Now there was sunlight coming through the raw face of the diamond rock! Jimmy paused for an instant to stare, bug-eyed. Even this high up, there were at least three hundred meters of solid diamond between them and the naked light of OnOff. Yet that was not enough. Scattered off a million fracture planes, bounced and diminished and diffused and diffracted, some of OnOff’s light made it through. The light was a glitter of rainbows, a thousand tiny sun-disks glowing from everywhere across the face of the rock. And every second it grew brighter, until he could see structure within the mountain, could see fracture and cleavage planes that extended hundreds of meters into diamond. And still the light got brighter.
So much for slipping by in the dark.Jimmy shut down his imagination and dashed upward. From the ground, the rim hatch was a tiny pucker at the edge of the ramscoop’s maw, but as he ascended it became larger and larger, and centered over his head. He waved Do and Patil to either side of the hatch. The Emergents had reprogrammed the hatch, of course, but they hadn’t replaced the physical mechanism as they had aboard the temp. Tsufe had snooped the passcode with binoculars, and their own gloves would be accepted as matching keys. How many guards would they face?We can take them. I know we can. He reached up to tap on the hatch control, and—
Someone pinged him.
“Jimmy, Jimmy! Can you hear me?” The voice was tiny in his ear. A telltale claimed it was the decryption of a laser burst from the roof of the Emergent hab. But the voice was Pham Trinli’s.
Jimmy froze. Worst case: the enemy was toying with him. Best case: Pham Trinli had guessed they were going after theFar Treasure and now was screwing up worse than anyone could have imagined.Ignore the fool,and if you live, beat the crap out of him. Jimmy glanced at the sky above Hammerfest. The coma was pale violet, slowly roiling in the light of OnOff. In space, a laser link is very hard to detect. But this was no longer ordinary space. It was more like a cometary surface at close passage. If the Emergents knew where to look they could probablysee Trinli’s link.
Jimmy’s reply was a millisecond compression flung back in the direction of the other’s beam. “Turn that off, you old shit. Now!”
“Soon. First: They know about the plan. They saw through your black crypto.” It was Trinli, and yet different. And Trinli had never been told about the crypto. “This is a setup, Jimmy. But they don’t know everything. Back off. Whatever they’ve got planned inside theTreasure will only make things worse.”
Lord.For a moment, Jimmy just froze. Thoughts of failure and death had haunted his every sleep since the ambush. To get this far, they had taken a thousand deadly risks. He had accepted that they might be discovered. But never had he thought it would happen like this. What the old fool had found might be important; it might be worthless. And backing down now would be nearly a worst-case outcome.It’s just too late.
Jimmy forced his mouth to open, his lips to speak. “I said, close down the link!” He turned back to theTreasure ’s hull and tapped the Emergent passcode on the hatch. A second passed—and then the clamshells parted. Do and Patil dove upward into the dimness of the airlock. Diem paused just a second, slapped a small gadget onto the hull beside the door, and followed them up.
TWELVE
Pham Trinli shut down the link. He flipped and climbed rapidly back along the cleft.So we were suckered. Tomas Nau was too clever by half, and he had some strange kind of edge. Trinli had seen a hundred ops, some smaller than this, some that lasted for centuries. But he had never seen the sort of precise fanatical attention to detail that he had seen in those snoop logs the Emergents kept on the black crypto. Nau had either magic software or teams of monomaniacs. In the back of his mind, the planner in him was wondering what it could be and how Pham Trinli might someday take advantage of it.
For now, survival was the only issue. If Diem would only back off from theTreasure, the trap Nau planned might not close or might not be so deadly.
The sheer diamond face on his left was sparkling now, the largest gemstone of all time shining sunlight all round him. Ahead, the light was almost as brilliant, a dazzling nimbus where icy peaks stood in OnOff’s light. The silver sunshield was billowing high, tied down in only three places.
Abruptly, Pham’s hands and knees were kicked out from under him. He spun out from the path, caught himself by one hand. And through that hand he could hear the mountains groan. Mist spewed out from the cleft all along its length—and the diamond mountain moved. It was less than a centimeter per second, stately, but it moved. Pham could see light all along the opening. He had seen the crew’s rock maps. Diamonds One and Two abutted each other along a common plane. The Emergent engineers had used the valley above as a convenient placement anchor for part of the ice and snow from Arachna. All very sensible… and not well enough modeled. Some of the volatiles had slipped between the two mountains. The light reflecting back and forth between One and Two had found that ice and air. Now the boil-off was pushing Diamonds One and Two apart. What had been hundreds of meters of shielding was now a jagged break, a million mirrors. The light shining through was a rainbow from hell.
“One hundred forty-five kilowatts per square meter.”
“That’s the top of the spike,” someone said. OnOff was shining more than a hundred times as bright as standard solar. It was following the track of its previous lightings, though this was brighter than most. OnOff would stay this bright for another ten thousand seconds, then drop back steeply to just over two solars, where it would stay for some years.
There was no triumphant shouting. The last few hundred seconds, the crowd in the temp had been almost silent. At first, Qiwi had been totally involved with her own anger at being kicked indoors. But she had quieted as one and then another of the silver canopy’s ties had broken, and the ice had been touched by direct sunlight. “I told Jimmy that wouldn’t hold.” But she didn’t sound angry anymore. The light show was beautiful, but the damage was far more than they had planned. Outgassing streamers were visible on all sides—and there was no way their pitiful electric jets could counter that. It would be Msecs before they got the rockpile gentled down again.
Then, at four hundred seconds into the Relight, the canopy tore free. It lifted slowly, twisting in the violet sky. There was no sign of the crewfolk who should have been sheltering under it. Worried murmuring grew. Nau did something with his cuff, and his voice was suddenly loud enough to be heard across the room. “Don’t worry. They had several hundred seconds to see the canopy was going, plenty of time to move down into the shadow.”
Qiwi nodded, but she said quietly to Ezr. “If they didn’t fall off. I don’t know why they were up there in the first place.” If they had fallen off, drifted out into the sunlight… Even with thermal jackets, they’d just cook.
He felt a small hand slip into his.Does the Brat even know she didthat? But after a second he squeezed her hand gently. Qiwi was staring out at the main work site. “I should be out there.” It was the same thing Qiwi had been saying since she came indoors, but now her tone was quite different.
Then the outside views jittered, as if something had hit all the cameras at once. The light leaking through the naked face of Diamond Two brightened into a jagged line. And now there wassound, a moan that grew louder and louder, its pitch scaling first up and then down.
“Podmaster!” The voice was loud and insistent, not the robotlike reporting of the Emergent techs. It was Ritser Brughel. “Diamond Two is shifting, lifting off—” And now it was obvious. The whole mountain was tilting. Billions of tonnes, loose.
And the moaning sound that still filled the auditorium must be the moorage webbing, twisting beneath the temp. “We’re not in its way, sir.” Ezr could see that now. The immensity was moving slowly, slowly, but its slide was away from the temp and Hammerfest and the moored starships. The view outside had slowly rotated, now was turning back. Everyone in the auditorium was scrambling for tie-downs.
Hammerfest was built into Diamond One. The big rock looked unchanged, unmoved. The starships beyond… They were minnows beside the bulk of the Diamonds, but each ship was over six hundred meters long, a million tonnes unfueled. And the ships were swaying slowly at the end of their mooring points on Diamond One. It was a dance of leviathans, and a dance that would totally wreck them if it continued.
“Podmaster!” Brughel again. “I’m getting audio from the crewleader, Diem.”
“Well put him on!”
