Beyond the habitats, partly hidden by the shoulder of Diamond One, were the moored ramscoops. A grim sight indeed. Starships should not be tied together like that, and never so close to a jumble of loose rocks. A memory floated up: piles of dead whales rotting in a sexual embrace. This was no way to run a shipyard. But then this was more a junkyard than anything else. The Emergents had paid dearly for their ambush. After Sammy's flagship was destroyed, Pham had drifted for most of a day in a wrecked taxi—but plugged into all the remaining battle automation. Presumably Podmaster Nau never figured out who was coordinating the battle. If he had, Pham would have ended up dead, or in frozen sleep with the other surviving armsmen on theFar Treasure.
Even ambushed, the Qeng Ho had come close to victory.We wouldhave won if the damn Emergent mindrot hadn't wiped us all. It was enough to teach a body caution. An expensive victory had been turned into something close to mutual suicide: There were perhaps two starships that were still capable of ramscoop flight; a couple more might be repaired by scavenging the other wrecks. From the looks of the volatiles distillery, it would be a long time before they had enough hydrogen to boost even one vehicle up to ram speed.
Less than five hundred seconds till Relight. Pham drifted slowly upward toward the rocks, until the junkyard was blocked from view by the insulation canopy. Across the surface of the rockpile, his people—Diem and Do and Patil, now that they had sent Qiwi indoors—were supposedly doing final checks on the ejet arrays. Jimmy Diem's voice came calmly over the work-crew channel, but Pham knew that was a recording. Behind the canopy, Diem and others had disappeared around the far side of the rockpile. All three were armed now; it was amazing what you could do with an electric jet, especially a Qeng Ho model.
And so Pham Trinli was left behind. No doubt, Jimmy was just as happy to be rid of him. He was trusted, but only for simple parts of the plan, such as maintaining the appearance of a functioning work crew. Trinli moved in and out of view of Hammerfest and the temp, responding to the cues in Jimmy Diem's soundtrack.
Three hundred seconds to Relight. Trinli drifted under the canopy. From here you could see jagged ice and carefully settled airsnow. The shadowed pile dwindled off beyond the canopy, finally met the bare surface of the diamond mountain.
Diamond. Where Pham Trinli had been a child, diamonds were an ultimate form of wealth. A single gram of gem-grade diamond could finance the murder of a prince. To the average Qeng Ho, diamond was simply another allotrope of carbon, cheaply made in tonne lots. But even the Qeng Ho had been a little intimidated by these boulders. Asteroids like this didn't exist outside of theory. And although these rocks weren't single gems, there was a vast, crystalline order to them. The cores of gas giants, planets blown away in some long-ago detonation? They were just another mystery of the OnOff system.
Since work began on the rockpile, Trinli had studied the terrain, but not for the same reasons as Qiwi Lisolet, or even Jimmy Diem. There was a cleft where the ice and airsnow filled the space between Diamond One and Diamond Two. That was significant to Qiwi and Jimmy, but only in connection with rockpile maintenance. For Pham Trinli...with a little digging, that cleft was a path from their main work site to Hammerfest, a path that was out of sight of ships and habitats. He hadn't mentioned it to Diem; the conspirators' plan was for Hammerfest to be taken after they grabbed theFar Treasure.
Trinli crawled along the -shaped cleft, closer and closer to the Emergent habitat. It would have surprised Diem and the others to know it, but Pham Trinli was not a born spacer. And sometimes when he climbed around like this, he got the vertigo that afflicted Chump groundlings. If he let his imagination go...he wasn't crawling hand-by-hand along a narrow ditch, but instead he was rock-climbing up a mountain chimney, a chimney that bent farther and farther back on him, till he must surely fall.
Trinli paused a second, holding his place with one hand while his whole body quivered with the need for crampons and ropes, and pitons driven solid into the walls around him.Lord. It had been a long time since his groundsider orientation had come back this strongly. He moved forward. Forward. Not up.