The order of events even suggests a particular scenario, one familiar from network security. Once upon a time (very long ago), there was another instance of the Blight. A successful defense was mounted, and all known copies of the Blight's recipe were destroyed. Of course, on a wide net, one can never be sure that all copies of a badness are gone. No doubt, the defense was distributed in enormous numbers. But even if a harboring archive were reached by such a distribution, there might be no effect if the Blight were not currently active there.
The luckless humans of Straumli Realm chanced on such an archive, no doubt a ruin long off the Net. They instantiated the Blight and incidentally — perhaps a little later — the defense program. Somehow that Blight's enemy escaped destruction. And the Blight has been searching for it ever since — in all the wrong places. In its weakness, the new instance of the defense retreated to depths no Power would think of penetrating, whence it could never return without outside help. Speculation on top of speculation: we can't guess the nature of this defense, except that its retreat is a discouraging sign. And now even that sacrifice has gone for naught, since the Blight has seen through the deception.
The Blight's fleet is clearly an ad hoc thing, hastily thrown together from forces that happened to be closest to the discovery. Without such haste, the quarry might have been lost to it. Thus the chase equipment is probably ill-suited to the depths, and its performance will degrade as the descent progresses. However, we estimate that it will remain stronger than any force that can reach the scene in the near future.
We may learn more after the Blight reaches the Out of Band II's destination. If it destroys that destination immediately, we'll know that something truly dangerous to the Blight existed there (and may exist elsewhere, at least in recipe form). If it does not, then perhaps the Blight was looking for something that will make it even more dangerous than before.
Ravna sat back, stared at the display for some time. Sandor Arbitration Intelligence was one of the sharpest posters in this newsgroup… But now even their predictions were just different flavors of doom. And all so damn cool they were, so analytical. She knew that Sandor was polyspecific, with branch offices scattered through the High Beyond. But they were no Power. If the Perversion could knock over Relay and kill Old One, then all of Sandor's resources wouldn't help it if the enemy decided to gobble them up. Their analysis had the tone of the pilot of a crashing ship, intent on understanding the danger, not taking time out for terror.
Oh Pham, how I wish I could talk to you like before! She curled gently in on herself, the way you can in zero gee. The sobs came softly, but without hope. They had not exchanged a hundred words in the last five days. They lived as if with guns at each others' heads. And that was the literal truth — she had made it so. When she and he and the Skroderiders had been together, at least the danger had been a shared burden. Now they were split apart and their enemies were slowly gaining on them. What good could Pham's godshatter be against a thousand enemy ships and the Blight behind them?
She floated for a timeless while, the sobs fading into despairing silence. And again she wondered if what she'd done could possibly be right. She had threatened Pham's life to protect Blueshell and Greenstalk and their kind. In doing so, she had kept secret what might be the greatest treachery in the history of the Known Net. Can one person make such a decision? Pham had asked her that, and she had answered yes but…
The question toyed with her every day. And every day she tried to see some way out. She wiped her face silently. She didn't doubt what Pham had discovered.
There were some smug posters on the Net who argued that something as vast as the Blight was simply a tragic disaster, and not an evil. Evil, they argued, could only have meaning on smaller scales, in the hurt that one sophont does to another. Before RIP, the argument had seemed a frivolous playing with words. Now she saw that it was meaningful — and dead wrong. The Blight had created the Riders, a marvelous and peaceful race. Their presence on a billion worlds had been a good. And behind it all was the potential for converting the sovereign minds of friends into monsters. When she thought of Blueshell and Greenstalk, and the fear welled up and she knew the poison that was there — even though they were good people — then she knew she'd glimpsed evil on the Transcendent scale.
She had gotten Blueshell and Greenstalk into this mission; they had not asked for it. They were friends and allies, and she would not harm them because of what they could become.
