But when Pham finished, the large rider did not launch into objections. “Across seventy light-years, ultrawave comm between ships is practical, even without our antenna swarm; we could even have live video. But you are right, the beam spread would include all the ships in the central cluster of fleets. If we could reliably identify an outlying vessel as belonging to Sjandra Kei, then what you are asking might be done; that ship could use internal fleet codes to relay to the others. But in honesty I must warn you,” continued Blueshell, brushing back Greenstalk’s gentle remonstrance, “professional communications folk would not honor your request for talk -would probably not even recognize it as such.”
“Silly.” Greenstalk finally spoke, her voder-voice gentle but clear. “You always say things like that—except when we are talking to paying customers.”
“Brap. Yes. Desperate times, desperate measures. I want to try it, but I fear… I want there to be no accusations of Rider treachery, Sir Pham. I want you to handle this.”
Pham Nuwen smiled back. “My thought exactly.”
“The Aniara Fleet.” That’s what some of the crews of Commercial Security were calling themselves. Aniara was the ship of an old human myth, older than Nyjora, perhaps going back to the Tuvo-Norsk cooperatives in the asteroids of Earth’s solar system. In the story, Aniara was a large ship launched into interstellar depths just before the death of its parent civilization. The crew watched the death agonies of the home system, and then over the following years—as their ship fell out and out into the endless dark—died themselves, their life-support systems slowly failing. The image was a haunting one, which was probably the reason it was known across millennia. With the destruction of Sjandra Kei and the escape of Commercial Security, the story seemed suddenly come true.
But we will not play it to the end. Group Captain Kjet Svensndot stared into the tracking display. This time the death of civilization had been a murder, and the murderers were almost within vengeance’s reach. For days, fleet HQ had been maneuvering them to close with the Alliance. The display showed that success was very, very near. The majority of Alliance and Sjandra Kei ships were bound in a glowing ball of drive traces—which also included the third, silent fleet. From that display you might think that battle was already possible. In fact, opposing ships were passing through almost the same space—sometimes less than a billion kilometers apart -but still separated by milliseconds of time. All the vessels were on ultradrive, jumping perhaps a dozen times a second. And even here at the Bottom of the Beyond, that came to a measurable fraction of a light-year on each jump. To fight an uncooperative enemy meant matching their jumps perfectly and flooding the common space with weapon drones.
Group Captain Svensndot changed the display to show ships that had exactly matched their pace with the Alliance. Almost a third of the fleet was in synch now. Another few hours and… “Damnation!” He slapped his display board, sending it spinning across the deck.
His first officer retrieved the display, sent it sailing back. “Is this a new damnation, or the usual?” Tirolle asked.
“It was the usual. Sorry.” And he really was. Tirolle and Glimfrelle had their own problems. No doubt there were still pockets of humanity in the Beyond, hidden from the Alliance. But of the Dirokimes, there might be no more than what was on Commercial Security’s fleet. Except for adventurous souls like Tirolle and Glimfrelle, all that was left of their kind had been in the dream terranes at Sjandra Kei.
Kjet Svensndot had started with Commercial Security twenty-five years before, back when the company had just been a small fleet of rentacops. He had spent thousands of hours learning to be the very best combat pilot in the organization. Only twice had he ever been in a shootout. Some might have regretted that. Svensndot and his superiors took it as the reward for being the best. His competence had won him the best fighting equipment in Commercial Security’s fleet, culminating with the ship he commanded now. The Olvira was purchased with part of the enormous premium that Sjandra Kei paid out when the Alliance first started making threatening noises. Olvira was not a rebuilt freighter, but a fighting machine from the keel out. The ship was equipped with the smartest processors, the smartest ultra drive, that could operate at Sjandra Kei’s altitude in the Beyond. It needed only a three-person crew—and combat could be managed by the pilot alone with his AI associates. Its holds contained more than ten thousand seeker bombs, each smarter than the average freighter’s entire drive unit. Quite a reward for twenty-five years of solid performance. They even let Svensndot name his new ship.
