A Deepness in the Sky

FORTY-FOUR

There is always an angle. Gonle Fong had lived her whole life by that principle. The mission to the OnOff star had been a long shot, the sort of thing that appealed mainly to scientists. But Gonle had seen angles. Then had come the Emergent ambush, and the long shot had been turned into servitude and exile. A prison run by thugs. But even then there was an angle. For almost twenty years of her life she had played the angles and prospered—if only by the standards of this dump.

Now things were changing. Jau Xin had been gone for more than four days, at least since the beginning of her current Watch. At first the rumor was that he and Rita had been unofficially moved to Watch tree C, and that they were still in coldsleep. That screwed some of the programming deals she had planned with Rita—and it was also as unusual as hell. Then Trinli reported that two pilot zipheads were missing from the Hammerfest Attic. So. Rita might still be on ice, but Jau Xin and his zipheads were… elsewhere. The rumors grew from there: Jau was on an expedition to the dead sun, Jau was landing on the Spider world. Trud Silipan strutted around Benny’s, smug with some inner secret that for once he was not sharing. More than anything, that proved that something very strange was going on.

Gonle had run a betting pool on the speculations, but she was suffering from sucker fever herself. She wasn’t one bit disappointed when the big bosses decided to let them all in on the secret.

Tomas Nau invited a handful of the peons down to his estate for the briefing. This was first time Gonle had been to Lake Park since the open house. Nau had made a big thing of his hospitality then. Afterward, the place had been locked tight—though to be honest, part of that might be because of what happened to Anne Reynolt during the open house.

As Gonle and the three other chosen peons shuffled down the footpath toward Nau’s lodge, she passed her critical judgment on the scene. “So they figured out how to do rain.” It was more a windblown mist, so fine it dewed her hair and eyelashes, so fine that the lack of real gravity didn’t matter.

Pham Trinli gave a cynical chuckle. “I’ll bet it’s partly garbage collection. In my time, I’ve seen plenty of these faked gravity parks, usually built by some Customer with more money than sense. If you want to have a groundside and a skyside, the clutter starts piling up. Pretty soon you have a sky full of crap.”

Walking beside him, Trud Silipan said, “Sky looks pretty clean to me.”

Trinli looked up into the driven mist. The clouds were low and gray, moving quickly in from the lake’s far shore. Some of this was real and some must be wallpaper, but the two were seamlessly meshed. Not a cheerful scene by Gonle Fong’s standards, but one that was chill and clean. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I gotta hand it to you, Trud. Your Ali Lin is a genius.”

Silipan puffed up a little. “Not just him. It’s the coordination that counts. I’ve got a team of zipheads on this. Every year it just gets better. Someday we’ll even figure out how to make natural-looking sea waves.”

Gonle looked across at Ezr Vinh and rolled her eyes. Neither of these buffoons liked to acknowledge how much everyone’s cooperation—very profitable cooperation—was involved here. Even if the peons weren’t welcome anymore, they still supplied a constant stream of food, finished woods, live plants, and program designs.

The mist made little swirls around the lodge, and the illusion of gravity was sorely tested as the visitors tilted this way and that on their grabber-soled shoes. Then they were in the lodge, warmed by very natural-looking burning logs in Tomas Nau’s big fireplace. The Podmaster gestured them toward a conference table. There were Nau, Brughel, and Reynolt. Three other figures were silhouetted against the windows and the gray light beyond. One was Qiwi.

“Well hello, Jau,” said Ezr. “Welcome… back.”

Sure enough, it was Jau and Rita. Tomas Nau brightened the room lights. The warmth and brightness were nothing more than in any civilized habitation, but somehow the cold and gloom so expensively maintained outside made this inner light a joyous security.

The Podmaster waved them to seats, then sat down himself. As usual, Nau was a picture of generous and high-minded leadership.But he doesn’t fool me for a moment, thought Gonle. Before this mission, she had had a long career, dealing with a dozen Customer cultures, on three worlds. Customers came in all the sizes and colors of humanity. And their governments were even more varied—tyrannies, democracies, demarchies. There was always a way of doing business with them. Big boss Nau was a villain, but a smart villain who understood that he had to do business. Qiwi had seen to that, years ago. It was too bad he held the physical upper hand—thatwas not part of the standard Qeng Ho business environment. Things were dicey when you couldn’t run away from the bad guys. But in the long term, even that didn’t matter.

The Podmaster nodded to each of them. “Thanks for coming in person. You should know that this meeting is being shown live on the local net, but I hope you’ll tell your friends what you’ve seen firsthand.” He grinned. “I’m sure it will make for good conversation at Benny’s. What I have is incredibly good news, but it’s also a great challenge. You see, Pilot Manager Xin has just returned from low Arachna orbit.” He paused. I bet there’s total, awesome silence in Benny’s. “And what he discovered there is… interesting. Jau—please. Describe the mission.”

Xin came to his feet a little too quickly. His wife caught his hand and he stood on the floor, facing them. Gonle tried unsuccessfully to catch Rita’s eye, but the woman’s entire attention was on Jau.I bet they kept her on iceuntil he was back; that was the only thing that would have kept her mouthshut about this. Rita’s expression was one of vast relief. Whatever this news was, it couldn’t be bad.

“Yes, sir. Per your instructions, I was brought on-Watch early, to undertake a close approach of Arachna.” As he spoke, Qiwi passed around some Qeng Ho–quality huds. Gonle mouthed a buy offer at Qiwi as she passed; the other grinned and whispered “Soon!” back at her. The big bosses still didn’t let peons own these things. Maybe finally that would change, too. A second went by as the huds synched on the consensus image. The space above the table rippled and became a view of the L1 rockpile. Far away, beyond the floor, there was the disk of the Spider world.

“My pilots and I took the last functioning pinnace.” A thread of gold arced out from the rockpile; the tip accelerated to the halfway point and then began to slow. Their pov caught up with the pinnace; ahead, the disk of Arachna grew wide. The world looked almost as frozen and dead as when the humans had first arrived. There was one big difference: a faint glitter of city lights across the northern hemisphere, webbing here and there at major cities.

Pham Trinli’s voice came from beyond the dark, an incredulous hoot. “I bet you got spotted!”

“They pinged us. Show the defense radars and native satellites,” he said to the display. A cloud of blue and green dots blossomed in the space around the planet. On the ground, there were arcs of flashing light, the sweep of the Spiders’ missile radars. “It’s going to be more of a problem in the future.”

Anne Reynolt’s voice cut across the Pilot Manager’s. “My network people deleted all the hard evidence. The risk was well worth it.”

“Hunh! That must have been something motherloving important.”

“Oh Pham, tas. Tas.” Jau stepped to one side of the consensus image, and jabbed his hand deep into the haze of satellites, marking one blue dot with the labelKINDRED GROUND RECON SATELLITE 543 followed by orbital parameters. He glanced in Pham’s direction, and there was a quiet smile on his face, as if he were expecting some reaction. The numbers didn’t mean anything to Gonle. She leaned to one side, looked at Trinli around the edge of the image. The old fraud looked just as mystified as any, and not at all happy with Xin’s smile or Silipan’s smug chuckle.

Trinli squinted into the display. “Okay, so you matched orbits with Recon543.” Beside him, Ezr Vinh sucked in a surprised breath. This made Trinli’s frown even deeper. “Launch date seven hundred Ksec ago, booster chemical, period synchronous, altitude…” His voice trailed off in a kind of gargle. “Altitude twelve thousand damn-all kilometers! That must be a mistake.”

Jau’s grinned widened. “No mistake. That’s the whole reason I went down for a close look.”

The significance finally percolated through to Gonle. In Supplies and Services, she dealt mainly with bargaining and inventory managment. But shipping was a big part of price points, and she was Qeng Ho. Arachna was a terrestroid planet, with a 90Ksec day. Synchronous altitude should have been way higher than twelve thousand klicks. Even for a nontechnical person, the satellite was a magical impossibility. “It’s stationkeeping?” she asked. “Little rockets?”

“No. Even fusion rockets would have trouble doing that for days at a time.”

“Cavorite.” Ezr’s voice was faint, awed. Where had she heard that word before?

But Jau was nodding. “Right.” He said something to the display, and now the view was from his pinnace. “Getting a close look was a problem, especially since I didn’t want to show my main torch. Instead, I fried the satellite’s cameras and then did an instantaneous match from below…. You can begin to see it now, at the center of my target pointer. The closing speed has fallen from fifty meters a second, to an instant now where we’re stopped relative to each other. It’s about five meters above us now.” There was something in the pointer, something boxy and dead black, falling toward them like a yo-yo on a string. It slowed, passed a meter or two below them, and started back up. The topside was not black but an irregular pattern of dark grays. “Okay, freeze the image. This should give you a good look. A flat architecture, probably gyro-stabilized. The polyhedral shell is for radar evasion. Except for the impossible orbit, this thing is a typical low-tech stealthed satellite….” The satellite slid upward again, but this time was met by grappling hooks. “This is where we took it aboard the pinnace—and left behind a credible explosion.”

“Good flying, man.” That from Pham Trinli, acknowledging someone almost as good as himself.

“Ha. Tas even tougher than it looks. I had to run my zipheads near the edge of a nonrecoverable panic all through the rendezvous. There were just too many inconsistencies in the dynamics.”

Silipan interrupted cheerily, “That will change. We’re reprogramming all the pilots for cavorite maneuvers.”

Jau killed the imagery and frowned at Silipan. “You screw up, and we’ll have no pilots.”

Gonle couldn’t take much more irrelevant chitchat. “The satellite. You have it here? How did the Spiders do this?”

She noticed Nau grinning at her. “I think Miss Fong has identified the immediate issue. Do you remember those stories of gravity anomalies in the altiplano? The short of it is, those stories weretrue. The Kindred military discovered some kind of—call it antigravity. Apparently they’ve been pursuing this for ten years now. We never caught on because Accord Intelligence missed it, and our penetration of the Kindred side has always lagged. This little satellite massed eight tonnes, but almost two tonnes of that was ‘cavorite’ cladding. The Kindred Spiders are using this remarkable substance simply to increase their rockets’ throw weight. I have a little demonstration for you….”

He spoke to the air. “Douse the fireplace, cut ventilation.” He paused, and the room became very quiet. Over by the wall, Qiwi closed a tall window that had drawn a taste of moistness in from the lake. The park’s fake sun peeked between breaks in the clouds, and streamers of light glittered on the water. Gonle wondered vaguely if Nau’s zipheads were so good that they could orchestrate his world for these moments. Probably.

The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. “This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we’ve stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch.” He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched…. And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling… straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink—and remained there.

No one said anything for several seconds.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we came to the OnOff star hoping for treasure. So far we’ve learned some new astrophysics, developed a slightly better ramdrive. The biologicals of the Spider world are another treasure, also enough to finance our coming. But originally, we expected more. We expected to find the remains of a starfaring race—well, after forty years, it looks like we have succeeded. Spectacularly.”

Maybe it was just as well that Nau had not scheduled this as a general meeting. Everyone was suddenly talking at once. Lord only knew what it was like over at Benny’s. Ezr Vinh finally got a question on the floor. “You think the Spiders made this stuff?”

Nau shook his head. “No. The Kindred had to mine thousands of tonnes of low-grade ore to get this much magic.”

Trinli said, “We’ve known for years that the Spiders evolved here, that they never had a higher tech.”

“Quite so. And their own archeologists have no solid evidence of visitations. But this… this stuffis an artifact, even if only we can see it as such. Anne’s automation has spent several days on this. It’s a coordinated processing matrix.”

“I thought you said it was refined from native ores.”

“Yes. It makes the conclusion all the more fantastic. For forty years we’ve thought the diamond powders of Arachna were either infalls or biological skeletons. Now it looks like they are fossil processing devices. And at least some of them reassert their mission when brought close together. Like localizers, but much much smaller, and with a special purpose… to manipulate physical laws in ways we don’t begin to understand.”

Trinli looked as if someone had punched him in the face, as if decades of bombast had been beaten out of him. He said softly, “Nanotech. The dream.”

“What? Yes, the Failed Dream. Till now.” The Podmaster looked up at the tile lying on the ceiling. He smiled. “Whoever visited here, it was millions or billions of years ago. I doubt we’ll ever find any camp tents or garbage middens… but the signs of their technology are everywhere.”

Vinh: “We were looking for starfarers, but we were too small and all we saw were their ankles.” He tore his gaze down from the ceiling. “Maybe even these—” He waved at the window, and Gonle realized that he was talking about the big diamonds of L1. “Maybe even these are artifacts.”

Brughel moved forward in his chair. “Nonsense. They are simple diamond rocks.” But there was an edge of uncertainty in the aggressive look he flashed around the table.

Nau hesitated an instant, then gave an easy chuckle, waving his thug silent. “We’re all beginning to sound like some Dawn Age fantasy. The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo. With what we already have, this expedition may be the most important in human history.”

And the most profitable, too.Gonle shifted back on her chair, and tried to catalogue all the things they might do with the glittering material that was lying on the ceiling.What’s the best way to sell something like that?How many centuries of monopoly might be wrung out of it?

But the Podmaster had returned to more practical matters. “So that’s the fantastic news. In the long term, it is good beyond our wildest dreams. In the short term—well, it puts a real knot in the Schedule. Qiwi?”

“Yes. As you know, the Spiders are about five years from having a mature planetary computer network, something we can reliably act through.”

Something advanced enough that we can use.Until today, that had been the biggest treasure that Gonle Fong had envisioned coming out of these years of exile. Forget about marginal advances in ramdrives or even biologicals. There was a whole industrialized world down there, with a culture guaranteed to be alien from other markets. If they controlled that, or even had a dominant bargaining position, they would rank with the legends of the Qeng Ho marketing. Gonle understood that. Surely Nau did. Qiwi did too, though right now she was talking simple idealism:

“Till now, we thought that they were also about five years away from really needing our help. We thought that any Kindred/Accord war wouldn’t happen till then. Well… we were wrong. The Kindred don’t have much of a computer net—but they do have the cavorite mines. Their cavorite satellites are stealthed for now, but that’s only for temporary advantage. Very soon, their missile fleet will be upgraded. Politically, we see them moving to subvert smaller countries, egging them into confrontation with the Accord. We simply can’t wait another five years to take a hand in things.”

Jau said, “There are other reasons for advancing the deadlines. With this cavorite, it’s going to be next to impossible to keep our operations a secret much longer. The Spiders are going to be out in local space very soon. Depending on how much of that”—he jerked his thumb at the glistening tile on the ceiling—“they have, they may actually be more maneuverable than we are.”

Beside him, Rita was looking more and more upset. “You mean there’s a chance Pedure’s crowd couldwin ? If we have to advance the Schedule, then it’s time we stopped pussyfooting. We need to come down with military force, on the side of the Accord.”

The Podmaster nodded solemnly in Liao’s direction. “I hear you, Rita. There are people down there that we’ve all come to respect, even to—” He waved his hand as if to push aside deeper sentiments, to concentrate on hard reality. “But as your Podmaster, I have to look at priorities: My highest priority is the survival of you and all the humans in our little pod. Don’t mistake the beauty you have all created here. The truth is, we have precious little real military power.” The setting sun had turned the lake to gold, and now the slanting rays lit the meeting room with a gentle, even warmth. “In fact, we are almost castaways, and we are about as far from Humankind as anyone has ever been. Our second priority—and it’s inextricably bound to the first—is the survival of the Spiders’ advanced industrial civilization, and therefore its people and their culture. We must act very carefully. We can’t act out of simple affection…. And you know, I listen to the translations, too. I think that people like Victory Smith and Sherkaner Underhill would understand.”

“But they can help!”

“Maybe. I’d call them in an instant if we had better information and better network penetration. But if we reveal ourselves unnecessarily, we could unite them all against us—or alternatively, provoke Pedure into attacking them immediately. We must save them, and we must not sacrifice ourselves.”

Rita wavered. To Nau’s right, but just in the shadows, Ritser Brughel glowered at her. The younger Podmaster had never really grasped the fact that the old, Emergent rules must change. The idea of someone giving back talk still sent him into a rage.Thank the Lord he’s not running things. Nau was a tough nut, smooth and ruthless despite all the nice words—but you could do business with him.

No one else spoke in support of Rita’s position, yet she made one more try. “We know Sherkaner Underhill is a genius. He would understand. He could help.”

Tomas Nau sighed. “Yes, Underhill. We owe him a lot. Without him, we’d probably be twenty years short of success, not just five. But, I’m afraid…” He glanced down the table at Ezr Vinh. “You know more about Underhill and Dawn Age technology than anyone, Ezr. What do you think?”

Gonle almost laughed. Vinh had been following the conversation like a spectator at a racquet match; now the ball had hit him square between the eyes. “Um. Yes. Underhill is remarkable. He’s like von Neumann, Einstein, Minsky, Zhang—a dozen Dawn Age geniuses wrapped into one body. Either that or the guy is just a genius at picking graduate students.” Vinh smiled sadly. “I’m sorry, Rita. For you and me, the Exile time has only been ten or fifteen years. Underhill has lived it all, second by second. By Spider standards—and pre-tech human ones—he’s an old man. I’m afraid he’s at the edge of senility. He’s lived through all the easy technical payoffs, and now he’s hit the dead ends…. What was flexibility has become superstitious mush. If we have to give up our Lurk advantage, I’d suggest we just contact the Accord government, play things as a straight business deal.”

Vinh might have continued, but the Podmaster said, “Rita, we’re trying for the safest outcome for everyone. I promise, if that means throwing ourselves on the Spiders’ mercy—well, so be it.” His glance flickered to his right, and Gonle realized that the message was directed at Brughel as much as anyone. Nau paused a moment, but no one had anything more to say. His voice became more businesslike. “So, the Schedule is suddenly very much advanced. Tas forced on us, but I am pleased by the challenge.” His smile flashed in the fake sunset. “One way or another, our Exile will be over in a year. We can afford to—we must—expend resources. From now till we’ve saved the Spider world, almost everyone will be on-Watch.”

Wow.

“We’ll start running the volatile plant at redline duty cycle.” Heads went up all around the table. “Remember, if we still need it in a year, we will have lost. We have an awful lot of planning in front of us, people—we need to unleash every last bit of our potential. As of now, I’m dropping the last community use limits. The ‘underground’ economy will have access to everything except the most critical security automation.”

Yes!Gonle grinned across the table at Qiwi Lisolet, saw her grinning right back. So that was what Qiwi had meant by “soon”! Nau went on for some seconds, not so much making detailed plans as undoing this and that stupid rule that had kept operations so hobbled over the years. She could feel the enthusiasm building with every sentence.Maybe I can start afutures market on groundside trade.

The meeting ended on an incredible high. On the way out, Gonle gave Qiwi a hug. “Kiddo, you did it!” she said softly.

Qiwi just grinned back, but it was a wider smile than Gonle had seen her wear in a long time.

Afterward, the four visiting peons walked back up the hillside, the last of the sunlight throwing long shadows before them. She took a last look behind her before they entered the forest.Presumptuous, this park. But stillit was beautiful, and I had something to do with it. The last light of the sun showed from under far clouds. It might be Nauly manipulation or the random outcome of the park’s automation. Either way, it seemed auspicious. Old Nau thought he manipulated everything. Gonle knew that this sudden, final liberalization was something the Podmaster might try to stuff back in the bottle later on, when imagination and sharp trading was more a risk than the alternatives. But Gonle was Qeng Ho. Over the years, she and Qiwi and Benny and dozens of others had chipped away at the Emergents’ tight little tyranny, until almost every Emergent was “corrupted” by the underground trade. Nau had learned that you win by doing business. After the Spider markets were opened up, he would see there was no advantage to stuffing freedom back in the bottle.

Tomas Nau’s second meeting was later in the day, aboard theInvisibleHand. Here they could talk, far from innocent ears. “I got Kal Omo’s report, Podmaster. From the snoops. You fooled almost everyone.”

“Almost?”

“Well, you know Vinh—but he didn’t see through everything you said. And Jau Xin looks… dubious.”

Nau glanced a question at Anne Reynolt.

Reynolt’s reply was quick. “Xin is one we really need, Podmaster. He’s our only remaining Pilot Manager. We would have lost that pinnace if not for him. The ziphead pilots glitched when they saw the cavorite orbit. Suddenly all the rules had changed and they just couldn’t deal with the situation.”

“Okay, he’s a secret doubter.” There was no help for that really. Xin had been near the operational center of too many things. He probably suspected the truth behind the Diem Massacre. “So we can’t ice him, and we can’t fool him, and we’ll need him at the bloodiest stage of the job. Still… I think Rita Liao is a sufficient lever. Ritser. Make sure Jau knows that her welfare depends on his quality of service.”

Ritser gave a little smile, and made a note.

Nau scanned Omo’s report for himself. “Yes, we did quite well. But then, telling people what they want to believe is an easy job. No one seemed to catch all the consequences of pushing the Schedule forward five years. There’s no way we can pull a smooth network takeover now, and we need an intact industrial ecology on the planet—but there’s no need for the whole planet to participate. Right now”—Nau glanced at the latest reports from Reynolt’s zips—“seven Spider nations have nuclear weapons. Four have substantial arsenals, and three have delivery systems.”

Reynolt shrugged. “So we engineer a war.”

“A precisely limited one, one that leaves the world financial system intact and controlled by us.” An exercise in disaster management.

“And the Kindred?”

“We want them to survive, of course—but weak enough that we can bluff full control. We’ll throw a bit more ‘good luck’ their way.”

Reynolt was nodding. “Yes. We can tailor things. Southland has long-range missiles but is otherwise backward; most of its population will be hibernating through the Dark. They’re very frightened of what will be done to them by the advanced powers. Honored Pedure has plans for taking advantage of that. We can make sure she succeeds—” Anne went on, detailing what frauds and miscues could be implemented, which cities could be safely murdered, how to save the Accord sites that held resources the Kindred did not yet have. Most of the deaths would be delivered by their proxies, which was just as well, considering the sorry state of their own weapons systems…. Brughel was watching her with a certain bemused awe—the way he always did when Anne talked like this. Dispassionate and calm as ever, yet she could be as bloody-minded as Brughel himself.

Anne Reynolt had been a young woman when the Emergency came to Frenk. If history were written by the losing side, her name would be legend. After the Frenkisch military had surrendered, Anne Reynolt’s ragtag partisans had fought on for years—and not as a fringe nuisance. Nau had seen the Intelligence estimates: Reynolt had tripled the cost of the invasion. She had taken an inchoate popular opposition and come within a hairsbreadth of defeating the Emergency’s expeditionary force. And when her cause had ultimately failed—well, enemies such as that were best disposed of quickly. But Alan Nau had noticed that this enemy was peculiar to the point of uniqueness. Focusing the higher, people-oriented skills was normally a losing proposition. The very nature of Focusing tended to leave out the broad sensibilities that were necessary to manage people. And yet… Reynolt was young, brilliant, with an absolute dedication to principle. Her fanatical resistance was like nothing so much as a ziphead’s loyalty to its subject matter. What if shecould be profitably Focused?

Uncle Alan’s long shot had paid off. Reynolt’s only academic specialty had been ancient literature, but Focus had somehow captured the more subtle skills of her accidental career: warfare, subversion, leadership. Alan had kept his discovery carefully out of sight, but he had used this very special ziphead over the following decades. Her skills had helped establish Uncle Alan as the dominant Podmaster of the Home Regime. She had been a very special gift to a very favored nephew….

And though he would never admit it to Ritser Brughel, sometimes when Tomas looked into Reynolt’s pale blue eyes… he felt a superstitious chill. For a hundred years of her lifetime, Anne Reynolt had worked to undo and suppress everything that was important to her unFocused self. If she wanted to cause him harm, she could do so much. But that was the beauty of Focus; that was the reason the Emergency would prevail. With Focus you got the capabilities of the subject without the humanity. And given attentive maintenance, all the ziphead’s interest and loyalty stayed squarely on its subject matter and its owner.

“Okay, get your people on it, Anne. You have one year. We’ll probably need a major vessel in low orbit during the final Ksecs.”

“You know,” said Ritser, “I think the groundside of this is working out for the best. With the Kindred, one or two guys are in charge. We’ll know who to hold responsible when we give orders. With that pus-be-damned Accord—”

“True. There are too many autonomous power centers within the Accord; their nonsovereign-kingship thing is even crazier than a democracy.” Nau shrugged. “It’s the luck of the draw. We have to take what we know we can control. Without the cavorite, we’d have another five years of slack. By then, the Accord would have a mature network, and we could take over everything without anyone firing a shot—more or less the goal I’m still hoping for in public.”

Ritser leaned forward. “And that is going to be our biggest problem. Once our people realize this is a major Spider fry and their special friends are the main course—”

“Of course. But handled properly, the final outcome should appear to be an unavoidable tragedy, one that would have been much more horrible without our efforts.”

“It will be even trickier than the Diem thing. I wish you hadn’t given the Peddlers increased resource access.”

“It’s unavoidable, Ritser. We need their logistical genius. But I will withhold full network processing from them. We’ll bring out all your security zips, do really intense monitoring. If necessary, there can be some fatal accidents.”

He glanced at Anne. “And speaking of accidents… is there any progress on your sabotage theory?” It had been almost a year since Anne’s maybe-accident in the MRI clinic. A year and not a sign of enemy action. Of course, there had been precious little evidence before the event, either.

But Anne Reynolt was adamant. “Someone is manipulating our systems, Podmaster, both the localizers and the zipheads. The evidence is spread through large patterns; it’s not something I can put into words. But he’s getting more aggressive… and I’m very close to nailing him, maybe as close as when he got me before.”

Anne had never bought the explanation that a stupid mistake had wiped her. But her Focushad been out of tune, even if so subtly it slipped past his own checks.Just how paranoid should I be? Anne had cleared Ritser of suspicion in the affair. “He? Him?”

“You know the suspect list. Pham Trinli is still at the top of it. Over the years, he’s wrung my techs dry. And he was the one who gave us the secret of the Qeng Ho localizers.”

“But you’ve had twenty years now to study them.”

Anne frowned. “The ensemble behavior is extremely complex, and there are physical-layer issues. Give me another three or four years.”

He glanced at Ritser. “Opinion?”

The junior Podmaster grinned. “We’ve been over this before, sir. Trinli is useful and we have a hold on him. He’s a weasel, but he’s our weasel.”

True. Trinli stood to gain much with the Emergents, and lose even more if the Qeng Ho ever learned of his traitorous past. Watch after Watch, the old man had passed every one of Nau’s tests, and in the process become ever more useful. In retrospect, the fellow was always just as sharp as he had to be. Of course, that was the strongest evidence against him.Pus andPest. “Okay. Ritser, I want you and Anne to set things up so we can pull the plug on Trinli and Vinh at an instant’s notice. Jau Xin we’ll have to keep alive in any case—but we have Rita to keep him in line.”

“What about Qiwi Lisolet, sir?” Ritser’s face was bland, but the Podmaster knew there was a smirk hidden just below the surface.

“Ah. I’m sure Qiwi will figure things out; we may have to scrub her several times before the crisis point.” But with luck she might be of use right to the end. “Okay. Those are our special problem cases, but almost anyone could twig the truth if we have bad luck. Surveillance and suppression readiness must be of the highest order.” He nodded to his Vice-Podmaster. “It will be hard work, this next year. The Peddlers are a competent, dedicated crowd. We’ll need them on duty till the action begins—and we’ll need many of them in the aftermath. The only letup may be during the takeover itself. It’s reasonable that they be simply observers then.”

“At which time, we’ll feed them the story of our noble efforts to limit the genocide.” Ritser smiled, intrigued by the challenge. “I like it.”

They set up the overall plan. Anne and her strategy zips would flesh out the details. Ritser was right; this would be trickier than the Diem wetwork. On the other hand, if they could just maintain the fraud till the takeover… that might be enough. Once he controlled Arachna, he could pick and choose from both Spiders and Qeng Ho, the best of both their worlds. And discard the rest. The prospect was a cool oasis at the end of his long, long journey.

FORTY-FIVE

The Dark was upon them once more. Hrunkner could almost feel the weight of traditional values on his shoulders. For the trads—and deep down, he would always be one—there was a time to be born and a time to die; reality turned in cycles. And the greatest cycle was the cycle of the sun.

Hrunkner had lived through two suns now. He was an old cobber. Last time when the Dark had come, he had been young. There had been a world war going on, and real doubt if his country could survive. And this time? There were minor wars, all over the globe. But the big one had not occurred. If it did, Hrunkner would be partly responsible. And if it didn’t—well, he liked to think that he would be partly responsible for that, too.

Either way, the cycles were shattered forever. Hrunkner nodded to the corporal who held the door for him. He stepped out onto frost-covered flagstones. He wore thick boots, covers, and sleeves. The cold gnawed the tips of his hands, burned his breathing passages even behind his air warmer. The alignment of the Princeton hills kept out the heaviest snows; that and the deep river moorage were the reasons why the city had returned cycle after cycle. But this was late afternoon on a summer day—and you had to search to find the dim disk that had been the sun. The world was beyond the soft kindliness of the Waning Years, beyond even the Early Dark. It stood at the edge of the thermal collapse, when weakening storms would circle and circle, squeezing the last water from the air—opening the way to times much colder, and the final stillness.

In earlier generations, all but soldiers would be in their deeps by now. Even in his own generation, in the Great War, only the die-hard tunnel warriors still fought this far into the Dark. This time—well, there were plenty of soldiers. Hrunkner had his own military escort. And even the security cobbers around the Underhill house were in uniform nowadays. But these were not caretakers, guarding against endcycle scavengers. Princeton wasoverflowing with people. The new, Dark Time housing was jammed. The city was busier than Unnerby had ever seen it.

And the mood? Fear close to panic, wild enthusiasm, often both in the same people. Business was booming. Just two days earlier, Prosperity Software had bought a controlling interest in the Bank of Princeton. No doubt the grab had gutted Prosperity’s financial reserves, and put them in a business that their software people knew nothing about. It was insane—and very much in the spirit of the times.

Hrunkner’s guards had to push their way through the crowd at the Hill House entrance. Even past the property limits, there were reporters with their little four-color cameras hanging from helium balloons. They couldn’t know who Hrunkner was, but they saw the guards and the direction he was heading.

“Sir, can you tell us—”

“Has Southland threatened preemption?” This one tugged on his balloon’s string, dragging the camera down till it hung just over Hrunkner’s eyes.

