"Yes. We're losing signal.... Group Captain, if none of this works, if you can't fight for us.... Your people are all that's left of Sjandra Kei. It's been good to see you and the Dirokimes.... after so long to see familiar faces,
复件 (4) 复件 air max1, people I really understand. I --" as she spoke, her image square-blurred into low-frequency components. "Huui!" said Glimfrelle. "Bandwidth just dropped through the floor." There was nothing sophisticated about their link to the Out of Band. Given communications problems, the ship's processors just switched to low-rate coding. "Hello, Out of Band. We've got problems on this channel now. Suggest we sign off." The window turned gray, and printed Samnorsk flickered across it: Yes. It is more than a communicati Glimfrelle diddled his comm panel. "Zip. Zero,
复件 (50) air max1," he said. "No detectable signal." Tirolle looked up from his navigation tank. "This is a lot more than a communications problem. Our computers haven't been able to commit on an ultradrive jump in more than twenty seconds." They had been doing five jumps a second, and just over a light-year per hour. Now.... Glimfrelle leaned back from his panel. "Hei -- so welcome to the Slow Zone." The Slow Zone. Ravna Bergsndot looked across the deck of the Out of Band II. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had always had a vision of the Slowness as a stifling darkness lit at best by torches, the domain of cretins and mechanical calculators. In fact, things didn't look much different from before. The ceilings and walls glowed just as before. The stars still shone through the windows (only now,
复件 (75) air max, it might be a very long time before any of them moved). It was on the OOB's other displays that the change was most obvious. The ultratrace tank blinked monotonously, a red legend displaying elapsed time since the last update. Navigation windows were filled with output from the diagnostics exercising the drive processors. An audible message in Triskweline was repeating over and over, "Warning. Transition to Slowness detected. Execute back jump at once! Warning. Transition to Slowness detected. Execute...." "Turn that off!" Ravna grabbed a saddle and strapped herself down. She was actually feeling dizzy, though that could only be (a very natural) panic. "Some bottom lugger this is. We run right into the Slow Zone, and all it can do is spout warnings after the fact!" Greenstalk drifted closer, "tiptoeing" off the ceiling with her tendrils. "Even bottom luggers can't avoid things like this, My Lady Ravna" Pham said something at the ship and most of the displays cleared. Blueshell: "Even a huge Zone storm doesn't normally extend more than a few light-years. We were two hundred light-years above the Zone boundary. What hit us must be a monster surge, the sort of thing you only read about in archives." Small consolation. "We knew something like this could happen,
复件 (26) air max," Pham said. "Things have been getting awfully rough the last few weeks." For a change, he didn't seem too upset. "Yes," she said. "We expected a slowing maybe, but not The Slowness." We are trapped. "Where's the nearest habitable system? Ten light-years? Fifty?" The vision of darkness had a new reality, and the starscape beyond the ship's walls was no longer a friendly,
monster beats, steadying thing. Surrounded by unending nothingness,
复件 (96) air max1, moving at some vanishing fraction of the speed of light ... entombed. All the courage of Kjet Svensndot and his fleet, for nothing. Jefri Olsndot, forever unrescued. Pham's hand touched her shoulder, the first touch in ... days? "We can still make it to the Tines' world. This is a bottom lugger, remember? We are not trapped.