A Deepness in the Sky

By his count of arm paces, he was just outside Hammerfest now, near its communications array. Odds were very high some camera could image him if he popped out. Of course, the odds were fairly good that no one and no program would be monitoring such a view in time to change things. Nevertheless, Trinli stayed hunkered down. If necessary, he would move closer, but for now he just wanted to snoop. He lay back in the cleft, his feet against the ice and his back against the diamond wall. He reeled out his little antenna probe. The Emergents had played smiling tyrant since the ambush. The one thing they made ugly threats about was possession of non-approved I/O devices. Pham knew that Diem and the core of the conspiracy had Qeng Ho huds, and had used black crypto across the local net. Most of the planning had been done right under the Emergents' noses. Some communication avoided automation altogether; many of these youngsters knew a variation on the old dots-and-dashes game, blinkertalk.

As a peripheral member of the conspiracy, Pham Trinli knew its secrets only because he was filthy with forbidden electronics. This little antenna reel would have been a sign of sneaky intent even in peaceful times.

The thread he spun out was transparent to almost anything that might shine on it here. At the tip, a tiny sensor sniffed at the electromagnetic spectrum. His main goal was a comm array on the Emergent habitat that had a line of sight on the Qeng Ho temp. Trinli moved his arms like a fisherman repositioning his cast. The slender thread had a stiffness that was very effective in a micrograv environment.There. The sensor hung in the beam between Hammerfest and the temp. Pham eased a directional element over the edge of the cleft, aimed it at an unused port on the Qeng Ho temp. From there he was hooked directly into the fleet's local net, and around all the Emergent security. This was exactly what Nau and the others were so afraid of and the reason for their death-penalty threats. Jimmy Diem wisely had not taken chances like this. Pham Trinli had some advantages. He knew the old,old tricks that were hidden in Qeng Ho gear....Even so, he would not have risked it if Jimmy and his conspirators hadn't bet so much on their takeover scheme.

Maybe he should have talked to Jimmy Diem straight out. There were too many critical things they didn't know about the Emergents. What made some of their automation so good? In the firefights at the ambush, they'd been clearly inferior in high-level tactics, but their target queuing had been better than any system Pham Trinli had ever fought.

Trinli had the ugly feeling that comes when you've been maneuvered into a corner. The conspirators figured that this might be both their best and last chance to knock over the Emergents. Maybe. But the whole thing was just too pat, too perfect.

So make the best of it.

Pham looked at the display windows inside his hood. He was intercepting Emergent telemetry and some of the video they were transmitting to the temp. Some of that he could decrypt. The Emergent bastards just trusted their line-of-sight link a little bit too much. It was time to do some real snooping.

"Fifty seconds to Relight." The voice had been counting off in a flat monotone for the last two hundred seconds. In the auditorium, almost everyone was watching the windows in silence.

"Forty seconds to Relight."

Ezr took a quick look around the room. The flight tech, Xin, was looking from display to display. He was visibly nervous. Tomas Nau was watching the view that came from low above OnOff's surface. His intentness seemed to hold more curiosity than fear or suspicion.

Qiwi Lisolet glared at the window that showed the insulation canopy and Jimmy Diem's work crew. Her look had been dark and scowly ever since she flew into the auditorium. Ezr could guess what had happened... and he was relieved. Jimmy had used an innocent fourteen-year-old as camouflage for the plot. But Jimmy had never been an absolute hardass. He had taken a chance to get the girl out of harm's way.But I bet Qiwiwon't forgive him, even when she knows the truth.

"Wave front to arrive in ten seconds."

Stillno change in the view from the microsat. Only a mild red glow peeked between the sliding clouds. Either "old faithful" had played a cosmic joke on them, or this was an absolute knife-edge of an effect.

"Relight."

In the full-disk view, a point of brilliance burned in the exact center of the disk, spread outward, and in less than two seconds filled the disk. The low-altitude view had vanished sometime during that spread. The light got brighter and brighter andbrighter. A soft, awed sigh spread around the room. The light cast shadows on the opposite wall before the wallpaper damped its output.