A Fire Upon the Deep

.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush

!V really doesn't look like "jovian hold" is consistent
!V probably have to RETRO more than the suit: namely, Pham's gradually
!V increasing preoccupation with planning for the countermeasure
!V Also reasons for Pham's suspicions
!V QU PRB but how does the suit really mesh with that?

-=*=-

CHAPTER 28

Ravna came to the cargo deck as Blueshell and Greenstalk were preparing the trellises for delivery. She moved hesitantly, pushing awkwardly from point to point. There were dark rings, almost bruises, beneath her eyes. She returned Pham's hug almost tentatively, but didn't let go. "I want to help. Is there anything I can do to help?" !V Small INCON so why weren't the two humans present during prep for
!V the first trip?

The Skroderiders left their trellises and rolled over. Blueshell ran a frond gently across Ravna's arm, "Nothing for you to do now, my lady Ravna. We have everything well, ah, in hand. We'll be back in less than an hour, and then we can be rid of here."
But they let her check their cameras and the cargo strap-downs. Pham drifted close by her as she inspected the trellises. The twisted carbon blocks looked stranger than the one alone had. Properly stacked, they fit perfectly. More than a meter across, the stack looked like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle carved from coal. Counting a separate bag of loose spares, they totaled less than half a kilogram. Huh. Damn things should be flammable as hell. Pham resolved to play with the remaining hundred odd trellises after they were safely back in deep space.
Then the Skroderiders were through the cargo lock with their delivery, and they could only follow along on their cameras. !V ID SOLN (or maybe rationalization) The wormheads are kind of an
!V argument for why we don't see "Real Alienness". The truly
!V unintelligible aliens do not interact with us intellectually;
!V they might as well be rocks or trees. (This is even true of the
!V Powers; any intelligible interactions are a result of Their
!V creating the appearance of intelligibility.)

This secondary harbor was not really part of the tusk-leg race's terrane. The inside of the arc was far different from what they had seen on the Skroderiders' first trip. There were no exterior views. Cramped passages wound between irregular walls pocked with dark holes. Insects flew everywhere, often covering parts of the camera balls. To Pham, the place looked filthy. There was no evidence of the terrane's owners -- unless they were the pallid worms that sometimes stuck a featureless head(?) up from a burrow hole. Over his voice link, Blueshell opined that these were very ancient tenants of the RIP system. After a million years, and a hundred transcendent emigrations, the residue might still be sentient, but stranger than anything evolved in the Slow Zone. Such a people would be protected from physical extinction by ancient automation, but they would also be inward turning, totally cautious, absorbed in concerns that were inane by any outside standard. It was the type that most often lusted after trellis work.
Pham tried to keep an eye on everything. The Riders had to travel almost four kilometers from the harbor lock to reach the place where the trellises would be "validated". Pham counted two exterior locks along the way, and nothing that looked especially threatening -- but then how would he know what "threatening" looked like here? He had the OOB mount an exterior watch. A large shepherd satellite floated on the outer side of the ring, but there were no other ships in this harbor. The EM and ultra-environment seemed placid, and what could be seen on the local net did not make the ship's defenses suspicious.
Pham looked up from the reports. Ravna had drifted across the deck to the outside view. The repair work was visible, though not spectacular. A pale greenish aura hung around the damaged spines. It was scarcely brighter than the glow you often see on ship hulls in low planetary orbit. She turned and said softly, "Is it really getting fixed?" !ID [for later] when the surges hit, managing the ship does not get
! easier for Pham, but he does become a more important user.
!V NÆH:
! Interesting: The only swear words he has in common with his companions
! may be very mild; should be able to make something funny out of that.

"As far as we can -- I mean yes." Ship's automation was monitoring the regrowth, but they wouldn't know for sure till they tried to fly with it.

Pham was never sure why Rihndell had the Skroderiders pass through the wormheads' terrane; maybe, if the creatures were the ultimate trellis users, they wanted a look at the sellers. Or maybe it had some connection with the treachery that ultimately followed. In any case the Riders were soon out of it, and into a polyspecific concourse as crowded as any low-tech bazaar. !three races? SEQ prequel about Pham's experiences with those three.
!INCON with polyspecificity at Relay?
!PRB but also want to show that there are many races that don't/can't
! interact
!V Yes, following point ties in with my earlier complaints about
!V controllability of the cameras:
!PRO RETRO? The wraparound, total nature of the cameras. Like being there
! avalanche of things to see in all directions
!QU to answer after this scene: Is it clear what's going on? Clear that
! Saint Rihndell is an aggrieved party and not a betrayer?
!V I'm not sure it has to be clear
!QU is it clear that the
! perversion of Greenstalk was not done by the Aprahanti?
!
!PRB hmm, these trellises ought to be extraordinarily flammable (high
! surface to volume ratio)
!ID IDEA 16Jan90 Sometimes a scene is very chaotic/busy the
! first time you see it, and later seems placid once you are familiar
! My archetype: La Jolla Shores Bl when I first saw it Sep66.
!RETRO make Pham more goggle-eyed when they go to The Wandering Companion
! back on Relay
!V Life a "rare development"; have I made this point before? Did I come
!V with the same number of races? INCON CHK
!V the point is made (about "life") in c08. I think it's okay
!V though the related collision with rarenss of packminds may still
!V be a problem.

