by Vernor Vinge
And now Jau Xin was all alone on the Hand’s bridge. He took a deep breath and tried to make sense of his displays. Ritser Brughel was right about one thing. It was Jau’s neck on the line here.
The core power trace was still high. He looked out across the curving horizon. No question now. The Hand was down, consistent with the eighty-thousand-meter altitude on the status board. He heard the rumble of the aux thrusters. Did I get through? If he could orient properly and somehow fire the main torch…But no, they weren’t turning in the right direction! The great ship was aligning on their direction of flight, rear end first. To the left and right of the aft view, parts of the starship’s outer hull could be seen, angular spidery structures that were meant for the flows of interstellar plasma but never the atmosphere of a planet. Now their edges were glowing. Soft yellows and reds splashed out around them, cascading like glowing ocean spray. The sharpest edges glowed white and sloughed away. But the aux thrusters were still firing, a pattern of tiny bursts. On off. On off. Whoever was running his pilots was making a perverse attempt to keep the Hand oriented. Without such precise control, the flow past the ship’s irregular hull would send them into a long tumble, a million tonnes of hardware torn apart by forces it had never been designed to face.
The glow across the stern was a spreading sheet of light, clear only in a few places where the shock was not hot enough to vaporize the hull. Jau drifted back into his chair, the acceleration growing gently, inexorably. Four hundred milligees, eight hundred. But this acceleration was not caused by the ship’s torch. This was a planetary atmosphere, having its way with them.
And there was another sound. Not the rumble of the aux. It was a rich, growing tone. From its throat to its outer hull, the Hand had become a vast organ pipe. The sound fell from chord to chord as the ship rammed deeper, slower. And as the glow of ionization trembled and faded, the Hand’s dying song rose in a crescendo—and was gone.
Jau stared out the aft view, at a scene that should have been impossible. The angular hull structures were smoothed and melted by their passage through the heat. But the Hand was a million tonnes, and the pilots had kept it precisely oriented in the flow, and most of its great mass had survived.
Nearly a standard gee pressed him against his chair, but this was almost at right angles to the earlier acceleration. This was planetary gravity. The Hand was a kind of aircraft now, a disaster skidding across the sky. They were forty thousand meters up, coming down at a steady hundred meters per second. Jau looked at the pale horizon, the ridges and blocks of ice that swept beneath his view. Some of those were five hundred meters high, ice pressed upward by the slow freezing of the ocean depths. He tapped at his console, got a flicker of attention from one of the pilots, a scrap of further information. They would clear that ridgeline and the three beyond it. Beyond that, near the horizon, the shadows were softer…a deception of distance, or maybe snow piled deep on the jagged ice.
Echoing up through the Hand’s corridors, Jau heard the rapid pounding of Brughel’s heavy gun. There was shouting, silence, then the pounding again, farther away. Every hatch must be sealed. And Ritser Brughel was punching through every one. In a way, the Podmaster was right; he controlled the physical layer. He could reach the hull optics, knock out the link to L1. He could “disconnect” whatever local zipheads still offended…
Thirty thousand meters. Dim sunlight reflected off the ice, but there was no sign of artificial lights or towns. They were coming down in the middle of the Spiders’ grandest ocean. The Hand was still making better than mach three. The sink rate was still one hundred meters per second. His intuition plus the few hints from the status board told him they would smear across the landscape at more than the speed of sound. Unless—the core power was still rising—if the main torch could be fired once more, and fired at precisely the right instant…a miracle touch might do it. The Hand was so big that its belly and throat might be used as a cushion, shredded across kilometers of crash path, leaving the bridge and the occupied quarters intact. Pham Trinli’s silly bragging had included such an adventure.
One thing was certain. Even if Jau were given full control at this instant, and all his pilots’ skills, there was no way he could accomplish such a landing.
They had cleared the last line of ridges. The aux thrusters burned briefly, a one-degree yaw, guiding them as if with special knowledge of conditions ahead.
Ritser Brughel’s time for killing had shrunk down to a few seconds. Rita would be safe. Jau watched the tumbled land rise toward him. And with it came the strangest feeling of terror, and triumph, and freedom. “You’re too late, Ritser. You’re just too late.”
