Name are you doing—” She handed her food and drink to someone behind her and rushed out onto the pier. The boat there had slipped free, was sliding smoothly out into the inlet. Like the lodge and the pier, it was dark timber. But this wood was tarred near the boat’s waterline, varnished and painted at the gunnels and prow. A Balacrean sail was hoisted on its single mast. Jau Xin grinned at the crowd from his seat amidships.
“Jau Xin, you come back here! That’s the Podmaster’s boat. You’ll—” Rita started running down the pier. She realized her mistake and tried to stop herself. When her feet left the ground she was moving at just a few centimeters per second. She floated off the platform, a-spin and embarrassed, and loudly angry. If no one snagged her, she would sail over her errant husband’s head, and come down in the lake a few hundred seconds later.
Time to move. His programs told him no one in the crowd was watching. His probes into Nau’s security showed that no snoop was on him right now, and he had a glimpse of Reynolt still working at some drudge task back in the lodge. He blinded the localizers for an instant and stepped into the fronds. Just a little massaging of the digital record and there’d be proof he was here the whole time. He could do what was necessary and get back unnoticed. It was still as dangerous as hell, even if Brughel’s snoops were not on alert.But taking out Reynolt is necessary.
Pham finger-walked up the cliff face, slowed by the need to stay hidden behind the bushes. Even here, the artistry of Ali Lin was evident. The cliff could have been simple raw diamond, but Ali had imported rocks from the mineral dumps on the surface of the L1 jumble. They were discolored as if etched by the seepage of a thousand years. The rock was watercolor art as great as any ever painted on paper or digital. Ali Lin had been a first-rank parkbuilder before the expedition to OnOff. Sammy Park had picked Ali for the crew for that reason. But in the years since his Focus, he had become something greater, what a human could become if all his mind was concentrated on a single love. What he and his fellows had done was subtle and deep… and as much as anything it proved the power that Focus gave to the culture that possessed it.Using it is right.
The tunnel entrance was still a few meters farther up. Pham sensed a half-dozen localizers floating there, imaging the outlines of the door.
A small fraction of his attention remained with the crowd back at the harbor. No eyes looked back in his direction. Some of the nimbler partyers had scrambled out onto the pier and formed a chain of life that reached six or seven meters into the air, an acrobatic tumble of humanity. The men and women of the chain were in a dozen different orientations, the classic zero-gee pose for such an operation. It broke the illusion of downness, and some of the Emergents looked away, groaning. Imagining the sea as flat and down was one thing. Suddenly seeing the sea as a watery cliff or a ceiling was enough to provoke nausea.
But then the tip of the chain extended a hand and grabbed Rita’s ankle. The chain contracted, bringing her back to the ground. Pham tapped his palm, and the audio from the scene below came louder in his ear. Jau Xin was beginning to get embarrassed. He apologized to his wife. “But Qiwi said it was okay. And face it, I am a space pilot.”
“A pilotmanager, Jau. It’s not the same thing.”
“Close enough. I can do some things without a ziphead to make it right.” Jau sat back down by the mast. He tweaked the sail a little. The boat moved out around the pier. It stayed level in the water. Maybe suction was keeping it fitted to the surface. But its wake rose a half meter into the air, twisting and braiding the way surface tension makes free water do. The crowd applauded—even Rita, now—and Jau swung the craft around, trying to make it back to the moorage.
Pham pulled himself even with the tunnel entrance. His remotes had already been fiddling with the hatch.Everything in this park was localizer-compatible, thank the Lord. The door opened silently. And when he drifted through, he had no trouble closing it behind him.
He had maybe two hundred seconds.
He pushed quickly up the narrow tunnel. Here there was no illusion. These walls were raw crystal, the naked stuff of Diamond One. Pham pushed faster. The maps that unrolled before his eyes showed what he had seen before. Tomas Nau intended the Lake Park to be his central site; after this open house, outsider visits would be strictly limited. Nau had used the last of the thermal diggers to cut these narrow tunnels. They gave him direct physical access to the critical resources of Hammerfest.
