A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

  “What about the godshatter state? I see you for hours, just staring at the tracking display, or mucking around in the library and the News,” scanning faster than any human could consciously read.

  Pham shrugged. “It’s studying the ships that are chasing us, trying to figure out just what belongs to whom, just what capabilities each might have. I don’t know the details. Self- awareness is on vacation then,” when all Pham’s mind was turned into a processor for whatever programs Old One had downloaded. A few hours of fugue state might yield an instant of Power-grade thought — and even that he didn’t consciously remember. “But I know this. Whatever the godshatter is, it’s a very narrow thing. It’s not alive; in some ways it may not even be very smart. For everyday matters like ship piloting, there’s just good old Pham Nuwen.”

  “… there’s the rest of us, Pham. Blueshell would like to help,” Ravna spoke softly. This was the place where Pham would close into icy silence — or blow up in rage. This day, he just cocked his head. “Ravna, Ravna. I know I need him…. And, and I’m glad I need him. That I don’t have to kill him.”Yet. Pham’s lips quivered for a second, and she thought he might start crying.

  “The godshatter can’t know Blueshell—”

  “Not the godshatter. It’s not making me act this way — I’m doing what any person should do when the stakes are this high.” The words were spoken without anger. Maybe there was a chance. Maybe she could reason:

  “Blueshell and Greenstalk are loyal, Pham. Except at Harmonious Repose—”

  Note 1016

  Pham sighed, “Yeah. I’ve thought about that a lot. They came to Relay from Straumli Realm. They got Vrinimi looking for the refugee ship. That smells of setup, but probably unknowing — maybe even a setup by something opposing the Blight. In any case they were innocent then, else the Blight would have known about Tines world right from the beginning. The Blight knew nothing till RIP, till Greenstalk was converted. And I know Blueshell was loyal even then. He knew things about my armor — the remotes, for instance — that he could have warned the others about.”

  Hope came as a surprise to Ravna. He really had thought things out, and — “It’s just the skrodes, Pham. They’re traps waiting to be sprung. But we’re isolated here, and you destroyed the one that Greenstalk—”

  Pham was shaking his head. “It’s more than the skrodes. The Blight had its hand in Rider design, too, at least to some degree. I can’t imagine the takeover of Greenstalk’s being so smooth otherwise.”

  “Y-yes. A risk. A very small risk compared to—”

  Note 1017

  Pham didn’t move, but something in him seemed to draw away from her, denying the support she could offer. “A small risk? We don’t know. The stakes are so high. I’m walking a tightrope. If I don’t use Blueshell now, we’ll be shot out of space by the Blighter fleet. If I let him do too much, if I trust him, then he or some part of him could betray us. All I have is the godshatter, and a bunch of memories that … that may be the biggest fakes of all.” These last words were nearly inaudible. He looked up at her, a look that was both cold and terribly lost. “But I’m going to use what I have, Rav, and whatever it is I am. Somehow I’m going to get us to Tines’ World. Somehow I’m going to get Old One’s godshatter to whatever is there.”

  Note 1018

  * * *

  Note 1019

  It was another three weeks before Blueshell’s predictions came true.

  Note 1020

  The OOB had seemed a sturdy beast up in the Middle Beyond; even its damaged ultradrive had failed gracefully. Now the ship was leaking bugs in all directions. Much of it had nothing to do with Pham’s meddling. Without those final consistency checks, none of the OOB‘s Bottom automation was really trustworthy. But its failures were compounded by Pham’s desperate security hacks.

  The ship’s library had source code for generic Bottom automation. Pham spent several days revising it for the OOB. All four of them were on the command deck during the installation, Blueshell trying to help, Pham suspiciously examining every suggestion. Thirty minutes into the installation, there were muffled banging noises down the main corridor. Ravna might have ignored them, except that she’d never heard the like aboard the OOB.

  Pham and the Riders reacted with near panic; spacers don’t like unexplained bumps in the night. Blueshell raced to the hatch, floated fronds-first through the hole. “I see nothing, Sir Pham.”

