no matter what happened at Sjandra Kei, no matter what happens here.”
Blueshell was hearty gentleness around his mate, but alone with Ravna his rage showed through: “No, no, I don’t object to Sir Pham’s navigation, at least not now. Perhaps we could be a little further ahead with me directly at the helm, but the fastest ships behind us would still be closing. It’s the other things, my lady. You know how untrustworthy our automation is down here. Pham is hurting it further. He’s written his own security overrides. He’s turning the ship’s environment automation into a system of boobytraps.”
Ravna had seen evidence of this. The areas around OOB’s command deck and ship’s workshop looked like military checkpoints. “You know his fears. If this makes him feel safer—”
“That’s not the point, My Lady. I would do anything to persuade him to accept my help. But what he’s doing is deadly dangerous. Our Bottom automation is not reliable, and he’s making it actively worse. If we get some sudden stress, the environment programs will likely have a bizarre crash—atmosphere dump, thermal runaway, anything.”
“I—”
“Doesn’t he understand? Pham controls nothing.” His voder broke into a nonlinear squawk. “He has the ability to destroy, but that is all. He needs my help. He was my friend. Doesn’t he understand?”
Pham understood… oh, Pham understood. He and Ravna still talked. Their arguments were the hardest thing in her life. And sometimes they didn’t exactly argue; sometimes it was almost like rational discussion:
“I haven’t been taken over, Ravna. Not like the Blight takes over Riders, anyway. I still have charge of my soul.” He turned away from the console and flashed a wan smile in her direction, acknowledging the flaw in such self-conviction. And from things like that smile, Ravna was convinced that Pham Nuwen still lived, and sometimes spoke.
“What about the godshatter state? I see you for hours, just staring at the tracking display, or mucking around in the library and the News,” scanning faster than any human could consciously read.
Pham shrugged. “It’s studying the ships that are chasing us, trying to figure out just what belongs to whom, just what capabilities each might have. I don’t know the details. Self-awareness is on vacation then,” when all Pham’s mind was turned into a processor for whatever programs Old One had downloaded. A few hours of fugue state might yield an instant of Power-grade thought—and even that he didn’t consciously remember. “But I know this. Whatever the godshatter is, it’s a very narrow thing. It’s not alive; in some ways it may not even be very smart. For everyday matters like ship piloting, there’s just good old Pham Nuwen.”
“… there’s the rest of us, Pham. Blueshell would like to help,” Ravna spoke softly. This was the place where Pham would close into icy silence -or blow up in rage. This day, he just cocked his head. “Ravna, Ravna. I know I need him… And, and I’m glad I need him. That I don’t have to kill him.” Yet. Pham’s lips quivered for a second, and she thought he might start crying.
“The godshatter can’t know Blueshell—”
“Not the godshatter. It’s not making me act this way—I’m doing what any person should do when the stakes are this high.” The words were spoken without anger. Maybe there was a chance. Maybe she could reason:
“Blueshell and Greenstalk are loyal, Pham. Except at Harmonious Repose—”
Pham sighed, “Yeah. I’ve thought about that a lot. They came to Relay from Straumli Realm. They got Vrinimi looking for the refugee ship. That smells of setup, but probably unknowing—maybe even a setup by something opposing the Blight. In any case they were innocent then, else the Blight would have known about Tines world right from the beginning. The Blight knew nothing till RIP, till Greenstalk was converted. And I know Blueshell was loyal even then. He knew things about my armor—the remotes, for instance—that he could have warned the others about.”
Hope came as a surprise to Ravna. He really had thought things out, and—'It’s just the skrodes, Pham. They’re traps waiting to be sprung. But we’re isolated here, and you destroyed the one that Greenstalk—”
Pham was shaking his head. “It’s more than the skrodes. The Blight had its hand in Rider design, too, at least to some degree. I can’t imagine the takeover of Greenstalk’s being so smooth otherwise.”
