There was drool coming down his chin. Pham’s eyes would focus on her and then drift.
“What are you doing to Pham!”
The Emissary Device stepped toward her, stumbled. “Making room,” came Pham Nuwen’s voice.
Ravna spoke Grondr’s phone code. There was no response.
The Emissary Device shook its head. “Vrinimi Org is very busy right now, trying to convince me to get off their equipment, trying to screw up their courage and force me off. They don’t believe what I’m telling them” He laughed, a quick choking sound. “Doesn’t matter. I see now that the attack here was just a deadly diversion… How about that, Little Ravna? See, the Blight is not a Class Two perversion. In the time I have left, I can only guess what it is… Something very old, very big. Whatever it is, I’m being eaten alive.”
Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled close to Ravna. Their fronds made faint skritching noises. Some thousands of light-years away, well into the Transcend, a Power was fighting for its life. And all they saw of it was one man turned into a slobbering lunatic.
“So that’s my apology, Little Ravna. Helping you probably wouldn’t have saved me.” His voice strangled on itself, and he took a gasping breath. “But helping you now will be a measure of—vengeance is a motive you would understand. I’ve called your ship down. If you move fast and don’t use agrav, you may survive the next hour.”
Blueshell’s voice was timid and blustery at the same time. “Survive? Only a conventional attack could work down here, and there is no sign of one.”
A maniac surrounded by the soft, quiet night. Ravna’s dataset showed nothing strange except for the diversion of bandwidth to Old One.
Pham Nuwen made a coughing laugh. “Oh, it’s conventional enough, but very clever. A few grams of replicant disorder, wafted in over weeks. It’s blossoming now, timed with the attack you see… The growth will die in a matter of hours, after it kills all of Relay’s precious High automation… Ravna! Take the ship, or die in the next thousand seconds. Take the ship. If you survive, go to the Bottom. Get the…” the Emissary Device pulled itself straighter, and smiled its greenish smile a last time. “And here is my gift to you, the best help I have left to give.”
The smile disappeared. The glassy look was replaced by a wonder… and then mounting terror. Pham Nuwen dragged in a great breath, and had time for one barking scream before he collapsed. He landed face down, twitching and choking in the sand.
Ravna shouted Grondr’s code again, and ran to Pham Nuwen. She pulled him over on his back and tried to clear his mouth. The fit lasted several seconds, Pham’s limbs flailing randomly about. Ravna collected several solid hits as she tried to steady him. Then Pham went limp, and she could barely feel his breath.
Blueshell was saying, “Somehow he’s grabbed the OOB. It’s four thousand kilometers out, coming straight for the Docks. Wail. We’re ruined.” Unauthorized flight close to the Docks was cause for confiscation.
Somehow Ravna didn’t think it mattered anymore. “Is there any sign of attack?” she said over her shoulder. She eased Pham’s head back, made sure he had a clear breathing passage.
Random rustling between the Skroderiders. Greenstalk: “Something is strange. We have service suspension on the main transceivers.” So Old One is still transmitting? “The local net is very clogged. Much automation, many employees being called to special duty.”
Ravna rocked back. The sky was night dark, punctuated by a dozen bright points of light—ships guiding for the Docks. All very normal. But her own dataset was showing what Greenstalk reported.
“Ravna, I can’t talk right now.” Grondr’s clickety voice sounded out of the air beside her. This would be his associate program. “Old One has taken most of Relay. Watch out for the Emissary Device.” A little late, that! “We’ve lost contact with the surveillance fence beyond the transceivers. We are having program and hardware failures. Old One claims we are being attacked.” A five second pause. “We see evidence of fleet action at the domestic defense boundary.” That was just a half light-year out.
“Brap!” From Blueshell. “At the domestic defense boundary! How could you miss them coming in?” He rolled back and forth, pivoted.
