The Children of the Sky

Tropicals could never have guessed. No one who wasn’t deeply involved with Oobii technology could have slipped past your search. Scrupilo might have managed it. Maybe I could have—after a lot of research. And then there’s Flenser, who over the years has wangled who knows what out of Oobii—and who I still suspect stole Oliphaunt.”

Ravna opened her mouth to protest, then decided that she had already challenged Woodcarver’s paranoia too much today. In fact, whoever had stolen the Oliphaunt dataset had an oracle that in some ways was as significant as Oobii. Possession would make almost any sneaky plan feasible. And Woodcarver had absolute faith in her smartest offspring’s continuing villainy. I should be grateful, thought Ravna. Better that Woodcarver obsess about Flenser than about the New Meeting Place.

•  •  •

When Ravna came back down the hill from the New Castle, it was an hour or two before midnight. The heather was in twilight. An occasional star was visible in the southern sky; there was the orbiting hulk of the freight device that had carried the Children’s Lander here.

The darkness and the clear sky together brought a deep chill that mostly hid during the summer. By the time Ravna reached Oobii, the breeze had picked up, driving like icy needles through her locally made sweater. The Children called such clothing “unspeakably dumb”; in any case, the fabric had no ability to average temperatures.

The lights from Oobii’s cargo bay—the New Meeting Place—splashed warm and welcoming out upon the hillside. Ravna stood in the outer fringes of the light and looked in. Even now, there were packs and Children within. They were probably just playing games, but even so, the sight comforted her. Woodcarver would eventually love this place.

But just now Ravna didn’t want to talk to anyone. She passed the light, continued on around the ship. Since the theft of the cloaks, local security had been a big topic at council meetings. Nevil, with Scrupilo in loud support, and Johanna soberly nodding, thought that any number of other terrible things might happen now, including smash-and-grab attacks. That sounded foolish to Ravna, but in fact, they didn’t know who they were up against. Maybe the added surveillance cams would help. Maybe they needed more guards. We’ll get all the evils of a nation state before we get the tech we need.

In any case, nothing could go wrong so close to her ship’s watchful eyes. She stepped near the hull, and Oobii quietly opened a hatch for her. She walked inside and let the ship take her up to her rooms by the bridge. She changed out of the heavy sweater and pants, into her shipboard clothes. Just doing that reminded her again of her special perks. Very soon she must move out of these digs. That had become a personal imperative, even though she hadn’t yet spoken of it to anyone. Living outside of Oobii would slow her work, but now she realized that staying aboard might be even more destructive.

Meantime, tonight, she had more than enough work to do, and it required all the tech that her starship bridge could provide:

What was Flenser-Tyrathect up to? Woodcarver had such strong suspicions about the pack. In fact, Ravna knew that some minor part of those suspicions was correct. The wily (reformed) monster had indeed figured out that Woodcarver had bugged his sanctums. But the reason Ravna knew that was also the reason she knew Flenser wasn’t behind the current mysteries.

She hunkered down in her favorite-style chair and called up Oobii’s surveillance suite—the High Beyond system that she had kept hidden from everyone.

The Out of Band II had been designed for operations at the Bottom of the Beyond and even in the Slow Zone (where they were now marooned). But the ship had been built in the Middle Beyond, where technology tapdanced at the edge of intelligibility. Almost none of the ship’s highest functions worked Down Here. Certainly, no ship could fly faster than light Down Here. And the antigravity was slowly dying. The natural-language translators were laughably incompetent. Even where local physics allowed a phenomenon, the ship’s software was often incapable of exploiting it. That was why a lot of Oobii’s design involved Very Dumb Solutions to classic problems.

Nevertheless, there were surprises. In the days after Pham died, after the Battle on Starship Hill, Ravna had taken inventory of what remained. Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers. The only other galactic on the planet was the Skroderider Greenstalk, and she was too soon gone. Oh, Greenstalk, how I miss you. The thought still popped up, for Greenstalk had been with her through all the most desperate times in space.

So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.

One such hardware system had survived Countermeasure’s surge. Even more miraculous, Oobii could still reconstruct the output. Early on, Ravna had to decide just who to target with that special surveillance. It had not been a difficult choice. The Old Flenser had created a strange culture that was both cruel and fiendishly inventive. Flenser had seemed every bit as dangerous as Woodcarver claimed.

And so one day during the early years, Ravna had infected Flenser-Tyrathect’s members with the surveillance system. The infestation was physically harmless, and the devices could not replicate, but there were more than enough devices to cover the pack, hopefully for as long as she needed them.

Over the years, Ravna had often wished—but never with the desperate frustration of one who has made a profound mistake—that she could infect somebody else with the surveillance system. But the “reformed” Flenser had been the greatest unknown, potentially the greatest threat, and Ravna’s camera had revealed to her that whatever strange thing Flenser-Tyrathect might be, it was not working against Woodcarver or Ravna or their plans for the Domain. That certainty had more than once brought Ravna to the verge of revealing her methods to Woodcarver. Now, after the misunderstanding about the New Meeting Place, Ravna wondered if she could ever dare tell her.

Woodcarver’s latest suspicions about Flenser and the radio cloaks made perfect sense—if one didn’t know about Ravna’s special surveillance. The ship was constantly monitoring the Flenser data, keeping a record of the reconstructed images and watching for specified alarm conditions. Ravna had reviewed that record very carefully in the days immediately after the theft of the radio cloaks, and the reformed Flenser had seemed just as darkly innocent as ever. What more could she do?

I wonder what the pack is up to right now, tonight? A frivolous thought perhaps, since “real time” views from the system were a strange and scattered thing. Nevertheless, Ravna made the request. Several seconds passed. Range was the great weakness of this system. Beyond the local area, reception became extremely ambiguous. Fortunately, Flenser had been out of the area only a few times in ten years—a very good consequence of Woodcarver’s strict hold on the fellow. The reports from the infestation were forwarded in unsynchronized driblets across the nearly random locations of devices that previously had been shed from the pack’s members. Sufficient data to build one picture might take a thousand seconds—and then less than one second for the next image.

Sometimes important adjustments would show up later and Oobii would revise the image stream in really strange ways.

Tonight, reception was poor, but as Oobii’s signal-processing software struggled with clues, the pictures gradually became clearer, more colorful, brighter. There were a few moments of motion and then the stream froze again. Ravna fiddled with the parameters.

Flenser was somewhere in the sub-basements of the Old Castle. He went there two or three times a year. Several years ago, Ravna had concluded that Flenser did indeed know where Woodcarver’s spy cameras were located. That was a scary conclusion, but then she realized that most of these trips “downstairs” were just part of Flenser’s hobby of enraging his pack parent.

There were exceptions; Flenser had some things he really didn’t want Woodcarver to know about. For instance, Woodcarver had forbidden Flenser to try to rehabilitate his creation, Steel. In