by Vernor Vinge
“But…it should be the King that goes for something like this.”
“Yes. It seems that a number of traditions are being broken in this new Dark.”
“You can’t go, ma’am.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, something chuckled at the violation of noncom etiquette.
“You aren’t the only person with that advice… The last thing Strut Greenval said to me, not two hundred yards from where we’re sitting now, was something similar.” She stopped, silent with memories. “Funny. Strut had so much figured out. He knew I’d end up on his perch. He knew there would be temptations to get into the field. Those first decades of the Bright, there were a dozen times when I know I could have fixed things—even saved lives—if I’d just go out and do what was necessary myself. But Greenval’s advice was more like an order, and I followed it, and lived to fight another day.” Abruptly she laughed, and her attention seemed to come back to the present. “And now I’m a rather old lady, hunkered down in a web of deceit. And it’s finally time to break Strut’s rule.”
“Ma’am, General Greenval’s advice is right as ever. Your place is here.”
“I…let this mess happen. It was my decision, my necessary decision. But if I go to Southmost now, there’s a chance I can save some lives.”
“But if you fail, then you die and we certainly lose!”
“No. If I die things will be bloodier, but we’ll still prevail.” She snapped her desk displays closed. “We leave in three hours, from Courier Launch Four. Be there.”
Hrunkner almost shrieked his frustration. “At least take special security. Young Victory and—”
“The Lighthill team?” A faint smile showed. “Their reputation has spread, has it?”
Hrunkner couldn’t help smiling back. “Y-yes. No one knows quite what they’re up to…but they seem to be as wacko as we ever were.” There were stories. Some good, some bad, all wild.
“You don’t really hate them, do you, Hrunk?” There was wonder in her voice. Smith went on. “They have other, more important things to do during the next seventy-five hours… Sherkaner and I created the present situation by conscious choice, over many years. We knew the risks. Now it’s payoff time.”
It was the first she had mentioned Sherkaner since he’d entered the room. The collaboration that had brought them so far had broken, and now the General had only herself.
The question was pointless, but he had to ask. “Have you talked to Sherk about this? What is he doing?”
Smith was silent, but her look was closed. Then, “The best he can, Sergeant. The best he can.”
The night was clear even by the standards of Paradise. Obret Nethering walked carefully around the tower at the island’s summit, checking the equipment for tonight’s session. His heated leggings and jacket weren’t especially bulky, but if his air warmer broke, or if the power cord that trailed behind him was severed…Well, it wasn’t a lie when he told his assistants that they could freeze off an arm or a leg or a lung in a matter of minutes. It was five years into the Dark. He wondered if even in the Great War there had been people awake this late.
Nethering paused in his inspection; after all, he was a little ahead of schedule. He stood in the cold stillness and looked out upon his specialty—the heavens. Twenty years ago, when he was just starting at Princeton, Nethering had wanted to be a geologist. Geology was the father science, and in this generation it was more important than ever, what with all mega-excavations and heavy mining. Astronomy, on the other hand, was the domain of fringe cranks. The natural orientation of sensible people must be downward, planning for the safest deepness in which to survive the next Darkness. What was there to see in the sky? The sun certainly, the source of all life and all problems. But beyond that nothing changed. The stars were such tiny constant things, not at all like the sun or anything else one could relate to.
Then, in his sophomore year, Nethering had met old Sherkaner Underhill, and his life was changed forever—though, in that, Nethering was not unique. There were ten thousand sophomores, yet somehow Underhill could still reach out to individuals. Or maybe it was the other way around: Underhill was such a blazing source of crazy ideas that certain students gathered round him like woodsfairies round a flame. Underhill claimed that all of math and physics had suffered because no one understood the simplicity of the world’s orbit about the sun or the intrinsic motions of the stars. If there had been even one other planet to play mind games with—why, the calculus might have been invented ten generations ago instead of two. And this generation’s mad explosion of technology might have been spread more peaceably across multiple cycles of Bright and Dark.