Pham's jaw sagged. Everywhere he looked there was a different class of sophont. Intelligent life is a rare development in the universe; in all his life in the Slow Zone, he had known three nonhuman races. But the universe is a big place, and with ultradrive it was easy to find other life. The Beyond collected the detritus of countless migrations, an accumulation that finally made civilization ubiquitous. For a moment he lost track of his surveillance programs and his general suspicions, drowned in the wonder of it. Ten species? Twelve? Individuals brushed familiarly by one another. Even Relay had not been like this. But then Harmonious Repose was a civilization lost in stagnation. These races had been part of the RIP complex for thousands of years. The ones that could interact had long since learned to do so.
And nowhere did he see butterfly wings on creatures with large, compassionate eyes.
He heard a small sound of surprise from the far side of the deck. Ravna was standing close by a window that looked out from one of Greenstalk's side cameras. "What is it, Rav?" !ID Point to make somewhere (perhaps later when Pham is negotiating the
! crowd): How unintelligible everything is. Doesn't even know what the
! people are doing. But he suspects he could figure out a lot by viewing
! and reviewing his suit's records.

"Skroderiders. See?" She pointed into the mob and zoomed the view. For a moment the images towered over her. Through the passing chaos he had a glimpse of hull forms and graceful fronds. Except for cosmetic stripes and tassles, they looked very familiar indeed.
"Yeah, there's a small colony of them hereabouts." He opened the channel to Greenstalk and told her about the sighting.
"I know. We ... smelled them. Sigh. I wish we had time to visit them after this. Finding friends in far places ... always nice." She helped Blueshell push the trellises around a balloon acquarium. They could see Rihndell's people just ahead. Six tusk-legs sat on the wall around what might be test equipment.
Blueshell and Greenstalk pushed their ball of frothy carbon into the group. The scrimshawed one leaned close to the pile and reached out to fondle the pieces with its tiny arms. One after another the trellises were placed in the tester. Blueshell moved in close to watch, and Pham set the main windows to look through his cameras. Twenty seconds passed. Rihndell's Trisk interpreter said, "First seven test true, make an interlocked septet."
Only then did Pham realize he had been holding his breath. The next three "septets" passed, too. Another sixty seconds. He glanced at the ship's repair status. OOB considered the job done but for sign-off commit from the local net. Another few minutes and we can kiss this place goodbye! !NO IMP ID that Old One was a human transcendance and p'raps that Pham was
! in the lineage that became him. Ie, Qeng Ho eventually escaped. May have
! been responsible for moving humanity to Nyjora?
! If I could think of a way of bringing this out at the end of this
! story, that would be good (especially if it had something to do with
! the refugee ship)
!V This idea would require some revision of Old One (in particular, if
!V Old One did all this, why is he only 10 or 11 years old?)
!V Note that this also one possible way to get what jrf wants about
!V reader understanding at the end

But there are always problems. Saint Rihndell bitched about the twelfth and fifteenth sets. Blueshell argued at length, grudgingly produced replacement pieces from his bag of spares. Pham couldn't tell if the Skroderider was debating for the fun of it, or if he really was short on good replacements. !ID. Ug. My motto of late: "Mush on, mush on"
!PRB INCON QU A little strange that they didn't notice the others
! coming up on Blueshell's cameras.

Twenty-five sets okayed.
"Where is Greenstalk going?" said Ravna.
"What?" Pham called up the view from Greenstalk's cameras. She was five meters from Blueshell and moving away. He panned wildly about. A local Skroderider was on her left and another floated inverted above her. Its fronds touched hers in apparently amiable conversation. "Greenstalk!" There was no reply.
"Blueshell! What's happening?" But that Rider was in gesticulating argument with the tusk-legs. Still another set of trellises had failed their examination. "Blueshell!" After a moment the Rider's voice came over their private channel. He sounded drifty, the way he often did when he was jammed or overloaded. "Not to bother me now, Sir Pham. I'm down to three perfect replacements. I must persuade these fellows to settle for what they already have."
Ravna broke in, "But what about Greenstalk? What's happening to her?" The cameras had lost sight of each other. Greenstalk and her companions emerged from a dense crowd and floated across the middle of the concourse. They were using gas jets instead of wheels. Someone was in a hurry.
The seriousness of events finally got through to Blueshell. The view from his skrode turned wildly as he rolled back and forth around Saint Rihndell's people. There was the rattle of Rider talk and then his voice came back on the inside channel, plaintive and confused. "She's gone. She's gone. I must ... I have to ...." Abruptly he rolled back to the tusk legs and resumed the argument that had just been interrupted. After a couple of seconds his voice came back on the inside channel. "What should I do, Sir Pham? I have a sale here still incomplete, yet my Greenstalk has wandered off."
Or been kidnapped. "Get us the sale, Blueshell. Greenstalk will be okay.... OOB: Plan B." He grabbed a headset and pushed off from the console.
Ravna rose with him. "Where are you going?"
He grinned. "Out. I thought Saint Rihndell might lose his halo when the crunch came -- and I made plans." She followed him as he glided toward the floor hatch. "Look. I want you to stay on deck. I can only carry so much snoop equipment; I'll need your coordination."
"But --"
He went through the hatch head first, missing the rest of her objection. She didn't follow, but a second later her voice was back, in his headset. Some of the tremor was gone from her voice; the old Ravna was there, fighting out from under her other problems. "Okay, I'll back you ... but what can we do?"
Pham pulled himself hand over hand down the passageway, accelerating to a speed that would have left a lubber caroming off the walls. Ahead loomed the uncompromising wall of the cargo lock. He swatted a hand gently at the wall and flipped head over heels. He dragged his hands precisely against the wall flanges, slowing just enough so the impact with the hatch did not break his ankles. Inside the lock, the ship had his suit already power up.
"Pham, you can't go out." Evidently she was watching through the lock's cameras. "They'll know we're a human expedition." !RETRO the existence of this pressure suit
!V Actually, in c17 there is some mention of this sort of thing
!V as supplied by the Vrinimi Org. So maybe Pham just dolled it up
!V in his spare time
!QU Do you have any good reason for doing this scene mono-viewpoint rather
! than in the style of the Chittirat scene?
!V Well, there aren't that many possible alternative viewpoints
!V June 8, 1991 It shouldn't yet have quite everything he's ever seen
!V in armor: no reactive armor yet (but then maybe that would not
! be an
!V improvement in an energy weapon context)