Pham’s tiny spies showed him to be just thirty meters short of the new entrance to the Focus clinic. Nau and Reynolt were safely at the party. All the MRI techs were at the party or off-Watch. He would have his time in the clinic, enough time for some sabotage. Pham twisted head for feet, and extended his hands as brakes against the walls.
Sabotage?Be honest. It was murder.No, it’s an execution. Or a combatdeath upon an enemy. Pham had killed his share in combat, and not always at the end of a ship-to-ship trajectory.This is no different. So what if Reynolt was a Focused automaton now, a slave to Nau? There had been a time when her evil had been self-aware. Pham had learned enough about the Xevalle clique to know that its villainy was not just the invention of those who had destroyed it. There had been a time when Anne Reynolt had been like Ritser Brughel, though doubtless more effective. In appearance, the two could have been twins: pale-skinned, reddish-haired, with cold, killing eyes. Pham tried to catch the image, amplify it in his mind. Someday he would overthrow the Nau/Brughel regime. Someday Pham would invade theInvisible Hand and end the horror that Brughel had made there.What I doto Anne Reynolt is no different.
And Pham realized he was floating in front of the clinic entrance, his fingers poised to command it open.How much time have I wasted? The time line he kept at the edge of his vision said only two seconds.
He tapped his fingers angrily. The door slid open, and he floated through into the silent room. The clinic was brightly lit, but the vision behind his eyes was suddenly dark and vacant. He moved cautiously, like a man suddenly struck blind. The localizers from the tunnel, and what he shook out from his clothing, spread out around him, slowly giving him back his vision. He moved quickly to the MRI control table, trying to ignore the absence of vision in the corners and dead spaces. The clinic was one place where the localizers could not survive long-term. When the big magnets were pulsed on, they fried the electronics in the localizers. Trud had taken to vacuuming them out after a magnet-accelerated dustmote had cut his ear.
But Pham Nuwen had no intention of pulsing the magnets, and his little spies would stay alive and well for the time it took him to set his trap. He moved across the room, quickly cataloguing the gear. As always, the clinic was an orderly maze of pale cabinets. Here wireless was not an option. Optical cables and short laser links connected automation to magnets. Superconducting power cables snaked back into areas he couldn’t see yet.Ah. His localizers drifted near the controller cabinet. It was set just the way Trud had left it the last time he had been here. Nowadays, Pham spent many Ksecs each Watch with Trud in the clinic. Pham Trinli had never seemed pointedly curious about the workings of the Focus gear, but Trud liked to brag and Pham was gradually learning more and more.
Focus could kill easily enough. Pham floated above the alignment coils. The inner region of the MRI was less than fifty centimeters across, not even big enough for whole-body imaging. But this gear was for the head only, and imaging was only part of the game. It was the bank of high-frequency modulators that made this different from any conventional imagers. Under program control—programs mostly maintained by Anne Reynolt, despite Trud’s claims—the modulators could tweak and stimulate the Focus virus in the victim’s head. Millimeter by cubic millimeter the mindrot could be orchestrated in their psychoactive secretion. Even done perfectly, the disease had to be retuned every few Msecs, or the ziphead would drift into catatonia or hyperactivity. Small errors could produce dysfunction—about a quarter of Trud’s work had to be redone. Moderate errors could easily destroy memory. Large errors could provoke a massive stroke, the victim dying even faster than Xopi Reung had.
Anne Reynolt was due for such a massive cerebral accident the next time she retuned herself.
He’d been gone from the Lake Park for almost one hundred seconds. Jau Xin was taking small groups for rides in the boat. Someone had finally fallen in the lake.Good. That will buy more time.
Pham pulled the hood off the controller box. There were interfaces to the superconductors. Things like that could fail, on rare occasions with no warning. Weaken the switch, tweak the management programs to recognize Reynolt when next she used the gear on herself….
Since he’d entered the clinic, the active localizers he’d brought with him had spread across the clinic. It was a little like light spreading farther and farther into absolute dark, revealing more and more of the room. He’d set the images at a low priority while he examined the SC switch with nearly microscopic vision.
A flicker of motion.He glimpsed a pants leg passing near one of the background views. Someone was hiding in the dead space behind the cabinets. Pham oriented on the localizers and dived for the open space above the
