but more than powerful enough to destroy this world, this solar system. And that’s what the Blight wants now. The Blight knows I can destroy it… just as it was destroyed before.”
Ravna was vaguely aware that Pilgrim had crawled in close on all sides. Every face was fixed on the blue froth and the human enmeshed within. “How, Pham?” Ravna whispered.
Silence. Then, “All the zone turbulence… that was Countermeasure trying to act, but without coordination. Now I’m guiding it. I’ve begun… the reverse surge. It’s drawing on local energy sources. Can’t you feel it?”
Reverse surge? What was Pham talking about? She glanced again at her wrist—and gasped. Enemy speed had jumped to twenty light-years per hour, as fast as might be expected in the Middle Beyond. What had been almost two days of grace was barely two hours. And now the display said twenty-five light-years per hour. Thirty.
Someone was pounding on the hatch.
Scrupilo was delinquent. He should be supervising the move up the hillside. He knew that, and really felt quite guilty—but he persevered in his dereliction. Like an addict chewing krima leaves, some things are too delicious to give up.
Scrupilo dawdled behind, carrying Dataset carefully between him so that its floppy pink ears would not drag on the ground. In fact, guarding Dataset was certainly more important than hassling his troopers. In any case, he was close enough to give advice. And his lieutenants were more clever than he at everyday work.
During the last few hours, the coastal winds had taken the smoke clouds inland, and the air was clean and salty. On this part of the hill, not everything was burned. There were even some flowers and fluffy seed pods. Bob- tailed birds sailed up the rising air from the sea valley, their cries a happy music, as if promising that the world would soon be as before.
Scrupilo knew it could not be. He turned all his heads to look down the hillside, at Ravna Bergsndot’s starship. He estimated the surviving drive spines as one hundred meters long. The hull itself was more than one hundred and twenty. He hunkered down around Dataset, and popped open its cushioned Oliphaunt face. Dataset knew lots about spacecraft. Actually, this ship was not a human design, but the overall shape was fairly ordinary; he knew that from his previous readings. Twenty to thirty thousand tonnes, equipped with antigravity floats and faster-than-light drive. All very ordinary for the Beyond… But to see it here, through the eyes of his very own members! Scrupilo couldn’t keep his gaze from the thing. Three of him worked with Dataset while the other two stared at the iridescent green hull. The troopers and guncarts around him faded to insignificance. For all its mass, the ship seemed to rest gently on the hillside. How long will it be before we can build such? Centuries, without outside help, the histories in Dataset claimed. What I wouldn’t give for a dayaround aboard her!
Yet this ship was being chased by something mightier. Scrupilo shivered in the summer sun. He had often enough heard Pilgrim’s story of the first landing, and he had seen the human’s beam weapon. He had read much in Dataset about planet-wrecker bombs and the other weapons of the Beyond. While he worked on Woodcarver’s cannon—the best weapons he could bring to be—he had dreamed and wondered. Until he saw the starship floating above, he had never quite felt the reality in his innermost hearts. Now he did. So a fleet of killers lay close behind Ravna Bergsndot. The hours of the world might be few indeed. He tabbed quickly through Dataset’s search paths, looking for articles about space piloting. If there be only hours, at least learn what there is time to learn.
So Scrupilo was lost in the sound and vision of Dataset. He had three windows open, each on a different aspect of the piloting experience.
Loud shouts from the hillside. He looked up with one head, more irritated than anything else. It wasn’t a battle alarm they were calling, just a general unease. Strange, the afternoon air seemed pleasantly cool. Two of him looked high, but there was no haze. “Scrupilo! Look, Look!”
His gunners were dancing in panic. They were pointing at the sky… at the sun. He folded the pink covers over Dataset’s face, at the same time looking sunward with shaded view. The sun was still high in the south, dazzling bright. Yet the air was cool, and the birds were making the cooing sounds of low-sun nesting. And suddenly he realized that he was looking straight at the sun’s disk, had been for five seconds—without pain or even watering of his eyes. And there was still no haze that he could see. An inner chill spread across his mind.