His head and shoulders were already in the suit's top shell. He felt the bottom pushing up around him, the seals fastening. "Not necessarily." And by now it probably doesn't matter. "There are plenty of two-arm/two-leg critters around, and I've glued some camouflage to this outfit." He cupped his chin in the helmet controls and reset the displays. The armored pressure suit was a very primitive thing compared to the field suits of Relay. Yet the Qeng Ho would have given a starship for this gear. He'd originally put the thing together to impress the Tines, but it's going to get some early testing.
He chinned up the outside view, what Ravna was seeing: his figure was unrelieved black, more than two meters tall. The hands were backed with carapace-claws and every edge of his figure was razor sharp and spined. These most recent additions should break the lines of the strictly human form, and hopefully be intimidating as hell.
Pham cycled the lock and pushed off, into the wormheads' terrane. Walls of mud stood all around, misty in humid air and swarms of insects.
Ravna's voice was in his ear. "I've got a low-level query, probably automatic: 'Why you send third negotiator?'"
"Ignore it." !V QU repetitive? (see below)

"Pham, be careful. These Middle Beyond cultures, the old ones, they keep nasty things in reserve. Otherwise they wouldn't still be around."
"I'll be a good citizen." As long as I'm treated nice. He was already halfway to the concourse gate. He chinned up a small window from Blueshell's camera. All this high-bandwidth comm was courtesy of the local net. Strange that Rihndell was still providing the service. Blueshell seemed to be negotiating still. Maybe there wasn't a scam ... or anyway, not one that Saint Rihndell was in on.
"Pham, I've lost the video from Greenstalk, just as she went into some kind of tunnel. Her location beacon is still clear." !NÆH: PRO They must also lose the location beacon some time
!V is it sufficiently clear that some of these suit mods where done
!V just a few hours earlier when he realized he might need the suit
!V at RIP?

The concourse gate made an opening for him, and then Pham was in the crowded, market volume. He heard the raucous hubbub even through his armor. He moved slowly, sticking to the most uncrowded paths, following guide ropes that threaded the space. The mob was no problem. Everyone made way, some with almost panicky haste. Pham didn't know whether it was his razor spines or the trace of chlorine his suit "leaked". Maybe that last touch was a bit much. But the whole point was to look nonhuman. He slowed even more, doing his best not to nick anyone. Something awfully like a target-designation laser flickered in his rear window. He ducked quickly around an aquarium as Ravna said, "The terrane just complained to your suit: 'You are in violation of dress-code' is how the translation comes out."
Is it my chlorine B.O., or have they detected the guns? "What about outside? Any Butterflies in sight?" !V INCON Why doesn't the godshatter make him turn around?
!V Possible answer: Godshatter knows how important the Riders are for
!V piloting the ship, etc (the very things they are deemed indispensable
!V for throughout the rest of the story)

"No. Ship activity hasn't changed much during the last five hours. No Aprahanti movement or change in comm status." Long pause. Indirectly from the OOB bridge he could hear Blueshell talking with Ravna, the words indistinct but excited. He jabbed around, trying to find the direct connection. Then Ravna was talking to him again. "Hei! Blueshell says Rihndell has accepted the shipment! He's onloading the agrav fabric right now. And OOB just got a commit on the repairs!" So they were ready to fly -- except that three of them were still ashore, and one of them was missing.
Pham floated over the top of the aquarium and finally caught direct sight of Blueshell. He tweaked the suit's gas jets very carefully and settled down beside the Rider. !PRB Too bad you can't shoot up the flamed trellises in the fighting
!PRB QU Rationalize names of animals
!SIDEBAR maybe in the final race to Navnløs there could be something
! from the weirdoes speculating why there should be a big surge. This
! would cite the apparent stability of the Helper
! Or, if you want to be a little less explicit, it could just be
! speculation
! on the obvious consequences of the Helper taking over all the
! High Beyond, if it turns out to as stable as it seems.
! In fact, this could be one reason why people have been so sanguine
! all along about the threat of the Helper
!PRB RETRO really need something somewhere to make it more plausible that
! all this face to face is needed with Rihndell's people (I think it is
! plausible, but the standard alternatives should be revealed)
!V hld's idea of religion is good, but I don't know if I have to say
!V anything explicit

