Jimmy froze. Worst case: the enemy was toying with him. Best case: Pham Trinli had guessed they were going after theFar Treasure and now was screwing up worse than anyone could have imagined.Ignore the fool,and if you live, beat the crap out of him. Jimmy glanced at the sky above Hammerfest. The coma was pale violet, slowly roiling in the light of OnOff. In space, a laser link is very hard to detect. But this was no longer ordinary space. It was more like a cometary surface at close passage. If the Emergents knew where to look they could probablysee Trinli's link.
Jimmy's reply was a millisecond compression flung back in the direction of the other's beam. "Turn that off, you old shit. Now!"
"Soon. First: They know about the plan. They saw through your black crypto." It was Trinli, and yet different. And Trinli had never been told about the crypto. "This is a setup, Jimmy. But they don't know everything. Back off. Whatever they've got planned inside theTreasure will only make things worse."
Lord.For a moment, Jimmy just froze. Thoughts of failure and death had haunted his every sleep since the ambush. To get this far, they had taken a thousand deadly risks. He had accepted that they might be discovered. But never had he thought it would happen like this. What the old fool had found might be important; it might be worthless. And backing down now would be nearly a worst-case outcome.It's just too late.
Jimmy forced his mouth to open, his lips to speak. "I said, close down the link!" He turned back to theTreasure 's hull and tapped the Emergent passcode on the hatch. A second passed—and then the clamshells parted. Do and Patil dove upward into the dimness of the airlock. Diem paused just a second, slapped a small gadget onto the hull beside the door, and followed them up.
TWELVE
Pham Trinli shut down the link. He flipped and climbed rapidly back along the cleft.So we were suckered. Tomas Nau was too clever by half, and he had some strange kind of edge. Trinli had seen a hundred ops, some smaller than this, some that lasted for centuries. But he had never seen the sort of precise fanatical attention to detail that he had seen in those snoop logs the Emergents kept on the black crypto. Nau had either magic software or teams of monomaniacs. In the back of his mind, the planner in him was wondering what it could be and how Pham Trinli might someday take advantage of it.
For now, survival was the only issue. If Diem would only back off from theTreasure, the trap Nau planned might not close or might not be so deadly.
The sheer diamond face on his left was sparkling now, the largest gemstone of all time shining sunlight all round him. Ahead, the light was almost as brilliant, a dazzling nimbus where icy peaks stood in OnOff's light. The silver sunshield was billowing high, tied down in only three places.
Abruptly, Pham's hands and knees were kicked out from under him. He spun out from the path, caught himself by one hand. And through that hand he could hear the mountains groan. Mist spewed out from the cleft all along its length—and the diamond mountain moved. It was less than a centimeter per second, stately, but it moved. Pham could see light all along the opening. He had seen the crew's rock maps. Diamonds One and Two abutted each other along a common plane. The Emergent engineers had used the valley above as a convenient placement anchor for part of the ice and snow from Arachna. All very sensible...and not well enough modeled. Some of the volatiles had slipped between the two mountains. The light reflecting back and forth between One and Two had found that ice and air. Now the boil-off was pushing Diamonds One and Two apart. What had been hundreds of meters of shielding was now a jagged break, a million mirrors. The light shining through was a rainbow from hell.
"One hundred forty-five kilowatts per square meter."
"That's the top of the spike," someone said. OnOff was shining more than a hundred times as bright as standard solar. It was following the track of its previous lightings, though this was brighter than most. OnOff would stay this bright for another ten thousand seconds, then drop back steeply to just over two solars, where it would stay for some years.
There was no triumphant shouting. The last few hundred seconds, the crowd in the temp had been almost silent. At first, Qiwi had been totally involved with her own anger at being kicked indoors. But she had quieted as one and then another of the silver canopy's ties had broken, and the ice had been touched by direct sunlight. "I told Jimmy that wouldn't hold." But she didn't sound angry anymore. The light show was beautiful, but the damage was far more than they had planned. Outgassing streamers were visible on all sides—and there was no way their pitiful electric jets could counter that. It would be Msecs before they got the rockpile gentled down again.
