out.” They were falling with the rest, but trying to drift out from under—before they hit Groundside. There was an occasional rattle/ping against the hull. Sometimes the acceleration ceased, or shifted in a new direction. Blueshell was actively avoiding the big pieces.
… Not with complete success. There was long, rasping sound that ended with a bang, and the room turned slowly around her. “Brrap! Just lost an ultradrive spine,” came Blueshell’s voice. “Two others already damaged. Please strap down, my lady.”
They touched atmosphere a hundred seconds later. The sound was a barely perceptible humming beyond the hull. It was the sound of death for a ship like this. It could no more aerobrake than a dog could jump over the moon. The noise came louder. Blueshell was actually diving, trying to get deep enough to shed the junk that surrounded the ship. Two more spines broke. Then came a long surge of main axis acceleration. Out of Band II arced out of the Docks’ death shadow, drove out and out, into inertial orbit.
Ravna looked over Blueshell’s fronds at the outside windows. They had just passed Groundside’s terminator, and were flying an inertial orbit. They were in free fall again, but this trajectory curved back on itself without whacking into big hard things—like Groundside.
Ravna didn’t know much more about space travel than you’d expect of a frequent passenger and an adventure fan. But it was obvious that Blueshell had pulled off a near miracle. When she tried to thank him, the Rider rolled back and forth across the stick-patches, buzzing faintly to himself. Embarrassed? or just Riderly inattentive?
Greenstalk spoke, sounding a little shy, a little proud: “Far trading is our life, you know. If we are cautious, life will be mostly safe and placid, but there will be close passages. Blueshell practices all the time, programming his skrode with every wit he can imagine. He is a master.” In everyday life, indecision seemed to dominate the Riders. But in a crunch, they didn’t hesitate to bet everything. She wondered how of that was the skrode overriding its rider?
“Grump,” said Blueshell. “I have simply postponed the close passage. I broke several of our drive spines. What if they do not self-repair? What do we do then? Everything around Groundside is destroyed. There is junk everywhere out to a hundred radii. Not dense like around the Docks, but of much higher velocity.” You can’t inject billions of tonnes of wreckage into buckshot orbits and expect safe navigation. “And any second, the Perversion’s creatures will be here, eating whoever survives.”
“Urk.” Greenstalk’s tendrils froze in comical disarray. She chittered to herself for a second. “You’re right… I forgot. I thought we had found an open space, but…”
Open space all right, but in a shooting gallery. Ravna looked back at the command deck windows. They were on the dayside now, perhaps five hundred kilometers above Groundside’s principal ocean. The space above the hazy blue horizon was free of flash and glow. “I don’t see any fighting,” Ravna said hopefully.
“Sorry.” Blueshell switched the windows to a more significant view. Most of it was navigation and ultratrace information, meaningless to Ravna. Her eye caught on a medstat: Pham Nuwen was breathing again. The ship’s surgeon thought it could save him. But there was also a communication status window; on it, the attack was dreadfully clear. The local net had broken into hundreds of screaming fragments. There were only automatic voices from the planetary surface, and they were calling for medical aid. Grondr had been down there. Somehow she suspected that not even his Marketing ops people had survived. Whatever hit Groundside was even deadlier than the failures at the Docks. In near planetary space, there were a few survivors in ships and fragments of habitats, most on doomed trajectories. Without massive and coordinated help, they would be dead in minutes—hours at the outside. The directors of Vrinimi Org were gone, destroyed before they ever figured out quite what had happened.
Go, Grondr had said, go.
Out-system, there was fighting. Ravna saw message traffic from Vrinimi defense units. Even without control or coordination, some still opposed the Perversion’s fleet. The light from their battles would arrive well after the defeat, well after the enemy arrived here in person. How long do we have? Minutes?
“Brrap. Look at those traces,” said Blueshell. “The Perversion has almost four thousand vessels. They are bypassing the defenders.”
“But now there is scarcely anyone left out there,” said Greenstalk. “I hope they’re not all dead.”
