by Vernor Vinge
The voices of Xin’s pilots spoke in his ear, confirming what he already saw on his tracking display. He looked up at Brughel and spoke with the formality the other seemed to like. “The burn is complete, sir. We’re in polar orbit, altitude one hundred fifty kilometers.” Any lower and they would need snowshoes.
“We were visible across thousands of kilometers, sir.” Xin matched his words with a concerned look. He’d been playing naive idiot on the trip down from L1. It was a dangerous game, but so far it had given him some leeway. And maybe, maybe there is some way I can avoid mass murder.
Brughel grinned back smug superiority. “Of course we were seen, Mr. Xin. The trick is to let them see—and then corrupt how they interpret the information.” He opened the comm channel to the Hand’s ziphead deck. “Mr. Phuong! Have you cloaked our arrival?”
Bil Phuong’s voice came back from the Hand’s ziphead hold. The place had been a madhouse the last time Jau looked, but Phuong sounded cool: “We’re on top of the situation, Podmaster. I’ve got three teams synthesizing satellite reports. L1 tells me they look good.” That would be Rita’s team talking to Bil. She should be going off duty any moment now, for what Nau would probably claim was a rest break before the heavy work. Jau had known for a day that that “lull” was when the killing would begin.
Phuong continued, “I must warn you, sir. Eventually the Spiders will sort things out. Our disguise won’t last for more than a hundred Ksec, less if someone down there is clever.”
“Thank you, Mr. Phuong. That should be more than enough.” Brughel smiled blandly at Jau.
Part of their horizon-spanning view disappeared, replaced by Tomas Nau back on L1. The senior Podmaster was sitting with Ezr Vinh and Pham Trinli in the lodge in Lake Park. Sunlight sparkled on the water behind them. This would be a public two-way conversation, visible to all the Followers and Qeng Ho. Nau looked out across the Hand’s bridge and his gaze seemed to find Ritser Brughel.
“Congratulations, Ritser. You are well placed. Rita tells me you have already achieved a close synch with the ground nets. We have some good news of our own. The Accord Intelligence chief is visiting Southmost. Her opposite number in the Kindred is already there. Short of accidents, things should be peaceful for a while more.”
Nau sounded so sincere and well-meaning. The amazing thing was that Ritser Brughel was almost as smooth: “Yes, sir. I’m setting up for the announcement and network takeover in—” He paused, as if checking his schedule. “—in fifty-one Ksec.”
Of course, Nau didn’t reply immediately. The signal from the Hand had to be bounced out of radio shadow to a relay and then across five light-seconds of space to L1. Any reply would take at least another five seconds coming the other way.
Sharp on ten seconds, Nau smiled. “Excellent. We’ll set the pacing here so everybody will be fresh when the workload spikes. Good luck to all of you down there, Ritser. We’re depending on you.”
There were a couple more rounds in their dance of deception; then Nau was gone. Brughel confirmed that all comm was local. “The go codes should come down any time, Mr. Phuong.” Brughel grinned. “Another twenty Ksec, and we fry some Spiders.”
Shepry Tripper gaped at the radar display. “It’s—it’s just like you said. Eighty-eight minutes, and there it is coming out of the north again!”
Shepry knew plenty of math and had worked for Nethering almost a year. He certainly understood the principles of satellite flight. But like most people, he still boggled at the notion of “a rock that gets thrown up and never comes down.” The cobblie would chortle delight when some comsat came trucking over the horizon at the time and azimuth that the math had predicted.
What Nethering had done tonight was a prediction of a different order, and he was just as awed as his assistant—and a whole lot more frightened. They had had only two or three clear radar bearings on the narrow end of the aurora. The thing had been decelerating even though it was well outside of the atmosphere. The Air Defense site at Princeton had not been impressed by his report. Nethering had a long-term relationship with those people, but tonight they treated him like a stranger, their autoresponse thanking him for his information and assuring that the matter was being taken care of. The world network was full of rumors of a high-altitude nuke. But this had been no bomb. Departing southward, it had appeared to be in low orbit…and now it was coming back from the north, right on schedule.