Unnerby raised his forearms in an elaborate shrug. “How should I know? I’m just a friggin’ sergeant.” In fact, hewas still a sergeant, but the rank was meaningless. Unnerby was one of those rankless cobbers who made whole military bureaucracies hop to their tune. As a young fellow he had been aware of such. They had seemed as distant as the King himself. Now… now he was so busy that even a visit with a friend had to be counted by the minute, balanced against what it might cost the life-and-death schedules he must keep.

His claim stopped the reporters just long enough for his team to get past and scuttle up the steps. Even so, it might have been the wrong thing to say. Behind him, Unnerby could see the reporters clustering together. By tomorrow, his name would be on their list. Ah, for the times when everyone thought that Hill House was just a plush annex to the University. Over the years, that cover had frayed away. The press thought they knew all about Sherkaner now.

Past the armored-glass doors there were no more intruders. Things were suddenly quiet, and it was much too warm for jackets and leggings. As he shed the insulation, he saw Underhill and his guide-bug standing just around the corner, out of the reporters’ sight. In the old days, Sherk would have come outside to greet him. Even at the height of his radio fame, it hadn’t bothered him to come outside. But nowadays Smith’s security had its way.

“So, Sherk. I came.” I always come when you call. For decades, every new idea had seemed crazier than the last—and changed the world still again. But things had slowly changed with Sherkaner too. The General had given him the first warning, at Calorica, five years ago. After that, there had been rumors. Sherkaner had drifted away from active research. Apparently his work on antigravity had gone nowhere, and now the Kindred were launching floater satellites, for God’s sake!

“Thanks, Hrunk.” His smile was quick, nervous. “Junior told me you would be in town and—”

“Little Victory? She’s here?”

“Yes! In the building somewhere. You’ll be seeing her.” Sherk led Hrunkner and his guards down the main hall, talking all the while about Little Victory and the other children, about Jirlib’s researches and the youngest ones’ basic training. Hrunkner tried to imagine what they looked like. It had been seventeen years since the kidnappings… since he had last seen the cobblies.

It was quite a caravan they made trooping down the hall, the guide-bug leading Sherkaner leading Hrunkner and the latter’s security. Underhill’s progress was a slow drift to the left, corrected by Mobiy’s constant gentle tugging on his tether. Sherk’s lateral dysbadisia was not a mental disease; like his tremor, it was a low-level nervous disorder. The luck of the Dark had made him a very late casualty of the Great War. Nowadays he looked and talked like someone a generation older.

Sherkaner stopped by an elevator; Unnerby didn’t remember it from his previous visits. “Watch this, Hrunk…. Press nine, Mobiy.” The bug extended one of its long, furry forelegs. The tip hovered uncertainly for a second, then poked the “9” slot on the elevator door. “They say no bug can be taught numbers. Mobiy and I, we’re working on it.”

Hrunkner shed his entourage at the elevator. It was just the two of them—and Mobiy—who headed upward. Sherkaner seemed to relax, and his tremor eased. He patted Mobiy’s back gently, but no longer held so tight to the tether. “This is just between you and me, Sergeant.”

Unnerby sharpened his gaze. “My guards are Deep Secret rated, Sherk. They’ve seen things that—”

Underhill raised a hand. His eyes gleamed in the ceiling lights. Those eyes seemed full of the old genius. “This is… different. It’s something I’ve wanted you to know for a long time, and now that things are so desperate—”

The elevator slowed to a stop and the doors opened. Sherkaner had taken them all the way to the top of the hill. “I have my office up here now. This used to be Junior’s, but now that she’s been commissioned, she has graciously willed it to me!” The hall had once been out-of-doors; Hrunkner remembered it as a path overlooking the children’s little park. Now it was walled with heavy glass, strong enough to hold pressure even after the atmosphere had snowed out.

There was the sound of electric motors, and doors slid aside. Sherkaner waved his friend into the room beyond. Tall windows looked out on the city. Little Victory had had quite a room. Now it was a Sherkaner jumble. Over in the corner was that rocket bomb/dollhouse, and a sleeping perch for Mobiy. But the room was dominated by processor boxes and superquality displays. The pictures shown were Mountroyal landscapes, the colors wilder than Hrunk had ever seen outside of nature. And yet, the pictures were surreal. There were shaded forest glens, but with plaid undertones. There were grizzards sleeting across an iceberg eruption, all in the colors of lava. It was graphical madness… silly videomancy. Hrunkner stopped, and waved at the colors. “I’m impressed, but it’s not very well calibrated, Sherk.”

“Oh, it’s calibrated, all right—but the inner meaning hasn’t been derived.” Sherk mounted a console perch, and seemed to be looking at the pictures. “Heh. The colorsare gross; after a while, you stop noticing…. Hrunkner, have you ever thought that our current problems are more serious than they should be?”

“How should I know? Everything is new.” Unnerby let himself sag. “Yeah, things are on an infernal slide. This Southland mess is every nightmare we imagined. They have nuclear weapons, maybe two hundred, and delivery systems. They’ve bankrupted themselves trying to keep up with the advanced nations.”

“Bankrupted themselves, just to kill the rest of us?”

Thirty-five years ago, Sherk had seen the shape of all this, at least in general outlines. Now he was asking moron questions. “No,” said Unnerby, almost lecturing. “At least, that’s not how it started out. They tried to create an industrial/agricultural base that could stay active in the Dark. They failed. They’ve got enough to keep a couple of cities going, a military division or two. Right now Southland is about five years further into the cold than the rest of the world. The dry hurricanes are already building over the south pole.” Southland was a marginally livable place at best; at the middle of the Bright Time, there were a few years where farming was possible. But the continent was fabulously rich in minerals. Over the last five generations, the Southlanders had been exploited by northern mining corporations, more avariciously each cycle than the last. But in this generation, there was a sovereign state in the South, one that was very afraid of the North and the coming Dark. “They spent so much trying to make the leap to nuclear-electrics that they don’t even have all their deepnesses provisioned.”

“And the Kindred are poisoning whatever goodwill there might otherwise be.”

“Of course.” Pedure was a genius. Assassination, blackmail, clever fearmongering. Whatever was evil, Pedure was very good at. And so now the Southland government figured that it was the Accord that planned to pounce on them in the Dark. “The news networks have it right, Sherk. The Southies might nuke us.”

Hrunkner looked beyond Sherkaner’s garish displays. From here, he could see Princeton in all directions. Some of the buildings—like Hill House—would be habitable even after the air condensed. They could hold pressure, and had good power connections. Most of the city was just slightly underground. It had taken fifteen years of construction madness to do that for the cities of the Accord, but now an entire civilization could survive, awake, through the Dark. But they were so close to the surface; they would quickly die in any nuclear war. The industries Hrunkner had helped to create had done miracles…. So now we’re more at risk than ever.More miracles were needed. Hrunkner and millions of others were struggling with those impossible demands. During the last thirty days, Unnerby had averaged only three hours’ sleep a day. This detour to chat with Underhill had scuttled one planning meeting and an inspection. Am I here out of loyalty… or because I hope that Sherk can save us all again?

Underhill steepled his forearms, making a little temple in front of his head. “Have… have you ever thought that maybe something else is responsible for our problems?”

“Damn it, Sherk. Like what?”

Sherkaner steadied himself on his perch, and his words came low and fast. “Like aliens from outer space. They’ve been here since before the New Sun. You and I saw them in the Dark, Hrunkner. The lights in the sky, remember?”

He rattled on, his tone so unlike the Sherkaner Underhill of years past. The Underhill of old revealed his weird speculations with an arch look or a challenging laugh. But now Underhill spoke in a rush, almost as if someone would stop him… or contradict him? This Underhill spoke like… a desperate man, grasping at fantasy.

The old fellow seemed to realize that he had lost his audience. “You don’t believe me, do you, Hrunk.”

Hrunkner shrank back on his perch. What resources had already been sunk into this horrifying nonsense? Other worlds—life on other worlds—that was one of Underhill’s oldest, craziest ideas. And now it was surfacing after years of justified obscurity. He knew the General; she’d be no more impressed by this than he was. The world was teetering on the edge of an abyss. There was no room to humor poor Sherkaner. Surely the General did not let this distract her. “It’s like the videomancy, isn’t it, Sherk?” All yourlife, you’ve made miracles. But now you need them faster and more desperately than ever before. And all you have left is superstition.

“No, no, Hrunk. The videomancy was just a means, a cover so the aliens wouldn’t see. Here, I’ll show you!” Sherkaner’s hands tapped at control holes. The pictures flickered, the color values changing. One landscape morphed from summer to winter. “It’ll be a moment. The bit rate is low, but channel setup is a very big computation.” Underhill’s head tilted toward tiny displays that Hrunkner could not see. His hands tapped impatiently on the console. “More than anyone, you deserved to know about this, Hrunk. You have done so much for us; you could have done so much more if only we’d brought you into it. But the General—”

On the display, the colors were shifting, the landscapes melting into low-resolution chaos. Several seconds passed.

And Sherkaner gave a little cry of surprise and unhappiness.

What was left of the picture was recognizable, if much lower bandwidth than the original video. This appeared to be a standard eight-color video stream. They were looking out a camera in Victory Smith’s office at Lands Command. It was a good picture, but crude compared to true vision, or even Sherk’s videomancy displays.

But this picture showed something real: General Smith stared back at them from her desk. The work was piled high around her. She waved an aide out of the office, and stared out at Underhill and Unnerby.

“Sherkaner… you brought Hrunkner Unnerby to your office.” Her tone was tight and angry.

“Yes, I—”

“I thought we discussed this, Sherkaner. You can play with your toys as much as you please, but you are not to bother people who have real work to do.”

Hrunkner had never heard the General use such tones and such sarcasm with Underhill. However necessary it might be, he would have given anything not to witness it.

Underhill seemed about to protest. He twisted on his perch, and his arms flailed, begging. Then: “Yes, dear.”

General Smith nodded and waved at Hrunkner. “I’m sorry for this inconvenience, Sergeant. If you need help getting back on schedule…”

“Thank you, ma’am. That may be. I’ll check with the airport and get back to you.”

“Fine.” The image from Lands Command vanished.

Sherkaner lowered his head until it rested on the console. His arms and legs were inward-drawn and still. The guide-bug moved closer, pushed at him questioningly.

Underhill moved toward him. “Sherk?” he said softly. “Are you all right?”

The other was silent for a moment. Then he raised his head. “I’ll be okay. I’m sorry, Hrunk.”

“I—um, Sherkaner, I’ve got to go. I have another meeting—” That wasn’t quite true. He had already missed both the meeting and the inspection. What was true was that there were so many other things to attend to. With Smith’s help he might be able to get out of Princeton fast enough to catch up.

Underhill climbed awkwardly down from his perch and let Mobiy guide him after the sergeant. As the heavy doors slid open, Sherkaner reached out a single forehand, gently tugging on one of his sleeves.More insanity?

“Don’t ever give up, Hrunk. There’s always a way, just like before; you’ll see.”

Unnerby nodded, mumbled something apologetic, and eased out of the room. As he walked down the glass-walled hallway toward the elevator, Sherkaner stood with Mobiy at the entrance to the office. Once upon a time, Underhill would have followed all the way down to the main foyer. But he seemed to realize that something had changed between them. As the elevator doors shut behind Unnerby, he saw his old friend give a shy little wave.

Then he was gone, and the elevator was sinking downward. For a moment, Unnerby surrendered to rage and sadness. Funny how the two emotions could mix. He had heard the stories about Sherkaner, and had willed disbelief. Like Sherkaner, he hadwanted certain things to be true and had ignored the contrary symptoms. Unlike Sherk, Hrunkner Unnerby could not ignore the hard truths of their situation. And so this ultimate crisis would have to be won or lost without Sherkaner Underhill….

Unnerby forced his mind away from Sherkaner. There would come a time later, hopefully a time to remember the good things instead of this afternoon. For now… if he could commandeer a jet out of Princeton, he might be back at Lands Command in time to chat up his deputy directors.

Around the level of the cobblies’ old park, the elevator slowed. Unnerby had thought this was Sherkaner’s private lift. Who might this be?

The doors slid back—

“Well! Sergeant Unnerby! May I join you?”

A young lady lieutenant, dressed in quartermaster fatigues. Victory Smith as she had been so many years ago. Her aspect had the same brightness, her movement the same graceful precision. For a moment, Unnerby could only boggle at the apparition beyond the doors.

The vision stepped into the elevator, and Unnerby involuntarily moved back, still in shock. Then the other’s military bearing slipped for an instant. The lieutenant lowered her head shyly. “Uncle Hrunk, don’t you recognize me? It’s Viki, all grown up.”

Of course. Unnerby gave a weak laugh. “I—I’ll never call you Little Victory again.”

Viki put a couple of arms affectionately across his shoulders. “No. You’re allowed. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll ever be giving you orders. Daddy said you were coming up today…. Have you seen him? Do you have a moment to talk with me?”

The elevator was sliding to a stop, foyer level. “I—Yes, I did…. Look, I’m in a bit of rush to get back to Lands Command.” After the debacle upstairs, he just didn’t know what he could say to Viki.

“That’s okay. I’m on minus minutes myself. Let’s share the ride to the airport.” She waved a grin. “Twice the security.”

Lieutenants might manage a security escort, but they are rarely the subject of one. Young Victory’s group was about half the number of Unnerby’s but, from the look of them, even more competent. Several of the guards were clearly combat veterans. The fellow on the top perch behind the driver was one of the biggest troopers Unnerby had ever seen. When they slid into the car, he’d given Unnerby an odd little salute, not a military thing at all. Huh! That was Brent!

“So. What did Daddy have to say?” The tone was light, but Hrunkner could hear the anxiety. Viki was not quite the perfect, opaque intelligence officer. It might have been a flaw, but then he had known her since she had cobblie eyes.

And that made it all the harder for Unnerby to say the truth. “You must know, Viki. He’s not himself anymore. He’s all into alien monsters and videomancy. It took the General herself to shut him up.”

Young Victory was quiet, but her arms drew into an angry frown. For a moment, he thought she was angry with him. But then he heard her faint mutter, “The old fool.” She sighed, and they rode in silence for a few seconds.

Surface traffic was sparse, mainly cobbers traveling between disconnected boroughs. The streetlights splashed pools of blue and ultra, glittered off the frost that lined the gutters and the sides of buildings. Light from within the buildings glowed through the rime, showing greenish where it caught flecks of snow moss in the ice. Crystal worms grew by the millions on the walls, their roots probing endlessly for morsels of heat. Here in Princeton, the natural world might survive almost into the heart of the Dark. The city around and beneath them was a growing, warming thing. Behind those walls, and below the ground, things were busier than ever in the history of Princeton. The newer buildings of the business district glowed from ten thousand windows, boasting power, spilling broad bands of light upon the older structures…. And even a modest nuclear attack would kill everyone here.

Viki touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry… about Daddy.”

She would know much better than he how far Sherkaner had fallen. “How long has he been into this? I remember him speculating on space monsters, but it was never serious.”

She shrugged, obviously unhappy with the question. “…He started playing with videomancy after the kidnappings.”

That far back?Then he remembered Sherkaner’s desperation when the poor cobber realized that all his science and logic couldn’t save his children. And so the seeds of this insanity had been planted. “Okay, Viki. Your mother is right. The important thing is that this nonsense not get in the way. Your father has the love and admiration of so many people”—including me, still. “No one will believe this crap, but I’m afraid that more than a few would try to help him, maybe divert resources, do experiments he suggests. We can’t afford that, not now.”

“Of course.” But Viki hesitated an instant, her hand tips straightening. If Unnerby had not known her as a child, he would have missed it. She wasn’t telling him everything, and was embarrassed by the deception. Little Victory had been a great fibber, except when she felt guilty about something.

“The General is humoring him, isn’t she? Even now?”

“…Look, nothing big. Some bandwidth, some processor time.” Processor time on what? Underhill’s desktop machines, or Intelligence Service superarrays? Maybe it didn’t matter; he realized now how much of Sherk’s low profile was simply the General keeping her husband from interfering with critical projects.But pray for the poor lady. For Victory Smith, losing Underhill must be like having your right legs shot off at the hips.

“Okay.” Whatever resources Sherk might be pissing away, there was nothing Hrunkner Unnerby could do about it. Maybe the best wisdom was the oldsoldier on, soldier. He glanced at Young Victory’s uniform. The name tag was on her far collar, out of sight. Would it be Victory Smith (now,that would catch a superior officer’s attention!), or Victory Underhill, or what?

“So, Lieutenant, how is your life in the military?”

Viki smiled, surely relieved to talk about something else. “It is a great challenge, Sergeant.” Formality slipped. “Actually, I’m having the time of my life. Basic training was—hmm, well you know as well as I. In fact, it is sergeants like you who make it the ‘charming’ experience it is. But I had an edge: When I went through BT, almost all the recruits were in-phase, years older than I am. Heh heh. It wasn’t hard to do well by comparison. Now—well, you can see this isn’t your average first posting.” She waved at the car, and the security around them. “Brent is a senior sergeant now; we’re working together. Rhapsa and Little Hrunk will go through officer school eventually, but for now they’re both junior enlisted. You may see them at the airport.”

“You’re all working together?” Unnerby tried to keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Yes. We’re a team. When the General wants a quick inspection, and needs absolute trust—we’re the four she sends.” All the surviving children except Jirlib. For a moment, the revelation just added to Unnerby’s depression. He wondered what the General Staff and midrankers thought when they saw a troop of Smith’s relatives poking into Deep Secret affairs. But… Hrunkner Unnerby had once been deep in Intelligence himself. Old Strut Greenval had also played by his own rules. The King gave certain prerogatives to the chief of Intelligence. A lot of midlevel Intelligence people thought it was simply stupid tradition, but if Victory Smith thought she needed an Inspector General team from her own family—well maybe she did.

Princeton’s airport was in chaos. There were more flights, more corporate charters, more crazy construction work than ever before. Chaotic or not, General Smith was ahead of the problem; a jet had already been diverted for his use. Viki’s cars were cleared to drive right out onto the military side of the field. They moved cautiously down designated lanes, under the wings of taxiing aircraft. The secondary paths were torn by construction, a craterlike pit every hundred feet. By the end of the year, all service operations were to be conducted without external exposure. Ultimately, these facilities would have to support new types of fliers, and operations in air-freezing cold.

Viki dropped him off by his jet. She hadn’t said where she was bound this evening. Unnerby found that pleasing. For all the strangeness of her present situation, at least she knew how to keep her mouth properly shut.

She followed him out into the freeze. There was no wind, so he risked going without the air heater. Every breath burned. It was so cold he could see clouds of frost hanging around the exposed joints of his hands.

Maybe Viki was too young and strong to notice. She trooped across the thirty yards to his jet, talking every second. If it weren’t for all the dark omens rising out of this visit, seeing Viki would have been an absolute joy. Even out-of-phase, she had turned out so beautifully, a wonderful incarnation of her mother—with Smith’s hard edge softened by what Sherkaner had been at his best. Hell, maybe part of it wasbecause she was out-of-phase! The thought almost made him stop in the middle of the runway. But yes, Viki had spent her whole life out of step, seeing things from a new angle. In a weird way, watching her diminished all his misgivings about the future.

Viki stepped aside as they reached the weather shelter at the base of his jet. She drew herself up and gave him a well-starched salute. Unnerby returned the gesture. And then he saw her name tag.

“What an interesting name, Lieutenant. Not a profession, not some bygone deepness. Where—?”

“Well, neither of my parents is a ‘smith.’ And no one knows which ‘underhill’ Daddy’s family might be ascended from. But, see behind you—” She pointed.

Behind him the tarmac spread away from them, hundreds of yards of flatness and construction work, all the way back to the terminal. But Viki was pointing higher, up from the river-bottom flatlands. The lights of Princeton curved around the horizon, from glittering towers to the suburban hills.

“Look about five degrees to your right-rear of the radio tower. Even from here you can see it.” She was pointing at Underhill’s house. It was the brightest thing in that direction, a tower of light in all the colors that modern fluorescents could make.

“Daddy designed well. We’ve hardly had to make any changes in the house at all. Even after the air has frozen, his light will still be up there on the hill. You know what Daddy says: We can go down and inward—or we can stand on high places and reach out. I’m glad that’s where I grew up, and I want that place to be my name.”

She lifted her name tag so it glittered in the aircraft lights.LIEUTENANTVICTORY LIGHTHILL. “Don’t worry, Sergeant. What you and Dad and Mother started is going to last a long time.”

FORTY-SIX

Belga Underville was getting a bit tired of Lands Command. It seemed that she was down here almost ten percent of the time—and it would be a lot more if she hadn’t become a heavy telecomm user. Colonel Underville had been head of Domestic Intelligence since 60//15, more than half the past Bright Time. It was a truism—at least in modern times—that the end of the Brightness was the beginning of the bloodiest wars. She had expected things to be rough, but not like this.

Underville got to the staff meeting early. She was more than a little nervous about what she intended; she had no desire to cross the chief, but that was exactly how her petition might look. Rachner Thract was already there, getting his own show in order. Grainy, ten-color reconnaissance photos were projected on the wall behind him. Apparently he’d found more Southlander launch sites—further evidence of Kindred aid for “the potential victims of Accord treachery.” Thract nodded civilly as she and her aides sat down. There was always some friction between External Intelligence and Domestic. External played by rules that were unacceptably rough for domestic operations, yet they always found excuses for meddling. The last few years, things had been especially tense between Thract and Underville. Since Thract had screwed up in Southland, he’d been much easier to handle.Even the end of the world can have short-term advantages, Belga thought sourly.

Underville flipped through the agenda. God, the crackpot distractions. Or maybe not: “What do you think about these high-altitude bogies, Rachner?” It was not meant as an argumentative question; Thract should not be in trouble when it came to air defense.

Thract’s hands jerked in abrupt dismissal. “After all the screaming, Air Defense claims only three sightings. ‘Sightings’ my ass. Even now that we know about Kindred antigravity capabilities, they still can’t track the cobbers properly. Now the AD Director claims the Kindred have some launch site I don’t know about. You know the chief is going to stick me with finding it…. Damn!” Underville couldn’t tell if that was his one-word summary answer, or if he had just noticed something obnoxious in his notes. Either way, Thract didn’t have anything more to say to her.

The others were trickling in now: Air Defense Director Dugway (seating himself on a perch far from Rachner Thract), the Director of Rocket Offense, the Director of Public Relations. The chief herself entered, followed almost immediately by the King’s Own Finance Minister.

General Smith called the meeting to order, and formally welcomed the Finance Minister. On paper, Minister Nizhnimor was her only superior short of the King himself. In fact, Amberdon Nizhnimor was an old crony of Smith’s.

The bogies were first on the agenda, and it went about as Thract had predicted. Air Defense had done further crunching on the three sightings. Dugway’s latest computer analysis confirmed that these were Kindred satellites, either pop-up recon jobs or maybe even the tests of a maneuvering antigravity missile. Either way, none of them had been seen twice. And none of them had been launched from any of the known Kindred sites. The director of Air Defense was very pointed about the need for competent ground intelligence from within Kindred territory. If the enemy had mobile launchers, it was essential to learn about them. Underville half-expected Thract to explode at the implication that his people had failed once more, but the Colonel accepted AD’s sarcasm and General Smith’s expected orders with impassive courtesy. Thract knew that this was the least of his problems; the last item on today’s agenda was his real nemesis.

Next up, Public Relations: “I’m sorry. There’s no way we can call a War Plebiscite, much less win one. People are more frightened than ever, but the time scales make a Plebiscite flatly unworkable.” Belga nodded; she didn’t need some flack from Public Relations for this insight. Within itself, the King’s Government was a rather autocratic affair. But for the last nineteen generations, since the Covenant of Accord, its civil power had been terrifyingly limited. The Crown retained sole title to its ancestral estates such as Lands Command, and had limited power of taxation, but had lost the exclusive right to print money, the right of eminent domain, the right to impress its subjects into military service. In peacetime, the Covenant worked. The courts ran on a fee system, and local police forces knew they couldn’t get too frisky or they might encounter real firepower. In wartime, well, that’s what the Plebiscite was for—to suspend the Covenant for a certain time. It had worked during the Great War, just barely. This time around, things moved so fast that just talking about a Plebiscite might precipitate a war. And a major nuclear exchange could be over in less than a day.

General Smith accepted the platitudes with considerable patience. Then it was Belga’s turn. She went through the usual catalogue of domestic threats. Things were under control, more or less. There were significant minorities that loathed the modernization. Some were already out of the picture, asleep in their own deepnesses. Others had dug themselves deep redoubts, but not to sleep in; these would be a problem if things went really bad. Hrunkner Unnerby had worked more of his engineering miracles. Even the oldest towns in the Northeast had nuclear electricity now, and—just as important—weatherized living space. “But of course not much of this is hardened. Even a light nuclear strike would kill most of these people, and the rest wouldn’t have the resources for a successful hibernation.” In fact, most of those resources had been spent on creating the power plants and underground farms.

General Smith gestured at the others. “Comments?” There were several. Public Relations suggested buying in to some of the hardened enterprises; he was already planning for after the end of the world, the bloody-minded little wimp. The chief just nodded, assigned Belga and the wimp to look into the possibility. She checked the Domestic Intelligence report off her copy of the agenda.

“Ma’am?” Belga Underville raised a hand. “I do have one more item I’d like to bring up.”

“Certainly.”

Underville brushed her eating hands nervously across her mouth. She was committed now. Damn. If only the Finance Minister weren’t here. “I—Ma’am, in the past you have been very, um, generous in your management of subordinate operations. You give us the job, and let us do it. I have been very grateful for that. Recently though, and very likely this is without your precise knowledge, people from your inner staff have been making unscheduled visits”—midnight raids, actually—“on domestic sites in my area of responsibility.”

General Smith nodded. “The Lighthill team.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Your own children, running around as though they werethe King’s Inspectors General. They were full of crazy, irrational demands, shutting down good projects, removing some of her best people. More than anything, it made her suspect that the chief’s crazy husband still had great influence. Belga hunkered down on her perch. She really didn’t have to say more. Victory Smith knew her well enough to see she was upset.

“On these inspection visits, did Lighthill find anything significant?”

“In one case, ma’am.” One fairly serious problem that Belga was sure she would have pounced on herself inside of another ten days. Around the table, Underville could see that most of the others were simply surprised by the complaint. Two nodded faintly in her direction—she already knew about them. Thract tapped an angry tattoo on the table; he seemed about to jump into the fray. It was no surprise that he had been targeted by the chief’s nepotistic crew, butplease God, grant him the cleverness to keep hismaw shut. Thract was already in such poor standing that his support would be about as much help as a steel anvil to a racing-climber.

The chief inclined her head, waited a polite moment for anyone else to comment. Then, “Colonel Underville, I understand that this can hurt your people’s morale. But we are entering very critical times, far deadlier than a declared war. I need special assistants, ones who can act very quickly and who I understand completely. The Lighthill team acts directly for me. Please tell me if you feel their behavior is out of line—but I ask you to respect their delegated authority.” Her tone seemed sincerely regretful, but the words were uncompromising; Smith was changing policy of decades’ standing. Belga had the sinking feeling that the chief knew all her cobblies’ depredations.

The Finance Minister had looked almost bored so far. Nizhnimor was a war hero; she had walked through the Dark with Sherkaner Underhill. You might forget that when you saw her; Amberdon Nizhnimor had spent all the decades of this generation climbing up the Other Side of the royal service, as a court politician and arbitrator. She dressed and moved like an old coot; Nizhnimor was a cartoon caricature of a Finance Minister. Big, lank, frail. Now she leaned forward. Her wheezy voice sounded as harmless as she looked. “I fear this is all a bit outside my realm. But I do have some advice. Though we can’t have a Plebiscite, we are very much at war. Internal to the government, we are moving to a war footing. Normal chains of appeal and review are in suspension. Given this extraordinary situation, it’s important for you to realize that both I and—more importantly—the King have complete faith in General Smith’s leadership. You all know that the chief of Intelligence has special prerogatives. This is not outmoded tradition, ladies and gentleman. This is considered, royal policy, and you must all accept it.”

Wow. So much for “frail” finance ministers. There were sober nods from all around the table and no one had anything more to say, least of all Belga Underville. In a strange way, Belga felt better for getting so definitively squashed. Things might be on a road straight to Hell, but she didn’t have to worry about who was on the driver’s perch.

After a moment, General Smith returned to her agenda. “…We have one item left. It is also the most critical problem we’re up against. Colonel Thract, will you tell us about the Southland situation?” Her tone was courteous, almost sympathetic. Nevertheless, poor Thract was in for it.

But Thract showed some hardshell. He bounced off his perch and walked briskly to the podium. “Minister. Ma’am.” He nodded at Nizhnimor and the chief. “We believe the situation has stabilized somewhat in the last fifteen hours.” He poked up the recon pictures that Belga had seen him studying before the meeting. Much of Southland was shrouded in a swirl of storm, but the launch sites were high in the Dry Mountains and mostly visible. Thract tapped away at his pictures, analyzing the supply situation. “The long-range Southlander rockets are liquid fueled, very fragile things. Their parliament has seemed insanely bellicose these last few days—their ‘Ultimatum for Cooperative Survival,’ for instance—but in fact, we don’t think that more than a tenth of their rockets are launch-ready. It will take three or four days for them to get all the tanks topped off.”

Belga: “That seems awfully stupid on their part.”

Thract nodded. “But remember, their parliamentary system makes them less decisive than either us or the Kindred. These people have been tricked into thinking that they must either fight a war now, or be murdered in their sleep. The Ultimatum may have been a mistake in timing, but it was also an attempt by some in Parliament to make the prospect of war so frightening that their colleagues would back down.”

The Director of Air Defense: “So you figure things will stay peaceful until they complete fueling?”

“Yes. The crunch will be the Parliament meeting at Southmost in four days. That’s where they review our response—if we’ve made one—to the Ultimatum.”

The wimp from Public Relations asked, “Why not just accede to their demands? They aren’t asking for territory. We are so strong that giving in would scarcely be a loss of prestige.”

There was a rattle of indignation from around the table. General Smith answered in terms a good deal milder than the question merited. “Unfortunately, it’s not a matter of prestige. The Southland Ultimatum requires us to weaken several of our military arms. In fact, I doubt that it would make the Southlanders any safer in their deepnesses—but it would increase our vulnerability to a Kindred first strike.”

Chezny Neudep, Director of Rocket Offense: “Indeed. Now the Southlanders are simply Kindred puppets. Pedure and her bloodsuckers must be happy. No matter how this comes out, they win.”

