A Deepness in the Sky (26 page)

A red light appeared on the wall; the hold's stand-alone data system was ready to talk. Nau put on his huds, and suddenly the caskets were labeled by name and affiliation. Everything looked green.Thank goodness. Nau turned to his podsergeant. Kal Omo's name, status, and vital signs floated in the air beside his face; the data system took its duties very literally. "Anne's medical people will be here in a few thousand seconds, Kal. Don't let them in till Ritser and I are finished."

"Yes, sir." There was a faint smile on the man's face as he turned and coasted out the door. Kal Omo had been through this before; he'd helped create the hoax aboard theFar Treasure. He knew what to expect.

And then he and Ritser Brughel were alone. "Okay, have you found any more bad apples, Ritser?"

Ritser was grinning; he had some surprise planned. They drifted past racks of coffins, the room light shining up from beneath their feet. The coffins had been through hell, yet they still worked reliably—the Qeng Ho ones, anyway. The Peddlers were clever; they broadcast technology throughout Human Space—yet their own goods were better than what they shouted free to the stars.But now we have a fleet library...and people tomake sense of it.

"I've been running my snoops hard, Podmaster. Watch A is pretty clean, though—" He paused and stopped his coast with a hand against the rack. The slender railings flexed along the length of the rack; this really was an ad hoc setup. "—though I don't know why you put up with seditious deadwood like this." He tapped one of the coffins with his podmaster's baton.

The Peddler coffins had wide, curved windows, and an internal light. Even without the display label, Nau would have recognized Pham Trinli. Somehow, the guy looked younger when his face was inanimate.

Ritser must have taken his silence for indecision. "He knew about Diem's plot."

Nau shrugged. "Of course. So did Vinh. So did a few others. And now they're known quantities."

"But—"

"Remember, Ritser, we agreed. We can't afford any more casual wet-work." His biggest mistake of this whole adventure had been in the field interrogations after the ambush. Nau had followed the disaster-management strategies of the Plague Time, the hard strategies that were shrouded from the view of ordinary citizens. But the First Podmasters had been in a very different situation; they'd had plenty of human resources. In this situation...well, for the Qeng Ho who could be Focused, interrogation was no problem. But the others were amazingly tough. Worst of all, they didn't respond to threats in a rational way. Ritser had gotten a little crazy, and Tomas hadn't been far behind. They had killed the last of the senior Peddlers before they really understood the other side's psychology. All in all, it had been quite a debacle, but it had also been a maturing experience. Tomas had learned how to deal with the survivors.

Ritser smiled. "Okay. At least he's good for comic relief. The way he tries to suck up to you and me—and pompous at the same time!" He waved at the racked corpsicles. "Sure. Wake 'em all per schedule. We've had to explain too many ‘accidents' as it is." He turned back toward Nau. He still wore a smile, but the bottom light made it look like the grimace it really was. "The real problem isn't with Watch A. Podmaster, in the last four days, I've discovered clear subversion elsewhere."

Nau stared at him with an expression of mild surprise. This was what he'd been waiting for. "Qiwi Lisolet?"

"Yes! Wait, I know you saw the face-off I had with her the other day. The pus-sucker deserves to die for that—but that's not my complaint to you. I have solid evidence she's breaking Your Law. And she is in league with others."

Nau actually was a bit surprised by this. "In what way?"

"You know I caught her in the Peddlers' park with her father. She had shut the park down on her own whim. That's what made me so angry. But afterwards...I put my snoops on her. Random monitoring might not have noticed it for several more Watches: the little slut is diverting the pod's resources. She's stolen output from the volatiles distillery. She's embezzled time from the factory. She's diverted her father's Focus to help her with private ventures."

Pestilence. This was more than Qiwi had told him about. "So...what is she doing with these resources?"

"These resources and others, Podmaster. She has a variety of plans. And she is not alone....She intends to barter these stolen goods for her own advancement."

