Diem “atrocity.” She was so alone she would confide in a windbag like Pham Trinli. “When… when I was little, I admired Ezr Vinh more than anyone in the universe, except my parents.” She glanced at Pham; her smile was tremulous and hurt. “I wanted so much for him to think well of me. And then the Emergents attacked us, and then Jimmy Diem killed my mother and all the others…. We are all in a very small lifeboat. We can’t have any more killing.” She gave her head a sharp little shake. “Did you know that Tomas has not used coldsleep since the Diem massacre? He’s lived every second of all these years. Tomas is so serious, so hardworking. He believes in Focus, but he’s open to new ways of doing things.” She was telling him what she had wanted to tell Ezr. “Benny’s parlor wouldn’t exist without Tomas. None of the trading and bonsai would exist. Little by little we are making the Emergents understand our ways. Someday, Tomas will be able to release my father and Trixia and all the Focused. Someday—”
Pham wanted to reach out and comfort her. Pham Nuwen might be the only living person besides the murderers who knew what had really happened to Jimmy Diem, and who knew what Nau and Brughel were doing with Qiwi Lin Lisolet. He should give her a gruff brush-off and leave, but somehow he couldn’t do that. Instead he hung in place, looking embarrassed and confused.Yes. Someday. Someday, child, you will be avenged.
TWENTY-SIX
Ritser Brughel’s quarters and command post were aboard theInvisibleHand. He often wondered how the Peddlers had come up with such a perfect name, in two words expressing the essence of Security. In any case, theHand was the most nearly undamaged of all the hulls, Qeng Ho or Emergent. The flight-crew quarters were sound. The main drive could probably sustain a one-gee thrust for several days. Since the takeover, theHand ’s comm and ECM had been refurbished to Focused standards. Here on theInvisible Hand , he was something of a god.
Unfortunately, physical isolation was no protection against a mindrot runaway. Runaway was triggered by emotional imbalance in the Focused mind. That meant it could propagate across communications networks, though normally that only happened between closely cooperating zipheads. Back in civilization, runaway was a constant, low-level concern, just another reason for having hot swaps available. Here in the godforsaken nowhere, it was a deadly threat. Ritser had been aware of the runaway almost as quickly as Reynolt—but he couldn’t afford to shut down his zips. As usual, Reynolt gave him second-class service, but he managed. They split the snoops into small groups, and ran each separately from the others. The resulting intelligence was fragmented; their logs would require lots of later analysis. But they had missed nothing big… and eventually they would catch up with all the details.
In the first 20Ksec, Ritser lost three snoops to the runaway. He had Omo flush them and keep the others running. He went down to Hammerfest, had a long meeting with Tomas Nau. It looked like Reynolt was going to lose at least six people, including a big hunk of her translation department. The Senior Podmaster was properly impressed with Brughel’s lower casualties. “Keep your people online, Ritser. Anne thinks the translators chose sides in that damn Spider debate, that the runaway rot was an escalation of a normal ziphead disagreement. Maybe so, but the debate was well removed from center of the translators’ Focus. Once things stabilize, I want you to go over every second of your records, comb it for suspicious events.”
After another 60Ksec, Brughel and Nau agreed that the crisis was past, at least for the Security zips. Podsergeant Omo put the snoops back into consultation with Reynolt’s people, but via a buffered link. He began a detailed scan of the immediate past. The debacle had indeed blown away Ritser’s operation, albeit very briefly. For about one thousand seconds, they had totally lost emission security. Closer investigation showed that nothing had been beamed toward any outside system; their long-term secrecy was intact. Locally, the translators had screamed something past the controllers, but the Spiders had not noticed; not surprising, since the chaotic transmissions would have seemed like transient noise.
In the end, Ritser was forced to conclude that the runway was simply very bad luck. But amid the trivia there were some very interesting tidbits:
Normally Ritser stayed up on theHand ’s bridge, where he could maintain a command perspective on the L1 rubble pile and Arachna far beyond. But with Ciret and Marli helping out on Hammerfest, there were just Tan and Kal Omo to run nearly one hundred Security snoops. So today he was mucking around in the guts of the operation with Omo and Tan.
