"Five seconds after Relight." The voice must be automatic. "We're up to seven kilowatts per square meter." This was a different tech, speaking in a flat Trilander accent.Not an Emergent? The question flickered past Ezr's attention, swamped for the moment by the rest of the action.
"Ten seconds after Relight." At the side of the room was a smaller window, a view of the Spider world. It had been dark and dim as ever, but now the light was coming back from it and the planetary disk glowed with its own brightness as ice and air woke to a sun that was already five times as bright as Sol standard. And still brightening:
"Twenty kilowatts per square meter." A strip graph was playing out below the image of the new sun, comparing its output with the historical record. This Relight looked as powerful as any before.
"Neutron flux is still below detectable limits."
Nau and Vinh exchanged relieved looks, for once sincere on both sides.That was the sort of danger that couldn't be detected from interstellar distances, and one of the oldentimes fly-throughs had failed at about this point. At least they wouldn't fry in radiation that no one had seen from afar.
"Thirty seconds after Relight."
"Fifty kilowatts per square meter."
Outside, the mountainside that shielded them from the sun was beginning toglow.
• • •
Pham Trinli had the public audio channel playing. Even without it, Relight would have been obvious. But for the moment he held those events in a small part of his mind and concentrated on what was going over the private links out of Hammerfest. It was at moments like this, when technicians were overwhelmed by externalities, that security was most likely to slip. If Diem was on schedule, he and his crew were now at the mooring point of theFar Treasure.
Trinli's eyes flickered across the half-dozen displays that now filled most of his hood's view space. His fleet net programs were doing a good job with the telemetry.Ha. You can't beat old trapdoors. Now that they needed lots of computing power, the Emergents were using more and more Qeng Ho automation, and Trinli's snooping was correspondingly more effective.
The signal strength faded. Alignment drift? Trinli cleared several display windows and looked at the world around him. The OnOff star was hidden behind the mountains, but its light glared off the hills that stuck up into its view. Where ice or airsnow was exposed, vapor steamed out. For the moment, Jimmy's silver canopy was holding, but the fabric slowly swayed and flapped. There was an almost bluish color to the sky now, the mists of thousands of tonnes of water and air boiling up, turning the rockpile into a comet.
And screwing up his line of sight on Hammerfest. Trinli wiggled his antenna. Losing the link couldn't have been the mists alone. Something had shifted.There. He was picking up Hammerfest's traffic again. After a second his crypto resynchronized and he was back in business. But now he kept an eye on the storm around him. The new sun was even more of a show than they had expected.
Trinli's network feelers were inside Hammerfest now. Every program had its exceptional circumstances, the situations that the designers assumed were outside the scope of their responsibility. There were loopholes that the present extremities had shaken open... .
Strange. There seemed to be dozens of users logged into system internals. And there were big sections of the Emergent system that he didn't recognize, that weren't built on the common foundations. But the Emergents were supposed to be ordinary Chumps, recently returned to high technology with the help of the Qeng Ho broadcast net. There was just too much strange stuff here. He dipped into the voice traffic. The Emergent Nese was understandable but clipped and full of jargon. "...Diem...around front of rocks...according to plan."
According to plan?
Trinli scanned related data streams, saw graphics that showed just what weapons Jimmy's crew would carry, that showed the entrance he intended to use to sneak aboard theFar Treasure. There were tables of names... of the conspirators. Pham Trinli was listed as a minor accomplice. More tables.Jimmy Diem's black crypto. The first version was only partially accurate; later files converged on precisely what Jimmy and the others were using. Somehow, they had been watching closely enough to see through all the tricks. There had been no traitors, just an inhuman attention to detail.
Pham jerked down his equipment and crawled a little farther. He popped up, pointing his directional at a slanted overhang of Hammerfest's roof. From here the angle should be right. He could bounce a beam down atFar Treasure 's moorage point.
"Jimmy, Jimmy! Can you hear me?" It was Qeng Ho encrypted, but if any enemy heard, both ends of the link would be nailed.
