Zones of Thought Trilogy

by Vernor Vinge

  In less than forty seconds, they had run four thousand meters, all the way around the sunside of the jumble. That would have been a good piece of free space rappelling even if the sun had not been blowing up, even if they hadn’t been wrapped in silver foil. They’d almost lost Pham Patil. A fast rappel depended on knowing exactly where to put your next ground spike, exactly how much force the piton could take when you accelerated out from the surface along your cable. But their surveys of the pile had all been done for placing the stationkeeping jets. There just hadn’t been an excuse to test the rappel points. Patil had been swinging out at nearly half a gee when his ground spike slipped free. He’d have floated out forever if Tsufe and Jimmy hadn’t been securely tied down. A few seconds more and the direct sunlight would have fried them right through their makeshift shields.

  But it worked! They were on the opposite side of the starships from where the bastards would expect visitors. While everyone’s eyes had been on the sun, and blinded by that, they had gotten in position.

  They hunkered down just short of the Treasure’s mooring point. The ship towered six hundred meters above them, so close that all they could see was part of the throat and the forward primer tanks. But from all their careful spying, they knew this was the least damaged of all the Qeng Ho ships. And inside was equipment—and more important, people—who could take back freedom.

  All was in shadow, but now the coma of gases had spread high. Reflected light softened the dark. Jimmy and the others shed their silver covers and thermal outerwear. It felt suddenly chill wearing just full-pressure coveralls and hood. They slipped from hiding place to hiding place, dragging their tools and improvised guns, and trying to keep it all out of the light from the glowing sky. It can’t get any brighter, can it? But his time display said that less than one hundred seconds had passed since Relight. They were perhaps another hundred seconds short of maximum brightness.

  The three floated up the moorage pilings, the maw of Treasure’s throat growing huge above them. One nice thing about sneaking aboard something as massive as a ramscoop, there wasn’t much worry that their movement would bob the vehicle around. There would be a maintenance crew aboard the Treasure. But would they expect armed visitors in the middle of all this? They had thought and thought on those risks, and there was no way to make them better. But if they took the ship, they would have one of the best remaining pieces of equipment, real weapons, and the surviving Qeng Ho armsmen. They would have a chance of ending the nightmare.

  Now there was sunlight coming through the raw face of the diamond rock! Jimmy paused for an instant to stare, bug-eyed. Even this high up, there were at least three hundred meters of solid diamond between them and the naked light of OnOff. Yet that was not enough. Scattered off a million fracture planes, bounced and diminished and diffused and diffracted, some of OnOff’s light made it through. The light was a glitter of rainbows, a thousand tiny sun-disks glowing from everywhere across the face of the rock. And every second it grew brighter, until he could see structure within the mountain, could see fracture and cleavage planes that extended hundreds of meters into diamond. And still the light got brighter.

  So much for slipping by in the dark. Jimmy shut down his imagination and dashed upward. From the ground, the rim hatch was a tiny pucker at the edge of the ramscoop’s maw, but as he ascended it became larger and larger, and centered over his head. He waved Do and Patil to either side of the hatch. The Emergents had reprogrammed the hatch, of course, but they hadn’t replaced the physical mechanism as they had aboard the temp. Tsufe had snooped the passcode with binoculars, and their own gloves would be accepted as matching keys. How many guards would they face? We can take them. I know we can. He reached up to tap on the hatch control, and—

  Someone pinged him.

  “Jimmy, Jimmy! Can you hear me?” The voice was tiny in his ear. A telltale claimed it was the decryption of a laser burst from the roof of the Emergent hab. But the voice was Pham Trinli’s.

  Jimmy froze. Worst case: the enemy was toying with him. Best case: Pham Trinli had guessed they were going after the Far Treasure and now was screwing up worse than anyone could have imagined. Ignore the fool, and if you live, beat the crap out of him. Jimmy glanced at the sky above Hammerfest. The coma was pale violet, slowly roiling in the light of OnOff. In space, a laser link is very hard to detect. But this was no longer ordinary space. It was more like a cometary surface at close passage. If the Emergents knew where to look they could probably see Trinli’s link.

