Glimfrelle shuddered, all flippancy departed. “They don’t even mention the Surge. Everything they say is a cowardly lie!” His voice shifted up to its normal speaking range and he continued in his own language. Kjet could understand parts of it. The Dirokimes that left their dream habitats were normally light-hearted folk, full of whimsy and gentle sarcasm. Glimfrelle sounded almost that way now, except for the high edges to his whistling and the insults more colorful than Svensndot had ever heard from them: “… get from a verminous cow-pie… killers of innocent dreams…” even in Samnorsk the words were strong, but in Dirokime “verminous cow-pie” was drenched in explicit imagery that almost brought the smell of such a thing into the room. Glimfrelle’s voice went higher and higher, then beyond the human register. Abruptly, he collapsed, shuddering and moaning low. Dirokimes could cry, though Svensndot had never seen such a thing before. Glimfrelle rocked in his brother’s arms.
Tirolle looked over Glimfrelle’s shoulder at Kjet. “Where does revenge take us now, Group Captain?”
For a moment, Kjet looked back silently. “I’ll let you know, Lieutenant.” He looked at the displays. Listen and watch a little longer, and maybe we’ll know. “Meantime, get us nearer the center of pursuit,” he said gently.
“Aye, sir.” Tirolle patted his brother’s back gently and turned back to the console.
During the next five hours, Olvira’s crew watched the Alliance fleet race helter-skelter for the higher spaces. It could not even be called a retreat, more a panicked dissolution. Great opportunists, they had not hesitated to kill by treachery, and to give chase when they thought there might be treasure at the end. Now that they were confronted with the possibility of being trapped in the Slowness, of dying between the stars, they raced for their separate safety. Their bulletins to the newsgroups were full of bravado, but their maneuver couldn’t be disguised. Former neutrals pointed to the discrepancy; more and more it was accepted that the Alliance was built around the Aprahanti Hegemony and perhaps had other motives than altruistic opposition to the Blight. There was nervous speculation about who might next receive Alliance attention.
Major transceivers still targeted the fleets. They might as well have been on a network trunk. The news traffic was a vast waterfall, totally beyond Olvira’s present ability to receive. Nevertheless, Svensndot kept an eye on it. Somewhere there might be some clue, some insight… The majority of War Trackers and Threats seemed to have little interest in the Alliance or the death of Sjandra Kei, per se. Most were terrified of the Blight that was still spreading through the Top of the Beyond. None of the Highest had successfully resisted, and there were rumors that two more interfering Powers had been destroyed. There were some (secret mouths of the Blight?) who welcomed the new stability at the Top, even one based on permanent parasitization.
In fact, the chase down here at the Bottom, the flight of the Out of Band and its pursuers, seemed the only place where the Blight was not completely triumphant. No wonder they were the subject of 10,000 messages an hour.
The geometry of emergence was enormously favorable to Olvira. They had been on the outskirts of the action, but now they had hours headstart on the main fleets. Glimfrelle and Tirolle were busier than they had ever been in their lives, monitoring the fleets’ emergence and establishing Olvira’s identity with the other vessels of Commercial Security. Until Scrits and Limmende emerged from the Slowness, Kjet Svensndot was the ranking officer of the organization. Furthermore, he was personally known to most of the commanders. Kjet had never been the admiral type; his Group Captaincy had been a reward for piloting skills, in a Sjandra Kei at peace. He had always been content to defer to his employers. But now…
The Group Captain used his ranking status. The Alliance vessels were not pursued. ('Wait till we can all act together,” ordered Svensndot.) Possible game plans bounced back and forth across the emerging fleet, including schemes that assumed HQ was destroyed. With certain commanders, Kjet hinted that this last might be the case, that Limmende’s flag ship was in enemy hands, and that the Alliance was somehow just a side effect of that true enemy. Very soon, Kjet would be committed to the “treason” he planned.