“Y-yes. A risk. A very small risk compared to—”
Pham didn’t move, but something in him seemed to draw away from her, denying the support she could offer. “A small risk? We don’t know. The stakes are so high. I’m walking a tightrope. If I don’t use Blueshell now, we’ll be shot out of space by the Blighter fleet. If I let him do too much, if I trust him, then he or some part of him could betray us. All I have is the godshatter, and a bunch of memories that… that may be the biggest fakes of all.” These last words were nearly inaudible. He looked up at her, a look that was both cold and terribly lost. “But I’m going to use what I have, Rav, and whatever it is I am. Somehow I’m going to get us to Tines’ World. Somehow I’m going to get Old One’s godshatter to whatever is there.”
It was another three weeks before Blueshell’s predictions came true.
The OOB had seemed a sturdy beast up in the Middle Beyond; even its damaged ultradrive had failed gracefully. Now the ship was leaking bugs in all directions. Much of it had nothing to do with Pham’s meddling. Without those final consistency checks, none of the OOB’s Bottom automation was really trustworthy. But its failures were compounded by Pham’s desperate security hacks.
The ship’s library had source code for generic Bottom automation. Pham spent several days revising it for the OOB. All four of them were on the command deck during the installation, Blueshell trying to help, Pham suspiciously examining every suggestion. Thirty minutes into the installation, there were muffled banging noises down the main corridor. Ravna might have ignored them, except that she’d never heard the like aboard the OOB.
Pham and the Riders reacted with near panic; spacers don’t like unexplained bumps in the night. Blueshell raced to the hatch, floated fronds-first through the hole. “I see nothing, Sir Pham.”
Pham was paging quickly through the diagnostic displays, mixed format things partly from the new setup. “I’ve got some warning lights here, but -”
Greenstalk started to say something, but Blueshell was back and talking fast: “I don’t believe it. Anything like this should make pictures, a detailed report. Something is terribly wrong.”
Pham stared at him a second, then returned to his diagnostics. Five seconds passed. “You’re right. Status is just looping through stale reports.” He began grabbing views from cameras all over the OOB’s interior. Barely half of them reported, but what they showed…
The ship’s water reservoir was a foggy, icy cavern. That was the banging sound—tonnes of water, spaced. A dozen other support services had gone bizarre, and—— the armed checkpoint outside the workshop had slagged down. The beamers were firing continuously on low power. And for all the destruction, the diagnostics still showed green or amber or no report. Pham got a camera in the workshop itself. The place was on fire.
Pham jumped up from his saddle and bounced off the ceiling. For an instant she thought he might go racing off the bridge. Then he tied himself down and grimly began trying to put out the fire.
For the next few minutes, the bridge was almost quiet, just Pham quietly swearing as none of the obvious things worked. “Interlocking failures,” he mumbled the phrase a couple of times. “The firesnuff automation is down… I can’t dump atmosphere from the shop. My beamers have melted everything shut.”
Ship fire. Ravna had seen pictures of such disasters, but they had always seemed an improbable thing. In the midst of universal vacuum, how could a fire survive? And in zero-gee, surely a fire would choke itself even if the crew couldn’t dump atmosphere. The workshop camera had a hazy view on the real thing: True, the flames ate the oxygen around them. There were sheets of construction foam that were only lightly scorched, protected for the moment by dead air. But the fire spread out, moving steadily into still-fresh air. In places, heat-driven turbulence enriched the mix, and previously burned areas blazed up.
“It’s still got ventilation, Sir Pham.”
“I know. I can’t shut it. The vents must be melted open.”
“It’s as likely software.” Blueshell was silent for a second. “Try this—” the directions were meaningless to Ravna, some low-level workaround.
But Pham nodded, and his fingers danced across the console.
In the workshop, the surface-hugging flames crept farther across the construction foam. Now they licked at the innards of the armor Pham had spent so much time on. This latest revision was only half finished. Ravna remembered he was working on reactive armor now… There would be oxidizers there. “Pham, is the armor sealed
