A Deepness in the Sky

In the days that followed, he came to understand the wedge that Nau had slipped between duty and loyalty. Ezr was home and yet he was not. Every day, he saw familiar faces. Benny Wen and Jimmy Diem had both survived. Ezr had known Benny since they were six years old; now he was like a stranger, a cooperative stranger.

And then one day, more by luck than planning, Ezr ran into Benny near the temp's taxi locks. Ezr was alone. More and more, his Emergent assistants did not dog his moves. They trusted him? They had him bugged? They couldn't imagine him doing harm? All the possibilities were obnoxious, but it was good to be free of them.

Benny was with a small crew of Qeng Ho right under the outermost balloon wall. Being near the locks, there was no exterior quilting here; every so often the lights of a passing taxi sent a moving glow across the fabric. Benny's crew was spread out across the wall, working at the nodes of the approach automation. Their Emergent gang boss was at the far end of the open space.

Ezr glided out of the radial tunnel, saw Benny Wen, and bounced easily across the wall toward him.

Wen looked up from his work and nodded courteously. "Fleet Manager." The formality was familiar now—and still as painful as a kick in the face.

"Hi, Benny. H-how are things going?"

Wen looked briefly down the length of the volume at the Emergent gang boss. That guy really stuck out, his work clothes gray and stark against the rampant individualism of most Qeng Ho. He was talking loudly to three of the work crew, but at this distance his words were muffled by the balloon fabric. Benny looked back at Ezr and shrugged. "Oh, just fine. You know what we're doing here?"

"Replacing the comm inputs." One of the Emergents' first moves had been to confiscate all head-up displays. The huds and their associated input electronics were the classic tools of freedom.

Wen laughed softly, his eyes still on the gang boss. "Right the first time, Ezr old pal. You see, our new...employers...have a problem. They need our ships. They need our equipment. But none of that will work without the automation. And how can they trust that?" All effective machinery had embedded controllers. And of course the controllers were networked, with the invisible glue of their fleet's local net that made everything work consistently.

The software for that system had been developed over millennia, refined by the Qeng Ho over centuries. Destroy it and the fleet would be barely more than scrap metal. But how could any conqueror trust what all those centuries had built in? In most such situations, the losers' gear was simply destroyed. But as Tomas Nau admitted, no one could afford to lose any more resources.

"Their own work gangs are going through every node, you know. Not just here, but on all our surviving ships. Bit by bit they are rehosting them."

"There's no way they can replace everything."I hope. The worst tyrannies were the ones where a government required its own logic on every embedded node.

"You'd be surprised what they are replacing. I've seen them work. Their computer techs are...strange. They've dug up stuff in the system that I never suspected." Benny shrugged. "But you're right, they aren't touching the lowest-level embedded stuff. It's mainly the I/O logic that gets jerked. In return, we get brand-new interfaces." Benny's face twisted in a little smile. He pulled a black plastic oblong from his belt. Some kind of keyboard. "This is the only thing we'll be using for a while."

"Lord, that looks ancient."

"Simple, not ancient. I think these are just backups the Emergents had floating around." Benny sent another look in the direction of the gang boss. "The important thing is, the comm gear in these boxes is known to the Emergents. Tamper with it, and there'll be alarms up the local net. In principle they can filter everything we do." Benny looked down at the box, hefted it. Benny was just another apprentice, like Ezr. He wasn't much sharper about technical things than Ezr, but he always had a nose for clever deals. "Strange. What I've seen of Emergent technology looks pretty dull. Yet these guys really intend to dredge and monitor everything. There'ssomething about their automation that we don't understand." He was almost talking to himself.