A Fire Upon the Deep

by Vernor Vinge

  Note 1205

  “Iiya! Look at that. Five nanoseconds more and we wouldn’t have been clipped at all. We actually committed the jump after the front hit!” And somehow the electronics had survived long enough to complete the jump. The gamma flux through the command deck had been 300 rem, nothing that would slow them down over the next few hours, and easily managed by a ship’s surgeon. As for the surgeon and all the rest of the Ølvira‘s automation …

  Tirolle typed several long queries at the box; there was no voice recognition left. Several seconds passed before a response marched across the screen. “Central automation suspended. Display management suspended. Drive computation suspended.” Tirolle dug an elbow at his brother. “Hei, ‘Frelle, it looks like ‘Vira managed a clean disconnect. We can bring most of this back!”

  * * *

  Dirokimes were known for being drifty optimists, but in this case Tirolle wasn’t far from the truth. Their encounter with the drone bomb had been a one-in-billion thing, the tiniest fraction of an exposure. Over the next hour and a half, the Dirokimes ran reboots off the monitor’s hardened processor, bringing up first one utility and then another. Some things were beyond recovery: parsing intelligence was gone from the comm automation, and the ultradrive spines on one side of the craft were partially melted. (Absurdly, the burning smell had been a vagrant diagnostic, something that should have been disabled along with all the rest of Ølivra‘s automation.) They were far behind the Blighter fleet.

  Note 1206

  … and there was still a Blighter fleet. The knot of enemy lights was smaller than before, but on the same unwavering trajectory. The battle was long over. What was left of Commercial Security was scattered across four light-years of abandoned battlefield; they had started the battle with numerical superiority. If they’d fought properly, they might have won. Instead they’d destroyed the vessels with significant real velocities — and knocked out only about half the others. Some of the largest enemy vessels survived. These outnumbered the corresponding Aniara survivors by more than four to one. Blight could have could have easily destroyed all that remained of Commercial Security. But that would have meant a detour from the pursuit, and that pursuit was the one constant in the enemy’s behavior.

  Note 1207

  Tirolle and Glimfrelle spent hours reestablishing communications and trying to discover who had died and who might be rescued. Five ships had lost all drive capability but still had surviving crew. Some ships had been hit at known locations, and Svensndot dispatched vessels with drone swarms to find the wrecks. Ship-to-ship warfare was a sanitary, intellectual exercise for most of the survivors, but the rubble and the destruction were as real as in any ground war, only spread over a trillion times more space.

  * * *

  Note 1208

  Finally the time for miracle rescues and sad discoveries was passed. The SjK commanders gathered on a common channel to decide a common future. It might better have been a wake — for Sjandra Kei and Aniara fleet. Part way through the meeting, a new window appeared, a view onto the bridge of the Out of Band. Ravna Bergsndot watched the proceedings silently. The erstwhile “godshatter” was nowhere in evidence.

  “What more to do?” said Johanna Haugen. “The damn Butterflies are long gone.”

  “Are we sure we have rescued everyone?” asked Jan Trenglets. Svensndot bit back an angry reply. The commander of Trance had become a recording loop on that issue. He had lost too many friends in the battle; all the rest of his life Jan Trenglets would live with nightmares of ships slowly dying in the deep night.

  “We’ve accounted for everything, even to vapor,” Haugen spoke as gently as the words allowed. “The question is where to go now.”

  Ravna made a small throat-clearing sound, “Gentlemen and Ladies, if—”

  Trenglets looked up at her tranceived image. All his hurt transformed into a blaze of anger. “We’re not your gentlemen, slut! You’re not some princess we happily die for. You deserve our deadly fire now, nothing more.”

  The woman shrank from Trenglets rage. “I—”

  “You put us into this suicidal battle,” shouted Trenglets. “You made us attack secondary targets. And then you did nothing to help. The Blight is locked on you like a dumshark on a squid. If you had just altered your course the tiniest fraction, you could have thrown the Blighters off our path.”