His arrival was about as welcome as finger-mites at a picnic. The scrimshawed one had been chattering away, tapping his articulated artwork on the wall as his helper translated into Trisk. Now the creature drew in his tusks, and the neck arms folded themselves. The others followed suit. All of them sidled up the wall, away from Blueshell and Pham. "Our business is now complete. We don't know where your friend has gone," said the Trisk interpreter.
Blueshell's fronds extended after them, wavering. "B-but just a little guidance is all we need. Who --" It was no use. Saint Rihndell and his merry crew kept going. Blueshell rattled in abrupt frustration. His fronds angled slightly, turning all attention on Pham Nuwen. "Sir Pham, I am doubting now your expertise as a trader. Saint Rihndell might have helped."
"Maybe." Pham watched the tusk-legs disappear into the crowd, pulling the trellises behind them like a big black balloon. Ugh. Maybe Rihndell was simply an honest trader. "What are the chances that Greenstalk would abandon you in the middle of something like that?"
Blueshell dithered for a moment. "In an ordinary trade stop, she might have noticed some extraordinary profit opportunity. But here, I --"
Ravna's voice interrupted sympathetically, "Maybe she just, uh, forgot the context?"
"No," Blueshell was definite. "The skrode would never permit such a failure, not in the middle of a hard trade."
Pham shifted windows around inside his helmet, looking in all directions. The crowd was still keeping an open space around them. There was no evidence of cops. Would I know them if I saw them? "Okay," said Pham. "We have a problem, whether I'd come out or not. I suggest we take a little walk, see if we can find where Greenstalk went."
Rattle. "We have little choice now. My lady Ravna, do please try to reach the tusk-legs interpreter. Perhaps he can link us to the local Skroderiders." He came off the wall, rotated on gas jets. "Come along, Sir Pham." !V CHK "thousands of years" with a similar mention nearby earlier
!V CHK "commensality"

Blueshell led the way across the concourse, vaguely in the direction Greenstalk had gone. Their path was anything but straight, more a drunkard's walk that once took them almost back to their starting place. "Delicately, delicately," the Skroderider responded when Pham complained about the pace. The Rider never insisted on passage through clots of critters. If they did not respond to the gentle waving of his fronds, he detoured all around them. And he kept Pham directly behind him so the intimidation factor of the razored armor was of no use. "These people may look very peaceable to you, Sir Pham, easy to push around. But note, this is among themselves. These races have had thousands of years to accommodate to one another, to achieve local commensality. To outsiders they will necessarily be less tolerant, else they would have been overrun long ago." Pham remembered the "dress-code" warning and decided not to argue.
The next twenty minutes would have been the experience of a lifetime for a Qeng Ho trader, to be within arm's reach of a dozen different intelligent species. But when they finally reached the far wall, Pham was grinding his teeth. Twice more he received a dress-code warning. The only bright spot: Saint Rihndell was still extending the courtesy of local net support, and Ravna had more information: "The local Skroderider colony is about a hundred kilometers from the concourse. There's some kind of transport station beyond the wall you're at."
And the tunnel Greenstalk had entered was just ahead of them. From this angle, they could see the dark of space beyond it. For the first time, there was no problem with crowds; scarcely anyone was entering or leaving the hole. !INCON since before this warning was paraphrased by Ravna.

Laser light twinkled on his rear windows. "Dress code violation. Fourth warning. It says to 'please leave the volume at once'."
"We're going. We're going."

!PRB QU RETRO How come they didn't see the shepherd moon when they
! moved into this
! harbor? Better stated: Is it necessary for me to mention that they
! saw it?

Darkness, and Pham boosted the gain on his helmet windows. At first he thought the "transport station" was open to space, that the locals had restraint fields as in the high beyond. then he noticed the pillars merged into transparent walls. they were still indoors in the old-fashioned way, but the view.... they were on the starward side of the arc. the ring particles were like dark fish floating silently a few tens of meters out from him. In the further distance, structures stuck out of the ring plane far enough to get sundazzle. But the brightest object was almost overhead: the blue of ocean, the white of cloud. Its soft light flooded the ground around him. However far the Qeng Ho fared, such a sight had been welcome. Yet this was not quite the real thing. The was only approximately spherical, and its face was bisected by the ring shadow. It was a small object, not more than a few hundred klicks above him, one of the shepherd satellites they had seen on the way in. The shepherd's haze of atmosphere was crisply bounded by the sides of a vast canopy.
He dragged his attention down from the view. "Ten to one that's the Skroderiders' terrane."
"Of course," Blueshell replied. "It's typical. The surf in such minigravity can never be what I prefer, but --"
"Dear Blueshell! Sir Pham! Over here." It was Greenstalk's voice. According to Pham's suit, it was a local connection, not relayed through the OOB. !PRB Seems to me that you have to calibrate the power of the Skrodes
! so that it's still plausible that they function in the Slow Zone.
! This is mainly to make the very last scenes in the book work.
!
!V SOLN aha: Some of these disadvantages of Pham's suit you can just
!V have himself
!V kick himself for not designing in -- he did his own hackword; one
!V thing you may want to RETRO write is to remove the claim that he
!V build these on top of space suits that were already aboard the OOB.
!V You may want it to be that there were no human designed suits on
!V the OOB;
!V DONE: however, if you do that then back in Part I, you should
!V weaken the claims of how completely stocked the ship was
!RETRO This suit is awfully primitive if it didn't tell him of the broken
! comm link with OOB.
!V the work on these suits is something for the Lost Time writeups
! Make a bigger deal of the suit as Pham's semisecret
! hobby. It is kinda pivotal in the RIP scene to action and credibility.
!V IMP INCON why he doesn't use the suit on Tines' world
!V This is explained in the ship's fire rewrite

