A Fire Upon the Deep (32 page)

There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups. Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that way.

Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a single loudmouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they do after all?"

Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began....
By the Powers,
I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than she realized. Now....

On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."

Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to look like anything human."

And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded? Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if necessary.

Pham Nuwen checked what they did -- and found more than one slip-up. For a barbarian programmer, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more sophisticated than what he had known.

Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the
OOB
was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an
elegance
to the refit that screamed of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it.

RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check and no boarding.
OOB
hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and "Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta be honest, right?")

Out of Band
was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet. The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet. Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides, hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects -- structures? -- sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt, and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred kilometers across ... but there appeared to be thousands of them.

At "Saint Rihndell's" direction they brought the ship down to the ring plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. "Just like old,
old
times," Pham Nuwen said.

In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of icy froth -- gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In the plane of the rings, they couldn't see more than a few hundred meters. The debris blocked further views. And it wasn't all loose. Greenstalk pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. "Looks like a single structure," she said.

Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the "frothy snowballs" sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks long.... The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with images from their approach, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time Nyjoran railway.

Over the next hour, they moved carefully in to dock at the ring arc. The only thing regular about the structure was its linearity. Some of the modules were clearly designed for linking fore and aft. Others were jumbled heaps of oddball equipment meshed in dirty ice. The last few kilometers, they drifted through a forest of ultradrive spines. Two thirds of the berths were occupied.

Blueshell opened a window on Saint Rihndell's business specs. "Hmm. Hm. Sir Rihndell seems extraordinarily busy." He angled some fronds back at the ships in the exterior view.

Pham: "Maybe he's running a junkyard."

Blueshell and Greenstalk went down to the cargo lock to prepare for their first trip ashore. The Skroderiders had been together for two hundred years, and Blueshell came from a star trader tradition before that. Yet the two argued back and forth about the best approach to take with "Saint Rihndell".

"Of course, Harmonious Repose is typical, dear Blueshell; I would remember the type even if I'd never ridden a Skrode. But
our
business here is not like anything we've done before."

Blueshell grumped wordlessly, and pushed another trade packet under his cargo scarf. The scarf was more than pretty. The material was tough, elastic stuff that protected what it covered.

This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly, there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it came to renting bandwidth -- or maybe it was simply cautious.

Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was encrypted.

"Yes."

The Skroderiders passed through
OOB
's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc habitat.

From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view, but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like food in a slow tidal surge.

The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment, one such drifted out from the wall near the
OOB
's lock. It buzzed something that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk, "The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs -- evolved from flippers or jaws or whatever -- were all very good for movement on land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.

The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going? What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.

Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller.... helper creatures those are.... allies of big new customer..." Their guide's limited speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important questions:
What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I persuade you to part with it?
Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and ability.

It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore articulated pressure suits -- the force-field suits of the High Beyond would last only a few weeks down here.

They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration ... but she doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.

Greenstalk had visited eight ring system civilizations in her life. They were a common consequence of accidents and wars (and occasionally, of deliberate habitat design). According to
OOB
's library, Harmonious Repose had been a normal planetary system up till ten million years ago. Then there'd been a real estate dispute: A young race from Below had thought to colonize and exterminate the moribund inhabitants. The attack had been a miscalculation, for the moribund could still kill and the system was reduced to rubble. Perhaps the young race survived. But after ten million years, if there were any of those young killers left they would now be the most frail of the systems' elder races. Perhaps a thousand new races had passed through in that time, and almost every one had done something to tailor the rings and the gas cloud left from the debacle. What was left was not a ruin at all, but old ... old. The ship's library claimed that no race had transcended from Harmonious Repose in a thousand years. That fact was more important than all the others. The current civilizations were in their twilight, refining mediocrity. More than anything else, the system had the feel of an old and beautiful tide pool, groomed and tended, shielded from the exciting waves that might upset its bansai plumes. Most likely the tusk-legs were the liveliest species about, perhaps the only one interested in trade with the outside.

Their car slowed and spiraled into a small tower.

"By the Fleet, what I wouldn't give to be out there with them!" Pham Nuwen waved at the views coming in from the skrode cameras. Ever since the Riders left, he'd been at the windows, alternately gaping wide-eyed at the ringscape and bouncing abstractedly between the command deck's floor and ceiling. Ravna had never seen him so absorbed, so intense. However fraudulent his memories of trading days, he truly thought he could make a difference.
And he may be right.

Pham came down from the ceiling, pulled close to the screen. It looked like serious bargaining was about to begin. The Skroderiders had arrived in a spherical room perhaps fifty meters across. Apparently they were floating near the center of it. A forest grew inward from all directions, and the Riders seemed to float just a few meters from the tree tops. Here and there between the branches, they could see the ground, a mosaic of flowers.