“Maybe not,” said Minister Nizhnimor. “I know many of the top Southlanders; they are not evil, or insane, or incompetent. We have come down to a matter of trust here. The King is willing to go to Southmost for this next meeting of the Southlander Parliament, and stay there for the remainder of this session. It’s hard to imagine a greater expression of trust on our part—and I think the Southlanders will accept it, no matter what Pedure may wish.”

Of course, this is what Kings were for. Nevertheless, the Minister’s offer was a shock; even “Old Megadeath” Neudep seemed taken aback. “Ma’am… I know it’s the King’s power to do such things, but I can’t agree that this is a problem of trust. Certainly, there are honorable people in high positions in the South. A year ago, the Southland was nearly an ally. We had sympathizers at all levels of government. Colonel Thract told us that we had—to be blunt—spiesin positions of power there. If not for that, I don’t think General Smith ever would have encouraged the technical growth of Southland…. But in less than a year, it seems we have lost all our advantage there. What I see now is a state thoroughly infiltrated by the Kindred. Even if the majority of Parliament is honorable,it doesn’t matter. “ Neudep shot two arms in Thract’s direction. “Your analysis, Colonel?”

Blame-assignment time. It had been part of each of the recent staff meetings, and each time Thract had been more the target.

Thract gave a little bow in Megadeath’s direction. “Sir, your assessment is generally correct, though I see little infiltration of the Southland rocket forces, per se. We had a friendly government there—and one that I would swear was carefully ‘instrumented’ with Accord agents. The Kindred were active, but we had them stymied. Then, step by step, we lost ground. At first, it was bungled surveillance, then fatal accidents, then assassinations we weren’t quick enough to block. Lately there have been trumped-up criminal prosecutions…. Our enemy is clever.”

“So the Honored Pedure is a genius beyond our ken?” asked the Director of Air Defense. Sarcasm dripped.

Thract was silent for a moment. His eating hands twisted back and forth. At earlier meetings, this was where he would counterattack with statistics and fine new projects. Now—something seemed to break inside him. Belga Underville had counted Thract as a bureaucratic enemy ever since the chief’s children were kidnapped, but now she felt embarrassed for him. When Thract finally spoke, his voice came out an anguished squeak. “No!Don’t you know I… I’ve had friends die; I’ve lost others because I began mistrusting them. For a long time, I thought there must be a Kindred agent high in my own organization. I shared critical information with fewer and fewer people, not even with my own superior—” He nodded at General Smith. “In the end, there were secrets plucked from us that only I knew and which I communicated with my own crypto equipment.”

There was silence, as the obvious consequence of these claims hardened in the minds of his audience. Thract’s attention seemed to turn inward, as if he didn’t care that others thought he might be the Father of All Traitors. He continued more quietly, “As far as one person can be a paranoid and be everywhere, so I have been. I have used different comm paths, different crypto. I have used differential frauds…. And I tell you, our enemy is something more than any single ‘Honored Pedure.’ Somehow, all of our clever science is working against us.”

“Nonsense!” said Air Defense. “My department uses more of what you call ‘clever science’ than anyone, and we are entirely satisfied with the results. In competent hands, computers and networks and satellite reconnaissance are incredibly powerful tools. Just look at what our deep analysis did with the unidentified radar sightings. Certainly, networks can be abused. But we are the world’s leaders in these technologies. And no matter what else may be broken we have a completely robust encryption technology…. Or do you claim the enemy can break our crypto?”

Thract swayed slightly from his place behind the podium. “No, that was my first great suspicion, but we had penetrated to the heart of the Kindred’s encryption establishment—and we were safely there until very recently. If I trust anything, it is that they can’t break our encryption.” He waved at them all. “You really don’t understand, do you? I tell you, there is some force in our networks, something that is actively opposing us. No matter what we do, It knows more and It is supporting our enemies….”

The scene was pathetic, a kind of abject collapse. Thract was left with nothing but phantoms to explain his failures. Maybe Pedure really was clever beyond all imagination; more likely, Thract was a Father Traitor.

Belga watched the chief with half her attention. General Smith was deep in the King’s trust. No doubt she could survive Thract’s collapse simply by starkly disowning him.

Smith beckoned the guard sergeant by the door. “Help Colonel Thract to the staff office. Colonel, I’ll be along to talk to you in a few minutes. Consider yourself as still on duty.”

It seemed to take a second for the words to penetrate Thract’s funk. He was headed out the door, but apparently not for arrest or even imminent quizzing by underlings. “Yes, ma’am.” He straightened to a semblance of smartness and followed the sergeant out.

The room was very quiet after Thract’s departure. Belga could tell that everyone was watching everyone else, and thinking very dark thoughts. Finally, General Smith said, “My friends, the Colonel has a point. No doubt we are infested with deep-cover Kindred agents. But they are effective across much too large a range of our departments. There is some systematic flaw in our security, and yet we have no idea what it is…. Now you see the reason for the Lighthill team.”

FORTY-SEVEN

It was forty years since the OnOff star had last come to life. Ritser Brughel had not been on-Watch all that time, yet still the Exile had consumed years of his life. And now it was drawing to an end. What had been years was now a matter of days. In less than four days, he would be vice-ruler of a world.

Brughel hung over the shoulder of the ziphead operating the remote lander, and quietly watched what the tiny device was sending back. A few seconds earlier, the lander had come out of its brake and spread its meter-wide wings. Still forty kilometers up, they had ghosted over an unending carpet of lights, threaded by a glowing webwork that refined itself into recursive infinity. Greater Kingston South was the ziphead name for the place. A Spider supercity. This world was cold and freezing colder, but it was no wasteland. The Spiders’ megalopolises looked almost Frenkisch. This was a real civilization, crowned by forty years of sustained progress. Its capital technology was still short of Humankind’s highest standards, but with ziphead guidance, that could be corrected in a decade or two.Forforty years, I have been reduced to a Master of Tens, and soon I will beMaster of Tens of Millions. And beyond that… if the Spider world really held clues to a Higher Technology… someday he and Tomas Nau would return to Frenk and Balacrea to rule there too.

In the space of three seconds, the picture fragmented into a dozen copies, and then a dozen dozen. “What—”

“The lander just broke into submunitions, Podmaster.” Reynolt’s explanation was cold, almost mocking. “Almost two hundred mobiles—we’ll get some into Southmost.” She turned from the display and almost looked him in the eyes. “Strange that you are suddenly so interested in operational details, Podmaster.”

He felt a flicker of the old rage at her impudence, but it was a mild thing, not affecting his breathing, much less his vision. He gave a little shrug at the question.Nowadays I can get along even with Reynolt. Maybe Tomas Nau was right; maybe he was growing up. “I want to see what the creatures really look like.” Know your slaves. Soon they would fry Spiders by the hundred million, but somehow he must learn to tolerate those that were spared.

The spylets arced silently downward, across a frozen strait. A few were still spinning, and Ritser had a glimpse of clouds, the topside of a—hurricane? Two hundred thumb-sized pellets. Over the next thousand seconds they all came down, many in deep snow, some on rocky wasteland. But there were successes, too.

Several ended up on some kind of roadway, drenched in blue streetlight. One of the views showed snow-draped ruins in the distance. Heavy, closed vehicles lumbered by. Reynolt’s ziphead wiggled his spylets out onto the road. He was trying to hitch a ride. One by one, they ceased transmitting, squashed flat. Ritser glanced at an inventory window. “This better work, Anne. We only have one more multi-lander.”

Reynolt didn’t bother to reply. Ritser pulled himself down to tap her specialist on the shoulder. “So, are you going to be able get one indoors?”

The odds were against any answer; a Focused mind in a control loop is usually unreachable. But after a moment the zip nodded. “Probe 132 is doing well. I’ve got three hundred seconds left on the high-gain link. We’re just a few meters this side of the weather door. This one is getting in—” The fellow hunched lower over the controls. He swayed back and forth like an addict playing a hand-eye game, which in a sense was exactly the situation. One of the pictures panned up and down as he wiggled the device into traffic.

Brughel looked back at Reynolt. “That damn time lag. How can you expect to—”

“Running a remote like this isn’t the worst. Melin”—the ziphead operator—“has very good delayed coordination. Our main problem is operations on the Spiders’ networks. We can dredge for data, but very soon we’ll be interacting in tight real time. A ten-second turnaround is longer than some network timeouts.”

As she spoke, a flashing tread flew past the little camera. By some magic of ziphead intuition, Melin had flipped the gadget onto the side of the vehicle. The image spun madly for several seconds as Melin synched the rotation with the view. A door opened in the wall ahead of them, and they drove on through. Thirty seconds passed. The walls seemed to slide upward. Some kind of elevator? But if the scale information were true, the room was wider than a racquetball court.

Seconds passed, and Brughel found himself caught by the scene. For years now, everything they had gotten about the Spiders had been secondhand, from Reynolt’s ziphead translators. Some large precentage of that had to be fairy-tale crap; it was just too cute. Real pictures were what he needed. Microsat optical reconnaissance produced some pictures, but the resolution was awful. For several years, Ritser had thought that when the Spiders finally invented hi-res video, he would get a good look. But the visual physiologies were just too different. Nowadays, about five percent of all Spider military comm was this extremely hi-res stuff that Trixia Bonsol called “videomancy.” Without heavy interpretation, it was just a jumble to humans. He would have been very suspicious that it was a steganographic cover, except that the translators had proven to Kal’s snoops that it was innocent video—all quite impressive if you were a Spider.

But now, in a very few seconds, he would get to see how the monsters looked from a human pov.

No motion was visible. If this was an elevator, they were going down a long way. That made sense, considering what the south pole weather was like. “Are we going to lose signal?”

Reynolt didn’t answer immediately. “I don’t know. Melin’s trying to get relays into that elevator shaft. I’m more worried about it being discovered. Even if the meltdown-triggers work—”

Brughel laughed. “Who cares? Don’t you see, Reynolt? We’re less than four days from grabbing it all.”

“The Accord is beginning to panic. They just sacked a senior manager. I’ve got meeting logs that show Victory Smith now suspects network corruption.”

“Their Intelligence boss?” The news stopped Brughel for a moment. This must have happened very recently. Still, “They have less than four days. What can they do?”

Reynolt’s gaze was the usual stone thing. “They could partition their net, maybe stop using it altogether. That would stop us.”

“And also lose them the war against the Kindred.”

“Yes. Unless they could provide the Kindred with solid proof of ‘Monsters from Outer Space.’ “

And that was not bloody likely. The woman was obsessive. Ritser smiled at her frowning face.Of course. That’s how we made you.

The elevator doors had opened. The camera was giving them only one frame a second now, with low resolution. Damn.

“Yes!” That was Melin, triumphant about something.

“He’s got a relay in place.”

Suddenly the picture turned crisp and smooth. As the spylet crept out from the elevator doors, Melin turned its eyes to look down an incredibly steep set of stairs, more like a ladder really. Who knew what this area was, a loading garage? For now, the little camera hid in corners and looked out upon the Spiders. From the scale bar, he could see that the monsters were of the expected size. A grown one would come up to about Brughel’s thigh. The creatures stretched far across the ground in a low posture, just as in the library pictures retrieved before Relight. They look very little like the mental picture that the ziphead translators evoked. Did they wear clothes? Not like humans. The monsters were swathed with things that looked like banners with buttons. Huge panniers hung from the sides of many of them. They moved in quick, sinister jerks, their bladelike forelegs cutting this way and that before them. There was a crowd here, chitinous black except for the mismatched colors of their clothing. Their heads glittered as with large flat gemstones. Spider eyes. And as for the Spider mouth—there the translators had used the proper word:maw. A fanged depth surround by tiny claws—was that what Bonsol & Co. called “eating hands”?—that seemed to be in constant, writhing motion.

Massed together, the Spiders were more a nightmare than he’d imagined, the sort of things you crush and crush and crush and still more of them come at you. Ritser sucked in a breath. One comforting thought was that—if all went well—in just under four days, these particular monsters would be dead.

For the first time in forty years, a starship would fly across the OnOff system. It would be a very short hop, less than two million kilometers, scarcely a remooring by civilized standards. It was very nearly the most that any of the surviving starships could manage.

Jau Xin had supervised the flight prep of theInvisible Hand. TheHand had always been Ritser Brughel’s portable fiefdom, but Jau knew it was also the only starship that had not been wholly cannibalized over the years.

In the days before their “passengers” embarked, Jau had drained the L1 distillery of hydrogen. It was just a few thousand tonnes, a droplet in the million-tonne capacity of the ramscoop’s primer tanks, but enough to slide them across the gap between L1 and the Spider world.

Jau and Pham Trinli made a final inspection of the starship’s drive throat. It was always strange, looking at that two-meter narrowness. Here the forces of hell had burned for decades, driving the Qeng Ho vessel up to thirty-percent lightspeed. The internal surface was micrometer smooth. The only evidence of its fiery past was the fractal pattern of gold and silver that glittered in the light of their suit lamps. It was the micronet of processors behind those walls that actually guided the fields, but if the throat wall cavitated while under way, the fastest processors in the universe wouldn’t save them. True to form, Trinli made a big deal of his laser-metric inspection, then was contemptuous of the results. “There’s ninety-micron swale on the port side—but what the hell. There’s no new pitting. You could carve your name in the walls here, and it wouldn’t make any difference on this flight. What are you planning, a couple hundred Ksecs at fractional gee?”

“Um. We’ll start with a long gentle push, but the braking burn will be a thousand seconds at a little more than one gravity.” They wouldn’t brake till they were low over open ocean. Anything else would light Arachna’s sky brighter than the sun, and be seen by every Spider on the near side of the planet.

Trinli waved his hand in an airy gesture of dismissal. “Don’t worry about it. Many times, I’ve taken bigger chances with in-system flight.” They crawled out the bow side of the throat; the smooth surface widened into the beginnings of the forward field projectors. All the while, Trinli continued with his bogus stories. No. Most of the stories could be true, but abstracted from all the real adventurers the old man had ever known. Trinli did know something about ship drives. The tragedy was that they didn’t have anyone who knew much more. All the Qeng Ho flight engineers had been killed in the original fighting—and the pod’s last ziphead engineer had fallen to mindrot runaway.

They emerged from the bow end of theHand and climbed a mooring strand back to their taxi. Trinli paused and turned. “I envy you, Jau my boy. Take a look at your ship! Almost a million tonnes dryweight! You won’t be going far, but you’ll be bringing theHand to the treasure and the Customers it sailed fifty light-years to find.”

Jau followed his broad gesture. Over the years, Jau had realized that Trinli’s theatrics were a cover… but sometimes they reached out and plucked at your soul. TheInvisible Hand looked quite starworthy, hundred meter after hundred meter of curving hull sweeping off into the distance, streamlined for speeds and environments at the limit of all human accomplishment. And beyond the stern rings—1.5 million kilometers beyond—the disk of Arachna showed pale and dim.A First Contact, and I will bethe Pilot Manager. Jau should have been a proud man….

Jau’s last day before departure was busy, filled with final checks and provisioning. There would be more than a hundred zipheads and staff. Jau didn’t learn just which specialties were represented, but it was obvious that the Podmasters wanted to manipulate the Spiders’ networks intensively, without the ten-second time delay of L1 operations. That was reasonable. Saving the Spiders from themselves would involve some incredible frauds, perhaps the taking over of entire strategic weapons systems.

Jau was coming off his shift when Kal Omo appeared at Xin’s little office just off theHand’ s bridge.

“One more job, Pilot Manager.” Omo’s narrow face broke into a humorless grin. “Call it overtime.”

They took a taxi down to the rockpile, but not to Hammerfest. Around the arc of Diamond One, embedded in ice and diamond, was the entrance to L1-A. Two other taxis were already moored by the arsenal’s lock.

“You’ve studied theHand’ s weapon fittings, Pilot Manager?”

“Yes.” Xin had studied everything about theHand, except Brughel’s private quarters. “But surely a Qeng Ho would be more familiar—”

Omo shook his head. “This isn’t appropriate work for a Peddler, not even Mr. Trinli.” It took some seconds to get through the main lock security, but once inside they had a clear passage into the weapons area. Here they were confronted by the noise of fitting machines and cutters. The squat ovoids racked along the walls were marked with the weapons glyph—the ancient Qeng Ho symbol for nukes and directed-energy weapons. For years, the gossip had speculated just how much survived at L1-A. Now Jau could see for himself.

Omo led him down a crawl line past unmarked cabinets. There was no consensual imagery in L1-A. And this was one of the few places left at L1 that did not use the Qeng Ho localizers. The automation here was simple and foolproof. They passed Rei Ciret, supervising a gang of zipheads in the construction of some kind of launch rack. “We’ll be moving most of these weapons to theInvisible Hand, Mr. Xin. Over the years we’ve cobbled together parts, tried to make as many deliverable devices as possible. We’ve done the best we could, but without depot facilities, that’s not a hell of a lot.” He waved at what looked like Qeng Ho drive units mated to Emergent tactical nukes. “Count ’em. Eighteen short-range nukes. In the cabinets we have the guts of a dozen weapon lasers.”

“I—I don’t understand, Podsergeant. You’re an armsmen. You have your own specialists. What need is there for—”

“—For a Pilot Manager to be concerned with such things?” Again the humorless smile. “To save the Spider civilization, it’s entirely possible that we’ll have to use these things, from theInvisible Hand in low orbit. The fitting and engagement sequences will be very important to your pilots.”

Xin nodded. He’d been over some of this. The most likely start of a planet-killer war was the current crisis at the Spiders’ south pole. After they arrived, they’d be in position over that site every fifty-three hundred seconds, with near-constant coverage from smaller vehicles. Tomas Nau had already announced about the lasers. As for the nukes… maybe they could help with bluffing.

The podsergeant continued the tour, pointing out the limitations of each resurrected device. Most of the weapons were shaped charges, and Omo’s zipheads had converted them into crude digger bombs. “…and we’ll have most of the network zipheads on board theHand. They’ll supply fire-control information for your maneuvers; we may have to make substantial orbit changes depending on the targets.”

Omo talked with an ordnanceman’s enthusiasm, and quickly left Jau with no place to hide. For a year, Jau had watched the preparations with increasing fear; there were details that could not be disguised from him. But for every treacherous possibility, there had always been some reasonable explanation. He had held to those “reasonable explanations” so fiercely. They allowed him to feel a shred of decency; they made it possible for him to laugh with Rita as they planned what the future would be like with the Spiders, and with children she and he would have.

The horror must have shown on Jau’s face. Omo stopped his parade of murderous revelation, and turned to looked at him. Jau asked, “Why…?”

“Why must I spell it out for you?” Omo jabbed a finger at Jau’s chest, pushing him away from the crawl line and into the wall. He jabbed again. His hard face showed an angry indignation. It was the righteous indignation of Emergency authority, what Jau had grown up with on Balacrea. “It shouldn’t really be necessary, should it? But you’re like too many of our pod. You’ve gone bad inside, become a kind of Peddler. The others we can let drift for a while longer, but when theHand reaches low orbit, we need your intelligent, instant obedience.” Omo jabbed him once more. “Do you understand now?”

“Y-yes. Yes!” Oh Rita! We will always be part of the Emergency.

FORTY-EIGHT

More than a hundred zipheads were leaving Hammerfest’s Attic. Genius that he was, Trud Silipan had scheduled the transfer as a single move. As Ezr headed for Trixia’s cell, he was swimming against a current of humanity. The Focused were being herded in groups of four and five, first out of the little capillary hallways that led to their roomlets, then into the tributary halls and finally into the main corridors. The handlers were gentle, but this was a difficult maneuver.

Ezr pulled himself sideways, into a utility nook, a back-eddy in the flow. There were people drifting past that he hadn’t seen in years. These were Qeng Ho and Trilander specialists, Focused right after the ambush, just like Trixia. A few of the handlers were friends of the Focused they guided. Watch on Watch they had come to visit the lost ones. At first there had been many such people. But the years passed and hope had dimmed. Maybe someday… they had Nau’s promise of manumission. In the meantime, the zipheads seemed beyond caring; a visit was at most an irritation to them. Only rare fools kept at it for years.

Ezr had never seen so many zipheads moving about. Corridor ventilation was not as good as in the little cells; the smell of unwashed bodies was strong. Anne kept the pod’s property healthy, but that didn’t mean they were clean and pretty.

Bil Phuong hung on a wall strap by a confluence of streams, directing his team handlers. Most teams had a common specialty. Vinh caught scraps of agitated conversation. Could it be that they cared about what was planned for the Spider world?… But no, this was impatience and distraction and technical gibberish. An older woman—one of the network protocol hackers—pushed her handler, actually spoke directly to him. “When then?” Her voice was shrill. “When do we get back to work?”

One of the woman’s team members shouted something like “Yeah, the stackface is stale!” and moved in on the handler from the other side. Away from their inputs, the poor things were going nuts. The entire team began screaming at the handler. The group was the nucleus of a growing clot in the stream. Suddenly, Ezr realized that something like a slave revolt could really happen—if the slaves were taken from their work! This was clearly a danger the Emergent team handler understood. He slid to the side, and yanked the stun lanyards on the two loudest zipheads. They spasmed, then went limp. Deprived of a center, the others’ complaints subsided into diffuse irritability.

Bil Phuong arrived to calm the last of the combative zipheads. He spared a frown for the team handler. “That’s two more I have to retune.” The team handler wiped blood from his cheek and glared back. “Tell it to Trud.” He grabbed the lanyards and floated the unconscious zipheads out over their fellows. The crowd moved on, and in a few seconds Vinh had a clear jump to the end of the corridor.

The translators weren’t going with theInvisible Hand. Their section of the Attic should have been peaceful. But when Ezr arrived, he found the cell doors open and the translators clogging the capillary corridor. Ezr wormed his way past the fidgeting, shouting zipheads. There was no sign of Trixia. But a few meters up the hall he ran into Rita Liao coming from the other direction.

“Rita! Where are the handlers?”

Liao raised both hands in irritation. “Busy elsewhere, of course! And now some idiot has opened the translators’ doors!”

Trud had really outdone himself, though most likely this was only a related glitch. Ironically, the translators—who weren’t supposed to go anywhere—had needed no urging to leave their cells, and now were loudly demanding directions. “We want to go to Arachna!” “We want to get in close!”

Where was Trixia? Ezr heard more shouting from around an upward corner. He followed the fork, and there she was, with the rest of the translators. Trixia looked badly disoriented; she just wasn’t used to the world outside of her cell. But she seemed to recognize him. “Shut up! Shut up!” she shouted, and the gabble quieted. She looked vaguely in Ezr’s direction. “Number Four, when do we go to Arachna?”

Number Four? “Um. Soon, Trixia. But not on this trip, not on the Invisible Hand.”

“Whynot ? I don’t like the time lag!”

“For now, your Podmaster wants you close by.” In fact, that was the official story: only lower network functions were needed in close orbit of Arachna. Pham and Ezr knew a darker explanation. Nau wanted as few people as possible on theHand when it performed its real mission. “You’ll go when it’s safe, Trixia. I promise.” He reached out toward her. Trixia didn’t flinch away, but she held tight to a wall stop, resisting any effort to draw her back to her cell.

Ezr looked over his shoulder at Rita Liao. “What should we do?”

“Wait one.” She touched her ear, listened. “Phuong and Silipan will be here to stuff ’em back in their holes, just as soon as they get the others settled down on theHand. “

Lord, that could take a while. In the meantime, twenty translators would be loose in the Attic maze. He gently patted Trixia’s arm. “Let’s go back to your room, Trixia. Uh, look, the longer you’re out here, the more you’re out of touch. I’ll bet you left your huds in your room. You could use them to ask fleet net your questions.” Trixia had probably left her huds behind because they were offline. But at this point, he was just trying to make reasonable noises.

Trixia bounced from wall stop to wall stop, full of indecision. Abruptly she pushed past him and flitted back to the downward fork that led to her little room. Ezr followed.

The cell reacted to Trixia’s presence, the lights coming to their usual dim glow. Trixia grabbed her huds, and Ezr synched to them. Her links weren’t completely down. Ezr saw the usual pictures and splashes of text; it wasn’t quite live from groundside, but it was close. Trixia’s eyes darted from display to display. Her fingers pounded on her old keyboard, but she seemed to have forgotten about contacting the fleet information service. Just the sight of her workspace had drawn her back to the center of her Focus. New text windows popped up. Glyphics nonsense shifted so fast across it that it must be a representation of spoken Spider talk, some radio show or—considering the current state of affairs—a military intercept. “I just can’t stand the time lag. It’s not fair.” Again a long silence. She opened another text screen. The pictures beside it went through a flickering series of colors, one of the Spiders’ video formats. It still didn’t look like a real picture, but he recognized this pattern; he had seen it often enough in Trixia’s little room. This was a Spider commercial newscast that Trixia translated daily. “They’re wrong. General Smith will go to Southmost instead of the King.” She was still tense, but now it was her usual, Focused absorption.

A few seconds later, Rita Liao stuck her head into the room. Ezr turned, saw a look of quiet amazement on her face. “You’re a magician, Ezr. How’d you get everyone calmed down?”

“I… I guess Trixia just trusts me.” That was an innermost hope phrased as diffident speculation.

Rita pulled her head out of the doorway to look up and down the corridor. “Yeah. But you know, after you got her back to work? All the others just quietly returned to their rooms. These translator types have more control functionality than military zips. All you have to do is convince the alpha member, and everyone falls into line.” She grinned. “But I guess we’ve seen this before, the way the translators can control the rote-layer zips. They’re the keystone components, all right.”

“Trixia is a person!” All the Focused are people, you damn slaver!

“I know, Ezr. Sorry. Really, I understand…. Trixia and the other translators do seem to be different. You have to be pretty special to translate natural languages. Of all—of all the Focused, the translators seem the closest to being real people…. Look, I’ll take care of buttoning things down and let Bil Phuong know things are under control.”

“Okay,” Ezr replied, his voice stiff.

Rita backed out of the room. The cell door slid shut. After a moment, he heard other doors thumping shut along the corridor.

Trixia sat hunched over her keyboard, oblivious of the opinions just rendered. Ezr watched her for some seconds, thinking about her future, thinking about how he would finally save her. Even after forty years of Lurk, the translators couldn’t masquerade real-time voice comm with the Spiders. Tomas Nau would gain no advantage by having his translators down by Arachna… yet. Once the world was conquered, Trixia and the others would be the voice of the conqueror.

But that time will not come.Pham and Ezr’s plan was proceeding down its own schedule. Except for a few old systems, a few electromechanical backups, the Qeng Ho localizers could have total control. Pham and Ezr were finally moving toward real sabotage—most important the Hammerfest wireless-power cutoff. That switch was an almost pure mechanical link, immune to all subtlety. But Pham had one more use for localizers. True grit. These last few Msecs, they had built up layers of grit near that switch, and set up similar sabotage in other old systems, and aboard theInvisibleHand. The last hundred seconds would involve flagrant risk. It was a trick that they could try only once, when Nau and his gang were most distracted with their own takeover.

If the sabotage worked—whenit worked—the Qeng Ho localizers would rule.And our time will come.

FORTY-NINE

Hrunkner Unnerby spent a lot of time at Lands Command; it was essentially the home base of his construction operations. Perhaps ten times a year he visited the inner sanctums of Accord Intelligence. He talked with General Smith every day by email; he saw her at staff meetings. Their meeting at Calorica—was that five years ago already—had been not cordial but at least an honest sharing of anxiety. But for seventeen years… for all the time since Gokna died… he had never been in General Smith’s private office.

The General had a new aide, someone young and oophase. Hrunkner barely noticed. He stepped into the silence of the chief’s den. The place was as big as he remembered, with open-storied nooks and isolated perches. For the moment he seemed to be alone. This had been Strut Greenval’s office, before Smith. It had been the Intelligence chief’s innermost den for two generations before that. Those previous occupants would scarcely recognize it now. There was even more comm and computer gear than in Sherk’s office in Princeton. One side of the room was a full vision display, as elaborate as any videomancy. Just now it was receiving from cameras topside: Royal Falls had stilled more than two years ago. He could see all the way up the valley. The hills were stark and cooling; there was CO2frost in the heights. But nearby… the colors beyond red leaked from buildings, flared bright in the exhaust of street traffic. For a moment, Hrunk just stared, thinking what this scene must have been like just one generation earlier, five years into the last Dark. Hell, this room would have been abandoned by then. Greenval’s people would have been stuck up in their little command cave, breathing stuffy air, listening for the last radio messages, wondering if Hrunk and Sherk would survive in their submarine deepness. A few more days and Greenval would have closed down his operation, and the Great War would have been frozen in its own deadly sleep.

But in this generation, we just go on and on, headed for the most terriblewar of all time.

Behind him, he saw the General step silently into the room. “Sergeant, please sit down.” Smith gestured to the perch in front of her desk.

Unnerby pulled his attention away from the view, and sat. Smith’s -shaped desk was piled with hardcopy reports and five or six small reading displays, three alight. Two showed abstract designs, similar to the pictures that Sherkaner had lost himself in.So she does still humor him.

The General’s smile seemed stiff, forced, and so it might be sincere. “I call you Sergeant. What a fantasy rank. But… thank you for coming.”

“Of course, ma’am.” Why did she call me down here? Maybe his wild scheme for the Northeast had a chance. Maybe— “Have you seen my excavation proposals, General? With nuclear explosives we could dig shielded caves, and quickly. The Northeast shales would be ideal. Give me the bombs and in one hundred days I could protect most of the agri and people there.” The words just tumbled out. The expense would be enormous, out of range of the Crown or free financing. The General would have to take emergency powers, Covenant or no. And even then, it would not make a happy ending. But if—when—the war came, it could save millions.

Victory Smith raised one hand, gently. “Hrunk, we don’t have a hundred days. One way or another, I expect things will be settled in less than three.” She gestured to one of the little displays. “I just got word that Honored Pedure is actually at Southmost in person, orchestrating things.”

“Well, damn her. If she lights off a Southmost attack, she’ll fry too.”

“That’s why we’re probably safe until she leaves.”

“I’ve heard rumors, ma’am. Our external intelligence is in the garbage? Thract has been cashiered?” The stories just grew and grew. There were terrible suspicions of Kindred agents at the heart of Intelligence. Deepest crypto was being used on the most routine transmissions. Where the enemy had not succeeded with direct threats, they might now win simply because of the panic and confusion that were everywhere.

Smith’s head jerked angrily. “That’s right. We’ve been outmaneuvered in the South. But we still have assets there, people who depended on me… people I have let down.” That last was almost inaudible, and Hrunk doubted it was addressed to him. She was silent for a moment, then straightened. “You’re something of an expert on the Southmost substructure, aren’t you, Sergeant?”

