Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  The first major operation of your Alliance has been an enormous success. With the extermination of their most important supporters, Blight encroachment on the Middle Beyond has been brought to a standstill. Yet much remains to be done:

  The Alliance Fleet is returning to the Middle Beyond. We’ve suffered some casualties and need substantial reprovisioning. We know that there are still scattered pockets of humanity in the Beyond, and we’ve identified secondary races that are aiding humanity. The defense of the Middle Beyond must be the goal of every sophont of good will. Elements of your Alliance Fleet will soon visit systems in the volume [parameter specification]. We ask for your aid and support against what is left of this terrible enemy.

  Death to vermin.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Kjet Svensndot was alone on Ølvira‘s bridge when the Surge passed. They had long since done all the preparations that were meaningful, and the ship had no realistic means of propulsion in the Slowness that surrounded it. Yet the Group Captain spent much of his time up here, trying to program some sort of responsiveness into the automation that remained. Half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date to the beginning of the human experience.

  Of course, the actual transition out of Slowness would have been totally unnoticed if not for all the alarms he and the Dirokimes had installed. As it was, the noise and lights blew him out of a half-drowse into hair-raised wakefulness. He punched the ship’s comm: “Glimfrelle! Tirolle! Get your tails up here.”

  By the time the brothers reached the command deck, preliminary nav displays had been computed, and a jump sequence was awaiting confirmation. The two were grinning from ear to ear as they bounced in, and strapped themselves down at action posts. For a few moments there was little chitchat, only an occasional whistle of pleasure from the Dirokimes. They had rehearsed this over and over during the last hundred plus hours, and with the poor automation there was a lot for them to do. Gradually the view from the deck’s windows sharpened. Where at first there had only been vague blurs, the ultrawave sensors were posting individual traces with steadily improving information on range and rates. The communication window showed the queue of fleet comm messages getting longer and longer.

  Tirolle looked up from his work “Hei, Boss, these jump figures look okay—at least as a first cut.”

  “Good. Commit and allow autocommit.” In the hours after the Surge, they had decided that their initial priority should be to continue with the pursuit. What they did then … they had talked long on that, and Group Captain Svensndot had thought even longer. Nothing was routine any more.

  “Yes, sir!” The Dirokime’s longfingers danced across the controls, and ‘Rolle added some verbal control. “Bingo!”

  Status showed five jumps completed, ten. Kjet stared out the true-view window for a few seconds. No change, no change … then he noticed that one of the brightest stars in the field had moved, was sliding imperceptibly across the sky. Like a juggler getting her pace, Ølvira was coming up to speed.

  “Hei, hei!” Glimfrelle leaned over to see his brother’s work. “We’re making 1.2 light-years per hour. That’s better than before the Surge.”

  “Good. Comm and Surveillance?” Where was everybody else and what were they up to?

  “Yup. Yup. I’m on it.” Glimfrelle bent his slender frame back to the console. For some seconds, he was almost silent. Svensndot began paging through the mail. There was nothing yet from Owner Limmende. Twenty-five years Kjet had worked for Limmende and SjK Commercial Security. Could he mutiny? And if he did, would any follow?

  “Okay. Here’s the situation, Boss.” Glimfrelle shifted the main window to show his interpretation of the ship’s reports. “It’s like we guessed, maybe a little more extreme.” They had realized almost from the beginning that the surge was bigger than anything in recorded history; that’s not what the Dirokime meant by “extreme”. He swept his shortfingers down, making a hazy blue line across the window. “We guessed that the leading edge of the Surge moved normal to this line. That would account for it taking Boss Limmende out four hundred seconds before it hit the Out of Band, and hitting us ten seconds after that… Now if the trailing edge were similar to ordinary surges”—upgraded a million times—“then we, and then the rest of the pursuing fleets should come out well before Out of Band.” He pointed at a single glowing dot that represented the Ølvira. Around and just ahead of it dozens of points of light were popping into existence as the ship’s detectors reported seeing the initiation of ultradrive jumps. It was like a cold fire sweeping away from them into the darkness. Eventually Limmende and the heart of the anonymous fleet would all be back in business. “Our pickup log shows that’s about what happened. Most all the pursuing fleets will be out of the surge before the Out of Band.”