“Do you think we’ll be able to see it this time, sir? It’s gonna pass almost right over us.”
“I don’t know. We don’t have any scope that can slew fast enough to track it overhead.” He started back toward the stairs. “Maybe we could use the ten-inch.”
“Yeah!” Shepry raced around him—
“Button your breather! Watch the power cords!”
—and was out of sight, banging up the stairs.
But the little cobblie was right! There were fewer than two minutes until the object was directly overhead, then a couple more before it was gone again. Huh. Maybe not even time for the scope. Nethering paused, grabbed a widefield 4-ocular from his desk. Then he was running up the stairs after Tripper.
Topside, there was a faint breeze, a cold that bit like tarant fangs, even through his electric leggings. The sun would rise in about seventy minutes; dim though its light was, the best part of his observing time would be gone. For once it just didn’t matter. Serendipity was up from the good cold earth this night.
There was at most a minute until the mystery came overhead. It should be well above the horizon now, gliding southward toward them. Nethering moved around the curved wall of the main dome, and stared into the north. From the equipment closet ahead of him, he heard Shepry struggling with the ten-inch, the little scope they showed the tourists. He should be helping the child, but there was really no time.
Familiar starfields extended crystal clear down to the horizon. That clarity was, for Obret Nethering, what made this little island truly paradise. There should be a fleck of reflected sunlight rising slowly across the sky. It would be very faint; the dead sun was such a pale thing. Nethering stared and stared, straining for the slightest motion-triggered gleam…Nothing. Maybe he should have stuck with the radar, maybe right now they were missing their one chance to get really good data. Shepry had the ten-inch out of the closet now. He was struggling to get it aligned. “Help me, sir!”
They both had guessed wrong. Serendipity might be an angel, but she was a fickle one. Obret turned back to Shepry, a little ashamed for ignoring him. Of course, he was still watching the sky, the swath just short of the zenith where there should be a tiny speck of light. A bite of blackness flickered across the glowing pile of the Robber’s Cluster. A bite of blackness. Something…huge.
All dignity forgotten, Nethering fell on his side, brought the 4-ocular up to his lesser eyes. But tonight it was all he had…He turned slowly, tracking along his guess at a sky-path, praying he could recapture his target.
“Sir? What is it?”
“Shepry, look up…just look up.”
The cobblie was silent for a second. “Oh!”
Obret Nethering wasn’t listening. He had the thing in the 4-ocs field and all his attention was on keeping up with it, on seeing and remembering. And what he saw was an absence of light, a silhouette that raced across the galactic swath of star clouds. It was almost a quarter of a degree across. In the gap between star clouds it was invisible again…and then he saw it for another second. Nethering almost had a sense of the shape of it: a squat cylinder, downward-pointing, with a hint of complexity sticking out amidships.
Amidships.
The rest of its track crossed lonely starfields down to the southern horizon. Nethering tried in vain to follow it all the way. If it hadn’t been for its crossing the Robber’s Cluster, he might not have latched on to it at all. Thank you, Serendipity!
He lowered the 4-ocs and stood. “We’ll keep watch a few more minutes.” What other junk might be flying along with the thing?
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br /> “Oh, please, let me go below and put this on the net!” said the cobblie. “More than ninety miles up, and so big I could see its shape. It must be half a mile long!”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
Shepry disappeared down the stairs. Three minutes passed. Four. There was a glint sliding across the southern horizon, most likely a Low-Comm S satellite. Nethering pocketed his 4-ocs and climbed slowly down the stairs. This time, Air Defense would have to listen to him. A good part of Nethering’s contract money came from Accord Intelligence; he knew about the floater satellites the Kindred had recently begun launching. This is not one of ours, and not one of the Kindred’s. And all our warfare is reduced to petty squabbling by this arrival. The world had been so close to nuclear war. And now…what? He remembered how old Underhill had gone on about the “deepness in the sky.” But angels should come from the good cold earth, never from the empty sky.
Shepry met him at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s no good, sir. I can’t—”
“The link to the mainland is down?”
“No. It’s up. But Air Defense brushed me off just like they did on the first pass.”
