good results… and at the same time he tried subtly to guide their research away from things that might be immediately useful. He knew he might slip up, and eventually Nau would sense the lack of cooperation. The monster was subtle; more than once Ezr wondered who was using whom.
But today… Pham Trinli had just given away so much.
Ezr forced calmness on himself.Just look at the library. Write somesilly report. That would count as duty time and he wouldn’t have to freak out in any visible way. He played with the hand control that came with the new, “sanitized” head-up display. At least it recognized the simpler command chords: the huds seamlessly replaced his natural vision of his cabin with a view of the library’s entry layer. As he looked around, the automation tracked his head motion and the images slid past almost as smoothly as if the documents were real objects floating in his room. But… he fiddled with the control. Damn. Almost no customization was possible. They had gutted the interface, or changed it to some Emergent standard. This wasn’t much better than ordinary wallpaper!
He reached up to pull the thing from his face, to crumple it.Calmdown. He was still too ticked by Trinli’s screwup. Besides, this really was an improvement over wall displays. He smiled for a moment, remembering Gonle Fong’s obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards.
So what to look at today? Something that would seem natural to Nau, but couldn’t give them any more than they already had. Ah, yes, Trinli’s super localizers. They’d be sitting in an out-of-the-way niche in some secure section. He followed a couple of threads, the obvious directions. This was a view of the library that no mere apprentice would have. Nau had obtained—in ways that Ezr imagined, and still gave him nightmares—top-level passwords and security parameters. Now Ezr had the same view that Captain Park himself could have had.
No luck. The pointers showed the localizers clearly. Their small size was not really a secret, but even their incidentals manifest did not show them as carrying sensors. The on-chip manuals were just as innocent of strange features.Hunh. So Trinli was claiming there were trapdoors in the manuals that were invisible even in a captain’s view of the library?
The anger that had been churning his guts was momentarily forgotten. Ezr stared out at the data lands ranged around him, feeling suddenly relieved. Tomas Nau would see nothing strange in this situation. Except for Ezr Vinh, there might not be a single surviving Trader who would realize how absurd Trinli’s story must be.
But Ezr Vinh had grown up in the heart of a great trading Family. As a child he had sat at the dinner table, listening to discussions of fleet strategies as they were really practiced. A Captain’s level of access to his fleet library did not normally admit of further hidden features. Things—as always—could be lost; legacy applications were often so old that the search engines couldn’t find relevance. But short of sabotage or a customizing, nonstandard Captain, there should be no isolated secrets. In the long run, such measures were simply too painful for the system maintainers.
Ezr would have laughed, except he suspected that these sanitized huds were reporting every sound he made back to Brughel’s zipheads. Yet this was the first happy thought of the day.Trinli was bullshitting us! The old fraud bluffed about a lot of things, but he was usually careful with Tomas Nau. When it came time to give Reynolt the details, Trinli would scrounge in the chip manuals… and come up empty-handed. Somehow Ezr couldn’t feel much sympathy for him; for once the old bastard would get what he deserved.
TWENTY-ONE
Qiwi Lin Lisolet spent a lot of time out-of-doors. Maybe with the localizer gimmick Old Trinli was promising, that would change. Qiwi floated low across the old Diamond One/Two contact edge. Now it was in sunlight, the volatiles of the earlier years moved or boiled away. Where it was undisturbed, the surface of the diamond was gray and dull and smooth, almost opalescent. The sunlight eventually burned the top millimeter or so into graphite, kind of a micro-regolith, disguising the glitter below. Every ten meters along the edge there was a rainbow glint, where a sensor was set. The ejet emplacements extended off on either side. Even this close, you could scarcely see the activity, but Qiwi knew her gear: the electric jets sputtered in millisecond bursts, guided by the programs that listened to her sensors. And even that wasn’t delicate enough. Qiwi spent more than two thirds of her duty time floating around the rockpile, adjusting the ejets—and still the rock quakes were dangerously large. With a finer sensor net and the programs that Trinli was claiming, it should be easy to design better firing regimes. Then there would be millions of quakes, but so small no one would notice. And then she wouldn’t have to be here so much of the time. Qiwi wondered what it would be like to be on a low-duty cycle Watch schedule like most people. It would save medical resources, but it would also leave poor Tomas even more alone.
Her mind slid around the worry.There are things you can cure andthings you can’t; be grateful for what Trinli’s localizers will make right. She floated up from the cleft, and checked with the rest of her maintenance crew.
“Just the usual problems,” Floria Peres’s voice sounded in her ear. Floria was coasting over the “upper slopes” of Diamond Three. That was above the rockpile’s current zero-surface. They lost a few jets there every year. “Three loosened mountings… we caught them in time.”
“Very good. I’ll put Arn and Dima on it. I think we’re done early.” She smiled to herself. Plenty of time for the more interesting projects. She switched her comm away from her crew’s public sequency. “Hey, Floria. You’re in charge of the distillery this Watch, true?”
“Sure.” There was a chuckle in the other’s voice. “I try to get that job every time; working for you is just one of the unavoidable chores that come along with it.”
“Well, I have some things for you. Maybe we can deal?”
“Oh, maybe.” Floria was on a mere ten-percent duty cycle; even so, this was a dance they had been through before. Besides, she was Qeng Ho. “Meet me down at the distillery in a couple of thousand seconds. We can have tea.”
The volatiles distillery sat at the end of its slow trek across the dark side of the rockpile. Its towers and retorts glistened with frost in the Arachna-light; in other places, it glowed with dull red heat where fractionation and recombination occurred. What came out was the simple stock materials for their factory and the organic sludges for the bactries. The core of the L1 distillery was from the Qeng Ho fleet. The Emergents had brought along similar equipment, but it had been lost in the fighting.Thank goodness it was ours that survived. The repairs and new construction had forced them to scavenge from all the ships. If the distillery core had been Emergent technology, they’d’ve been lucky to have anything working now.
Qiwi tied down her taxi a few meters from the distillery. She unloaded her thermal-wrapped cargo, and pulled herself along the guide ropes toward the entrance. Around her lay the sweeping drifts of their remaining hoard of volatiles: airsnow and ocean ice from the surface of Arachna. Those had come a long way, and cost a lot. Much of the original mass, especially the airsnow, had been lost in the Relight and chance illuminations since. The remainder had been pushed and balanced into the safest shadows, had been melted in a vain attempt to glue the rockpile together, had been used to breathe and eat and live. Tomas had plans to hollow out portions of Diamond One as a really secure capture cave. Maybe that wouldn’t be necessary. As the sun slowly dimmed, it should be easier to save what was left. Meantime, the distillery made its slow progress—less than ten meters per year— through the drifts of ice and air. Behind, it left starglint on raw diamond, and a track of anchor holes.
Floria’s control cubby was at the base of the distillery’s rearmost towers. As part of the original Qeng Ho module, it had been nothing more than a pressurized hutch to eat and nap in. Over the years of the Exile, its various occupants had added to it. Coming in on it from ground level… Qiwi paused a moment. Most of her life was spent either in close-in rooms and tunnels, or in open emptiness. Floria’s latest changes made this something in between. She could imagine what Ezr would say of this: It really did look like a little cabin, almost like the fairy-tale pictures of how a farmer might live in the snow-covered foothills of an ancient land, close to a glistening forest.
Qiwi climbed past the outriggers and anchor cables—the edge of the magic forest—and knocked on the cabin door.
Trading was always fun. She had tried so many times to explain that to Tomas. The poor fellow had a good heart, but he came from a culture that just could not understand.
Qiwi brought partial payment for Floria’s most recent output: inside the thermal wrap was a twenty-
