A Deepness in the Sky (14 page)

Ezr only remembered waking in a new, specially made nursery. He had been treated like a king for uncounted Ksecs afterward.

So Ezr Vinh had always come out of coldsleep in a happy mood. He suffered the usual disorientation, the usual physical discomfort, but childhood memories assured him that wherever he was things would be good.

At first, this time was no different, except perhaps gentler than usual. He was lying in near zero gee, snug in a warm bed. He had the impression of space, a high ceiling. There was a painting on the wall beyond the bed...so meticulously rendered; it might have been a photo.Trixia loathedthose pictures. The thought popped up, fixed some context on this waking. Trixia. Triland. The mission to the OnOff star. And this was not the first waking there. There had been some very bad times, the Emergent ambush. How had they won over that? The very last memories before this sleep, what were they?Floating through darkness in a crippled lander. Park'sflagship destroyed. Trixia...

"I think that brought him out of it, Podmaster." A woman's voice.

Almost unwillingly, he turned his head toward the voice. Anne Reynolt sat at his bedside, and next to her was Tomas Nau.

"Ah, Apprentice Vinh. I am pleased to see you back among the living." Nau's smile was concerned and solemn.

It took Ezr a couple of tries to gargle up something intelligible: "Wha's...What's happening? Where am I?"

"You're aboard my principal residence. It's about eight days since your fleet attempted to destroy mine."

"Guh?"We attacked you?

Nau cocked his head quizzically at Vinh's incoherence. "I wanted to be here when we woke you. Director Reynolt will fill you in on the details, but I just wanted to assure you of my support. I'm appointing you Fleet Manager of what's left of the Qeng Ho expedition." He stood, patted Vinh gently on the shoulder. Vinh's gaze followed the Emergent out of the room.Fleet Manager?

Reynolt brought Vinh a book of windows with more hard facts than he could easily absorb. They could not all be lies....Fourteen hundred Qeng Ho had died, almost half the fleet's complement. Four of the seven Qeng Ho starships had been destroyed. The ramscoops on the rest were disabled. Most of the smaller vehicles had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Nau's people were busy cleaning up the orbital flotsam of the firefights. They quite intended to continue the "joint operation." The volatiles and ores that had been lifted from Arachna would support habitats the Emergents were building at the L1 point of the sun/planet system.

And she let him see the crew lists. ThePham Nuwen had been lost with all hands. Captain Park and several members of the Trading Committee were dead. Most people on the surviving ships still lived, but the senior ones were being held in coldsleep.

The killing headache of his last few moments on the lander was gone. Ezr had been cured of the "unfortunate contagion," Reynolt said. But only an engineered disease could have such a convenient and universal time of onset. The Emergent lies were scarcely more than an excuse for civility. They had planned the ambush from the beginning, and down to the last second.

At least Anne Reynolt did not smile when she spoke the lies. In fact, she rarely smiled at all. Director of Human Resources Reynolt. Funny that not even Trixia had picked up on what that title might imply. At first, Ezr thought Reynolt was fighting a proper sense of shame: she hardly ever looked him directly in the eye. But gradually he realized that looking at his face was no more interesting to her than studying a bulkhead. She didn't see him as a person; she didn't care a jot for the dead.

Ezr read the reports quietly, not sneering, not crying out when he saw that Sum Dotran was gone.Trixia's name was nowhere on the list of thedead. Finally he came to the lists of the waking survivors and their present disposition. Almost three hundred were aboard the Qeng Ho temp, also moved to the L1 point. Ezr scanned the names, memorizing: junior people, and virtually no Trilanders or academics. No Trixia Bonsol. He paged further...another list.Trixia! Her name was there, and she was even listed under "Linguistics Department."

Ezr looked up from the book of windows, tried to sound casual. "What, um, what's the meaning of this glyph beside some of the names?"BesideTrixia's name.

" ‘Focused." '

"And what does that mean?" There was an edge, unwanted, in his voice.

"They're still under medical treatment. Not everyone recovered as easily as you." Her stare was hard and impassive.

The next day, Nau showed up again.

