War in Heaven - David Zindell

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and he and his ship would surely have been destroyed. As it was, his peril was still great. The Snowy Owl gleamed in the radiance of the Star of Neverness like a dove with a broken wing. Its opening of a window from the manifold had surely created tells that any lightship in this neighbourhood of stars would detect. And surely, with war so near, the Lord Pilot, Salmalin the Prudent, would have deployed many ships to protect Neverness from surprise attack. Danlo waited for the arrival of these ships. It was almost all that he could do. But first he aimed a radio signal at the city of Neverness informing the Lords of the Order of the Snowy Owl’s mission. He did not think that the Old Order’s Ringists had sunk so far into barbarism that they would simply murder two ambassadors out of hand. The danger was that one of the arriving lightships might act without waiting for instructions from Neverness. Some reckless young pilot might perceive the Snowy Owl as only the vanguard of an invasion fleet and fall immediately against him.

      And so Danlo waited in the pit of the Snowy Owl, counting heartbeats as he searched for the tells of other lightships. He began counting the seven hundred and fourteen seconds that his radio signal would take to cross seventy million miles of realspace and be returned as a command to all the Order’s lightships that Danlo and Demothi Bede were not to be harmed. He waited exactly eighty-eight seconds, and then a lightship fell out of the thickspace near him, followed only a few seconds later by four more of these deathly diamond needles. He recognized these ships. There was the Infinite Dactyl, piloted by Dario of Urradeth, and the Golden Lotus and the Bell of Time. And Nicabar Blackstone’s Ark of the Angels, with its lovely, curving wings. The fifth ship he knew well because he had been at Resa with its pilot, Ciro Dalibar, as chance would fall. He had even helped Ciro design the heuristics for this uniquely pointed ship, which Ciro had named the Diamond Arrow.

      Ahira, Ahira, Danlo prayed, and he beamed a radio signal to each of these ships. And now he waited for the five pilots either to accept his parlay or to destroy him. That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.

      Much later he would learn that these five pilots, floating in the dazzling void near the Star of Neverness, had held a conclave among themselves. Ciro Dalibar, with his cruel, thin lips and jealousy of Danlo, had argued that as a pilot of the Order of the Vild – and thus of the Fellowship – he should be slain as a just act of war. But Cham Estarei of the Blue Lotus had spoken against such bloodthirstiness. As had Nicabar Blackstone. Nicabar, a master pilot and eldest of the five, told the others that it would do no harm to wait to hear from the lords on Neverness. If they wished to accept Danlo’s and Demothi’s embassy, well and good. If they did not, then the Snowy Owl could be sent back to Sheydveg or wherever the Order of the Vild’s fleet might be. Or they could send Danlo into the Star of Neverness. The five ships, acting together, could open a window into this blazing star whenever they wished and send Danlo’s ship into the fires of hell.

      ‘We’ll wait for the wishes of the lords,’ Nicabar Blackstone told Danlo and Demothi. Nicabar’s imago, with its glowing green eyes and deathly white countenance, had appeared in the pit of the Snowy Owl. ‘We must ask that you attempt no motion in realspace nor open any windows into the manifold. If you do, we’ll fall against you and destroy you.’

      And so, with the noses of five ships pointing at him across only a few miles of space, Danlo waited. It took more than two thousand seconds for the Lords of Neverness’s message to arrive. Neither Danlo nor Demothi Bede were to be harmed. Danlo wi Soli Ringess was instructed to make a mapping to a certain point-exit above Neverness. The five lightships were to ensure that the Snowy Owl fell out into near-space exactly where it should. Then they were to escort the ambassadors down through the atmosphere to the Hollow Fields, where a sled would carry them to an emergency session of the Lords’ College.

      ‘I’d advise caution,’ the Ede hologram said in the privacy of the Snowy Owl. ‘The Ringists might wish to trap you.’

      ‘Yes,’ Danlo said. ‘Of course they will – we will be as prisoners the moment we touch the ice of Neverness.’

