A Deepness in the Sky

Pham slid around three walls, staying carefully beyond the zipheads' reach, occasionally dodging a thrown keyboard or drinking bulb. But the renewed incoming data flow was having some calming effect. The translator section was almost quiet, their talk mostly directed at one another. Pham drifted down next to Trixia Bonsol. The woman was hunched over her keyboards with fierce intentness. Pham plugged into the data stream that was coming up from theInvisible Hand. There should be some good news there, Ritser and company bogged down just when they were ready to commit mass murder... .

It took him an instant to orient to the multiplex stream. There was stuff for the translators, trajectory data, launch codes.Launch codes? Brughel was going ahead with Nau's sucker punch! The execution was awkward; the Accord would be left with a good fraction of its weapons. Ballistics were arcing up, dozens of launches per second.

For a moment, Pham's attention was swallowed by the horror of it. Nau had conspired to kill half the people in a world. Ritser was doing his best to accomplish the murders. He stepped through the log of Trixia Bonsol's last few hundred seconds. The log had gone berserk when her job stream had been cut off, a metaphorical upchuck. There were pages of disordered nonsense, a gabble of files that showed no last-access date. His eyes caught on a passage that almost made sense:

It is an edged cliché that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It's true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It's a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It's the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.

By blind good fortune, Sherkaner Underhill chose the most beautiful days in the years of the Waning for his first trip to Lands Command....

It was clearly one of Trixia's translations, the sort of "human-colored" description that irritated Ritser Brughel so much. But Underhill's "first trip to Lands Command"? That would be before the last Dark. Strange that Tomas Nau had wanted such retrospectives.

"It's all messed up now."

"What?" Pham's mind came back to the Attic grouproom, the irritable voices of the zipheads. It was Trixia Bonsol who had just spoken. Her eyes were distant and her fingers still twitched across her keys.

Pham sighed. "Yeah, you got that right," he replied. Whatever she was talking about, the comment was appropriate.

His low-rate synthesis from the unpowered net was complete: He had a view down on L1-A. If he could trigger a little more connectivity, he might reach the ejets near L1-A. No great processing power there, but those sites were on the ejet power grid...and more important,Maybe we canuse the electric jets themselves! If they could target a few dozen of them on the Podmaster..."Trud! Have you had any luck with the numerical people?"

FIFTY-EIGHT

Rachner Thract's helicopter lifted clean of the tilted landing pad, its turbine and rotor sounds healthy. By turning his head this way and that, Thract was able to keep track of the terrain. He took them eastward, along the caldera wall. The punched-hole craters marched off ahead of them, a line of destruction that disappeared over the top of the far wall. In the city below, there were emergency lights now, and ground traffic heading for the craters that had been apartments and occupied mansions.

On the perch beside him, Underhill was moving feebly, pulling at the panniers on his guide-bug's back. The animal was trying to help, but it was injured far worse than its master. "I need to see, Rachner. Can you help me with Mobiy's pack?"

"Just a minute, sir. I want to bring us around to the heliport."

Underhill pushed a few inches up from his perch. "Just put it on autopilot, Colonel. Please, help me."

Thract's helicopter contained dozens of embedded processors, themselves hooked into traffic control and information nets. Once he had been very proud of this fancy aircraft. He hadn't flown it on automatic since that last staff meeting at Lands Command. "Sir...I don't trust the automatics."

Underhill gave a gentle laugh, then broke into liquid coughing. "It's okay, Rach. Please, I have to see what's happening. Help me with Mobiy."

Yes! By the Dark, what did it matter now! Rachner slammed four hands into the control sockets, and wiggled on full auto. Then he turned to his passengers and quickly unzipped the bag on the top of Mobiy's broken back.

Underhill reached in and removed the gear within as if it were some King's crown jewels. Rachner turned his head for a closer look. What...a bloody computer game helmet, it was!