first. And they had not persuaded a single member of the Trading Committee. Even after meeting the Emergents face-to-face, the committee couldn’t recognize the other side’s certain treachery. Instead, they asked a Vinh to decide for them. AVinh !
Trinli coasted down empty corridors, slowed to a stop by the taxi lock, and popped the hatch on the one he had specially prepared.I could askLisolet to mutiny. The Deputy Fleet Captain had her own command, the QHSInvisible Hand . A mutiny was physically possible, and once she started shooting, Sammy and the others would surely have to join her.
He slipped into the taxi, started the lock pumps.No, I wash my handsof all of them. Somewhere at the back of his skull, a little headache was growing. Tension didn’t usually affect him this way. He shook his head. Okay, the truth was, he wasn’t asking Lisolet to mutiny, because she was one of those very rare people who had honor. So, he would do the best with what he had. Sammyhad brought weapons. Trinli grinned, anticipating the time ahead.Even if the other side strikes first, I wager we’re the last menstanding. As his taxi drifted out from the Qeng Ho flagship, Trinli studied the threat updates, planning. What would the other side try? If they waited long enough, he might yet figure out Sammy’s weapons locks… and be his own one-man mutiny.
There were plenty of signs of the treachery abuilding, but even Pham Trinli missed the most blatant. You had to guess the method of attack to recognize that one.
Ezr Vinh was quite ignorant of military developments overhead. The Ksecs spent on the surface had been hard, fascinating work, work that didn’t leave much time to pursue suspicions. In all his life, he had spent only a few dozen Msecs walking around on the surface of planets. Despite exercise and Qeng Ho medicine, he was feeling the strain. The first Ksecs had seemed relatively easy, but now every muscle ached. Fortunately, he wasn’t the only wimp. The whole crew seemed to be dragging. Final cleanup was an eternity of careful checking that they had left no garbage, that any signs of their presence would be lost in the effects of OnOff’s relighting. Crewleader Diem twisted his ankle on the climb back to the lander. Without the freight winch on the lander, the rest of the climb would have been impossible. When they finally got aboard, even stripping off and stowing their thermal jackets was a pain.
“Lord.” Benny collapsed on the rack next to Vinh. There were groans from all along the aisle as the lander boosted them skyward. Still, Vinh felt a quiet glow of satisfaction; the fleet had learned far more from their one landing than anyone expected. Theirs was a righteous fatigue.
There was little chitchat among Diem’s crewmembers now. The sound of the lander’s torch was an almost subsonic drone that seemed to originate in their bones and grow outward. Vinh could still hear public conversations from on high, but Trixia was out of it. No one was talking to Diem’s people now. Correction: Qiwi was trying to talk to him, but Ezr was just too tired to humor the Brat.
Over the curve of the world, the heavy lifting was behind schedule. Clean nukes had broken up several million tonnes of frozen ocean, but steam above the extraction site was complicating the remainder of the job. The Emergent, Brughel, was complaining that they had lost contact with one of their lifters.
“I think it’s your angle of view, sir,” came the voice of a Qeng Ho tech. “We can see all of them. Three are still at the surface; one is heavily obscured by the local haze, but it looks well positioned. Three more are in ascent, clean lifts, well separated…. One moment….” Seconds passed. On a more “distant” channel, a voice was talking about some sort of medical problem; apparently someone had committed a zero-gee barf. Then the flight controller was back: “That’s strange. We’ve lost our view of the East Coast operation.”
Brughel, his voice sharpening: “Surely you have secondaries?”
The Qeng Ho tech did not reply.
A third voice: “We just got an EM pulse. I thought you people were done with your surface blasting?”
“We are!” Brughel was indignant.
“Well we just got three more pulses. I—Yessir!”
EM pulses? Vinh struggled to sit up, but the acceleration was too much, and suddenly his head hurt even more than ever.Say something more, damnit! But the fellow who just said “yessir”—a Qeng Ho armsman by the sound of him—was off the air, or more likely had changed mode and encrypted himself.