      Demothi Bede drew his hand across his old, wrinkled face and said, ‘Still, it will be good to see the city again. And my old friends. I never thought I would.’

      ‘To see old friends,’ Danlo repeated softly. His eyes were grave yet full of light. He felt a terrible burning behind his eyes, and terrible images began streaming into his mind as if he were looking far across space and time. ‘To see the city again – and what lies above.’

      A few moments later, at Nicabar Blackstone’s command, Danlo made a mapping to the point-exit above Neverness. The Snowy Owl fell out exactly as arranged, and Danlo gasped at the changes that only a few years had wrought in the once-empty reaches of space encircling Icefall. To begin with, the sky above his world’s sky was swarming with ships. There were deep-ships and long-ships, fire-ships and gold ships and many, many black ships armed for war. He counted more than forty-eight thousand ships spread out below him in a vast moving carpet of steel and diamond and black nall. He counted two hundred and ten lightships, too; a much larger fleet than that of the Fellowship of Free Worlds, even though all the Ringist lightships were not present. Some of these two hundred and thirty-one missing ships would be off on raiding missions such as the one that had surprised the Sonderval’s ships near Ulladulla. Others would try to detect the movements of the Fellowship’s fleet when it finally fell away from Sheydveg on its unknown pathway towards Neverness. Surely Salmalin would have positioned more than a few lightships in a protective cordon around the Star of Neverness. And at least twenty of these lightships protected something else, something more precious to the Ringists than firestones or pearls or even the icy ground beneath their feet.

      This was Hanuman li Tosh’s Universal Computer, floating many miles above Neverness like a dazzling, black moon. In a way, it was a moon, for it was huge and made from the elements of Kasotat, Vierge and Varvara, three of the six moons that Danlo had beheld shining in the sky since the year of his birth. With his ship’s telescope he looked out at these nearby moons. The surface of each one swarmed with robots and disassemblers smaller than bacteria. These infinitesimal engines of destruction were tearing apart earth and rocks even as he watched, reducing layer after layer of the moons into their constituent elements. Their once-silvery surfaces were grey and pitted as a hibakusha’s face. Truly, as Bardo had said, Hanuman and the Ringists had ordered the mining of these moons, this shaida act that was a crime against the laws of the Civilized Worlds. At any moment, from any of the three moons, there might issue a flash of light as a deep-ship filled with silicon or carbon or gold would disappear into the manifold only to fall out an instant later at a point-exit above the Universal Computer. There, in vast floating factories, its cargo would be assembled into diamond chips and neurologics and opticals – the very substance and circuitry of the Universal Computer. More robots assembled these parts into an ungodly (or perhaps just the opposite) machine. One day, if nothing were done to halt this monument to one man’s hubris, it would grow to the size of a moon.

       Ahira, Ahira, ki los shaida, shaida neti shaida.

      ‘If you’re ready, Pilot, we’ll make our planetfall now.’ This was Nicabar Blackstone’s voice, spilling into the pit of the Snowy Owl like an overturned goblet of honey-wine. He was a master pilot whose sweet-rich voice almost belied his innate ruthlessness. ‘We’ll make a straight fall for the Fields. I’ll lead the way, and you must follow – and then Dario of Urradeth, Cham Estarei, Ciro Dalibar and the Visolela will follow you.’

      With that, the Ark of the Angels dipped its diamond nose towards the planet below them, followed in line by the Snowy Owl, the Infinite Dactyl, the Blue Lotus, the Diamond Arrow and the Bell of Time. The six ships slowly fell towards Icefall. And now, even as they passed through the ships of the fleet like needles through a thick carpet, Danlo had a moment to gaze upon the most profound of the changes that had come to his world. This was the Golden Ring. Ahead of him, and below, enveloping all of Icefall in a sphere of living gold, was this miracle of evolution that had taken root in the uppermost atmospheres of many worlds throughout the galaxy. Many believed the Ring to be the Entity’s handiwork, or rather the child of her vast stellar womb.

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