by Vernor Vinge
Nau looked out over North Paw’s afternoon brightness, but his huds were filled with a view of Trinli and Vinh, sitting in the flesh just a couple meters from him. Trinli had a faintly amused expression, but his fingers never stopped their flickering work on his assignment, monitoring the nuclear munitions in Kindred territory. Vinh? Vinh looked nervous; the diagnostic tags that hovered by his face showed that he knew something was up but hadn’t quite figured out what it was. It was time to move him out of the way, a few brief errands. When he came back events would be in motion…and Trinli would back up the Podmaster’s story.
Anne Reynolt’s voice came tiny in Nau’s ear. “Sir, we have an emergency.”
“Yes, go ahead.” Nau spoke easily, not turning away from the lake. Inside, though, something froze in his guts. This was the closest he had ever heard Anne come to panicky sharpness.
“Our pet subversive has stepped up the pace. There’s much less masking. He’s grabbing everything that’s loose. A few thousand more seconds and he can shut us zipheads down…It’s Trinli, sir, ninety percent probability.”
But Trinli is sitting right here, before my very eyes! And I need him to back up the post-attack lies. “I don’t know, Anne,” he said aloud. Maybe Anne was freaking. It was possible, though he had been tracking her meds and MRI tuning more closely than ever before.
Anne shrugged, didn’t reply. It was the typical dismissive gesture of a ziphead. She had done her best, and he was welcome to ignore her advice and go to hell.
This was not a distraction he needed when forty years’ work was coming to a cusp. Which was exactly why an enemy might pick this moment finally to act.
Kal Omo was standing right behind Nau, and was on the private link with Reynolt. Of the other three guards, only Rei Ciret was actually in the room. Nau sighed. “Okay, Anne.” He gave Omo an invisible signal to get the rest of his team into the room. We’ll put these two on ice, deal with them later.
Nau had given his targets no warning, yet—from the corner of his vision, he saw Trinli’s hand flicker in a throwing gesture. Kal Omo gave a gargling scream.
Nau pulled himself under the table. Something slammed into the thick wood above him. There was a chatter of wire-gun fire, another scream.
“He’s getting away!”
Nau slid across the floor and bounced up toward the ceiling on the far side of the table. Rei Ciret was in midair, flailing at Ezr Vinh. “Sorry, sir! This one jumped me.” He pushed the bleeding body away; Vinh had bought Trinli the instant he needed to escape. “Marli and Tung will get him!”
Indeed they were trying. The two sprayed wire-fire up the hillside, toward the forest. But Trinli was way ahead of them, flying from tree to tree. Then he was gone, and Tung and Marli were halfway to the forest in hot pursuit.
“Wait!” Nau’s voice roared over the lodge speakers. A lifetime of obedience stopped their reckless pursuit. They came carefully back down the hillside, scanning for threats all the way. Shock and rage were strong in their faces.
Nau continued in a lower voice. “Get inside. Guard the lodge.” It was the sort of basic direction a podsergeant would give, but Kal Omo was…Nau floated back to the meeting table, the etiquette of consensual gravity set aside for the moment. Something sharp and shiny was wedged in the edge of the table, just at the point where he had dived for cover. A similar blade had slashed across Omo’s throat; its butt end protruded from the podsergeant’s windpipe. Omo had stopped twitching. Blood hung all around him, drifting only slowly toward the floor. The podsergeant’s wire gun was half out of its holster.
Omo was a useful man. Do I have time to put him on ice? Nau thought a second more on tactics and timing…and Kal Omo lost.
The guards hovered around the lodge’s windows, but their eyes kept straying back to their podsergeant. Nau’s mind raced down chains of consequences. “Ciret, get Vinh tied down. Marli, find Ali Lin.”
Vinh moaned weakly as they shoved him onto a chair. Nau came over the table to look more closely at the man. It looked like he’d taken a wire-gun nick across the shoulder. It was bloody, but it wasn’t spouting. Vinh would live…long enough.
“Pus, that Trinli was fast,” Tung said, blabbering with released tension. “All these years he was just a loud old fart and then—bam—he scragged the podsergeant. Scragged him and then got clean away.”