Grondr’s associate ignored the question. “Minimum three thousand ships. Destruction of transceivers immin—”
“Ravna, are the Skroderiders with you?” It was still Grondr’s voice, but more staccato, more involved. This was the real guy.
“Y-yes.”
“The local network is failing. Life support failing. The Docks will fall. We would be stronger than the attacking fleet, but we’re rotting from the inside… Relay is dying.” His voice sharpened, clattering, “but Vrinimi will not die, and a contract is a contract! Tell the Riders, we will pay them… somehow, someday. We require… plead… they fly the mission we contracted. Ravna?”
“Yes. They hear.”
“Then go!” And the voice was gone.
Blueshell said, “OOB will be here in two hundred seconds.”
Pham Nuwen had calmed, and his breathing was easier. As the two Riders chittered back and forth, Ravna looked around—and suddenly realized that all the death and destruction had been reports from afar. The beach and the sky were almost as placid as ever. The last of the sun’s rays had left the waves. The foam was a dim band in the low green light. Here and there, yellow lights glowed in the trees and the farther towers.
Yet the alarum had clearly spread. She could hear datasets coming on. Some of the beach fires guttered out, and the figures around them ran into the trees or drifted upwards, headed for farther offices. Now starships floated up from their berths across the sea, falling higher and higher till they glittered in the departed sunlight.
It was Relay’s last moment of peace.
A patch of glowing dark spread across the sky. She gasped at light so twisted it should have gone unseen. It shone more in the back of her head than in her eyes. Afterwards she couldn’t think what made it objectively different from blackness.
“There’s another!” said Blueshell. This one was near the Decks’ horizon, a blot of darkness perhaps a degree across. The edges were an indistinct bleeding of black into black.
“What is it?” Ravna was no war freak, but she’d read her share of adventure stories. She knew about antimatter bombs and relativistic KE slugs. From a distance such weapons were bright spots of light, sometimes an orchestrated flickering. Or closer: a world-wrecker would glow incandescent across the curve of a planet, splashing the globe itself like a drop of water, but slow, slow. Those were the images her reading had prepared her for. What she saw now was more like a defect in her eyesight than a vision of war.
Powers only knew what the Skroderiders saw, but: “Your main transceivers… vaping out, I think,” said Blueshell.
“Those are light-years out! There’s no way we could see—” Another splotch appeared, not even in her field of view. The color floated, placeless. Pham Nuwen spasmed again, but weakly. She had no trouble holding him still, but… blood dribbled from his mouth. The back of his shirt was wet with something that stank of decay.
“OOB will be here in one hundred seconds. Plenty of time, there’s plenty of time.” Blueshell rolled back and forth around them, talking reassurance that just showed how nervous he was. “Yes, my lady, light-years out. And years from now, the flash of their going will light the sky for anyone still alive here. But only a fraction of the vape- out is making light. The rest is an ultrawave surge so great that ordinary matter is affected… Optic nerves tickled by the overflow… So much that your own nervous system becomes a receiver.” He spun around. “But don’t worry. We’re tough and quick. We’ve squeezed through close spots before.” There was something absurd about a creature with no short-term memory bragging up its lightning reflexes. She hoped his skrode was up to this.
Greenstalk’s voice buzzed painfully loud. “Look!”
The surf line was drawing back, further than she had ever seen it.
“The sea is falling!” shouted Greenstalk. Water’s edge had pulled back a hundred meters, two hundred. The green-limned horizon was dipping.
“Ship’s still fifty seconds out. We’ll fly to meet it. Come, Ravna!”
Ravna’s own courage died cold that second. Grondr had said the Docks would fall! The near sky was crowded now as dozens of people raced for safety. A hundred meters away the sand itself was shifting, an avalanche tilting toward the abyss. She remembered something Old One had said, and suddenly she knew the fliers were making a terrible mistake. The thought cut through her terror. “No! Just head for higher ground.”
The night was silent no more. A bell-like moaning came from the sea. The sound spread. The sunset breeze
