“You mean our relay from Fleet Central?” Svensndot explained about the narrow bandwidth and the crummy performance of his ship’s processors down here at the Bottom.
“And so their picture of us must have been equally bad… I wonder what they thought I was?”
“Unh…” Good question. Consider Pham Nuwen: bristly red hair, smoke-gray skin, singsong voice. If cues such as those were sent, like as not the display at Fleet Central would show something quite different from the human Kjet saw. “… wait a minute. That’s not how evocations work. I’m sure they got a pretty clear view of you. See, a few high-resolution pics would get sent at the beginning of the session. Then those would be used as the base for the animation.”
Pham stared back lumpishly, almost as though he didn’t buy it and was daring Kjet to think things through. Well damn it, the explanation was correct; there was no doubt that Limmende and Skrits had seen the redhead as a human. Yet there was something here that bothered Kjet… Limmende and Skrits had both looked out of date.
“Glimfrelle! Check the raw stream we got from Central. Did they send us any sync pictures?”
It took Glimfrelle only seconds. He whistled a sharp tone of surprise. “No, Boss. And since it was all properly encrypted, our end just made do with old ad animation.” He said something to Tirolle, and the two twittered rapidly. “Nothing seems to work down here. Maybe this is just another bug.” But Glimfrelle didn’t sound very confident of the assertion.
Svensndot turned back to the picture from the Out of Band. “Look. The channel to Fleet Central was fully encrypted, using one— time schemes I trust more than what we’re talking with now. I can’t believe it was a masquerade.” But nausea was creeping up Kjet’s guts. This was like the first minutes of the Battle for Sjandra Kei, when he guessed how thoroughly they had been outmaneuvered, when he realized that everyone he was trying to protect would be murdered. “Hei, we’ll contact other vessels. We’ll verify Central’s location—”
Pham Nuwen raised an eyebrow. “Maybe it wasn’t a masquerade.” Before he could say more, one of the Riders—the one with the greater skrode—was shouting at them. It rolled across the room’s apparent ceiling, pushing the humans aside to get close to the camera. “I have a question!” The voder speech was burred, nearly unintelligible. The creature’s tendrils rattled dryly against each other, as distressed as Kjet Svensndot had ever heard. “My question: Are there Skroderiders aboard your fleet’s command vessel?”
“Why do you—”
“Answer the question!”
“How should I know?” Kjet tried to think. “Tirolle. You have friends on Skrits’ staff. Are there any Riders aboard?”
Tirolle stuttered a few bars, “A’a’a’a. Yes. Emergency hires—rescues actually—right after the battle.”
“That’s the best we can do, friend.”
The Skroderider trembled, unspeaking. Then its tendrils seemed to wilt. “Thank you,” it said softly. It rolled back and out of camera range.
Pham Nuwen disappeared from view. Ravna looked wildly around, “Wait please!” she said to the camera, and Kjet was looking at the abandoned command deck of the Out of Band. At the limit of the pickup’s hearing came sounds of mumbled conversation, voder and human. Then she was back.
“What was that all about?” Svensndot to Ravna.
“N-Nothing any of us can help anymore… Captain Svensndot, it looks to me like your fleet is no longer run by the people you think.”
“Maybe.” Probably. “It’s something I’ve got to think about.”
She nodded. For a moment they looked at each other, unspeaking. So strange, so far from home and after all the heartbreak… to see someone so familiar. “You were truly at Relay?” the question sounded stupid in his ears. Yet in a way she was a bridge from what he knew and trusted to the deadly weirdness of the present situation.
Ravna Bergsndot nodded. “Yes… and it was like everything you’ve read. We even had direct contact with a Power… And yet it was not enough, Group Captain. The Blight destroyed it all. That part of the News is no lie.”
