by Vernor Vinge
But now his right arm was immobilized, the full-press sleeve at maximum tension. Such a painful extreme of fashion, but it might be enough to keep him alive.
He drank from drifting water, and tried to think.
There was a querulous mewing sound behind him. The sky-kitten slid into view, settled onto his chest and good arm. He reached up, felt the trembling body. “You in trouble too?” he asked. His words came as croaks. The kitten’s great dark eyes peered back at him and it burrowed deeply at the space between his chest and left arm. Strange. Normally, a sick kitten would go off and hide; that had caused Ali lots of problems, even though the creatures were tagged. The sky-kitten was soaked, but it seemed alert. Maybe, “You came to comfort me, Little One?”
He could feel it purring now, and the warmth of its body. He smiled; just having someone to listen made him feel more alert.
There was a thutter of wings. Two more kittens. Three. They hung above him and meowed irritably as if to say, “What have you done with our park,” or maybe “We want dinner.” They swirled around him, but didn’t chase the little one from his arms. Then the largest, a rag-eared tom, swooped away from Ezr and settled on the highest point in the ruin. He glowered down at Ezr, and began grooming his wings. The damn creature didn’t even look wet.
The highest point left in the ruin…a diamond tube almost two meters across, surmounted by a metal cap. Ezr suddenly realized what he was looking at: a tunnel head in Tomas Nau’s den, most likely a direct route to L1-A. He coasted up the hill to the metal-topped pillar. The tom hunkered down, reluctant to move out of Ezr’s way. Even now the creatures were as possessive as ever.
The control lights on the hatch glowed pass-green.
He looked at the big tom. “You know you’re sitting on the key to everything, don’t you, fellow?”
He gently disengaged the littlest kitten from his jacket, and shooed them all away from the hatch mechanism. It slid back, locked itself open. Would the little stupids try to follow? He gave them a last wave. “Whatever you may think, you really don’t want to come with me. Gun wire hurts.”
The Attic grouproom was crammed with extra seating; there was scarcely room to maneuver around the edges. And the moment Silipan turned off the zipheads’ comm links, the place turned into a madhouse. Trud dived away from the reaching arms, retreated to the control area at the top of the room. “They really really don’t like to be taken off their work.”
It was worse than Pham had thought it would be. If the zipheads hadn’t been tied down, he and Trud would have been attacked. He looked back at the Emergent. “It had to be done. This is the core of Nau’s power, and now it’s denied him. We’re taking over all across L1, Trud.”
Silipan’s stare was glassy. There had been too many shocks. “All over L1? That’s impossible…You’ve killed us all, Pham. You’ve killed me.” Some alertness returned; no doubt he was imagining what Nau and Brughel would do to him.
Pham steadied him with his free hand. “No. I intend to win. If I do, you’ll survive. So will the Spiders.”
“What?” Trud bit his lip. “Yeah, cutting off support will slow Ritser. Maybe those damned Spiders will have a chance.” His gaze became distant, then snapped back to Pham’s face. “What are you, Pham?”
Pham answered softly, pitching his voice just over the shouted demands from the zipheads. “Just now, I’m your only hope.” He drew Silipan’s confiscated huds from his jacket pocket, and handed them to the man.
Trud carefully straightened the crumpled material and slipped them over his eyes. He was silent for a moment, then: “We have more huds. I can get you a pair.”
Pham smiled the foxy grin that Silipan had never seen till two hundred seconds ago. “That’s okay. I have something better.”
“Oh.” Trud’s voice was small.
“Now I want you to do a damage assessment. Is there any way you can get work from your people here, with Nau cut off?”
Trud shrugged angrily. “You know that’s imposs—” He looked up again at Pham. “Maybe, maybe there are some trivial things. We do offline computing. I might be able to trick the numerical control zipheads…”
“Good man. Calm these people down, see if any of them will help us.”
They parted. Silipan descended to the zipheads, talked soothing words, bagged the floating vomitus that the sudden upset had generated. The shouting only got louder:
“I need the tracking updates!”
“Where are the translations on the Kindred response?”
“You stupids, you’ve lost the comm!”
Pham slid sideways across the ceiling, looking downward through the ranks of seated zipheads, listening to the complaints. On the far wall, Anne and her other assistant floated motionless on grabfelt rests. She should be safe and out of it. Your final battle is being fought, just a century or two after you thought all was lost.
The vision behind Pham’s eyes faded in and out. In most of the Attic, he’d been able to restart the microwave pulse power. He had perhaps one hundred thousand localizers in reach and alive. It was a bright meta-light extending his vision in disjoint fingers through the Attic, to wherever a cloud of localizers had come alive and could find a thread of links back to him.
Status, status. Pham scanned across the readouts on zipheads in the grouproom and beyond. There were only a few still locked in their roomlets in the capillary tunnels, specialists that hadn’t been needed in the current operation. Many of them had gone into convulsive tantrums when their job stream was blocked. Pham eased into the control system and opened some of the incoming communications. There were things he had to know, and it might ease the discomfort of the Focused. Trud looked up uneasily; he could tell that someone was messing with his system.