  Jimmy’s reply was a millisecond compression flung back in the direction of the other’s beam. “Turn that off, you old shit. Now!”

  “Soon. First: They know about the plan. They saw through your black crypto.” It was Trinli, and yet different. And Trinli had never been told about the crypto. “This is a setup, Jimmy. But they don’t know everything. Back off. Whatever they’ve got planned inside the Treasure will only make things worse.”

  Lord. For a moment, Jimmy just froze. Thoughts of failure and death had haunted his every sleep since the ambush. To get this far, they had taken a thousand deadly risks. He had accepted that they might be discovered. But never had he thought it would happen like this. What the old fool had found might be important; it might be worthless. And backing down now would be nearly a worst-case outcome. It’s just too late.

  Jimmy forced his mouth to open, his lips to speak. “I said, close down the link!” He turned back to the Treasure’s hull and tapped the Emergent passcode on the hatch. A second passed—and then the clamshells parted. Do and Patil dove upward into the dimness of the airlock. Diem paused just a second, slapped a small gadget onto the hull beside the door, and followed them up.

  TWELVE

  Pham Trinli shut down the link. He flipped and climbed rapidly back along the cleft. So we were suckered. Tomas Nau was too clever by half, and he had some strange kind of edge. Trinli had seen a hundred ops, some smaller than this, some that lasted for centuries. But he had never seen the sort of precise fanatical attention to detail that he had seen in those snoop logs the Emergents kept on the black crypto. Nau had either magic software or teams of monomaniacs. In the back of his mind, the planner in him was wondering what it could be and how Pham Trinli might someday take advantage of it.

  For now, survival was the only issue. If Diem would only back off from the Treasure, the trap Nau planned might not close or might not be so deadly.

  The sheer diamond face on his left was sparkling now, the largest gemstone of all time shining sunlight all round him. Ahead, the light was almost as brilliant, a dazzling nimbus where icy peaks stood in OnOff’s light. The silver sunshield was billowing high, tied down in only three places.

  Abruptly, Pham’s hands and knees were kicked out from under him. He spun out from the path, caught himself by one hand. And through that hand he could hear the mountains groan. Mist spewed out from the cleft all along its length—and the diamond mountain moved. It was less than a centimeter per second, stately, but it moved. Pham could see light all along the opening. He had seen the crew’s rock maps. Diamonds One and Two abutted each other along a common plane. The Emergent engineers had used the valley above as a convenient placement anchor for part of the ice and snow from Arachna. All very sensible…and not well enough modeled. Some of the volatiles had slipped between the two mountains. The light reflecting back and forth between One and Two had found that ice and air. Now the boil-off was pushing Diamonds One and Two apart. What had been hundreds of meters of shielding was now a jagged break, a million mirrors. The light shining through was a rainbow from hell.

  “One hundred forty-five kilowatts per square meter.”

  “That’s the top of the spike,” someone said. OnOff was shining more than a hundred times as bright as standard solar. It was following the track of its previous lightings, though this was brighter than most. OnOff would stay this bright for another ten thousand seconds, then drop back steeply to just over two solars, where it would stay for some years.
>
  There was no triumphant shouting. The last few hundred seconds, the crowd in the temp had been almost silent. At first, Qiwi had been totally involved with her own anger at being kicked indoors. But she had quieted as one and then another of the silver canopy’s ties had broken, and the ice had been touched by direct sunlight. “I told Jimmy that wouldn’t hold.” But she didn’t sound angry anymore. The light show was beautiful, but the damage was far more than they had planned. Outgassing streamers were visible on all sides—and there was no way their pitiful electric jets could counter that. It would be Msecs before they got the, rockpile gentled down again.

  Then, at four hundred seconds into the Relight, the canopy tore free. It lifted slowly, twisting in the violet sky. There was no sign of the crewfolk who should have been sheltering under it. Worried murmuring grew. Nau did something with his cuff, and his voice was suddenly loud enough to be heard across the room. “Don’t worry. They had several hundred seconds to see the canopy was going, plenty of time to move down into the shadow.”

