chance.” His gaze became distant, then snapped back to Pham’s face. “What are you, Pham?”
Pham answered softly, pitching his voice just over the shouted demands from the zipheads. “Just now, I’m your only hope.” He drew Silipan’s confiscated huds from his jacket pocket, and handed them to the man.
Trud carefully straightened the crumpled material and slipped them over his eyes. He was silent for a moment, then: “We have more huds. I can get you a pair.”
Pham smiled the foxy grin that Silipan had never seen till two hundred seconds ago. “That’s okay. I have something better.”
“Oh.” Trud’s voice was small.
“Now I want you to do a damage assessment. Is there any way you can get work from your people here, with Nau cut off?”
Trud shrugged angrily. “You know that’s imposs—” He looked up again at Pham. “Maybe, maybe there are some trivial things. We do offline computing. I might be able to trick the numerical control zipheads….”
“Good man. Calm these people down, see if any of them will help us.”
They parted. Silipan descended to the zipheads, talked soothing words, bagged the floating vomitus that the sudden upset had generated. The shouting only got louder:
“I need the tracking updates!”
“Where are the translations on the Kindred response?”
“You stupids, you’ve lost the comm!”
Pham slid sideways across the ceiling, looking downward through the ranks of seated zipheads, listening to the complaints. On the far wall, Anne and her other assistant floated motionless on grabfelt rests. She should be safe and out of it.Your final battle is being fought, just a century or twoafter you thought all was lost.
The vision behind Pham’s eyes faded in and out. In most of the Attic, he’d been able to restart the microwave pulse power. He had perhaps one hundred thousand localizers in reach and alive. It was a bright meta- light extending his vision in disjoint fingers through the Attic, to wherever a cloud of localizers had come alive and could find a thread of links back to him.
Status, status. Pham scanned across the readouts on zipheads in the grouproom and beyond. There were only a few still locked in their roomlets in the capillary tunnels, specialists that hadn’t been needed in the current operation. Many of them had gone into convulsive tantrums when their job stream was blocked. Pham eased into the control system and opened some of the incoming communications. There were things he had to know, and it might ease the discomfort of the Focused. Trud looked up uneasily; he could tell that someone was messing with his system.
Pham reached beyond the Attic, searching for some glimmer from localizers on the rockpile’s surface. There! One or two isolated images, low-rate and monochrome. He had a glimpse of a taxi coming down on naked rock, near Hammerfest. Damn, sluiceway S745. If Nau could negotiate that lockless hatch, there was no doubt where he’d go next.
For a fleeting moment Pham felt the overwhelming fear of facing an unstoppable adversary.Ah, it’s like being young again. He had perhaps three hundred seconds before Nau got to L1-A. No point in holding anything back. Pham sent out the command to bring all reachable localizers online—even the ones without power. Their tiny capacitors held enough charge for a few dozen packets each. Used cleverly, he could get a fair amount of I/O.
Behind his eyes, pictures slowly formed, bit by bit by bit.
Pham slid around three walls, staying carefully beyond the zipheads’ reach, occasionally dodging a thrown keyboard or drinking bulb. But the renewed incoming data flow was having some calming effect. The translator section was almost quiet, their talk mostly directed at one another. Pham drifted down next to Trixia Bonsol. The woman was hunched over her keyboards with fierce intentness. Pham plugged into the data stream that was coming up from theInvisible Hand. There should be some good news there, Ritser and company bogged down just when they were ready to commit mass murder….
It took him an instant to orient to the multiplex stream. There was stuff for the translators, trajectory data, launch codes.Launch codes? Brughel was going ahead with Nau’s sucker punch! The execution was awkward; the Accord would be left with a good fraction of its weapons. Ballistics were arcing up, dozens of launches per second.
For a moment, Pham’s attention was swallowed by the horror of it. Nau had conspired to kill half the people in a world. Ritser was doing his best to accomplish the murders. He stepped through the log of Trixia Bonsol’s last few hundred seconds. The log had gone berserk when her job stream had been cut off, a metaphorical upchuck. There were pages of disordered nonsense, a gabble of files that showed no last-access date. His eyes caught on a passage that almost made sense:
It is an edged cliche that the world is most pleasant in the years of a Waning Sun. It’s true that the weather is not so driven, that everywhere there is a sense of slowing down, and most places experience a few years where the summers do not burn and the winters are not yet overly fierce. It is the classic time of romance. It’s a time that seductively beckons higher creatures to relax, postpone. It’s the last chance to prepare for the end of the world.
By blind good fortune, Sherkaner Underhill chose the most beautiful days in the years of the Waning for his first trip to Lands Command….
It was clearly one of Trixia’s translations, the sort of “human-colored” description that irritated Ritser Brughel so much. But Underhill’s “first trip to Lands Command”? That would be before the last Dark. Strange that Tomas Nau had wanted such retrospectives.
“It’s all messed up now.”
“What?” Pham’s mind came back to the Attic grouproom, the irritable voices of the zipheads. It was Trixia Bonsol who had just spoken. Her eyes were distant and her fingers still twitched across her keys.
Pham sighed. “Yeah, you got that right,” he replied. Whatever she was talking about, the comment was appropriate.
His low-rate synthesis from the unpowered net was complete: He had a view down on L1-A. If he could trigger a little more connectivity, he might reach the ejets near L1-A. No great processing power there, but those sites were on the ejet power grid… and more important,Maybe we canuse the electric jets themselves! If they could target a few dozen of them on the Podmaster… “Trud! Have you had any luck with the numerical people?”
FIFTY-EIGHT
Rachner Thract’s helicopter lifted clean of the tilted landing pad, its turbine and rotor sounds healthy. By turning his head this way and that, Thract was able to keep track of the terrain. He took them eastward, along the caldera wall. The punched-hole craters marched off ahead of them, a line of destruction that disappeared over the top of the far wall. In the city below, there were emergency lights now, and ground traffic heading for the craters that had been apartments and occupied mansions.
On the perch beside him, Underhill was moving feebly, pulling at the panniers on his guide-bug’s back. The animal was trying to help, but it was injured far worse than its master. “I need to see, Rachner. Can you help me with Mobiy’s pack?”
“Just a minute, sir. I want to bring us around to the heliport.”
Underhill pushed a few inches up from his perch. “Just put it on autopilot, Colonel. Please, help me.”
Thract’s helicopter contained dozens of embedded processors, themselves hooked into traffic control and information nets. Once he had been very proud of this fancy aircraft. He hadn’t flown it on automatic since that last staff meeting at Lands Command. “Sir… I don’t trust the automatics.”
Underhill gave a gentle laugh, then broke into liquid coughing. “It’s okay, Rach. Please, I have to see what’s happening. Help me with Mobiy.”
Yes! By the Dark, what did it matter now! Rachner slammed four hands into the control sockets, and wiggled on full auto. Then he turned to his passengers and quickly unzipped the bag on the top of Mobiy’s broken