The sunlight was fading. He could see black dots on its disk. Sunspots. He had seen them often enough with Scriber’s telescopes. But that had been through heavy filters. Something stood between him and the sun, something that sucked away its light and warmth.
The packs on the hillside moaned. It was a frightened sound Scrupilo had never heard in battle, the sound of someone confronted by unknowable terror.
Blue faded from the sky. The air was suddenly cold as deep dark night. And the sun’s color was a gray luminescence, like a faded moon. Less. Scrupilo hunkered bellies to ground. Some of him was whistling deep in the throat. Weapons, weapons. But Dataset never spoke of this.
The stars were the brightest light on the hillside.
“Pham, Pham. They’ll be here in an hour. What have you done?” A miracle, but of ill?
Pham Nuwen swayed in Countermeasure’s bright embrace. His voice was almost normal, the godshatter receding. “What have I done? Not much. And more than any Power. Even Old One only guessed, Ravna. The thing the Straumers brought here is the Rider Myth. We—I, it—just moved the Zone boundary back. A local change, but intense. We’re in the equivalent of the High Beyond now, maybe even the Low Transcend locally. That’s why the Blighter fleet can move so fast.”
“But—”
Pilgrim was back from the hatch. He interrupted Ravna’s incoherent panic with a matter-of-fact, “The sun just went out.” His heads bobbed in an expression she couldn’t fathom.
Pham answered, “That’s temporary. Something has to power this maneuver.”
“W-why, Pham?” Even if the Blight was sure to win, why help it?
The man’s face went blank, Pham Nuwen almost disappearing behind the other programs at work in his mind. Then, “I’m… focusing Countermeasure. I see now, Countermeasure, what it is… It was designed by something beyond the Powers. Maybe there are Cloud People, maybe this is signaling them. Or maybe what it’s just done is like an insect bite, something that will cause a much greater reaction. The Bottom of the Beyond has just receded, like the waterline before a tsunami.” The Countermeasure glared red-orange, its arcs and barbs embracing Pham more tightly than before. “And now that we’ve bootstrapped to a decent Zone… things can really happen. Oh, the ghost of Old One is amused. Seeing beyond the Powers was almost worth dying for.”
The fleet stats flowed across Ravna’s wrist. The Blight was coming on even faster than before. “Five minutes, Pham.” Even though they were still thirty light-years out.
Laughter. “Oh, the Blight knows, too. I see this is what it feared all along. This is what killed it those aeons ago. It’s racing forward now, but it’s too late.” The glow brightened; the mask of light that was Pham’s face seemed to relax. “Something very… far… away has heard me, Rav. It’s coming.”
“What? What’s coming?”
“The Surge. So big. It makes what hit us before seem a gentle wave. This is the one nobody believes, because no one’s left to record it. The Bottom will be blown out beyond the fleet.
Sudden understanding. Sudden wild hope. “… And they’ll be trapped out there, won’t they?” So Kjet Svensndot had not fought in vain, and Pham’s advice had not been nonsense: Now there wasn’t a single ramscoop in the Blighter fleet.
“Yes. They’re thirty-light years out. We killed all the speed-capable ones. They’ll be a thousand years getting here…” The artifact abruptly contracted, and Pham moaned. “Not much time. We’re at maximum recession. When the surge comes, it will—” Again a sound of pain. “I can see it! By the Powers, Ravna, it will sweep high and last long.”
“How high, Pham?” Ravna said softly. She thought of all the civilizations above them. There were the Butterflies and the treacherous types who supported the pogrom at Sjandra Kei… And there were trillions who lived in peace and made their own way toward the heights.
“A thousand light-years? Ten thousand? I’m not sure. The ghosts in Countermeasure—Arne and Sjana thought it might rise so high it would punch into the Transcend, encyst the Blight right where it sits… That must be what happened Before.”
Arne and Sjana?
