A Deepness in the Sky (17 page)

Since work began on the rockpile, Trinli had studied the terrain, but not for the same reasons as Qiwi Lisolet, or even Jimmy Diem. There was a cleft where the ice and airsnow filled the space between Diamond One and Diamond Two. That was significant to Qiwi and Jimmy, but only in connection with rockpile maintenance. For Pham Trinli...with a little digging, that cleft was a path from their main work site to Hammerfest, a path that was out of sight of ships and habitats. He hadn't mentioned it to Diem; the conspirators' plan was for Hammerfest to be taken after they grabbed theFar Treasure.

Trinli crawled along the -shaped cleft, closer and closer to the Emergent habitat. It would have surprised Diem and the others to know it, but Pham Trinli was not a born spacer. And sometimes when he climbed around like this, he got the vertigo that afflicted Chump groundlings. If he let his imagination go...he wasn't crawling hand-by-hand along a narrow ditch, but instead he was rock-climbing up a mountain chimney, a chimney that bent farther and farther back on him, till he must surely fall.

Trinli paused a second, holding his place with one hand while his whole body quivered with the need for crampons and ropes, and pitons driven solid into the walls around him.Lord. It had been a long time since his groundsider orientation had come back this strongly. He moved forward. Forward. Not up.

By his count of arm paces, he was just outside Hammerfest now, near its communications array. Odds were very high some camera could image him if he popped out. Of course, the odds were fairly good that no one and no program would be monitoring such a view in time to change things. Nevertheless, Trinli stayed hunkered down. If necessary, he would move closer, but for now he just wanted to snoop. He lay back in the cleft, his feet against the ice and his back against the diamond wall. He reeled out his little antenna probe. The Emergents had played smiling tyrant since the ambush. The one thing they made ugly threats about was possession of non-approved I/O devices. Pham knew that Diem and the core of the conspiracy had Qeng Ho huds, and had used black crypto across the local net. Most of the planning had been done right under the Emergents' noses. Some communication avoided automation altogether; many of these youngsters knew a variation on the old dots-and-dashes game, blinkertalk.

As a peripheral member of the conspiracy, Pham Trinli knew its secrets only because he was filthy with forbidden electronics. This little antenna reel would have been a sign of sneaky intent even in peaceful times.

The thread he spun out was transparent to almost anything that might shine on it here. At the tip, a tiny sensor sniffed at the electromagnetic spectrum. His main goal was a comm array on the Emergent habitat that had a line of sight on the Qeng Ho temp. Trinli moved his arms like a fisherman repositioning his cast. The slender thread had a stiffness that was very effective in a micrograv environment.There. The sensor hung in the beam between Hammerfest and the temp. Pham eased a directional element over the edge of the cleft, aimed it at an unused port on the Qeng Ho temp. From there he was hooked directly into the fleet's local net, and around all the Emergent security. This was exactly what Nau and the others were so afraid of and the reason for their death-penalty threats. Jimmy Diem wisely had not taken chances like this. Pham Trinli had some advantages. He knew the old,old tricks that were hidden in Qeng Ho gear....Even so, he would not have risked it if Jimmy and his conspirators hadn't bet so much on their takeover scheme.

Maybe he should have talked to Jimmy Diem straight out. There were too many critical things they didn't know about the Emergents. What made some of their automation so good? In the firefights at the ambush, they'd been clearly inferior in high-level tactics, but their target queuing had been better than any system Pham Trinli had ever fought.

Trinli had the ugly feeling that comes when you've been maneuvered into a corner. The conspirators figured that this might be both their best and last chance to knock over the Emergents. Maybe. But the whole thing was just too pat, too perfect.

So make the best of it.

Pham looked at the display windows inside his hood. He was intercepting Emergent telemetry and some of the video they were transmitting to the temp. Some of that he could decrypt. The Emergent bastards just trusted their line-of-sight link a little bit too much. It was time to do some real snooping.

"Fifty seconds to Relight." The voice had been counting off in a flat monotone for the last two hundred seconds. In the auditorium, almost everyone was watching the windows in silence.

"Forty seconds to Relight."

