To hide inaccessibly deep, and wait to strike. And I think the plan might work, Rav, at least if I -- if Old One's godshatter -- can get down there and help it. Look at the News. The Blight is turning the top of the Beyond upside down -- hunting for something. Hitting Relay was the least of it, a small by-product of its murdering Old One. But it's looking in all the wrong places. We'll have our chance at Countermeasure." She thought of Jefri's messages. "The rot on the walls of Jefri's ship. You think that's what it is?" Pham's eyes went vague. "Yes. It seems completely passive, but he says it was there from the beginning, that his parents kept him away from it. He seems a little disgusted by it.... That's good, probably keeps his Tinish friends away from it." A thousand questions flitted up. Surely they must in Pham's mind too. And they could know the answer to none of them now. Yet someday they would stand before that unknown and Old One's dead hand would act ... through Pham. Ravna shivered, and didn't say anything more for a time. Month by month, the gunpowder project stayed right on the schedule of the library's development program. The Tines had been able to make the stuff easily; there had been very little backtracking through the development tree. Alloy testing had been the critical event that slowed things,
复件 (43) air max, but they were over the hump there too. The packs of "Hidden Island" had built the first three prototypes: breech-loading cannon that were small enough to be carried by a single pack. Jefri guessed they could begin mass production in another ten days. The radio project was the weird one. In one sense it was behind schedule; in another, it had become something more than Ravna had ever imagined. After a long period of normal progress, Jefri had come back with a counterplan. It consisted of a complete reworking of the tables for the acoustic interface. "I thought these jokers were first-time medievals," Pham Nuwen said when he saw Jefri's message. "That's right. And in principle,
复件 (65) air max, they just reasoned out consequences to what we sent them. The want to support pack-thought across the radio." "Hunh. Yes. We described how the tables specified the transducer grid -- all in nontechnical Samnorsk. That included showing how small table changes would make the grid different. But look, our design would give them a three kilohertz band -- a nice, voice-grade connection. You're telling me that implementing this new table would give'em two hundred kilohertz." "Yes. That's what my dataset says." He grinned his cocky smile. "Ha,
复件 (49) air max! And that's my point. Sure, in principle we gave them enough information to do the mod. It looks to me like making this expanded spec table is equivalent to solving a, hmm,
mbt panda sale," he counted rows and columns, "a five-hundred-node numerical PDE. And little Jefri claims that all his datasets are destroyed, and that his ship computer is not generally usable." Ravna leaned back from the display. "Sorry. I see what you mean." You get so used to everyday tools, sometimes you forget what it must be like without them. "You ... you think this might be, uh,
Dre Beats?(Black) Pro? High Performance Professional Headphones From Monster?, Countermeasure's doing?" Pham Nuwen hesitated, as if he hadn't even considered the possibility. Then,
复件 (61) air max, "No ... no, it's not that. I think this 'Mister Steel' is playing games with our heads. All we have is a byte stream from 'Jefri'. What do we really know about what's going on?"