“No!” shouted Jimmy. “You’ll wriggle out soon as events don’t have you by the throat.”
“Damn it, man, it’s your own people aboard theTreasure. “
“If they were out of coldsleep, they’d agree with me, Podmaster. It’s showdown time. We’ve got twenty- three ofyour people in the sickbay plus the five in your maintenance crew. We know how to play the hostage game, too. I want you and Brughel over here. You can use your taxis, all nice and safe. You have one thousand seconds.”
Nau had always seemed a very calculating type to Ezr Vinh. And already, he seemed recovered from his shock. Nau raised his chin dramatically and glared at the sound of Jimmy’s voice. “And if we don’t?”
“We lose, but so do you. To start with, your people here die. Then we’ll use the S7 to blow theTreasure free of its moorings. We’ll ram it into your damn Hammerfest.”
Qiwi had listened with pale, wide-eyed shock. Now suddenly she was bawling. She launched herself toward the sound of Jimmy’s voice. “No! No! Jimmy! Please don’t!”
For a few seconds every eye was on Qiwi. Even the frantic closing of hoods and gloves ceased, and there was only the loud moaning of the temp’s mooring web as it twisted slowly about. Qiwi’s mother was aboard theFarTreasure; her father was on Hammerfest with all the mindrot victims. In coldsleep or “Focus,” most of the survivors of the Qeng Ho expedition were in one place or the other. Trixia.This is too much, Jimmy. Slow down! But the words died in Ezr’s throat. He had trusted everything to Jimmy. If this deadly talk convinced Ezr Vinh, maybe it would convince Tomas Nau.
When Jimmy spoke again, he ignored Qiwi’s cry. “You have only nine hundred seventy-five seconds, Podmaster. I advise you and Brughel to get your butts over here.”
That would have been hard to do even if Nau had bolted out of the temp. He turned to Xin and the two argued in low voices.
“Yes, I can get you there. It’s dangerous, but the loose stuff is moving at less than a meter per second. We can avoid it.”
Nau nodded. “Then let’s go. I want—” He fastened his full-press jacket and hood, and his voice became inaudible.
The crowd of Qeng Ho and Emergents melted away from the two as they headed toward the exit.
From the speaker link, there was a loud thump, cut off abruptly. In the auditorium someone shouted, pointing at the main window. Something flickered from the side of theFar Treasure, something small and moving fast. A fragment of hull.
Nau had stopped at the auditorium doors. He looked back at theFarTreasure. “System status says theFar Treasure has been breached,” said Brughel. “Multiple explosions in aft radial deck fifteen.”
That was coldsleep storage and sickbay. Ezr couldn’t move, couldn’t look away. The hull of theTreasure puckered out in two more places. Pale light flickered briefly from the holes. It was insignificant compared to the storm of the Relight. To an untrained eye, theTreasure might have looked undamaged. The hull holes were only a couple of meters across. But S7 was the Qeng Ho’s most powerful chemical explosive, and it looked as if all four kilograms had gone up. Radial deck fifteen was behind four bulkheads, twenty meters below the outer hull. Extending inward, the blast had most likely crushed theFar Treasure ’s ramscoop throat. One more starship had died.
Qiwi floated motionless in the middle of the room, beyond the reach of comforting hands.
THIRTEEN
Ksecs passed, busier than any time in Ezr’s life. The horror of Jimmy’s failure hung in the back of his mind. There wasn’t room for it to leak out. They were all too busy simply trying to save what they could from the human and natural catastrophes.
The next day, Tomas Nau addressed the survivors on the temp and at Hammerfest. The Tomas Nau that looked out of the window at them was visibly tired and lacked his usual smoothness.
“Ladies and gentlemen, congratulations. We’ve survived the second harshest Relight in the recorded history of OnOff. We did this despite the most terrible treachery.” He moved closer to the pov, as if looking at the exhausted Emergents and Qeng Ho huddled in the auditorium. “Damage survey and reclamation attempts will be our most important jobs over the next Msecs… but I must be frank with you. The initial battle between the Qeng Ho and Emergent fleets was immensely destructive of the Qeng Ho; I regret to say that tas nearly as bad for the Emergent side. We tried to disguise some of that damage. We had plenty of equipment spares, medical facilities, and the raw materials we brought up from Arachna. We would have had the expertise of hundreds of senior Qeng Ho available once the security issues were resolved. Nevertheless, we were operating near the edge of safety. After the events of yesterday, all safety margins have vanished. At this moment, we do not have a single functioning ramscoop—and it’s not clear if we will be able to scavenge one from the wreckage.”
Only two of the starships had collided. But apparently theFar Treasure had been the most functional—and after Jimmy’s action, its drive and most of its life-support system were junk.
“Many of you have risked your lives over the last Ksecs trying to save some of the volatiles. That part of the disaster appears to be no one’s fault. None of us had counted on the violence of this Relighting, or the effect that ice trapped between the diamonds might have. As you know, we’ve recaptured most of the large blocks. Only three remain loose.” Benny Wen and Jau Xin were working together to try to bring back those and several smaller ones. They were only thirty kilometers away, but the big ones massed one hundred thousand tonnes each—and all they had for hauling equipment were taxis and one crippled lifter.
“OnOff’s flux is down to two point five kilowatts per square meter. Our vehicles can operate in that light. Properly suited crew can work briefly in it. But the airsnow that drifted out is lost, and we fear that much of the water ice is gone too.”
Nau spread his hands, and sighed. “This is like so many of the histories you Qeng Ho have told us of. We fought and fought, and in the end we’ve nearly made ourselves extinct. With what we have, we can’t go home—to either of our homes. We can only guess how long we can survive on what we salvage here. Five years? One hundred years? The old truths still hold: without a sustaining civilization, no isolated collection of ships and humans can rebuild the core of technology.”
A wan smile came briefly to his face. “And yet there is hope. In a way, these disasters have forced us to concentrate all our attention on what our missions were initially dedicated to. It is no longer a matter of academic curiosity, or even Qeng Ho selling to customers—now our very survival depends on the sophonts of Arachna. They are on the verge of the Information Age. From everything we can tell, they will attain a competent industrial ecology during the current bright time. If we can last a few more decades, the Spiders will have the industry that we need. Our two missions will have succeeded, even if at far greater human cost than any of us ever imagined.
“Can we last three to five more decades? Maybe. We can scavenge, we can conserve…. The real question is, can we cooperate? So far, our history here is not good. Whether in offense or defense, all our hands are drenched in blood. You all know about Jimmy Diem. There were at least three involved in his conspiracy. There may be more— but a security pogrom would just diminish our overall chances for survival. So I appeal to all of you among the Qeng Ho who may have been part of this plot, even peripherally: Remember what Jimmy Diem and Tsufe Do and Pham Patil did and tried to do. They were willing to destroy all the ships and crush Hammerfest. Instead, their own explosives destroyed them, destroyed the Qeng Ho that we were holding in coldsleep, and destroyed a sickbay full of Emergents and Qeng Ho.
“So. This will be our Exile. An Exile we have brought upon ourselves. I will continue to do my best to lead, but without your help we will surely fail. We must bury what differences and hatred there may be. We Emergents know much about you Qeng Ho; we have listened to your public network for hundreds of years. Your information made a critical difference to us as we regained technology.” That tired smile again. “I know you did it to make more good customers; we are grateful nevertheless. But what we Emergents have become is not what you expect. I believe we bring something new and wonderful and powerful to the human universe: Focus. It is something that will be strange to you at first. I beg you to give time a chance here. Learn our ways, as we have yours.
“With everyone’s willing support, we can survive. In the end, we can prosper.”
