham Trinli was left behind. No doubt, Jimmy was just as happy to be rid of him. He was trusted, but only for simple parts of the plan, such as maintaining the appearance of a functioning work crew. Trinli moved in and out of view of Hammerfest and the temp, responding to the cues in Jimmy Diem’s soundtrack.
Three hundred seconds to Relight. Trinli drifted under the canopy. From here you could see jagged ice and carefully settled airsnow. The shadowed pile dwindled off beyond the canopy, finally met the bare surface of the diamond mountain.
Diamond. Where Pham Trinli had been a child, diamonds were an ultimate form of wealth. A single gram of gem-grade diamond could finance the murder of a prince. To the average Qeng Ho, diamond was simply another allotrope of carbon, cheaply made in tonne lots. But even the Qeng Ho had been a little intimidated by these boulders. Asteroids like this didn’t exist outside of theory. And although these rocks weren’t single gems, there was a vast, crystalline order to them. The cores of gas giants, planets blown away in some long-ago detonation? They were just another mystery of the OnOff system.
Since work began on the rockpile, Trinli had studied the terrain, but not for the same reasons as Qiwi Lisolet, or even Jimmy Diem. There was a cleft where the ice and airsnow filled the space between Diamond One and Diamond Two. That was significant to Qiwi and Jimmy, but only in connection with rockpile maintenance. For Pham Trinli…with a little digging, that cleft was a path from their main work site to Hammerfest, a path that was out of sight of ships and habitats. He hadn’t mentioned it to Diem; the conspirators’ plan was for Hammerfest to be taken after they grabbed the Far Treasure.
Trinli crawled along the V-shaped cleft, closer and closer to the Emergent habitat. It would have surprised Diem and the others to know it, but Pham Trinli was not a born spacer. And sometimes when he climbed around like this, he got the vertigo that afflicted Chump groundlings. If he let his imagination go…he wasn’t crawling hand-by-hand along a narrow ditch, but instead he was rock-climbing up a mountain chimney, a chimney that bent farther and farther back on him, till he must surely fall.
Trinli paused a second, holding his place with one hand while his whole body quivered with the need for crampons and ropes, and pitons driven solid into the walls around him. Lord. It had been a long time since his groundsider orientation had come back this strongly. He moved forward. Forward. Not up.
By his count of arm paces, he was just outside Hammerfest now, near its communications array. Odds were very high some camera could image him if he popped out. Of course, the odds were fairly good that no one and no program would be monitoring such a view in time to change things. Nevertheless, Trinli stayed hunkered down. If necessary, he would move closer, but for now he just wanted to snoop. He lay back in the cleft, his feet against the ice and his back against the diamond wall. He reeled out his little antenna probe. The Emergents had played smiling tyrant since the ambush. The one thing they made ugly threats about was possession of non-approved I/O devices. Pham knew that Diem and the core of the conspiracy had Qeng Ho huds, and had used black crypto across the local net. Most of the planning had been done right under the Emergents’ noses. Some communication avoided automation altogether; many of these youngsters knew a variation on the old dots-and-dashes game, blinkertalk.
As a peripheral member of the conspiracy, Pham Trinli knew its secrets only because he was filthy with forbidden electronics. This little antenna reel would have been a sign of sneaky intent even in peaceful times.
The thread he spun out was transparent to almost anything that might shine on it here. At the tip, a tiny sensor sniffed at the electromagnetic spectrum. His main goal was a comm array on the Emergent habitat that had a line of sight on the Qeng Ho temp. Trinli moved his arms like a fisherman repositioning his cast. The slender thread had a stiffness that was very effective in a micrograv environment. There. The sensor hung in the beam between Hammerfest and the temp. Pham eased a directional element over the edge of the cleft, aimed it at an unused port on the Qeng Ho temp. From there he was hooked directly into the fleet’s local net, and around all the Emergent security. This was exactly what Nau and the others were so afraid of and the reason for their death-penalty threats. Jimmy Diem wisely had not taken chances like this. Pham Trinli had some advantages. He knew the old, old tricks that were hidden in Qeng Ho gear…Even so, he would not have risked it if Jimmy and his conspirators hadn’t bet so much on their takeover scheme.
Maybe he should have talked to Jimmy Diem straight out. There were too many critical things they didn’t know about the Emergents. What made some of their automation so good? In the firefights at the ambush, they’d been clearly inferior in high-level tactics, but their target queuing had been better than any system Pham Trinli had ever fought.