“Wouldn’t have been clean if this one hadn’t gotten in the way.” Ciret prodded Vinh’s head with the muzzle of his wire-gun. “They were both fast.”
Too fast. Nau slipped the huds off his eyes, and stared at them for a moment. Qeng Ho huds, driven by data off the localizer net. He crumpled the huds into a wad, and dug out the fiberphone that Reynolt had insisted upon as backup. “Anne, can you hear me? Did you see what happened?”
“Yes. Trinli was in motion the moment you signaled Kal Omo.”
“He knew. He could hear your side of the conversation.” Pestilence! How could Anne detect the subversion and not notice that Trinli had broken into their comm?
“…Yes. I only guessed a part of what he was up to.” So the localizers were Trinli’s customized weapon. A trap built across millennia. Who am I fighting?
“Anne. I want you to cut the wireless power to all the localizers.” But localizers were the backbone of Plague knew how many critical systems. Localizers maintained the stability of the lake itself. “Inside North Paw, leave the stabilizers on. Have your zipheads manage them directly, over the fiber.”
“Done. Things will be rough, but we can manage. What about the ground ops?”
“Get in touch with Ritser. Things are too complicated to be subtle. We have to advance the groundside time line.”
He could hear Anne punching out instructions to her people. But gone was his view of the orders and the threads of ziphead processing assigned to each project. This was like fighting blind. They could lose while they were staggering around in shock.
A hundred seconds later, Anne was back to him. “Ritser understands. My people are helping him set up a simple attack run. We can fine-tune the results later.” She spoke with her old, calm impatience. Anne Reynolt had fought battles much harder than this, won a hundred times against overwhelming odds. If only all enemies could be so used.
“Very good. Have you spotted Trinli? I’ll bet he’s in the tunnels.” If he isn’t circling back for a second ambush.
“Yes, I think so. We’re hearing movement off the old geophones.” Emergent equipment.
“Good. Meantime, patch together some synthetic voice to keep the people at Benny’s happy.”
“Done,” came her immediate reply. Already done.
Nau turned back to his guards and Ezr Vinh. A very small breathing space had been created. Long enough to get new orders to Ritser. Long enough to find out a little about what he was really up against.
Vinh had regained consciousness. There was a glaze of pain in his eyes—and a glitter of hatred. Nau smiled back at him. He gestured for Ciret to twist Vinh’s maimed shoulder. “I need a few answers, Ezr.”
The Peddler screamed.
Pham boosted himself faster and faster up the diamond corridor, guided by green images that smeared and wobbled…and dimmed toward total darkness. He coasted blind for a few seconds, still not slowing. He patted at his temples, trying to reset the localizers there. They were in place, and he knew there were thousands of localizers drifting through the length of the tunnel. Anne must have cut off the wireless power pulses, at least in this tunnel.
The woman is unbelievable! For years, Pham had avoided direct manipulation of the ziphead system. Yet somehow Anne had still noticed. The mindscrub had slowed her progress for a while, but this last year she had tightened the noose and tightened it, until…We were so close to disabling the power cutoff, and now we’ve lost everything. Almost everything. Ezr had died to give him one more chance.
The tunnel turned somewhere just ahead. He reached into the dark, touching the walls lightly, then harder, breaking his dive and tur
ning himself feet first. The maneuver was a fraction of a second late. Feet, knees, hands, smashed into the unseen surface, about like a bad fall groundside—except that he bounced back, spinning into another wall.
He caught himself and finger-walked back to the turn. Four separate corridors branched from here. He felt for the openings, and started down the second one, but very quietly this time. Anne hadn’t known for sure until a few seconds ago. The cache he had set in this tunnel should still be in place.
After a few meters, his hands touched a cloth bag tacked to the wall. Ha. Planting the cache had been a big risk, but endgame maneuvers usually are, and this one had paid off. He slipped the bag open, found the ring light inside. A glint of yellow glowed up around his hand. Pham grabbed at the rest of the gear, the light following his hands, rainbows and shadows hurtling back and forth around him. There were tiny balls in one of the packages. He bounced one of them down a side tunnel. It flew silently for a second, and then there was a thud and miscellaneous banging—a decoy for Anne’s listening zipheads.