Saint Rihndell's sales creatures were scattered all about the tallest trees. They sat(?) with their ivory limbs twined about the tree tops. Tusk-leg races were a common thing in the galaxy, but these were the first Ravna had known. The body plan was totally unlike anything from home, and even now she didn't have a clear idea of their appearance. Sitting in the trees, their legs had more of the aspect of a skeletal fingers grasping around the trunk. Their chief rep -- who claimed to be Saint Rihndell itself -- had scrimshaw covering two-thirds of its ivory. Two of the windows showed the carving close up; Pham seemed to think that understanding the artwork might be useful.

Progress was slow. Triskweline was the common language, but good interpreting devices didn't work this deep in the Beyond, and Saint Rihndell's folk were only marginally familiar with the trade talk. Ravna was used to clean translations. Even the Net messages she dealt with were usually intelligible (though sometimes misleadingly so).

They'd been talking for twenty minutes and had only just established that Saint Rihndell might have the ability to repair
OOB
. It was the usual Riderly driftiness, and something more. The tedium seemed to please Pham Nuwen, "Rav, this is almost like a Qeng Ho operation, face to face with critters and scarcely a common language."

"We sent them a description of our repair problem hours ago. Why should it take so long for a simple yes or no?"

"Because they're haggling," said Pham, his grin broadening. "'Honest' Saint Rihndell here --" he waved at the scrimshawed local, "-- wants to convince us just how hard the job is.... Lord I wish I was out there."

Even Blueshell and Greenstalk seemed a little strange now. Their Triskweline was stripped down, barely more complex than Saint Rihndell's. And much of the discussion seemed very round about. Working for Vrinimi, Ravna had had some experience with sales and trading. But
haggling?
You had your pricing data bases and strategy support, and directions from Grondr's people. You either had a deal or you didn't. What was going on between the Riders and Saint Rihndell was one of the more alien things Ravna had ever seen.

"Actually, things are going pretty well ... I think. You saw when we arrived, the bone legs took away Blueshell's samples. By now they know precisely what we have. There's something in those samples that they want.

"Yeah?"

"Sure. Saint Rihndell isn't bad-mouthing our stuff for his health."

"Damn it, it's possible we don't have anything on board they could want. This was never intended to be a trade expedition." Blueshell and Greenstalk had scavenged "product samples" from the ship's supplies, things that the
OOB
could survive without. These included sensoria and some Low Beyond computer gear. Some of that would be a serious loss.
But one way or another, we need those repairs.

Pham chuckled. "No. There's something there Saint Rihndell wants. Otherwise he wouldn't still be jawing.... And see how he keeps needling us about his 'other customers' needs'? Saint Rihndell is a human kind of a guy."

Something like human song came over the link to the Riders. Ravna phased Greenstalk's cameras toward the sound. From the forest "floor" on the far side of Blueshell, three new creatures had appeared.

"Why ... they're beautiful. Butterflies," said Ravna.

"Huh?"

"I mean they look like butterflies. You know? Um. Insects with large colored wings."

Giant butterflies, actually. The newcomers had a generally humanoid body plan. They were about 150 centimeters tall and covered with soft-looking brown fur. Their wings sprouted from behind their shoulder blades. At full spread they were almost two meters across, soft blues and yellows, some more intricately patterned than others. Surely they were artificial, or a gengineered affectation; they would have been useless for flying about in any reasonable gravity. But here in zero-gee.... The three floated at the entrance for just a moment, their huge, soft eyes looking up at the Riders. Then they swept their wings in measured sweeps, and drifted gracefully into the air above the forest. The entire effect was like something out of a children's video. They had pert, button noses, like pet jorakorns, and eyes as wide and bashful as any human animator ever drew. Their voices sounded like youngsters singing.

Saint Rihndell and his buddies sidled around their tree tops. The tallest visitor sang on, its wings gently flexing. After a moment, Ravna realized it was speaking fluent Trisk with a front end adapted to the creature's natural speech:

"Saint Rihndell, greetings! Our ships are ready for your repairs. We have made fair payment, and we are in a great hurry. Your work must begin at once!" Saint Rihndell's Trisk specialist translated the speech for his boss.

Ravna leaned across Pham's back. "So maybe our friendly repairman really is overbooked," she said.

"... Yeah."

Saint Rihndell came back around his treetop. His little arms picked at the green needles as he made a reply. "Honored Customers. You made offer of payment, not fully accepted. What you ask is in short supply, difficult to ... do."

The cuddly butterfly made a squeaking noise that might have passed for joyous laughter in a human child. The sense behind its singing was different: "Times are changing, Rihndell creature! Your people must learn: We will not be stymied. You know my fleet's sacred mission. We count every passing hour against you. Think on the fleet you will face if your lack of cooperation is ever known -- is ever even
suspected
." There was a sweep of blue and yellow wings, and the butterfly turned. Its dark, bashful eyes rested on the Riders. "And these potted plants, they are customers? Dismiss them. Till we are gone, you have no other customers."

Ravna sucked in a breath. The three had no visible weapons, but she was suddenly afraid for Blueshell and Greenstalk.

"Well, what do you know," Pham said. "Butterflies in jackboots."

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