  Pham was paging quickly through the diagnostic displays, mixed format things partly from the new setup. “I’ve got some warning lights here, but—”

  Greenstalk started to say something, but Blueshell was back and talking fast: “I don’t believe it. Anything like this should make pictures, a detailed report. Something is terribly wrong.”

  Pham stared at him a second, then returned to his diagnostics. Five seconds passed. “You’re right. Status is just looping through stale reports.” He began grabbing views from cameras all over the OOB‘s interior. Barely half of them reported, but what they showed…

  The ship’s water reservoir was a foggy, icy cavern. That was the banging sound — tonnes of water, spaced. A dozen other support services had gone bizarre, and —

  — the armed checkpoint outside the workshop had slagged down. The beamers were firing continuously on low power. And for all the destruction, the diagnostics still showed green or amber or no report. Pham got a camera in the workshop itself. The place was on fire.

  Pham jumped up from his saddle and bounced off the ceiling. For an instant she thought he might go racing off the bridge. Then he tied himself down and grimly began trying to put out the fire.

  For the next few minutes, the bridge was almost quiet, just Pham quietly swearing as none of the obvious things worked. “Interlocking failures,” he mumbled the phrase a couple of times. “The firesnuff automation is down…. I can’t dump atmosphere from the shop. My beamers have melted everything shut.”

  Note 1021

  Ship fire. Ravna had seen pictures of such disasters, but they had always seemed an improbable thing. In the midst of universal vacuum, how could a fire survive? And in zero-gee, surely a fire would choke itself even if the crew couldn’t dump atmosphere. The workshop camera had a hazy view on the real thing: True, the flames ate the oxygen around them. There were sheets of construction foam that were only lightly scorched, protected for the moment by dead air. But the fire spread out, moving steadily into still-fresh air. In places, heat-driven turbulence enriched the mix, and previously burned areas blazed up.

  “It’s still got ventilation, Sir Pham.”

  “I know. I can’t shut it. The vents must be melted open.”

  “It’s as likely software.” Blueshell was silent for a second. “Try this—” the directions were meaningless to Ravna, some low- level workaround.

  But Pham nodded, and his fingers danced across the console.

  In the workshop, the surface-hugging flames crept farther across the construction foam. Now they licked at the innards of the armor Pham had spent so much time on. This latest revision was only half finished. Ravna remembered he was working on reactive armor now …. There would be oxidizers there. “Pham, is the armor sealed—”

  The fire was sixty meters aft and behind a dozen bulkheads. The explosion came as a distant thump, almost innocent. But in the camera view, the armor dismembered itself, and the fire blazed triumphant.

  Seconds later, Pham got Blueshell’s suggestion working, and the workshop’s vents closed. The fire in the wrecked armor continued for another half hour, but did not spread beyond the shop.

  * * *

  Note 1022

  It took two days to clean up, to estimate the damage, and have some confidence that no new disaster was on the way. Most of the workshop was destroyed. They would have no armor on Tines world. Pham salvaged one of the beamers that had been guarding the entrance to ths shop. Disaster was scattered all across the ship, the classic random ruin of interlocking failures: They had lost fifty
percent of their water. The ship’s landing boat had lost its higher automation.

  OOB‘s rocket drive was massively degraded. That was unimportant here in interstellar space, but their final velocity matching would be done at only 0.4 gees. Thank goodness the agrav worked; they would have no trouble maneuvering in steep gravitational wells — that is, landing on Tines world.

  Ravna knew how close they were to losing the ship, but she watched Pham with even greater dread. She was so afraid that he would take this as final evidence of Rider treachery, that this would drive him over the edge. Strangely, almost the opposite happened. His pain and devastation were obvious, but he didn’t lash out, just doggedly went about gathering up the pieces. He was talking to Blueshell more now, not letting him modify the automation, but cautiously accepting more of his advice. Together they restored the ship to something like its pre-fire state.

