Huh? This Pilgrim had the jargon, but probably not much else. Pham must have been talking to him. She made a shushing gesture. "Yes, yes. I understand." She stared into the light. The changing shape, so hard to look at, was something like the graphics you can generate on most displays, the silly cross-sections of high-dimensional froths. It glowed in purest monochrome, but shifted through the colors. Much of the light must be coherent: interference speckles crawled on every solid surface. In places the interference banded up, stripes of dark and light that slid across the hull as the color changed.
She walked slowly closer, staring at Pham and… the Countermeasure. For what else could it be? The scum in the walls, now grown out to meet godshatter. This was not simply data, a message to be relayed. This was a Transcendent machine. Ravna had read of such things: devices made in the Transcend, but for use at the Bottom of the Beyond. There would be nothing sentient about it, nothing that violated the constraints of the Lower Zones — yet it would make the best possible use of nature here, to do whatever its builder had desired: Its builder? The Blight? An enemy of the Blight?
She stepped closer. The thing was deep in Pham's chest, but there was no blood, no torn flesh. She might have thought it all trick holography except that she could see him shudder at its writhing. The fractal arms were feathered by long teeth, twisting at him. She gasped and almost called his name. But Pham wasn't resisting. He seemed deeper into godshatter than ever before, and more at peace. The hope and fear came suddenly out of hiding: hope that maybe, even now, godshatter could do something about the Blight; and fear, that Pham would die in the process.
The artifact's twisting evolution slowed. The light hung at the pale edge of blue. Pham's eyes opened. His head turned toward her. "The Riders' Myth is real, Ravna." His voice was distant. She heard the whisper of a laugh. "The Riders should know, I guess. They learned the last time. There are Things that don't like the Blight. Things my Old One only guessed at…"
Powers beyond the Powers? Ravna sank to the floor. The display on her wrist glowed up at here. Less than forty-five hours left.
Pham saw her downward glance, "I know. Nothing has slowed the fleet. It's a pitiful thing so far down here… but more than powerful enough to destroy this world, this solar system. And that's what the Blight wants now. The Blight knows I can destroy it… just as it was destroyed before."
Ravna was vaguely aware that Pilgrim had crawled in close on all sides. Every face was fixed on the blue froth and the human enmeshed within. "How, Pham?" Ravna whispered.
Silence. Then, "All the zone turbulence… that was Countermeasure trying to act, but without coordination. Now I'm guiding it. I've begun… the reverse surge. It's drawing on local energy sources. Can't you feel it?"
Reverse surge? What was Pham talking about? She glanced again at her wrist — and gasped. Enemy speed had jumped to twenty light-years per hour, as fast as might be expected in the Middle Beyond. What had been almost two days of grace was barely two hours. And now the display said twenty-five light-years per hour. Thirty.
Someone was pounding on the hatch.
Scrupilo was delinquent. He should be supervising the move up the hillside. He knew that, and really felt quite guilty — but he persevered in his dereliction. Like an addict chewing krima leaves, some things are too delicious to give up.
Scrupilo dawdled behind, carrying Dataset carefully between him so that its floppy pink ears would not drag on the ground. In fact, guarding Dataset was certainly more important than hassling his troopers. In any case, he was close enough to give advice. And his lieutenants were more clever than he at everyday work.
During the last few hours, the coastal winds had taken the smoke clouds inland, and the air was clean and salty. On this part of the hill, not everything was burned. There were even some flowers and fluffy seed pods. Bob-tailed birds sailed up the rising air from the sea valley, their cries a happy music, as if promising that the world would soon be as before.