Trinli had the ugly feeling that comes when you’ve been maneuvered into a corner. The conspirators figured that this might be both their best and last chance to knock over the Emergents. Maybe. But the whole thing was just too pat, too perfect.
So make the best of it.
Pham looked at the display windows inside his hood. He was intercepting Emergent telemetry and some of the video they were transmitting to the temp. Some of that he could decrypt. The Emergent bastards just trusted their line-of-sight link a little bit too much. It was time to do some real snooping.
“Fifty seconds to Relight.” The voice had been counting off in a flat monotone for the last two hundred seconds. In the auditorium, almost everyone was watching the windows in silence.
“Forty seconds to Relight.”
Ezr took a quick look around the room. The flight tech, Xin, was looking from display to display. He was visibly nervous. Tomas Nau was watching the view that came from low above OnOff’s surface. His intentness seemed to hold more curiosity than fear or suspicion.
Qiwi Lisolet glared at the window that showed the insulation canopy and Jimmy Diem’s work crew. Her look had been dark and scowly ever since she flew into the auditorium. Ezr could guess what had happened…and he was relieved. Jimmy had used an innocent fourteen-year-old as camouflage for the plot. But Jimmy had never been an absolute hardass. He had taken a chance to get the girl out of harm’s way. But I bet Qiwi won’t forgive him, even when she knows the truth.
“Wave front to arrive in ten seconds.”
Still no change in the view from the microsat. Only a mild red glow peeked between the sliding clouds. Either “old faithful” had played a cosmic joke on them, or this was an absolute knife-edge of an effect.
“Relight.”
In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk. The low-altitude view had vanished sometime during that spread. The light got brighter and brighter and brighter. A soft, awed sigh spread around the room. The light cast shadows on the opposite wall before the wallpaper damped its output.
“Five seconds after Relight.” The voice must be automatic. “We’re up to seven kilowatts per square meter.” This was a different tech, speaking in a flat Trilander accent. Not an Emergent? The question flickered past Ezr’s attention, swamped for the moment by the rest of the action.
“Ten seconds after Relight.” At the side of the room was a smaller window, a view of the Spider world. It had been dark and dim as ever, but now the light was coming back from it and the planetary disk glowed with its own brightness as ice and air woke to a sun that was already five times as bright as Sol standard. And still brightening:
“Twenty kilowatts per square meter.” A strip graph was playing out below the image of the new sun, comparing its output with the historical record. This Relight looked as powerful as any before.
“Neutron flux is still below detectable limits.”
Nau and Vinh exchanged relieved looks, for once sincere on both sides. That was the sort of danger that couldn’t be detected from inter
stellar distances, and one of the olden-times fly-throughs had failed at about this point. At least they wouldn’t fry in radiation that no one had seen from afar.
“Thirty seconds after Relight.”
“Fifty kilowatts per square meter.”
Outside, the mountainside that shielded them from the sun was beginning to glow.
Pham Trinli had the public audio channel playing. Even without it, Relight would have been obvious. But for the moment he held those events in a small part of his mind and concentrated on what was going over the private links out of Hammerfest. It was at moments like this, when technicians were overwhelmed by externalities, that security was most likely to slip. If Diem was on schedule, he and his crew were now at the mooring point of the Far Treasure.
Trinli’s eyes flickered across the half-dozen displays that now filled most of his hood’s view space. His fleet net programs were doing a good job with the telemetry. Ha. You can’t beat old trapdoors. Now that they needed lots of computing power, the Emergents were using more and more Qeng Ho automation, and Trinli’s snooping was correspondingly more effective.
The signal strength faded. Alignment drift? Trinli cleared several display windows and looked at the world around him. The OnOff star was hidden behind the mountains, but its light glared off the hills that stuck up into its view. Where ice or airsnow was exposed, vapor steamed out. For the moment, Jimmy’s silver canopy was holding, but the fabric slowly swayed and flapped. There was an almost bluish color to the sky now, the mists of thousands of tonnes of water and air boiling up, turning the rockpile into a comet.
And screwing up his line of sight on Hammerfest. Trinli wiggled his antenna. Losing the link couldn’t have been the mists alone. Something had shifted. There. He was picking up Hammerfest’s traffic again. After a second his crypto resynchronized and he was back in business. But now he kept an eye on the storm around him. The new sun was even more of a show than they had expected.