  She asked Pham about it. “No change of heart,” he finally said. “I had to balance the risks, and I messed up…. And maybe there is no balance. Maybe the Blight will win.”

  The godshatter had bet too much on Pham’s doing it all himself. Now it was turning down the paranoia a little.

  * * *

  Seven weeks out from Harmonious Repose, less than one week from whatever waited at Tines’ world, Pham went into a multiday fugue. Before he had been busy, a futile attempt to run handmade checks on all the automation they might need at Tines’ World. Now — Ravna couldn’t even get him to eat:

  The nav display showed the three fleets as identified by the News and Pham’s intuition: the Blight’s agents, the Alliance for the Defense, and what was left of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. Deadly monsters and the remains of a victim. The Alliance still proclaimed itself with regular bulletins on the News. SjK Commercial Security had posted a few terse refutations, but was mostly silent; they were unused to propaganda, or — as likely — uninterested in it. A private revenge was all that remained to Commercial Security. And the Blighter fleet? The News hadn’t heard anything from them. Piecing together departures and lost ships, War Trackers Newsgroup concluded they were a wildly ad hoc assembly, whatever the Blight had controlled down here at the time of the RIP debacle. Ravna knew that the War Trackers analysis was wrong about one thing: The Blighter fleet was not silent. Thirty times over the last weeks, they had sent messages at the OOB… in skrode maintenance format. Pham had had the ship reject the messages unread — and then worried about whether the order was really followed. After all, the OOB was of Rider design.

  But now the torment in him was submerged. Pham sat for hours, staring at the display. Soon Sjandra Kei would close with the Alliance fleet. At least one set of villains would pay. But the Blighter fleet and at least part of the Alliance would survive…. Maybe this fugue was just godshatter getting desperate.

  Three days passed; Pham snapped out of it. Except for the new thinness in his face, he seemed more normal than he had in weeks. He asked Ravna to bring the Riders up to the bridge.

  Note 1023

  Pham waved at the ultradrive traces that floated in the window. The three fleets were spread through a rough cylinder, five light- years deep and three across. The display captured only the heart of that volume, where the fastest of the pursuers had clustered. The current position of each ship was a fleck of light trailing an unending stream of fainter lights — the ultradrive trace left by that vehicle’s drive. “I’ve used red, blue, and green to mark my best guess as to the fleet affiliation of each trace.” The fastest ships were collected in a blob so dense that it looked white at this scale, but with colored streamers diverging behind. There were other tags, annotations he had set but which he admitted once to Ravna he didn’t understand.

  “The front edge of that mob — the fastest of the fast — is still gaining.”

  Blueshell said hesitantly. “We might get a little more speed if you would grant me direct control. Not much, but—”

  Pham’s response was civil at least. “No, I’m thinking of something else, something Ravna suggested a while back. It’s always been a possibility and … I … think the time may have come for it.”

  Ravna moved closer to the display, stared at the green traces. Their distribution was in near agreement with what the News claimed to be the remnants of Sjandra Kei Commercial Security. All that’s left of my people.“They’ve been trying to engage with the Alliance for a hundred hours now.”

  Pham’s glance touched hers. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Poor bastards. They’re literally the fleet from Port Despair. If I were them, I’d—” His expression smoothed over again. “Any idea how well- armed they are?” That was surely a rhetorical question, but it put the topic on the table.

  Note 1024

  “War Trackers thinks that Sjandra Kei had been expecting something unpleasant ever since the Alliance started talking ‘death to vermin’. Commercial Security was providing deep space defense. Their fleet is converted freighters armed with locally-designed weapons. War Trackers claims they weren’t really a match for what the other side could field, if the Alliance was willing to take some heavy casualties. Trouble is, Sjandra Kei never expected the planet-smasher attack. So when the Alliance fleet showed up, ours moved out to meet it—”

  “— and meantime the KE bombs were coming straight in to the heart spaces of Sjandra Kei.”

  Into my heart spaces. “Yes. The Alliance must have been running those bombs for weeks.”