“Not all. I see several thousand ships departing, everyone with the means and any sense.” Blueshell rolled back and forth. “Alas! We have the good sense… but look at this repair report.” One window spread large, filled with colored patterns that meant less than zip to Ravna. “Two spines still broken, unrepairable. Three partially repaired. If they don’t heal, we’ll be stuck here. This is unacceptable!” His voder voice buzzed up shrilly. Greenstalk drove close to him, and they rattled their fronds at each other.
Several minutes passed. When Blueshell spoke Samnorsk again, his voice was quieter. “One spine repaired. Maybe, maybe, maybe…” He opened a natural view. The OOB was coasting across Groundside’s south pole, back into night. Their orbit should take them over the worst of the Docks junk, but the ride was a constant jigging as the ship avoided other debris. The cries of battle horror from out-system dwindled. The Vrinimi Organization was one vast, twitching corpse… and very soon its killer would come snuffling.
“Two repaired.” Blueshell became very quiet… “Three! Three are repaired! Fifteen seconds to recalibrate and we can jump!”
It seemed longer… but then all the windows changed to a natural view. Groundside and its sun were gone. Stars and dark stretched all around.
Three hours later and Relay was a hundred and fifty light-years behind them. The OOB had caught up with the main body of fleeing ships. What with the archives and the tourism, there had been an extraordinary number of interstellar ships at Relay: ten thousand vehicles were spread across the light-years around them. But stars were rare this far off the galactic plane and they were at least a hundred hours flying time from the nearest refuge.
For Ravna, it was the start of a new battle. She glared across the deck at Blueshell. The Skroderider dithered, its fronds twisting on themselves in a way she had not seen before. “See here, my lady Bergsndot, High Point is a lovely civilization, with some bipedal participants. It is safe. It is nearby. You could adapt.” He paused. Reading my expression is he? “But -but if that is not acceptable, we will take you further. Give us a chance to contract the proper cargo, and—and we’ll take you all the way back to Sjandra Kei. How about that?”
“No. You already have a contract, Blueshell. With Vrinimi Organization. The three of us—” and whatever has become of Pham Nuwen “— are going to the Bottom of the Beyond.”
“I am shaking my head in disbelief! We received a preliminary retainer, true. But now that Vrinimi Org is dead, there is no one to make good on the rest of the agreement. Hence we are free of it also.”
“Vrinimi is not dead. You heard Grondr ’Kalir. The Org had—has -branch offices all across the Beyond. The obligation stands.”
“On a technicality. We both know that those branches could never make the final payment.”
Ravna didn’t have a good answer to that. “You have an obligation,” she said, but without the proper forcefulness. She had never been good at bluster.
“My lady, are you truly speaking from Org ethics, or from simple humanity?”
“I— ” In fact, Ravna had never completely understood Org ethics. That was one reason why she had intended to return to Sjandra Kei after her ’prenticeship, and one reason the Org had dealt cautiously with the human race. “It doesn’t matter which I speak from! There is a contract. You were happy to honor it when things looked safe. Well, things turned deadly—but that possibility was part of the deal.” Ravna glanced at Greenstalk. She had been silent so far, not even rustling at her mate. Her fronds were tightly held against her central stalk. Maybe —'Listen, there are other reasons besides contract obligation. The Perversion is more powerful than anyone thought. It killed a Power today. And it’s operating in the Middle Beyond… The Riders have a long history, Blueshell, longer than most races’ entire existence. The Perversion may be strong enough to put an end to all of that.”
Greenstalk rolled toward her and opened slightly. “You—you really think we might find something on that ship at the Bottom, something that could harm a Power among Powers?”
Ravna paused. “Yes. And Old One himself thought so, just before he died.”
Blueshell wrapped even tighter around himself, twisting. In anguish? “My Lady, we are traders. We have lived long and traveled far… and survived by minding our own business. No matter what romantics may think, traders do not go on quests. What you ask… is impossible, mere Beyonders seeking to subvert a Power.”
