cabinets.
A woman’s voice: “Grab a stop and freeze!”
It was Anne Reynolt. She emerged from between the cabinets, just beyond where he could reach. She was holding a pointing device as though it were some kind of weapon.
Reynolt steadied herself on the ceiling and waggled the pointer at him. “Hand over hand, walk yourself back to the wall.”
For an instant, Pham teetered on the edge of a frontal attack. The pointer could be a bluff, but even if it were guiding a cannon, what did it matter? The game was up. The only option left was swift and overwhelming violence, here and with the localizers all across Hammerfest.And maybe not… Pham retreated as instructed.
Reynolt came out from behind the cabinets. She hooked a foot under a restraint. The pointer in her hand did not waver. “So. Mr. Pham Trinli. It’s nice to finally know.” With her free hand, she brushed her hair back from her face. Her huds were clear, and he had a good view into her eyes. There was something strange about her. Her face was as pale and cold as always, but the usual impatience and indifference was overlaid with a kind of triumph, a conscious arrogance. And… there was a smile, faint yet unmistakable, on her lips.
“You set me up, Anne, didn’t you?” Back at Nau’s lodge, he took another, longer look at what he thought had been Anne Reynolt. It was a patch of wallpaper, lying loosely on a bed. She had blinded the eyes that could get really close, and fooled him with a crude video.
She nodded. “I didn’t know tas you, but yes. It’s been clear for a long time that someone was manipulating my systems. At first, I thought it was Ritser or Kal Omo, playing political games. You were an outside bet, the fellow who was too often in the middle of things. First you were an old fool, then an old slavemaster in hiding as a fool. Now I see that you are something more, Mr. Trinli. Did you really think you could outsmart the Podmaster’s systems forever?”
“I—” Pham’s vision swept out of the room, roamed across Lake Park. The party was continuing. Tomas Nau himself and Qiwi had joined Jau Xin on the little sailboat. Pham zoomed in on Nau’s face: he was not wearing huds. He was not a man overseeing an ambush.He doesn’t know! “I was very afraid I couldn’t outsmart his systems forever—you, in particular.”
She nodded. “I guessed whoever-it-was would target me. I’m the critical component.” She glanced briefly away from him, at the uncovered controller box. “You knew I was retuning in the next Msec, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” And you need retuning more than I knew. Hope surged in him. She was behaving like a character in an idiot adventure. She hadn’t told her boss what she was up to. She probably had no backups. And now she was just floating there, talking!Keep her talking. “I figured I could weaken the SC switches. When you used the device, it would jam high and—”
“—And I’d have a capillary blowout? Very crude, very fatal, Mr. Trinli. But then, you’re not clever enough to try real reprogramming, are you?”
“No.” How far out of calibration is she? Hit at emotion. “Besides, I wanted you dead. You and Nau and Brughel are the only real monsters here. For now, you’re the only one I can reach.”
Her smile widened. “You’re crazy.”
“No,you are. Once upon a time you were a Podmaster just like them. Your problem is you lost. Or don’t you remember? The Xevalle clique?”
Her arrogant smile vanished and for a moment her gaze was the usual frowning indifference. Then she was smiling again. “I remember very well. You’re right, I was a loser—but tas a century before Xevalle, and I was fighting all the Podmasters.” She advanced slowly across the room. Her pointer never wavered from Pham’s chest. “The Emergents had invaded Frenk. I was an ancient-lit major at Arnham University…. I learned to be other things. For fifteen years we fought them. They had technology, they had Focus. At first, we had numbers. We lost and lost, but we made them pay for every victory. Toward the end we were better-armed, but by then there were so few of us. And still we fought.”
The look in her eyes was… joyous. He was hearing the history of Frenk from the other side. “You—you’re the Frenkisch Orc!”