"Time to introduce you to your new subordinates," he said. They coasted through a long, straight corridor to a vehicular airlock. This habitat wasn't the banquet place. There was the faintest drift of gravity, as though it were set on a small asteroid. The taxi beyond the airlock was larger than any the Qeng Ho had brought. It was luxurious in a baroque, primitive way. There were low tables and a bar that served in all directions. Wide, natural-looking windows surrounded them. Nau gave him a moment to look out:

The taxi was rising through the strutwork of a grounded habitat. The thing was incomplete but it looked as big as a Qeng Ho legation temp. Now they were above the strutwork. The ground curved away into a jumble of gray leviathans. These were the diamond mountains, all collected together. The blocks were strangely uncratered, but as somberly dull as common asteroids. Here and there the frail sunlight picked out where the surface graphite had been nicked away, and there was a rainbow glitter. Nestled between two of the mountains he saw pale fields of snow, a blocky tumble of freshly cut rock and ice; these must be the fragments of ocean and seamount they'd lifted from Arachna. The taxi rose further. Around the corner of the mountains, the forms of starships climbed into view. The ships were more than six hundred meters long, but dwarfed by the rockpile. They were moored tightly together, the way salvage is bundled in a junkyard; Ezr counted quickly, estimated what he could not see directly. "So you've brought everything here—to L1? You really intend a lurking strategy?"

Nau gave a nod. "I'm afraid so. It's best to be frank about this. Our fighting has put us all near the edge. We have sufficient resources to return home, but empty-handed. Instead, if we can just cooperate...well, from here at L1 we can watch the Spiders. If they are indeed entering the Information Age, we can eventually use their resources to refit. In either case, we may get much of what we came for."

Hm. An extended lurk, waiting for your customers to mature. It was a strategy the Qeng Ho had followed on a few occasions. Sometimes it even worked. "It will be difficult."

From behind Ezr, a voice said, "For you perhaps. But Emergents live well, little man. Best you learn that now." It was a voice that Vinh recognized, the voice that had protested of Qeng Ho ambush even as the killing began. Ritser Brughel. Ezr turned. The big, blond fellow was grinning at him. No subtle nuance here. "And we also play to win. The Spiders will learn that too." Not too long ago, Ezr Vinh had spent an evening sitting next to this fellow, listening to him lecture Pham Trinli. The blond was a boor and a bully, but it hadn't mattered then. Vinh's gaze flickered across the carpeted walls to Anne Reynolt. She was watching the conversation intently. Physically, she and Brughel could have been sister and brother. There was even a tinge of red in the guy's blond hair. But there the similarity ended. Obnoxious as he was, Brughel's emotions were clear things, and intense. The only affect that Vinh had seen in Anne Reynolt was impatience. She watched the present conversation as one might watch insects in garden soil.

"But don't worry, Peddler boy. Your quarters are properly inconspicuous." Brughel pointed out the forward window. There was a greenish speck, barely showing a disk. It was the Qeng Ho temp. "We have it parked in an eight-day orbit of the main jumble."

Tomas Nau raised his hand politely, almost as if asking for the floor, and Brughel shut up. "We have only a moment, Mr. Vinh. I know that Anne Reynolt has given you an overview, but I want to make sure you understand your new responsibilities." He did something with his cuff, and the image of the Qeng Ho temp swelled. Vinh swallowed; funny, it was just an ordinary field temp, barely one hundred meters on a side. His eyes searched the lumpy, quilted hull. He had lived in there less than 2Msec, cursed its squat economies a thousand times. But now, it was the closest thing to home that still existed; inside were many of Ezr's surviving friends. A field temp is so easy to destroy. Yet all the cells looked fully inflated and there was no patchwork. Captain Park had set this one far from his ships, and Nau had spared it. "...so your new position is an important one. As my Fleet Manager, you have responsibilities comparable to the late Captain Park's. You will have my consistent support; I will make sure that my people understand this." A glance at Ritser Brughel. "But please remember: Our success—even our survival—now depends on our cooperation."

TEN

When it came to personnel management, Ezr knew he was a little slow. What Nau was up to should have been instantly obvious. Vinh had even studied such things in school. When they reached the temp, Nau gave an unctuous little speech, introducing Vinh as the new "Qeng Ho Fleet Manager." Nau made a special point of the fact that Ezr Vinh was the most senior member of a ship-owning Family present. The two Vinh starships had survived the recent ambush relatively undamaged. If there was any legitimate master for the Qeng Ho ships, it was Ezr Vinh. And if everyone cooperated with legitimate authority, there would yet be wealth for all. Then Ezr was pushed forward to mumble a few words about how glad he was to be back among friends, and how he hoped for their help.