“Vinh has tripped three flags this Watch, Podmaster. Two times during the runaway, as matter of fact.”
As he floated in over Omo, Ritser glanced down at the zipheads on Watch. About a third were asleep in their saddles. The rest were immersed in data streams, reviewing the logs, correlating their results with Reynolt’s Focused on Hammerfest. “Okay, so what do you have on him?”
“This is camera analysis of Reynolt’s lab and a corridor near Podmaster Nau’s residence.” The scenes flickered by quickly, highlighted where the snoops had seen exceptionable body language.
“Nothing overt?”
Omo’s hatchetlike face spread in a humorless smile. “Plenty that would be actionable back home, but not under the current RoE.”
“I’ll bet.” Podmaster Nau’s Rules of Enforcement would have been reason for his instant removal anywhere in the Emergency. For more than twenty years, the Senior Podmaster had let the Peddler swine get away with their excesses, perverting law-abiding Followers in the process. It had driven Ritser to distraction at first. Now… Now he could understand. Tomas was right about so many things. They had no margin for further destruction. And letting people talk yielded a lot of information, secrets they could use when the noose was retightened. “So what’s different about this time?”
“Analysts Seven and Eight both correlate on the last two events.” Seven and Eight were the zipheads at the end of the first row. As children they might have had names, but that was long ago and before they entered the Police Academy. Frivolous names and “Doctor” titles might be used in civilian work, but not in a serious police shop. “Vinh is intent on something that goes beyond his normal anxiety. Look at this head tracking.”
It didn’t mean anything to Ritser, but then his job was to lead, not to understand forensic details. Omo continued, “He’s watching Trinli with great suspicion. It happens again in the corridor by the taxi locks.”
Brughel riffled through the video index of Vinh’s visit to Hammerfest. “Okay. He fought Trinli. He harassed Trud Silipan. Lordy—” Brughel couldn’t help laughing. “—heassaulted Tomas Nau’s private whore. But you say the security flags are for eye contact and body language?”
Omo shrugged. “The overt behavior fits with the guy’s known problems, sir. And it doesn’t come under the RoE.”
So Qiwi Lisolet got slapped around, right on Tomas’s doorstep. Ritser found himself grinning at the irony. All these years, Tomas had fooled the little slut. The periodic mindscrubs had come to be a bright spot in Ritser’s life, especially since he saw her reaction to a certain video. Still, he couldn’t deny his envy. He, Ritser Brughel, couldn’t have maintained a masquerade, even with mindscrubs. Ritser’s own women just didn’t last. A couple of times a year, he had go back to Tomas and wheedle more playthings out of him. Ritser had used up the most attractive expendables. Sometimes he had a bit of luck, as with Floria Peres. She would have noticed Qiwi’s mindscrub for sure; chemical engineer or no, she had to be taken down. But there were limits to such good fortune… and the Exile stretched out years more ahead of him. The thought was dark and familiar, and he resolutely pushed it away.
“Okay. So your point is, Seven and Eight figure that Vinh is hiding something that wasn’t in his consciousness before—at least not at this level of intensity.”
Back in civilization, there’d have been no problem. They’d just bring the perp in and cut the answers out of him. Here… well, they’d had their chance to do some cutting; they had learned disappointingly little. Too many of the Qeng Ho had effective blocks, and too many couldn’t be properly infected with mindrot.
He cycled through the highlighted incidents. “Hmm. Do you suppose he’s figured out that Trinli is really Zamle Eng?” The Peddlers were crazy; they tolerated almost any corruption, but had blood hatred for one of their own simply because he traded in flesh. Ritser’s lip turned in disgust.Pus.How far we’ve fallen. Blackmail was a fitting weapon between Podmasters,but simple terror should suffice for people like Pham Trinli. He scanned once more through Omo’s evidence. It was really frail. “Sometimes I wonder, maybe we have the trigger threshold set