“I designed it; supervised most of the construction.” And that had been when the South and the Accord had been as friendly as different nation-states ever got.

The General edged back and forth on her perch. Her arms trembled. “Sergeant… even now, I can’t stand the sight of you. I think you know that.”

Hrunk lowered his head.I know. Oh, yes.

“But for simple things, I trust you. And, oh, by the Deep, just now I need you! An order would be meaningless… but will you help me with Southmost?” The words seemed to be wrung from her.

You have to ask? Hrunkner raised his hands. “Of course.”

Evidently, the quick response had not been expected. Smith just gobbled for a second. “Do you understand? This will put you at risk, in personal service to me.”

“Yes, yes. I have always wanted to help.” I’ve always wanted to makethings right again.

The General stared at him a moment more. Then: “Thank you, Sergeant.” She tapped something into her desk. “Tim Downing”—that young new aide?—“will get you the detailed analysis later. The short of it is, there’s only one reason Pedure would be down there in Southmost: The issue there is not decided. She doesn’t have all the key people entrapped. Some members of the Southland Parliament have requested I come down to talk.”

“But… it should be the King that goes for something like this.”

“Yes. It seems that a number of traditions are being broken in this new Dark.”

“You can’t go, ma’am.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, something chuckled at the violation of noncom etiquette.

“You aren’t the only person with that advice…. The last thing Strut Greenval said to me, not two hundred yards from where we’re sitting now, was something similar.” She stopped, silent with memories. “Funny. Strut had so much figured out. He knew I’d end up on his perch. He knew there would be temptations to get into the field. Those first decades of the Bright, there were a dozen times when I know I could have fixed things—even saved lives—if I’d just go out and do what was necessary myself. But Greenval’s advice was more like an order, and I followed it, and lived to fight another day.” Abruptly she laughed, and her attention seemed to come back to the present. “And now I’m a rather old lady, hunkered down in a web of deceit. And it’s finally time to break Strut’s rule.”

“Ma’am, General Greenval’s advice is right as ever. Your place is here.”

“I… let this mess happen. It was my decision, my necessary decision. But if I go to Southmost now, there’s a chance I can save some lives.”

“But if you fail, then you die and we certainly lose!”

“No. If I die things will be bloodier, but we’ll still prevail.” She snapped her desk displays closed. “We leave in three hours, from Courier Launch Four. Be there.”

Hrunkner almost shrieked his frustration. “At least take special security. Young Victory and—”

“The Lighthill team?” A faint smile showed. “Their reputation has spread, has it?”

Hrunkner couldn’t help smiling back. “Y-yes. No one knows quite what they’re up to… but they seem to be as wacko as we ever were.” There were stories. Some good, some bad, all wild.

“You don’t really hate them, do you, Hrunk?” There was wonder in her voice. Smith went on. “They have other, more important things to do during the next seventy-five hours…. Sherkaner and I created the present situation by conscious choice, over many years. We knew the risks. Now it’s payoff time.”

It was the first she had mentioned Sherkaner since he’d entered the room. The collaboration that had brought them so far had broken, and now the General had only herself.

The question was pointless, but he had to ask. “Have you talked to Sherk about this? What is he doing?”

Smith was silent, but her look was closed. Then, “The best he can, Sergeant. The best he can.”

The night was clear even by the standards of Paradise. Obret Nethering walked carefully around the tower at the island’s summit, checking the equipment for tonight’s session. His heated leggings and jacket weren’t especially bulky, but if his air warmer broke, or if the power cord that trailed behind him was severed… Well, it wasn’t a lie when he told his assistants that they could freeze off an arm or a leg or a lung in a matter of minutes. It was five years into the Dark. He wondered if even in the Great War there had been people awake this late.

Nethering paused in his inspection; after all, he was a little ahead of schedule. He stood in the cold stillness and looked out upon his specialty—the heavens. Twenty years ago, when he was just starting at Princeton, Nethering had wanted to be a geologist. Geology was the father science, and in this generation it was more important than ever, what with all mega-excavations and heavy mining. Astronomy, on the other hand, was the domain of fringe cranks. The natural orientation of sensible people must be downward, planning for the safest deepness in which to survive the next Darkness. What was there to see in the sky? The sun certainly, the source of all life and all problems. But beyond that nothing changed. The stars were such tiny constant things, not at all like the sun or anything else one could relate to.

Then, in his sophomore year, Nethering had met old Sherkaner Underhill, and his life was changed forever—though, in that, Nethering was not unique. There were ten thousand sophomores, yet somehow Underhill could still reach out to individuals. Or maybe it was the other way around: Underhill was such a blazing source of crazy ideas that certain students gathered round him like woodsfairies round a flame. Underhill claimed that all of math and physics had suffered because no one understood the simplicity of the world’s orbit about the sun or the intrinsic motions of the stars. If there had been evenone other planet to play mind games with—why, the calculus might have been invented ten generations ago instead of two. And this generation’s mad explosion of technology might have been spread more peaceably across multiple cycles of Bright and Dark.

Of course, Underhill’s claims about science weren’t entirely original. Five generations ago, with the invention of the telescope, binary star astronomy had revolutionized Spiderkind’s understanding of time. But Underhill brought the old ideas together in such marvelous new ways. Young Nethering had been drawn further and further away from safe and sane geology, until the Emptiness Above became his love. The more you realized what the stars really were, the more you realized what the universe must really be. And nowadays, all the colors could be seen in the sky if one knew where to look, and with what instruments. Here on Paradise Island, the far-red of the stars shone clearer than anywhere in the world. With the large telescopes being built nowadays, and the dry stillness of the upper air, sometimes he felt like he could see to the end of the universe.

Huh?Low above the northeast horizon, a narrow feather of aurora was spreading south. There was a permanent loop of magnetism over the North Sea, but with the Dark five years old, auroras were very rare. Down in Paradise Town, what tourists were left must be oohing and aahing at the show. For Obret Nethering, this was just an unexpected inconvenience. He watched a second more, beginning to wonder. The light was awfully cohesive, especially at the northern end, where it narrowed almost to a point. Huh. If it did wreck tonight’s session, maybe they should just fire up the far-blue scope and take a close look at it. Serendipity and all that.

Nethering turned back from the parapet and headed for the stairs. There was a loud rattle and bang that might have been a troop of one hundred combateers coming up the stairs—but was more likely Shepry Tripper and his four hiking boots. A moment passed, and his assistant bounced out onto the open. Shepry was just fifteen years old, about as far out-of-phase as a child could be. There had been a time when Nethering couldn’t imagine talking to, much less working with, such an abomination. That was another thing that had changed for him at Princeton. Now—well, Shepry was still a child, ignorant of so many things. But there was something starkly strong about his enthusiasm. Nethering wondered how many years of research were wasted at the end of Waning Years because the youngest researchers were already in early middle age, starting families, and too dulled to bring intensity to their work.

“Dr. Nethering! Sir!” Shepry’s voice came muffled by his air warmer. The boy was gasping, losing whatever time his dash up the stairs had gained him. “Big trouble. I’ve lost the radio link with North Point”—five miles away, the other end of the interferometer. “There’s blooming static all across the bands.”

So nothing would be left of his plans for tonight. “Did you call Sam on the ground line? What—” He stopped, Shepry’s words slowly sinking in:static all across the bands. Behind him the strange auroral “spike” moved steadily southward. Irritation merged silently into fear. Obret Nethering knew the world was teetering on the edge of war. Everyone knew that. Civilization could be destroyed in a matter of hours if the bombs started falling. Even out-of-the-way places like Paradise Island might not be safe.And that light? It was fading now, the bright point vanished. A nuke burst in the magnetopatch might look like aurora, but surely not so asymmetrical and not with such a long rise time. Hmm. Or maybe some clever physics types had built something more subtle than a simple nuclear bomb. Curiosity and horror skirmished in Nethering’s head.

He turned and dragged Shepry back toward the stairs.Slow down. How many times had he given Shepry that advice? “Step by step, Shepry, and watch your power cord for snags. Is the radar array up tonight?”

“Y-yes.” Shepry’s heavy boots clomped down the stairs just behind him. “But the log will just be noise.”

“Maybe.” Bouncing microwaves off ionization trails was one of the minor projects that Nethering and Tripper managed. Almost all the reflections could be tied to returning satellite junk, but every year or so they’d see something they couldn’t explain, a mystery from the Great Empty. He’d almost gotten a research article out of that. Then the damn reviewers—the ubiquitous T. Lurksalot—ran their own programs, and didn’t buy his conclusions. Tonight there would be another use for the array. The pointed end of the strange light—what if it were a physical object?

“Shepry, are we still on the net?” Their high-rate connection was optical fiber strung across the ocean ice; he’d intended to use mainland supercomputers to guide tonight’s run. Now—

“I’ll check.”

Nethering laughed. “We may have something interesting to show Princeton!” He poked up the radar log, began scanning. Was it Nature or War that was talking to them tonight? Either way, the message was important.

FIFTY

Nowadays, flying made Hrunkner Unnerby feel very old. He remembered when piston engines spun wood propellers, and wings were fabric on wood.

And Victory Smith’s aircraft was no ordinary executive jet: They were flying at nearly one hundred thousand feet, moving south at three times the speed of sound. The two engines were almost silent, just a high thready tone that seemed to bury itself in your guts. Outside, the star- and sunlight together were just bright enough so colors could be seen in the clouds below. Deck upon deck, the clouds layered the world. From this altitude, even the highest of the clouds seemed to be low, crouching things. Here and there canyons opened in the air, and they glimpsed ice and snow. In a few more minutes they would reach the Southern Straits and pass out of Accord airspace. The flight communications officer said there was a squadron of Accord fighter craft all around them, that they would be in place all the way to the embassy airfield at Southmost. The only evidence Unnerby saw for the claim was an occasional glint in the sky above them. Sigh. Like everything important nowadays, they moved too fast and too far to be seen by mere mortals.

General Smith’s private craft was actually a supersonic recon bomber, the sort of thing that was becoming obsolete with the advent of satellites. “Air Defense practically gave it to us,” Smith had remarked when they came on board. “All this will be junk when the air begins to snow out.” There would be a whole new transportation industry then. Ballistic vehicles, maybe? Antigravity floaters? Maybe it didn’t matter. If their current mission didn’t work out, there might not be any industry at all, just endless fighting among the ruins.

The center of the fuselage was filled with rack on rack of computer and communications gear. Unnerby had seen the laser and microwave pods when they came aboard. The flight techs were plugged into the Accord’s military net almost as securely as if they’d been back at Lands Command. There were no stewards on this flight. Unnerby and General Smith were strapped into small perches that seemed awfully hard after the first couple of hours. Still, he was probably more comfortable than the combateers hanging on nets in the back of the aircraft. A ten-squad; that was all the General had for bodyguards.

Victory Smith had been quiet and busy. Her assistant, Tim Downing, had carried all her computer gear aboard: heavy, awkward boxes that must be very powerful, very well shielded, or very obsolete. For the last three hours she had sat surrounded by half a dozen screens, their light glittering faintly off her eyes. Hrunkner wondered what she was seeing. Her military networks combined with all the open nets must give her an almost godlike view.

Unnerby’s display showed the latest report on the Southmost underground construction. Some of it was lies—but he knew enough of the original designs to guess the truth. For the nth time, he forced his attention back to the reading. Strange; when he was young, back in the Great War, he could concentrate just like the General was now. But today, his mind kept flitting forward, to a situation and a catastrophe that he couldn’t see any way around.

Out over the Straits now; from this altitude, the broken sea ice was an intricate mosaic of cracks.

There was a shout from one of the comm techs. “Wow! Did you see that?”

Hrunkner hadn’t seen a damn thing.

“Yes! I’m still up though. Check it out.”

“Yes, sir.”

On their perches ahead of Unnerby, the techs crouched over their displays, tapping and poking. Lights flickered around them, but Unnerby couldn’t read the words on their screens—and the display format wasn’t anything he’d trained on.

Behind him, he saw that Victory Smith had risen off her perch and was watching intently. Apparently her gear was not linked with the techs’. Huh. So much for the “godlike view” he’d been imagining.

After a moment she raised a hand, signaled one of them. The fellow called back to her. “It looks like somebody went nuclear, ma’am.”

“Hm,” said Smith. Unnerby’s display hadn’t even flickered.

“It was very far away, probably over the North Sea. Here, I’ll set up a slave window for you.”

“And for Sergeant Unnerby, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The Southmost report in front of Hrunkner suddenly was replaced by a map of the North Coast. Colored contours spread concentrically about point twelve hundred kilometers northeast of Paradise Island. Yes, the old Tiefer refueling depot, a useless chunk of seamount except when you wanted to project force across ice. Thatwas far away, almost the other side of the world from where they were right now.

“Just one blast?” said Smith.

“Yes, very high up. A pulse attack… except that it wasn’t more than a megaton. We’re building this map off satellites and ground analysis from the North Coast and Princeton.” Legends scattered across the picture, bibliographic pointers to the network sites that contributed to the analysis. Hah. There was even an eyewitness report from Paradise Island—an academic observatory, according to the code.

“What did we lose?”

“No military losses, ma’am. Two commercial satellites are offline, but that may be temporary. This was barely a jab.”

What then?A test? A warning? Unnerby stared at the display.

Jau Xin had been here less than a year before, but that had been on a six-man pinnace, sneaking in and out in less than a day. Today he managed the piloting of theInvisible Hand, a million tonnes of starship.

This was the true arrival of the conquerors—even if those conquerors were duped into thinking they were rescuers. Next to Jau, Ritser Brughel sat in what had once been a Peddler Captain’s seat. The Podmaster spouted an unending stream of trivial orders—you’d think he was trying to manage the pilots himself. They’d come in over Arachna’s north pole, skirting the atmosphere, decelerating in a single strong burn, nearly a thousand seconds at better than one gee. The decel had been over open ocean, far from Spider population centers, but it must have been enormously bright to those few who saw it. Jau could see the glow reflected in the ice and snow below.

Brughel watched the icy waste rolling out before them. His features were pursed with some intense feeling. Disgust, to see so much that looked totally worthless? Triumph, to arrive on the world that he would co-rule? Probably both. And here on the bridge, both triumph and violent intent leaked into his tone, sometimes even his words. Tomas Nau might have to keep the fraud going back on L1, but here Ritser Brughel was shedding his restraint. Jau had seen the corridors that led to Brughel’s private quarters. The walls were a constant swirl of pink, sensuous in a heavy, threatening way. No staff meetings were held down those corridors. On the way from L1, he heard Brughel brag to Podcorporal Anlang about the special treat he would bring out of the freezer to celebrate the coming victory.No,don’t think on it. You know too much already.

The voices of Xin’s pilots spoke in his ear, confirming what he already saw on his tracking display. He looked up at Brughel and spoke with the formality the other seemed to like. “The burn is complete, sir. We’re in polar orbit, altitude one hundred fifty kilometers.” Any lower and they would need snowshoes.

“We were visible across thousands of kilometers, sir.” Xin matched his words with a concerned look. He’d been playing naive idiot on the trip down from L1. It was a dangerous game, but so far it had given him some leeway.And maybe, maybe there is some way I can avoid mass murder.

Brughel grinned back smug superiority. “Of course we were seen, Mr. Xin. The trick is to let them see—and then corrupt how they interpret the information.” He opened the comm channel to theHand’ s ziphead deck. “Mr. Phuong! Have you cloaked our arrival?”

Bil Phuong’s voice came back from theHand’ s ziphead hold. The place had been a madhouse the last time Jau looked, but Phuong sounded cool: “We’re on top of the situation, Podmaster. I’ve got three teams synthesizing satellite reports. L1 tells me they look good.” That would be Rita’s team talking to Bil. She should be going off duty any moment now, for what Nau would probably claim was a rest break before the heavy work. Jau had known for a day that that “lull” was when the killing would begin.

Phuong continued, “I must warn you, sir. Eventually the Spiders will sort things out. Our disguise won’t last for more than a hundred Ksec, less if someone down there is clever.”

“Thank you, Mr. Phuong. That should be more than enough.” Brughel smiled blandly at Jau.

Part of their horizon-spanning view disappeared, replaced by Tomas Nau back on L1. The senior Podmaster was sitting with Ezr Vinh and Pham Trinli in the lodge in Lake Park. Sunlight sparkled on the water behind them. This would be a public two-way conversation, visible to all the Followers and Qeng Ho. Nau looked out across theHand’ s bridge and his gaze seemed to find Ritser Brughel.

“Congratulations, Ritser. You are well placed. Rita tells me you have already achieved a close synch with the ground nets. We have some good news of our own. The Accord Intelligence chief is visiting Southmost. Her opposite number in the Kindred is already there. Short of accidents, things should be peaceful for a while more.”

Nau sounded so sincere and well-meaning. The amazing thing was that Ritser Brughel was almost as smooth: “Yes, sir. I’m setting up for the announcement and network takeover in—” He paused, as if checking his schedule. “—in fifty-one Ksec.”

Of course, Nau didn’t reply immediately. The signal from theHand had to be bounced out of radio shadow to a relay and then across five light-seconds of space to L1. Any reply would take at least another five seconds coming the other way.

Sharp on ten seconds, Nau smiled. “Excellent. We’ll set the pacing here so everybody will be fresh when the workload spikes. Good luck to all of you down there, Ritser. We’re depending on you.”

There were a couple more rounds in their dance of deception; then Nau was gone. Brughel confirmed that all comm was local. “The go codes should come down any time, Mr. Phuong.” Brughel grinned. “Another twenty Ksec, and we fry some Spiders.”

Shepry Tripper gaped at the radar display. “It’s—it’s just like you said. Eighty-eight minutes, and there it is coming out of the north again!”

Shepry knew plenty of math and had worked for Nethering almost a year. He certainly understood the principles of satellite flight. But like most people, he still boggled at the notion of “a rock that gets thrown up and never comes down.” The cobblie would chortle delight when some comsat came trucking over the horizon at the time and azimuth that the math had predicted.

What Nethering had done tonight was a prediction of a different order, and he was just as awed as his assistant—and a whole lot more frightened. They had had only two or three clear radar bearings on the narrow end of the aurora. The thing had been decelerating even though it was well outside of the atmosphere. The Air Defense site at Princeton had not been impressed by his report. Nethering had a long-term relationship with those people, but tonight they treated him like a stranger, their autoresponse thanking him for his information and assuring that the matter was being taken care of. The world network was full of rumors of a high-altitude nuke. But this had been no bomb. Departing southward, it had appeared to be in low orbit… and now it was coming back from the north, right on schedule.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see it this time, sir? It’s gonna pass almost right over us.”

“I don’t know. We don’t have any scope that can slew fast enough to track it overhead.” He started back toward the stairs. “Maybe we could use the ten-inch.”

“Yeah!” Shepry raced around him—

“Button your breather! Watch the power cords!”

—and was out of sight, banging up the stairs.

But the little cobblie was right! There were fewer than two minutes until the object was directly overhead, then a couple more before it was gone again. Huh. Maybe not even time for the scope. Nethering paused, grabbed a widefield 4-ocular from his desk. Then he was running up the stairs after Tripper.

Topside, there was a faint breeze, a cold that bit like tarant fangs, even through his electric leggings. The sun would rise in about seventy minutes; dim though its light was, the best part of his observing time would be gone. For once it just didn’t matter. Serendipity was up from the good cold earth this night.

There was at most a minute until the mystery came overhead. It should be well above the horizon now, gliding southward toward them. Nethering moved around the curved wall of the main dome, and stared into the north. From the equipment closet ahead of him, he heard Shepry struggling with the ten-inch, the little scope they showed the tourists. He should be helping the child, but there was really no time.

Familiar starfields extended crystal clear down to the horizon. That clarity was, for Obret Nethering, what made this little island truly paradise. There should be a fleck of reflected sunlight rising slowly across the sky. It would be very faint; the dead sun was such a pale thing. Nethering stared and stared, straining for the slightest motion-triggered gleam…. Nothing. Maybe he should have stuck with the radar, maybe right now they were missing their one chance to get really good data. Shepry had the ten-inch out of the closet now. He was struggling to get it aligned. “Help me, sir!”

They both had guessed wrong. Serendipity might be an angel, but she was a fickle one. Obret turned back to Shepry, a little ashamed for ignoring him. Of course, he was still watching the sky, the swath just short of the zenith where there should be a tiny speck of light. A bite of blackness flickered across the glowing pile of the Robber’s Cluster. A bite of blackness. Something… huge.

All dignity forgotten, Nethering fell on his side, brought the 4-ocular up to his lesser eyes. But tonight it was all he had…. He turned slowly, tracking along his guess at a sky-path, praying he could recapture his target.

“Sir? What is it?”

“Shepry, look up… just look up.”

The cobblie was silent for a second. “Oh!”

Obret Nethering wasn’t listening. He had thething in the 4-ocs field and all his attention was on keeping up with it, on seeing and remembering. And what he saw was an absence of light, a silhouette that raced across the galactic swath of star clouds. It was almost a quarter of a degree across. In the gap between star clouds it was invisible again… and then he saw it for another second. Nethering almost had a sense of the shape of it: a squat cylinder, downward-pointing, with a hint of complexity sticking out amidships.

Amidships.

The rest of its track crossed lonely starfields down to the southern horizon. Nethering tried in vain to follow it all the way. If it hadn’t been for its crossing the Robber’s Cluster, he might not have latched on to it at all.Thank you, Serendipity!

He lowered the 4-ocs and stood. “We’ll keep watch a few more minutes.” What other junk might be flying along with the thing?

“Oh, please, let me go below and put this on the net!” said the cobblie. “More than ninety miles up, and so big I could see its shape. It must be half a mile long!”

“Okay. Go ahead.”

Shepry disappeared down the stairs. Three minutes passed. Four. There was a glint sliding across the southern horizon, most likely a Low-Comm S satellite. Nethering pocketed his 4-ocs and climbed slowly down the stairs. This time, Air Defense would have to listen to him. A good part of Nethering’s contract money came from Accord Intelligence; he knew about the floater satellites the Kindred had recently begun launching.This is not oneof ours, and not one of the Kindred’s. And all our warfare is reduced to pettysquabbling by this arrival. The world had been so close to nuclear war. And now… what? He remembered how old Underhill had gone on about the “deepness in the sky.” But angels should come from the good cold earth, never from the empty sky.

Shepry met him at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s no good, sir. I can’t—”

“The link to the mainland is down?”

“No. It’s up. But Air Defense brushed me off just like they did on the first pass.”

“Maybe they already know.”

Shepry jerked his hands in agitation. “Maybe. But something perved is happening on the gossips, too. The last few days, crank postings have pounded the ceiling. You know, end-of-the-world claims, snow-troll sightings. It’s been kind of a laugh; I even did some counter-crapping of my own. But tonight the cranks have totally pounced.” Shepry paused, seemed to run out of jargon. Suddenly he looked very young and uncertain. “It’s… it’s not natural, sir. I found two postings that described just what we saw. That’s about what you’d expect for something that just happened over midocean. But they’re lost in all crazy crap.”

Hmm. Nethering walked across the room, settled down on his old perch beside the control bays. Shepry fidgeted back and forth, waiting for some judgment.When I first came to the observatory, the controls covered threewalls, instruments and levers, almost all analog. Now most of the gear was tiny, digital, precise. Sometimes he joked with Shepry, asking him whether they should really trust anything they couldn’t see the guts of. Shepry had never understood his lack of faith in computer automation. Until tonight.

“You know, Shepry, maybe we should make some phone calls.”

FIFTY-ONE

Hrunkner had been in a dry hurricane once before, during the Great War. But that had been on the ground—underground most of the time—and about all he remembered was the ceaseless wind and the fineness of the snow that swirled and piled, and penetrated every crevice and gap.

This time he was in the air, descending through forty thousand feet. In the dim sunlight, he could see the swirl of the hurricane spread across hundreds of miles, its sixty-mile-per-hour winds brought to stillness by distance. A dry hurricane could never equal the fury of a Bright Time water hurricane. Yet this kind of storm would last for years, its eye of cold widening and widening. The world’s heat balance had paused on a kind of thermal plateau, water’s energy of crystallization. Once past this plateau, temperatures would fall steadily toward the next, much colder level, where the air itself began to dew out.

Their jet slid down toward the walls of cloud, bucking and slewing on invisible turbulence. One of the pilots remarked that the air pressure was less now than it had been at fifty thousand feet back over the Straits. Hrunkner tilted his head up to a window, looked almost directly ahead. In the hurricane’s eye, sunlight glinted off motley snow and ice. There were also lights, the hot reds of Southland industry just below the surface.

Far ahead, a ragged edge of mountains pierced the clouds and there were colors and textures he hadn’t seen since he and Sherkaner took their long-ago walk in the Dark.

The Accord Embassy at Southmost had its own airport, a four-mile-by-two-mile property just outside the city core. Even this was just a fragment of the enclave that colonial interests had held in previous generations. The remnant of empire was alternately an obstacle to friendly relations and an economic boost for both nations. To Unnerby it was just an overly short, oil-smudged strip of ice. Their converted bomber made the most exciting landing of Hrunkner’s career, a rolling skid past an unending blur of snow-covered warehouses.

The General’s pilot was good, or very lucky. They came to a stop just a hundred feet short of snowdrifts that marked the no-more-excuses end of the runway. In minutes, beetle-shaped vehicles had driven up and were pulling them toward a hangar. Not a single person walked about in the open. Away from their path, the ground glittered with CO₂ frost.

Inside the cavernous hangar, the lights were bright and—once the doors were shut—ground crews rushed out with stairs. There were a few fancy-looking cobbers down there, waiting by the base of the stairs. Very likely the Accord ambassador and the head of the embassy guards. Since they were still on Accord ground, it was unlikely that any Southlanders would be here….Then he saw the parliamentary ensign on the jackets of two of the VIPs. Someone was eager beyond the bounds of clever diplomacy.

The mid-hatch was opened; a bolus of frigid air spilled into the cabin. Smith had already gathered up her gear and was climbing back to the hatch. Hrunkner remained on his perch a moment longer. He waved at one of the Intelligence techs. “Have there been any more nukes?”

“No, sir, nothing. We’ve got confirmation up and down the net. It was an isolated, one-megaton burst.”

The NCO Club at Lands Command was a bit out of the ordinary. Lands Command was more than a day’s drive from civilian entertainment, and the post had a fat budget compared to most out-of-the-way places. The average noncom at Lands Command was likely to be a tech with at least four years of academic training, and many of the troopers here worked at the deepmost Command and Control Center, several stories beneath the club. So, there were the usual game tables and gym sets and fizzbar, but there were also a good book collection and a number of net-connected arcade games that could also be used as study stations.

Victory Lighthill slouched in the dimness behind the fizzbar and watched the panorama of commercial video on the far wall. Maybe the most unusual thing about the club was that she was allowed in. Lighthill was a junior lieutenant, the natural bane and antagonist of many NCOs. Yet the tradition here was that if an officer covered her rank and was invited in by a noncom, then that officer’s presence was tolerated.

Tolerated, but in Lighthill’s case, not really welcomed. Her team’s reputation for inspection raids and its special connection with the Director of Intelligence made the average cobber uneasy about her and the team. But hey, the rest of the team were noncoms. Right now they were scattered around the club, each with a bulging departure pannier. For once, the other NCOs were talking to them, if not actually socializing. Even the ones who weren’t in Intelligence knew that things were teetering on the edge—and the ever-mysterious Lighthill team must surely have inside knowledge.

“It’s Smith down there at Southmost,” said a senior sergeant sitting at the bar. “Who else could it be?” He tipped his head in the direction of one of Lighthill’s corporals and waited for some reaction. Corporal Suabisme just shrugged, looking very innocent and—by trad standards—indecently young. “I wouldn’t be knowing, Sergeant. I truly wouldn’t.”

The senior sergeant waved his eating hands in a sneer. “Oh? So how come you Lighthill flunkies are all carrying departure bags? I’d say you’re just waiting to hop on a plane for someplace.”

It was the sort of probing that would normally bring Viki into action, either to withdraw Suabisme or—if necessary—to shut the senior sergeant down. But in the NCO club, Lighthill had zero authority. Besides, the point of being here was to keep the team out of official sight. But after a moment, the senior sergeant seemed to realize he wasn’t going to provoke any slips from the young soldier; he turned back to his buddies at the bar.

Viki let out a quiet sigh. She hunkered down until just the tops of her eyes were above the level of the fizzbar. The place was getting busy, the ping of spit in cuspidors a kind of background music. There was little talk, and even less laughter. Off-duty NCOs should be a more lively lot, but these cobbers had plenty on their minds. The center of attention was the television. The NCO cooperative had bought the latest variable-format video. In the dimness behind the bar, Viki smiled in spite of herself. If the world could survive even a few more years, such gear would be as good as the videomancy gear Daddy played with.

The TV was sucking from a commercial news site. One window was a crude image from some rent-a-camera at the embassy airport at Southmost: the aircraft coasting down the embassy runway was a type that Lighthill herself had seen only twice before. Like many things, it was secret and obsolete all at the same time. The press scarcely commented on it. On the main window, an editorialist was congratulating herself on this journalistic coup, and speculating just who was aboard the daggercraft.

“…It’s not the King himself, despite what our competitors may claim. Our coverage around the palace and at the Princeton airfields would have detected any movement of the Royal Household. So who is this now arriving at Southmost?” The announcer paused and the cameras moved closer, surrounding her forebody. The picture expanded to spill over the nearby displays. The maneuver gave the impression suddenly of intimate conversation. “We now know that the emissary is the head of the King’s Own Intelligence Service, Victory Smith.” The cameras backed off a little. “So, to the King’s Information Officers, we say: You can’t hide from the press. Better to give us full access. Let the people see Smith’s progress with the Southlanders.”

Another camera, from inside a hangar: Mom’s daggercraft had been towed all the way into the embassy hangar, and the clamshell doors were being pulled shut. The scene looked like a diorama built from children’s toys: the futuristic aircraft, the closed-body tractors chugging around the hangar’s wide floor. No people were visible.Surely they don’t have to pressurize the hangar? Even at the eye of the dry hurricane, the pressure couldn’t be that low. But after a moment, soldiers popped out of a van. They pushed a stairway up to the side of the dagger. Everyone in the NCO Club became suddenly very quiet.

A soldier climbed to the aircraft’s mid-hatch. It cracked open, and… the embassy rent-a-camera feed went dead, replaced by the King’s seal.

