I… don’t know.” She shook her head, her face hidden behind her hands and a sweep of black hair. Finally she looked up and brushed back her hair. Her voice was calm but very quiet. “But we are going ahead. It’s what we came for. Things could still work out… You know there’s something down there, something the Blight wants desperately. Maybe fifty-five hours is enough to figure out what it is and tell the Net. And… and we’ll still have Pham’s godshatter.”
Your worst enemy? Quite possibly this Pham Nuwen was a construct of the Powers. He certainly looked like something built from a second-hand description of humanity. But how can you tell godshatter from simple nuttery?
She shrugged, as if acknowledging the doubts—and accepting them. “So what will you and Commercial Security do?”
“There is no Commercial Security anymore. Virtually all our customers got shot out from under us. Now we’ve killed our company’s owner—or at least destroyed her ship and those supporting her. We are Aniara Fleet now.” It was the official name chosen at the fleet conference just ended. There was a certain grim pleasure in embracing it, the ghost from before Sjandra Kei and before Nyjora, from the earliest times of the human race. For they were truly cast away now, from their worlds and their customers and their former leaders. One hundred ships bound for… “We talked it over. A few still wanted to follow you to Tines’ world. Some of the crews want to return to Middle Beyond, spend the rest of their lives killing Butterflies. The majority want to start the races of Sjandra Kei over again, some place where we won’t be noticed, some place where no one cares if we live.”
And the one thing everyone agreed on was that Aniara must be split no further, must make no further sacrifices outside of itself. Once that was clear, it was easy to decide what to do. In the wake of the Great Surge, this part of the Bottom was an incredible froth of Slowness and Beyond. It would be centuries before the zonographic vessels from above had reasonable maps of the new interface. Hidden away in the folds and interstices were worlds fresh from the Slowness, worlds where Sjandra Kei could be born again. Ny Sjandra Kei?
He looked across the bridge at Tirolle and Glimfrelle. They were busy bringing the main navigation processors out of suspension. That wasn’t absolutely necessary for the rendezvous with Lynsnar, but things would be a lot more convenient if both ships could maneuver. The brothers seemed oblivious to Kjet’s conversation with Ravna. And maybe they weren’t paying attention. In a way, the Aniara decision meant more to them than to the humans of the fleet: No one doubted that millions of humans survived in the Beyond (and who knew how many human worlds might still exist in the Slowness, distant cousins of Nyjora, distant children of Old Earth). But this side of the Transcend, the Dirokimes of Aniara were the only ones that existed. The dream habitats of Sjandra Kei were gone, and with them the race. There were at least a thousand Dirokimes left aboard Aniara, pairs of sisters and brothers scattered across a hundred vessels. These were the most adventurous of their race’s latter days, and now they were faced with their greatest challenge. The two on Olvira had already been scouting among the survivors, looking for friends and dreaming a new reality.
Ravna listened solemnly to his explanations. “Group Captain, zonography is a tedious thing… and your ships are near their limits. In this froth you might search for years and not find a new home.”
“We’re taking precautions. We’re abandoning all our ships except the ones with ramscoop and coldsleep capability. We’ll operate in coordinated nets; no one should be lost for more than a few years.” He shrugged. “And if we never find what we seek—” if we die between the stars as our life support finally fails “— well then, we will have still lived true to our name.” Aniara. “I think we have a chance.” More than can be said for you.
Ravna nodded slowly. “Yes, well. It… helps me to know that.”
They talked a few minutes more, Tirolle and Glimfrelle joining in. They had been at the center of something vast, but as usual with the affairs of the Powers, no one knew quite what had happened, nor the result of the strivings.
“Rendezvous Lynsnar two hundred seconds,” said the ship’s voice.
Ravna heard it, nodded. She raised her hand. “Fare you well, Kjet Svensndot and Tirolle and Glimfrelle.”
The Dirokimes whistled back the common farewell, and Svensndot raised his hand. The window on Ravna Bergsndot closed.
… Kjet Svensndot remembered her face all the rest of his life, though in later years it seemed more and more to be the same as Olvira’s.
PART III
CHAPTER 37
“Tines’ world. I can see it, Pham!”
The main window showed a true view upon the system: a sun less than two hundred million kilometers off, daylight across the command deck. The positions of identified planets were marked with blinking red arrows. But one of those—just twenty million kilometers off—was labeled “terrestrial'. Coming off an interstellar jump, you couldn’t get positioning much better than that.
Pham didn’t reply, just glared out the window as if there were something wrong with what they were seeing. Something had broken in him after the battle with the Blight. He’d been so sure of his godshatter—and so bewildered by the consequences. Afterwards he had retreated more than ever. Now he seemed to think that if they moved fast enough, the surviving enemy could do them no harm. More than ever he was suspicious of Blueshell and Greenstalk, as if somehow they were greater threats than the ships that still pursued.
“Damn,” Pham said finally. “Look at the relative velocity.” Seventy kilometers per second.
Position matching was no problem, but “Matching velocities will cost us time, Sir Pham.”
Pham’s stare turned on Blueshell. “We talked this out with the locals three weeks ago, remember? You managed the burn.”
“And you checked my work, Sir Pham. This must be another nav system bug
… though I didn’t expect anything was wrong in simple ballistics.” A sign inverted, seventy klicks per second closing velocity instead of zero. Blueshell drifted toward the secondary console.
“Maybe,” said Pham. “Just now, I want you off the deck, Blueshell.”
“But I can help! We should be contacting Jefri, and rematching velocities, and—”
“Get off the deck, Blueshell. I don’t have time to watch you anymore,” Pham dived across the intervening space and was met by Ravna, just short of the Rider.
She floated between the two, talking fast, hoping whatever she said would both make sense and make peace. “It’s okay, Pham. He’ll go.” She brushed her hand across one of Blueshell’s wildly vibrating fronds. After a second, Blueshell wilted. “I’ll go. I’ll go.” She kept an encouraging touch on him—and kept herself between him and Pham, as the Skroderider made a dejected exit.
When the Rider was gone, she turned to Pham. “Couldn’t it have been a nav bug, Pham?”
The other didn’t seem to hear the question. The instant the hatch had closed, he had returned to the command console. OOB’s latest estimate put the Blight’s arrival less than fifty-three hours away. And now they must waste time redoing a velocity match supposedly accomplished three weeks earlier. “Somebody, something, screwed us over…” Pham was muttering, even as he finished with the control sequence, “Maybe it was a bug. This next damn burn is going to be as manual as it can be.” Acceleration alarms echoed down the core of the OOB. Pham flipped through monitor windows, searching for loose items that might be big enough to be dangerous. “You tie down, too.” He reached out to override the five minute timer.
Ravna dived back across the deck, unfolding the free-fall saddle into a seat and strapping in. She heard Pham speaking on the general announce channel, warning of the timer override. Then the impulse drive cut in, a lazy pressure back into the webbing. Four tenths of a gee—all the poor OOB could still manage.
When Pham said manual, he meant it. The main window appeared to be bore-centered now. The view didn’t drift at the whim of the pilot, and there were no helpful legends and schematics. As much as possible, the were