SIXTY
Belga Underville had rarely seen joy or fear so strong, and never attached to the same events by the same people. Coldhaven’s techs should have been cheering as wave after wave of their long-range interceptors scored against the Kindred ballistics, and hundreds of other enemy missiles blew themselves up or otherwise aborted. The success rate was already nearing ninety-nine percent. Which left thirty live nuclear warheads arcing into Accord territory. It was the difference between annihilation and mere isolated disaster…and the technicians chewed on their eating hands as they struggled to stop those last, straggling threats.
Coldhaven walked down his row of techs. One of Lighthill’s people, an oophase corporal, was by his side. The General was hanging on Rhapsa Lighthill’s every word, making sure his techs got the benefit of all the new intelligence that was flooding across their displays. Belga hung back. There was nothing she could do but get in the way. Victory Lighthill was deep in some weird conversation with the aliens, every few sentences punctuated by long delays, time for side conversations with her brother and Coldhaven’s people. She paused, waiting, and gave Belga a shy smile.
Belga gave her a little wave back. The cobblie wasn’t quite the same as her mother—except, perhaps, where it mattered.
Then Lighthill’s phone came alive again—some relatively near collaborator? “Yes, good. We’ll get people out there. Five hours maybe…Daddy, we’re back on track. Critter Number Five is playing fair. You were right about that one. Daddy?…Brent, we’ve lost him again! That shouldn’t happen now…Daddy?”
Rachner’s helicopter had stopped its zigzag, evasive course, though not before Thract became thoroughly lost. Now the heli flew low and fast across the altiplano, as if fearless of hostile observation from above. A passenger on his own pilot’s perch, Thract watched the sky show with an almost hypnotized wonder, only partly aware of Sherkaner Underhill’s delirious mumbling, and the strange lights coming from his game helmet.
The sheets of amissile launches were long gone, but all across the horizon the evidence of their mission was lighting the sky. At least we fought back.
The timbre of the rotor noise changed, bringing Thract back from his terrible, far vision. The heli was sliding down through the dark. Shading his eyes against the sky lights, Thract could see that they were headed for a landing on a random stretch of naked stone, hills and ice all around.
They touched down, roughly, and the turbines idled till the rotors were spinning slow enough to see. It was almost quiet in the cabin. The guide-bug stirred, pushed insistently at the door beside Underhill.
“Don’t let him out, sir. If we lose him here, he might stay lost.”
Underhill’s head bobbed uncertainly. He set down the game helmet; its lights flickered and died. He patted his guide-bug, and pulled shut the closures of his jacket. “It’s okay, Colonel. It’s all over now. You see, we won.”
The cobber sounded as delirious as ever. But Thract was beginning to realize: delirious or not, Underhill had saved the world. “What happened, sir?” He said softly. “Alien monsters controlled our nets…and you controlled the monsters?”
The old, familiar chuckle. “Something like that. The problem was, they aren’t all monsters. Some of them are both clever and good…and we almost squashed each other with our separate plans. That was terribly expensi
ve to fix.” He was silent for a second, his head wavering. “It will be okay, but…just now I can’t see much.” The cobber had taken a full head of the aliens’ killer beam. The blisters on Underhill’s eyes were spreading, a pervasive, creamy haze. “Maybe you can take a moment and tell me what you see.” The cobber jerked a hand skyward.
Rachner pushed his best side close to the south-facing window. The shoulder of the mountain cut off part of the view, but there were still one hundred degrees of horizon. “Hundreds of nukes, sir, glowing lights in the sky. I think those are our interceptors, way far off.”
“Ha. Poor Nizhnimor and Hrunk…when we walked in the Dark, we saw something similar. Though it was much colder then.” The guide-bug had the trick of the door. It popped it open a crack, and a slow draft of coldest air licked into the cabin.
“Sir—” Rachner started to complain about the draft.
“It’s okay. You won’t be here long. What else do you see?”
“Lights spreading out from the hits. I guess that’s ionization in the magnetopatches. And—” Rach’s voice caught in his throat. There were other things, and these he recognized. “I see reentry traces, sir. Dozens of them. They’re passing overhead, and to our east.” Rach had seen similar things in Air Defense tests. When the warheads finally came down through the atmosphere, they left trails that glowed in a dozen colors. Even in the tests, they’d been horrible things, the stabbing hands of a spirit tarant, pouncing from the sky. A dozen traces, more coming. Thousands of missiles had been stopped, but what remained could destroy cities.