  “Hm. So it’ll lose part of its lead.”

  “Yup. But if it’s going where we think—” a G-star eighty light-years ahead “—it’ll still get there before they kill it.” He paused, pointed at a haze that was spreading sideways from the growing knot of light. “Not everybody is still chasing.”

  “Yeah…” Svensndot had been reading the News even as he listened to ‘Frelle’s summary. “…according to the Net, that’s the Alliance for the Defense departing the battle field, victorious.”

  “Say what?” Tirolle twisted abruptly in his harness. His large, dark eyes held none of their usual humor.

  “You heard me.” Kjet put the item where the brothers could see it. The two read rapidly, ‘Frelle mumbling phrases aloud, “…courage of Alliance commanders … substantial destruction of escaping forces…”

  Glimfrelle shuddered, all flippancy departed. “They don’t even mention the Surge. Everything they say is a cowardly lie!” His voice shifted up to its normal speaking range and he continued in his own language. Kjet could understand parts of it. The Dirokimes that left their dream habitats were normally light-hearted folk, full of whimsy and gentle sarcasm. Glimfrelle sounded almost that way now, except for the high edges to his whistling and the insults more colorful than Svensndot had ever heard from them: “…get from a verminous cow-pie … killers of innocent dreams…” even in Samnorsk the words were strong, but in Dirokime “verminous cow-pie” was drenched in explicit imagery that almost brought the smell of such a thing into the room. Glimfrelle’s voice went higher and higher, then beyond the human register. Abruptly, he collapsed, shuddering and moaning low. Dirokimes could cry, though Svensndot had never seen such a thing before. Glimfrelle rocked in his brother’s arms.

  Tirolle looked over Glimfrelle’s shoulder at Kjet. “Where does revenge take us now, Group Captain?”

  For a moment, Kjet looked back silently. “I’ll let you know, Lieutenant.” He looked at the displays. Listen and watch a little longer, and maybe we’ll know.“Meantime, get us nearer the center of pursuit,” he said gently.

  “Aye, sir.” Tirolle patted his brother’s back gently and turned back to the console.

  During the next five hours, Ølvira‘s crew watched the Alliance fleet race helter-skelter for the higher spaces. It could not even be called a retreat, more a panicked dissolution. Great opportunists, they had not hesitated to kill by treachery, and to give chase when they thought there might be treasure at the end. Now that they were confronted with the possibility of being trapped in the Slowness, of dying between the stars, they raced for their separate safety. Their bulletins to the newsgroups were full of bravado, but their maneuver couldn’t be disguised. Former neutrals pointed to the discrepancy; more and more it was accepted that the Alliance was built around the Aprahanti Hegemony and perhaps had other motives than altruistic opposition to the Blight. There was nervous speculation about who might next receive Alliance attention.

  Major tranceivers still targeted the fleets. They might as well have been on a network trunk. The news traffic was a vast waterfall, totally beyond Ølvira‘s present ability to receive. Nevertheless, Svensndot kept an eye on it. Somewhere there might be some clue
, some insight… The majority of War Trackers and Threats seemed to have little interest in the Alliance or the death of Sjandra Kei, per se. Most were terrified of the Blight that was still spreading through the Top of the Beyond. None of the Highest had successfully resisted, and there were rumors that two more interfering Powers had been destroyed. There were some (secret mouths of the Blight?) who welcomed the new stability at the Top, even one based on permanent parasitization.

  In fact, the chase down here at the Bottom, the flight of the Out of Band and its pursuers, seemed the only place where the Blight was not completely triumphant. No wonder they were the subject of 10,000 messages an hour.

