Victory Smith now suspects network corruption.”
“Their Intelligence boss?” The news stopped Brughel for a moment. This must have happened very recently. Still, “They have less than four days. What can they do?”
Reynolt’s gaze was the usual stone thing. “They could partition their net, maybe stop using it altogether. That would stop us.”
“And also lose them the war against the Kindred.”
“Yes. Unless they could provide the Kindred with solid proof of ‘Monsters from Outer Space.’ “
And that was not bloody likely. The woman was obsessive. Ritser smiled at her frowning face.Of course. That’s how we made you.
The elevator doors had opened. The camera was giving them only one frame a second now, with low resolution. Damn.
“Yes!” That was Melin, triumphant about something.
“He’s got a relay in place.”
Suddenly the picture turned crisp and smooth. As the spylet crept out from the elevator doors, Melin turned its eyes to look down an incredibly steep set of stairs, more like a ladder really. Who knew what this area was, a loading garage? For now, the little camera hid in corners and looked out upon the Spiders. From the scale bar, he could see that the monsters were of the expected size. A grown one would come up to about Brughel’s thigh. The creatures stretched far across the ground in a low posture, just as in the library pictures retrieved before Relight. They look very little like the mental picture that the ziphead translators evoked. Did they wear clothes? Not like humans. The monsters were swathed with things that looked like banners with buttons. Huge panniers hung from the sides of many of them. They moved in quick, sinister jerks, their bladelike forelegs cutting this way and that before them. There was a crowd here, chitinous black except for the mismatched colors of their clothing. Their heads glittered as with large flat gemstones. Spider eyes. And as for the Spider mouth—there the translators had used the proper word:maw. A fanged depth surround by tiny claws—was that what Bonsol & Co. called “eating hands”?—that seemed to be in constant, writhing motion.
Massed together, the Spiders were more a nightmare than he’d imagined, the sort of things you crush and crush and crush and still more of them come at you. Ritser sucked in a breath. One comforting thought was that—if all went well—in just under four days, these particular monsters would be dead.
For the first time in forty years, a starship would fly across the OnOff system. It would be a very short hop, less than two million kilometers, scarcely a remooring by civilized standards. It was very nearly the most that any of the surviving starships could manage.
Jau Xin had supervised the flight prep of theInvisible Hand. TheHand had always been Ritser Brughel’s portable fiefdom, but Jau knew it was also the only starship that had not been wholly cannibalized over the years.
In the days before their “passengers” embarked, Jau had drained the L1 distillery of hydrogen. It was just a few thousand tonnes, a droplet in the million-tonne capacity of the ramscoop’s primer tanks, but enough to slide them across the gap between L1 and the Spider world.
Jau and Pham Trinli made a final inspection of the starship’s drive throat. It was always strange, looking at that two-meter narrowness. Here the forces of hell had burned for decades, driving the Qeng Ho vessel up to thirty-percent lightspeed. The internal surface was micrometer smooth. The only evidence of its fiery past was the fractal pattern of gold and silver that glittered in the light of their suit lamps. It was the micronet of processors behind those walls that actually guided the fields, but if the throat wall cavitated while under way, the fastest processors in the universe wouldn’t save them. True to form, Trinli made a big deal of his laser-metric inspection, then was contemptuous of the results. “There’s ninety-micron swale on the port side—but what the hell. There’s no new pitting. You could carve your name in the walls here, and it wouldn’t make any difference on this flight. What are you planning, a couple hundred Ksecs at fractional gee?”
“Um. We’ll start with a long gentle push, but the braking burn will be a thousand seconds at a little more than one gravity.” They wouldn’t brake till they were low over open ocean. Anything else would light Arachna’s sky brighter than the sun, and be seen by every Spider on the near side of the planet.