There was startled laughter, then applause and hooting. “Good for the General!” someone shouted. As much as anyone, these cobbers wanted to know what was happening at Southmost, but they also had a long-standing dislike for the news companies. They regarded these latest, very open discussions as a personal affront.

She looked at her team members. Most had been watching the television, but without great interest. They already knew what was going on, and—as Senior Sergeant Loudmouth had speculated—they expected to see action themselves very soon. Unfortunately, the television couldn’t help them with that. At the back of the room, far from the fizzbar and the television, a few hard-core gamers hung around their arcade boxes. That included three of Lighthill’s people. Brent had been there since they began to loiter. Her brother was hunched down under a custom game display, the helmet covering most of his head. To look at him, you’d never guess that the world was teetering on the edge of destruction.

Viki slipped off her perch and walked quietly back toward the arcade machines.

In all its thirty-five-year existence, this was the booze parlor’s finest moment.But, who knows, maybe after this we’ll carry on, turn into a realbusiness. Stranger things had happened. Benny’s parlor had been the social center of their strange community at L1. Very soon that community would include another race, the first high-tech alien race Humankind had ever met. The parlor might well be the centerpiece of the marvelous combination.

Benny Wen floated from table to table, directing his helpers, greeting customers. Yet still occasionally his attention was off in a fabulous future, trying to imagine what it would be like to cater to Spiders.

“The bottom wing is out of brew, Benny.” Hunte’s voice came in his ear.

“Ask Gonle, Papa. She promised she’d cover whatever is needed.” He looked around, caught a glimpse of Fong down a tunnel of flowers and vines, over in the east wing of the parlor.

Benny didn’t hear his father’s reply. He was already talking to the party of Emergents and Qeng Ho that floated down around the just-prepped table. “Welcome, welcome. Lara! I haven’t seen you in so many Watches.” Pride at showing off the parlor and pleasure at meeting old friends mixed all together, warming him.

After a moment’s chat he drifted away from the table, to the next, and the next, all the time keeping track of the overall service situation. Even with Gonle and Papa both on duty, they were just barely keeping their helpers coordinated.

“She’s here, Benny.” Gonle’s voice sounded in his ear.

“She came!” he replied. “I’ll meet her at the front table!” He drifted in from the tables, toward the central cavity. All six cardinal points had customer wings. The Podmaster had allowed, encouraged, them to knock out walls and consume the volume that had been meeting rooms. The parlor was now the biggest single space on the temp. Except for the Lake Park, it was the biggest single living space at L1. Today, almost three-quarters of all the Emergents and Qeng Ho were on-Watch simultaneously, the climax of the rushed preparations for the Spider Rescue. And for a short time before the final push, virtually everyone was here at Benny’s. The affair was as much a reunion as it was a rescue and a new beginning.

The central core of the parlor was an icosahedron of display devices, a tent of their best remaining video wallpaper. It was primitive and warmly communal at the same time. From all directions, his customers would look inward at the shared views. Benny glided quickly across the empty space, his feet just missing a corner of the displays. In the directions outward from here, he could see the hundreds of his customers, dozens of tables nestled among the vines and flowers. He grabbled a vine and brought himself to a graceful stop at a table on the up wing, at the edge of the empty core. “The table of honor” was how Tomas Nau had put it.

“Qiwi! Please, sit and be welcome!” He flipped over the table to float beside her.

Qiwi Lisolet smiled hesitantly back at Benny. By now she was five or six years older than him, but suddenly she seemed very young, uncertain. Qiwi was holding something close at her shoulder; it was one of the North Paw kittens, the first that Benny had ever seen outside of the Lake Park. Qiwi looked around the parlor, as if surprised to see the crowds. “So almost everyone is here.”

“Yes we are! We’re so glad you could come. You can give us the inside view of what’s going on.” A goodwill ambassador from the Podmaster. And Qiwi looked the part. No pressure-coveralls for Qiwi today. She wore a lacey dress that floated in soft swirls as she moved. Even at the Lake Park open house she hadn’t looked so beautiful.

Qiwi sat hesitantly at the table. Benny sat down for a moment too, a courtesy. He handed her a control wand. “This is what Gonle gave me; sorry we don’t have better.” He pointed out the display and link options. “And this gives you voice access to all the parlor. Please use it. More than anyone here, you know what’s going on.”

After a moment, Qiwi took the wand. Her other hand held tight to the kitten. The creature wriggled its wings into a more comfortable position, but didn’t otherwise complain. For years Qiwi had been the most popular of the Podmaster’s inner circle. She wasn’t really an ambassador; she was more like a princess. That was how Benny had once described her to Gonle Fong. Gonle had smirked cynically at the word, and then agreed with him. Qiwi was trusted by all, a gentle restraint on tyranny…. And yet there were times when she seemed to be lost. Today was one of those times. Benny sat back in his seat. Let the others do some hustling for a bit. Somehow he knew that Qiwi needed his time more.

She looked up after a moment, a little of the old smile on her face. “Yes, I can run the show. Tomas showed me how.” She loosened her grip on the kitten and patted his hand. “Don’t worry, Benny. This rescue is a tricky thing, but we’ll bring it off.”

She played with the wand, and the display core of the parlor flared into announcement colors, the light splashing back onto the flowered vines. When she spoke, her voice came from a thousand microspeakers, phased so that she seemed at everyone’s side. “Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show.” Her voice was happy and confident, the Qiwi they all knew.

The display core was sorting itself into multiple views: Qiwi’s face, Arachna as seen from theInvisible Hand, Podmaster Nau working at his lodge at North Paw, schematics of theHand’ s orbit and the military configuration of the various Spider nations.

“As you know, our old friend Victory Smith has just arrived in Southland. In a few moments she’ll be at their parliament, and we’ll have a treat none of us have experienced before—a direct human-camera view from the ground. Finally, after all these years, we’ll be seeing firsthand.” On the big center display, Qiwi’s face opened into a smile. “Think of it as a taste of things to come, the beginning of our life with the people of Arachna.

“But before we get to that point, you know we have a war to prevent, and our presence finally to reveal.” She looked down at the displays, and her voiced hesitated, as if she were suddenly struck by the enormity of what they were attempting. “We have planned to announce ourselves in just over forty Ksec, when our low-orbit network manipulations are in place, and theHand’ s orbit takes it over the capitals of both Kindred and Accord. I think you know how tricky it will be. The Spiders, our hoped-for friends, are poised on more dangerous ground than most human civilizations can survive. But I know you have prepared for this day well. When the time for announcement and contact comes, I know we will succeed.

“So, watch for now. Soon we will be very busy.”

FIFTY-TWO

Oddly enough, Rachner Thract retained his rank of colonel, not that former colleagues would trust him to scrape out their latrines. General Smith had treated him gently. They couldn’t prove he was a traitor, and apparently she was unwilling to use extreme interrogation on him. So Colonel Rachner Thract, formerly of the unnamed service, found himself with a salary and per diem worthy of full duty… and nothing whatsoever to do.

It had been four days since that terrible meeting at Lands Command, but Thract had seen his disgrace building for almost a year. When it finally overcame him… it had been such a relief, except for the unhappy detail that he survived it, a living ghost.

Old-time officers, especially Tiefers, would decapitate themselves after such ignominy. Rachner Thract was one-half Tiefer, but he hadn’t cut off his head with a weighted blade. Instead, he’d numbed his brain with five straight days of fizz, chewing his way round and round the Calorica Strip.An idiot right to the end. Calorica was the only place in the world where it was too warm to lapse into fizz coma.

So he’d heard the reports that someone—Smith, it had to be Smith—was flying to Southmost, was trying to recover something of what Thract had lost. As the hours counted down toward Smith’s arrival at Southmost, Rachner had eased off on the fizz. He sat staring at the news feeds in the public houses. Sat and prayed that somehow Victory Smith could succeed where Thract’s life effort had failed. But he knew that she would fail. No one believed him, and even Rachner Thract didn’t know the how and why. But he was sure: There was something backing up the Kindred. Even the Kindred didn’t know about it, but it was there, twisting every one of the Accord’s technical advantages back on itself.

On the multiple screens, live from Southmost, Smith passed through the Great Doors of Parliament Hall. Even here, the rowdiest public house on the Strip, the clientele was suddenly very silent. Thract settled his head upon the bar, and felt his stare become glazed.

And then his telephone began ringing. Rachner hauled it out of his jacket. He held it by his head, stared at it with uninterested disbelief.Itmust be broken. Or someone was sending him an advertisement. Nothing important could ever come over this unsecured piece of junk.

He was about to throw it to the floor when the cobber on the next perch whacked him across the back. “Damn military bum! Get out!” she shouted.

Thract came off his perch, not sure if he was about to follow the other’s demand, or defend the honor of Smith and all the others who tried to keep the peace.

In the end, house management decided the issue; Thract found himself out on the street, cut off from the television that might have shown him what his General was attempting. And his telephone was still ringing. He stabbedACCEPT and snarled something incoherent into the microphone.

“Colonel Thract, is that you?” The words were jerky and garbled, but the voice was vaguely familiar. “Colonel? Is your end a secure comm?”

Thract swore loudly. “The bleeding hellno !”

“Oh thank goodness!” came the almost-familiar voice. “There’s a chance then. Surely eventhey can’t meddle with all the world’s idle talk.”

They.The emphasis cut through Thract’s fizz hangover. He brought the microphone close his maw, and his next words came out almost casually curious. “Who is this?”

“Sorry. Obret Nethering here.Please don’t hang up. You probably don’t remember me. Fifteen years ago, I taught a short course on remote sensing. At Princeton. You sat in.”

“I, ah, remember.” In fact, it had been a rather good course.

“You do? Oh good, good! So you’ll know I’m not a crank. Sir, I know how busy you must be right now, but I pray you’ll give me just a minute of your time. Please.”

Thract was suddenly aware of the street and the buildings around him. Calorica Strip stretched around the bottom of the volcanic bowl, perhaps the warmest place left on the surface of the world. But the Strip was just a faded memory of the time when Calorica had been a playground for the super-rich. The bars and hotels were dying. Even the snowfalls were long ended. The snow piled up in the alley behind him was two years old, littered with fizz barf and streaked with urine.My high-tech command center.

Thract hunkered down, out of the wind. “I suppose I can give you a moment.”

“Oh, thank you! You’re my last hope. All my calls to Professor Underhill come up blocked. Not surprising, now that I understand…” Thract could almost hear the cobber collecting his wits, trying not to blather. “I’m an astronomer out on Paradise Island, Colonel. Last night I saw”—a spaceship as big as a city, its drives lighting the sky… and ignored by Air Defense and all the networks. Nethering’s descriptions were short and blunt, and took just under a minute. The astronomer continued. “I’m no crank, I tell you. This is what we saw! Surely there are hundreds of eyewitnesses, but somehow it’s invisible to Air Defense. Colonel, you’ve got to believe me.” His tone segued into uncomfortable self-realization, an understanding that no one in his right mind could buy such a story.

“Oh, I believe you,” Rachner said softly. It was a floridly paranoid vision… and it explained everything.

“What did you say, Colonel? Sorry, I can’t send you much hard evidence. They cut our landline about half an hour ago; I’m using a hobbyist’s packet radio to reach rout—” Several syllables were jumbled into incoherence. “So that’s really all I had to tell you. Maybe this is some Deepest Secret plot on the part of Air Defense. If you can’t say anything, I’ll understand. But I had to try to get through. That ship was so large, and—”

For a moment, Thract thought the other had paused, overcome. But the silence continued for several seconds, and then a synthetic voice blatted from the telephone’s tiny speaker: “Message 305. Network error. Please retry your call later.”

Rachner slowly tucked the telephone back in his jacket. His maw and eating hands were numb, and it wasn’t just the cold air. Once upon a time, his network intelligence cobbers had done a study on automated snooping. Given enough computing power, it was in principle possible to monitorevery in-the-clear communication for keywords, and trigger security responses. In principle. In fact, development of the necessary computers always lagged behind the size of the contemporary public networks. But now it looked like someone had just that power.

A Deep Secret plot on the part of Air Defense? Not likely. Over the last year, Rachner Thract had watched the mysteries and the failures encroach from all directions. Even if Accord Intelligence and Pedure and all the intelligence agencies of the world hadcooperated, they could not have produced the seamless lies that Thract had sensed. No. Whatever they faced was larger than the world, a grander evil than anything Spiderly.

And now at last he had something concrete. His mind should climb into combat alertness; instead he was filled with panicked confusion.Damnthe fizz. If they were up against an alien force so deep, so crafty—what did it matter that Obret Nethering and now Rachner Thract knew the truth? What could they do? But Nethering had been permitted to talk for more than a minute. He’d spoken a number of keywords before the connection was chopped. The aliens might be better than Spiders—but they weren’t gods.

The thought brought Thract to a halt. So they weren’t gods. The word of their monster ship must be percolating across the civilized world, slowed and suppressed to one-on-one contacts between little people without access to power. But that couldn’t hide the secret more than a few hours. And that meant… whatever the purpose of this vast fraud, it must be headed for consummation in the next few hours. Right now the chief was risking her life down at Southmost, trying to bail them out from a disaster that was actually a trap.If I could get through to her, to Belga, to anybody at the top….

But telephones and network mail would be worse than useless. He needed some direct contact. Thract ran a weaving course down the deserted sidewalk. There was a bus stop somewhere beyond the corner. How long until the next one came through? He still had his private helicopter, a rich cobber’s toy… that might be too network-smart. The aliens might simply take it over and crash him. He pushed the fear away. Just now, the chopper was his only hope. From the heliport he could reach any place within two hundred miles. Who would be in that range? He skidded around the corner. Grand Boulevard extended off beneath an endless row of trichrome lights, down from the Strip and through the Calorica forest. The forest was long dead, of course. Not even its leaves were left to spore, the ground beneath being too warm. The center had been cleared flat for a heliport. From there he could fly to… Thract’s gaze reached across the bowl. The boulevard lights dwindled to tiny sparkles. Once upon a time, they had ascended the caldera walls, to the mansions of the Waning Years. But the truly rich had abandoned their palaces. Only a few were still occupied, inaccessible from below.

But Sherkaner Underhill was up there, back from Princeton.At least that had been the word in the last situation report he had seen, the day his career had ended. He knew the stories about Underhill, that the poor cobber had lost it mentally. No matter. What Thract needed was a sidewise path into Lands Command, maybe through the chief’s daughter, a path that did not pass through the net.

A minute later the city bus pulled up behind Thract. He hopped aboard, the only passenger, even though it was midmorning. “You’re in luck.” The driver grinned. “The next one isn’t until three hours after noon.”

Twenty miles an hour, thirty. The bus rumbled down the Grand Boulevard toward the Dead Forest Heliport.I can be on his doorstep in tenminutes. And suddenly Rachner was aware of the fizz barf that crusted his maw and eating hands, of the stains on his uniform. He brushed at his head, but there was nothing he could do about the uniform. A madman come to see a senile old coot. Maybe it was fitting. It also might be the last chance any of them had.

A decade earlier, in friendlier times, Hrunkner Unnerby had advised the Southlanders in the design of New Southmost Under. So in a strange way, things became more familiar after they left the Accord Embassy and entered Southland territory. There were lots of elevators. The Southland had wanted a Parliament Hall that would survive a nuclear strike. He had warned them that future ordnance developments would likely make their goal impossible, but the Southlanders hadn’t listened, and had wasted substantial resources that could have gone to Dark Time agriculture.

The main elevator was so large that even the reporters could get aboard, and they did so. The Southland press was a privileged class, explicitly protected by Parliament law—even on government property! The General did all right with the mob. Maybe she had learned from watching Sherkaner deal with journalists. Her combateers hulked innocuously in the background. She made a few general remarks, and then politely ignored their questions, letting the Southland police keep the reporters out of her physical way.

A thousand feet underground, their elevator started sideways on an electric polyrail. The elevator’s tall windows looked out on brightly lit industrial caves. The Southlanders had done a lot here and on the Coastal Arc, but they didn’t have enough underground farms to support it all.

The two Elected Representatives who had greeted her at the airfield had once been powerful in the South. But times had changed: there had been assassinations, subornations, all Pedure’s usual tricks—and lately a near-magical good luck on the Kindred side. Now these two were, at least publicly, alone in their friendliness for the Accord. Now they were regarded as toadies of a foreign king. The two stood close to the General, one close enough that he could talk with her behind a screen. Hopefully, only the General and Hrunkner Unnerby could hear.Don’t count on it, Unnerby thought to himself.

“No disrespect, ma’am, but we had hoped that your king would come in his own person.” The politico wore a finely tailored jacket and leggings—and an air of spiritual bedragglement.

The General nodded reassuringly. “I understand, sir. I’m here to make sure the right things can be done, and done safely. Will I be allowed to address Parliament?” In the present situation, Hrunk guessed that there was no “inner circle” to speak to—unless you counted the group that was firmly controlled by Pedure. But a parliamentary vote could make a difference, since the strategic rocket forces were still loyal to it.

“Y-yes. We have set that up. But things have gone too far.” He waved his watch hand. “I wouldn’t put it past the Other Side to cause an elevator wreck and—”

“They let us get this far. If I can talk to Parliament, I think there will be an accommodation.” General Smith smiled at the Southlander, an almost conspiratorial look.

Fifteen minutes later, the elevator had deposited them at the main esplanade. Three sides and the roof simply lifted off.That was an embellishment he hadn’t seen before. Unnerby the engineer couldn’t resist: He froze and stared up into the glaring lights and darkness, trying to see the mechanism that had such a large and silent effect.

Then the crush of police and politicians and reporters swept him off the platform…

…and they were climbing up the stairs of Parliament Hall.

At the top, Southland security finally separated them from the reporters and Smith’s own combateers. They passed by five-ton timbered doors… into the hall itself. The hall had always been an underground affair, in earlier generations squatting just above the local deepness. Those early rulers had been more like bandits (or freedom fighters, depending on your source of propaganda) whose forces roamed the mountainous land.

Hrunkner had helped design this incarnation of Parliament Hall. It was one of the few projects he’d worked on where a major design goal was awesome appearance. It might not really be bombproof, but it looked damned spectacular:

The hall was a shallow bowl, with levels connected by gently curving stairs, each level a wide setback with rows of desks and perches. The rock walls curved in an enormous arch that carried fluorescent tubes—and a half-dozen other lighting technologies. Together those lights had almost the brightness and purity of a mid-Bright day, a light rich enough to show all the colors in the walls. Carpeting as deep and soft as father’s-pelt covered the stairs and aisles and proscenium. Paintings were hung on the polished wood that faced each level, paintings done with a thousand dyes by artists who knew how to exploit every illusion. For a poor country, they had spent much on this place. But then, their parliament was their greatest pride, an invention that had ended banditry and dependence, and brought peace. Until now.

The doors swung closed behind them. The sound returned deep echoes from the dome and the far walls. In here, there would be just the Elected, their visitors, and—high above, Hrunker could see clusters of lenses—the news cameras. Across the curves of desks, almost every perch was filled. Unnerby could feel the attention of half a thousand Elected.

Smith and Unnerby and Tim Downing started down the steps that led to the proscenium. The Elected were mostly quiet, watching. There was respect here, and hostility, and hope. Maybe Smith would have her chance to keep the peace.

For this day of triumph, Tomas Nau had set North Paw’s weather to be its sunniest, the kind of warm afternoon that could extend all the summer day round. Ali Lin had grumbled, but made the necessary changes. Now Ali was weeding in the garden beneath Nau’s study, his irritation forgotten. So what if the park’s patterns were upset; fixing the problem would be Ali’s next task.

And my task is to manage everything together,Tomas thought. Across the table from him sat Vinh and Trinli, working with the site monitoring he had assigned them. Trinli was essential to the cover story, the only Peddler that Tomas was confident would support the lies. Vinh… well, a credible excuse would take him offline for critical moments, but what he did see would corroborate Trinli. That would be tricky, but if there were any surprises… well, that was what Kal and his men were here to handle.

Ritser’s presence was just a flat image, showing him sitting in the Captain’s chair aboard theHand. None of his words would be heard by innocent ears. “Yes, Podmaster! We’ll have the picture in a moment. We got a functioning spybot into Parliament Hall. Hey, Reynolt, your Melin got something right.”

Anne was up in the Hammerfest Attic. She was present only as a private image in Tomas’s huds, and a voice in his ear. At the moment, her attention was split in at least three directions. She was running some kind of ziphead analysis, watching a Trixia Bonsol translation on the wall above her, and tracking the data stream from theHand. The ziphead situation was as complicated as it had ever been. She didn’t respond to Ritser’s words.

“Anne? When Ritser’s spy pics come, pipe them directly to Benny’s. Trixia can do overlay translation, but give us some true audio, too.” Tomas had already seen some of the spybot transmissions. Let the people at Benny’s see living Spiders up close and in motion. That would be a subtle help in the postconquest lies.

Anne didn’t look away from her work. “Yes, sir. I see that what you say is heard by Vinh and Trinli.”

“Quite so.”

“Very well. Just want you to know… our internal enemies have stepped up the pace. I’m seeing meddling all through our automation.Watch Trinli. I’ll bet he’s sitting there diddling his localizers.” Anne’s gaze flicked up for an instant, catching the question in Nau’s eyes. She shrugged. “No, I’m still not sure it’s him. But I’m very close. Be ready.”

A second passed. Anne’s voice came again, but now publicly audible here and in the Peddlers’ temp. “Okay. Here we have live video from Parliament Hall at Southmost. This is what a human would actually see and hear.”

Nau looked to the left, where his huds showed Qiwi’s pov in the temp. The main facets of Benny’s display flickered. For an instant it wasn’t clear what they were seeing. There was a jumble of reds and greens, actinic blues. They were looking into some kind of a pit. Stone ladders were cut into the walls. Moss or hairy pelts grew from rock. The Spiders crowded like black roaches.

Ritser Brughel glanced up from the pictures of Parliament and shook his head almost in awe. “It’s like some Frenkisch prophet’s vision of Hell.”

Nau gave a gave a silent nod of acknowledgment. With the ten-second time lag, casual chitchat was to be avoided. But Brughel was right; seeing so many together was even worse than the earlier spybot videos. The zipheads’ cozy, humanesque translations gave a very unreal view of the Spiders.I wonder how much we are missing about their minds. He called up a separate image of the scene, this one synthesized by ziphead translators from a Spider news feed. In this picture, the steep pit became a shallow amphitheater, the ugly splashes of color were orderly mosaics worked into the carpet (which no longer looked like scraggly hair). The woodwork was everywhere glistening with polish (not stained and pitted). And the creatures themselves were somehow more sedate, their gestures almost meaningful in human body language.

In both displays, three figures appeared at the Parliament’s entrance. They climbed (walked) down the stone stairs. The air was full of hissing and clicking, the true sound of these creatures.

The threesome disappeared into the bottom of the pit. A moment passed and they reappeared, climbing the far side. Ritser chuckled. “The midsized one in front must be the spy chief, that’s what Bonsol calls ‘Victory Smith.’ “ One detail of the ziphead story was accurate: The creature’s clothing was dead black, but it was more a pile of interlocking patches than a uniform. “The hairy creature behind Smith, that must be the engineer, ‘Hrunkner Unnerby.’ Such quaint names for monsters.”

The three climbed out onto an arching spike of stone. A fourth Spider, already on the precarious structure, clambered to its pointed end.

Nau turned from the Spiders’ hall to look at the crowd at Benny’s. They were silent, watching in vast shock. Even Benny Wen’s helpers were motionless, their gaze captured by the images from the Spider world.

“Introductions by the Parliamentary Speaker,” spoke a ziphead voice. “The Parliament will come to order. I have the honor to—” Around the sensible words, Ritser’s spy robot sent back the reality, the hissing clatter, the stabbing gestures with forelegs that ended in rapier points. In truth, these creatures did look like the statues the Qeng Ho had seen at Lands Command. But when they moved it was the chilling grace of predators, some gestures slow, some very very fast. Strangest of all, for all their superior vision, it wasn’t easy to identify their eyes. Across the fluted ridges of the head, there were patches of smooth glassiness, bulbous here and there, with extensions that might be the cool-down points for its thermal infrared vision. The front of the Spider body was a nightmarish eating machine. The razor mandibles and clawlike helper limbs were in constant motion. But the creature’s head was almost immobile on the thorax.

The Speaker left the tip of the stone needle, and General Smith climbed up, negotiating a tricky passage around the other. Smith was silent for a moment, once she reached the point. Her forelegs waved in a little spiral, as if encouraging foolish persons to get close to her maw. Hiss and clatter came from the speaker. On the “translated” image, a legend appeared over her representation:SMILING GENTLY AT THE AUDIENCE.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Parliament.” The voice was strong and beautiful—Trixia Bonsol’s voice. Nau noticed Ezr Vinh’s head jerk slightly at the sound of her. The diag traces on Vinh rose with the usual conflicted intensity.He’ll be usable, just long enough, thought Nau.

“I come here speaking for my King, and with his full authority. I come here hoping I can offer enough to win your trust.”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Parliament.” Rank on rank, the Elected looked back upon Victory Smith. All their attention was hers, and Hrunkner felt the power of the General’s personality flowing as strongly as ever it had done. “I come here speaking for my King, and with his full authority. I come here hoping I can offer enough to win your trust.

“We are at a point in history where we can destroy all progress that has been made—or we can make good on all the efforts of the past and achieve an unbounded paradise. These two outcomes are the two sides of our one situation. The bright outcome depends on trust for one another.”

There were scattered hoots of derision, the Kindred partisans. Unnerby wondered if all of those had tickets off Southland. Surely they must realize that any lesser payoff would leave them as dead as the country they were betraying, once the bombs started falling.

The General had told him that Pedure was down here herself. I wonder… Unnerby looked in all directions as the General spoke, his gaze most intensely upon the shadows and sergeants-at-arms.There. Pedure was sitting on the proscenium, not a hundred feet from Smith. After all these years, she was more confident than ever.Wait a little longer, dear HonoredPedure. Maybe my General can surprise you.

“I have a proposal. It is simple but it has substance—and it can be put into place very quickly.” She motioned for Tim Downing to pass the data cards to the Speaker’s clerk. “I think you know my position in the force structure of the Accord. Even the most suspicious of you will grant that, while I am here, the Accord must show the restraint it has publicly promised. I am authorized to offer a continuance of this state. You of the Southland Parliament may pick any three persons of the Accord—including myself, including the King himself—for indefinite residence at our embassy here at Southmost.” It was the most primitive peacekeeping strategy, though more generous than ever in the past, since she was offering the choice of hostages to the other side. And more than ever in history, it was practical. The Accord Embassy at Southmost was plenty big enough to house a small city, and with modern communications it would not even cripple the important activities of the hostage. If the Parliament was not totally corrupted, this might stick a bar between the legs of onrushing disaster.

The Elected were silent, even Pedure’s buddies. Shocked? Facing up to the only real options they had? Listening for instructions from their boss?Something was going on. In the shadows behind Smith, Hrunkner could see Pedure talking intensely to an aide.

When Victory Smith’s speech ended, Benny’s parlor rang with applause. There had been stark shock when the speech began, when everyone saw how living Spiders really looked. But the words of the speech had fit the personality of Victory Smith, and that was something most people were familiar with. The rest would take a lot of getting used to, but…

Rita Liao caught Benny’s sleeve as he sailed by with drinks for the ceiling. “You shouldn’t have Qiwi up front all by herself, Benny. She can squeeze in here, and still talk to everyone.”

“Um, okay.” It was the Podmaster who had suggested the front-row solitude, but surely it couldn’t matter when things were going so well. Benny delivered the drinks, listening to the happy speculations with half his attention.

“—between that speech and our meddling, they should be safe as temps at Triland—”

“Hey, we could beon the ground in less than four Msecs! After all these years—”

“Space or ground, who cares? We’ll have the resources to dump the birth bans—”

Yes, the birth bans. Our own, human version of the oophase taboo. MaybeI can finally ask Gonle— Benny’s mind shied away from the thought. It was tempting fate to act too soon. Nevertheless, he suddenly felt happier than he had in a long time. Benny avoided the tables by diving across the central gap, a quick detour in Qiwi’s direction.

She nodded at Rita’s suggestion. “That would be nice.” Her smile was tentative, and her eyes had barely flicked away from the parlor’s display screens. General Smith was climbing down from the speaker’s platform.

“Qiwi! Things are working out just like the Podmaster planned. Everyone wants to congratulate you!”

Qiwi petted the kitten in her arms gently, but with a kind of intense protectiveness. She looked at him and her expression was oddly puzzled. “Yes, it’s all working out.” She rose from the table and followed Benny across the space to Rita’s table.

“I have to talk to him, Corporal.Immediately. “ Rachner drew himself up as he spoke the words, projecting fifteen years of colonelcy into his manner.

And for a moment the young corporal wilted before his glare. Then the oophase cobblie must have noticed the traces of fizz barf on Thract’s maw and the bedraggled state of his uniform. He shrugged, his gaze watchful and closed. “I’m sorry, sir, you’re not on the list.”

Rachner felt his shoulders droop. “Corporal, just ring down to him. Tell him it’s Rachner, and it’s a matter of… of life and death.” And as soon as he said the words, Thract wished he hadn’t asserted this absolute truth. The cobblie stared at him for a second—debating whether to throw him out? Then something like sick pity seemed to rise in his aspect; he opened a comm line and spoke to someone inside.

A minute passed. Two. Rachner paced the visitor holding box. At least it was out of the wind; he’d frozen the tips of two hands just climbing the stairs from Underhill’s helipad. But… an external guard, and a holding box? Somehow, he hadn’t expected such security. Maybe some good had come out of his losing his job. It had wakened the others to the need for protection.

“Rachner, is that you?” The voice that came from the sentry’s comm was frail and querulous. Underhill.

“Yes, sir. Please, I’ve got to talk to you.”

“You—you lookterrible, Colonel. I’m sorry, I—” His voice faded. There was mumbling in the background. Someone said, “The speech went well… plenty of time now.” Then he was back, and sounding much less drifty. “Colonel, I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

FIFTY-THREE

“An excellent speech. It could not have been better if we had scripted it.” In the flat video from theHand, Ritser rattled on, well pleased with himself. Nau just nodded, smiling. Smith’s peace proposal was strong enough to bring the Spider militaries to a pause. It would give the humans time to announce themselves, and propose cooperation. That was the official story, a risky plan that would leave the Podmasters in a second-class position. In fact, about 7Ksec from now, Anne’s zipheads would initiate a sneak attack by Smith’s own military. The resulting Kindred “counterattack” would complete the planned destruction.And we’ll step in and pickup the pieces.