  The geometry of emergence was enormously favorable to Ølvira. They had been on the outskirts of the action, but now they had hours headstart on the main fleets. Glimfrelle and Tirolle were busier than they had ever been in their lives, monitoring the fleets’ emergence and establishing Ølvira‘s identity with the other vessels of Commercial Security. Until Scrits and Limmende emerged from the Slowness, Kjet Svensndot was the ranking officer of the organization. Furthermore, he was personally known to most of the commanders. Kjet had never been the admiral type; his Group Captaincy had been a reward for piloting skills, in a Sjandra Kei at peace. He had always been content to defer to his employers. But now…

  The Group Captain used his ranking status. The Alliance vessels were not pursued. (“Wait till we can all act togther,” ordered Svensndot.) Possible game plans bounced back and forth across the emerging fleet, including schemes that assumed HQ was destroyed. With certain commanders, Kjet hinted that this last might be the case, that Limmende’s flag ship was in enemy hands, and that the Alliance was somehow just a side effect of that true enemy. Very soon, Kjet would be committed to the “treason” he planned.

  The Limmende flag ships and the core of the Blighter fleet came out of the Slowness almost simultaneously. Comm alarms went off across Ølvira‘s deck as priority mail arrived and passed through the ship’s crypto. “Source: Limmende at HQ. Star Breaker Priority,” said the ship’s voice.

  Glimfrelle put the message on the main window, and Svensndot felt a chill certainty spread up his neck.

  … All units are to pursue fleeing vessels. These are the enemy, the killers of our people. WARNING: Masquerades suspected. Destroy any vessels countermanding these orders. Order of Battle and validation codes follow…

  Order of Battle was simple, even by Commercial Security standards. Limmende wanted them to split up and be gone, staying only long enough to destroy “masqueraders”. Kjet said to Glimfrelle, “How about the validation codes?”

  The Dirokime seemed his usual self again: “They’re clean. We wouldn’t be receiving the message at all unless the sender had today’s one-time pad… We’re beginning to receive queries from the others, Boss. Audio and video channels. They want to know what to do.”

  If he hadn’t prepared the ground during the last few hours, Kjet’s mutiny wouldn’t have had a chance. If Commercial Security had been a real military organization, the Limmende order might have been obeyed without question. As it was, the other commanders pondered the questions that Svensndot had raised: At these ranges, video communication was easy and the fleet had one-time ciphers large enough to support enormous amounts of it. Yet “Limmende” had chosen printed mail for her priority message. It made perfect military sense given that the encryption was correct, but it was also what Svensndot had predicted: The supposed HQ was not quite willing to show its face down here where perfect visual masquerades were not possible. Their commands would be by mail, or evocations that a sharp observer might suspect.

  Such a slender thread of reason Kjet and his friends were hanging from.

  Kjet eyed the knot of light that represented the Blighter fleet. It was suffering from no indecision. None of its vessels were straggling back toward safer heights. Whatever commanded there had discipline beyond most human militaries. It would sacrifice everything in its single-minded pursuit of one small starship. What next, Group Captain?

  Just ahead of that cold smear of light, a single tiny gleam appeared. “The Out of Band!” said Glimfrelle. “Sixty-five light-years out now.”

  “I’m getting encrypted video from them, Boss. The same half-crocked xor pad as before.” He put the signal on the main window without waiting for Kjet’s direction.

  It was Ravna Bergsndot. The background was a jumble of motion and shouting, the strange human and a Skroderider arguing. Bergsndot was facing away from the pickup, and doing her share of shouting. Things looked even worse than Kjet’s recollection of the first moments of his ship’s emergence.

  “It doesn’t matter just now, I tell you! Let him be. We’ve got to contact—” she must have seen the signal Glimfrelle was sending back to her. “They’re here! By the Powers, Pham, please—” She waved her hand angrily and turned to the camera. “Group Captain. We’re—”

  “I know. We’ve been out of the surge for hours. We’re near the center of the pursuit now.”

  She caught her breath. Even with a hundred hours of planning, events were moving too fast for her. And for me too.“That’s something,” she said after an instant. “Everything we said before holds, Group Captain. We need your help. That’s the Blight that’s coming behind us. Please!”

  Svensndot noticed a telltale by the window. Sassy Glimfrelle was retransmitting this to all the fleet they could trust. Good. He had talked about the situation with the others these last hours, but it meant something more to see Ravna Bergsndot on the comm, to see someone from Sjandra Kei who still survived and needed their help. You can spend the rest of your life chasing revenge in the Middle Beyond, but all you kill will be the vultures. What’s chasing Ravna Bergsndot may be the first cause.