In the days that followed, he came to understand the wedge that Nau had slipped between duty and loyalty. Ezr was home and yet he was not. Every day, he saw familiar faces. Benny Wen and Jimmy Diem had both survived. Ezr had known Benny since they were six years old; now he was like a stranger, a cooperative stranger.

And then one day, more by luck than planning, Ezr ran into Benny near the temp's taxi locks. Ezr was alone. More and more, his Emergent assistants did not dog his moves. They trusted him? They had him bugged? They couldn't imagine him doing harm? All the possibilities were obnoxious, but it was good to be free of them.

Benny was with a small crew of Qeng Ho right under the outermost balloon wall. Being near the locks, there was no exterior quilting here; every so often the lights of a passing taxi sent a moving glow across the fabric. Benny's crew was spread out across the wall, working at the nodes of the approach automation. Their Emergent gang boss was at the far end of the open space.

Ezr glided out of the radial tunnel, saw Benny Wen, and bounced easily across the wall toward him.

Wen looked up from his work and nodded courteously. "Fleet Manager." The formality was familiar now—and still as painful as a kick in the face.

"Hi, Benny. H-how are things going?"

Wen looked briefly down the length of the volume at the Emergent gang boss. That guy really stuck out, his work clothes gray and stark against the rampant individualism of most Qeng Ho. He was talking loudly to three of the work crew, but at this distance his words were muffled by the balloon fabric. Benny looked back at Ezr and shrugged. "Oh, just fine. You know what we're doing here?"

"Replacing the comm inputs." One of the Emergents' first moves had been to confiscate all head-up displays. The huds and their associated input electronics were the classic tools of freedom.

Wen laughed softly, his eyes still on the gang boss. "Right the first time, Ezr old pal. You see, our new...employers...have a problem. They need our ships. They need our equipment. But none of that will work without the automation. And how can they trust that?" All effective machinery had embedded controllers. And of course the controllers were networked, with the invisible glue of their fleet's local net that made everything work consistently.

The software for that system had been developed over millennia, refined by the Qeng Ho over centuries. Destroy it and the fleet would be barely more than scrap metal. But how could any conqueror trust what all those centuries had built in? In most such situations, the losers' gear was simply destroyed. But as Tomas Nau admitted, no one could afford to lose any more resources.

"Their own work gangs are going through every node, you know. Not just here, but on all our surviving ships. Bit by bit they are rehosting them."

"There's no way they can replace everything."I hope. The worst tyrannies were the ones where a government required its own logic on every embedded node.

"You'd be surprised what they are replacing. I've seen them work. Their computer techs are...strange. They've dug up stuff in the system that I never suspected." Benny shrugged. "But you're right, they aren't touching the lowest-level embedded stuff. It's mainly the I/O logic that gets jerked. In return, we get brand-new interfaces." Benny's face twisted in a little smile. He pulled a black plastic oblong from his belt. Some kind of keyboard. "This is the only thing we'll be using for a while."

"Lord, that looks ancient."

"Simple, not ancient. I think these are just backups the Emergents had floating around." Benny sent another look in the direction of the gang boss. "The important thing is, the comm gear in these boxes is known to the Emergents. Tamper with it, and there'll be alarms up the local net. In principle they can filter everything we do." Benny looked down at the box, hefted it. Benny was just another apprentice, like Ezr. He wasn't much sharper about technical things than Ezr, but he always had a nose for clever deals. "Strange. What I've seen of Emergent technology looks pretty dull. Yet these guys really intend to dredge and monitor everything. There'ssomething about their automation that we don't understand." He was almost talking to himself.

On the wall behind him a light grew and grew, shifted slowly sideways. A taxi was approaching the docking bay. The light slid around the curve of the wall, and a second later there was a mutedkchunk. Shallow ripples chased out across the fabric from the docking cylinder. The lock pumps kicked in. Here, their whine was louder than at the dock entrance itself. Ezr hesitated. The noise was enough to mask their conversation from the gang boss.Sure, and any surveillance bugs could hear through the racketbetter than our own ears. So when he spoke, it was not a conspiratorial murmur, but loud against the racket of the pumps. "Benny, lots has happened. I just want you to know I haven't changed. I'm not—"I'm not atraitor, damn it!