  Pham Nuwen laughed shortly. “If I were shipping with the Alliance fleet, I’d be a bit nervous now. They’re down in numbers, and those retread freighters seem about as fast as anything here…. I’ll bet every pilot out of Sjandra Kei is dead set on revenge.” The emotion faded. “Hmm. There’s no way they could kill all the Alliance ships or all the Blight’s, much less all of both. It would be pointless to …

  His gaze abruptly focussed on her. “So if we leave things as they are, the Sjandra Kei fleet will eventually match position with the Alliance and try to blow them out of existence.”

  Note 1025

  Ravna just nodded. “In twelve hours or so, they say.”

  Note 1026

  “And then all that will be left is the Blight’s own fleet on our tail. But if we could talk your people into fighting the right enemies…”

  Note 1027

  It was Ravna’s nightmare scheme. All that was left of Sjandra Kei dying to save the OOB… trying to save them. There was little chance the Sjandra Kei fleet could destroy all the Blighter ships. But they’re here to fight. Why not a vengeance that means something? That was the nightmare’s message. Now somehow it fit godshatter’s plans. “There are problems. They don’t know what we’re doing or the purpose of the third fleet. Anything we shout back to them will be overheard.” Ultrawave was directional, but most of their pursuers were closely mingled.

  Pham nodded. “Somehow we have to talk to them, and them alone. Somehow we have to persuade them to fight.” Faint smile. “And I think we may have just the … equipment … to do all that. Blueshell: Remember that night on the High Docks. You told us about your ‘rotted cargo’ from Sjandra Kei?”

  Note 1028

  “Indeed, Sir Pham. We carried one third of a cipher generated by SjK Commercial Security for their long-range communications. It’s still in the ship’s safe, though worthless without the other two thirds.” Gram for gram, crypto materials were about the most valuable thing shipped between the stars — and once compromised, about the most valueless. Somewhere in Out of Band‘s cargo files there was an SjK one-time communications pad. Part of a pad.

  “Worthless? Maybe not. Even one third would provide us with secure communications.”

  Blueshell dithered. “I must not mislead you. No competent customer would accept such. Certainly, it provides secure communication, but the other side has no verification that you are who you claim.”

  Note 1029

  Pham’s glance slid sideways, toward Ravna. There was that smile again. “If they’ll listen, I think we can convi
nce them…. The hard part is, I only want one of them to hear us.” Pham explained what he had in mind. The Riders’ rustled faintly behind Pham’s words. After all their time together, Ravna could almost get some sense of their talk — or maybe she just understood their personalities. As usual, Blueshell was worrying about how impossible the idea was, and Greenstalk was urging him to listen.

  Note 1030

  But when Pham finished, the large rider did not launch into objections. “Across seventy light-years, ultrawave comm between ships is practical, even without our antenna swarm; we could even have live video. But you are right, the beam spread would include all the ships in the central cluster of fleets. If we could reliably identify an outlying vessel as belonging to Sjandra Kei, then what you are asking might be done; that ship could use internal fleet codes to relay to the others. But in honesty I must warn you,” continued Blueshell, brushing back Greenstalk’s gentle remonstrance, “professional communications folk would not honor your request for talk — would probably not even recognize it as such.”

  Note 1031

  “Silly.” Greenstalk finally spoke, her voder-voice gentle but clear. “You always say things like that — except when we are talking to paying customers.”

  Note 1032

  “Brap. Yes. Desperate times, desperate measures. I want to try it, but I fear…. I want there to be no accusations of Rider treachery, Sir Pham. I want you to handle this.”

  Pham Nuwen smiled back. “My thought exactly.”

  Note 1033

  * * *

  Note 1034

  “The Aniara Fleet.” That’s what some of the crews of Commercial Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth, older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the asteroids of Earth’s solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and then over the following years — as their ship fell out and out into the endless dark — died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing. The image was a haunting one, which was probably the reason it was known across millennia. With the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the escape of Commercial Security, the story seemed suddenly come true.