by Vernor Vinge
Pham’s fleet made a low-altitude pass by Namqem world. The maneuver kept them out of Tarelsk’s direct fire for a few thousand seconds. In itself, it was a kind of first. Civilized systems didn’t like large fusion rockets—much less starship drives—operating in the middle of urban areas. Heavy fines, even ostracism or confiscation were the price of such violations. For once, it was nice to give the finger to all of that. Pham’s thirty were decelerating at torch max, more than one gee, and had been for Ksecs. They swept over Namqem’s middle north latitudes at less than two hundred kilometers—and moving at almost two hundred kilometers per second. There was a glimpse of forests, of manicured deserts, of the temporary cities that housed the refugees from Alqin. And then they were heading out, their trajectory scarcely bent by the planetary mass. It was like something out of a children’s graphic, a planet literally whipping past their viewpoint.
Just kilometers ahead of them, space was alive with hellish light, and only some of it was defensive fire. This was the real reason why high-speed flight in an urban area was insane. The space near Namqem world had once been an orderly scene of optimized usage. There had even been talk of setting up orbital towers. That optimization had been successfully resisted by the governance, but even so, low space was saturated with thousands of vehicles and satellites. In the best of times, microcollisions had created so much junk that garbage collection was the largest industry in near-Namqem space.
That orderly commerce had ended many Msecs earlier. The Qeng Ho armada had not precipitated this chaos, but they were rushing through it with bomb flares and ramfields that stretched out and sideways for hundreds of kilometers. Pham’s ramfields swept across millions of tonnes of junk and freighters and governance military vehicles…Their coming had been announced; perhaps there were no innocent casualties. What was left behind was as tumbled and charred as any battlefield.
Tarelsk lay directly ahead. The million lights of its great days had been put out, either by governance fiat or by Pham’s pulse bombs. But the satellite was not dead. Casualties were as light as humanly possible. And in less than fifty seconds Pham’s ships would cut their torches. What followed would be the riskiest time of the adventure for them personally. Without the torches, they could not run their ramfields…and without the ramfields even accidental pieces of high-speed junk could cause damage.
“Forty seconds to flameout.” Their torches were already tuning down, so as not to destroy Tarelsk’s surface.
Pham scanned the reports from the other fleets: the landers down on Namqem world, the two thousand starships moving to save the starving at Maresk. Maresk floated like a deep-sea leviathan in the middle of a feeding frenzy. Many of the two thousand had been able to dock. The rest hung off-surface. The last of the freighters from the outer system was visible beyond Maresk’s limb. That huge, slow blimp had been launched Msecs earlier, when the outermost farms were still under effective automation. The freighter was as big as a starship, but with none of a ramscoop’s structural overhead. There were ten million tonnes of grain aboard it, enough to sustain Maresk a little while longer.
“Twenty seconds to flameout.”
Pham watched the view of Maresk for a couple of seconds more. Clouds of lesser craft swarmed around the Qeng Ho visitors there, but they were not fighting. The people there had not lost out to crazies as at Tarelsk.
Silver glyphs tripped across the top of Pham’s view, chilling fragments of ice. The message was from Sura’s agents on Maresk: Sabotage detected in harbored vehicles. Flee! Flee! Flee! And the view of Maresk vanished from Pham’s huds. For a moment he was looking out across the Far Regard’s bridge at an unembellished view back toward Namqem world. Daylight spread serenely across two-thirds of its face. In this true view, Maresk was hidden behind the planet.
And then the fringe of Namqem’s atmosphere flared with the light of a sun, a new sun that had been born somewhere beyond it. Two seconds later, there was another flash, and then another.
A moment before, the Far Regard’s bridge crew had been totally intent on the flameout countdown and preparing for the dangers that would follow the loss of their ramfield protection. Now there was a surge of activity as they turned startled attention upon the lights that flashed across the limb of Namqem world. “Multigigatonne detonations around Maresk.” The analyst was trying to keep his voice level. “Our fleets near the surface—Lord—they’re gone!” Gone along with the billion-plus population of the megalopolis.
Sammy Park sat frozen, staring. Pham realized he might have to take over the bridge. But then Sammy leaned forward against his harness, and his voice was loud and sharp. “Tran, Lang, back to your stations. Look to our fleet!”
Another voice: “Flameout…now.”
Pham felt the familiar, falling lightness as Far Regard’s main torch quenched to zero. His huds showed that all thirty of his fleet had flamed out within a hundred milliseconds of the planned instant. Less than four kilometers ahead floated Tarelsk, so near that it did not seem a moon or a planet so much as a landscape that stretched out and out around them. Before the coming of Humankind, Tarelsk had been just another dead and cratered moon, scarcely larger than the original Luna. But like Luna, the economics of transport had brought it greatness. By the light of Namqem world, Tarelsk was a landscape of pastels and soaring artificial mountains. And unlike old Luna, this world had never known human-made catastrophe…until now.
“Closing velocity fifty-five meters per second. Range thirty-five hundred meters.” By intent, they had finished their decel so close that the other side could not attack them without wounding themselves. But this mad governance just killed a billion people. “Sammy! Get us down! Land anywhere, hard.”
