Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

So be it. They jigged the OOB three light-years spinward. Now they were flying down the main Net trunk towards RIP: they'd be able to listen to the News the whole way in.

Harmonious Repose advertised. At least one species valued external goods, specializing in ship outfitting and repair. An industrious, hard-footed(?) race, the ads said. Eventually, she saw some video: the creatures walked on ivory tusks and had a froth of short arms growing from just below their necks. The ads included Net addresses of satisfied users. Too bad we can't follow up on those. Instead, Ravna sent a short message in Triskweline, requesting generic drive replacements, and listing possible methods of payment.

Meantime, the bad news kept rolling in:

Crypto: 0

As received by: OOB shipboard ad hoc

Language path: Baeloresk-»Triskweline, SjK units

From: Alliance for the Defense [Claimed cooperative of five polyspecific empires in the Beyond below Straumli Realm. No record of existence before the Fall of the Realm.]

Subject: Call to action

Distribution:

Threat of the Blight, War Trackers Interest Group, Homo Sapiens Interest Group

Date: 158.00 days since Fall of Relay

Key phrases: Action, not talk

Text of message:

Alliance Forces are preparing for action against the tools of the Perversion. It is time for our friends to declare themselves. At the moment we do not need your military pledges, but in the very near future we will need support services including free Net time.

In the coming seconds we will be watching closely to see who supports our action and who may be enslaved to the Perversion. If you live with the human infestation, you have a choice: act now with a good possibility of victory — or wait, and be destroyed.

Death to vermin.

There were plenty of secondary messages, including speculation about who Death to Vermin (aka the "Alliance for the Defense") had in mind. There were also rumors of military movement. This wasn't making the splash the fall of Relay had, but it did have the attention of several News groups. Ravna swallowed hard and looked away from the display. "Well, they're still making big noises," she tried for a light tone, but it didn't come out that way.

Pham Nuwen touched her shoulder. "Quite true. And real killers generally don't advertise beforehand." But there was more sympathy than conviction in his voice. "We still don't know that this is more than a single loud-mouth. There's no definite word of ship movements. What can they do after all?"

Ravna pushed herself up from the table. "Not much, I hope. There are hundreds of civilizations with small human settlements. Surely they've have taken precautions since this Death to Vermin stuff began… By the Powers, I wish I knew Sjandra Kei was safe." It had been more than two years since she'd seen Lynne and her parents. Sometimes Sjandra Kei seemed something from another life, but just knowing it was there had been more comfort than she realized. Now…

On the other side of the command deck, the Skroderiders had been working on the repair specs. Now Blueshell rolled toward them. "I do fear for the small settlements, but the humans at Sjandra Kei are the driving force of that civilization; even the name is a human one. Any attack on them would be an attack on the entire civilization. Greenstalk and I have traded there often enough, and with their commercial security forces. Only fools or bluffers would announce an invasion beforehand."

Ravna thought a moment, brightened. The Dirokimes and Lophers would stand against any threat to humankind at Sjandra Kei. "Yeah. We're not a ghetto there." Things might be very bad for isolated humans, but Sjandra Kei would be okay. "Bluffers. Well it's not called the Net of a Million Lies for nothing." She pulled her mind back from worries beyond her control. "But one thing is clear. Stopping at Harmonious Repose, we must be damn sure not to look like anything human."

And of course, part of not looking human was that there be no sign of Ravna and Pham. The Riders would do all the "talking". Ravna and the Riders went through all the ship's exterior programs, weeding out human nuances that had crept in since they left Relay. And if they were actually boarded? Well, they would never survive a determined search, but they isolated things human in a fake jovian hold. The two humans would slip in there if necessary.

Pham Nuwen checked what they did — and found more than one slip-up. For a barbarian programmer, he wasn't bad. But then they were rapidly reaching the depths where the best computer equipment wasn't that much more sophisticated than what he had known.

Ironically, there was one thing they could not disguise: that the OOB was from the Top of the Beyond. True, the ship was a bottom lugger and based on a Mid Beyond design. But there was an elegance to the refit that screamed of nearly superhuman competence. "The damn thing has the feel of a hand axe built in a factory," was how Pham Nuwen put it.

RIPer security was an encouraging thing: a perfunctory velocity check and no boarding. OOB hopped into the system and finished a rocket burn to match position/velocity vector with the heart of Harmonious Repose and "Saint(?) Rihndell's Repair Harbor". (Pham: "If you're a 'saint', you gotta be honest, right?")

Out of Band was above the ecliptic and some eighty million kilometers from RIP's single star. Even knowing what to expect, the view was spectacular: The inner system was as dusty/gassy as a stellar nursery, even though the primary was a three-billion-year-old G star. That sun was surrounded by millions of rings, more spectacular than around any planet. The largest and brightest resolved into myriads more. Even in the natural view, there was bright color here, threads of green and red and violet. Warping of the ring plane laid lakes of shadow between colored hillsides, hillsides a million kilometers across. There were occasional objects -structures? — sticking far enough up from the ring plane to cast needle-like shadows out-system. Infrared and proper motion windows showed more conventional features: Beyond the rings lay a massive asteroid belt, and far beyond that a single jovian planet, its own million-klick ring system a puny afterthought. There were no other planets, either detected or on file. The largest objects in the main ring system were three hundred kilometers across… but there appeared to be thousands of them.

At "Saint Rihndell's" direction they brought the ship down to the ring plane and matched velocities with the local junk. That last was a big impulsive burn: three gees for almost five minutes. "Just like old, old times," Pham Nuwen said.

In free fall again, they looked out upon their harbor: Up close it looked like planetary ring systems Ravna had known all her life. There were objects of all sizes down to less than a handspan across, uncounted globs of icy froth — gently touching, sticking, separating. The debris hung nearly motionless all about them; this was chaos that had been tamed long ago. In the plane of the rings, they couldn't see more than a few hundred meters. The debris blocked further views. And it wasn't all loose. Greenstalk pointed to a line of white that seemed to curve from infinity, pass close by them, and then retreat forever in the other direction. "Looks like a single structure," she said.

Ravna stepped up the magnification. In planetary ring systems, the "frothy snowballs" sometimes accreted into strings thousands of klicks long… The white thread spread wide beyond the window. The display said it was almost a kilometer across. This arc was definitely not made of snowballs. She could see ship locks and communications nodes. Checking with images from their approach, Ravna could see that the whole thing was better than forty million kilometers long. There were a number of breaks scattered along the arc. That figured: the scaled tensile strength of such a structure could be near zero. Depending on local distortions, it would pull apart briefly, then gently come together some time later. The whole affair was vaguely reminiscent of train cars coupling and uncoupling on some old-time Nyjoran railway.