Tirolle pushed back from his nav station. “Then how can anything you do down here hurt the Blight?” The words were blunt, but ’Rolle’s eyes were wide and serious. In fact, he was pleading for some sense behind all the death. Dirokimes had not been the greatest part of the Sjandra Kei civilization, but they had been by far its oldest member race. A million years ago they had burst out of the Slow Zone, colonizing the three systems that humans one day would call Sjandra Kei. Long before the humans arrived, they were a race of inward dreamers. They protected their star systems with ancient automation and friendly younger races. Another half million years and their race might be gone from the Beyond, extinct or evolved into something else. It was a common pattern, something like death and old age, but gentler.
There is a common misconception about such senescent races, that their members are senescent too. In any large population, there will be variation. There will always be those who want to see the outside world and play there for a while. Humankind had gotten on very well with the likes of Glimfrelle and Tirolle.
And Bergsndot seemed to understand. “Have any of you heard of godshatter?”
Kjet said, “No,” then noticed that both Dirokimes had started. They whistled at each other for several seconds in some kind of surprise dialect. “Yes,” ’Rolle spoke at last in Samnorsk, his voice as close to awe as Kjet had ever heard. “You know we Dirokimes have been in the Beyond for a long time. We’ve sent many colonies into the Transcend; some became Powers… And once… Something came back. It wasn’t a Power of course. In fact, it was more like a mind— crippled Dirokime. But it knew things and did things that made great changes for us.”
“Fentrollar?” Kjet asked wonderingly, suddenly recognizing the story. It had happened one hundred thousand years before humankind arrived at Sjandra Kei, yet it was a central contradiction of the Dirokime terranes.
“Yes.” Tirolle said. “Even now people don’t agree if Fentrollar was a gift or a curse, but he founded the dream habitats and the Old Religion.”
Ravna nodded, “That’s the case most familiar to us of Sjandra Kei. Maybe it’s not a happy example considering all its effects…” and she told them about the fall of Relay, what had happened to Old One, and what had become of Pham Nuwen. The Dirokimes side chat dwindled to zero and they were very still.
Finally Kjet said, “So what does Nu— ” he stumbled over the name, as strange as everything else about this fellow, “Nuwen know about the thing you seek at the Bottom? What can he do with it?”
“I-I don’t know, Group Captain. Pham Nuwen himself doesn’t know. A little bit at a time, the insight comes. I believe, because I was there for some of it… but I don’t know how to make you believe.” She drew a shuddering breath. Kjet suddenly guessed what a strange, tortured place the Out of Band must be. Somehow that made the story more credible. Anything that really could destroy the Blight would be unwholesomely weird. Kjet wondered how he would do, locked up with such a thing.
“My Lady Ravna,” he said, the words stilted and formal. After all, I’m suggesting treason. “I, uh, I’ve got a number of friends in the Commercial Security fleet. I can check on the suspicions you’ve raised, and…” say it! “it’s possible we can give you support in spite of my HQ.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you.”
Glimfrelle broke the silence. “We’re getting a poor signal on the Out of Band’s channel now.”
Kjet eyes swept the windows. All the ultratrace displays looked like random noise. Whatever this storm was, it was bad.
“Looks like we won’t be talking much longer, Ravna Bergsndot.”
“Yes. We’re losing signal… Group Captain, if none of this works, if you can’t fight for us… Your people are all that’s left of Sjandra Kei. It’s been good to see you and the Dirokimes… after so long to see familiar faces, people I really understand. I—” as she spoke, her image square-blurred into low-frequency components.
“Huui!” said Glimfrelle. “Bandwidth just dropped through the floor.” There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the Out of Band. Given communications problems, the ship’s processors just switched to low-rate coding.
“Hello, Out of Band. We’ve got problems on this channel now. Suggest we sign off.”
The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it:
Yes. It is more than a communicati
Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. “Zip. Zero,” he said. “No detectable signal.”
Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. “This is a lot more than a communications problem. Our computers haven’t been able to commit on an ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds.” They had been doing
