During the next five hours, Olvira's crew watched the Alliance fleet race helter-skelter for the higher spaces. It could not even be called a retreat, more a panicked dissolution. Great opportunists, they had not hesitated to kill by treachery, and to give chase when they thought there might be treasure at the end. Now that they were confronted with the possibility of being trapped in the Slowness, of dying between the stars, they raced for their separate safety. Their bulletins to the newsgroups were full of bravado, but their maneuver couldn't be disguised. Former neutrals pointed to the discrepancy; more and more it was accepted that the Alliance was built around the Aprahanti Hegemony and perhaps had other motives than altruistic opposition to the Blight. There was nervous speculation about who might next receive Alliance attention.
Major transceivers still targeted the fleets. They might as well have been on a network trunk. The news traffic was a vast waterfall, totally beyond Olvira's present ability to receive. Nevertheless, Svensndot kept an eye on it. Somewhere there might be some clue, some insight… The majority of War Trackers and Threats seemed to have little interest in the Alliance or the death of Sjandra Kei, per se. Most were terrified of the Blight that was still spreading through the Top of the Beyond. None of the Highest had successfully resisted, and there were rumors that two more interfering Powers had been destroyed. There were some (secret mouths of the Blight?) who welcomed the new stability at the Top, even one based on permanent parasitization.
In fact, the chase down here at the Bottom, the flight of the Out of Band and its pursuers, seemed the only place where the Blight was not completely triumphant. No wonder they were the subject of 10,000 messages an hour.
The geometry of emergence was enormously favorable to Olvira. They had been on the outskirts of the action, but now they had hours headstart on the main fleets. Glimfrelle and Tirolle were busier than they had ever been in their lives, monitoring the fleets' emergence and establishing Olvira's identity with the other vessels of Commercial Security. Until Scrits and Limmende emerged from the Slowness, Kjet Svensndot was the ranking officer of the organization. Furthermore, he was personally known to most of the commanders. Kjet had never been the admiral type; his Group Captaincy had been a reward for piloting skills, in a Sjandra Kei at peace. He had always been content to defer to his employers. But now…
The Group Captain used his ranking status. The Alliance vessels were not pursued. ("Wait till we can all act together," ordered Svensndot.) Possible game plans bounced back and forth across the emerging fleet, including schemes that assumed HQ was destroyed. With certain commanders, Kjet hinted that this last might be the case, that Limmende's flag ship was in enemy hands, and that the Alliance was somehow just a side effect of that true enemy. Very soon, Kjet would be committed to the "treason" he planned.
The Limmende flag ships and the core of the Blighter fleet came out of the Slowness almost simultaneously. Comm alarms went off across Olvira's deck as priority mail arrived and passed through the ship's crypto. "Source: Limmende at HQ. Star Breaker Priority," said the ship's voice.
Glimfrelle put the message on the main window, and Svensndot felt a chill certainty spread up his neck.
… All units are to pursue fleeing vessels. These are the enemy, the killers of our people. WARNING: Masquerades suspected. Destroy any vessels countermanding these orders. Order of Battle and validation codes follow…
Order of Battle was simple, even by Commercial Security standards. Limmende wanted them to split up and be gone, staying only long enough to destroy "masqueraders". Kjet said to Glimfrelle, "How about the validation codes?"
The Dirokime seemed his usual self again: "They're clean. We wouldn't be receiving the message at all unless the sender had today's one-time pad… We're beginning to receive queries from the others, Boss. Audio and video channels. They want to know what to do."
If he hadn't prepared the ground during the last few hours, Kjet's mutiny wouldn't have had a chance. If Commercial Security had been a real military organization, the Limmende order might have been obeyed without question. As it was, the other commanders pondered the questions that Svensndot had raised: At these ranges, video communication was easy and the fleet had one-time ciphers large enough to support enormous amounts of it. Yet "Limmende" had chosen printed mail for her priority message. It made perfect military sense given that the encryption was correct, but it was also what Svensndot had predicted: The supposed HQ was not quite willing to show its face down here where perfect visual masquerades were not possible. Their commands would be by mail, or evocations that a sharp observer might suspect.