Of course, Underhill’s claims about science weren’t entirely original. Five generations ago, with the invention of the telescope, binary star astronomy had revolutionized Spiderkind’s understanding of time. But Underhill brought the old ideas together in such marvelous new ways. Young Nethering had been drawn further and further away from safe and sane geology, until the Emptiness Above became his love. The more you realized what the stars really were, the more you realized what the universe must really be. And nowadays, all the colors could be seen in the sky if one knew where to look, and with what instruments. Here on Paradise Island, the far-red of the stars shone clearer than anywhere in the world. With the large telescopes being built nowadays, and the dry stillness of the upper air, sometimes he felt like he could see to the end of the universe.
Huh? Low above the northeast horizon, a narrow feather of aurora was spreading south. There was a permanent loop of magnetism over the North Sea, but with the Dark five years old, auroras were very rare. Down in Paradise Town, what tourists were left must be oohing and aahing at the show. For Obret Nethering, this was just an unexpected inconvenience. He watched a second more, beginning to wonder. The light was awfully cohesive, especially at the northern end, where it narrowed almost to a point. Huh. If it did wreck tonight’s session, maybe they should just fire up the far-blue scope and take a close look at it. Serendipity and all that.
Nethering turned back from the parapet and headed for the stairs. There was a loud rattle and bang that might have been a troop of one hundred combateers coming up the stairs—but was more likely Shepry Tripper and his four hiking boots. A moment passed, and his assistant bounced out onto the open. Shepry was just fifteen years old, about as far out-of-phase as a child could be. There had been a time when Nethering couldn’t imagine talking to, much less working with, such an abomination. That was another thing that had changed for him at Princeton. Now—well, Shepry was still a child, ignorant of so many things. But there was something starkly strong about his enthusiasm. Nethering wondered how many years of research were wasted at the end of Waning Years because the youngest researchers were already in early middle age, starting families, and too dulled to bring intensity to their work.
“Dr. Nethering! Sir!” Shepry’s voice came muffled by his air warmer. The boy was gasping, losing whatever time his dash up the stairs had gained him. “Big trouble. I’ve lost the radio link with North Point”—five miles away, the other end of the interferometer. “There’s blooming static all across the bands.”
So nothing would be left of his plans for tonight. “Did you call Sam on the ground line? What—” He stopped, Shepry’s words slowly sinking in: static all across the bands. Behind him the strange auroral “spike” moved steadily southward. Irritation merged silently into fear. Obret Nethering knew the world was teetering on the edge of war. Everyone knew that. Civilization could be destroyed in a matter of hours if the bombs started falling. Even out-of-the-way places like Paradise Island might not be safe. And that light? It was fading now, the bright point vanished. A nuke burst in the magnetopatch might look like aurora, but surely not so asymmetrical and not with such a long rise time. Hmm. Or maybe some clever physics types had built something more subtle than a simple nuclear bomb. Curiosity and horror skirmished in Nethering’s head.
He turned and dragged Shepry back toward the
stairs. Slow down. How many times had he given Shepry that advice? “Step by step, Shepry, and watch your power cord for snags. Is the radar array up tonight?”
“Y-yes.” Shepry’s heavy boots clomped down the stairs just behind him. “But the log will just be noise.”
“Maybe.” Bouncing microwaves off ionization trails was one of the minor projects that Nethering and Tripper managed. Almost all the reflections could be tied to returning satellite junk, but every year or so they’d see something they couldn’t explain, a mystery from the Great Empty. He’d almost gotten a research article out of that. Then the damn reviewers—the ubiquitous T. Lurksalot—ran their own programs, and didn’t buy his conclusions. Tonight there would be another use for the array. The pointed end of the strange light—what if it were a physical object?
“Shepry, are we still on the net?” Their high-rate connection was optical fiber strung across the ocean ice; he’d intended to use mainland supercomputers to guide tonight’s run. Now—
“I’ll check.”