And now… Well, the true Olvira was surely dead. Along with billions of others they had been hired to protect, she had been at Herte, in the inner system. Glow bombs leave no survivors.
And his beautiful ship with the same name, it had been a half light-year out-system, seeking enemies that weren’t there. In any honest battle, Kjet Svensndot and this Olvira could have done very well. Instead they were chasing down into the Bottom of the Beyond. Every light-year took them further from the regions Olvira was built for. Every light-year the processors worked a bit more slowly (or not at all). Down here the converted freighters were almost an optimum design. Clumsy and stupid, with crews of dozens, but they kept on working. Already Olvira was lagging five light-years behind them. It was the freighters that would make the attack on the Alliance fleet. And once again Kjet would stand powerless while his friends died.
For the hundredth time, Svensndot glared at the trace display and contemplated mutiny. There were Alliance stragglers too—'high performance” vehicles left behind the central pack. But his orders were to maintain position, to be a tactical coordinator for the fleet’s swifter combatants. Well, he would do as he was hired… this one last time. But when the battle was done, when the fleet was dead, with as many of the Alliance that they could take with them—then he would think of his own revenge. Some of that depended on Tirolle and Glimfrelle. Could he persuade them to leave the remnants of the Alliance fleet and ascend to the Middle Beyond, up where the Olvira was the best of her kind? There was good evidence now about which star systems were behind the “Alliance for the Defense'. The murderers were boasting to the news. Apparently they thought that would bring them new support. It might also bring them visitors like Olvira. The bombs in her belly could destroy worlds, though not as swiftly sure as what had been used on Sjandra Kei. And even now Svensndot’s mind shrank from that sort of revenge. No. They would choose their targets carefully: ships coming to form new Alliance fleets, underprotected convoys. Olvira might last a long time if he always struck from ambush and never left survivors. He stared and stared at the display, and ignored the wetness that floated at the corners of his eyes. All his life, he had lived by the law. Often his job had been to stop acts of revenge… And now revenge was all that life had left for him.
“I’m getting something peculiar, Kjet.” Glimfrelle was monitoring signals this watch. It was the sort of thing that should have been totally automated—and had been in Olvira’s natural environment, but which was now a boring and exhausting enterprise.
“What? More Net lies?” said Tirolle.
“No. This is on the bearing of that bottom-lugger everyone is chasing. It can’t be anyone else.”
Svensndot’s eyebrows rose. He turned on the mystery with enormous, scarcely realized, pleasure. “Characteristics?”
“Ship’s signal processor says it’s probably a narrow beam. We are its only likely target. The signal is strong and the bandwidth is at least enough to support flat video. If our snarfling DSP was working right, I’d know—” ’Frelle sang a little song that was impatient humming among his kind. “— Iiae! It’s encrypted, but at a high layer. This stuff is syntax 45 video. In fact, it claims to be using one third of a cipher the Company made a year back.” For an instant, Svensndot thought ’Frelle was claiming the message itself was smart; that should be absolutely impossible here at the Bottom. The second officer must have caught his look: “Just sloppy language, Boss. I read this out of the frame format…” Something flashed on his display. “Okay, here’s the story on the cipher: the Company made it and its peers to cover shipping security.” Back before the Alliance, that had been the highest crypto level in the organization. “This is the third that never got delivered. The whole was assumed compromised, but miracle of miracles, we still have a copy.” Both ’Frelle and ’Rolle were looking at Svensndot expectantly, their eyes large and dark. Standard policy—standard orders—were that transmissions on compromised keys were to be ignored. If the Company’s signals people had been doing a proper job, the rotted cipher wouldn’t even have been aboard and the policy would have enforced itself.
“Decrypt the thing,” Svensndot said shortly. The last weeks had demonstrated that his company was a dismal failure when it came to military intelligence and signals. They might as well get some benefit from that incompetence.
“Yes sir!” Glimfrelle tapped a single key. Somewhere inside Olvira’s signal processor, a long segment of “random” noise was broken into frames and laid precisely down on the “random” noise in the data frames incoming. There was a perceptible pause (damn the Bottom) and then the comm window lit with a flat video picture.