  The Butterflies were long gone, still singing their courage across the Net. Less than one percent of Commercial Security had followed “Limmende’s” order to chase after them. Those were not the problem: it was the ten percent that stayed behind and arrayed themselves with the Blight’s forces that bothered Kjet Svensndot. Some of those ships might not be subverted, might simply be loyal to orders they believed. It would be very hard to fire on them.

  And there would be fighting, no doubt of that. Maneuvering for conflict while under ultradrive was difficult—if the other side attempted to evade. But Blight’s fleet was unwavering in its pursuit of the Out of Band. Slowly, slowly the two fleets were coming to occupy the same volume. At present they were scattered across cubic light-years, but with every jump, the Group Captain’s Aniara fleet was more finely tuned to the stutter of their quarries’ drives. Some ships were actually within a few hundred million kilometers of the enemy—or where the enemy had been or would be. Targeting tactics were set. First fire was only a few hundred seconds away.

  “With the Aprahanti gone, we have numerical superiority. A normal enemy would back off now—”

  “But of course, that is one thing the Blight fleet is not.” It was the red-haired guy who was doing the talking now. It was a good thing Glimfrelle hadn’t relayed his face to the rest of Svensndot’s fleet. The guy acted edgy and alien most of the time. Just now, he seemed intent on bashing every idea Svensndot advanced. “The Blight doesn’t care what its losses are as long as it arrives with the upper hand.”

  Svensndot shrugged. “Look, we’ll do our best. First fire is seventy seconds off. If they don’t have any secret advantage, we may win this one.” He looked sharply at the other. “Or is that your point? Could the Blight—” Stories were still coming down about the Blight’s progress across the Top of the Beyond. Without a doubt, it was a transhuman intelligence. An unarmed man might be outnumbered by a pack of dogs, yet still defeat them. So might the Blight…?

  Pham Nuwen shook his head. “No, no, no. The Blight’s tactics down here will probably be inferior to yours. Its great advantage is at the Top, where it can control its slaves like fingers on a hand. Its creatures down here are like badly-synched waldos.” Nuwen frowned at something off
camera. “No, what we have to fear is its strategic cleverness.” His voice suddenly had a detached quality that was more unsettling than the earlier impatience. It wasn’t the calm of someone facing up to a threat; it was more the calm of the demented. “One hundred seconds to contact… Group Captain, we have a chance, if you concentrate your forces on the right points.” Ravna floated down from the top of the picture, put one hand on the red-head’s shoulder. Godshatter, she said he was, their secret edge against the enemy. Godshatter, a Power’s dying message; garbage or treasure, who really knew?

  Damn. If the other guys are badly-synched waldoes, what does following Pham Nuwen make us? But he motioned Tirolle to mark the targets Nuwen was saying. Ninety seconds. Decision time. Kjet pointed at the red marks Tirolle had scattered through the enemy fleet. “Anything special about those targets, ‘Rolle?”

  The Dirokime whistled for a moment. Correlations popped up agonizingly slowly on the windows before him. “The ships he’s targetting aren’t the biggest or the fastest. It’s gonna take extra time to position on them.” Command vessels? “One other thing. Some of’em show high real velocities, not natural residuals at all.” Ships with ram drives? Planet busters?

  “Hm.” Svensndot looked at the display just a second more. Thirty seconds and Jo Haugen’s ship Lynsnar would be in contact, but not with one of Nuwen’s targets. “Get on the comm, Glimfrelle. Tell Lynsnar to back off, retarget.” Retarget everything.

  The lights that were Aniara fleet slid slowly around the core of the Blighter fleet, searching for their new targets. Twenty minutes passed, and not a few arguments with the other captains. Commercial Security was not built for military combat. What had made Kjet Svensndot’s appeal successful was also the cause of constant questioning and countersuggestions. And then there were the threats that came from Owner Limmende’s channel: kill the mutineers, death to all those disloyal to the company. The encryption was valid but the tone was totally alien to the mild, profit-oriented Giske Limmende. Everyone could now see that disbelieving Limmende was one correct decision, anyway.