  Note 1209

  “I doubt that would have helped, sir,” said Ravna. “The Blight seems most interested in where we’re bound.” The solar system just fifty-five light-years beyond the Out of Band. The fugitives would arrive there just over two days before their pursuers.

  Jo Haugen shrugged. “You must realize what your friend’s crazy battle plan has done. If we had attacked rationally, the enemy would be a fraction of its present size. If it chose to continue, we might have been able to protect you at this, this Tines’ world.” She seemed to taste the strange name, wondering at its meaning. “Now … no way am I going to chase them there. What’s left of the enemy could wipe us out.” She glanced at Svensndot’s viewpoint. Kjet forced himself to look back. No matter who might blame Out of Band, it had been Group Captain Kjet Svensndot’s word that had persuaded the fleet to fight as they did. Aniara’s sacrifice had been ill- spent, and he wondered that Haugen and Trenglets and the others talked to him at all now. “Suggest we continue the business meeting later. Rendezvous in one thousand seconds, Kjet.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “Good.” Jo cut the link without saying anything more to Ravna Bergsndot. Seconds later, Trenglets and the other commanders were gone. It was just Svensndot and the two Dirokimes — and Ravna Bergsndot looking out her window from Out of Band.

  Finally, Bergsndot said, “When I was a little girl on Herte, sometimes we would play kidnappers and Commercial Security. I always dreamed of being rescued by your company from fates worse than death.”

  Kjet smiled bleakly, “Well, you got the rescue attempt,” and you not even a currently subscribed customer. “This was far the biggest gun fight we’ve ever been in.”

  “I’m sorry, Kje — Group Captain.”

  He looked into her dark features. A lass from Sjandra Kei, down to the violet eyes. No way this could be a simulation, not here. He had bet everything that she was not; he still believed she was not. Yet — “What does your friend say about all this?” Pham Nuwen had not been seen since his so-impressive godshatter act at the beginning of the battle.

  Ravna’s glance shifted to something off-camera. “He’s not saying much, Group Captain. He’s wandering around even more upset than your Captain Trenglets. Pham remembers being absolutely convinced he was demanding the right thing, but now he can’t figure out why it was right.”

  “Hmm.” A little late for second thoughts. “What are you going to do now? Haugen is right, you know. It would be useless suicide for us to follow the Blighters to your destination. I daresay it’s useless suicide for you, too. You’ll arrive maybe fifty-five hours before them. What can you do in that time?”

  Note 1210

  Ravna Bergsndot looked back at him, and her expression slowly collapsed into sobbing grief. “I don’t know. I … don’t know.” She shook her head, her face hidden behind her hands and a sweep of black hair. Finally she looked up and brushed back her hair. Her voice was calm but very quiet. “But we are going ahead. It’s what we came for. Things could still work out…. You know there’s something down there, something the Blight wants desperately. Maybe fifty-five hours is enough to figure out what it is and tell the Net. And … and we’ll still have Pham’s godshatter.”

  Your worst enemy? Quite possibly this Pham Nuwen was a construct of the Powers. He certainly looked like something built from a second-hand description of humanity. But how can you tell godshatter from simple nuttery?

  She shrugged, as if acknowledging the doubts — and accepting them. “So what will you and Commercial Security do?”

  Note 1211

  “There is no Commercial S
ecurity anymore. Virtually all our customers got shot out from under us. Now we’ve killed our company’s owner — or at least destroyed her ship and those supporting her. We are Aniara Fleet now.” It was the official name chosen at the fleet conference just ended. There was a certain grim pleasure in embracing it, the ghost from before Sjandra Kei and before Nyjora, from the earliest times of the human race. For they were truly cast away now, from their worlds and their customers and their former leaders. One hundred ships bound for…. “We talked it over. A few still wanted to follow you to Tines’ world. Some of the crews want to return to Middle Beyond, spend the rest of their lives killing Butterflies. The majority want to start the races of Sjandra Kei over again, some place where we won’t be noticed, some place where no one cares if we live.”

