A Deepness in the Sky

The odds were against any answer; a Focused mind in a control loop is usually unreachable. But after a moment the zip nodded. "Probe 132 is doing well. I've got three hundred seconds left on the high-gain link. We're just a few meters this side of the weather door. This one is getting in—" The fellow hunched lower over the controls. He swayed back and forth like an addict playing a hand-eye game, which in a sense was exactly the situation. One of the pictures panned up and down as he wiggled the device into traffic.

Brughel looked back at Reynolt. "That damn time lag. How can you expect to—"

"Running a remote like this isn't the worst. Melin"—the ziphead operator—"has very good delayed coordination. Our main problem is operations on the Spiders' networks. We can dredge for data, but very soon we'll be interacting in tight real time. A ten-second turnaround is longer than some network timeouts."

As she spoke, a flashing tread flew past the little camera. By some magic of ziphead intuition, Melin had flipped the gadget onto the side of the vehicle. The image spun madly for several seconds as Melin synched the rotation with the view. A door opened in the wall ahead of them, and they drove on through. Thirty seconds passed. The walls seemed to slide upward. Some kind of elevator? But if the scale information were true, the room was wider than a racquetball court.

Seconds passed, and Brughel found himself caught by the scene. For years now, everything they had gotten about the Spiders had been secondhand, from Reynolt's ziphead translators. Some large precentage of that had to be fairy-tale crap; it was just too cute. Real pictures were what he needed. Microsat optical reconnaissance produced some pictures, but the resolution was awful. For several years, Ritser had thought that when the Spiders finally invented hi-res video, he would get a good look. But the visual physiologies were just too different. Nowadays, about five percent of all Spider military comm was this extremely hi-res stuff that Trixia Bonsol called "videomancy." Without heavy interpretation, it was just a jumble to humans. He would have been very suspicious that it was a steganographic cover, except that the translators had proven to Kal's snoops that it was innocent video—all quite impressive if you were a Spider.

But now, in a very few seconds, he would get to see how the monsters looked from a human pov.

No motion was visible. If this was an elevator, they were going down a long way. That made sense, considering what the south pole weather was like. "Are we going to lose signal?"

Reynolt didn't answer immediately. "I don't know. Melin's trying to get relays into that elevator shaft. I'm more worried about it being discovered. Even if the meltdown-triggers work—"

Brughel laughed. "Who cares? Don't you see, Reynolt? We're less than four days from grabbing it all."

"The Accord is beginning to panic. They just sacked a senior manager. I've got meeting logs that show Victory Smith now suspects network corruption."

"Their Intelligence boss?" The news stopped Brughel for a moment. This must have happened very recently. Still, "They have less than four days. What can they do?"

Reynolt's gaze was the usual stone thing. "They could partition their net, maybe stop using it altogether. That would stop us."

"And also lose them the war against the Kindred."

"Yes. Unless they could provide the Kindred with solid proof of ‘Monsters from Outer Space.' "

And that was not bloody likely. The woman was obsessive. Ritser smiled at her frowning face.Of course. That's how we made you.

The elevator doors had opened. The camera was giving them only one frame a second now, with low resolution. Damn.

"Yes!" That was Melin, triumphant about something.

"He's got a relay in place."