Ezr took a quick look around the room. The flight tech, Xin, was looking from display to display. He was visibly nervous. Tomas Nau was watching the view that came from low above OnOff's surface. His intentness seemed to hold more curiosity than fear or suspicion.

Qiwi Lisolet glared at the window that showed the insulation canopy and Jimmy Diem's work crew. Her look had been dark and scowly ever since she flew into the auditorium. Ezr could guess what had happened... and he was relieved. Jimmy had used an innocent fourteen-year-old as camouflage for the plot. But Jimmy had never been an absolute hardass. He had taken a chance to get the girl out of harm's way.But I bet Qiwiwon't forgive him, even when she knows the truth.

"Wave front to arrive in ten seconds."

Stillno change in the view from the microsat. Only a mild red glow peeked between the sliding clouds. Either "old faithful" had played a cosmic joke on them, or this was an absolute knife-edge of an effect.

"Relight."

In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk. The low-altitude view had vanished sometime during that spread. The light got brighter and brighter andbrighter. A soft, awed sigh spread around the room. The light cast shadows on the opposite wall before the wallpaper damped its output.

"Five seconds after Relight." The voice must be automatic. "We're up to seven kilowatts per square meter." This was a different tech, speaking in a flat Trilander accent.Not an Emergent? The question flickered past Ezr's attention, swamped for the moment by the rest of the action.

"Ten seconds after Relight." At the side of the room was a smaller window, a view of the Spider world. It had been dark and dim as ever, but now the light was coming back from it and the planetary disk glowed with its own brightness as ice and air woke to a sun that was already five times as bright as Sol standard. And still brightening:

"Twenty kilowatts per square meter." A strip graph was playing out below the image of the new sun, comparing its output with the historical record. This Relight looked as powerful as any before.

"Neutron flux is still below detectable limits."

Nau and Vinh exchanged relieved looks, for once sincere on both sides.That was the sort of danger that couldn't be detected from interstellar distances, and one of the oldentimes fly-throughs had failed at about this point. At least they wouldn't fry in radiation that no one had seen from afar.

"Thirty seconds after Relight."

"Fifty kilowatts per square meter."

Outside, the mountainside that shielded them from the sun was beginning toglow.

• • •

Pham Trinli had the public audio channel playing. Even without it, Relight would have been obvious. But for the moment he held those events in a small part of his mind and concentrated on what was going over the private links out of Hammerfest. It was at moments like this, when technicians were overwhelmed by externalities, that security was most likely to slip. If Diem was on schedule, he and his crew were now at the mooring point of theFar Treasure.

Trinli's eyes flickered across the half-dozen displays that now filled most of his hood's view space. His fleet net programs were doing a good job with the telemetry.Ha. You can't beat old trapdoors. Now that they needed lots of computing power, the Emergents were using more and more Qeng Ho automation, and Trinli's snooping was correspondingly more effective.

The signal strength faded. Alignment drift? Trinli cleared several display windows and looked at the world around him. The OnOff star was hidden behind the mountains, but its light glared off the hills that stuck up into its view. Where ice or airsnow was exposed, vapor steamed out. For the moment, Jimmy's silver canopy was holding, but the fabric slowly swayed and flapped. There was an almost bluish color to the sky now, the mists of thousands of tonnes of water and air boiling up, turning the rockpile into a comet.

And screwing up his line of sight on Hammerfest. Trinli wiggled his antenna. Losing the link couldn't have been the mists alone. Something had shifted.There. He was picking up Hammerfest's traffic again. After a second his crypto resynchronized and he was back in business. But now he kept an eye on the storm around him. The new sun was even more of a show than they had expected.

Trinli's network feelers were inside Hammerfest now. Every program had its exceptional circumstances, the situations that the designers assumed were outside the scope of their responsibility. There were loopholes that the present extremities had shaken open... .

Strange. There seemed to be dozens of users logged into system internals. And there were big sections of the Emergent system that he didn't recognize, that weren't built on the common foundations. But the Emergents were supposed to be ordinary Chumps, recently returned to high technology with the help of the Qeng Ho broadcast net. There was just too much strange stuff here. He dipped into the voice traffic. The Emergent Nese was understandable but clipped and full of jargon. "...Diem...around front of rocks...according to plan."

