back after Sherk had paid for the kerosene. “Damn. Lands Command says there’s a worse storm due in about midnight. First time I take my own car, and all hell breaks loose.” Smith sounded angry, which usually meant she was irritated with herself. They got aboard the auto. She poked at the ignition motor twice. Three times. The engine caught. “We’ll bivouac here overnight.” She sat for a moment, almost indecisive. Or maybe she was watching the sky to the south. “I know where there’s some Crown land west of town.”
Smith tooled down gravel roads, then muddy trails. Unnerby almost thought she was lost except she never hesitated or backtracked. Behind them came the security vehicles, about as inconspicuous as a parade of osprechs. The mud path petered out on a promontory overlooking the ocean. Steep slopes fell away on three sides. Someday, the forest would be tall here again, but now even the millions of armored sproutlings could not hide the naked rock of the drop-off.
Smith stopped at the dead end, and leaned back on her perch. “Sorry. I… made a wrong turn.” She waved at the first of the security vehicles pulling up behind her.
Unnerby stared out at the ocean and the sky above. Sometimes wrong turnings were the best kind. “That’s okay. God, what a view.” The breaks in the clouds were like deep canyons. The light coming down them flared red and near-red, reflections of sunset. A billion rubies glinted in the water droplets on the foliage around them. He scrambled out the back of the auto, and walked a little way through the sprouts toward the end of the promontory. The forest mat squelched deep and wet beneath his feet. After a moment, Sherkaner followed him.
The breeze coming off the ocean was moist and cool. You didn’t have to be the Met Department to know a storm was coming. He looked out over the water. They were standing less than three miles from the breakers, about as close as it was safe to be in this phase of the sun. From here you could see the turbulence and hear the grinding. Three icebergs were stranded, towering, in the surf. But there were hundreds more, stretching off to the horizon. It was the eternal battle, the fire from the New Sun against the ice of the good earth. Neither could finally win. It would be twenty years before the last of the shallows ice had surfaced and melted. By then, the sun would be waning. Even Sherkaner seemed subdued by the scene.
Victory Smith had left the auto, but instead of following them, she walked back, along the south edge of the promontory.The poor General.She can’t decide if this trip is business or pleasure. Unnerby was just as happy they wouldn’t get down to Lands Command in one whack.
They walked back to Smith. On this side of the promontory, the ground dropped into a little valley. On the high ground beyond there was some kind of building, perhaps a small inn. Smith was standing where the bedrock edge of the drop-off was nicked, and the slope was not deadly steep. Once, the road might have continued down into the little valley and up the other side.
Sherkaner stopped by his wife’s side and draped his left arms over her shoulders; after a moment she slipped two of her arms over his, never saying a word. Unnerby walked to the edge and dipped his head over the drop-off. There were traces of road cut, all the way to the bottom. But the storms and floods of the Early Bright had gouged new cliffs. The valley itself was charming, untouched and clean. “Heh, heh. No way we’re going to drive down there, ma’am. The road is washed clean away.”
Victory Smith was silent for a moment. “Yes. Washed clean. That’s for the best….”
Sherk said, “You know, we could probably walk across, and up the other side.” He jabbed a hand at the inn on the hillcrest beyond the valley. “We could see if Lady Encl—”
Victory gave him a sharp, rippling hug. “No. That place couldn’t put up more than the three of us, anyway. We’ll camp with my security team.”
After a moment, Sherk gave a little laugh. “…Fine by me. I’m curious to see a modern motorized bivouac.” They followed Smith back to the trail. By the time they reached the vehicles, Sherkaner was in full form, some scheme for lightweight tents that could survive even the storms of the First Bright.
FIFTEEN
Tomas Nau stood at his bedroom window, looking out. In fact, his rooms were fifty meters deep in Diamond One, but the view out his window was from the loftiest spire of Hammerfest. His estate had grown since the Relighting. Cut diamond slabs made adequate walls, and the surviving special craftsmen would spend their lives polishing and faceting, carving friezes as intricate as anything Nau had owned at home.
