Ritser rattled on, well pleased with himself. Nau just nodded, smiling. Smith’s peace proposal was strong enough to bring the Spider militaries to a pause. It would give the humans time to announce themselves, and propose cooperation. That was the official story, a risky plan that would leave the Podmasters in a second-class position. In fact, about 7Ksec from now, Anne’s zipheads would initiate a sneak attack by Smith’s own military. The resulting Kindred “counterattack” would complete the planned destruction.And we’ll step in and pickup the pieces.
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 finallyto 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 themlater.
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.”
“Heknew. 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 Ifighting?
“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.”
“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 disablingthe power cutoff, and now we’ve lost everything.Almost everything. Ezr had died to give him one more chance.