So our cover was blown, just a few Ksecs too soon. But screwups happen more often than not when plans finally meet reality. If things had gone right, he’d never have needed this pack—which was just why he’d planted it. One by one, Pham considered the contents of the pack: the respirator, the amplifying receiver, the medikit, the trick dart gun.
Nau and Company had some choices. They might gas the tunnels or dump them into vacuum—though that last would destroy a lot of valuable equipment. They might try to chase him around in here. That would be fun; Nau’s goons would find just how dangerous their tunnels had become…Pham felt the old, old enthusiasm rising in him, the rush he always got when the crunch came, when the planning and thought became action. He tucked the gear into his pockets as the plan-of-the-moment grew sharper in his mind. Ezr, we’ll win, I promise. We’ll win despite Anne…and for her.
Quiet as a fog, he started up the tunnel, his ring light just bright enough for him to see the side tunnels up ahead. It was time to pay Anne a visit.
The Invisible Hand coasted 150 kilometers above the Spiders’ world. It was so low that only a limited ground swath of Spiders might directly see them, yet when the time came it would pass precisely over the ordained targets. And whatever the lies they were telling Rita and the others at L1, aboard the Hand the Spider sites were called targets.
Jau Xin sat in the Pilot Manager’s chair—once, when the Qeng Ho had owned this ship, it had been the executive officer’s—and surveyed the gray curve of the horizon. He had three ziphead pilots on this, but only one was actually monitoring flight. The others were plugged into Bil Phuong’s ordnance systems, plotting options. Jau tried to ignore the words he heard from the Captain’s chair beside him. Ritser Brughel was enjoying this, giving his boss on Hammerfest a running account of what was happening on the ground.
Brughel paused in his perverse analysis, was mercifully silent for some seconds. Abruptly, the Vice-Podmaster swore. “Sir! What—” Suddenly he was shouting. “Phuong! There’s shooting at North Paw. Omo is down and—pus, I’ve lost my huds link. Phuong!”
Xin turned in his chair, saw Brughel pounding on his console. The man’s pale face was flushed. The Vice-Podmaster listened on his private channel for a moment. “But the Podmaster survived? Okay, put Reynolt on then. Put her on!”
Apparently Anne Reynolt was not immediately available. One hundred seconds passed. Two hundred. Brughel steamed and fumed, and even his goons backed away. Jau turned to his own displays, but they flowed by him meaninglessly. This wasn’t in Tomas Nau’s script.
“Slut! Where have you been? What—” Then Brughel was silent again. He grunted occasionally, but did not interrupt what must have been a monologue. When he spoke again, he sounded more thoughtful than enraged. “I understand. You tell the Podmaster he can count on me.”
The long-distance conversation continued through one more exchange, and Jau began to guess what was coming. Jau couldn’t help himself; his gaze slid sideways, toward the Vice-Podmaster. Brughel was looking back at him. “Pilot Manager Xin. Our present position?”
“Sir, we’re southbound over the ocean, about sixteen hundred kilometers from Southmost.”
Brughel glanced over his head, taking in a more precise view coming up on his huds. “So, and I see on this pass we’ll overfly the Accord’s missile fields as we progress north.”
There was a hard lump in Xin’s throat. This moment had been inevitable, but I thought I had more time. “…We’ll pass some hundreds of kilometers east of the fields, sir.”
Brughel gestured dismissively. “A main torch burn would correct that…Phuong, you’re tracking this? Yes, we’re advancing things by seven Ksec. So? Maybe they will notice us, but it’ll be too late to matter. Have your people generate a new ops sequence. Of course it’ll mean more direct involvement. Reynolt is diverting all her loose zips to your disposal. Synch ’em up as best you can…Good.”