The grounds around Hammerfest had been planed smooth, tiled with metals from the ore dump on Diamond Two. He tried to keep the rockpile oriented so only Hammerfest’s flag spire actually spiked into the sunlight. The last year or so, that caution wasn’t really necessary, but staying in the shade meant that water ice could be used for shielding and some gluework. Arachna hung halfway up the sky, a brilliant blue-and-white disk almost half a degree across. Its light was bright and soft across the castle grounds. It was all quite a contrast to the first Msecs here, the hell of the Relight. Nau had worked five years to create the present view, the peace, the beauty.
Five years. And how many years more would they be stuck here? Thirty to forty was the specialists’ best estimate; however long it took the Spiders to create an industrial ecology. It was funny how things had worked out. This really was an Exile, though quite unlike what he had planned back on Balacrea. That original mission had been a different kind of calculated risk: a couple of centuries away from the increasingly deadly politics of the home regime, an opportunity to breed his resources away from poachers—and the outside, golden chance that they might learn the secrets of a star-faring nonhuman race. He hadn’t counted on the Qeng Ho arriving first.
Qeng Ho knowledge was the core of Balacrea’s Emergent civilization. Tomas Nau had studied the Qeng Ho all his life, yet till he met them he had not understood how weirdly different the Peddlers were. Their fleet had been softheaded and naive. Infecting them with timed-expression mindrot had been trivial, arranging the ambush almost as easy. But once under attack, the Peddlers had fought like devils, clever devils with a hundred surprises they must have prepared in advance. Their flagship had been destroyed in the first hundred seconds of the battle—yet that seemed only to make them more deadly killers. When finally the mindrot shut the Peddlers down, both sides were wrecked. And after the battle had come Nau’s second great misestimate of the Peddlers. Mindrot could kill Qeng Ho, but many of them could not be scrubbed or Focused. The field interrogations had gone very badly, though in the end he had turned that debacle into the means of unifying the survivors.
So Hammerfest’s attic and Focus clinic and splendid furnishings—those were cut from the ruined starships. Here and there within the ruins, high technology still functioned. All the rest must come from the raw materials of the rockpile—and the eventual civilization of the Spiders.
Thirty or forty years. They could make it. There should be enough coldsleep coffins to serve the survivors. The main thing now was to study the Spiders, learn their languages, their history and culture. To span the decades, the work was split into a tree of Watches, a few Msecs on duty, a year or two off and in coldsleep. Some, the translators and scientists, would be spending a lot of time on Watch. Others—the pilots and tactics people—would be mainly unused in the early years, then live full time toward the end of the mission. Nau had explained it all in meetings with his own people and the Qeng Ho. And what he had promised was mostly true. The Qeng Ho had great expertise in such operations; with luck, the average person would get through the Exile with only ten to twelve years of lifetime spent. Along the way, he would plunder the Peddlers’ fleet library; he would learn everything the Qeng Ho had ever learned.
Nau rested his hand against the surface of the window. It was as warm as the carpet on the walls. Plague’s name, this Qeng Ho wallpaper was good. Even looking off to the side, there was no distortion. He chuckled softly. In the end, running the Peddler side of the Exile might be the easiest thing.They had some experience with the duty schedule that Nau proposed.
But for himself… Nau allowed a moment of self-pity. Someone trustable and competent must stay on Watch till final recovery. There was only one such person, and his name was Tomas Nau. On his own, Ritser Brughel would foolishly kill resources that could not be spared—or do his best to kill Nau himself. On her own, Anne Reynolt could be trusted for years, but if something unexpected came up… Well, the Qeng Ho seemed thoroughly subdued, and after the interrogations, Nau was relatively sure that no big secrets remained. But if the Qeng Ho did again conspire, Anne Reynolt would be lost.
So Tomas Nau might be a hundred years old before he saw triumph here. That was middle-aged by Balacrean standards. Nau sighed. So be it. Qeng Ho medicine would more than make up for the time lost. And
