A Deepness in the Sky

Victory was silent for a moment. She was several meters up the hillside, poking around beneath an overhang. Like all of her race, she was more than humanly good at rock climbing. "Yes, eventually. We know he's not on the surface. Maybe...I think Mobiy must have lucked out, found a hole more than a few yards deep. But even that wouldn't be a viable deepness; Dad's body would dry to death in a short time." She pulled out from under the rock. "It's funny. When the Plan was coming apart, I thought it was Mom we had lost and Dad we could save. But now...you know the humans just made new sonograms of the bottom of Southmost? The Kindred nukes crushed Parliament Hall and the upper layers. Below that there are millions of tons of fractured bedrock—but there is open space, what's left of the Southlanders' superdeepness. If Mother and Hrunk made it alive to one of those..."

Trixia frowned; she had seen the news. "But the report says it's too dangerous to dig, that it would just crush the open spaces." And when the New Sun came, those millions of tons of rock would surely collapse upon the deepness.

"Ah, but we have time to plan. We'll improve on the humans' digging technology. Maybe we can come in from miles out and tunnel really deep, maintaining the balance with cavorite. Someday before the next New Sun, we'll know what's in those superdeeps. And if Mother and Hrunk are down there, we'll rescue them."

They walked northward, around the hillock. Even if this were the hill where Sherkaner left Thract, they were well away from where Rachner could have landed. Still, Victory peeped into every shadow.

Trixia couldn't keep up. She straightened and looked away from the hillside. The sky above the southern horizon glowed, as if over a city. And it almost was. The old missile fields were gone, but now the world had a better use for the altiplano. Cavorite mines. Companies from all over the waking world had descended on it. From orbit, you could see the open pit mines stretching from the original Kindred operation, a thousand miles across the wasteland. A million Spiders worked there now. Even if they never figured out how to synthesize the magic substance, cavorite would revolutionize local spaceflight, partly making up for the lack of other bodies in this solar system.

Victory seemed to notice that Trixia's pace had faltered. The Spider found a rounded knob of rock, shaded from the wind, and settled on it. Trixia sat down beside her, pleased that they could be on the same level. Across the plains to the south, they could see hundreds of hillocks, any one of which might mark Sherkaner's final rest. But in the sky glow beyond the horizon, tiny dots of light drifted slowly upward, antigrav freighters hauling mass into space. In all human histories, antigravity had been one of the Failed Dreams. And here it was.

Viki didn't speak for a time. A human who didn't know the Spiders might think she was asleep. But Trixia could see the telltale movements of eating hands, and she heard untranslated keening. Every so often Viki would be like this; every so often she had to shed the image that she projected to her team and Belga Underville and the aliens from space. Little Victory had done very well, at least as well as her mother could have done, Trixia was sure. She had managed the final triumph of her parents' Great Lurk. In her own huds, Trixia could see a dozen calls pending for Major Lighthill. An hour or two alone, that was all Victory could spare these days. Outside of Brent, Trixia was probably the only person who knew the doubts that lived inside Victory Lighthill.

OnOff climbed into the sky, turning the shadows across the tumbled lands. This was the warmest High Equatoria would be for the next two hundred years, yet the best that OnOff could do was raise a soft haze of sublimation.

"I hope for the best, Trixia. The General and Dad, they were so very clever. They can't both be dead. But they—and I—had to do so many hard things. People who trusted us died."

"It was a war, Victory. Against Pedure, against the Emergents." That was what Trixia told herself now, when she thought about Xopi Reung.