A Fire Upon the Deep (47 page)

"My Lady Ravna," he said, the words stilted and formal.
After all, I'm suggesting treason.
"I, uh, I've got a number of friends in the Commercial Security fleet. I can check on the suspicions you've raised, and ..."
say it!
"it's possible we can give you support in spite of my HQ."

"Thank you, sir. Thank you."

Glimfrelle broke the silence. "We're getting a poor signal on the
Out of Band
's channel now."

Kjet eyes swept the windows. All the ultratrace displays looked like random noise. Whatever this storm was, it was bad.

"Looks like we won't be talking much longer, Ravna Bergsndot."

"Yes. We're losing signal.... Group Captain, if none of this works, if you can't fight for us.... Your people are all that's left of Sjandra Kei. It's been good to see you and the Dirokimes.... after so long to see familiar faces, people I really understand. I --" as she spoke, her image square-blurred into low-frequency components.

"
Huui!
" said Glimfrelle. "Bandwidth just dropped through the floor." There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the
Out of Band
. Given communications problems, the ship's processors just switched to low-rate coding.

"Hello,
Out of Band
. We've got problems on this channel now. Suggest we sign off."

The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it:

Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. "Zip. Zero," he said. "No detectable signal."

Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. "This is a lot more than a communications problem. Our computers haven't been able to commit on an ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds." They had been doing five jumps a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now....

Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. "Hei -- so welcome to the Slow Zone."

The Slow Zone. Ravna Bergsndot looked across the deck of the
Out of Band II
. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always had a vision of the Slowness as a stifling darkness lit at best by torches, the domain of cretins and mechanical calculators. In fact, things didn't look much different from before. The ceilings and walls glowed just as before. The stars still shone through the windows (only now, it might be a
very
long time before any of them moved).

It was on the
OOB
's other displays that the change was most obvious. The ultratrace tank blinked monotonously, a red legend displaying elapsed time since the last update. Navigation windows were filled with output from the diagnostics exercising the drive processors. An audible message in Triskweline was repeating over and over, "Warning. Transition to Slowness detected. Execute back jump at once! Warning. Transition to Slowness detected. Execute...."

"Turn that off!" Ravna grabbed a saddle and strapped herself down. She was actually feeling dizzy, though that could only be (a very natural) panic. "Some bottom lugger this is. We run right into the Slow Zone, and all it can do is spout warnings after the fact!"

Greenstalk drifted closer, "tiptoeing" off the ceiling with her tendrils. "Even bottom luggers can't avoid things like this, My Lady Ravna"

Pham said something at the ship and most of the displays cleared.

Blueshell: "Even a huge Zone storm doesn't normally extend more than a few light-years. We were two hundred light-years above the Zone boundary. What hit us must be a monster surge, the sort of thing you only read about in archives."

Small consolation. "We knew something like this could happen," Pham said. "Things have been getting awfully rough the last few weeks." For a change,
he
didn't seem too upset.

"Yes," she said. "We expected a slowing maybe, but not The Slowness."
We are trapped.
"Where's the nearest habitable system? Ten light-years? Fifty?" The vision of darkness had a new reality, and the starscape beyond the ship's walls was no longer a friendly, steadying thing. Surrounded by unending nothingness, moving at some vanishing fraction of the speed of light ... entombed. All the courage of Kjet Svensndot and his fleet, for nothing. Jefri Olsndot, forever unrescued.

Pham's hand touched her shoulder, the first touch in ... days? "We can still make it to the Tines' world. This is a bottom lugger, remember? We are not trapped. Hell, the ramscoop on this buggy is better than anything I ever had in the Qeng Ho. And I thought I was the freest man in the universe back then."

Decades of travel time, mostly in coldsleep. Such had been the world of the Qeng Ho, the world of Pham's memories. Ravna let out a shuddering breath that ended in weak laughter. For Pham, the terrible pressure was abated, at least temporarily. He could be human.

"What's so funny?" said Pham.

She shook her head. "All of us. Never mind." She took a couple of slow breaths. "Okay. I think I can make rational conversation. So the Zone has surged. Something that normally takes a thousand years -- even in a storm -- to move a single light-year, has suddenly shifted two hundred. Hunh! There'll be people a million years from now reading about this in the archives. I'm not sure I want the honor.... We knew there was a storm, but I never expected to be drowned," buried light-years deep beneath the sea.

"The sea storm analogy is not perfect," said Blueshell. The Skroderider was still on the far side of the deck, where he had retreated after questioning the Sjandra Kei captain. He still looked upset, though he was back to sounding precise and picky. Blueshell was studying a nav display, evidently a recording from right before the surge. He dumped the picture to a display flat and rolled slowly across the ceiling toward them. Greenstalk's fronds brushed him gently as he passed.

He sailed the display flat into Ravna's hands, and continued in a lecturing tone. "Even in a sea storm, the water's surface is never as roiled as in a big interface disturbance. The most recent News reports showed it as a fractal surface with dimension close to three.... Like foam and spray." Even he could not avoid the storm analogy. The starscapes hung serene beyond crystal walls, and the loudest sound was a faint breeze from the ship's ventilators. Yet they had been swallowed in a maelstrom. Blueshell waved a frond at the display flat. "We could be back in the Beyond in a few hours."

"What?"

"See. The plane of the display is determined by the positions of the supposed Sjandra Kei command vessel, the outflying craft that we contacted directly, and ourselves." The three formed a narrow triangle, the Limmende and Svensndot vertices close together. "I've marked the times that contact was lost with the others. Notice: the link to Commercial Security HQ went down 150 seconds before we were hit. From the incoming signal and its requests for protocol changes, I believe that
both
we and the outflyer were enveloped and at about the same time."