The Emergent’s voice was clipped and angry: “I want to talk to someone in authority.Now. We know targeting lasers when they shine on us! Turn them off or we’ll all regret it.”
Ezr’s head-up display went clear, and he was looking at the lander’s bulkheads. The wallpaper backup flickered on, but the video was some random emergency-procedures sequence.
“Shit!” It was Jimmy Diem. At the front of the cabin, the crewleader was pounding on a command console. Somewhere behind Vinh there was the sound of vomiting. It was like one of those nightmares where everything goes nuts at once.
At that instant, the lander reached end-of-burn. In the space of three seconds, the terrible pressure eased off Vinh’s chest and there was the comforting familiarity of zero gee. He pulled on his couch release and coasted forward to Diem.
From the ceiling it was easy to stand with his head by Diem’s and see the emergency displays, without getting in the crewleader’s way. “We’re really shooting at them?” Lord, but my head hurts! When he tried to read Diem’s command console, the glyphs swam before his eyes.
Diem turned his head a fraction to look at Ezr. Agony was clear in his face; he could barely move. “I don’t know what we’re doing. I’ve lost consensual imaging. Tie yourself down….” He leaned forward as though to focus on the display. “The fleet net has gone hard crypto, and we’re stuck at the least secure level,” which meant that they would get little information beyond direct commands from Park’s armsmen.
The ceiling gave Vinh a solid whack on the butt, and he started to slide toward the back of the cabin. The lander was turning, some kind of emergency override—the autopilot had given no warning. Most likely, fleet command was prepping them for another burn. He tied down behind Diem, just as the lander’s main torch lit off at about a tenth of a gee. “They’re moving us to a lower orbit… but I don’t see anything coming to rendezvous,” said Diem. He poked awkwardly at the password field beneath the display. “Okay, I’m doing my own snooping…. I hope Park isn’t too pissed….”
Behind them, there was the sound of more vomiting. Diem started to turn his head, winced. “You’re the mobile one, Vinh. Take care of that.”
Ezr slid down the aisle’s ladderline, letting the one-tenth-gee load do the moving for him. Qeng Ho lived their lives under varying accelerations. Medicine and good breeding made orientation sickness a rare thing among them. But Tsufe Do and Pham Patil had both upchucked, and Benny Wen was curled up as far as his ties would permit. He held the sides of his head and swayed in apparent agony. “The pressure, the pressure…”
Vinh eased next to Patil and Do, gently vac’d the goo that was dribbling down their coveralls. Tsufe looked up at him, embarrassment in her eyes. “Never barfed in my life.”
“It’s not you,” said Vinh, and tried to think past the pain that squeezed harder and harder.Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could it take so long tounderstand? It was not the Qeng Ho that was attacking the Emergents; somehow it was quite the reverse.
Suddenly he could see outside again. “I got local consensus,” Diem’s voice came in his earphones. The crewleader’s words came in short, tortured bursts. “Five high-gee bombs from Emergent positions…. Target: Park’s flag….”
Vinh leaned across the row of couches and looked out. The missiles’ jets were pointing away from the lander’s viewpoint; the five were faint stars moving faster and faster across the sky, closing on the QHSPham Nuwen. Yet their paths were not smooth arcs. There were sharp bends and wobbles.
“We must be lasing at them. They’re jinking.”
One of the tiny lights vanished. “We got one! We—”
Four points of light blazed in the sky. The brightness grew and grew, a thousand times brighter than the faded disk of the sun.
Then the view was gone again. The cabin lights died, winked back on, died again. The bottommost emergency system came online. There was a faint network of reddish lines, outlining equipment bays, airlock, the emergency console. The system was rad-hardened but very simpleminded and low-powered. There wasn’t even backup video.
“What about Park’s flagship, Crewleader?” asked Vinh. Four close-set detonations, so terribly bright—the corners of a regular tetrahedron, clasping its victim. The view was gone but it would burn in his memory forever.