“Uh—” Sammy’s gaze caught his, and now he understood, too. But it was too late.
All systems died, a vanishing that left his huds clear and silent. For the first time in his life, Pham Nuwen felt a physical jolt on a starship. A million tonnes of hull and shielding absorbed and smoothed out the event, but something had smashed against them. Pham looked around the bridge. A crowd of voices came through the air, reports from all over but without filtering or analysis.
“Contact nuke, by God!”
One by one, a scattering of displays came online, the backup wallpaper. The view slid smoothly across the Tarelsk landscape and into the sky. The Far Regard was turning at several degrees per second. Some of the junior analysts were climbing out of their restraints.
Sammy shouted across the bridge. “Pick up drill! Contact secondaries!”
On the single functioning window-wall, the Tarelsk landscape came back into view, ramps and towers and clear domes over farmland. Tarelsk was so large that it could almost survive without the outer-system agriculture. And they were headed down into that at—fifteen meters per second? Without functioning huds he couldn’t see a closing velocity.
“How fast, Sammy?”
His Flag Captain shook his head. “Don’t know. That nuke hit us from the Tarelsk side, and almost on center. We can’t be going more than twenty meters per second now.” But in the spinning wreck that the Far Regard had become, there was no way they could slow down any more.
Sammy’s crew were busy to distraction, trying to contact the rest of the ship, resuming contact with the other ships of the thirty. Pham sat listening, watching. All the thirty had been nuked. The Far Regard was not the most or the least damaged. As the reports trickled in, their view turned and turned…and the landscape grew. Pham could see blast damage. The crazies had trashed some of their own farms in this attack. Almost dead ahead…Lord…it was the old office towers that he and Sura had bought in the first century.
Ship collisions came in enormous variety, from millimeter-per-second bruisings, chiefly of interest to harbor police…to vast, bright flashes that wreck planetoids and vaporize spacecraft. The Far Regard’s encounter with Tarelsk was something in between the extremes. A million tonnes of starship drove downward through pressure domes and multilevel residences
, but not much faster than a human might run in a one-gee field.
A million tonnes does not stop easily. The collision went on and on and on, a screaming, twisting fury. The city levels crushed more easily than hull metal and drive core, but the ship and the city around it mingled into a single ruin.
It couldn’t have lasted more than twenty seconds, but when it was over, Pham and the others hung on their harnesses in the two-tenths gravity of Tarelsk’s surface. Light flickered from the buckled walls, and the displays were mostly nonsense. Pham unlatched from his harness and slid down to walk on the ceiling. Dust swirled near the ventilator grids, but his full-press coveralls were tightening. The bridge itself was sucking vacuum. On the command channel, he could hear Sammy working down through damage assessment. There had been five hundred living people aboard the Far Regard…until just moments before.
“We lost all forward stowage, Fleet Captain. It’ll take Ksecs to get the bodies out. We—”
Pham climbed a wall to the hatch, and slid it open just a crack. There was a brief gale of equalizing wind. “Our landing crews, Sammy. Are they okay?”
“Yes, sir. But—”
“Get ’em together. You can leave the others as a rescue party, but we’re going out.” And kick some ass.
The next few Ksecs were confused. There was so much happening, and happening all at once. For all the years of planning, no one had really believed that the operation might end up as ground combat. And even the Qeng Ho armsmen were not real fighters. Pham Nuwen had seen more blood and death in medieval Canberra than most of them had seen in their whole lives.
But what they were fighting was not a real military either. The mad governance of Tarelsk had not even warned the surface boroughs of the impending collisions. Acting on their own, most people had pulled back from the highest levels, but still, millions had died in the long, slow crushing. Pham’s teams worked their way downward, to the second-level supertrams. He had comm with the other landings now. The people of Tarelsk were only a few years removed from the highest technology and best education in all Human Space. They understood the disaster; for the most part, they understood what their mad governance did not. But they were helpless before the systems that this last set of rulers used against them.
In his headset, Pham could hear another ship’s landing party, thirty kilometers away. They had run into ubiquitous law enforcement. “Everything is working here, sir—against us. I lost fifteen of my people at the tram station.”
“No help for it, Dav. You have pulse bombs. Use ’em, and then flood the utility cores with our automation.”
Sammy’s party was slipping farther and farther away from Pham’s. They had climbed through the same rents in hull metal, but at every turning, Sammy was going the other way. At first it didn’t matter. Comm through the walls was still easy, and the separation made them a more dispersed target…but hell, Sammy was already two klicks down-east from him. Pham’s party was surrounded by locals now, and some claimed to be utility system managers, people who could show them where to try for overrides. “Wait up, Sammy!”
The field link could support only low-rate video, so Pham couldn’t see what Sammy’s team was up to. But they were moving still farther away. After a moment: “Pham! We’ve broken through the rubble into…a university campus. There’s a blowout, and—” A still-pic from Sammy’s group popped up in Pham’s huds. There was a parklike lawn, at least several dozen locals running toward the camera—none of them wearing pressure suits. But up near the ceiling, dust and loose papers swirled. The audio feed was full of the high-pitched whistle of a substantial leak.