“Don’t worry.” Underhill’s voice came softly from Thract’s blind side. “My alien friends have taken care of those. Those warheads are dead carcasses now, a few tonnes of radioactive junk. Not much fun if one drops directly on your head, but otherwise no threat.”
Rachner turned, followed the tracks anxiously across the sky. My alien friends have taken care of those. “What are the monsters really like, Sherkaner? Can we trust them?”
“Heh. Trust them? What a thing for an Intelligence officer to ask. My General never trusted them, any of them. I’ve studied the humans for almost twenty years, Rachner. They’ve been traveling in space for hundreds of generations. They’ve seen so much, they’ve done so much…The poor crappers think they know what is impossible. They’re free to fly between the stars, and their imagination is trapped in a cage they can’t even see.”
The glowing streaks had passed across the sky. Most had faded to far-red or invisibility. Two converged toward a point on the horizon, probably the High Equatoria launch site. Thract held his breath, waiting.
Behind him, Underhill said something like, “Ah, dear victory,” and then was very quiet.
Thract strained to watch the north. If the warheads were still live, the detonations would be visible even from over the horizon. Ten seconds. Thirty. There was silence and cold. And to the north, there was only the light of the stars. “You’re right, sir. What’s left is just falling junk. I—” Rachner turned, suddenly conscious of just how cold the heli’s cabin had become.
Underhill was gone.
Thract lunged across the cabin to the half-open door. “Sir! Sherkaner!” He started down the outside steps, turning his head this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of the other. The air was still, but so cold that it cut. Without a heated breather, he’d have burned lungs in a matter of minutes.
There! A dozen yards from the heli, in the shade of both stars and sky glow, two far-red blotches. Underhill limped slowly behind Mobiy. The guide-bug tugged him gently along, at every step probing the hillside with its long arms. It was the instinctive behavior of an animal in hopeless cold, trying to the last to find an effective deepness. Here, in a random nowhere, the critter didn’t stand a chance. In less than an hour he and his master would be dead, their tissues desiccated.
Thract scrambled down the steps, shouting at Underhill. And above him, the heli’s blades began to spin up. Thract cringed beneath the frigid wash. As the turbines ramped up and the blades began to provide real lift, he turned and pulled himself back into the cabin. He pounded on the autopilot, poking at every disconnect.
It didn’t matter. The turbines hit takeoff power and the heli lifted. He had one last glimpse of the shadows hiding Sherkaner Underhill. Then the craft tilted eastward and the scene was lost behind him.
SIXTY-ONE
Blowouts in small volumes were normally fatal. Quickly fatal. It was one of his guards who unintentionally saved Tomas Nau. Just as the hull melted through, Tung released his harness and dived up toward the hatch. The blowout clawed at all of them, but Tung was loose and closest to the hole. He rammed headfirst into the wall melt, sucked through to his hips.
Somehow Qiwi had kept her place by the jammed taxi hatch. Now she had the L1-A hatch open, too. She turned back, grabbed her father, and boosted him into the lock beyond. The action was a single smooth motion, almost a dance. Nau had scarcely begun to react when she turned a second time, hooked a foot into a wall loop, and reached out to snag his sleeve with the tips of her fingers. She pulled gently, and as he came closer, grabbed him by main force and shoved him through to safety.
Safe. And I was as good as dead just five seconds ago. The hiss of escaping air was loud. The damaged docking collar could blow in a second.
Qiwi dropped back from hatchway. “I’ll get Marli and Ciret.”
“Yes!” Nau came back to the opening, and cursed himself for losing his wire gun in the chaos. He looked into the taxi. One guard was clearly dead: Tung’s legs weren’t even twitching. Marli was probably dead too, certainly out of it, though Qiwi was struggling to get both him and Ciret free. In a second she would have them out, as quick and effectively as she had saved himself and Ali Lin. Qiwi was just too dangerous, and this was his last sure opportunity to get her out of the picture.