Pham nodded. "Yeah. The most distant sites losing contact last. That must mean the surge moved in from the side."

"Exactly!" From his perch on the ceiling, Blueshell reached to tap the display. "The three ships were like probes in the standard Zone mapping technique. Replaying the trace displays will no doubt confirm the conclusion."

Ravna looked at the plot. The long point of the triangle -- tipped by the
OOB
-- pointed almost directly toward the heart of the galaxy. "It must have been a huge, clifflike thing perpendicular to the rest of the surface."

"A monster wave sweeping sideways!" said Greenstalk. "And that's also why it won't last long."

"Yes. It's the radial changes that are most often long term. This thing must have a trailing edge. We should pass through it in a few hours -- and back into the Beyond."

So there was still a race to be won or lost.

The first hours were strange. "A few hours," had been Blueshell's estimate of when they would be back in the Beyond. They hung around the bridge, alternately watching the clock and stewing about the strange conversations just completed. Pham was building himself back to trigger tension. Any time now, they would be back in the Beyond. What to do then? If only a few ships were perverted, perhaps Svensndot could still coordinate an attack. Would that do any good? Pham played the ultratrace recordings over and over, studying every detectable ship in all the fleets. "But when we get out, when we get out ... I'll know what to do. Not
why
I must do it, but what." And he couldn't explain more.

Any time now.... There was scarcely any reason to do much about resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.

But after eight hours: "It really could be longer, even a day." They had been scrounging around in the historical literature. "Maybe we should do a little housekeeping." The
Out of Band II
had been designed for both the Beyond and the Slowness, but that second environment was regarded as an unlikely, emergency one. There were special-purpose processors for the Slow Zone, but they hadn't come up automatically. With Blueshell's advice, Pham took the high-performance automation off-line; that wasn't too difficult, except for a couple of voice-actuated independents that were no longer bright enough to understand the quitting commands.

Using the new automation gave Ravna a chill that, in a subtle way, was almost as frightening as the original loss of the ultradrive. Her image of the Slowness as darkness and torchlight -- that was just nightmare fantasy. On the other hand, the Slowness as the domain of cretins and mechanical calculators, there was something to that. The
OOB
's performance had degraded steadily during their voyage to the Bottom, but now ... Gone were the voice-driven graphics generators; they were just a bit too complex to be supported by the new
OOB
, at least in full interpretive mode. Gone were the intelligent context analyzers that made the ship's library almost as accessible as one's own memories. Eventually, Ravna even turned off the art and music units; without mood and context response, they seemed so wooden ... constant reminders that there were no brains behind them. Even the simplest things were corrupted. Take voice and gesture controls: They no longer responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang. It took a certain
discipline
to use them effectively. (Pham actually seemed to like this. It reminded him of the Qeng Ho.)

Twenty hours. Fifty. Everyone was still telling each other there was nothing to worry about. But now Blueshell said that talk of "hours" had been unrealistic. Considering the height of the "tsunami" (at least two hundred light-years), it would likely be several hundred light-years across -- that in keeping with the scaling laws of historical precedent. There was only one trouble with this reasoning: they were beyond all precedent. For the most part, zone boundaries followed galactic mean density. There was virtually no change from year to year, just the aeons' long shrinkage that might someday -- after the death of all but the smallest stars -- expose the galactic core to the Beyond. At any given time, perhaps one billionth of that boundary might qualify as being in a "storm state". In an ordinary storm, the surface might move in or out a light-year in a decade or so. Such storms were common enough to affect the fortunes of many worlds every year.

Much rarer -- perhaps once in a hundred thousand years in the whole galaxy -- there would be a storm where the boundary became seriously distorted, and where surges might move at a high multiple of light speed.
These
were the transverse surges that Pham and Blueshell made their scale estimates from. The fastest moved at about a light-year per second, across a distance of less than three lights; the largest were thirty light-years high and moved at scarcely a light-year per day.

So what was known of monsters like the thing that had engulfed them? Not much. Third-hand stories in the Ship's library told of surges perhaps as big as theirs, but the quoted dimensions and propagation rates were not clear. Stories more than a hundred million years old are hard to trust; there are scarcely any intermediate languages. (And even if there were, it wouldn't have helped. The new, dumb version of the
OOB
absolutely could not do mechanical translation of natural languages. Dredging the library was pointless.)

When Ravna complained about this to Pham, he said, "Things could be worse. What was the Ur-Partition really?"

Five billion years ago. "No one's sure."

Pham jerked a thumb at his library display. "Some people think it was a 'super supersurge', you know. Something so big it swallowed the races that might have recorded it. Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all -- no one's around to write horror stories."

Great.

"I'm sorry, Ravna. Honestly, if we're in anything like most past disasters, we'll come out of it in another day or two. The best thing is to
plan
for things that way. This is like a 'time-out' in the battle. Take advantage of it to have a little peace. Figure out how to get the unperverted parts of Commercial Security to help us."

"... Yeah." Depending on the shape of the surge's trailing edge the
OOB
might have lost a good part of its lead....
But I'll bet the Alliance fleet is completely panicked by all this.
Such opportunists would likely run for safety as soon as they're back in the Beyond.

The advice kept her busy for another twenty hours, fighting with the half-witted things that claimed to be strategy planners on the new version of the
OOB
. Even if the surge passed right this instant, it might be too late. There were players in this game for whom the surge was not a time-out: Jefri Olsndot and his Tinish allies. It had been seventy hours now since their last contact; Ravna had missed three comm sessions with them. If
she
were panicked, what must be like for Jefri? Even if Steel could hold off his enemies, time -- and trust -- would be running out at Tines' world.

One hundred hours into the surge, Ravna noticed that Blueshell and Pham were doing power tests on the
OOB
's ramscoop drive.... Some time-outs last forever.