highest levels, but still, millions had died in the long, slow crushing. Pham’s teams worked their way downward, to the second-level supertrams. He had comm with the other landings now. The people of Tarelsk were only a few years removed from the highest technology and best education in all Human Space.They understood the disaster; for the most part,they understood what their mad governance did not. But they were helpless before the systems that this last set of rulers used against them.
In his headset, Pham could hear another ship’s landing party, thirty kilometers away. They had run into ubiquitous law enforcement. “Everything is working here, sir—against us. I lost fifteen of my people at the tram station.”
“No help for it, Dav. You have pulse bombs. Use ’em, and then flood the utility cores with our automation.”
Sammy’s party was slipping farther and farther away from Pham’s. They had climbed through the same rents in hull metal, but at every turning, Sammy was going the other way. At first it didn’t matter. Comm through the walls was still easy, and the separation made them a more dispersed target… but hell, Sammy was already two klicks down-east from him. Pham’s party was surrounded by locals now, and some claimed to be utility system managers, people who could show them where to try for overrides. “Wait up, Sammy!”
The field link could support only low-rate video, so Pham couldn’t see what Sammy’s team was up to. But they were moving still farther away. After a moment: “Pham! We’ve broken through the rubble into… a university campus. There’s a blowout, and—” A still-pic from Sammy’s group popped up in Pham’s huds. There was a parklike lawn, at least several dozen locals running toward the camera—none of them wearing pressure suits. But up near the ceiling, dust and loose papers swirled. The audio feed was full of the high-pitched whistle of a substantial leak.
A second still-pic was mostly formed, this showing Sammy’s men at work with industrial patching equipment. The large crowd was coming out of nowhere, some of them children—the place must be one of those inverse towers. Sammy’s voice was back on the comm. “These are my people, Pham!”
Pham remembered that the Tarelsk side of Sammy Park’s family had been academics.Damn. “Don’t get sidetracked, Sammy. This place has more floorspace than all the cities on an average planet. The chances are zero we came down next to—”
“Not zero…” His voice broke in and out of audibility. “…didn’t tell you, seemed like a small thing. I made sureFar Regard would end up near the Polytech.”
Double damn.
“Look, we can save them, Pham! But more—they’ve been waiting for us…. Some of Sura’s people are here. Between them, they’ve got the core utility plans… and some of the new regime’s software changes. Pham, they think they know where the screwballs are holed up!”
Maybe it was a good thing that Sammy had had his own agenda; as ground combateers, the Qeng Ho pretty much stank. But with the core utility plans, they had a good fix on the governance and its control net.
Ten Ksec later, Pham had a comm link with the madmen who called themselves governance: a half-dozen red-eyed, panicky people. Their leader wore a uniform that might once have been from park maintenance. They were an endpoint of civilization.
“There’s nothing you can do but make things worse,” Pham told them.
“Nonsense. We have Tarelsk. We’ve wiped you and the gluttons at Maresk. We have more than enough resources to make Tarelsk self-sufficient. With you gone, we will bring a new order.” And then the video wavered and faded; Pham never knew if the break was deliberate or just the fractured comm system.
It didn’t matter. The conversation had lasted long enough to identify the intermediate nodes. And Pham Nuwen’s forces had hardware and software that was outside the heredity of Namqem. With their equipment and the help of the local population, the mad governance couldn’t survive more than a few more Ksecs.
When it was gone, the hardest work of the Rescue began.
THIRTY-NINE
The Qeng Ho Grand Meeting was held 20Msec later. Namqem solar system was still a disaster area. Alqin was mostly empty, its people camped on Namqem world, but not starving. Maresk, the smallest moon, was a radioactive wreck; rebuilding it would be the work of centuries. Almost a billion people had died there. But the last food shipment had been saved, the outer system agri automation restarted, and there was enough food for the two billion survivors on Tarelsk. The automation of Namqem had been trashed, and was operating at perhaps ten percent of its pre-debacle efficiency. The people of Namqem system who had survived till now would live to rebuild. There would be no extinction, no dark age. The survivors’ grandchildren would wonder at the terror of this time.
But there still was no civilized venue for the Grand Meeting. Pham and Sura stuck by the original decision. The Meeting would be out in Brisgo Gap, the most deserted place in the middle system. At least there was no destruction to look upon there, no local problems to solve. From Brisgo Gap, Namqem world and its three moons were just a blue-green disk and three spots of light.
Sura Vinh used the last of her asteroid resources to build the Grand Meeting temp. Pham had hoped that she would be impressed by the success that the Qeng Ho Plan had had. “We saved the civilization, Sura. Surely you believe me now. We can be more than furtive traders.”
But Sura Vinh was so old now. At the dawn of civilization, medical science had promised immortality. In the early millennia, progress had been rapid. Two hundred years of life, even three hundred, were achieved. After that, each advance was less impressive and more costly. And so Humankind had gradually lost another of its naive dreams. Coldsleep might postpone death for thousands of years, but even with the best medical support, you couldn’t expect much more than five hundred years of real lifetime. It was the ultimate limit on one man’s reach. And getting near that limit took an awful toll.
Sura’s powered chair was more like a mobile hospital ward than a piece of furniture. Her arms twitched up, weak even in zero gee. “No, Pham,” she said. Her eyes were clear and green as ever, surely transplants or artificial. Her voice was more obviously synthetic, but Pham could hear the familiar smile in it. “The Grand Meeting must decide, remember? We’ve never agreed on your plans. The point of coming together was to put the issue to a vote.”
That was what Sura had said ever since the earliest centuries, when she’d realized that Pham would never give up his dream. Oh, Sura, I don’t want to hurt you, but if my view must explicitly win over yours, so be it.
The temp that Sura towed into the middle of Brisgo Gap was enormous, even by the standards of her pre- debacle holdings. The starships of all the surviving fleets could moor at it, and Sura provided security extending out more than two million kilometers beyond the Gap.
The temp’s central volume was a zero-gee meeting hall. It was probably the grandest in history, large beyond all practical use. For Msecs before the Meeting itself, there was socializing, the largest single meeting of Traders there had ever been, probably the largest that would ever be. Pham took every Ksec he could from the rescue schedules to participate. Every day, he was making more contacts, interacting more than he could in a century of his life until now. Somehow he had to convert the doubters. And there were so many of them. They were basically decent, but so cautious and clever. Many of them were his own descendants. Their admiration—even their affection—seemed sincere, but he was never sure how many he had really convinced. Pham realized that he was edgier than he had ever been in combat, or even in hard trading.Never mind, he told himself. He had waited all his life for this. Small wonder that he should be nervous when the final test was just Msecs away.
The last Msecs before the Meeting were a frantic rearrangement of schedules. Namqem solar system still lacked decent automation. There would probably be a decade more during which outside help would be necessary to keep things from backsliding, to make sure that no more opportunists surfaced. But Pham wanted his own people at the Meeting. And Sura didn’t play games with his wish. Together, they set up a scheme that would bring all Pham’s people to the temp, and still not put the new governance of Namqem at risk.
And finally, Pham’s time came. His one, greatest opportunity to make things work. He looked out past the veil of the entrance curtains, at the sweep of the hall. Sura had just finished her introduction of Pham and was