Brughel relaxed on his Qeng Ho Captain’s chair, and smiled. “The only drawback to all this is we won’t have time to get Pedure out of Southmost. Pedure we had figured out; I think she would have made a good native viceroy…But, you know, for myself I’m not fond of any of them.” He saw that Xin was following his words with undisguised horror. “Careful, careful, Pilot Manager. You’ve been too long with your Qeng Ho friends. Whatever they just tried, it failed. Do you have that straight? The Podmaster survived and still has his resources.” He looked beyond Jau, seeing something in his huds. “Synch your pilots with Bil Phuong’s zipheads. You’ll have concrete numbers in a few seconds. Over Southmost we won’t fire any of our own weapons. Instead you’ll locate and trigger the short-range rockets the Kindred have offshore, the ‘Accord sneak attack’ we already had planned. Your real job will come a few hundred seconds later. Your people will take out the Accord’s missile fields.” That would involve using the small number of rockets and beam weapons that remained to the humans. But those weapons were quite sufficient against the Spiders’ more primitive antimissile defenses…and after that, thousands of Kindred missiles would murder cities across half the planet.
“I—” Xin choked, horror-struck. If he didn’t do this, they would murder Rita. Brughel would kill Rita and then Jau. But if he followed orders…I know too much.
Brughel watched him intently. It was a look Jau had never seen in Ritser Brughel before…a cool, assessing, almost Nauly look. Brughel cocked his head, and spoke mildly. “You have nothing to fear in following orders. Oh, maybe a mindscrub; you’ll lose a little. But we need you, Jau. You and Rita can serve us for many years, a good life. If only you follow orders now.”
Before everything blew up, Reynolt had been in the Attic. Pham guessed she’d be there even now, camped in the grouproom with Trud and every bit of comm access she could manage, doing her best to protect and manage her people…and use their combined genius to do Nau’s will.
Pham flitted upward through the darkness, easing through tunnels that finally narrowed to less than eighty centimeters across. These had been machine-carved over decades, beginning when Hammerfest’s roots were driven into Diamond One. Sometime in the third decade of the Exile, Pham had penetrated the Emergents’ architecture programs, and the tunnels—some of them—had simply been lost; other connections had been added. He was betting that not even Anne knew all the places he could go.
At every turning point, he slowed himself with easy hand presses, and flickered his light briefly. Searching, searching. Even without external power, the localizers’ capacitors could drive a last, brief computation. With the amplifying receiver he could still get clues—he knew he was high in the Hammerfest tower, on the grouproom side of the structure.
But the nearby localizers were almost exhausted. He drifted around a corner, past what he’d thought was the most likely spot. The walls glittered dim rainbows, unblemished. A few more meters. There! A faint circle etched in the wall of diamond. He coasted up to it and gently touched a control
code to the surface. There was a click. Light blazed all around the disk as it turned back, revealing a storeroom beyond. Pham slipped through the opening. There were racks of food rations and toiletries.
He came around the racks, was almost across the room, almost to its more official entrance—when someone opened that door. Pham dove to the side of the doorway, and as the visitor stepped through, he reached out and lightly plucked off his huds. It was Trud Silipan.
“Pham!” Silipan looked more surprised than frightened. “What the devil—do you know, Anne is having a fit about you? She’s gone nuts, says you’ve killed Kal Omo and taken over North Paw.” His words guttered to a stop as he realized that Pham’s presence here was equally unlikely.
Pham grinned at Silipan, and shut the door behind him. “Oh, the stories are all true, Trud. I’ve come to take back my fleet.”
“Your…fleet.” Trud just stared for a moment, fear and wonder playing across his face. “Pus, Pham. What are you on? You look strange.” A little adrenaline, a little freedom. Amazing what it can do for you. Silipan shrank before the smile that was growing on Pham’s face. “You’re crazy, man. You know you can’t win. You’re trapped here. Give up. Maybe we can pass this off as—as temporary insanity.”
Pham shook his head. “I’m here to win, Trud.” He raised his little dart gun up where Silipan could see. “And you’re going to help. We’re going out to the grouproom, and you’re going to cut off all ziphead support—”
Silipan brushed irritably at Nuwen’s gun hand. “Impossible. There’s a critical need for them, supporting the ground op.”
“Supporting Nau’s Spider-extermination program? All the better to cut them off right now. It should have an interesting effect on the Podmaster’s lake, too.”
Pham could almost see the Emergent balancing the risks in his mind: Pham Trinli, his old drinking buddy and fellow-braggart, now armed with a debatably effective dart gun—against all the Podmasters’ lethal power. “No way, Pham. You got yourself into this, and now you’re stuck with it.”
