The podsergeant continued the tour, pointing out the limitations of each resurrected device. Most of the weapons were shaped charges, and Omo’s zipheads had converted them into crude digger bombs. “…and we’ll have most of the network zipheads on board theHand. They’ll supply fire-control information for your maneuvers; we may have to make substantial orbit changes depending on the targets.”
Omo talked with an ordnanceman’s enthusiasm, and quickly left Jau with no place to hide. For a year, Jau had watched the preparations with increasing fear; there were details that could not be disguised from him. But for every treacherous possibility, there had always been some reasonable explanation. He had held to those “reasonable explanations” so fiercely. They allowed him to feel a shred of decency; they made it possible for him to laugh with Rita as they planned what the future would be like with the Spiders, and with children she and he would have.
The horror must have shown on Jau’s face. Omo stopped his parade of murderous revelation, and turned to looked at him. Jau asked, “Why…?”
“Why must I spell it out for you?” Omo jabbed a finger at Jau’s chest, pushing him away from the crawl line and into the wall. He jabbed again. His hard face showed an angry indignation. It was the righteous indignation of Emergency authority, what Jau had grown up with on Balacrea. “It shouldn’t really be necessary, should it? But you’re like too many of our pod. You’ve gone bad inside, become a kind of Peddler. The others we can let drift for a while longer, but when theHand reaches low orbit, we need your intelligent, instant obedience.” Omo jabbed him once more. “Do you understand now?”
“Y-yes. Yes!” Oh Rita! We will always be part of the Emergency.
FORTY-EIGHT
More than a hundred zipheads were leaving Hammerfest’s Attic. Genius that he was, Trud Silipan had scheduled the transfer as a single move. As Ezr headed for Trixia’s cell, he was swimming against a current of humanity. The Focused were being herded in groups of four and five, first out of the little capillary hallways that led to their roomlets, then into the tributary halls and finally into the main corridors. The handlers were gentle, but this was a difficult maneuver.
Ezr pulled himself sideways, into a utility nook, a back-eddy in the flow. There were people drifting past that he hadn’t seen in years. These were Qeng Ho and Trilander specialists, Focused right after the ambush, just like Trixia. A few of the handlers were friends of the Focused they guided. Watch on Watch they had come to visit the lost ones. At first there had been many such people. But the years passed and hope had dimmed. Maybe someday… they had Nau’s promise of manumission. In the meantime, the zipheads seemed beyond caring; a visit was at most an irritation to them. Only rare fools kept at it for years.
Ezr had never seen so many zipheads moving about. Corridor ventilation was not as good as in the little cells; the smell of unwashed bodies was strong. Anne kept the pod’s property healthy, but that didn’t mean they were clean and pretty.
Bil Phuong hung on a wall strap by a confluence of streams, directing his team handlers. Most teams had a common specialty. Vinh caught scraps of agitated conversation. Could it be that they cared about what was planned for the Spider world?… But no, this was impatience and distraction and technical gibberish. An older woman—one of the network protocol hackers—pushed her handler, actually spoke directly to him. “When then?” Her voice was shrill. “When do we get back to work?”
One of the woman’s team members shouted something like “Yeah, the stackface is stale!” and moved in on the handler from the other side. Away from their inputs, the poor things were going nuts. The entire team began screaming at the handler. The group was the nucleus of a growing clot in the stream. Suddenly, Ezr realized that something like a slave revolt could really happen—if the slaves were taken from their work! This was clearly a danger the Emergent team handler understood. He slid to the side, and yanked the stun lanyards on the two loudest zipheads. They spasmed, then went limp. Deprived of a center, the others’ complaints subsided into diffuse irritability.
Bil Phuong arrived to calm the last of the combative zipheads. He spared a frown for the team handler. “That’s two more I have to retune.” The team handler wiped blood from his cheek and glared back. “Tell it to Trud.” He grabbed the lanyards and floated the unconscious zipheads out over their fellows. The crowd moved on, and in a few seconds Vinh had a clear jump to the end of the corridor.
The translators weren’t going with theInvisible Hand. Their section of the Attic should have been peaceful. But when Ezr arrived, he found the cell doors open and the translators clogging the capillary corridor. Ezr wormed his way past the fidgeting, shouting zipheads. There was no sign of Trixia. But a few meters up the hall he ran into Rita Liao coming from the other direction.
“Rita! Where are the handlers?”
Liao raised both hands in irritation. “Busy elsewhere, of course! And now some idiot has opened the translators’ doors!”
Trud had really outdone himself, though most likely this was only a related glitch. Ironically, the translators —who weren’t supposed to go anywhere—had needed no urging to leave their cells, and now were loudly demanding directions. “We want to go to Arachna!” “We want to get in close!”
Where was Trixia? Ezr heard more shouting from around an upward corner. He followed the fork, and there she was, with the rest of the translators. Trixia looked badly disoriented; she just wasn’t used to the world outside of her cell. But she seemed to recognize him. “Shut up! Shut up!” she shouted, and the gabble quieted. She looked vaguely in Ezr’s direction. “Number Four, when do we go to Arachna?”
Number Four? “Um. Soon, Trixia. But not on this trip, not on the
“Whynot ? I don’t like the time lag!”
“For now, your Podmaster wants you close by.” In fact, that was the official story: only lower network functions were needed in close orbit of Arachna. Pham and Ezr knew a darker explanation. Nau wanted as few people as possible on theHand when it performed its real mission. “You’ll go when it’s safe, Trixia. I promise.” He reached out toward her. Trixia didn’t flinch away, but she held tight to a wall stop, resisting any effort to draw her back to her cell.
Ezr looked over his shoulder at Rita Liao. “What should we do?”
“Wait one.” She touched her ear, listened. “Phuong and Silipan will be here to stuff ’em back in their holes, just as soon as they get the others settled down on theHand. “
Lord, that could take a while. In the meantime, twenty translators would be loose in the Attic maze. He gently patted Trixia’s arm. “Let’s go back to your room, Trixia. Uh, look, the longer you’re out here, the more you’re out of touch. I’ll bet you left your huds in your room. You could use them to ask fleet net your questions.” Trixia had probably left her huds behind because they were offline. But at this point, he was just trying to make reasonable noises.
Trixia bounced from wall stop to wall stop, full of indecision. Abruptly she pushed past him and flitted back to the downward fork that led to her little room. Ezr followed.
The cell reacted to Trixia’s presence, the lights coming to their usual dim glow. Trixia grabbed her huds, and Ezr synched to them. Her links weren’t completely down. Ezr saw the usual pictures and splashes of text; it wasn’t quite live from groundside, but it was close. Trixia’s eyes darted from display to display. Her fingers pounded on her old keyboard, but she seemed to have forgotten about contacting the fleet information service. Just the sight of her workspace had drawn her back to the center of her Focus. New text windows popped up. Glyphics nonsense shifted so fast across it that it must be a representation of spoken Spider talk, some radio show or—considering the current state of affairs—a military intercept. “I just can’t stand the time lag. It’s not fair.” Again a long silence. She opened another text screen. The pictures beside it went through a flickering series of colors, one of the Spiders’ video formats. It still didn’t look like a real picture, but he recognized this pattern; he had seen it often enough in Trixia’s little room. This was a Spider commercial newscast that Trixia translated daily. “They’re wrong. General Smith will go to Southmost instead of the King.” She was still tense, but now it was her usual, Focused absorption.
A few seconds later, Rita Liao stuck her head into the room. Ezr turned, saw a look of quiet amazement on
