Behind her there was the sound of wheels crunching across sand. Blueshell and Greenstalk had rolled out of the water. Wetness glistened on the sides of their skrodes, transforming their cosmetic stripes into jagged rainbows. Ravna walked down to meet them. How do I tell them there's no help coming?
With someone like Pham Nuwen fronting for it, Old One had seemed so different from what she imagined in her classes back at Sjandra Kei. She'd almost thought she could make a difference just by talking. What a joke. She had caught a glimpse just now, behind the front: of a being who could play with souls the way a programmer plays with a clever graphic, a being so far beyond her that only its indifference could protect her. Be happy, little Ravna moth. You were only dazzled by the flame.
The next few weeks went surprisingly well. Despite the Pham Nuwen debacle, Blueshell and Greenstalk were still willing to fly the rescue. Vrinimi Org even kicked in some extra resources. Every day, Ravna took a tele-excursion out to the repair yards. The Out of Band II might not be getting any Transcendent enhancements, but when the refitting was complete, the ship would be something extraordinary: Now it floated in a golden haze of structors, billions of tiny robots regrowing sections of the hull into the characteristic form of a bottom lugger. Sometimes the ship seemed to Ravna like a fragile moth… and sometimes an abyssal fish. The rebuilt ship could survive across a range of environments: It had the spines of an ultradrive craft, but the hull was streamlined and wasp-waist — the classic form of a ramscoop ship. Bottom-luggers must troll dangerously near the Slow Zone. The zone surface was hard to detect from a distance, even harder to map; and there were short-term position changes. It was not impossible for a lugger to be trapped a light-year or two within the Slowness. It was then you'd thank goodness for the ramscoop and the coldsleep facilities. Of course, by the time you returned to civilization, you might be completely out of date, but at least you could get back.
Ravna floated her viewpoint through the drive spines that spread out from the hull. They were broader than on most ships that came to Relay. They weren't optimal for the Middle or High Beyond, but with appropriate (i.e., Low Beyond) computers, the ship would fly as fast as anything when it reached the Bottom.
Grondr let her spend half-time on the project, and after a few days Ravna realized this was not just a favor. She was the best person for this job. She knew humans, and she knew archive management. Jefri Olsndot needed reassurance every day. And the things Jefri was telling her were immediately important. Even if everything went according to plan — even if the Perversion stayed completely out of it — this rescue was going to be tricky. The kid and his ship seemed to be in the middle of a bloody war. Extracting them would mean making instantly correct decisions and acting on them. They would need an effective onboard database and strategy program. But not much could be expected to work at the Bottom, and memory capacity would be limited. It was up to Ravna to decide what library materials to move to the ship, to balance the ease of local availability against the greater resources that would be accessible over the ultrawave from Relay.
Grondr was available on the local net, and often in real time. He wanted this to work: "Don't worry, Ravna. We'll dedicate part of R00 to this mission. If their antenna swarm works properly, the Riders should have have a thirty Kbps link to Relay. You'll be their prime contact here, and you'll have access to our best strategists. If nothing… interferes, you should have no trouble managing this rescue."
Even four weeks ago, Ravna wouldn't have dared to ask for more. Now: "Sir, I have a better idea. Send me with the Skroderiders."
All of Grondr's mouth parts clapped together at once. She'd seen that much surprise in people like Egravan, but never in the staid Grondr. He was silent for a moment. "No. We need you here. You are our best sanity check when it comes to questions about humankind." The newsgroups interested in the Straumli Perversion carried more than one hundred thousand messages a day, about a tenth of that human-related. Thousands of messages were old ideas rehashed, or patent absurdities, or probable lies. Marketing's automation was fairly good at filtering out the redundancy and some of the absurdity, but when it came to questions on human nature Ravna was without equal. About half her time was spent guiding that analysis and handling queries about humankind at the archives. All that would be next to impossible if she left with the Skroderiders.
