Skrits' face twisted, a cartoonish smile. "You can't have it both ways. You want us to risk everything on your assurance of competence. We are willing to die for this, but not to be pawns in a game of monsters." The last words had a strange tone, the angry delivery shading away. There had been no motion in the picture from Fleet Central except for ill-synched lip movement. Glimfrelle caught Svensndot's eye and pointed at the failure lights on his comm panel.
Skrits' voice continued, "And Group Captain Svensndot: It's imperative that all further communications with this unknown vessel be channeled — " the image froze, and there were no more words.
Ravna: "What happened?"
Glimfrelle made a twitter-snort. "We're losing the link with Fleet Central. Our effective bandwidth is down to twenty bits per second, and dropping. Skrits' last transmission was scarcely a hundred bits," padded out to apparent legibility by the Olvira's software.
Kjet waved angrily at the screen. "Cut the damn thing off." At least he wouldn't have to put up with the evocation any further. And he didn't want to hear what he guessed was Jan Skrits' last order.
Tirolle said, "Hei, why not leave it on? We might not notice much difference." Glimfrelle's snickered at his brother's wit, but his longfingers danced across the comm panel, and the display became a window on the stars. The two Dirokimes had a thing about bureaucrats.
Svensndot ignored them and looked at the remaining comm window. The channel to Pham and Ravna was wideband video with scarcely any interpretation; there would be no perverse subtleties if it went down. "Sorry about that. The last few days, we've had a lot of problems with comm. Apparently, this Zone storm is the worst in centuries." In fact, it was getting still worse: the starboard ultratrace displays were showing random garbage.
"You've lost contact with your command?" asked Ravna.
"For the moment…" He glanced at Pham. The redhead's eyes were still a bit glassy. "Look… I'm even more sorry about how things have turned out, but Limmende and Skrits are bright people. You can see their point of view."
"Strange," interrupted Pham. "The pictures were strange," his tone was drifty.
"You mean our relay from Fleet Central?" Svensndot explained about the narrow bandwidth and the crummy performance of his ship's processors down here at the Bottom.
"And so their picture of us must have been equally bad… I wonder what they thought I was?"
"Unh…" Good question. Consider Pham Nuwen: bristly red hair, smoke-gray skin, singsong voice. If cues such as those were sent, like as not the display at Fleet Central would show something quite different from the human Kjet saw. "… wait a minute. That's not how evocations work. I'm sure they got a pretty clear view of you. See, a few high-resolution pics would get sent at the beginning of the session. Then those would be used as the base for the animation."
Pham stared back lumpishly, almost as though he didn't buy it and was daring Kjet to think things through. Well damn it, the explanation was correct; there was no doubt that Limmende and Skrits had seen the redhead as a human. Yet there was something here that bothered Kjet… Limmende and Skrits had both looked out of date.
"Glimfrelle! Check the raw stream we got from Central. Did they send us any sync pictures?"
It took Glimfrelle only seconds. He whistled a sharp tone of surprise. "No, Boss. And since it was all properly encrypted, our end just made do with old ad animation." He said something to Tirolle, and the two twittered rapidly. "Nothing seems to work down here. Maybe this is just another bug." But Glimfrelle didn't sound very confident of the assertion.
Svensndot turned back to the picture from the Out of Band. "Look. The channel to Fleet Central was fully encrypted, using one— time schemes I trust more than what we're talking with now. I can't believe it was a masquerade." But nausea was creeping up Kjet's guts. This was like the first minutes of the Battle for Sjandra Kei, when he guessed how thoroughly they had been outmaneuvered, when he realized that everyone he was trying to protect would be murdered. "Hei, we'll contact other vessels. We'll verify Central's location — "
Pham Nuwen raised an eyebrow. "Maybe it wasn't a masquerade." Before he could say more, one of the Riders — the one with the greater skrode — was shouting at them. It rolled across the room's apparent ceiling, pushing the humans aside to get close to the camera. "I have a question!" The voder speech was burred, nearly unintelligible. The creature's tendrils rattled dryly against each other, as distressed as Kjet Svensndot had ever heard. "My question: Are there Skroderiders aboard your fleet's command vessel?"
"Why do you — "
"Answer the question!"
"How should I know?" Kjet tried to think. "Tirolle. You have friends on Skrits' staff. Are there any Riders aboard?"
Tirolle stuttered a few bars, "A'a'a'a. Yes. Emergency hires — rescues actually — right after the battle."