Nau pushed on the L1-A hatch. It turned smoothly, pressed by the air currents, and slammed shut with an ear-numbing crash. His fingers danced across the access control, tapping out the code for an emergency jettison. From the other side of the wall there was the explosive whump of exhausting gas, the banging of metal on metal. Nau imagined the airless taxi, floating out from the lock. Let Pham Nuwen take his target practice on the dead.
The lock’s pressure rose quickly to normal. Nau popped the inner hatch and took Ali Lin through, into the corridor beyond. The old man mumbled, semiconscious. At least his bleeding had stopped. Don’t die on me, damn it. Ali was worthless meat right now, but in the long run he was a treasure. Things would be expensive enough without losing him.
He coasted Ali gently up the long corridor. The walls around him were green plastic. This had been the security vault aboard Common Good. Its irregular shape had made sense there; nowadays its value lay in its monolithic construction and its shielding, several meters of composites with the melting point of tungsten. All the firepower Pham Nuwen possessed couldn’t get him in here.
Till a few days ago, the vault had held most of the surviving heavy weapons in the OnOff system. Now it was almost empty, stripped to support the mission of the Invisible Hand. No matter. Nau had been very careful that enough nukes remained. If necessary, he could play the old, old game of total disaster management.
So what can be salvaged? He had only the vaguest idea how much Pham Nuwen controlled. For an instant, Nau quailed. All his life he had studied such men, and now he was pitted against one. But in winning, I will be all the more. There were a dozen things to be done, and only seconds to do them. Nau let Ali loose, free to slowly fall in the rockpile’s microgravity. A comm set and local huds were tacked to grabfelt by the door. He snatched them up and spoke brief commands. The automation here was primitive, but it would do. Now he could see out from the vault. The Peddlers’ temp was above his horizon, and there was no taxi traffic, there were no suited figures approaching around the rockpile’s surface.
He dove across the open space, unshipped a small torpedo. The flag at the corner of his view tol
d him that his call to Hammerfest had made it through. The ring pattern disappeared, and Pham’s voice came in his ear.
“Nau?”
“Right the first time, sir.” Nau floated the nuke across to the launch tube that Kal Omo had installed just thirty-five days ago. It had seemed a maniac precaution then. Now it was his last chance.
“It’s time that you surrendered, Podmaster. My forces control all of L1 space. We—”
Pham’s voice held quiet certainty, with none of the bluster of Old Pham Trinli. Nau could imagine ordinary people gripped by that voice, led. But Tomas Nau was a pro himself. He had no trouble interrupting: “On the contrary, sir. I hold the only power that is worth noting.” He touched the panel by the launch tube. There was a thump as compressed air blew out the top end and cleared the snow. “I’ve programmed and loaded a tactical nuclear weapon. The target is the Peddlers’ temp. The weapon is ad hoc, but I’m sure it’s sufficient.”
“You can’t do that, Podmaster. Three hundred of your own people are over there.”
Nau laughed gently. “Oh, I can do it. I lose a lot, but I still have some people in coldsleep. I—are you really Pham Nuwen?” The question slipped out, almost uncalculated.
There was a pause, and when Nuwen spoke, he sounded distracted, “Yes.” And you’re handling everything yourself, aren’t you? It made sense. An ordinary conspiracy would have been detected years ago. It had been just Pham Nuwen and Ezr Vinh, right from the beginning. Like a single man pulling his wagon across a continent, Nuwen had persevered, had almost conquered. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. I’ve studied you for many years.” As he spoke, Nau popped up a view of the torpedo’s diagnostics. He was looking straight down the launch rail; the tube was clear. “Perhaps your only mistake is that you have not fully understood the Podmaster ethos. You see, we Podmasters grew out of disaster. That is our inner strength, our edge. If I destroy the temp, it will be an enormous setback for the L1 operation. But my personal situation will improve. I will still have the rockpile. I will still have many of the zipheads. I will still have the Invisible Hand.” He turned away from the launch tube. He looked across the equipment bays, at the remaining torpedoes; he might have to knock out the Hammerfest Attic, too. That had not been part of even the most extreme disaster plans. Maybe there was some way to do it that would leave some of the zipheads alive. Another part of his mind waited curiously for what Pham Nuwen would say. Would he cave in like an ordinary person, or did he have the true heart of a Podmaster? That question was the essence of Pham Nuwen’s moral weakness.