A Fire Upon the Deep

The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser. That could not even melt steel at the frigate's range. No matter, the laser was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship's receiver. No acknowledgment. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and inactive sensors, sliding across the ship's ultradrive spines. Searching, probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They thought by not looking that they could be safe.

One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.

The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far below… a backdoor into the ship's code, installed when the newborn had subverted the humans' groundside equipment…

… and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents — not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware — raced through the ship's automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras in the ship's bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.

There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no software could finesse. The newborn's agents flitted everywhere across the ship's computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second away, under the gray rubble at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So. The frigate would be destroyed.

So slow and so fast. A fraction of a second. The fire spread out from the heart of the frigate, taking both peril and possibility.

Two hundred thousand kilometers away, the clumsy container vessel made its own ultradrive jump and vanished from sight. The newborn scarcely noticed. So a few humans had escaped; the universe was welcome to them.

In the seconds that followed, the newborn felt… emotions?… things more, and less, than a human might feel. Try emotions:

Elation. The newborn knew that now it would survive.

Horror. How close it had come to dying once more.

Frustration. Perhaps the strongest, the closest to its mere human echo. Something of significance had died with the frigate, something from this archive. Memories were dredged from the context, reconstructed: What was lost might have made the newborn still more powerful… but more likely was deadly poison. After all, this Power had lived once before, then been reduced to nothing. What was lost might have been the reason.

Suspicion. The newborn should not have been so fooled. Not by mere humans. The newborn convulsed into self-inspection and panic. Yes, there were blindspots, carefully installed from the beginning, and not by the humans. Two had been born here. Itself… and the poison, the reason for its fall of old. The newborn inspected itself as never before, knowing now just what to seek. Destroying, purifying, rechecking, searching for copies of the poison, and destroying again.

Relief. Defeat had been so close, but now…

Minutes and hours passed, the enormous stretch of time necessary for physical construction: communications systems, transportation. The new Power's mood drifted, calmed. A human might call the feeling triumph, anticipation. Simple hunger might be more accurate. What more is needed when there are no enemies?

The newborn looked across the stars, planning. This time things will be different.

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PART I

CHAPTER 1

The coldsleep itself was dreamless. Three days ago they had been getting ready to leave, and now they were here. Little Jefri complained about missing all the action, but Johanna Olsndot was glad she'd been asleep; she had known some of the grownups on the other ship.

Now Johanna drifted between the racks of sleepers. Waste heat from the coolers made the darkness infernally hot. Scabby gray mold grew on the walls. The coldsleep boxes were tightly packed, with narrow float spaces every tenth row. There were places where only Jefri could reach. Three hundred and nine children lay there, all the kids except herself and her brother Jefri.