Reynolt’s smile broadened and she came even nearer, her slim body straightening out of zero-gee crouch. “Yes indeed. The Podmasters wisely decided to rewrite the histories. The ‘Frenkisch Orc’ makes a better villain than ‘Anne of Arnham.’ Rescuing Frenks from a mutant subspecies makes a better story than massacre and Focus.”
Lord.But some automatic part of him still remembered why he was here. He slid his feet back along the wall, positioning for a kick-lunge.
Reynolt stopped her approach. She lowered her aim, to his knees. “Don’t try it, Mr. Trinli. This pointer is guiding a program in the MRI controller. If you had had a moment more, you would have seen the nickel pellets I put in the magnet target area. It’s an ad hoc weapon, but good enough to blow your legs off—and you would still face interrogation.”
Pham sent his vision back into the MRI gear. Yes, there were the pellets. Given a proper magnetic pulse, they would be high-velocity buckshot. But the program, if it was in the controller… Tiny eyes swept along the superconductor interface. He had enough localizers to talk through the optical link and wipe her pointer program.She still doesn’t know what Ican do with them! The hope was like a bright flame.
He tapped his fingers on the palms of his hands, maneuvering the devices into place. Hopefully, it would look like nervous gesturing to Reynolt. “Interrogation? You’re still loyal to Nau?”
“Of course. How could it be otherwise?”
“But you’re working behind his back.”
“Only to serve him better. If this had turned out to be Ritser Brughel’s work, I wanted a complete case before going to my Podmas—”
Pham lunged outward from the wall. He heard Reynolt’s pointer click uselessly, and then he slammed into her. The two of them tumbled back into the MRI cabinets. Reynolt fought almost silently, slamming her knee into him, trying to bite at his throat. But he had her arms pinned, and as they sailed past the magnet box, he twisted and slammed her head against the cover plate.
Reynolt went limp. Pham caught himself on a stop, ready to smash her again.
Think.The party at North Paw was still going on, an idyll. Pham’s timer showed that 250 seconds had passed since he had left the harbor.I canstill make this work! There were necessary changes. The blow to Reynolt’s head would show up on an autopsy…. But—miracles!—her clothes showed no sign of the struggle. There would have to be some changes. He reached into the MRI target area and swept the nickel pellets into a safety bin…. Something like his original plan could still work. Suppose she had been trying to recalibrate the controllers and had an accident?
Pham moved her body carefully into position. He held her tightly, watching for any sign of consciousness.
The monster. The Frenkisch Orc. Of course, Anne Reynolt was neither. She was a tall, slender woman—as much a human as Pham Nuwen or any of the far descendants of Earth.
Now the carven legends on the Hammerfest walls had a clear translation. For years and years, Anne Reynolt had fought against Focus, her people driven back step by step, to that last redoubt in the mountains. Anne of Arnham. Now all that remained was the myth of a twisted monster… and the real monsters like Ritser Brughel, the descendants of the surviving Frenks, the conquered and the Focused.
But Anne of Arnham had not died. Instead, her genius had been Focused. And now it was deadly danger to Pham and all he worked for. And so she must die….
…Three hundred seconds.Wake up. Pham tapped out instructions. Botched. He typed them again. Once he weakened the SC connectors, this little program would be enough. It was a simple thing, a coded beat of high- frequency pulses that would turn the bugs in Anne’s head into little factories, flooding her brain with vasoconstrictors, creating millions of tiny aneurisms. It would be quick. It would be lethal. And Trud had claimed so many times that none of their operations were physically painful.
Unconscious, Anne’s face had relaxed; she might have been asleep. There were no marks, no bruises. Even the slender silver chain around her throat, even that had survived their struggle, though it had been pulled free of her blouse. There was a ’membrance gem at the end of the chain. Pham couldn’t help himself. He reached over her shoulder and squeezed the greenish stone. The pressure was enough to power a moment of imagery. The stone cleared, and Pham was looking down on a mountain hillside. His viewpoint seemed to be on the cupola of an armored flyer. Ranged around the hillside were a half-dozen other such vehicles, dragons come down from the sky