  Note 1212

  And the one thing everyone agreed on was that Aniara must be split no further, must make no further sacrifices outside of itself. Once that was clear, it was easy to decide what to do. In the wake of the Great Surge, this part of the Bottom was an incredible froth of Slowness and Beyond. It would be centuries before the zonographic vessels from above had reasonable maps of the new interface. Hidden away in the folds and interstices were worlds fresh from the Slowness, worlds where Sjandra Kei could be born again. Ny Sjandra Kei?

  He looked across the bridge at Tirolle and Glimfrelle. They were busy bringing the main navigation processors out of suspension. That wasn’t absolutely necessary for the rendezvous with Lynsnar, but things would be a lot more convenient if both ships could maneuver. The brothers seemed oblivious to Kjet’s conversation with Ravna. And maybe they weren’t paying attention. In a way, the Aniara decision meant more to them than to the humans of the fleet: No one doubted that millions of humans survived in the Beyond (and who knew how many human worlds might still exist in the Slowness, distant cousins of Nyjora, distant children of Old Earth). But this side of the Transcend, the Dirokimes of Aniara were the only ones that existed. The dream habitats of Sjandra Kei were gone, and with them the race. There were at least a thousand Dirokimes left aboard Aniara, pairs of sisters and brothers scattered across a hundred vessels. These were the most adventurous of their race’s latter days, and now they were faced with their greatest challenge. The two on Ølvira had already been scouting among the survivors, looking for friends and dreaming a new reality.

  Ravna listened solemnly to his explanations. “Group Captain, zonography is a tedious thing … and your ships are near their limits. In this froth you might search for years and not find a new home.”

  Note 1213

  “We’re taking precautions. We’re abandoning all our ships except the ones with ramscoop and coldsleep capability. We’ll operate in coordinated nets; no one should be lost for more than a few years.” He shrugged. “And if we never find what we seek—”if we die between the stars as our life support finally fails“— well then, we will have still lived true to our name.”Aniara.“I think we have a chance.” More than can be said for you.

  Ravna nodded slowly. “Yes, well. It … helps me to know that.”

  They talked a few minutes more, Tirolle and Glimfrelle joining in. They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings.

  “Rendezvous Lynsnar two hundred seconds,” said the ship’s voice.

  Ravna heard it, nodded. She raised her hand. “Fare you well, Kjet Svensndot and Tirolle and Glimfrelle.”

  The Dirokimes whistled back the common farewell, and Svensndot raised his hand. The window on Ravna Bergsndot closed.

  … Kjet Svensndot remembered her face all the rest of his life, though in later years it seemed more and more to be the same as Ølvira’s.

  Note 1214

  Note 1215

  PART III

  Chapter 37

  Note 1216

  Note 1217

  Note 1218

  “Tines’ world. I can see it, Pham!”

  The main window showed a true view upon the system: a sun less than two hundred million kilometers off, daylight across the command deck. The positions of identified planets were marked with blinking red arrows. But one of those — just twenty million kilometers off —was labeled “terrestrial”. Coming off an interstellar jump, you couldn’t get positioning much better than that.

  Pham didn’t reply, just glared out the window as if there were something wrong with what they were seeing. Something had broken in him after the battle with the Blight. He’d been so sure of his godshatter — and so bewildered by the consequences. Afterwards he had retreated more than ever. Now he seemed to think that if they moved fast enough, the surviving enemy could do them no harm. More than ever he was suspicious of Blueshell and Greenstalk, as if somehow they were greater threats than the ships that still pursued.

  “Damn,” Pham said finally. “Look at the relative velocity.” Seventy kilometers per second.

  Position matching was no problem, but “Matching velocities will cost us time, Sir Pham.”

  Pham’s stare turned on Blueshell. “We talked this out with the locals three weeks ago, remember? You managed the burn.”

  “And you checked my work, Sir Pham. This must be another nav system bug … though I didn’t expect anything was wrong in simple ballistics.” A sign inverted, seventy klicks per second closing velocity instead of zero. Blueshell drifted toward the secondary console.