Trinli waved his hand in an airy gesture of dismissal. “Don’t worry about it. Many times, I’ve taken bigger chances with in-system flight.” They crawled out the bow side of the throat; the smooth surface widened into the beginnings of the forward field projectors. All the while, Trinli continued with his bogus stories. No. Most of the stories could be true, but abstracted from all the real adventurers the old man had ever known. Trinli did know something about ship drives. The tragedy was that they didn’t have anyone who knew much more. All the Qeng Ho flight engineers had been killed in the original fighting—and the pod’s last ziphead engineer had fallen to mindrot runaway.
They emerged from the bow end of theHand and climbed a mooring strand back to their taxi. Trinli paused and turned. “I envy you, Jau my boy. Take a look at your ship! Almost a million tonnes dryweight! You won’t be going far, but you’ll be bringing theHand to the treasure and the Customers it sailed fifty light-years to find.”
Jau followed his broad gesture. Over the years, Jau had realized that Trinli’s theatrics were a cover… but sometimes they reached out and plucked at your soul. TheInvisible Hand looked quite starworthy, hundred meter after hundred meter of curving hull sweeping off into the distance, streamlined for speeds and environments at the limit of all human accomplishment. And beyond the stern rings—1.5 million kilometers beyond—the disk of Arachna showed pale and dim.A First Contact, and I will bethe Pilot Manager. Jau should have been a proud man….
Jau’s last day before departure was busy, filled with final checks and provisioning. There would be more than a hundred zipheads and staff. Jau didn’t learn just which specialties were represented, but it was obvious that the Podmasters wanted to manipulate the Spiders’ networks intensively, without the ten-second time delay of L1 operations. That was reasonable. Saving the Spiders from themselves would involve some incredible frauds, perhaps the taking over of entire strategic weapons systems.
Jau was coming off his shift when Kal Omo appeared at Xin’s little office just off theHand’ s bridge.
“One more job, Pilot Manager.” Omo’s narrow face broke into a humorless grin. “Call it overtime.”
They took a taxi down to the rockpile, but not to Hammerfest. Around the arc of Diamond One, embedded in ice and diamond, was the entrance to L1-A. Two other taxis were already moored by the arsenal’s lock.
“You’ve studied theHand’ s weapon fittings, Pilot Manager?”
“Yes.” Xin had studied everything about theHand, except Brughel’s private quarters. “But surely a Qeng Ho would be more familiar—”
Omo shook his head. “This isn’t appropriate work for a Peddler, not even Mr. Trinli.” It took some seconds to get through the main lock security, but once inside they had a clear passage into the weapons area. Here they were confronted by the noise of fitting machines and cutters. The squat ovoids racked along the walls were marked with the weapons glyph—the ancient Qeng Ho symbol for nukes and directed-energy weapons. For years, the gossip had speculated just how much survived at L1-A. Now Jau could see for himself.
Omo led him down a crawl line past unmarked cabinets. There was no consensual imagery in L1-A. And this was one of the few places left at L1 that did not use the Qeng Ho localizers. The automation here was simple and foolproof. They passed Rei Ciret, supervising a gang of zipheads in the construction of some kind of launch rack. “We’ll be moving most of these weapons to theInvisible Hand, Mr. Xin. Over the years we’ve cobbled together parts, tried to make as many deliverable devices as possible. We’ve done the best we could, but without depot facilities, that’s not a hell of a lot.” He waved at what looked like Qeng Ho drive units mated to Emergent tactical nukes. “Count ’em. Eighteen short-range nukes. In the cabinets we have the guts of a dozen weapon lasers.”
“I—I don’t understand, Podsergeant. You’re an armsmen. You have your own specialists. What need is there for—”
“—For a Pilot Manager to be concerned with such things?” Again the humorless smile. “To save the Spider civilization, it’s entirely possible that we’ll have to use these things, from theInvisible Hand in low orbit. The fitting and engagement sequences will be very important to your pilots.”
Xin nodded. He’d been over some of this. The most likely start of a planet-killer war was the current crisis at the Spiders’ south pole. After they arrived, they’d be in position over that site every fifty-three hundred seconds, with near-constant coverage from smaller vehicles. Tomas Nau had already announced about the lasers. As for the nukes… maybe they could help with bluffing.