Pham reached beyond the Attic, searching for some glimmer from localizers on the rockpile’s surface. There! One or two isolated images, low-rate and monochrome. He had a glimpse of a taxi coming down on naked rock, near Hammerfest. Damn, sluiceway S745. If Nau could negotiate that lockless hatch, there was no doubt where he’d go next.
For a fleeting moment Pham felt the overwhelming fear of facing an unstoppable adversary. Ah, it’s like being young again. He had perhaps three hundred seconds before Nau got to L1-A. No point in holding anything back. Pham sent out the command to bring all reachable localizers online—even the ones without power. Their tiny capacitors held enough charge for a few dozen packets each. Used cleverly, he could get a fair amount of I/O.
Behind his eyes, pictures slowly formed, bit by bit by bit.
Pham slid around three walls, staying carefully beyond the zipheads’ reach, occasionally dodging a thrown keyboard or drinking bulb. But the renewed incoming data flow was having some calming effect. The translator section was almost quiet, their talk mostly directed at one another. Pham drifted down next to Trixia Bonsol. The woman was hunched over her keyboards with fierce intentness. Pham plugged into the data stream that was coming up from the Invisible Hand. There should be some good news there, Ritser and company bogged down just when they were ready to commit mass murder…
It took him an instant to orient to the multiplex stream. There was stuff for the translators, trajectory data, launch codes. Launch codes? Brughel was going ahead with Nau’s sucker punch! The execution was awkward; the Accord would be left with a good fraction of its weapons. Ballistics were arcing up, dozens of launches per second.
For a moment, Pham’s attention was swallowed by the horror of it. Nau had conspired to kill half the people in a world. Ritser was doing his best to accomplish the murders. He stepped through the log of Trixia Bonsol’s last few hundred seconds. The log had gone berserk when her job stream had been cut off, a metaphorical upchuck. There were pages of disordered nonsense, a gabble of files that showed no last-access date. His eyes caught on a passage that almost made sense:
It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It’s true that the weather is not so driven, that everywh
ere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It’s a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It’s the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
By blind good fortune, Sherkaner Underhill chose the most beautiful days in the years of the Waning for his first trip to Lands Command…
It was clearly one of Trixia’s translations, the sort of “human-colored” description that irritated Ritser Brughel so much. But Underhill’s “first trip to Lands Command”? That would be before the last Dark. Strange that Tomas Nau had wanted such retrospectives.
“It’s all messed up now.”
“What?” Pham’s mind came back to the Attic grouproom, the irritable voices of the zipheads. It was Trixia Bonsol who had just spoken. Her eyes were distant and her fingers still twitched across her keys.
Pham sighed. “Yeah, you got that right,” he replied. Whatever she was talking about, the comment was appropriate.
His low-rate synthesis from the unpowered net was complete: He had a view down on L1-A. If he could trigger a little more connectivity, he might reach the ejets near L1-A. No great processing power there, but those sites were on the ejet power grid…and more important, Maybe we can use the electric jets themselves! If they could target a few dozen of them on the Podmaster…“Trud! Have you had any luck with the numerical people?”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Rachner Thract’s helicopter lifted clean of the tilted landing pad, its turbine and rotor sounds healthy. By turning his head this way and that, Thract was able to keep track of the terrain. He took them eastward, along the caldera wall. The punched-hole craters marched off ahead of them, a line of destruction that disappeared over the top of the far wall. In the city below, there were emergency lights now, and ground traffic heading for the craters that had been apartments and occupied mansions.
On the perch beside him, Underhill was moving feebly, pulling at the panniers on his guide-bug’s back. The animal was trying to help, but it was injured far worse than its master. “I need to see, Rachner. Can you help me with Mobiy’s pack?”
“Just a minute, sir. I want to bring us around to the heliport.”
Underhill pushed a few inches up from his perch. “Just put it on autopilot, Colonel. Please, help me.”
Thract’s helicopter contained dozens of embedded processors, themselves hooked into traffic control and information nets. Once he had been very proud of this fancy aircraft. He hadn’t flown it on automatic since that last staff meeting at Lands Command. “Sir…I don’t trust the automatics.”
Underhill gave a gentle laugh, then broke into liquid coughing. “It’s okay, Rach. Please, I have to see what’s happening. Help me with Mobiy.”
Yes! By the Dark, what did it matter now! Rachner slammed four hands into the control sockets, and wiggled on full auto. Then he turned to his passengers and quickly unzipped the bag on the top of Mobiy’s broken back.
Underhill reached in and removed the gear within as if it were some King’s crown jewels. Rachner turned his head for a closer look. What…a bloody computer game helmet, it was!
“Ah, it looks okay,” Underhill said softly. He started to settle the helmet across his eyes, then winced away. Rachner could see why; there were blisters all across the cobber’s eyes. But Underhill didn’t give up. He held the device just off his head, then turned on the power.
Glittering light splashed out and around his head. Rachner jerked back reflexively. The cabin of the heli was suddenly awash in a million shifting colors, bright and plaid. He remembered the rumors about Underhill’s crazy hobbies, the videomancy. So it had all been true; this “gaming helmet” must have cost a small fortune.