Blueshell's fronds angled in all directions. "Are you all right, Greenstalk?" They rattled back and forth at each other for a few seconds. Then Greenstalk resumed in Trisk: "Sir Pham. Yes, I'm all right. I'm sorry to upset you all so much. But I could tell the deal with Rihndell was going to work out, and then these local Riders stopped by. They are wonderful people, Sir Pham. They have invited us across to their terrane. Just for a day or so. It will be a wonderful rest before we go on our way. And I think they may be able to help us."
Like the quest romances he'd found in Ravna's bedtime library: the weary travelers, partway to their goal, find a friendly haven and some special gift. Pham switched to a private line to Blueshell: "Is that really Greenstalk? Is she under duress?" !V CHK INCON 200y

"It's her, and free, Sir Pham. You heard us speaking. I've been with her two hundred years. No one's twisting her fronds."
"Then why the hell did she skip out on us?" Pham surprised himself, almost hissing the words.
Long pause. "That is strange. My guess: these local Riders somehow know something very important to us. Come, Sir Pham. But carefully." He rolled away in what seemed a random direction.
"Rav, what do you --" Pham noticed the red light blinking on his comm status panel, and his irritation chilled. How long had the link to Ravna been down? !QU Milord, Milady in Norske (perhaps as a substitute for Sir)?
! Cappelens has only a paraphrased translation!! ... a revealing point
! about the culture?

Pham followed Blueshell, floating low behind the other, using his gas jets to pace the Skroderider. This entire area was covered with the stickem that Riders liked for zero-gee rolling. Yet right now the place seemed deserted. Nobody in sight where just a hundred meters away there was light and crowds. The whole thing screamed ambush, yet it didn't make sense. If Death to Vermin -- or their stooges -- had spotted them, a simple alarum would have served. Some Rihndell game ...? Pham powered up the suit's beam weapons and enabled countermeasures; midge cameras flitted off in all directions. So much for dress codes. !V June 9, 1991 Oops, may have to RETRO write (Lost Time 1) that
!V Riders didn't know all about what he was doing with the suit
!V This is actually something of a logic hole.

The bluish moonlight washed the plain, showing soft mounds and angular arrays of unknown equipment. The surface was pocked with holes (tunnel entrances?). Blueshell said something muddled about the "beautiful night", how much fun it would be to sit on the seashore a hundred kilometers above them. Pham scanned in all directions, trying to identify fields of fire and killing zones. !PRO Need more buttressing for weakness of this ambush. This could
! probably be provided when Pham and Ravna argue about revealing the
! the secret of the skrodes.
!ID this transport node is actually another ring segment. This would go
! a little way to SOLving the PRB that these radically different volumes
! seem so close together. With these ring arcs there is also the analogy
! with recombination of DNA -- lots of variety and change possible
!
!IMP! PRB QU Zone must to some extent rotate with the galaxy. New findings
! 1990 might also make it difficult for many star systems to stay in
! the same zone through a rev
! Really important to think about this galactic dynamics in general.
! How much mixing would there be, that is, stars that spend part of their
! time in different zones. Seems like there would be a lot. If so there
! ought to be a number of races in the Slow Zone that have evidence of the
! other Zones
!V I've decided to go with the symmetric galactic model (not the
!V barred spiral model), so this isn't as much
!V of a problem. However, I suppose it's just bad luck that Qeng Ho
!V hadn't figured it out ID IMP Maybe they did! Maybe that's what
!V sent Pham on the Wild Goose chase (unfortunately
! in the wrong direction)
!V SEQ the flight of the Wild Goose
!V IMP this may imply slight change in his reporting of what the
!V Wild Goose quest was (maybe not; you've already mentioned that
!V he has memory problems)
!
^ AWK in following paragraph; could be improved
!CHK "hull stripes" "signet flag"