For a moment, Nau couldn't think of what to say. Of course, bartering community resources was a crime. During most of the Plague Years, more people had been executed for barter and hoarding than had died of the Plague itself. But in modern times...well, barter could never be totally eliminated. On Balacrea, it was periodically the excuse for major exterminations—but only that, an excuse. "Ritser." Nau spoke carefully, lying: "I knew about all these activities. Certainly they are against the letter of My Law. But consider. We are twenty light-years from home. We are dealing with the Qeng Ho. They reallyare peddlers. I know it is hard to accept, but their whole existence revolves around cheating the community. We cannot hope to suppress that in an instant—"

"No!"Brughel pushed off the rack he had been holding, grabbed the railing next to Tomas. "They are all scum, but it is only Lisolet and a few aggravant conspirators—and I can tell you just who they are—who are violating Your Law!"

Nau could imagine how all this happened. Qiwi Lin Lisolet had never obeyed rules, even among the Qeng Ho. Her crazy mother had set her up to be manipulated, but even so the girl was beyond direct control. More that anything, she loved to play. Qiwi had once said to him, "It's always easier to get forgiveness than to get permission." As much as anything, that simple claim showed the gulf that separated Qiwi's worldview from the First Podmasters'.

It took an effort of will not to retreat before Brughel's advance.

What's gotten into him?He looked straight into the other's eyes, ignoring the baton in Ritser's twitching hand. "I'm sure you could identify them. That's your job, Vice-Podmaster. And part of my job is to interpret My Law. You know that Qiwi never shook off the mindrot; if necessary, she can be easily...curbed. I want you to keep me informed of these possible infractions, but for now I choose to wink at them."

"You choose to wink at them? Youchoose ? I—" Brughel was wordless for a second. When he continued, his voice was more controlled, a metered rage. "Yes, we're twenty light-years from home. We're twenty light-years from your family. And your uncle doesn't rule anymore." The word of Alan Nau's assassination had arrived while their expedition was still three years out of the OnOff system. "At home maybe you could break any rule, protect lawbreakers simply because they were a good lay." He slapped his baton gently against his palm. "Out here, and right now, you're very alone."

Lethal force between Podmasters was beyond any law. That was a principle dating back to the Plague Years—but it was also a basic truth of nature. If Brughel were to smash his skull now, Kal Omo would follow the Vice-Podmaster. But Nau just spoke quietly. "You are even more alone, my friend. How many of the Focused are imprinted on you?"

"I—I have Xin's pilots, I have the snoops. I could make Reynolt redirect whatever else I need."

Ritser was teetering at the edge of an abyss that Tomas hadn't noticed before, but at least he was calming down. "I think you understand Anne better than that, Ritser."

And abruptly the killing flame in Brughel was quenched. "Yeah, you're right. You're right." He seemed to crumple. "Sir...it's just that this mission has turned out so different from what I imagined. We had the resources to live like High Podmasters here. We had the prospect of finding a treasure world. Now most of our zipheads are dead. We don't have the equipment for a safe return. We're stuck here for decades... ."

Ritser seemed on the verge of tears. The passage from threat to weakness was fascinating. Tomas spoke quietly, his tone comforting. "I understand, Ritser. We are in a more extreme situation than anyone has been in since the Plagues. If this is painful to one as strong as you, I am very afraid for ordinary crew of the mission." All true, though most of the crew had much less remarkable personalities than Ritser Brughel. Like Ritser, they were caught in a decades-long cul-de-sac in which family and children-raising were not an option. That was a dangerous problem, one that he must not overlook. But most of the ordinary folk would have no trouble continuing relationships, finding new ones; there were almost a thousand unFocused people here. Ritser's drives would be harder to satisfy. Ritser used people up, and now there were scarcely any left for him.

"But there is still the prospect of treasure—perhaps all that we hoped for. Taking the Qeng Ho nearly cost us our lives, but now we are learning their secrets. And you were at the last Watch-manager meeting: we've discovered physics that is new even to the Qeng Ho. The best is yet to come, Ritser. The Spiders are primitive now, but life could scarcely have originated here; this solar system is just too extreme. We aren't the first species that has come snooping. Imagine, Ritser: a nonhuman, starfaring civilization. Its secrets are down there, somewhere in the ruins of their past."

He guided his Vice-Podmaster around the far end of the coffin racks, and they started back along the second aisle. The head-up display reported green everywhere, though as usual the Emergent coffins were showing high wear. Sigh. In a few years, they might not have enough usable coffins to maintain a comfortable Watch schedule. By itself, a star fleet could not build another fleet, or even keep itself indefinitely provisioned with hightech supplies. It was an old, old problem: to build the most advanced technological products you need an entire civilization—a civilization with all its webs of expertise and layers of capital industry. There were no shortcuts; Humankind had often imagined, but never created, a general assembler.