According to plan?

Trinli scanned related data streams, saw graphics that showed just what weapons Jimmy's crew would carry, that showed the entrance he intended to use to sneak aboard theFar Treasure. There were tables of names... of the conspirators. Pham Trinli was listed as a minor accomplice. More tables.Jimmy Diem's black crypto. The first version was only partially accurate; later files converged on precisely what Jimmy and the others were using. Somehow, they had been watching closely enough to see through all the tricks. There had been no traitors, just an inhuman attention to detail.

Pham jerked down his equipment and crawled a little farther. He popped up, pointing his directional at a slanted overhang of Hammerfest's roof. From here the angle should be right. He could bounce a beam down atFar Treasure 's moorage point.

"Jimmy, Jimmy! Can you hear me?" It was Qeng Ho encrypted, but if any enemy heard, both ends of the link would be nailed.

All Jimmy Diem had ever wanted was to be a crewleader good enough to make management track. Then he and Tsufe could get married, all perfectly timed for when the voyage to the OnOff star began to pay off. Of course, that had been before the Emergents arrived and before the ambush. Now? Now he was leading a conspiracy, betting everything on a few moments of hellish risk. Well, at least they were finally acting... .

In less than forty seconds, they had run four thousand meters, all the way around the sunside of the jumble. That would have been a good piece of free space rappelling even if the sun had not been blowing up, even if they hadn't been wrapped in silver foil. They'd almost lost Pham Patil. A fast rappel depended on knowing exactly where to put your next ground spike, exactly how much force the piton could take when you accelerated out from the surface along your cable. But their surveys of the pile had all been done for placing the stationkeeping jets. There just hadn't been an excuse to test the rappel points. Patil had been swinging out at nearly half a gee when his ground spike slipped free. He'd have floated out forever if Tsufe and Jimmy hadn't been securely tied down. A few seconds more and the direct sunlight would have fried them right through their makeshift shields.

But it worked!They were on the opposite side of the starships from where the bastards would expect visitors. While everyone's eyes had been on the sun, and blinded by that, they had gotten in position.

They hunkered down just short of theTreasure 's mooring point. The ship towered six hundred meters above them, so close that all they could see was part of the throat and the forward primer tanks. But from all their careful spying, they knew this was the least damaged of all the Qeng Ho ships. And inside was equipment—and more important,people —who could take back freedom.

All was in shadow, but now the coma of gases had spread high. Reflected light softened the dark. Jimmy and the others shed their silver covers and thermal outerwear. It felt suddenly chill wearing just full-pressure coveralls and hood. They slipped from hiding place to hiding place, dragging their tools and improvised guns, and trying to keep it all out of the light from the glowing sky.It can't get any brighter, can it? But his time display said that less than one hundred seconds had passed since Relight. They were perhaps another hundred seconds short of maximum brightness.

The three floated up the moorage pilings, the maw ofTreasure 's throat growing huge above them. One nice thing about sneaking aboard something as massive as a ramscoop, there wasn't much worry that their movement would bob the vehicle around. There would be a maintenance crew aboard theTreasure. But would they expect armed visitors in the middle of all this? They had thought and thought on those risks, and there was no way to make them better. But if they took the ship, they would have one of the best remaining pieces of equipment, real weapons, and the surviving Qeng Ho armsmen. They would have a chance of ending the nightmare.

Now there was sunlight coming through the raw face of the diamond rock! Jimmy paused for an instant to stare, bug-eyed. Even this high up, there were at least three hundred meters of solid diamond between them and the naked light of OnOff. Yet that was not enough. Scattered off a million fracture planes, bounced and diminished and diffused and diffracted, some of OnOff's light made it through. The light was a glitter of rainbows, a thousand tiny sun-disks glowing from everywhere across the face of the rock. And every second it grew brighter, until he could see structure within the mountain, could see fracture and cleavage planes that extended hundreds of meters into diamond. And still the light got brighter.