The view from one of his midges showed a forest of leafless fronds -- Skroderiders standing silent in the moonlight. They were two hillocks away. Silent, motionless, without any lights ... perhaps just enjoying the moonlight. In the midge's amplified view, Pham had no trouble identifying Greenstalk; she was standing at one end of a line of five Riders, her hull stripes clearly visible. There was a hump on the front of her skrode, and a rod-like projection. Some kind of restraint? He floated a couple of midges near. A weapon. All those Riders were armed.
"We're already aboard the transport, Blueshell," came Greenstalk's voice. "You'll see it in a few more meters, just on the other side of a ventilator pile," apparently referring to the mound that he and the Skroderider were approaching. But Pham knew there was no flier there; Greenstalk and her guns were to the side of their progress. Treachery, very workmanlike but also very low tech. Pham almost shouted out to Blueshell. Then he notice the flat ceramic rectangle mounted in the hill just a few meters behind the Rider. The nearest midge reported it was some kind of explosive, probably a directional mine. A low-resolution camera, barely more than a motion sensor, was mounted beside it. Blueshell had rolled nonchalantly past the thing, all the while chattering with Greenstalk. They let him past. New suspicions rose dark and grim. Pham broke to a stop, backing quickly; never touching ground, the only sounds he made were the quiet hisses of his gas jets. He detached one of his wrist claws and had a midge fly it close past the mine's sensor....
There was a flash of pale fire and a loud noise. Even five meters to the side, the shock wave pushed him back. He had a glimpse of Blueshell thrown frond over wheels on the far side of the mine. Edged metal knickered about, but mindlessly: nothing came back to attack again. Several midges were destroyed by the blast. !PRB QU INCON actually it seems like the skrode perversion should not
! produce perfectly functional critters
! SOLN: This is just added proof that there was heavy duty fiddling, and
! that the race is of long term interest to the Helper phenom. Sometime
! you should CHK your sidebars about the Helper's background to make sure
! that you have presaged this properly. So this would be just part of the
! analysis that is revealed in the Skrode's Secret scene.

Pham took advantage of the racket to accelerate hard, scooting up a nearby "hill" and into a shallow valley (alley?) that looked down on the Skroderiders. The ambushers rolled forward around the hill, rattling happily at one another. Pham held his fire, curious. After a moment, Blueshell floated into the air a hundred meters away. "Pham?" he said plaintively, "Pham?"
The ambushers ignored Blueshell. Three of them disappeared around the hill. Pham's midges saw them stop in consternation, fronds erect -- they had suddenly realized he'd gotten away. The five spread out, searching the area, hunting him down. There was no persuasive talk from Greenstalk anymore.
There was a sharp cracking sound and blaster fire glowed from behind a hill. Somebody was a little nervous on the trigger.
Above it all floated Blueshell, the perfect target, yet still untouched. His speech was a combination of Trisk and Rider rattle now, and where Pham could understand it, he heard fear. "Why are you shooting? What is the problem? Greenstalk, please!" !ID 100GJ? 1GJ? you should say the energy rating.
!ID IDEA for future ZONE story. A fast eddy. Decide what to say about
! how often surges happen. You should have that small yet extreme ones
! are possible.

The paranoid in Pham Nuwen was not deceived. I don't want you up there looking down. He sighted his main beam gun on the Rider, then shifted his aim and fired. The blast was not in visible wavelengths, but there were gigajoules in the pulse. Plasma coruscated along the beam, missing Blueshell by less than five meters. Well above the Skroderider, the beam struck hull crystal. The explosion was spectacular, an actinic glare that sent glowing fragments in a thousand rays.
Pham flew sideways even as the ceiling flared. He saw Blueshell spinning off, regain control -- and move precipitously for cover. Where Pham's beam had hit, a corona of light was dimming from blue through orange and red, its light still brighter than the shepherd moon overhead.
His warning shot had been like a great finger pointing back toward his location. In the next fifteen seconds, four of the ambushers fired on the place Pham had been. There was silence, then faint rustling. In a game of stealth, the five might think themselves easy winners. They still hadn't realized how well-equipped he was. Pham smiled at the pictures coming in from his midges. He had every one of them in sight, and Blueshell too. ^ QU CHK velocity calculation on the hole you describe. CIT?
!V CHK INCON 5

If it were just these four (five?), there would be no problem. But surely reinforcements, or at least complications, were on the way. The wound in the ceiling had cooled to darkness, but there was a hole there now, half a meter across. The sound of hissing wind came from it, a sound that brought reflex fear to Pham even in his armor. It might take a while before the leak affected the Skroderiders, but it was an emergency nevertheless. It would attract notice. He stared at the hole. Down here it was stirring a breeze, but in the few meters right below the hole there was a miniature tornado of dust and loose junk, hurtling up and out....
And beyond the transparent hull, in space:
A gap of dark and then a glittering plume, where the debris emerged from the arc's shadow into the sunlight. A neat idea struggled for his attention.
Oops. The five Riders had roughly encircled him. Now one blundered into view, saw him, and snapped a shot. Pham returned fire and the other exploded in a cloud of superheated water and charred flesh. Its undamaged skrode sailed across the space between the hills, collecting panicky fire from the others. Pham changed position again, moving in the direction he knew was farthest from his enemies' positions. !V INCON seems like he could have done this trick by reflecting
!V off the towers or even off the Rider moon.