Nau looked out over North Paw’s afternoon brightness, but his huds were filled with a view of Trinli and Vinh, sitting in the flesh just a couple meters from him. Trinli had a faintly amused expression, but his fingers never stopped their flickering work on his assignment, monitoring the nuclear munitions in Kindred territory. Vinh? Vinh looked nervous; the diagnostic tags that hovered by his face showed that he knew something was up but hadn’t quite figured out what it was. It was time to move him out of the way, a few brief errands. When he came back events would be in motion… and Trinli would back up the Podmaster’s story.

Anne Reynolt’s voice came tiny in Nau’s ear. “Sir, we have an emergency.”

“Yes, go ahead.” Nau spoke easily, not turning away from the lake. Inside, though, something froze in his guts. This was the closest he had ever heard Anne come to panicky sharpness.

“Our pet subversive has stepped up the pace. There’s much less masking. He’s grabbing everything that’s loose. A few thousand more seconds and he can shut us zipheads down…. It’s Trinli, sir, ninety percent probability.”

But Trinli is sitting right here, before my very eyes! And I need him to back up the post-attack lies. “I don’t know, Anne,” he said aloud. Maybe Anne was freaking. It was possible, though he had been tracking her meds and MRI tuning more closely than ever before.

Anne shrugged, didn’t reply. It was the typical dismissive gesture of a ziphead. She had done her best, and he was welcome to ignore her advice and go to hell.

This was not a distraction he needed when forty years’ work was coming to a cusp.Which was exactly why an enemy might pick this moment finallyto act.

Kal Omo was standing right behind Nau, and was on the private link with Reynolt. Of the other three guards, only Rei Ciret was actually in the room. Nau sighed. “Okay, Anne.” He gave Omo an invisible signal to get the rest of his team into the room.We’ll put these two on ice, deal with themlater.

Nau had given his targets no warning, yet—from the corner of his vision, he saw Trinli’s hand flicker in a throwing gesture. Kal Omo gave a gargling scream.

Nau pulled himself under the table. Something slammed into the thick wood above him. There was a chatter of wire-gun fire, another scream.

“He’s getting away!”

Nau slid across the floor and bounced up toward the ceiling on the far side of the table. Rei Ciret was in midair, flailing at Ezr Vinh. “Sorry, sir! This one jumped me.” He pushed the bleeding body away; Vinh had bought Trinli the instant he needed to escape. “Marli and Tung will get him!”

Indeed they were trying. The two sprayed wire-fire up the hillside, toward the forest. But Trinli was way ahead of them, flying from tree to tree. Then he was gone, and Tung and Marli were halfway to the forest in hot pursuit.

“Wait!” Nau’s voice roared over the lodge speakers. A lifetime of obedience stopped their reckless pursuit. They came carefully back down the hillside, scanning for threats all the way. Shock and rage were strong in their faces.

Nau continued in a lower voice. “Get inside. Guard the lodge.” It was the sort of basic direction a podsergeant would give, but Kal Omo was… Nau floated back to the meeting table, the etiquette of consensual gravity set aside for the moment. Something sharp and shiny was wedged in the edge of the table, just at the point where he had dived for cover. A similar blade had slashed across Omo’s throat; its butt end protruded from the podsergeant’s windpipe. Omo had stopped twitching. Blood hung all around him, drifting only slowly toward the floor. The podsergeant’s wire gun was half out of its holster.

Omo was a useful man.Do I have time to put him on ice? Nau thought a second more on tactics and timing… and Kal Omo lost.

The guards hovered around the lodge’s windows, but their eyes kept straying back to their podsergeant. Nau’s mind raced down chains of consequences. “Ciret, get Vinh tied down. Marli, find Ali Lin.”

Vinh moaned weakly as they shoved him onto a chair. Nau came over the table to look more closely at the man. It looked like he’d taken a wire-gun nick across the shoulder. It was bloody, but it wasn’t spouting. Vinh would live… long enough.

“Pus, that Trinli was fast,” Tung said, blabbering with released tension. “All these years he was just a loud old fart and then—bam—he scragged the podsergeant. Scragged him and then got clean away.”

“Wouldn’t have been clean if this one hadn’t gotten in the way.” Ciret prodded Vinh’s head with the muzzle of his wire-gun. “They were both fast.”

Too fast.Nau slipped the huds off his eyes, and stared at them for a moment. Qeng Ho huds, driven by data off the localizer net. He crumpled the huds into a wad, and dug out the fiberphone that Reynolt had insisted upon as backup. “Anne, can you hear me? Did you see what happened?”

“Yes. Trinli was in motion the moment you signaled Kal Omo.”

“Heknew. He could hear your side of the conversation.” Pestilence! How could Anne detect the subversion and not notice that Trinli had broken into their comm?

“…Yes. I only guessed a part of what he was up to.” So the localizers were Trinli’s customized weapon. A trap built across millennia.Who am Ifighting?

“Anne. I want you to cut the wireless power to all the localizers.” But localizers were the backbone of Plague knew how many critical systems. Localizers maintained the stability of the lake itself. “Inside North Paw, leave the stabilizers on. Have your zipheads manage them directly, over the fiber.”

“Done. Things will be rough, but we can manage. What about the ground ops?”

“Get in touch with Ritser. Things are too complicated to be subtle. We have to advance the groundside time line.”

He could hear Anne punching out instructions to her people. But gone was his view of the orders and the threads of ziphead processing assigned to each project. This was like fighting blind. They could lose while they were staggering around in shock.

A hundred seconds later, Anne was back to him. “Ritser understands. My people are helping him set up a simple attack run. We can fine-tune the results later.” She spoke with her old, calm impatience. Anne Reynolt had fought battles much harder than this, won a hundred times against overwhelming odds. If only all enemies could be so used.

“Very good. Have you spotted Trinli? I’ll bet he’s in the tunnels.” If he isn’t circling back for a second ambush.

“Yes, I think so. We’re hearing movement off the old geophones.” Emergent equipment.

“Good. Meantime, patch together some synthetic voice to keep the people at Benny’s happy.”

“Done,” came her immediate reply. Already done.

Nau turned back to his guards and Ezr Vinh. A very small breathing space had been created. Long enough to get new orders to Ritser. Long enough to find out a little about what he was really up against.

Vinh had regained consciousness. There was a glaze of pain in his eyes—and a glitter of hatred. Nau smiled back at him. He gestured for Ciret to twist Vinh’s maimed shoulder. “I need a few answers, Ezr.”

The Peddler screamed.

Pham boosted himself faster and faster up the diamond corridor, guided by green images that smeared and wobbled… and dimmed toward total darkness. He coasted blind for a few seconds, still not slowing. He patted at his temples, trying to reset the localizers there. They were in place, and he knew there were thousands of localizers drifting through the length of the tunnel. Anne must have cut off the wireless power pulses, at least in this tunnel.

The woman is unbelievable!For years, Pham had avoided direct manipulation of the ziphead system. Yet somehow Anne had still noticed. The mindscrub had slowed her progress for a while, but this last year she had tightened the noose and tightened it, until… We were so close to disablingthe power cutoff, and now we’ve lost everything.Almost everything. Ezr had died to give him one more chance.

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 about you? She’s gone nuts, says you’ve killed Kal Omo and taken over North Paw.” His words guttered to a stop as he realized that Pham’s presence here was equally unlikely.

Pham grinned at Silipan, and shut the door behind him. “Oh, the stories are all true, Trud. I’ve come to take back my fleet.”

“Your… fleet.” Trud just stared for a moment, fear and wonder playing across his face. “Pus, Pham. What are you on? You look strange.” A little adrenaline, a little freedom. Amazing what it can do for you. Silipan shrank before the smile that was growing on Pham’s face. “You’re crazy, man. You know you can’t win. You’re trapped here. Give up. Maybe we can pass this off as—as temporary insanity.”

Pham shook his head. “I’m here to win, Trud.” He raised his little dart gun up where Silipan could see. “And you’re going to help. We’re going out to the grouproom, and you’re going to cut off all ziphead support—”

Silipan brushed irritably at Nuwen’s gun hand. “Impossible. There’s a critical need for them, supporting the ground op.”

“Supporting Nau’s Spider-extermination program? All the better to cut them off right now. It should have an interesting effect on the Podmaster’s lake, too.”

Pham could almost see the Emergent balancing the risks in his mind: Pham Trinli, his old drinking buddy and fellow-braggart, now armed with a debatably effective dart gun—against all the Podmasters’ lethal power. “No way, Pham. You got yourself into this, and now you’re stuck with it.”

The huds that Pham held crumpled in his right hand were making muffled, angry noises. There was a final squawk, and the door to the storeroom popped open. “What’s the matter with you, Silipan? I told you we need—” Anne Reynolt slid into the room. She seemed to take in the tableau instantly, but she had nothing to bounce out on.

And Pham was just as fast as she. His hand turned, the little dart gun fired, and Reynolt convulsed. An instant later, a strange thudding rocked her body. Pham turned back to Trud, and now his smile was broader. “Explosive darts, don’t you know? They get inside, then—bam—your guts are hamburger.”

Trud’s complexion turned a pale shade of ash. “Unh-unh…” He stared at the body of his former boss/slave, and he looked about ready to puke.

Pham tapped Silipan’s chest with the little dart gun. Trud stared down, horror-frozen, into the muzzle. “Trud, my friend, why so glum? You’re a good Emergent. Reynolt was just a ziphead, a piece of furniture.” He gestured at Reynolt’s body, its convulsions fading toward the limpness of fresh death. “So let’s stow this garbage out of the way, and then you can show me how to disconnect the zipheads’ comm.” He grinned and moved back to snag the body. Trud was visibly trembling as started toward the door.

The instant Silipan turned away from him, Pham’s casual grip on Anne became gentle, careful.Lord, that sounded like the real thing, not a stundart and a noisemaker. It had been half a lifetime since he’d used this trick; what if he’d botched it? For the first time since the action started, panic seeped through the adrenaline rush. He slipped one hand to the side of her throat… and found a strong, steady pulse. Anne was thoroughly stunned and nothing more.

Pham pasted the predatory smile back on his face and followed Trud into the zipheads’ grouproom.

FIFTY-FOUR

The news companies had had the last laugh after all. So what if Accord Security had blacked out Mom’s getting off the daggercraft? Within minutes, she was on Southland territory—and the local news services were more than willing to show Victory Smith and every person in her entourage. For a few minutes, the cameras were so close that she could see the inner expression of the General’s eating hands. Mom looked as calm and military as ever… but for a few minutes Victory Lighthill felt more like a small child than a lieutenant in the Intelligence Service. This was as bad as the morning Gokna had died.Mom, why are you taking this risk? But Viki knew the answer to that. The General was no longer essential to the great counterlurk that she and Daddy had created; now she could help those she had put in greatest peril.

The NCO Club was crowded with cobbers who normally would have been on sleep shift or at other amusements. It was the closest place they could come to being back on the job. And for once “the job” was clearly the most important thing any cobber could be doing.

Victory drifted among the arcade games, discreetly signaled her people that things were cool. Finally, she hopped on a perch next to Brent. Her brother had not taken off his game helmet. His hands were in constant motion across the games console. She tapped him on a shoulder. “Mom will be talking any second now,” she said softly.

“I know,” was all Brent said. “Critter nine sees our op, but it still is fooled. It thinks the problem is local.”

Viki almost grabbed her brother’s helmet off his head. Damn. I might as well be deaf and blind. Instead, she took a telephone from her jacket and poked out a number. “Hi, Daddy? Mom has started talking.”

The speech was short. It was good. It blocked the threat from the South.And so what? Going down there was still too much of a risk. On the displays over the fizz bar, Viki could see the General handing her formal offer to Tim to pass out to Parliament. Maybe that end of things would work out. Maybe the trip was worth it. Several minutes passed. The cameras at Parliament Hall scanned back and forth across growing tumult. Mom had departed the platform with Uncle Hrunk. A scruffy little cobber in dark clothes approached them. Pedure. They were arguing….

And suddenly none of it mattered anymore. Brent shrugged against her. “Bad news,” he said, still not pulling the game display off his head. “I’ve lost them all. Even our old friend.”

Lighthill jumped off her game perch and signaled the team. Her gesture could have been a shrill whistle for the effect it had. Her team was on its feet, saddled up with panniers, and all headed for the door. Brent pulled up his game hat and hustled out just ahead of Lighthill.

Behind them, she saw curious glances, but most of the club’s clientele were too stuck on the television to pay them much attention.

Her team had bounced down two stories before the attack alarums started screaming.

“What do you mean, we’ve lost ziphead support? Was the fiber cut?” Trinli had somehow found all the fibers?

“N-no, sir. At least I don’t think so.” Podcorporal Marli was competent enough, but he was no Kal Omo. “We can still ping through, but the control channels don’t respond. Sir… it’s as though somebody just took the zips off-line.”

“Hm. Yes.” This could be another Trinli surprise, or maybe there was a traitor in the Attic. Either way… Nau looked across the room at Ezr Vinh. The Peddler’s eyes were glazed with pain. There were important secrets behind those eyes, but Vinh was as tough as any that he and Ritser had interrogated to death. It would take time or some special lever to get real information out of him. Time they didn’t have. He turned back to Marli. “Can I still talk to Ritser?”

“I think so. We’ve got fiber to the laser station on the outside.” He tapped hesitantly at the console. Nau suppressed the impulse to rage at his clumsiness. But without ziphead support, everything was clumsy.We mightas well be Qeng Ho.

Marli grinned suddenly. “Our session link to theInvisible Hand is still active, sir! I just keyed audio to your collar mike.”

“Very good…. Ritser! I don’t know how much you’ve got of this, but—” Nau gave a quick rehash of the debacle, finishing with: “I’ll be out of touch for the next few hundred seconds; I’m evacuating to L1-A. The bottom-line question: Without our zipheads, can you still prosecute the ground operation?”

It would be at least ten seconds before an answer came back on that. Nau glanced at his second surviving guard. “Ciret, get Tung and the ziphead. We’re going to L1-A.”

From the arsenal vault, they would have direct power of life and death over everyone in L1 space, with no intervening automation. Nau opened the cabinet behind him and touched a control. A section of the parquet floor slid aside, revealing a tunnel hatch. The tunnel went directly through Diamond One to the arsenal vault, and it had never been automated with localizers or cut with cross tunnels. The security locks at both ends were keyed to his thumbprint. He touched the reader. The tiny access light stayed red.How could Trinli sabotage that? Nau forced down panic, and tried the thumb pad again. Still red. Again. The light shifted reluctantly to pass-green, and the hatch beneath the floor rotated to unlocked position. The software must be correlating on his blood pressure, concluding he was under coercion.We could still be balked at the other end. He keyed his thumbprint for the far lock. It took two tries, but that one finally showed pass-green, too.

Ciret and Tung were back, pushing Ali Lin ahead of them. “You’re breaking the rules,” the old man scolded them. “We shouldwalk, like this, with our feet on the floor.” Ali’s face was a mix of irritation and puzzlement. Zipheads never liked to be taken off their Focused task. Very likely, weeding the Podmaster’s garden had been as important in Ali’s mind as the most delicate gene-splicing. Now suddenly he was being forced indoors and all the fake-gravity etiquette of his park was being ignored.

“Just stand still, and keep quiet. Ciret, unlatch Vinh. We’re taking him, too.”

Ali stood still, his feet planted firmly on the tacky floor. But he did not remain silent. He stared past Nau with a typical far gaze, and just went on complaining. “You’re ruining everything, can’t you see?”

Abruptly, Ritser Brughel’s voice filled the room. “Sir, the situation here is under control. TheHand’ s zipheads are still online. We won’t really need the high-latency services till after the nukes have fallen. Phuong says that short-term, we may be better off without L1. Just before they dropped out, some of Reynolt’s units were getting very erratic. Here’s the attack schedule. Southmost gets burned in seven hundred seconds. Soon after that, theHand will be overflying the Accord’s antimissile fields. We’ll scrag them ourselves—”

Brughel’s reply was turning into a report, the usual fate of long-distance conversation. Lin had quieted. Nau felt a coolness on his back, the sunlight fading. A cloud? He turned—and saw that for once, a ziphead’s far gaze was meaningful. Tung stepped around Lin to look out the den’s lake-facing windows. “Pus,” the guard said, softly.

“Ritser! We have more problems. I’ll get back to you.”

The voice from theInvisible Hand blathered on, but now no one was listening.

Like some undine of Balacrean myth, the waters of North Paw had slowly gathered themselves, rising and spreading from Ali Lin’s carefully designed shore. “Sunlight” wavered through the million tonnes of water that billowed over them. Even without controls, the park lake should have stayed approximately in place. But the enemy had left the lakebed servos running in rhythm… and the sea had quietly oscillated into catastrophe.

Nau dived for the tunnel hatch. He braced himself and pulled on the massive security cover. The wall of water touched the lodge. The building groaned and the windows shattered before a mountain of water moving implacably at something more than a meter per second.

And the wall of water became a thousand arms seeking through the breaking wall, swarming chill around his body, tearing him away from the hatch. Screams and shouts, quickly drowned, and for a moment Nau was completely submerged. The only sound was the rumbling crumbling of his lodge as it was torn to rubble. He had a last glimpse of his den, his burl-surfaced desk, the marble fireplace. Then the slow tsunami broke out the far wall and Nau was lifted up and up in the swirl.

Still submerged, lungs burning. The water was numbing cold. Nau twisted, trying to make sense of the blurs he could see. The clearest view was downward. He saw the green of the forest behind the lodge. Nau swam down, toward the air.

He broke free, sending threads of water skittering ahead of the main surface, and launching himself into the open space beyond. For a second or two, Nau floated alone, drifting just fast enough to stay ahead of the flying sea. The air was filled with a sound Nau had never imagined, an oleaginous rumble, the sound of a million tonnes of water turning, spreading, falling. The surge had hit the cavern’s roof, and now the sea was coming down, and he beneath it. In the forest below, the butterflies had for once stopped their song. They huddled in massive clusters in the largest groteselms. But far away,something was in the air. Tiny dots hovered near the side of the towering sea. The winged kittens! They seemed not the least frightened of it—but then Qiwi claimed they were an old sky breed. He saw one splash into the side of the undine. It was gone for a moment, and then emerged, and dived in again. The damn cats might be just agile enough to survive.

He turned again and looked back through the water, into the park’s sunlight. It glittered golden on rubble, on human figures trapped like flies in amber. The others were paddling his way, some weakly, some with emphatic force. Marli dove into the air. An instant later Tung breached the water wall, then Ciret with Ali Lin in his arms.Good man!

There was one more figure, Ezr Vinh. The Peddler came half out of the water, about ten meters from the rest of them. He was dazed and choking, but more awake than he had seemed during the interrogation. He looked down upon the treetops they were falling toward, and made a sound that might have been a laugh. “You’re trapped, Podmaster. Pham Nuwen has outsmarted you.”

“Pham who?”

The Peddler squinted at him, seemed to realize that he had let slip information that he had been dying to protect. Nau waved at Marli. “Fetch him here.”

But Marli had nothing to bounce against. Vinh splashed against the water, drawing himself back within—to drown, but out of their reach.

Marli turned, firing his wire gun into the forest and propelling himself back toward the falling water. Nau could see Ezr Vinh silhouetted in the sunlight, flailing weakly, but now several meters deep in the water.

The treetops were brushing up around them. Marli looked around wildly. “We have to get out of the way, sir!”

“Just kill him then.” Nau was already grabbing at the treetops. Above him, Marli fired several short bursts. The flying wire was designed to tear and mangle flesh; its range in water was almost zero. But Marli was lucky. A haze of red bloomed around the Peddler’s body.

And then there was no more time. Nau pulled himself from branch to branch, diving through the open spaces beneath the forest canopy. All around was the sound of breaking tree limbs as the water pushed through the groteselms and oleenfirn, a sound that conjured fire and wetness all at once. The water wall shredded into a million fractal fingers, twisting, reeling, merging. It touched the edge of a butterfly horde, and there was an instant of piping song, louder than Nau had ever heard—and then the cluster was swallowed.

Marli boosted ahead of him, and turned. “The water is between us and the general entrance, sir.”

Trapped,just as the Peddler said.

The four of them moved along the groundwort, parallel to the wall of the park. Above them, the roof of water came lower and lower, well past the forest crown and still descending. The sunlight was a glow from all directions, through dozens of meters of water. There had only been so much water in the lake. There would be enormous air pockets throughout the park—but they had not been lucky. Their space was a not-so-large cave, water on four sides of them.

Ali Lin had to be dragged from branch to branch. He seemed fascinated by the undine, and totally oblivious of the danger.

Maybe… “Ali!” Nau said sharply.

Ali Lin turned toward him. But he wasn’t frowning at the interruption; he wassmiling. “My park, it’s ruined. But I see something better now, something no one has ever done. We can make a true micrograv lake, bubbles and droplets trading in and out for dominance. There are animals and plants I could—”

“Ali. Yes! You’ll build a better park, I promise. Now. I have to know, is there any way we can get out of the park—without drowning first?”

Thank goodness the ziphead could see an upside to this. Ali’s central interests had been frustrated again and again in the last few hundred seconds. Normally, ziphead loyalty was unbreakable, but if they thought you were getting between them and their specialty… After a moment, Ali shrugged and said, “Of course. There’s a sluiceway behind that boulder. I never welded it shut.”

Marli dived for the rock. A sluiceway here? Without his huds, Nau didn’t know. But there were dozens of them opening into the park, the channels they’d used to bring the ice down from the surface.

“The zip’s right, sir! And the open codes work.”

Nau and the others moved around the rock, looked into the hole that Marli had uncovered. Meantime, the walls of their cave of air—their bubble—were moving. In another thirty seconds, this would be under water too. Marli looked across at Nau, and some of the triumph leaked out of his expression. “Sir, we’ll be safe from the water in there, but—”

“But there’s nowhere to go from there. Right. I know.” The channel would end in a sealed hatch, with vacuum beyond that. It was a dead end.

A slowly curling stalactite of water splashed across Nau’s head, forcing him to crouch beside Marli. The lowering mound of water retreated, and for a moment their ceiling rose.Step by step, I’ve lost almost everything. Unbelievable. And suddenly Tomas knew that Ezr Vinh’s blurted claim must be true. Pham Trinli was not Zamle Eng; that had been a convenient lie, tailored for Tomas Nau. All these years, his greatest hero—and therefore the deadliest possible enemy—had been within arm’s reach. Trinliwas Pham Nuwen. For the first time since childhood, Nau was gripped by paralyzing fear.

But even Pham Nuwen had had his flaws, his abiding moral weakness.I’ve studied the man’s career all my life, taking the good parts for my own.As much as anyone, I know his flaws. And I know how to use them. He looked at the others, cataloguing them and their equipment: an old man that Qiwi loved, some comm gear, some weapons, and some gunmen. It would be enough.

“Ali, isn’t there a fiber headpoint at the outer end of these sluices? Ali!”

The ziphead turned away from his inspection of the ceiling’s undulation. “Yes, yes. We needed careful coordination when we brought down the ice.”

He waved Marli into the sluiceway. “It’s okay. This will work fine.” One by one, they slipped through the narrow entrance. Around them, the bottom of the bubble broke free of the ground. Now there was half a meter of water covering the ground, and it was rising. Tung and Ali Lin came through in a shower of water. Ciret dived through last, and slammed the hatch shut behind them. A few dozen liters of undine came in too, now just a mess of spilled water. But on the other side of the hatch, they could hear the sea piling deep.

Nau turned to Marli, who was shining his comm laser as a diffuse light. “Let’s hike up to the headpoint, Corporal. Ali Lin is going to help me make a phone call.”

Pham Nuwen had come close to winning, but Nau still had a mind and the ability to reach out and manipulate others. As they coasted up the sluiceway, he thought on just what he should say to Qiwi Lin Lisolet.

General Smith retired from the speaker’s perch. The information on Tim Downing’s cards had been distributed to the Elected, and now five hundred heads were thinking over the deal. Hrunkner Unnerby stood in the shadows behind the perch and wondered. Smith had made another miracle. In a just world it would surely work. So what would Pedure invent to counter this?

Smith stepped back until she was even with him. “Come with me, Sergeant. I saw someone I’ve been wanting to talk to for a long time.” There would be a vote called later in the day. Before that there could well be follow-up questions for the General. There was plenty of time for political maneuver. He and Downing followed the General to the far end of the proscenium, blocking the exit. A scruffy cobber in extravagant leggings was coming toward them. Pedure. The years had not been kind to her—or maybe the stories about the attempted assassinations were true. She made to sidle around Victory Smith, but the General stepped into her path.

Smith smiled at her. “Hello, Cobblie Killer. So nice to meet you in person.”

The other hissed. “Yes. And if you don’t move from my path, I will be very pleased to kill you.” The words were heavily accented, but the tiny knife on her hand was clear enough.

Smith stretched her arms sideways, an extravagant shrug that would catch notice all across the hall. “In front of all these people, Honored Pedure? I don’t think so. You’re—”

Smith hesitated, raised a pair of hands to her head, and seemed to listen. To her telephone?

Pedure just stared, her entire aspect full of suspicion. Pedure was a small female with galled chitin, and gestures that were just a bit too quick. A totally untrustworthy picture. She must be so used to killing from afar that personal charm and facility with language were long-discarded talents. She was out of her element here, managing things directly. It made Unnerby just a shade more confident.

Something buzzed in Pedure’s jacket. Her little knife disappeared and she grabbed her phone. For a moment, the two spy chiefs looked like old friends, communing with their memories.

“No!” Pedure spasmed; her voice was a scream. She grabbed the phone with her eating hands, all but stuffed it into her maw. “Not here! Not now!” The fact that they were a sudden spectacle did not seem to matter to her.

General Smith turned toward Unnerby. “Everyone’s schemes just went down the toilet, Sergeant. Three ice-launched missiles are coming our way. We’ve got about seven minutes.” For an instant, Unnerby’s gaze caught on the dome above them. It was a thousand feet underground, proof against tactical fission bombs. But he knew the Kindred fleet had progressed to much bigger things. A triple launch would most likely be a deep-penetration strike. Even so… I helped design this place.There were stairs nearby, access to much deeper places. He reached for one of Smith’s arms. “Please, General. Follow me.” They started back across the proscenium.

Villains and good guys, Unnerby had seen courage and cowardice among them all. Pedure… well, Honored Pedure was almost twitching with panic. She twisted this way and that in little hops, screaming Tiefic into her telephone. Abruptly she stopped and turned back to Smith. Terror warred with incredulous surprise. “The missiles. They’re yours! You—” With a shriek, she launched herself toward Smith’s back, her knife a silver extension of her longest arm.

Unnerby slipped between them before Smith could even turn. He gave Honored Pedure the hard of his shoulders, sending her flying off the stage. Around them everything was confused. Pedure’s people swarmed up from the floor, and were met by Smith’s combateers swinging down from the visitors’ gallery. Shock spread across the hall as cobbers lifted their heads from their readers and noticed just who was fighting. Then from high at the back there was a scream. “Look! The network news! The Accord has launched missiles on us!”

Unnerby led the combateers and his General out a side entrance. They raced down stairs toward the hidden shafts that dropped to the security core. Seven minutes to live? Maybe. But suddenly Hrunkner’s heart soared free. What was left was so simple, just as it had been with Victory long ago. Life and death, a few good troops, and a few minutes to decide it all.

FIFTY-FIVE

Belga Underville was senior in the Command and Control Center. That really didn’t count for much; Underville was Domestic Intelligence. What happened here could change her job forever, but she was out of this chain of command, just a link to civil defense and the King’s household forces. Belga watched Elno Coldhaven, the shiny new Director of External Intelligence, the acting CO of the center. Coldhaven knew the firestorm of failures that had ended the career of his predecessor. He knew that Rachner Thract was no dummy and probably no traitor. And now Elno had the same job, and the chief was out of the country. He was operating very much without a safety net. More than once in last few days he had taken Underville aside and earnestly asked her advice. She suspected that this had been the chief’s reason for having her stay down here rather than return to Princeton.

The CCC was more than a mile inside the promontory headrock of Lands Command, beneath the old Royal Deepness. A decade ago, the Center had been a huge thing, dozens of intelligence techs with the funny little CRT displays of the era. Behind them had been glassed-in meeting rooms and oversight bridges for the presiding officers. But year by year, computer systems and networks improved. Now Accord Intelligence had better eyes and ears and automation, and the CCC itself was scarcely bigger than a conference room. A quiet, strange conference room of outward-sitting perches. The air was fresh, always lightly moving; bright lighting left no shadows. There were data displays, but now the simplest ones were twelve-color-capable. And there were still technicians, but each of them managed a thousand nodes scattered across the continent and into the near-space recon system. Indirectly, each had hundreds of specialists available for interpretation. Eight technicians, four field-rank officers, a commanding officer. Those were all that need be physically present.

The center screen showed the chief being introduced to Parliament. It was the same commercial feed that the rest of the world saw—External Intelligence had decided not to try to sneak special video into Parliament Hall. One of the techs was working with freeze-frames from the video. He popped up a composite of a dozen snippets, fiddled with the lighting. A scruffy-looking character appeared on the screen, the details of her dark clothing vague. Beside Belga, General Coldhaven said softly, “Good. That’s a positive identification. Ol’ Pedure herself…. She can’t very well act when her own head is on the line.”

Underville listened with half her attention. There was so much going on…. The General’s speech was even more a shock than seeing Pedure. When Smith made the hostage offer, several of the technicians looked from their work, their eating hands frozen in their maws. “God!” she heard Elno Coldhaven mutter.

“Yeah,” Belga whispered back. “But if they go for it, we might have a way out.”

“If they pick the King as hostage. But if they want General Smith—” If Smith had to stay down South, things would get very complicated, especially for Elno Coldhaven. Coldhaven couldn’t quite conceal his stark discomfort.So this is news to him, too.

“We can manage,” said Kred Dugway, the Director of Air Defense. Dugway was the only other general officer present. The AD director had been one of poor Thract’s biggest critics, and Elno Coldhaven’s former superior. And Dugway seemed to think he was still Elno’s boss.

In the video from Southland, General Smith had climbed down from the speaker’s perch. She handed her formal proposal to Tim Downing. The camera followed Smith offstage. “She’s headed for Pedure!”

Dugway chuckled. “Now,this will be interesting.”

“Damn.” The camera had turned back to watch Major Downing hand out copies of the General’s proposal.

“Can you give me anything on the chief? Does she still have audio?”