A second still-pic was mostly formed, this showing Sammy’s men at work with industrial patching equipment. The large crowd was coming out of nowhere, some of them children—the place must be one of those inverse towers. Sammy’s voice was back on the comm. “These are my people, Pham!”
Pham remembered that the Tarelsk side of Sammy Park’s family had been academics. Damn. “Don’t get sidetracked, Sammy. This place has more floorspace than all the cities on an average planet. The chances are zero we came down next to—”
“Not zero…” His voice broke in and out of audibility. “…didn’t tell you, seemed like a small thing. I made sure Far Regard would end up near the Polytech.”
Double damn.
“Look, we can save them, Pham! But more—they’ve been waiting for us…Some of Sura’s people are here. Between them, they’ve got the core utility plans…and some of the new regime’s software changes. Pham, they think they know where the screwballs are holed up!”
Maybe it was a good thing that Sammy had had his own agenda; as ground combateers, the Qeng Ho pretty much stank. But with the core utility plans, they had a good fix on the governance and its control net.
Ten Ksec later, Pham had a comm link with the madmen who called themselves governance: a half-dozen red-eyed, panicky people. Their leader wore a uniform that might once have been from park maintenance. They were an endpoint of civilization.
“There’s nothing you can do but make things worse,” Pham told them.
“Nonsense. We have Tarelsk. We’ve wiped you and the gluttons at Maresk. We have more than enough resources to make Tarelsk self-sufficient. With you gone, we will bring a new order.” And then the video wavered and faded; Pham never knew if the break was deliberate or just the fractured comm system.
It didn’t matter. The conversation had lasted long enough to identify the intermediate nodes. And Pham Nuwen’s forces had hardware and software that was outside the heredity of Namqem. With their equipment and the help of the local population, the mad governance couldn’t survive more than a few more Ksecs.
When it was gone, the hardest work of the Rescue began.
THIRTY-NINE
The Qeng Ho Grand Meeting was held 20Msec later. Namqem solar system was still a disaster area. Alqin was mostly empty, its people camped on Namqem world, but not starving. Maresk, the smallest moon, was a radioactive wreck; rebuilding it would be the work of centuries. Almost a billion people had died there. But the last food shipment had been saved, the outer system agri automation restarted, and there was enough food for the two billion survivors on Tarelsk. The automation of Namqem had been trashed, and was operating at perhaps ten percent of its pre-debacle efficiency. The people of Namqem system who had survived till now would live to rebuild. There would be no extinction, no dark age. The survivors’ grandchildren would wonder at the terror of this time.
But there still was no civilized venue for the Grand Meeting. Pham and Sura stuck by the original decision. The Meeting would be out in Brisgo Gap, the most deserted place in the middle system. At least there was no destruction to look upon there, no local problems to solve. From Brisgo Gap, Namqem world and its three moons were just a blue-green disk and three spots of light.
Sura Vinh used the last of her asteroid resources to build the Grand Meeting temp. Pham had hoped that she would be impressed by the success that the Qeng Ho Plan had had. “We saved the civilization, Sura. Surely you believe me now. We can be more than furtive traders.”
But Sura Vinh was so old now. At the dawn of civilization, medical science had promised immortality. In the early millennia, progress had been rapid. Two hundred years of life, even three hundred, were achieved. After that, each advance was less impressive and more costly. And so Humankind had gradually lost another of its naive dreams. Coldsleep might postpone death for thousands of years, but even with the best medical support, you couldn’t expect much more than five hundred years of real lifetime. It was the ultimate limit on one man’s reach. And getting near that limit took an awful toll.
Sura’s powered chair was more like a mobile hospital ward than a piece of furniture. Her arms twitched up, weak even in zero gee. “No, Pham,” she said. Her eyes were clear and green as ever, surely transplants or artificial. Her voice was more obviously synthetic, but Pham could hear the familiar smile in it. “The Grand Meeting must decide, remember? We’ve
never agreed on your plans. The point of coming together was to put the issue to a vote.”
That was what Sura had said ever since the earliest centuries, when she’d realized that Pham would never give up his dream. Oh, Sura, I don’t want to hurt you, but if my view must explicitly win over yours, so be it.
The temp that Sura towed into the middle of Brisgo Gap was enormous, even by the standards of her pre-debacle holdings. The starships of all the surviving fleets could moor at it, and Sura provided security extending out more than two million kilometers beyond the Gap.
The temp’s central volume was a zero-gee meeting hall. It was probably the grandest in history, large beyond all practical use. For Msecs before the Meeting itself, there was socializing, the largest single meeting of Traders there had ever been, probably the largest that would ever be. Pham took every Ksec he could from the rescue schedules to participate. Every day, he was making more contacts, interacting more than he could in a century of his life until now. Somehow he had to convert the doubters. And there were so many of them. They were basically decent, but so cautious and clever. Many of them were his own descendants. Their admiration—even their affection—seemed sincere, but he was never sure how many he had really convinced. Pham realized that he was edgier than he had ever been in combat, or even in hard trading. Never mind, he told himself. He had waited all his life for this. Small wonder that he should be nervous when the final test was just Msecs away.