A few more minutes of peace. He looked up at the crystal plume. There was something ... yes. If reinforcements should come, why not for him? He sighted on the plume and shunted his voice line through the gun's trigger circuit. He almost started talking, then thought ... Better lower the power on this one. Details. He aimed again, fired continuously, and said, "Ravna, I sure as hell hope you have your eyes open. I need help ..." and briefly described the crazy events of the last ten minutes.
This time his beam was putting out less than ten thousand joules per second, not enough to glow the air. But reflecting off the plume beyond the hull, the modulation should be visible for thousands of klicks, in particular to the OOB on the other side of the habitat. !hld joules=energy; watts=power ==> probably watts are the correct unit
!hld for talking about plasma bounce.
!hld could have the suit use synthetic stereo sound to cue threat vectors;
!hld this is practical now
!ID PRO In later scenes, Ravna can review the record Pham's suit makes of
! all this.
!RETRO this "valley (alley?)" trick earlier rather than in this paragraph
! Basically you want to give a feeling of a landscape that is also an
! interior of some sort.
!PRB QU This scene seems to blow away some of the self-doubts you
! were planning to have for Pham.
!PRB should have more about other senses, hearing in particular, in
! this scene.

The Skroderiders were closing in again. Damn. No way he could leave this message on automatic send; he needed the "transmitter" for more important things. Pham flew from valley to valley, maneuvering behind the Rider that was farthest from the others. One against three (four?). He had superior firepower and information, but one piece of bad luck and he was dead. He floated up on his next target. Quietly, carefully ...
A sear of light brushed his arm, flaring the armor incandescent. White hot drops of metal sprayed as he twisted out of the way. He boosted straight across the space between three hillocks, firing down on the Rider there. Lights crisscrossed around him, and then he was under cover again. They were fast, almost as if they had automatic aiming gear. Maybe they did: their skrodes.
Then the pain hit. Pham folded on himself, gasping. If this were like wounds he remembered, there would be char to the bone. Tears floated in his eyes, and consciousness disappeared in a nauseated faint. He came to. It could only be a second or two later -- else he'd never have wakened. The others were a lot closer now, but the one he'd fired on was just a glowing crater and random skrode fragments. His suit's automation brought the damaged armor in close to his side. He felt the chill of local anesthetic, and the pain dimmed. Pham eased around the hill, trying to keep all three of his antagonists simultaneously out of sight. They had caught on to his midges; every few seconds a glow erupted or a hill top turned to glowing slag. It was overkill, but the midges were dying ... and he was losing his greatest advantage. !V June 9, 1991 Strange they didn't blast Blueshell INCON

Where is Blueshell? Pham cycled through the views from his remaining midges, then his own. The bastard was back in the air, high above the combat -- untouched by his fellow Riders. Reporting everything I do. Pham rolled over, awkwardly bringing his gun to bear on the tiny figure. He hesitated. You're getting soft, Nuwen. Blueshell abruptly accelerated downwards, his cargo scarf billowing out behind him. Evidently he was using his gas jets' full power. Against the background noise of bubbling metal and blast beam thunder, his fall was totally silent. He was driving straight for the nearest of the attackers. !NÆH: ID mama = Norsk mamma. When Jefri is rescued he might mistake Ravna
! for
! his mother. She picks him up, carries him off without correcting. He's
! semi delerious.
!IMP INCON QU remember to put stuff in about crazed nature of monosex
! packs?
! I don't know. There are reasons not to:
! Maybe Ravna&&Tines in Blabber were lying
! Maybe a monosex pack isn't pathological if there are other packs
! around that do have members of the opposite sex
!V -- NOTE: you already have some of this in the conversation
!V with Vendacious, more is optional I think.
!ID PRO by the time Ravna and Pham discuss the Skrode Secret, she could
! have had a chance to review the suits recording
! V DONE (c28)
!
!ID SIDEBAR for late in the story. Speculation of what the galaxy would
! be like after a helper success. This could in the (perceptive) reader's
! mind ultimately tie up with the reason for the Great Surge
!PRB QU HLD JLC MG JDV JF deus ex machina ending
! in a way seems even worse than an indecisive ending.
! I wonder whether the two problems can be made to collide with each other
!hld I still think they should find something on the refugee ship that the
!hld "god-fragment" in Pham can recognize/use to damage/control/kill the
!hld Helper, perhaps by being uploaded on the net from OOB -- something
!hld ranging from a virus that wipes the Blight's OS kernal
!hld to something that jumps
!hld starts something into the Transcend to clobber the Helper, or maybe
!hld bounces through the Net to some entity capable of causing Zone the
! surge.
!hld The entity could be in the Transcend (or TRAN Transcend) or maybe an
!hld astrophysical phenomenon that turns out to be a literal deus ex
!hld machina.
!PRB with Ravna/Pham skrode secret scene: Even if they did scream out
! the secret it would just be more net noise. You might simply ignore this
! question. In any case, if they did make such a public revelation
! it would be coming from a now infamous place: the OOB.
!ID OOB is kinda in a honored place: How many times has a single ship
! been such a focus?
!PRB INCON Where's the refugee ship's antenna cloud? Does it really
! need one? NO
!hld Refugee ship doesn't need big antenna cloud if the receiver is
!hld huge, eg deep space probes have 2m antennas to Goldstone's 85m
!hld antenna -- YES
!ID RETRO QU PRB What was the actual reason for the attack on Relay.
! You should CHK what you say there. I don't think it is
! reasonable that it
! was directed specifically to pick up the OOB mission. Perhaps the
! attack was just ancillary to the attack on Old One.
! <-- YES June 9, 1991
!V June 14, 1991 At least 2 places I've tried to make give info
!V about the Relay attack: one was in the Sandor posting.
!
!hld Maybe the attack on Relay was to kill the most probably antenna
!hld for receiving the Testament <-- NO June 9, 1991
!V -- because this would imply the Blight knew it had lost something
!V at the bottom. You need a better reason, hopefully one that does not
!V implicate these Skroderiders
! Tie up to nature of the helper
! Helper is sort of a worm, in any case look at it from
! a natural history point of view
!V PRB with the above SOLN is that then the Blight would be all set
!V with a very custom fleet to chase them at the end
!
!Back to the scene at hand:
!ID RETRO One way you could explain Blueshell surviving this stunt is
! if there were holes in the landscape. This could be part of a
! description
! right at the beginning, in which you make it clear the paradoxical
! aspects of the landscape.
!IDEA 21Jan90 Fellow whose hobby is doing things with
! machines that have (macroscopic) moving parts.