Ritser seemed calmer now, his desperate anger replaced by thought. "...Okay. We sacrifice a lot, but in the end we go home winners. I can gut it out as well as any. But still...why should it take so pus long? We should land squat on some Spider kingdom and take over—"

"They've just reinvented electronics, Ritser. We need more—"

The Vice-Podmaster shook his head impatiently. "Yes, yes. Of course. We need a solid industrial base. I probably know that better than you; I was Podmaster at the Lorbita Shipyards. Nothing short of a major rebuild is going to save our ass. But there's still no reason for hiding here at L1. If we take over some Spider nation—maybe just pretend to ally with it—we could speed things up."

"True, but the real problem is maintaining control. For that, timing is everything. You know I was in on the conquest of Gaspr. The early post-conquest, actually; if I'd been with the first fleet, I'd own millions now." Nau didn't keep the envy from his voice; it was a vision that Brughel would understand. Gaspr had been a jackpot. "Lord, what that first fleet did. It was just two ships, Ritser! Imagine. They had only five hundred zipheads—fewer than we have. But they sat and lurked and when Gaspr reattained the Information Age, they controlled every data system on the planet. The treasure just fell into their hands!" Nau shook his head, dismissing the vision. "Yes. We could try to take the Spiders now. It might speed things up. But it would be largely bluff on our part, against aliens that we don't understand. If we miscalculated, if we got into a guerrilla war, we could piss away everything very quickly....We'd probably ‘win,' but a thirty-year wait might become five hundred. There's precedent for that sort of failure, Ritser, though it doesn't come from our Plague Time. Do you know the story of Canberra?"

Brughel shrugged. Canberra might be the most powerful civilization in Human Space, but it was too far away to interest him. Like many Emergents, Brughel's interest in the wider universe was minimal.

"Three thousand years ago, Canberra was medieval. Like Gaspr, the original colony had bombed itself into total savagery, except that the Canberrans weren't even halfway back. A small Qeng Ho fleet voyaged there; through some crazy mistake, they thought the Canberrans still had a profitable civilization. That was the Peddlers' first big mistake. The second was in hanging around; they tried to trade with the Canberrans as they were. The Qeng Ho had all the power, they could make the primitive societies of Canberra do whatever they wanted."

Brughel grunted. "I see where this is going. But the locals sound a lot more primitive than what we have here."

"Yes, but they were human. And the Qeng Ho had much better resources. Anyway, they made their alliances. They pushed the local technology as hard as they could. They set out to conquer the world. And actually, they succeeded. But every step ground them down. The original crew lived their old age in stone castles. They didn't even have coldsleep anymore. The hybrid civilization of Peddlers and locals eventually became very advanced and powerful—but that was too late for the originals."

The Podmaster and his Vice were almost back to the main entrance. Brughel floated ahead, turning slowly so that he touched the wall like a deck, feet first. He looked up at the approaching Nau with an intent expression.

Nau touched down, let the grabfelt in his boots stop his rebound. "Think about what I've said, Ritser. Our Exile here is really necessary, and the payoff is as great as you ever imagined. In the meantime, let's work on what's bothering you. A Podmaster should not have to suffer."

The look on the younger man's face was surprised and grateful. "Ththank you, sir. A little help now and then is all I need." They talked a few moments more, setting up the necessary compromises.

Coming back from theSuivire, Tomas had some time to think. From his taxi, the rockpile was a glittering jumble ahead of him, the sky around it speckled with the irregular shapes of the temps and warehouses and starships that orbited the pile. Here at Tween Watch he saw no evidence of human movement. Even Qiwi's crews were out of sight, probably on the shade side of the pile. Far beyond the diamond mountains, Arachna floated in glorious isolation. Its great ocean showed patches of cloudlessness today. The tropical convergence zone was clear against the blue. More and more, the Spider world was looking like archetype Mother Earth, the one-in-a-thousand world where humans could land and thrive. It would continue to look like paradise for another thirty years or so—till once more its sun guttered out.And by then we will own it.