“Sorry, sir. No.”

Attention colors lit the Air Defense displays. The technician hunched down, hissed something over his voice link. Then, “Sir, I don’t understand quite what is happening, but—”

Dugway jabbed a hand at the composite situation map of Southland. “Those are launches!”

Yes. Even Belga recognized the coding. Crosses marked the estimated launch sites. “A launch of three.Not Southland-based; those are from ice subs. They could be—” They couldn’t be anything but Kindred. Accord and Kindred were the only nations with missile-launching ice-tunnelers.

And now the first target estimates had appeared on the display. The three circles were all near the south pole.

Coldhaven made a chopping gesture at the attack-management technicians. “Go to condition Most Bright.” On the main display, the news cameras were still panning around Parliament Hall, soaking up the reactions to General Smith’s speech.

One of the attack-management techs rose from her perch. “Sir! Those missiles are ours. They’re from the Seventh, theIcedug andCrawlunder !”

“Says what?” General Coldhaven’s voice cut through whatever his former boss had been about to say.

“Autologs from the ships themselves. I’m trying to get through to their captains right now, sir—we’re still bidding each other’s crypto.”

Dugway pounced on the report. “And until we talk to them direct, I don’t believe anything. I know those commanders. Something strange is going on here.”

“We have real launches and real targets, sir.” The technician tapped the crosses and circles.

Dugway: “You have nothing but pretty lights!”

“It’s across the secure net, sir, direct from our launch-detection satellites.”

Coldhaven motioned both of them to be quiet. “This seems a bit like the problems my predecessor ran into.”

Dugway glared at his former protégé… and slowly the significance seemed to sink in. “Yes….”

Coldhaven grunted. “It’s not just us. There have been rumors going around on the unswitched analog radio.” There were still people who used such things; Underville had rural agents who resisted all upgrades. The surprise was that anyone at Lands Command would seriously listen to such comm. Coldhaven noticed Belga’s expression. “My wife works in the technical museum out front.” A smile flitted across his aspect. “She says her old-time radio friends aren’t cranks. And now we’re seeing the impossible, too. In the past we could blame the contradictions on someone else’s idiocy. Now…” The arrival time on the shrinking target circles was barely three minutes away. The targeting satellites all agreed on their destination now: Southmost.

Underville boggled for a moment. All Rachner’s paranoia—true? “So maybe the launch is a fake. Anything we see—”

“At least anything we see on the net—”

“—could be a lie.” It was a technophobe’s most extravagant nightmare.

The point was finally getting through to Dugway. A faith built over twenty years was being shattered. “But the encryption, the cross-checking… what can wedo, Elno?”

Coldhaven seemed to wilt. His theory was accepted, and that left them with disaster. “We—we can shut down. Disassociate command and comm from the net. I’ve seen it as a war-game option—onlythat was on the net, too!”

Belga put a hand on his shoulders. “I say do it. We can use analog radio from the museum. And I’ve got people, couriers. It will be slow—” Far too slow, but at least they would discover what they were up against.

There were others a moment away across the net—Nizhnimor, the King himself—and now nothing seemed trustable. Dugway was present, but Elno Coldhaven was the CCC commanding officer. Coldhaven hesitated, but didn’t defer to Dugway. He called to his chief sergeant. “Plan Network Corrupt. I want the notice hand-carried to the museum.”

“Yes, sir!” The tech had been following the conversation, and seemed not quite as dumbfounded as his seniors. The target circles showed two minutes to impact. On the video from Parliament Hall, stark chaos reigned. For an instant, Underville was caught by the horror of the scene. The poor cobbers. Before, war had been an ominous cloud on the horizon; now the Southland Elected found themselves at ground zero with less than two minutes to live. Some sat frozen, staring upward at where megatons would burst. Others were stampeding down the carpeted stairs, searching for some way out, some way downward. And somewhere beyond their view, General Smith was facing the same fate.

By some miracle, the senior sergeant had hardcopies of Plan Network Corrupt. He handed them to his techs and started the procedures for opening the CCC’s blast doors.

But the doors were already opening. Belga stiffened.Nothing was supposed to come in until the shift ended, or Coldhaven gave the release code. A CCC guard entered with a confused backwards gait, his rifle held at an uneasy port arms. “I saw your clearance, ma’am, but no one is allowed—”

An almost familiar voice followed him. “Nonsense. We have clearance, and you saw that the doors opened. Please stand aside.” A young lieutenant strode into the room. The plain black uniform, the slender, deadly build. It was as if Victory Smith had not only escaped from the South but had returned as young as the first time Underville had ever seen her. After the lieutenant came a huge corporal and a team of combateers. Most of the intruders carried stubby assault rifles.

General Dugway spouted indignant rage at the young lieutenant. Dugway was a fool. More than anything, this looked like a decapitating strike—but why weren’t they shooting? Elno Coldhaven edged back around his desk, his hands reaching for some unseen drawer. Belga stepped between him and the intruders and said, “You’re Smith’s daughter.”

The lieutenant snapped Underville a salute. “Yes ma’am. Victory Lighthill, and this is my team. We’re authorized by General Smith to make inspections per our best judgment. With all respect, ma’am, that’s what we’re here for now.”

Lighthill sidled past the frothing Director of Air Defense; old Dugway was angry beyond words. Behind Belga, and mostly shielded by her body, Elno Coldhaven was tapping out command codes.

Somehow Lighthill realized what was going on. “Please step away from your console, General Coldhaven.” Her big corporal waggled his assault rifle in Coldhaven’s direction. Now Underville recognized the corporal. Smith’s retarded son. Damn.

Elno Coldhaven stepped back from his desk, his hands raised slightly in the air, acknowledging that they were far beyond any “inspection.” The two techs nearest the door sprinted past the intruders. But these combateers werefast. They turned, pouncing on the techs, dragging them back into the CCC.

The blast doors swung slowly shut.

And Coldhaven made one more try, the most frail of all: “Lieutenant, there’s massive corruption in our signals automation. We have to get our Command and Control off the net.”

Lighthill stepped close to the displays. There was still a picture from Parliament Hall, but no one was behind the camera: the view wandered aimlessly, finally centering on the ceiling. Across the other displays, Most Bright lights had blossomed, queries to the Command Center, launch announcements from the King’s Rocket Offense forces. The world coming to an end.

Finally, Lighthill spoke. “I know, sir. We are here to prevent you from doing that.” Her combateers had spread around the now crowded Command and Control Center. Not a single tech or officer was out of their reach now. The big corporal was pulling open a cargo pannier, setting up additional equipment… game displays?

Dugway finally found his voice. “We suspected a deep-cover agent. I was sure it was Rachner Thract. What fools we were. All along it was Victory Smith working for Pedure and the Kindred.”

A traitor at the heart. It explained everything, but—Belga looked at the displays, the network-massaged reports of Accord launches coming in from all directions. She said, “What of it is really true, Lieutenant? Is it all a lie, even the attack on Southmost?”

For a moment Underville thought the lieutenant wouldn’t answer. The target circles at Southmost had shrunk to points. The news camera view of Parliament Hall dome lasted a second longer. Then Belga had a fleeting impression of the rock bulging downward, of light beyond—and the display went blank. Victory Lighthill flinched, and when she finally answered Belga, her voice was soft and hard. “No. That attack was very real.”

FIFTY-SIX

“You’re sure she’ll be able to see me?”

Marli looked up from his gadgets. “Yes, sir. And I’ve got a clear-to-talk from her huds.”

You’re on, Podmaster. The greatest performance of your life. “Qiwi! Are you there?”

“Yes, I—” and he heard Qiwi’s quick intake of breath. Heard. There was no video coming back this way; the desperation of this situation was no fake. “Father!”

Nau cradled Ali Lin’s head and shoulders in his arms. The ziphead’s wounds were gouges, oozing a swamp of blood through makeshift bandages.Pest, I hope the guy isn’t dead. But above all, this had to look real; Marli had done his best.

“Tas Vinh, Qiwi. He and Trinli jumped us, killed Kal Omo. They would have killed Ali if… if I hadn’t let them get away.” The words tumbled out, fueled by true rage and fear and guided by the tactical necessities. The savage attack of traitors, timed for when everything was most critical, when an entire civilization stood at risk. The destruction of North Paw. “I saw two of the kittens drown, Qiwi. I’m sorry, we couldn’t get close enough to save them—” Words failed him, but artfully.

He heard small choking sounds from the other end of the connection, the sounds Qiwi made in moments of absolute horror. Damn, that could start a memory cascade. He pushed down his fear and said, “Qiwi, we still have a chance. Have the traitors shown themselves at Benny’s?” Has PhamNuwen gotten through to the parlor?

“No. But we know something has gone terribly wrong. We lost the video from North Paw, and now it looks like war down on Arachna. This is a private link, but everyone saw me leave Benny’s.”

“Okay. Okay. This is good, Qiwi. Whoever are in this with Vinh and Trinli are still confused. We have a chance, the two of us—”

“But surely we can trust—” Qiwi’s protest trailed off, and she didn’t give him any argument. Good. This soon after a scrubbing, Qiwi was most unsure of herself. “Okay. ButI can help. Where are you hiding? One of the sluiceways?”

“Yes, trapped behind the outer hatch. But if we can get out, we can rescue the situation. L1-A has—”

“Which sluiceway?”

“Uh.” He looked at the face of the hatch. A number was just visible in Marli’s light. “S-seven-four-five. Does that—”

“I know where it is. I’ll see you in two hundred seconds. Don’t worry, Tomas.”

Lord.Qiwi’s recovery was awesome. Nau waited a moment, then glanced questioningly at Marli.

“The connection is down, sir.”

“Okay. Realign. See if you can punch through to Ritser Brughel.” This might be his last chance to check on the ground operation before everything was settled, one way or another.

TheInvisible Hand was over the horizon from Southmost when the missiles arrived there. Nevertheless, Jau’s displays showed flashes against the upper atmosphere. And their trailing satellites relayed a detailed analysis of the destruction. All three nukes were on target.

But Ritser Brughel was not entirely happy. “The timing wasn’t right. They didn’t get the best penetration.”

Bil Phuong’s voice came over the bridge-wide channel. “Yes, sir. That depended on high-level ordnance knowledge—things that are up on L1.”

“Okay. Okay. We’ll make do. Xin!”

“Yes, sir?” Jau looked up from his console.

“Are your people ready to hit the missile fields?”

“Yes, sir. The burn we just completed will put us over most of them. We’ll take out a good part of the Accord’s forces.”

“Pilot Manager, I want you to personally—” A tone sounded on Brughel’s console. There was no video, but the Vice-Podmaster was listening to something incoming. After a moment, Brughel said, “Yes, sir. We can make up for that. What is your situation?”

What’s happening up there? What’s happening to Rita?Jau forced his attention away from the long-distance conversation, and looked at his own situation board. In fact, he was pushing his zipheads to the limit. They were beyond finesse now. There was no way they could disguise this operation from the Spider networks. The Accord missile fields stretched across a swath of the northern continent, and they only approximately followed the track of theInvisible Hand. Jau’s pilots were coordinating a dozen ordnance zipheads. TheHand’ s patchwork of battle lasers could take out near-surface launchpads, but only if they were given a fifty-millisecond dwell time. Hitting everything would be a miracle ballet of firepower. Some of the deepest targets, offensive sites, would be hit by digger bombs. Those had already been launched, were now arcing down behind them.

Jau had done everything he could to make this work.I didn’t have anychoice. Every few seconds, the mantra floated up through his consciousness, the response to the equally persistentI am not a butcher.

But now… now there might be a safe way to evade Brughel’s terrible orders.Be honest, you’re still a butcher. But of hundreds, not millions.

Without the detailed geographic and ordnance advice from L1, any number of small errors might be made. The Southmost strike showed that. Jau’s fingers drifted over his keyboard, sending last-second advice to his team. The mistake was very subtle. But it would introduce a tree of random deviations into their attack on the antimissiles. Many of those strikes would now be way off target. The Accord would have a chance against the Kindred nukes.

Rachner Thract paced back and forth in the visitor holding box. How long could it take Underhill to come out? Maybe the cobber had changed his mind, or simply forgotten what he was about. The sentry looked upset, too. He was talking on some kind of comm line, his words inaudible.

Finally, there was the whine of hidden motors. A moment later the old wood doors slid aside. A guide-bug emerged, closely followed by Sherkaner Underhill. The guard came racing around his sentry box. “Sir, could I have a word with you? I’m getting—”

“Yes, but let me talk to the Colonel here for just a moment.” Underhill seemed to sag under the weight of his parka, and every step took him steadily to the side. The sentry fidgeted by his post, not sure what to do. The guide-bug patiently dragged Underhill back onto a more or less straight path headed for Thract.

Underhill reached the visitor holding box. “I have a few free minutes now, Colonel. I’m very sorry about your losing your job. I want to—”

“That’s not important now, sir! I have to tell you.” It was a miracle that he had gotten through to Underhill. Now, if I can just convince him beforethat sentry gets up the courage to intervene. “Our command automation is corrupt, sir. I have proof!” Underhill was raising his arms in protest, but Rachner rumbled on. This was his last chance. “It sounds crazy, but it explains everything: There’s an—”

The world exploded around them. Colors beyond color. Pain beyond the brightest sun of Thract’s imagination. For a moment the color of pain was all there was, squeezing out consciousness, fear, even startlement.

And then he was back. In agony, but at least aware. He was lying in snow and random wreckage. His eyes… his eyeshurt. The afterimages of Hell were burned all across his foreview, blocking his vision. The afterimages showed stark silhouettes against a beam of utter darkness: the sentry, Sherkaner Underhill.

Underhill! Thract came to his feet, pushed aside the flatboards that had fallen on him. Now other pains were surfacing. His back was a single massive ache.Getting punched through walls will do that to you. He took a few shaky steps, but nothing seemed broken.

“Sir? Professor Underhill?” His own voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. Rachner turned his head this way and that, like a child still with its baby eyes. He had no choice; his forevision was filled with burning afterimages. Downhill, along the curve of the caldera wall, there was a row of smoking holes. But the destruction here was enormously greater. None of the Underhill outbuildings still stood, and fire was spreading across all that was flammable. Rachner took a step toward where the sentry had been standing. But now that was the edge of a steep, steaming crater. The hillside above him was blown out. Thract had seen something like this before, but that had been a terrible accident, an ammo dump struck by penetrating artillery.What hit us? What was Underhill storing below? Something in the back of his mind was asking the questions, but he had no answers and plenty of more immediate concerns.

There was an animal hissing sound, right at his feet. Rachner turned his head. It was Underhill’s guide-bug. Its fighting hands were poised to stab, but its body lay twisted in the wreckage. The poor beast’s shell must be cracked. When he tried to sidle around it, the bug shrieked more fiercely and made a ghastly effort to pull its crushed body out from the flatboards.

“Mobiy! It’s okay. It’s okay, Mobiy.” It was Underhill! His voice was muffled, but so were all sounds just now. As Thract slipped past the guide-bug, it pulled its broken body from the flatboards and followed him toward Underhill’s voice. But the bug’s hissing was no longer a threat. It was more a sobbing whimper.

Thract walked along the edge of the crater. The edge was piled deep with debris that had been thrown up. The glassy sides were already slumping, collapsing inward. And still there was no sign of Underhill.

The guide-bug pulled himself past Thract. There, right ahead of the bug: a single Spiderly arm stuck sharp and high from the mangle. The guide-bug shrilled, and started feebly digging. Rachner joined him, pulling boards out of the way, shoveling the warm splatter dirt to the side. Warm? It was hot as the Calorica bottomland. There was something especially horrifying about being buried in warm earth. Thract dug desperately faster.

Underhill was buried rear-end down, his head just a foot below the air. In seconds, they had him free down past his shoulders. The ground lurched, sliding with the rest of the crater’s edge. Thract reached out, twined his arms around Underhill’s—and pulled. An inch, a foot… the two of them fell onto the high ground just as Underhill’s grave slid into the pit.

The guide-bug crawled around them, his arms never letting go of his master. Underhill patted the animal gently. Then he turned, weaving his head about in the same silly way Thract had been. There were blisters in the crystal surfaces of his eyes. Sherkaner Underhill had shaded the blast from Thract’s eyes; the whole top of the old cobber’s head had been directly exposed.

Underhill seemed to be looking toward the pit. “Jaybert? Nizhnimor?” He said softly, disbelievingly. He came to his feet, and started for the drop-off. Both Thract and the bug held him. At first, Underhill let them guide him back over the crest of the splatter. It was hard to tell under the heavy clothes, but at least two of his legs seemed to be cracked.

Then: “Victory? Brent? Can you hear me? I’ve lost—” He turned and started back toward the pit. This time, Rachner actually had to fight him. The poor cobber was drifting in and out of delirium.Think! Rachner looked downslope. The helipad was tilted but the ground above had shielded it from the flying debris. His chopper still sat there, apparently undamaged. “Ah! Professor—there’s a telephone in my helicopter. Come on, we can call the General from there.” The improvisation was thin, but Underhill was drifting in and out of delirium. He swayed for a moment, almost collapsed. Then a moment of false lucidity: “A helicopter? Yes… I have a use for that.”

“Okay. Let’s go down there.” Thract started for the top of the stairs, but Underhill still hesitated. “We can’t leave Mobiy. Nizhnimor and the others yes. They are surely dead. But Mobiy…”

Mobiy is dying.But Thract didn’t say that aloud. The guide-bug had stopped crawling. Its arms waved gently in Underhill’s direction. “It’s an animal, sir,” Thract said softly.

Underhill chuckled, delirious. “That’s all a matter of scale, Colonel.”

So Thract took off his outer jacket and made a sling for the guide-bug. The creature seemed like about eighty pounds of very dead weight. But they were going downhill, and now Sherkaner Underhill followed without further complaint, needing only occasional help to keep on the stairs.Sowhat better could you be doing now, eh, Colonel? The lurking Enemy had finally pounced. Thract looked out across the caldera at the pattern of smoking destruction. Likely it was repeated on the altiplano, trashing the King’s strategic defenses. Doubtless, the High Command had been nuked.Whatever it was I came to do, it’s too late now.

FIFTY-SEVEN

The taxi floated up from the L1 jumble. Below them, the mouth of S745 was open, exhausting air and ice particles. If not for Qiwi, they would still be trapped behind the sluiceway’s pressure hatch. Qiwi’s landing and ad hoc lock work were something that even well-managed zipheads might not have accomplished.

Nau slid Ali Lin gently into the front seat beside Qiwi. The woman turned from her controls, and her face twisted in grief. “Papa? Papa?” She reached to feel for his pulse, and her expression eased a fraction.

“I think he’ll make it, Qiwi. Look, there’s medical automation at L1-A, and—”

Qiwi pulled back into her seat. “The arsenal….” But her gaze stayed on her father, and the horror was shading toward thoughtfulness. Abruptly, she looked away and nodded. “Yes.”

The taxi boosted on its little reaction jets, sending Nau and his men on a quick scramble for handholds. Qiwi was overriding the taxi’s sedate automation. “What happened, Tomas? Do we have a chance?”

“I think so. If we can get into L1-A.” He related the story of treachery, almost the truth except for Ali Lin.

Qiwi’s slewed the taxi smoothly into its braking approach. But her voice was near sobbing. “It’s the Diem Massacre all over again, isn’t it? And if we don’t stop them this time, we’ll all die. And the Spiders too.”

Bingo.If Qiwi hadn’t been so freshly scrubbed, this would be a very dangerous line of thought. A few days more and she’d have a hundred little inconsistencies to piece together; she’d quickly see through it all. But now, for the next few Ksecs, the analogy with Diem played in his favor. “Yes! But this time we have a chance to stop them, Qiwi.”

The taxi descended swiftly across Diamond One. The sun was like a dim red moon, its light glistening here and there off the last of their stolen snow. Hammerfest had disappeared around the corner. Most likely, Pham Nuwen was trapped in the Attic there. The fellow was a genius, but he’d achieved only half a victory. He had cut off ziphead services, but he hadn’t stopped the Arachna operation, and he hadn’t reached allies.

And in this game, half a victory was worth nothing.In a few hundredseconds, I’ll have the firepower at L1-A. Strategy would crystalize in assured destruction, and Pham Nuwen’s own moral weakness would give all the game to Tomas Nau.

Ezr never lost consciousness; if he had, there would have been no waking. But for a time, all awareness was centered within himself, on the numbing cold, the tearing pain in his shoulder and down his arm.

The urge to gasp air into his lungs became overpowering. Somewhere there must be air; the park had as much breathable space as ever. Butwhere ? He turned in the direction where the fake sunlight was brightest. Some remnant of reason noted that the water had come out of that direction. It would be falling now.Swim toward the brightness. He kicked feebly and as hard as he was able, guiding with his good hand.

Water. More water. Water forever. Reddish in the sunlight.

He burst through the surface, coughing and vomiting, andbreathing at last. The sea lay around him. It writhed and climbed, with no horizon. It was like something from a Canberra swords-and-pirates story he had watched as a child; he was a sailor trapped in a final maelstrom. He stared up and up. The water curved around and closed above his head. His seascape was a bubble, perhaps five meters across.

With orientation came something like rational thought. Ezr twisted, looked down and behind him. No sign of pursuers. But maybe it didn’t matter. The water around him was stained with his own blood; he couldtaste it. The cold that had slowed the flow of blood and numbed some of the pain was also paralyzing his legs and his good arm.

Ezr stared through the water, trying to estimate how far his air bubble was from the outer surface. The water on the sun side did not seem deep, but… He looked down and back toward what had been the forest. Through the blur and the flow, he could see the ruins of the trees. Nowhere was this water more than a dozen meters deep.I’m out of the main mass. His bubble was itself part of a free droplet, drifting slowly across North Paw’s sky.

Drifting downward, by some combination of microgravity and the sea’s collision with the cavern roof. Ezr watched numbly as the ground came up around him. He would hit the lake bed, just off the lodge’s moorage.

When it came, the collision was dreamlike slow, less than a meter per second. But the water swept swiftly around him, spraying and streaming. He hit on his legs and butt and bounced upward, sharing space with a tumble of jiggling, spinning blobs of water. All around him was a clacking sound, a mindless mechanical applause. The stone casement of the seawall was less than a meter away. He reached out, almost stopped his spin. Then his bad shoulder touched the casement, and everything disappeared in a blaze of agony.

He was gone for only a second or two. When consciousness returned, he saw that he was about five meters above the seabed. Near him, the stones of the casement were covered with a line of moss and stain, the old sea level. And the clacking applause… he looked across the seabed. He could see them in their hundreds, the stabilizer servos, pursuing the same sabotage that had set the sea to marching.

Ezr climbed the rough-cut stone of the seawall. It was only a few meters to the top, to the lodge… to where the lodge had been. There were recognizable foundations. The stubs of wall frames still stood. But a million tonnes of water, even moving slow, had been enough to sweep the place away. Here and there, rubble swayed up, snagged in the deeper wreckage.

Ezr moved from point to point, using his good hand to climb across the ruins. The sea had settled into a deep layer that hugged the forests and climbed the far walls of the cavern. It still roiled and shifted. Ten-meter blobs of water still coasted across the sky. Much of the sea might eventually pool back in the basin, but Ali Lin’s masterpiece was destroyed.

Things were getting fuzzy and dim; he didn’t hurt as much as before. Somewhere out there in the drowned forest, Tomas Nau was trapped along with his merry men. Ezr remembered the triumph he had felt when he saw them sinking into the trees beneath the water.Pham, we won. But this wasn’t the original plan. In fact, Nau had somehow seen through them, almost killed them both. Nau might not be trapped at all. If he could get out of the cavern, he could track down Pham or get to L1-A.

But the fear was far away, receding. Ribbons of sticky red water floated around him now. He bent his head to look at his arm. Marli’s wire gun had shattered his elbow, opening an artery. The previous wound in his shoulder, and the torture, had created a kind of accidental tourniquet, butI’m bleeding out. Logically, the thought was cause for frantic alarm, but all he really wanted to do was let loose of the ground and rest awhile.And then you die,and then maybe Tomas Nau wins.

Ezr forced himself to keep moving. If he could stop the bleeding… but no way could he even take off his jacket. His mind drifted away from the impossible. Grayness crept in around the edges of his mind.What canI do in the seconds I have left? He picked his way across the wreckage, his vision narrowed down to the ground just centimeters from his face. If he could find Nau’s den, even a comm set.At least I could warn Pham. There was no comm set, just endless rubble. The fine woods that Fong had grown were all kindling now, their spiral grain shattered.

A naked white arm reached from beneath a crushed armoire. Ezr’s mind stumbled on the horror and the mystery.Who did we leave behind? Omo, yes. But this limb was naked, glistening, bloodless white. He touched the hand at the end of the arm. It twitched, slid around his fingers. Ah, not a corpse at all, just one of those full-press jackets that Nau favored. An idea floated up from the dimness,Maybe to stop the bleeding. He tugged on the jacket sleeve. It slid, caught, and then floated free. He lost his grip on the ground, and for a moment it was a dance between himself and the jacket. The left sleeve slit open, forking down through the fingers. He slipped his arm along its length and the jacket closed from fingers to shoulder. He pulled the fabric across his back, and fit the right side loosely around his mangled arm. Now he could bleed to death, and no one would see another drop.Tighten the fabric. He shrugged it snug.Tighter, a real tourniquet. He slid his left hand down the cover of his ruined arm, squeezing agony from the flesh beneath. But the full-press fabric responded, stiffening. Far away, he heard himself groan with pain. He lost consciousness for a moment, woke lying lightly on his head.

But now his right arm was immobilized, the full-press sleeve at maximum tension. Such a painful extreme of fashion, but it might be enough to keep him alive.

He drank from drifting water, and tried to think.

There was a querulous mewing sound behind him. The sky-kitten slid into view, settled onto his chest and good arm. He reached up, felt the trembling body. “You in trouble too?” he asked. His words came as croaks. The kitten’s great dark eyes peered back at him and it burrowed deeply at the space between his chest and left arm. Strange. Normally, a sick kitten would go off and hide; that had caused Ali lots of problems, even though the creatures were tagged. The sky-kitten was soaked, but it seemed alert. Maybe, “You came to comfort me, Little One?”

He could feel it purring now, and the warmth of its body. He smiled; just having someone to listen made him feel more alert.

There was a thutter of wings. Two more kittens. Three. They hung above him and meowed irritably as if to say, “What have you done with our park,” or maybe “We want dinner.” They swirled around him, but didn’t chase the little one from his arms. Then the largest, a rag-eared tom, swooped away from Ezr and settled on the highest point in the ruin. He glowered down at Ezr, and began grooming his wings. The damn creature didn’t even look wet.

The highest point left in the ruin… a diamond tube almost two meters across, surmounted by a metal cap. Ezr suddenly realized what he was looking at: a tunnel head in Tomas Nau’s den, most likely a direct route to L1-A. He coasted up the hill to the metal-topped pillar. The tom hunkered down, reluctant to move out of Ezr’s way. Even now the creatures were as possessive as ever.

The control lights on the hatch glowed pass-green.

He looked at the big tom. “You know you’re sitting on the key to everything, don’t you, fellow?”

He gently disengaged the littlest kitten from his jacket, and shooed them all away from the hatch mechanism. It slid back, locked itself open. Would the little stupids try to follow? He gave them a last wave. “Whatever you may think, you really don’t want to come with me. Gun wire hurts.”

The Attic grouproom was crammed with extra seating; there was scarcely room to maneuver around the edges. And the moment Silipan turned off the zipheads’ comm links, the place turned into a madhouse. Trud dived away from the reaching arms, retreated to the control area at the top of the room. “They reallyreally don’t like to be taken off their work.”

It was worse than Pham had thought it would be. If the zipheads hadn’t been tied down, he and Trud would have been attacked. He looked back at the Emergent. “It had to be done. This is the core of Nau’s power, and now it’s denied him. We’re taking over all across L1, Trud.”

Silipan’s stare was glassy. There had been too many shocks. “All over L1? That’s impossible…. You’ve killed us all, Pham. You’ve killed me.” Some alertness returned; no doubt he was imagining what Nau and Brughel would do to him.

Pham steadied him with his free hand. “No. I intend to win. If I do, you’ll survive. So will the Spiders.”

“What?” Trud bit his lip. “Yeah, cutting off support will slow Ritser. Maybe those damned Spiders will have a 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 cliché 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 back.

Underhill reached in and removed the gear within as if it were some King’s crown jewels. Rachner turned his head for a closer look. What… a bloody computer game helmet, it was!

“Ah, it looks okay,” Underhill said softly. He started to settle the helmet across his eyes, then winced away. Rachner could see why; there were blisters all across the cobber’s eyes. But Underhill didn’t give up. He held the device just off his head, then turned on the power.

Glittering light splashed out and around his head. Rachner jerked back reflexively. The cabin of the heli was suddenly awash in a million shifting colors, bright and plaid. He remembered the rumors about Underhill’s crazy hobbies, the videomancy. So it had all been true; this “gaming helmet” must have cost a small fortune.

Underhill mumbled to himself, shifting the helmet this way and that, as if to see around the blind spots in his burned eyes. There really wasn’t much to see, just an incredibly beautiful shifting of lights, the mesmerizing power of computers in the service of quackery. It seemed to satisfy Sherkaner Underhill. He stared and stared, petting his guide-bug with a free hand. “Ah… I see,” he said softly.

And the helicopter’s turbines suddenly began a banshee twistup, well past their redline. The power was like magic, and would burn them out in a matter of an hour or two. That’s why no reasonable controls would allow such performance.

“What the devil—” The words caught in Thract’s throat as the turbine windup finally reached the blades above. His aircraft suddenly became a maniac, clawing its way up and up, over the caldera ridge.

The turbines briefly idled as the helicopter soared over the top, five hundred feet, a thousand feet above the altiplano. Rachner had a glimpse of the flatlands. The single row of destruction they had seen at Calorica was actually part of a grid. Stretched out south and west of them were hundreds of steaming plumes.The antimissile fields. But the crappers had missed! Wave after wave of interceptor rockets were sweeping up from their silos across the altiplano. Hundreds of launches, quick and profligate as short-range rocket artillery—except that the silos were dozens of miles away. Those rocket plumes were pushing smart payloads toward long-range intercepts thousands of miles away, and scores of miles up. It was awesome beyond all the staff-meeting hype that Air Defense had ever shilled… and it must mean that the Kindred had just launched everything they had.

Sherkaner Underhill didn’t seem to notice. He moved his head back and forth under the helmet’s light show. “There has to be some reconnect. There has to be.” His hands twitched at the game controls. Seconds passed. “It’s all messed up now,” he sobbed.

