You alone will have the prize. We fear what you might turn out to be." For a long moment, Pham Nuwen was silent. The wildness slowly left his face. "You have a point, Owner Limmende. And a dilemma. Is there any way out?" "Skrits and I have been discussing it. No matter what we do, both we and you must take big chances.... It's only the alternatives that are more terrible. We are willing to accept your guidance in battle, if you will first maneuver your ship back toward us and allow us to board." "Give up the lead in this chase, you mean?" Limmende nodded. Pham's mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. Ravna said,
mbt tunisha denim, "Then if you don't succeed, everything is lost. At least now, we have a sixty-hour lead. That might be enough to get word out about this artifact, even if the Blighter fleet survives." 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,
Bose Headphones,
Sennheiser,
Slendertone, 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 ?lvira'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,
habari chocolate, singsong voice. If cues such as those were sent,
复件 (28) air max, 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.
Sennheiser
Linear Mode
