He sailed the display flat into Ravna's hands, and continued in a lecturing tone. "Even in a sea storm, the water's surface is never as roiled as in a big interface disturbance. The most recent News reports showed it as a fractal surface with dimension close to three… Like foam and spray." Even he could not avoid the storm analogy. The starscapes hung serene beyond crystal walls, and the loudest sound was a faint breeze from the ship's ventilators. Yet they had been swallowed in a maelstrom. Blueshell waved a frond at the display flat. "We could be back in the Beyond in a few hours."
"What?"
"See. The plane of the display is determined by the positions of the supposed Sjandra Kei command vessel, the outflying craft that we contacted directly, and ourselves." The three formed a narrow triangle, the Limmende and Svensndot vertices close together. "I've marked the times that contact was lost with the others. Notice: the link to Commercial Security HQ went down 150 seconds before we were hit. From the incoming signal and its requests for protocol changes, I believe that both we and the outflyer were enveloped and at about the same time."
Pham nodded. "Yeah. The most distant sites losing contact last. That must mean the surge moved in from the side."
"Exactly!" From his perch on the ceiling, Blueshell reached to tap the display. "The three ships were like probes in the standard Zone mapping technique. Replaying the trace displays will no doubt confirm the conclusion."
Ravna looked at the plot. The long point of the triangle — tipped by the OOB — pointed almost directly toward the heart of the galaxy. "It must have been a huge, clifflike thing perpendicular to the rest of the surface."
"A monster wave sweeping sideways!" said Greenstalk. "And that's also why it won't last long."
"Yes. It's the radial changes that are most often long term. This thing must have a trailing edge. We should pass through it in a few hours — and back into the Beyond."
So there was still a race to be won or lost.
The first hours were strange. "A few hours," had been Blueshell's estimate of when they would be back in the Beyond. They hung around the bridge, alternately watching the clock and stewing about the strange conversations just completed. Pham was building himself back to trigger tension. Any time now, they would be back in the Beyond. What to do then? If only a few ships were perverted, perhaps Svensndot could still coordinate an attack. Would that do any good? Pham played the ultratrace recordings over and over, studying every detectable ship in all the fleets. "But when we get out, when we get out… I'll know what to do. Not why I must do it, but what." And he couldn't explain more.
Any time now… There was scarcely any reason to do much about resetting equipment that would need another initialization right away.
But after eight hours: "It really could be longer, even a day." They had been scrounging around in the historical literature. "Maybe we should do a little housekeeping." The Out of Band II had been designed for both the Beyond and the Slowness, but that second environment was regarded as an unlikely, emergency one. There were special-purpose processors for the Slow Zone, but they hadn't come up automatically. With Blueshell's advice, Pham took the high-performance automation off-line; that wasn't too difficult, except for a couple of voice-actuated independents that were no longer bright enough to understand the quitting commands.
Using the new automation gave Ravna a chill that, in a subtle way, was almost as frightening as the original loss of the ultradrive. Her image of the Slowness as darkness and torchlight — that was just nightmare fantasy. On the other hand, the Slowness as the domain of cretins and mechanical calculators, there was something to that. The OOB's performance had degraded steadily during their voyage to the Bottom, but now… Gone were the voice-driven graphics generators; they were just a bit too complex to be supported by the new OOB, at least in full interpretive mode. Gone were the intelligent context analyzers that made the ship's library almost as accessible as one's own memories. Eventually, Ravna even turned off the art and music units; without mood and context response, they seemed so wooden
… constant reminders that there were no brains behind them. Even the simplest things were corrupted. Take voice and gesture controls: They no longer responded consistently to sarcasm and casual slang. It took a certain discipline to use them effectively. (Pham actually seemed to like this. It reminded him of the Qeng Ho.)
