The tunnel turned somewhere just ahead. He reached into the dark, touching the walls lightly, then harder, breaking his dive and turning 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 untila 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 forher.
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.
TheInvisible 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 theHand the Spider sites were calledtargets.
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 Reyolt 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, itfailed. 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 weneed 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