  “Maybe,” said Pham. “Just now, I want you off the deck, Blueshell.”

  “But I can help! We should be contacting Jefri, and rematching velocities, and—”

  “Get off the deck, Blueshell. I don’t have time to watch you anymore,” Pham dived across the intervening space and was met by Ravna, just short of the Rider.

  She floated between the two, talking fast, hoping whatever she said would both make sense and make peace. “It’s okay, Pham. He’ll go.” She brushed her hand across one of Blueshell’s wildly vibrating fronds. After a second, Blueshell wilted. “I’ll go. I’ll go.” She kept an encouraging touch on him — and kept herself between him and Pham, as the Skroderider made a dejected exit.

  Note 1219

  When the Rider was gone, she turned to Pham. “Couldn’t it have been a nav bug, Pham?”

  Note 1220

  The other didn’t seem to hear the question. The instant the hatch had closed, he had returned to the command console. OOB‘s latest estimate put the Blight’s arrival less than fifty-three hours away. And now they must waste time redoing a velocity match supposedly accomplished three weeks earlier. “Somebody, something, screwed us over …” Pham was muttering, even as he finished with the control sequence, “Maybe it was a bug. This next damn burn is going to be as manual as it can be.” Acceleration alarms echoed down the core of the OOB. Pham flipped through monitor windows, searching for loose items that might be big enough to be dangerous. “You tie down, too.” He reached out to override the five minute timer.

  Ravna dived back across the deck, unfolding the free-fall saddle into a seat and strapping in. She heard Pham speaking on the general announce channel, warning of the timer override. Then the impulse drive cut in, a lazy pressure back into the webbing. Four tenths of a gee — all the poor OOB could still manage.

  * * *

  Note 1221

  When Pham said manual, he meant it. The main window appeared to be bore-centered now. The view didn’t drift at the whim of the pilot, and there were no helpful legends and schematics. As much as possible, the were seeing true view along OOB‘s main axis. Peripheral windows were held in fixed geometry with main. Pham’s eyes flickered from one to another, as his hands played over the command board. As near as could be, he was flying by his own senses, and trusting no one else.

  Note 1222

  But Pham still had use for the ultradrive. They were twenty million klicks off target, a submicroscopic jump. Pham Nuwen fiddled with the drive parameters, trying to make an accurate jump smaller than the standard inte
rval. Every few seconds the sunlight would shift a fraction, coming first over Ravna’s left shoulder and then her right. It made reestablishing comm with Jefri nearly impossible.

  Suddenly the window below their feet was filled by a world, huge and gibbous, blue and swirling white. The Tines’ world was as Jefri Olsndot advertised, a normal terrestrial planet. After the months aspace and the loss of Sjandra Kei, the sight caught Ravna short. Ocean, the world was mostly ocean, but near the terminator there were the darker shades of land. A single tiny moon was visible beyond the limb.

  Note 1223

  Pham sucked in his breath. “It’s about ten thousand kilometers off. Perfect. Except we’re closing at seventy klicks per second.” Even as she watched, the world seemed to grow, falling toward them. Pham watched it for few seconds more. “Don’t worry, we’re going to miss, fly right past the, um, north limb.”

  Note 1224

  The globe swelled below them, eclipsing the moon. She had always loved the appearance of Herte at Sjandra Kei. But that world had smaller oceans, and was criss-crossed with Dirokime accidents. This place was as beautiful as Relay, and seemed truly untouched. The small polar cap was in sunlight, and she could follow the coastline that came south from it toward the terminator. I’m seeing the northwest coast. Jefri’s right down there! Ravna reached for her keyboard, asked the ship to attempt both ultrawave comm and a radio link.

  “Ultrawave contact,” she said after a second.

  “What does it say?”

  Note 1225

  “It’s garbled. Probably just a ping response,” acknowledgment to OOB‘s signal. Jefri was housed very near the ship these days; sometimes she had gotten responses almost immediately, even during his night time. It would be good to talk to him again, even if …