  Qiwi nodded, but she said quietly to Ezr. “If they didn’t fall off. I don’t know why they were up there in the first place.” If they had fallen off, drifted out into the sunlight…Even with thermal jackets, they’d just cook.

  He felt a small hand slip into his. Does the Brat even know she did that? But after a second he squeezed her hand gently. Qiwi was staring out at the main work site. “I should be out there.” It was the same thing Qiwi had been saying since she came indoors, but now her tone was quite different.

  Then the outside views jittered, as if something had hit all the cameras at once. The light leaking through the naked face of Diamond Two brightened into a jagged line. And now there was sound, a moan that grew louder and louder, its pitch scaling first up and then down.

  “Podmaster!” The voice was loud and insistent, not the robotlike reporting of the Emergent techs. It was Ritser Brughel. “Diamond Two is shifting, lifting off—” And now it was obvious. The whole mountain was tilting. Billions of tonnes, loose.

  And the moaning sound that still filled the auditorium must be the moorage webbing, twisting beneath the temp.

  “We’re not in its way, sir.” Ezr could see that now. The immensity was moving slowly, slowly, but its slide was away from the temp and Hammerfest and the moored starships. The view outside had slowly rotated, now was turning back. Everyone in the auditorium was scrambling for tie-downs.

  Hammerfest was built into Diamond One. The big rock looked unchanged, unmoved. The starships beyond…They were minnows beside the bulk of the Diamonds, but each ship was over six hundred meters long, a million tonnes unfueled. And the ships were swaying slowly at the end of their mooring points on Diamond One. It was a dance of leviathans, and a dance that would totally wreck them if it continued.

  “Podmaster!” Brughel again. “I’m getting audio from the crewleader, Diem.”

  “Well put him on!”

  It was dark above the airlock. The lights did not come on, and there was no atmosphere. Diem and the others floated up the tunnel from the lock, their hood lights flickering this way and that. They looked out from the tunnels into empty rooms, into rooms with partitions blasted away, gutted fifty meters deep. This was supposed to be the undamaged ship. A coldness grew inside Diem. The enemy had come in after the battle and sucked it dry, left a dead hulk.

  Behind him, Tsufe said, “Jimmy, the Treasure is moving.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a solid contact with the wall here. Sounds like it’s twisting on its mooring point.”

  Diem reached out from the ladderline and pressed his hood against the wall. Yes. If there had been atmosphere, the place would be full of the sounds of ringing destruction. So the Relight was causing more shifting than anyone had guessed. A day ago that knowledge would have terrorized. Now…“I don’t think it matters, Tsufe. Come on.” He led Do and Patil still faster up the ladderline. So Pham Trinli had been right, and the plan was doomed. But one way or another, he was going to discover what had been done to them. And just maybe he could get the truth out to the others.

  The interior locks had been ripped out and vacuum extended to every room. They floated up past what should have been repair bays and workshops, past deep holes that should have held the ram’s startup injectors.

  High abaft, in the shielded heart of the Far Treasure that was where the sickbay had been, that was where there should be coldsleep tanks. Now…Jimmy and the others moved sideways through the shielding. When their hands touched the walls, they could hear the creaking of the hull, feel its slow motion. So far, the close-tethered starships had not collided—though Jimmy wasn’t sure if they could really know that. The ships were so large, so massive, if they collided at a few centimeters per second the hulls would just slide into each other with scarcely a jolt.

  They had reached the entrance to the sickbay. Where the Emergents claimed to hold the surviving armsmen.

  More emptiness? Another lie?

  Jimmy slipped through the door. Their head lamps flickered around the room.

  Tsufe Do cried out.

  Not empty. Bodies. He swept his light about, and everywhere…the coldsleep boxes had been removed, but the room was…filled with corpses. Diem pulled the lamp from his head and stuck it to an open patch of wall. Their shadows still danced and twisted, but now he could see it all.

  “Th-they’re all dead, aren’t they?” Pham Patil’s voice was dreamy, the question simply an expression of horror.

