Qiwi Lisolet glared at the window that showed the insulation canopy and Jimmy Diem’s work crew. Her look had been dark and scowly ever since she flew into the auditorium. Ezr could guess what had happened… and he was relieved. Jimmy had used an innocent fourteen-year-old as camouflage for the plot. But Jimmy had never been an absolute hardass. He had taken a chance to get the girl out of harm’s way.But I bet Qiwiwon’t forgive him, even when she knows the truth.
“Wave front to arrive in ten seconds.”
Stillno change in the view from the microsat. Only a mild red glow peeked between the sliding clouds. Either “old faithful” had played a cosmic joke on them, or this was an absolute knife-edge of an effect.
“Relight.”
In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk. The low-altitude view had vanished sometime during that spread. The light got brighter and brighter andbrighter. A soft, awed sigh spread around the room. The light cast shadows on the opposite wall before the wallpaper damped its output.
“Five seconds after Relight.” The voice must be automatic. “We’re up to seven kilowatts per square meter.” This was a different tech, speaking in a flat Trilander accent.Not an Emergent? The question flickered past Ezr’s attention, swamped for the moment by the rest of the action.
“Ten seconds after Relight.” At the side of the room was a smaller window, a view of the Spider world. It had been dark and dim as ever, but now the light was coming back from it and the planetary disk glowed with its own brightness as ice and air woke to a sun that was already five times as bright as Sol standard. And still brightening:
“Twenty kilowatts per square meter.” A strip graph was playing out below the image of the new sun, comparing its output with the historical record. This Relight looked as powerful as any before.
“Neutron flux is still below detectable limits.”
Nau and Vinh exchanged relieved looks, for once sincere on both sides.That was the sort of danger that couldn’t be detected from interstellar distances, and one of the oldentimes fly-throughs had failed at about this point. At least they wouldn’t fry in radiation that no one had seen from afar.
“Thirty seconds after Relight.”
“Fifty kilowatts per square meter.”
Outside, the mountainside that shielded them from the sun was beginning toglow.
Pham Trinli had the public audio channel playing. Even without it, Relight would have been obvious. But for the moment he held those events in a small part of his mind and concentrated on what was going over the private links out of Hammerfest. It was at moments like this, when technicians were overwhelmed by externalities, that security was most likely to slip. If Diem was on schedule, he and his crew were now at the mooring point of theFar Treasure.
Trinli’s eyes flickered across the half-dozen displays that now filled most of his hood’s view space. His fleet net programs were doing a good job with the telemetry.Ha. You can’t beat old trapdoors. Now that they needed lots of computing power, the Emergents were using more and more Qeng Ho automation, and Trinli’s snooping was correspondingly more effective.
The signal strength faded. Alignment drift? Trinli cleared several display windows and looked at the world around him. The OnOff star was hidden behind the mountains, but its light glared off the hills that stuck up into its view. Where ice or airsnow was exposed, vapor steamed out. For the moment, Jimmy’s silver canopy was holding, but the fabric slowly swayed and flapped. There was an almost bluish color to the sky now, the mists of thousands of tonnes of water and air boiling up, turning the rockpile into a comet.
And screwing up his line of sight on Hammerfest. Trinli wiggled his antenna. Losing the link couldn’t have been the mists alone. Something had shifted.There. He was picking up Hammerfest’s traffic again. After a second his crypto resynchronized and he was back in business. But now he kept an eye on the storm around him. The new sun was even more of a show than they had expected.
Trinli’s network feelers were inside Hammerfest now. Every program had its exceptional circumstances, the situations that the designers assumed were outside the scope of their responsibility. There were loopholes that the present extremities had shaken open….
Strange. There seemed to be dozens of users logged into system internals. And there were big sections of the Emergent system that he didn’t recognize, that weren’t built on the common foundations. But the Emergents were supposed to be ordinary Chumps, recently returned to high technology with the help of the Qeng Ho broadcast net. There was just too much strange stuff here. He dipped into the voice traffic. The Emergent Nese was understandable but clipped and full of jargon. “…Diem… around front of rocks… according to plan.”
According to plan?
Trinli scanned related data streams, saw graphics that showed just what weapons Jimmy’s crew would carry, that showed the entrance he intended to use to sneak aboard theFar Treasure. There were tables of names… of the conspirators. Pham Trinli was listed as a minor accomplice. More tables.Jimmy Diem’s black crypto. The first version was only partially accurate; later files converged on precisely what Jimmy and the others were using. Somehow, they had been watching closely enough to see through all the tricks. There had been no traitors, just an inhuman attention to detail.
Pham jerked down his equipment and crawled a little farther. He popped up, pointing his directional at a slanted overhang of Hammerfest’s roof. From here the angle should be right. He could bounce a beam down atFar Treasure ’s moorage point.
“Jimmy, Jimmy! Can you hear me?” It was Qeng Ho encrypted, but if any enemy heard, both ends of the link would be nailed.
All Jimmy Diem had ever wanted was to be a crewleader good enough to make management track. Then he and Tsufe could get married, all perfectly timed for when the voyage to the OnOff star began to pay off. Of course, that had been before the Emergents arrived and before the ambush. Now? Now he was leading a conspiracy, betting everything on a few moments of hellish risk. Well, at least they were finally acting….
In less than forty seconds, they had run four thousand meters, all the way around the sunside of the jumble. That would have been a good piece of free space rappelling even if the sun had not been blowing up, even if they hadn’t been wrapped in silver foil. They’d almost lost Pham Patil. A fast rappel depended on knowing exactly where to put your next ground spike, exactly how much force the piton could take when you accelerated out from the surface along your cable. But their surveys of the pile had all been done for placing the stationkeeping jets. There just hadn’t been an excuse to test the rappel points. Patil had been swinging out at nearly half a gee when his ground spike slipped free. He’d have floated out forever if Tsufe and Jimmy hadn’t been securely tied down. A few seconds more and the direct sunlight would have fried them right through their makeshift shields.
But it worked!They were on the opposite side of the starships from where the bastards would expect visitors. While everyone’s eyes had been on the sun, and blinded by that, they had gotten in position.
They hunkered down just short of theTreasure ’s mooring point. The ship towered six hundred meters above them, so close that all they could see was part of the throat and the forward primer tanks. But from all their careful spying, they knew this was the least damaged of all the Qeng Ho ships. And inside was equipment—and more important,people —who could take back freedom.
All was in shadow, but now the coma of gases had spread high. Reflected light softened the dark. Jimmy and the others shed their silver covers and thermal outerwear. It felt suddenly chill wearing just full-pressure coveralls and hood. They slipped from hiding place to hiding place, dragging their tools and improvised guns, and trying to keep it all out of the light from the glowing sky.It can’t get any brighter, can it? But his time display said that less than one hundred seconds had passed since Relight. They were perhaps another hundred seconds short of maximum brightness.
The three floated up the moorage pilings, the maw ofTreasure ’s throat growing huge above them. One nice thing about sneaking aboard something as massive as a ramscoop, there wasn’t much worry that their movement would bob the vehicle around. There would be a maintenance crew aboard theTreasure. But would they expect armed visitors in the middle of all this? They had thought and thought on those risks, and there was no way to make them better. But if they took the ship, they would have one of the best remaining pieces of equipment, real weapons, and the surviving Qeng Ho armsmen. They would have a chance of ending the nightmare.
