The Children of the Sky

What was Flenser-Tyrathect up to? Woodcarver had such strong suspicions about the pack. In fact, Ravna knew that some minor part of those suspicions was correct. The wily (reformed) monster had indeed figured out that Woodcarver had bugged his sanctums. But the reason Ravna knew that was also the reason she knew Flenser wasn’t behind the current mysteries.

She hunkered down in her favorite-style chair and called up Oobii’s surveillance suite—the High Beyond system that she had kept hidden from everyone.

The Out of Band II had been designed for operations at the Bottom of the Beyond and even in the Slow Zone (where they were now marooned). But the ship had been built in the Middle Beyond, where technology tapdanced at the edge of intelligibility. Almost none of the ship’s highest functions worked Down Here. Certainly, no ship could fly faster than light Down Here. And the antigravity was slowly dying. The natural-language translators were laughably incompetent. Even where local physics allowed a phenomenon, the ship’s software was often incapable of exploiting it. That was why a lot of Oobii’s design involved Very Dumb Solutions to classic problems.

Nevertheless, there were surprises. In the days after Pham died, after the Battle on Starship Hill, Ravna had taken inventory of what remained. Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers. The only other galactic on the planet was the Skroderider Greenstalk, and she was too soon gone. Oh, Greenstalk, how I miss you. The thought still popped up, for Greenstalk had been with her through all the most desperate times in space.

So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.

One such hardware system had survived Countermeasure’s surge. Even more miraculous, Oobii could still reconstruct the output. Early on, Ravna had to decide just who to target with that special surveillance. It had not been a difficult choice. The Old Flenser had created a strange culture that was both cruel and fiendishly inventive. Flenser had seemed every bit as dangerous as Woodcarver claimed.

And so one day during the early years, Ravna had infected Flenser-Tyrathect’s members with the surveillance system. The infestation was physically harmless, and the devices could not replicate, but there were more than enough devices to cover the pack, hopefully for as long as she needed them.

Over the years, Ravna had often wished—but never with the desperate frustration of one who has made a profound mistake—that she could infect somebody else with the surveillance system. But the “reformed” Flenser had been the greatest unknown, potentially the greatest threat, and Ravna’s camera had revealed to her that whatever strange thing Flenser-Tyrathect might be, it was not working against Woodcarver or Ravna or their plans for the Domain. That certainty had more than once brought Ravna to the verge of revealing her methods to Woodcarver. Now, after the misunderstanding about the New Meeting Place, Ravna wondered if she could ever dare tell her.

Woodcarver’s latest suspicions about Flenser and the radio cloaks made perfect sense—if one didn’t know about Ravna’s special surveillance. The ship was constantly monitoring the Flenser data, keeping a record of the reconstructed images and watching for specified alarm conditions. Ravna had reviewed that record very carefully in the days immediately after the theft of the radio cloaks, and the reformed Flenser had seemed just as darkly innocent as ever. What more could she do?