Thirty meters up, the Rider released something large and angular. The two separated, Blueshell braking and diving to the side. He disappeared behind the hills. At the same time, much nearer, came a solid thud/crunch. Pham spent his next to last midge for a peek around the hillside. He had a glimpse of a skrode, and fronds splayed all about a squashed stalk; there was a flash of light, and the midge was gone. !PRB INCON RETRO why weren't the midges armed?
!QU RETRO decide about whether to use the nose lock more explicitly in
! docking -- no; in fact, you're pretty explicit that they're using
! the ship's cargo lock
!QU By now, should there be other holes in the hull?
!QU Also, it seems like this hab would likely have been cut loose from the
! arc when serious shooting started.
!V CHK INCON 2

Only two ambushers left. One was Greenstalk.
For ten seconds there was no more firing. Yet things were not completely silent. The slumped, glowing metal of his arm popped and sputtered as it cooled. High above, there was the susurrus of air escaping the hull. Fitful breezes whispered around ground level, making it impossible to keep position without constant tweaking at his jets. He paused, letting the current carry him silently out of his little valley. There. A ghostly hiss that was not his own. Another. The two were closing in on him from different directions. They might not know his exact position, but they could obviously coordinate their own.
The pain faded in and out, along with consciousness. Short pulses of agony and darkness. He dared not fool with more anesthetic. Pham saw frond tips peeping over a nearby hill. He halted, watched the fronds. Most likely, there was just enough vision area in the tips to sense motion.... Two seconds passed. Pham's last midge showed the other attacker floating silently in from the side. Any second now, the two would pop up. At that instant, Pham would have given anything for an armed midge. In all his stupid hacking, he'd never gotten around to that. No help for it. He waited for a moment of clear consciousness, long enough to boost over the enemy and shoot. !CHK how long they've really been on the road
!PRB BKG do some design work on weapons and nomenclature. Also a fair
! amount of RETROwriting should be done to make the nature of Pham's
! weapons in this scene plausible.
!V RETRO the Comm Synod of RIP as a Rider run organization
!V do it as a speculation June 9, 1991
!V CHK INCON 150d CHRON

There was a rattle of fronds, loud self-announcement. Pham's midge caught sight of Blueshell rolling behind slatted walls a hundred meters away. The Skroderider rushed from protection to protection, but always closer to Greenstalk's position. And the rattling? Was it a pleading? Even after five months with the Riders, Pham had only the vaguest sense of their rattle-talk. Greenstalk -- the Greenstalk who had always been the shy one, the compulsively honest one -- rattled nothing back. She swung her beamer around, raking the slats with fire. The third Rider popped up just far enough to shoot at the slats. His angle would have been just right to fry Blueshell where he stood -- except that the movement took him directly in front of Pham Nuwen's gun.
Even as Pham fired, he was boosting out of his hole. Now was his only chance. If he could turn, fire back on Greenstalk before she was done with Blueshell --
The maneuver was an easy head-over-heels that should have left him upside down and facing back upon Greenstalk. But nothing was easy for him now, and Pham came around spinning too fast, the landscape dwindling beneath him. But there was Greenstalk all right, swinging her weapon back toward him.
And there was Blueshell, racing from between pillars that glowed white in the heat of Greenstalk's fire. His voice was loud in Pham's ear: "I beg, don't kill her. Don't kill --"
Greenstalk hesitated, then turned the weapon back on the advancing Blueshell. Pham triggered his gun, letting his spin drag the beam across the ground. Consciousness ebbed. Aim! Aim right! He furrowed the land below with a glowing, molten arrow, that ended at something dark and slumped. Blueshell's tiny figure was still rolling across the wreckage, trying to reach her. Then Pham had turned too far and could not remember how to change the view. The sky swung slowly past his eyes:
A bluish moon with a sharp shadow 'cross its middle. A ship floating close, with feathery spines, like some giant bug. What in the Qeng Ho ... where am I? ... and consciousness fled. !V Looking back over the RIP stuff, it doesn't look like I ever had
!V Pham kick himself for perhaps not really being Qeng Ho
!V related to your new view of the credibility (during the narrative)
!V of the Qeng Ho "myth" June 14, 1991 TUF