Nethering laughed. “We may have something interesting to show Princeton!” He poked up the radar log, began scanning. Was it Nature or War that was talking to them tonight? Either way, the message was important.
FIFTY
Nowadays, flying made Hrunkner Unnerby feel very old. He remembered when piston engines spun wood propellers, and wings were fabric on wood.
And Victory Smith’s aircraft was no ordinary executive jet: They were flying at nearly one hundred thousand feet, moving south at three times the speed of sound. The two engines were almost silent, just a high thready tone that seemed to bury itself in your guts. Outside, the star- and sunlight together were just bright enough so colors could be seen in the clouds below. Deck upon deck, the clouds layered the world. From this altitude, even the highest of the clouds seemed to be low, crouching things. Here and there canyons opened in the air, and they glimpsed ice and snow. In a few more minutes they would reach the Southern Straits and pass out of Accord airspace. The flight communications officer said there was a squadron of Accord fighter craft all around them, that they would be in place all the way to the embassy airfield at Southmost. The only evidence Unnerby saw for the claim was an occasional glint in the sky above them. Sigh. Like everything important nowadays, they moved too fast and too far to be seen by mere mortals.
General Smith’s private craft was actually a supersonic recon bomber, the sort of thing that was becoming obsolete with the advent of satellites. “Air Defense practically gave it to us,” Smith had remarked when they came on board. “All this will be junk when the air begins to snow out.” There would be a whole new transportation industry then. Ballistic vehicles, maybe? Antigravity floaters? Maybe it didn’t matter. If their current mission didn’t work out, there might not be any industry at all, just endless fighting among the ruins.
The center of the fuselage was filled with rack on rack of computer and communications gear. Unnerby had seen the laser and microwave pods when they came aboard. The flight techs were plugged into the Accord’s military net almost as securely as if they’d been back at Lands Command. There were no stewards on this flight. Unnerby and General Smith were strapped into small perches that seemed awfully hard after the first couple of hours. Still, he was probably more comfortable than the combateers hanging on nets in the back of the aircraft. A ten-squad; that was all the General had for bodyguards.
Victory Smith had been quiet and busy. Her assistant, Tim Downing, had carried all her computer gear aboard: heavy, awkward boxes that must be very powerful, very well shielded, or very obsolete. For the last three hours she had sat surrounded by half a dozen screens, their light glittering faintly off her eyes. Hrunkner wondered what she was seeing. Her military networks combined with all the open nets must give her an almost godlike view.
Unnerby’s display showed the latest report on the Southmost underground construction. Some of it was lies—but he knew enough of the original designs to guess the truth. For the nth time, he forced his attention back to the reading. Strange; when he was young, back in the Great War, he could concentrate just like the General was now. But today, his mind kept flitting forward, to a situation and a catastrophe that he couldn’t see any way around.
Out over the Straits now; from this altitude, the broken sea ice was an intricate mosaic of cracks.
There was a shout from one of the comm techs. “Wow! Did you see that?”
Hrunkner hadn’t seen a damn thing.
“Yes! I’m still up though. Check it out.”
“Yes, sir.”
On their perches ahead of Unnerby, the techs crouched over their displays, tapping and poking. Lights flickered around them, but Unnerby couldn’t read the words on their screens—and the display format wasn’t anything he’d trained on.
Behind him, he saw that Victory Smith had risen off her perch and was watching intently. Apparently her gear was not linked with the techs’. Huh. So much for the “godlike view” he’d been imagining.
After a moment she raised a hand, signaled one of them. The fellow called back to her. “It looks like somebody went nuclear, ma’am.”
“Hm,” said Smith. Unnerby’s display hadn’t even flickered.
“It was very far away, probably over the North Sea. Here, I’ll set up a slave window for you.”
“And for Sergeant Unnerby, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The Southmost report in front of Hrunkner suddenly was replaced by a map of the North Coast. Colored contours spread concentrically about point twelve hundred kilometers northeast of Paradise Island. Yes, the old Tiefer refueling depot, a useless chunk of seamount except when you wanted to project force across ice. That was far away, almost the other side of the world from where they were right now.