“Maybe they already know.”
Shepry jerked his hands in agitation. “Maybe. But something perved is happening on the gossips, too. The last few days, crank postings have pounded the ceiling. You know, end-of-the-world claims, snow-troll sightings. It’s been kind of a laugh; I even did some counter-crapping of my own. But tonight the cranks have totally pounced.” Shepry paused, seemed to run out of jargon. Suddenly he looked very young and uncertain. “It’s…it’s not natural, sir. I found two postings that described just what we saw. That’s about what you’d expect for something that just happened over midocean. But they’re lost in all crazy crap.”
Hmm. Nethering walked across the room, settled down on his old perch beside the control bays. Shepry fidgeted back and forth, waiting for some judgment. When I first came to the observatory, the controls covered three walls, instruments and levers, almost all analog. Now most of the gear was tiny, digital, precise. Sometimes he joked with Shepry, asking him whether they should really trust anything they couldn’t see the guts of. Shepry had never understood his lack of faith in computer automation. Until tonight.
“You know, Shepry, maybe we should make some phone calls.”
FIFTY-ONE
Hrunkner had been in a dry hurricane once before, during the Great War. But that had been on the ground—underground most of the time—and about all he remembered was the ceaseless wind and the fineness of the snow that swirled and piled, and penetrated every crevice and gap.
This time he was in the air, descending through forty thousand feet. In the dim sunlight, he could see the swirl of the hurricane spread across hundreds of miles, its sixty-mile-per-hour winds brought to stillness by distance. A dry hurricane could never equal the fury of a Bright Time water hurricane. Yet this kind of storm would last for years, its eye of cold widening and widening. The world’s heat balance had paused on a kind of thermal plateau, water’s energy of crystallization. Once past this plateau, temperatures would fall steadily toward the next, much colder level, where the air itself began to dew out.
Their jet slid down toward the walls of cloud, bucking and slewing on invisible turbulence. One of the pilots remarked that the air pressure was less now than it had been at fifty thousand feet back over the Straits. Hrunkner tilted his head up to a window, looked almost directly ahead. In the hurricane’s eye, sunlight glinted off motley snow and ice. There were also lights, the hot reds of Southland industry just below the surface.
Far ahead, a ragged edge of mountains pierced the clouds and there were colors and textures he hadn’t seen since he and Sherkaner took their long-ago walk in the Dark.
The Accord Embassy at Southmost had its own airport, a four-mile-by-two-mile property just outside the city core. Even this was just a fragment of the enclave that colonial interests had held in previous generations. The remnant of empire was alternately an obstacle to friendly relations and an economic boost for both nations. To Unnerby it was just an overly short, oil-smudged strip of ice. Their converted bomber made the most exciting landing of Hrunkner’s career, a rolling skid past an unending blur of snow-covered warehouses.
The General’s pilot was good, or very lucky. They came to a stop just a hundred feet short of snowdrifts that marked the no-more-excuses end of the runway. In minutes, beetle-shaped vehicles had driven up and were pulling them toward a hangar. Not a single person walked about in the open. Away from their path, the ground glittered with CO2 frost.
Inside the cavernous hangar, the lights were bright and—once the doors were shut—ground crews rushed out with stairs. There were a few fancy-looking cobbers down there, waiting by the base of the stairs. Very likely the Accord ambassador and the head of the embassy guards. Since they were still on Accord ground, it was unlikely that any Southlanders would be here…Then he saw the parliamentary ensign on the jackets of two of the VIPs. Someone was eager beyond the bounds of clever diplomacy.
The mid-hatch was opened; a bolus of frigid air spilled into the cabin. Smith had already gathered up her gear and was climbing back to the hatch. Hrunkner remained on his perch a moment longer. He waved at one of the Intelligence techs. “Have there been any more nukes?”
“No, sir, nothing. We’ve got confirmation up and down the net. It was an isolated, one-megaton burst.”