  Diem moved among the dead. They were neatly stacked. Hundreds, but in a small volume. He recognized some armsmen. Qiwi’s mom. Only a few showed violent decompression damage. When did the rest die? Some of the faces were peaceful, but others—He stopped, frozen by a pair of glittering dead eyes that stared out at him. The face was emaciated; there were frozen bruises across the forehead. This one had lived some time after the ambush. And Jimmy recognized the face.

  Tsufe came across the room, her shadow skittering across the horror. “That’s one of the Trilanders, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. One of the geologists, I think.” One of the academics supposedly being held on Hammerfest. Diem moved back toward the light he had set on the wall. How many were here? The bodies stretched off into the dimness beyond where once there had been walls. Did they kill everyone? Nausea clawed its way up his throat.

  Patil had floated motionless since that first inane question. But Tsufe was shaking, her voice going from dullness to a giddy wavering. “We thought they had so many hostages. And all the time they had nothing but deaders.” She laughed, high-pitched. “But it didn’t matter, did it? We believed, and that served them as well as the truth.”

  “Maybe not.” And suddenly the nausea was gone. The trap had been sprung. No doubt, he and Tsufe and Patil would die very soon. But if they lived even seconds, perhaps the monsters could be unmasked. He pulled an audio box from his coveralls, found a clean piece of wall to make contact. Another banned I/O device. Death is the penalty for possession. Yeah. Yeah. But now he could talk the length of the Treasure, to the broadcaster he had left at the rim airlock. The nearside of the temp would be bathed in his message. Embedded utilities would detect it. Surely some would respond to its priority, would squirt the message to where Qeng Ho would hear it.

  And Jimmy began talking. “Qeng Ho! Listen! I’m aboard the Far Treasure. It’s gutted. They’ve killed everyone we thought was here…”

  Ezr—everyone in the temp’s auditorium—waited a silent second as Ritser Brughel set up the connection. Then Jimmy began talking:

  “Qeng Ho! Listen! I’m—”

  “Crewleader!” Tomas Nau interrupted. “Are you all right? We can’t see you outside.”

  Jimmy laughed. “That’s because I’m aboard the Far Treasure.”

  The look on Nau’s face was puzzled. “I don’t understand. The Treasure’s crew hasn’t reported—”

  “Of course they haven’t.” Ezr could almost hear the smile behind Jimmy’s words. “You see, Far Tr
easure is a Qeng Ho vessel and now we’ve taken it back!”

  Shock and joy spread across the faces Ezr could see. So that was the plan! A working starship, perhaps with its original weapons. The main Emergent sickbay, the armsmen and senior crew who survived the ambush. We have a chance now!

  Tomas Nau seemed to realize the same. His puzzled expression changed to an angry, frightened scowl. “Brughel?” He said to the air.

  “Podmaster, I think he’s telling the truth. He’s on the Treasure’s maintenance channel, and I can’t raise anyone else there.”

  The power graph in the main window hovered just under 145kW/m^. The light reflected between One and Two was beginning to boil snow and ice in the shadows. Thousand- and hundred-thousand-tonne boulders of ore and ice were shifting in the clefts between the great diamonds. The motion was almost imperceptible, a few centimeters per second. But some of the boulders were now floating free. However slow-moving, they could destroy whatever human work they collided with.

  Nau stared out the window for a couple of seconds. When he spoke his voice seemed more intense than commanding: “Look, Diem. It can’t work. The Relight is causing a lot more damage than anyone could have known—”

  A harsh laugh came from the other end of the connection. “Anyone? Not really. We retuned the stationkeeping network to shake things up a bit. Whatever instabilities there were, we gave them an extra nudge.”

  Qiwi’s hand tightened on Ezr’s. The girl’s eyes were wide with surprise. And Ezr felt a little sick. The stationkeeping grid couldn’t have done much one way or another, but why make things worse?

  Around them, people with full-press coveralls and hoods were zipping up; others were diving out the doors of the auditorium. A huge ore boulder floated just a hundred meters off. It was rising slowly, its top dazzling in direct sunlight. It would just miss the top of the temp.

  “But, but—” For a moment the glib Podmaster seemed speechless. “Your own people could die! And we’ve taken the weapons off the Treasure. It’s our hospital ship, for God’s sake!”