The Limmende flag ships and the core of the Blighter fleet came out of the Slowness almost simultaneously. Comm alarms went off across Olvira’s deck as priority mail arrived and passed through the ship’s crypto. “Source: Limmende at HQ. Star Breaker Priority,” said the ship’s voice.
Glimfrelle put the message on the main window, and Svensndot felt a chill certainty spread up his neck.
… All units are to pursue fleeing vessels. These are the enemy, the killers of our people. WARNING: Masquerades suspected. Destroy any vessels countermanding these orders. Order of Battle and validation codes follow…
Order of Battle was simple, even by Commercial Security standards. Limmende wanted them to split up and be gone, staying only long enough to destroy “masqueraders'. Kjet said to Glimfrelle, “How about the validation codes?”
The Dirokime seemed his usual self again: “They’re clean. We wouldn’t be receiving the message at all unless the sender had today’s one-time pad… We’re beginning to receive queries from the others, Boss. Audio and video channels. They want to know what to do.”
If he hadn’t prepared the ground during the last few hours, Kjet’s mutiny wouldn’t have had a chance. If Commercial Security had been a real military organization, the Limmende order might have been obeyed without question. As it was, the other commanders pondered the questions that Svensndot had raised: At these ranges, video communication was easy and the fleet had one-time ciphers large enough to support enormous amounts of it. Yet “Limmende” had chosen printed mail for her priority message. It made perfect military sense given that the encryption was correct, but it was also what Svensndot had predicted: The supposed HQ was not quite willing to show its face down here where perfect visual masquerades were not possible. Their commands would be by mail, or evocations that a sharp observer might suspect.
Such a slender thread of reason Kjet and his friends were hanging from.
Kjet eyed the knot of light that represented the Blighter fleet. It was suffering from no indecision. None of its vessels were straggling back toward safer heights. Whatever commanded there had discipline beyond most human militaries. It would sacrifice everything in its single-minded pursuit of one small starship. What next, Group Captain?
Just ahead of that cold smear of light, a single tiny gleam appeared. “The Out of Band!” said Glimfrelle. “Sixty-five light-years out now.”
“I’m getting encrypted video from them, Boss. The same half-crocked xor pad as before.” He put the signal on the main window without waiting for Kjet’s direction.
It was Ravna Bergsndot. The background was a jumble of motion and shouting, the strange human and a Skroderider arguing. Bergsndot was facing away from the pickup, and doing her share of shouting. Things looked even worse than Kjet’s recollection of the first moments of his ship’s emergence.
“It doesn’t matter just now, I tell you! Let him be. We’ve got to contact—” she must have seen the signal Glimfrelle was sending back to her. “They’re here! By the Powers, Pham, please—” She waved her hand angrily and turned to the camera. “Group Captain. We’re—”
“I know. We’ve been out of the surge for hours. We’re near the center of the pursuit now.”
She caught her breath. Even with a hundred hours of planning, events were moving too fast for her. And for me too. “That’s something,” she said after an instant. “Everything we said before holds, Group Captain. We need your help. That’s the Blight that’s coming behind us. Please!”
Svensndot noticed a telltale by the window. Sassy Glimfrelle was retransmitting this to all the fleet they could trust. Good. He had talked about the situation with the others these last hours, but it meant something more to see Ravna Bergsndot on the comm, to see someone from Sjandra Kei who still survived and needed their help. You can spend the rest of your life chasing revenge in the Middle Beyond, but all you kill will be the vultures. What’s chasing Ravna Bergsndot may be the first cause.
The Butterflies were long gone, still singing their courage across the Net. Less than one percent of Commercial Security had followed “Limmende’s” order to chase after them. Those were not the problem: it was the ten percent that stayed behind and arrayed themselves with the Blight’s forces that bothered Kjet Svensndot. Some of those ships might not be subverted, might simply be loyal to orders they believed. It would be very hard to fire on them.
And there would be fighting, no doubt of that. Maneuvering for conflict while under ultradrive was difficult—if the other side attempted to evade. But Blight’s fleet was unwavering in its pursuit of the Out of Band. Slowly, slowly