“Just one blast?” said Smith.
“Yes, very high up. A pulse attack…except that it wasn’t more than a megaton. We’re building this map off satellites and ground analysis from the North Coast and Princeton.” Legends scattered across the picture, bibliographic pointers to the network sites that contributed to the analysis. Hah. There was even an eyewitness report from Paradise Island—an academic observatory, according to the code.
“What did we lose?”
“No military losses, ma’am. Two commercial satellites are offline, but that may be temporary. This was barely a jab.”
What then? A test? A warning? Unnerby stared at the display.
Jau Xin had been here less than a year before, but that had been on a six-man pinnace, sneaking in and out in less than a day. Today he managed the piloting of the Invisible Hand, a million tonnes of starship.
This was the true arrival of the conquerors—even if those conquerors were duped into thinking they were rescuers. Next to Jau, Ritser Brughel sat in what had once been a Peddler Captain’s seat. The Podmaster spouted an unending stream of trivial orders—you’d think he was trying to manage the pilots himself. They’d come in over Arachna’s north pole, skirting the atmosphere, decelerating in a single strong burn, nearly a thousand seconds at better than one gee. The decel had been over open ocean, far from Spider population centers, but it must have been enormously bright to those few who saw it. Jau could see the glow reflected in the ice and snow below.
Brughel watched the icy waste rolling out before them. His features were pursed with some intense feeling. Disgust, to see so much that looked totally worthless? Triumph, to arrive on the world that he would corule? Probably both. And here on the bridge, both triumph and violent intent leaked into his tone, sometimes even his words. Tomas Nau might have to keep the fraud going back on L1, but here Ritser Brughel was shedding his restraint. Jau had seen the corridors that led to Brughel’s private quarters. The walls were a constant swirl of pink, sensuous in a heavy, threatening way. No staff meetings were held down those corridors. On the way from L1, he heard Brughel brag to Podcorporal Anlang about the special treat he would bring out of the freezer to celebrate the coming victory. No, don’t think on
it. You know too much already.
The voices of Xin’s pilots spoke in his ear, confirming what he already saw on his tracking display. He looked up at Brughel and spoke with the formality the other seemed to like. “The burn is complete, sir. We’re in polar orbit, altitude one hundred fifty kilometers.” Any lower and they would need snowshoes.
“We were visible across thousands of kilometers, sir.” Xin matched his words with a concerned look. He’d been playing naive idiot on the trip down from L1. It was a dangerous game, but so far it had given him some leeway. And maybe, maybe there is some way I can avoid mass murder.
Brughel grinned back smug superiority. “Of course we were seen, Mr. Xin. The trick is to let them see—and then corrupt how they interpret the information.” He opened the comm channel to the Hand’s ziphead deck. “Mr. Phuong! Have you cloaked our arrival?”
Bil Phuong’s voice came back from the Hand’s ziphead hold. The place had been a madhouse the last time Jau looked, but Phuong sounded cool: “We’re on top of the situation, Podmaster. I’ve got three teams synthesizing satellite reports. L1 tells me they look good.” That would be Rita’s team talking to Bil. She should be going off duty any moment now, for what Nau would probably claim was a rest break before the heavy work. Jau had known for a day that that “lull” was when the killing would begin.
Phuong continued, “I must warn you, sir. Eventually the Spiders will sort things out. Our disguise won’t last for more than a hundred Ksec, less if someone down there is clever.”
“Thank you, Mr. Phuong. That should be more than enough.” Brughel smiled blandly at Jau.
Part of their horizon-spanning view disappeared, replaced by Tomas Nau back on L1. The senior Podmaster was sitting with Ezr Vinh and Pham Trinli in the lodge in Lake Park. Sunlight sparkled on the water behind them. This would be a public two-way conversation, visible to all the Followers and Qeng Ho. Nau looked out across the Hand’s bridge and his gaze seemed to find Ritser Brughel.