The NCO Club at Lands Command was a bit out of the ordinary. Lands Command was more than a day’s drive from civilian entertainment, and the post had a fat budget compared to most out-of-the-way places. The average noncom at Lands Command was likely to be a tech with at least four years of academic training, and many of the troopers here worked at the deepmost Command and Control Center, several stories beneath the club. So, there were the usual game tables and gym sets and fizzbar, but there were also a good book collection and a number of net-connected arcade games that could also be used as study stations.
Victory Lighthill slouched in the dimness behind the fizzbar and watched the panorama of commercial video on the far wall. Maybe the most unusual thing about the club was that she was allowed in. Lighthill was a junior lieutenant, the natural bane and antagonist of many NCOs. Yet the tradition here was that if an officer covered her rank and was invited in by a noncom, then that officer’s presence was tolerated.
Tolerated, but in Lighthill’s case, not really welcomed. Her team’s reputation for inspection raids and its special connection with the Director of Intelligence made the average cobber uneasy about her and the team. But hey, the rest of the team were noncoms. Right now they were scattered around the club, each with a bulging departure pannier. For once, the other NCOs were talking to them, if not actually socializing. Even the ones who weren’t in Intelligence knew that things were teetering on the edge—and the ever-mysterious Lighthill team must surely have inside knowledge.
“It’s Smith down there at Southmost,” said a senior sergeant sitting at the bar. “Who else could it be?” He tipped his head in the direction of one of Lighthill’s corporals and waited for some reaction. Corporal Suabisme just shrugged, looking very innocent and—by trad standards—indecently young. “I wouldn’t be knowing, Sergeant. I truly wouldn’t.”
The senior sergeant waved his eating hands in a sneer. “Oh? So how come you Lighthill flunkies are all carrying departure bags? I’d say you’re just waiting to hop on a plane for someplace.”
It was the sort of probing that would normally bring Viki into action, either to withdraw Suabisme or—if necessary—to shut the senior sergeant down. But in the NCO club, Lighthill had zero authority. Besides, the point of being here was to keep the team out of official sight. But after a moment, the senior sergeant seemed to realize he wasn’t going to provoke any slips from the young soldier; he turned back to his buddies at the bar.
Viki let out a quiet sigh. She hunkered down until just the tops of her eyes were above the level of the fizzbar. The
place was getting busy, the ping of spit in cuspidors a kind of background music. There was little talk, and even less laughter. Off-duty NCOs should be a more lively lot, but these cobbers had plenty on their minds. The center of attention was the television. The NCO cooperative had bought the latest variable-format video. In the dimness behind the bar, Viki smiled in spite of herself. If the world could survive even a few more years, such gear would be as good as the videomancy gear Daddy used.
The TV was sucking from a commercial news site. One window was a crude image from some rent-a-camera at the embassy airport at Southmost: the aircraft coasting down the embassy runway was a type that Lighthill herself had seen only twice before. Like many things, it was secret and obsolete all at the same time. The press scarcely commented on it. On the main window, an editorialist was congratulating herself on this journalistic coup, and speculating just who was aboard the daggercraft.
“…It’s not the King himself, despite what our competitors may claim. Our coverage around the palace and at the Princeton airfields would have detected any movement of the Royal Household. So who is this now arriving at Southmost?” The announcer paused and the cameras moved closer, surrounding her forebody. The picture expanded to spill over the nearby displays. The maneuver gave the impression suddenly of intimate conversation. “We now know that the emissary is the head of the King’s Own Intelligence Service, Victory Smith.” The cameras backed off a little. “So, to the King’s Information Officers, we say: You can’t hide from the press. Better to give us full access. Let the people see Smith’s progress with the Southlanders.”
Another camera, from inside a hangar: Mom’s daggercraft had been towed all the way into the embassy hangar, and the clamshell doors were being pulled shut. The scene looked like a diorama built from children’s toys: the futuristic aircraft, the closed-body tractors chugging around the hangar’s wide floor. No people were visible. Surely they don’t have to pressurize the hangar? Even at the eye of the dry hurricane, the pressure couldn’t be that low. But after a moment, soldiers popped out of a van. They pushed a stairway up to the side of the dagger. Everyone in the NCO Club became suddenly very quiet.