centuries, with really good medical support. In a crazy, exotic way she was lovely. Physically lovely.So you were a Podmaster.
Reynolt’s gaze flickered up, and impaled him for an instant. “Okay. You’re here to tell me the details of these localizers.”
Pham nodded. Strange. After that momentary glance, her gaze shifted away from his eyes. She was watching his lips, his throat, only briefly his eyes. There was no sympathy, no communication, but Pham had the chill feeling that she was seeing through all his masks.
“Good. What is their standard sensorium?”
He grumbled through the answers, claiming ignorance of details.
Reynolt didn’t seem to take offense. Her questions were delivered in a uniformly calm, mildly contemptuous tone. Then: “This isn’t enough to work with. I need the manuals.”
“Sure. That’s what I’m here for. The full manuals are on the localizer chips, encrypted beneath what ordinary techs are allowed to see.”
Again that long, scattered stare: “We’ve looked. We don’t see them.”
This was the dangerous part. At best, Nau and Brughel would be taking a very close look at Trinli’s buffoon persona. At worst… if they realized he was giving away secrets that even top armsmen wouldn’t know, he’d be in serious trouble. Pham pointed to a head-up display on Reynolt’s desk. “Allow me,” he said.
Reynolt didn’t react to his flippancy, but she did put on the huds and accepted consensual imaging. Pham continued, “I remember the passcode. It’s long, though”—and the full version was keyed to his own body, but he didn’t say that. He tried several incorrect codes, and acted irritable and nervous when they failed. A normal human, even Tomas Nau, would have expressed impatience—or laughed.
Reynolt didn’t say anything. She just sat there. But then, suddenly, “I have no patience for this. Do not pretend incompetence.”
She knew.In all the time since Triland, no one had ever seen this far behind his cover. He’d hoped for more time; once they started using the localizers he could write some new cover for himself.Damn. Then he remembered what Silipan had said. Anne Reynolt knewsomething. Most likely, she had simply concluded that Trinli was a reluctant informant.
“Sorry,” Pham mumbled. He typed in the correct sequence.
A simple acknowledgment came back from the fleet library, chip doc subsection. The glyphs floated silver on the air between them. The secret inventory data, the component specifications.
“Good enough,” said Reynolt. She did something with her control, and her office seemed to vanish. The two of them floated through the inventory information, and then they were standing within the localizers’ specifications.
“As you said, temperature, sonics, light levels… multispectrum. But this is more elaborate than you described at the meeting.”
“I said it was good. These are just the details.”
Reynolt spoke quickly, reviewing capability after capability. Now she sounded almost excited. This was far beyond the corresponding Emergent products. “A naked localizer, with a good sensorium and independent operation.” And she was seeing only the part that Pham wanted her to see.
“You do have to pulse it power.”
“Just as well. That way we can limit its use till we thoroughly understand it.”
She flicked away the image, and they were sitting in her office again, the lights sparkling cool off the rough walls. Pham could feel himself beginning to sweat.
She wasn’t even looking at him anymore. “The inventory showed several million localizers in addition to those embedded in fleet hardware.”
“Sure. Inactive, they pack into just a few liters.”
Calm observation: “You were fools not to use them for security.”
Pham glowered at her. “We armsmen knew what they could do. In a military situation—”
But those were not the details in Anne Reynolt’s Focus. She waved him silent. “It looks like we have more than enough for our purposes.”
The beautiful janissary looked back into Pham’s face. For an instant, her gaze stabbed directly into his eyes.
“You’ve made possible a new era of control, Armsman.”
Pham looked into the clear blue eyes and nodded; he hoped she didn’t understand the full truth that she spoke. And now Pham realized how central she was to all his plans. Anne Reynolt managed almost all the zipheads. Anne Reynolt was Tomas Nau’s direct control over operations. Anne Reynolt understood the things about the Emergents that a successful revolutionary must understand. And Anne Reynolt was a ziphead. She might figure out what he was up to—or she might be the key to destroying Nau and Brughel.
Things never got completely quiet in an ad hoc habitat. The Traders’ temp was only a hundred meters across; the crew, bouncing around in it, created stresses that could not be completely damped. And thermal stress made an occasional loud snapping sound. But just now was in the middle of most of the crew’s sleep period; Pham Nuwen’s little cabin was about as quiet as it ever got. He floated in the darkened cabin, pretending to drowse. His secret life was about to become very busy. The Emergents didn’t know it, but they’d just been snared by a trap that went deeper than most any Qeng Ho Fleet Captain knew about. It was one of two or three scams that Pham Nuwen had set up long ago. Sura and a few others had known about them, but even after Brisgo Gap, the knowledge hadn’t seeped into the general Qeng Ho armamentarium. Pham had always wondered about that; Sura could be subtle.
How long would it take Reynolt and Brughel to retrain their people to use the localizers? There were more than enough of the gadgets to run the L1 stab operations, and also snoop all living spaces. At third meal, some of the comm people had told of spikes in the temp’s cable spine. Ten times a second, a microwave pulse spread through the temp—enough wireless power to keep the localizers well fed. Just before the beginning of the sleep period, he’d noticed the first of the dustmotes come wafting through the ventilator. Right now, Brughel and Reynolt were probably calibrating the system. Brughel and Nau would be congratulating themselves on the quality of the sound and video. With good luck, they would eventually phase out their own clunky spy devices; even if he wasn’t so lucky… well, in a few Msecs he would have the ability to subvert the reports from them.
Something scarcely heavier than a dustmote settled on his cheek. He made as if to wipe his face, and in the act settled the mote just beside his eyelid. A few moments later he poked another deep within the channel of his right ear. It was ironic, considering how much effort the Emergents had gone to, disabling untrusted I/O devices.
The localizers did everything that Pham had told Tomas Nau. Just as such devices had done through all of human history, these located one another in geometrical space—a simple exercise, nothing more than a time-of- flight computation. The Qeng Ho versions were smaller than most, could be powered by wireless across short distances, and had a simple set of sensors. They made great spy devices, just what Podmaster Nau needed. Localizers were by their nature a type of computer network, in fact a type of distributed processor. Each little dustmote had a small amount of computing ability—and they communicated with one another. A few hundred thousand of them dusted across the Traders’ temp was more computing power than all the gear that Nau and Brughel had brought aboard. Of course, all localizers—even the Emergent clunkers—had such computational potential. The real secret of the Qeng Ho version was that no added interface was necessary, for output or input. If you knew the secret, you could access the Qeng Ho localizers directly, let the localizers sense your body position, interpret the proper codings, and respond with built-in effectors. Itdidn’t matter that the Emergents had removed all front-end interfaces from the temp. Now a Qeng Ho interface was all around them, for anyone who knew the secrets.
Access took special knowledge and some concentration. It was not something that could happen by accident or under coercion. Pham relaxed in the hammock, partly to pretend to finally fall asleep, partly to get in the mood for his coming work. He needed a particular pattern of heartbeats, a particular cadence of breathing.Do I even remember it anymore, after allthis time? The sharp moment of panic took him aback. One mote by his eye, another in his ear; that should be enough to provide alignment for the other localizers that must be floating in the room. That should be enough.