Underhill mumbled to himself, shifting the helmet this way and that, as if to see around the blind spots in his burned eyes. There really wasn’t much to see, just an incredibly beautiful shifting of lights, the mesmerizing power of computers in the service of quackery. It seemed to satisfy Sherkaner Underhill. He stared and stared, petting his guide-bug with a free hand. “Ah…I see,” he said softly.
And the helicopter’s turbines suddenly began a banshee twistup, well past their redline. The power was like magic, and would burn them out in a matter of an hour or two. That’s why no reasonable controls would allow such performance.
“What the devil—” The words caught in Thract’s throat as the turbine windup finally reached the blades above. His aircraft suddenly became a maniac, clawing its way up and up, over the caldera ridge.
The turbines briefly idled as the helicopter soared over the top, five hundred feet, a thousand feet above the altiplano. Rachner had a glimpse of the flatlands. The single row of destruction they had seen at Calorica was actually part of a grid. Stretched out south and west of them were hundreds of steaming plumes. The antimissile fields. But the crappers had missed! Wave after wave of interceptor rockets were sweeping up from their silos across the altiplano. Hundreds of launches, quick and profligate as short-range rocket artillery—except that the silos were dozens of miles away. Those rocket plumes were pushing smart payloads toward long-range intercepts thousands of miles away, and scores of miles up. It was awesome beyond all the staff-meeting hype that Air Defense had ever shilled…and it must mean that the Kindred had just launched everything they had.
Sherkaner Underhill didn’t seem to notice. He moved his head back and forth under the helmet’s light show. “There has to be some reconnect. There has to be.” His hands twitched at the game controls. Seconds passed. “It’s all messed up now,” he sobbed.
Trud left his numerical-control zipheads and rejoined Pham Trinli by the translators. “The pure numericals I can manage, Pham. I mean I can get answers. But for control—”
Trinli just nodded, brushing the objections aside. Trinli looks so different. I’ve known him years of Watch time, and now he’s a different person. The old Pham Trinli had been loud and arrogant, a bluster that you could argue and joke with. This Pham was quieter, but his actions were like knives. Killing us all. Trud’s eyes slid unwillingly to where Anne Reynolt’s body hung like meat on a hook. And even if he could conceive a scheme to betray Pham, it probably wouldn’t save him. Nau and Brughel were Podmasters, and Trud knew he had passed beyond forgiveness.
“—still a chance, Trud.” Pham’s voice cut through his fear. “Maybe we could open things a little further, fool the zipheads into—”
Silipan shrugged. Not that it mattered, but, “Do that and the Podmaster will be down our throat instantly. I’m getting fifty service requests a second from Nau and Brughel.”
Pham rubbed his temples and his eyes got a faraway look. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Okay. What do we have? The temp—”
“The cameras at Benny’s show a lot of very puzzled people. If they’re lucky they’ll stay where they are.” And afterward the Podmasters would have no claim of vengeance on them.
One of the zipheads—Bonsol—interrupted, the typical irrelevance of the Focused: “There are millions of people on the ground. They will start dying in a few seconds.”
The comment actually seemed to derail Pham. Even the new Pham Trinli was still an amateur when it came to dealing with zipheads. “Yeah,” he said, more to himself than to Silipan or the ziphead. “But at least the Spiders have a chance. Without our zipheads, Ritser can’t tighten the screws any more.” Of course, Bonsol ignored the reply, just went on tapping at her keys.
Trinli’s attention snapped back to Silipan. “Look. Nau is in a taxi, coming in on the L1-A site. There are electric stab jets all over the area. If we can get a few zipheads to work them—”
Trud felt anger sweeping up. Whatever he was, Pham Trinli was still a fool. “Plague take you! You just don’t understand Focused loyalty! We need to—”
Bonsol interrupted. “Ritser can’t tighten the screws, but we can’t loosen them either.” She was laughing, almost inau
dibly. “What an intriguing thing. We have a deadlock.”
Trud motioned for Pham to move back toward the ceiling, out of range of this random ziphead commentary. “They’ll go on like that forever.”
But Pham turned back to the ziphead, abruptly giving her all his attention. “What do you mean ‘we have a deadlock’?” he said quietly.
“Pus take it, Pham! What does it matter!” But Trinli jerked his hand up, commanding silence. The gesture had the peremptory confidence of a senior Podmaster—and Silipan’s protests died on his lips. Inside, his fear just grew and grew. So much for miracles. If there had been any chance for keeping Nau out of L1-A, it was vanishing in this delay. And Silipan knew what was in L1-A. Oh yes. Beyond all automation and subtlety, L1-A would give the Podmaster back his absolute power. The clock at the corner of Trud’s vision counted mercilessly on, the seconds of life dribbling out. And of course, the ziphead wasn’t even paying attention to Pham, much less his question.
The silence stretched for ten or fifteen seconds. Then, abruptly, Bonsol’s head snapped up and she stared directly into Pham’s eyes—the way a ziphead almost never did, except when role-playing. “I mean you’re blocking us and we’re blocking you,” she said. “My victory thought you were all monsters, that we couldn’t trust any of you. And now we are all paying for that mistake.”