Trud left his numerical-control zipheads and rejoined Pham Trinli by the translators. “The pure numericals I can manage, Pham. I mean I can get answers. But for control—”

Trinli just nodded, brushing the objections aside.Trinli looks so different. I’ve known him years of Watch time, and now he’s a different person. The old Pham Trinli had been loud and arrogant, a bluster that you could argue and joke with. This Pham was quieter, but his actions were like knives.Killing us all. Trud’s eyes slid unwillingly to where Anne Reynolt’s body hung like meat on a hook. And even if he could conceive a scheme to betray Pham, it probably wouldn’t save him. Nau and Brughel were Podmasters, and Trud knew he had passed beyond foriveness.

“—still a chance, Trud.” Pham’s voice cut through his fear. “Maybe we could open things a little further, fool the zipheads into—”

Silipan shrugged. Not that it mattered, but, “Do that and the Podmaster will be down our throat instantly. I’m getting fifty service requests a second from Nau and Brughel.”

Pham rubbed his temples and his eyes got a faraway look. “Yeah, I see what you’re saying. Okay. What do we have? The temp—”

“The cameras at Benny’s show a lot of very puzzled people. If they’re lucky they’ll stay where they are.” And afterward the Podmasters would have no claim of vengeance on them.

One of the zipheads—Bonsol—interrupted, the typical irrelevance of the Focused: “There are millions of people on the ground. They will start dying in a few seconds.”

The comment actually seemed to derail Pham. Even the new Pham Trinli was still an amateur when it came to dealing with zipheads. “Yeah,” he said, more to himself than to Silipan or the ziphead. “But at least the Spiders have a chance. Without our zipheads, Ritser can’t tighten the screws any more.” Of course, Bonsol ignored the reply, just went on tapping at her keys.

Trinli’s attention snapped back to Silipan. “Look. Nau is in a taxi, coming in on the L1-A site. There are electric stab jets all over the area. If we can get a few zipheads to work them—”

Trud felt anger sweeping up. Whatever he was, Pham Trinli was still a fool. “Plague take you! You just don’t understand Focused loyalty! We need to—”

Bonsol interrupted. “Ritser can’t tighten the screws, but we can’t loosen them either.” She was laughing, almost inaudibly. “What an intriguing thing. We have a deadlock.”

Trud motioned for Pham to move back toward the ceiling, out of range of this random ziphead commentary. “They’ll go on like that forever.”

But Pham turned back to the ziphead, abruptly giving her all his attention. “What do you mean ‘we have a deadlock’?” he said quietly.

“Pus take it, Pham! What does it matter!” But Trinli jerked his hand up, commanding silence. The gesture had the peremptory confidence of a senior Podmaster—and Silipan’s protests died on his lips. Inside, his fear just grew and grew. So much for miracles. If there had been any chance for keeping Nau out of L1-A, it was vanishing in this delay. And Silipan knew what was in L1-A. Oh yes. Beyond all automation and subtlety, L1-A would give the Podmaster back his absolute power. The clock at the corner of Trud’s vision counted mercilessly on, the seconds of life dribbling out. And of course, the ziphead wasn’t even paying attention to Pham, much less his question.

The silence stretched for ten or fifteen seconds. Then, abruptly, Bonsol’s head snapped up and she stared directly into Pham’s eyes—the way a ziphead almost never did, except when role-playing. “I mean you’re blocking us and we’re blocking you,” she said. “My victory thought you were all monsters, that we couldn’t trust any of you. And now we are all paying for that mistake.”

It was ziphead nonsense, just more portentous than most. But Pham pulled himself down to Bonsol’s chair. His mouth was half-open as if in unutterable surprise, the look of a man whose world has suddenly been blown apart, who is falling headlong into insanity. And when he finally spoke, his words were crazy, too. “I—mostly we’re not monsters. If the deadlock were to end, can you run everything? And afterwards… we would be at your mercy afterwards. How can we trust you?”

Bonsol’s gaze had wandered. She didn’t answer, and her hands roamed her console. Silent seconds ticked by, but now a cold surmise stole up Trud’s spine.No.

Sharp on ten seconds, Trixia Bonsol spoke again: “If you restore full access, we can control the most important things. At least that was the plan. As for trust…” Bonsol’s face twisted in a strange smile, mocking and wistful all at once. “Well, you know us much better than the reverse. You must choose your own monsters.”

“Yes,” said Pham. He rubbed his temple and squinted at something invisible to Trud. He turned to Silipan, and he was smiling the same feral smile as when he had popped up in the supply closet, the smile of someone who is risking everything—and expects to win. “Let’s restore all the comm links, Trud. It’s time to give Nau and Brughel the ziphead support they deserve.”

FIFTY-NINE

Nau watched Qiwi guide their taxi in; ahead and below were the snow mounds that he had piled around the L1-A lock. With only the automation aboard the taxi, Qiwi had found the sluiceway, overridden the hatch safeties, and rescued them—all in a few hundred seconds. If only she would last a few more seconds, he would have an absolute whip hand. If only she would last that few more seconds… He saw the looks she was giving her father. The sight of Ali was somehow pushing her toward the edge of understanding.Pestilence! Just get us safely down, that’s all I ask. Then he could kill her.

Marli looked up from his comm gear. There was surprised relief on his face. “Sir! I’m getting acks back from the ziphead channels. We should have full automation in a few seconds.”

“Ah.” Finally some unexpected good news. Now he could limit the destruction necessary to regain control. Except this is Pham Nuwen you’re up against, and almost anything is possible. This could be some incredible masquerade. “Very good, Podcorporal. But for the moment, don’t use that automation.”

“Yes, sir.” Marli sounded puzzled.

Nau looked out the taxi’s window. Strange to be seeing raw nature with no enhancement. The L1-A lock was about seventy meters away now, deep in shadow. There was something strange about it… the lip of metal was highlighted in red.But I’m not wearing huds.

“Qiwi—”

“I see it. Someone is—”

There was a loud snapping sound. Marli screamed. His hair was on fire. The hull by his seat was glowing red.

“Shit!” Qiwi boosted the taxi up. “They’re usingmy electric jets!” She spun the taxi even as she jinked it back and forth. Nau’s stomach crawled up his gut.Nothing is supposed to fly like this.

The glow on the L1-A lock, the hot spot in the hull behind him—the enemy must be using all the stab jets within line of sight. Each jet by itself could only be an accidental, local danger. Somehow, Nuwen had ganged dozens of them to shine precisely on the two targets that mattered.

Marli was still screaming. Qiwi’s piloting jammed Nau up into his restraints, turned him as he came back down. He had a glimpse of the podcoporal in the arms of his fellows. As least he wasn’t burning anymore. The other guards’ eyes were wide. “X-rays,” one of them said. The splash from those electron beams could fry them all. A long-term peril, all things considered—

Still spinning the taxi, Qiwi swung them close to the hillsides of Diamond One. The craft was precessing now, a wild triple spin. No way could the enemy keep their guns on one spot. And yet, the glow in the wall grew brighter with each rev.Pestilence. Somehow Nuwen had full system automation.

The nose and then the butt of the taxi smashed into the ground, splashing snow up from the surface. The hull groaned but held. And now, in the floating haze of rising volatiles, Nau could see the beams of the ejets. The ice and air in their way exploded into incandescence. Five beams, maybe ten, they shifted in and out as the taxi spun, and several were always on the glowing spot in their hull.

Around them the swirl of vapor and ice grew thicker. The glowing spot in the hull began to dim as the snows soaked and diffused the murderous beams. Qiwi damped their spin with four precise bursts of attitude control, at the same time snaking their craft over the boiling snows toward the L1-A airlock.

Peering forward, Nau saw the lock approach from dead ahead, a certain crash. But somehow Qiwi was still in control. She flipped the taxi up, slamming the docking collar into its mate on the lock. There was the sound of bending metal, and then they were stopped.

Qiwi tapped at the lock controls, then bounded out of her chair, to the forward hatch mechanism. “It’s jammed, Tomas! Help me!”

And now they were locked down, trapped like dogs in a pit shoot. Tomas rushed forward, braced himself, and pulled with Qiwi at the taxi hatch. It was jammed. Almost jammed. Together, they pulled it partway open. He reached through, spent precious seconds clearing security on the L1-A hatch. All right!

He looked over Qiwi’s head at the hull behind them. The red spot was more like a bull’s-eye now, a ring of red, a ring of orange, and glaring white in the middle. It was like standing in front of an open kiln.

The white-hot center bubbled outward, and was gone. All around them was a cascading thunderclap of departing atmosphere.

Things had been very quiet since Victory Lighthill took the Command and Control Center. The Intelligence techs had been moved away from their perches. They and the staff officers had been herded back against Underville, Coldhaven, and Dugway.Like bugs at a slaughter-suck, thought Belga. But it didn’t matter. The situation map showed that much of the world was going down to slaughter now:

The tracks of thousands of Kindred missiles curved across the map, and more were being launched each second. There were target circles drawn across every Accord military site, every city—even the trad deepnesses.

And the strangeAccord launchings that had showed just after Lighthill arrived—those had disappeared from the maps. Lies, no longer needed.

Victory Lighthill walked up and down the line of perches, gazing briefly over the shoulders of each of her techs. She seemed to have forgotten Underville and the others. And strangely, she seemed just as horror-struck as CCC’s proper occupants. She wheeled on her brother, who seemed quite in another world, entertaining himself with his game helmet. “Brent?”

The big corporal groaned. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Calorica is still down. Sis… I think they hit Dad.”

“But how? There’s no way they could know!”

“I dunno. Only the low-level ones are talking, and by themselves, they’re never very helpful. I think it happened a while ago, just after we lost contact with the High Perch—” He paused, communing with his game? Light leaked from the edges of his helmet, flickering. Then: “He’s back! Listen!”

Lighthill brought a phone to the side of her head. “Daddy!” Joyous as a cobblie home from school. “Where—?” Her eating hands clasped each other in surprise and she shut up, listening to some extended speech. But she was almost bouncing with excitement, and her renegades were suddenly pounding on their consoles.

Finally: “We copy all, Daddy. We—” She paused, watching her techs for an instant. “—we’re getting control, just like you say. I think we can do it, but for God’s sake, route through someplace closer. Twenty seconds is just too long. We need you now more than ever!” And then she was talking to her techs. “Rhapsa, target only the ones we can’t stop from above. Birbop, fix this damn routing—”

And on the situation map… the missile fields across High Equatoria had come alive. The map showed the colored traces of dozens, hundreds of antimissiles, the long-range interceptors arcing up to meet the enemy. More lies? Belga looked across the suddenly joyous aspects of Lighthill and the other intruders, and felt hope climbing into her own heart.

The first contacts were still half a minute away. Belga had seen the simulations. At least five percent of the attacking missiles would get through. The deaths would be a hundred times more than during the Great War, but at least it wasn’t annihilation…. But other things were happening on the map. Well behind the leading wave of the attack, here and there, enemy markers were vanishing.

Lighthill waved at the display, and for the first time since the takeover addressed Underville and the others. “The Kindred had callback capability on some of their missiles. We’re using that wherever we can. Some of the others, we can attack from above.” From above? As if by an invisible eraser, sweeping northward over the continent, a swath of missile markers disappeared. Lighthill turned toward Coldhaven and the other officers, and came to full attention. “Sir, ma’am. Your people might be best at managing the amissiles. If we can coordinate—”

“Damn, yes!” chorused Dugway and Coldhaven. The techs rushed back to their places. There were precious lost moments, re-upping target lists, and then the first of the amissiles scored.

“Positive EMP!” shouted one of the AD techs. Somehow it seemed more real than all the rest.

General Coldhaven dipped a hand at Lighthill, an odd sort of reverse salute. Lighthill said quietly, “Thank you, sir. This isn’t quite what the chief planned, but I think we can make it work…. Brent, see if you can make the situation map completely truthful.”

…Hundreds of new markers glittered across the board. But they weren’t missiles. Belga knew the tags well enough to recognize satellites, though these looked like broken graphics. There were missing data fields and there were fields that contained nonsense strings. Moving off the north edge of the display was a strange rectangle. It pulsed with chevron modifiers. General Dugway hissed. “That can’t be true. A dozen size-chevrons. That would make it a thousand feet long.”

“Yes, sir,” said Lieutenant Lighthill. “The standard display programs can’t quite handle this. That vehicle is almost two thousand feet long.” She didn’t seem to notice the look that came over Dugway. She contemplated the apparition a second longer. “And I think it has just about outlived its usefulness.”

Ritser Brughel seemed pleased with himself. “We’ve done pus good even without Reynolt’s people.” The Vice-Podmaster came over from his Captain’s chair to hover beside his Pilot Manager. “Maybe we launched a few more nukes than precisely needed, but that balanced your botch of the amissile fields, eh?” He slapped Xin familiarly on the shoulder. Jau had the sudden realization that his single, frail treason had been detected.

“Yes, sir” was all he could think to say. Ahead, the curve of the planet glittered with a web of lights, the cities they had come to call Princeton, Valdemon, Mountroyal. Maybe the Spiders weren’t the people Rita imagined, maybe that was a fraud of translation. But whatever the truth, those cities were in the last seconds of their existence.

“Sir.” Bil Phuong’s voice came across bridge-wide comm. “I’ve got a high-level ack from Anne’s people. We’ll have full automation in a matter of seconds.”

“Ha. About time.” But there was a note of relief in Ritser Brughel’s voice.

Jau felt a thutter of vibration. Again. Again. Brughel’s head snapped up, and he gazed off at a virtual display. “That sounds like our battle lasers, but—”

Jau’s eyes flickered across the status listings. The weapons board was clean. Core power had jagged as if charging capacitors—but now that was level, too. And, “My pilots aren’t reporting any fire, sir.”

Thutter. Thutter. They had passed over the great cities, were coasting north into the arctic, over tiny lights scattered across an immensity of dark, frozen land. Nothing there, but behind them… Thutter.The sky lit with three pale beams, diverging, fading… the classic look of battle lasers in upper atmosphere.

“Phuong! What the fuck is going on down there!”

“Nothing, sir! I mean—” Sounds of Phuong moving among his zipheads. “Uh, the zips are working on valid target lists from L1.”

“Well, they’re totally out of synch withmy target list. Pull your head out, man!” Brughel cut the connection and turned back to his Pilot Manager. The Podmaster’s pale face was ruddy with building anger. “Shoot the bloody zips and get new ones!” He glared at Jau. “So what’s your problem?”

“I—maybe nothing, but we’re being illuminated from below.”

“Hunh.” Brughel, squinted at the electronic intelligence. “Yeah. Ground radars. But this happens several times on every rev… oh.”

Xin nodded. “This contact has lasted fifteen seconds. It’s like they’re tracking us.”

“That’s impossible. Weown the Spider nets.” Brughel bit his lip. “Unless Phuong has totally screwed up the L1 comm.”

The radar tag faded for a moment… and then it was back, brighter, focused. “That’s a targeting lock!”

Brughel jerked as if the image had turned into a striking snake. “Xin. Take control. Main torch if it will help. Get us out of here.”

“Yes, sir.” There weren’t many missile sites in the Spiders’ far north. But what there were would be nuke armed. Even a single hit could cripple theHand. Jau reached to enable his pilots—

—and the rumble of auxiliary thrusters filled the bridge.

“That wasn’t me, sir!”

Brughel had been looking right at him when the sound began. He nodded. “Get through to your pilots. Get control!” He bounced up from his place beside Xin and waved to his guards toward the aft hatch. “Phuong!”

Jau pounded frantically on his controls, shouted the command codes over and over. He saw scattered diagnostics, but no response from his pilots. The horizon had tilted slightly. The Hand’s auxiliaries were being run full-out, but not by Jau. Slowly, slowly, the ship seemed to be coming back to a nose-down, cruise attitude. Still no response from his pilots, but—Jau noticed the rising trace from the power core.

“Main torch burn, sir! I can’t stop it—”

Brughel and his guards grabbed for hold-ons. The torch subsonics were unmistakable, vibrating out from bones and teeth. Slowly, slowly, the acceleration ramped up. Fifty milligees. One hundred. Loose junk floated faster and faster sternward, spinning and bouncing off obstacles. Three hundred milligees. A huge gentle fist pressed Jau back into his chair. One of the guards had been in open space, unable to reach a hold-down. He drifted past now, hefell past, crashing into the aft wall. Five hundred milligees, and still increasing. Jau twisted in his harness and looked back, up, at Brughel and the others. They were pinned aft, trapped by the acceleration that went on and on….

And then the torch sound faded, and Jau floated up in against his restraints. Brughel was shouting to his guards, gathering them together. Somewhere in the action he had lost his huds. “Status, Mr. Xin!”

Jau stared at his displays. The status board was still a random jumble. He looked out, forward along theHand’ s orbit. They had passed through a sunrise. Dim lit, the frozen ocean stretched to the horizon. But that wasn’t what mattered. The horizon itself looked subtly different.Not your classicalde-orbit burn, but it will do. Jau licked his lips. “Sir, we’ll be in the soup in one or two hundred seconds.”

For a moment, horror registered in Brughel’s face. “You get us back up, mister.”

“Yes, sir.” What else was there to say?

Brughel and his goons coasted across the bridge to the aft hatch.

Phuong: “Sir. I have a voice transmission from L1.”

“Well, put it on.”

It was a woman’s voice, Trixia Bonsol. “Greetings to the humans aboardInvisible Hand. This is Lieutenant Victory Lighthill, Accord Intelligence Service. I have taken control of your spacecraft. You will be on the ground shortly. It may be some time before our forces arrive on the scene. Do not, I repeat, do not resist those forces.”

Stark, gape-mouth surprise held everyone on the bridge… but Bonsol said nothing more. Brughel recovered first, but his voice wavered. “Phuong. Shut down the L1 link. All the protocol layers.”

“Sir. I-I can’t. Once up, the interconnect—”

“Yes you can. Get physical. Take a club to the equipment, but get yourselfoffline. “

“Sir. Even without the local zipheads… I think L1 has workarounds.”

“I’ll take care of that. We’re coming down.”

The guard by the hatch looked up at Brughel. “It won’t open, sir.”

“Phuong!”

There was no answer.

Brughel jumped to the wall beside the hatch, began pounding the direct opener. He might as well have been pounding a rock. The Podmaster turned, and Jau saw that the red was gone from his face. He was dead white and his eyes were wild. He had a wire gun in his hand now, and he looked around the bridge as if in search of a target. His gaze locked on Jau. The gun twitched up.

“Sir, I think I’ve gotten through to one of my pilots.” It was an absolute lie, but without his huds, Brughel couldn’t know.

“Ah?” The gun muzzle slipped a fraction. “Good. Keep at it, Xin. It’s your neck, too.”

Jau nodded, turned back to diddle fiercely with the dead controls.

Behind him, the search for the hatch’s manual override was frantic and obscene and incompetent… and finally terminated by the chatter of gunfire. Tumbling wires caromed around the bridge. “Bloody hell. That won’t do it,” Brughel said. There was the sound of a cabinet opening, but Jau kept his head down, doing his best to look desperately busy. “Here. Try this.” There was a pause, then a string of ear-numbing detonations.Lordy! Brughel kept that kind of ordnance on a starship’s bridge?

Triumphant shouts were faint behind the ringing in his ears. Then Brughel was shouting. “Go! Go! Go!”

Jau turned his head slightly, got a sidelong look at the bridge behind him. The hatch was still closed, but now there was a ragged hole punched in it. Twisted metal and less identifiable junk floated up from it.

And now Jau Xin was all alone on theHand’ s bridge. He took a deep breath and tried to make sense of his displays. Ritser Brughel was right about one thing. It was Jau’s neck on the line here.

The core power trace was still high. He looked out across the curving horizon. No question now. TheHand was down, consistent with the eighty-thousand-meter altitude on the status board. He heard the rumble of the aux thrusters.Did I get through? If he could orient properly and somehow fire the main torch… But no, they weren’t turning in the right direction! The great ship was aligning on their direction of flight, rear end first. To the left and right of the aft view, parts of the starship’s outer hull could be seen, angular spidery structures that were meant for the flows of interstellar plasma but never the atmosphere of a planet. Now their edges were glowing. Soft yellows and reds splashed out around them, cascading like glowing ocean spray. The sharpest edges glowed white and sloughed away. But the aux thrusters were still firing, a pattern of tiny bursts. On off. On off. Whoever was running his pilots was making a perverse attempt to keep theHand oriented. Without such precise control, the flow past the ship’s irregular hull would send them into a long tumble, a million tonnes of hardware torn apart by forces it had never been designed to face.

The glow across the stern was a spreading sheet of light, clear only in a few places where the shock was not hot enough to vaporize the hull. Jau drifted back into his chair, the acceleration growing gently, inexorably. Four hundred milligees, eight hundred. But this acceleration was not caused by the ship’s torch. This was a planetary atmosphere, having its way with them.

And there was another sound. Not the rumble of the aux. It was a rich, growing tone. From its throat to its outer hull, theHand had become a vast organ pipe. The sound fell from chord to chord as the ship rammed deeper, slower. And as the glow of ionization trembled and faded, the Hand’s dying song rose in a crescendo—and was gone.

Jau stared out the aft view, at a scene that should have been impossible. The angular hull structures were smoothed and melted by their passage through the heat. But theHand was a million tonnes, and the pilots had kept it precisely oriented in the flow, and most of its great mass had survived.

Nearly a standard gee pressed him against his chair, but this was almost at right angles to the earlier acceleration. This was planetary gravity. TheHand was a kind of aircraft now, a disaster skidding across the sky. They were forty thousand meters up, coming down at a steady hundred meters per second. Jau looked at the pale horizon, the ridges and blocks of ice that swept beneath his view. Some of those were five hundred meters high, ice pressed upward by the slow freezing of the ocean depths. He tapped at his console, got a flicker of attention from one of the pilots, a scrap of further information. They would clear that ridgeline and the three beyond it. Beyond that, near the horizon, the shadows were softer… a deception of distance, or maybe snow piled deep on the jagged ice.

Echoing up through the Hand’s corridors, Jau heard the rapid pounding of Brughel’s heavy gun. There was shouting, silence, then the pounding again, farther away.Every hatch must be sealed. And Ritser Brughel was punching through every one. In a way, the Podmaster was right; he controlled the physical layer. He could reach the hull optics, knock out the link to L1. He could “disconnect” whatever local zipheads still offended….

Thirty thousand meters. Dim sunlight reflected off the ice, but there was no sign of artificial lights or towns. They were coming down in the middle of the Spiders’ grandest ocean. TheHand was still making better than mach three. The sink rate was still one hundred meters per second. His intuition plus the few hints from the status board told him they would smear across the landscape at more than the speed of sound. Unless—the core power was still rising—if the main torch could be fired once more, and fired at precisely the right instant… a miracle touch might do it. TheHand was so big that its belly and throat might be used as a cushion, shredded across kilometers of crash path, leaving the bridge and the occupied quarters intact. Pham Trinli’s silly bragging had included such an adventure.

One thing was certain. Even if Jau were given full control at this instant, and all his pilots’ skills, there was no way he could accomplish such a landing.

They had cleared the last line of ridges. The aux thrusters burned briefly, a one-degree yaw, guiding them as if with special knowledge of conditions ahead.

Ritser Brughel’s time for killing had shrunk down to a few seconds. Rita would be safe. Jau watched the tumbled land rise toward him. And with it came the strangest feeling of terror, and triumph, and freedom. “You’re too late, Ritser. You’re just too late.”

SIXTY

Belga Underville had rarely seen joy or fear so strong, and never attached to the same events by the same people. Coldhaven’s techs should have been cheering as wave after wave of their long-range interceptors scored against the Kindred ballistics, and hundreds of other enemy missiles blew themselves up or otherwise aborted. The success rate was already nearing ninety-nine percent. Which left thirty live nuclear warheads arcing into Accord territory. It was the difference between annihilation and mere isolated disaster… and the technicians chewed on their eating hands as they struggled to stop those last, straggling threats.

Coldhaven walked down his row of techs. One of Lighthill’s people, an oophase corporal, was by his side. The General was hanging on Rhapsa Lighthill’s every word, making sure his techs got the benefit of all the new intelligence that was flooding across their displays. Belga hung back. There was nothing she could do but get in the way. Victory Lighthill was deep in some weird conversation with the aliens, every few sentences punctuated by long delays, time for side conversations with her brother and Coldhaven’s people. She paused, waiting, and gave Belga a shy smile.

Belga gave her a little wave back. The cobblie wasn’t quite the same as her mother—except, perhaps, where it mattered.

Then Lighthill’s phone came alive again—some relatively near collaborator? “Yes, good. We’ll get people out there. Five hours maybe…. Daddy, we’re back on track. Critter Number Five is playing fair. You were right about that one. Daddy?… Brent, we’ve lost him again! That shouldn’t happen now…. Daddy?”

Rachner’s helicopter had stopped its zigzag, evasive course, though not before Thract became thoroughly lost. Now the heli flew low and fast across the altiplano, as if fearless of hostile observation from above. A passenger on his own pilot’s perch, Thract watched the sky show with an almost hypnotized wonder, only partly aware of Sherkaner Underhill’s delirious mumbling, and the strange lights coming from his game helmet.

The sheets of amissile launches were long gone, but all across the horizon the evidence of their mission was lighting the sky.At least we foughtback.

The timbre of the rotor noise changed, bringing Thract back from his terrible, far vision. The heli was sliding down through the dark. Shading his eyes against the sky lights, Thract could see that they were headed for a landing on a random stretch of naked stone, hills and ice all around.

They touched down, roughly, and the turbines idled till the rotors were spinning slow enough to see. It was almost quiet in the cabin. The guide-bug stirred, pushed insistently at the door beside Underhill.

“Don’t let him out, sir. If we lose him here, he might stay lost.”

Underhill’s head bobbed uncertainly. He set down the game helmet; its lights flickered and died. He patted his guide-bug, and pulled shut the closures of his jacket. “It’s okay, Colonel. It’s all over now. You see, we won.”

The cobber sounded as delirious as ever. But Thract was beginning to realize: delirious or not, Underhill had saved the world. “What happened, sir?” He said softly. “Alien monsters controlled our nets… and you controlled the monsters?”

The old, familiar chuckle. “Something like that. The problem was, they aren’t all monsters. Some of them are both clever and good… and we almost squashed each other with our separate plans. That was terribly expensive to fix.” He was silent for a second, his head wavering. “It will be okay, but… just now I can’t see much.” The cobber had taken a full head of the aliens’ killer beam. The blisters on Underhill’s eyes were spreading, a pervasive, creamy haze. “Maybe you can take a moment and tell me what you see.” The cobber jerked a hand skyward.

Rachner pushed his best side close to the south-facing window. The shoulder of the mountain cut off part of the view, but there were still one hundred degrees of horizon. “Hundreds of nukes, sir, glowing lights in the sky. I think those are our interceptors, way far off.”

“Ha. Poor Nizhnimor and Hrunk… when we walked in the Dark, we saw something similar. Though it was much colder then.” The guide-bug had the trick of the door. It popped it open a crack, and a slow draft of coldest air licked into the cabin.

“Sir—” Rachner started to complain about the draft.

“It’s okay. You won’t be here long. What else do you see?”

“Lights spreading out from the hits. I guess that’s ionization in the magnetopatches. And—” Rach’s voice caught in his throat. There were other things, and these he recognized. “I see reentry traces, sir. Dozens of them. They’re passing overhead, and to our east.” Rach had seen similar things in Air Defense tests. When the warheads finally came down through the atmosphere, they left trails that glowed in a dozen colors. Even in the tests, they’d been horrible things, the stabbing hands of a spirit tarant, pouncing from the sky. A dozen traces, more coming. Thousands of missiles had been stopped, but what remained could destroy cities.

“Don’t worry.” Underhill’s voice came softly from Thract’s blind side. “My alien friends have taken care of those. Those warheads are dead carcasses now, a few tonnes of radioactive junk. Not much fun if one drops directly on your head, but otherwise no threat.”

Rachner turned, followed the tracks anxiously across the sky.My alienfriends have taken care of those. “What are the monsters really like, Sherkaner? Can we trust them?”

“Heh. Trust them? What a thing for an Intelligence officer to ask. My General never trusted them, any of them. I’ve studied thehumans for almost twenty years, Rachner. They’ve been traveling in space for hundreds of generations. They’ve seen so much, they’ve done so much…. The poor crappers think they know what is impossible. They’re free to fly between the stars, and their imagination is trapped in a cage they can’t even see.”

The glowing streaks had passed across the sky. Most had faded to far-red or invisibility. Two converged toward a point on the horizon, probably the High Equatoria launch site. Thract held his breath, waiting.

Behind him, Underhill said something like, “Ah, dear victory,” and then was very quiet.

Thract strained to watch the north. If the warheads were still live, the detonations would be visible even from over the horizon. Ten seconds. Thirty. There was silence and cold. And to the north, there was only the light of the stars. “You’re right, sir. What’s left is just falling junk. I—” Rachner turned, suddenly conscious of just how cold the heli’s cabin had become.

Underhill was gone.

Thract lunged across the cabin to the half-open door. “Sir!Sherkaner! “ He started down the outside steps, turning his head this way and that, trying to catch a glimpse of the other. The air was still, but so cold that it cut. Without a heated breather, he’d have burned lungs in a matter of minutes.

There! A dozen yards from the heli, in the shade of both stars and sky glow, two far-red blotches. Underhill limped slowly behind Mobiy. The guide-bug tugged him gently along, at every step probing the hillside with its long arms. It was the instinctive behavior of an animal in hopeless cold, trying to the last to find an effective deepness. Here, in a random nowhere, the critter didn’t stand a chance. In less than an hour he and his master would be dead, their tissues desiccated.

Thract scrambled down the steps, shouting at Underhill. And above him, the heli’s blades began to spin up. Thract cringed beneath the frigid wash. As the turbines ramped up and the blades began to provide real lift, he turned and pulled himself back into the cabin. He pounded on the autopilot, poking at every disconnect.

It didn’t matter. The turbines hit takeoff power and the heli lifted. He had one last glimpse of the shadows hiding Sherkaner Underhill. Then the craft tilted eastward and the scene was lost behind him.

SIXTY-ONE

Blowouts in small volumes were normally fatal. Quickly fatal. It was one of his guards who unintentionally saved Tomas Nau. Just as the hull melted through, Tung released his harness and dived up toward the hatch. The blowout clawed at all of them, but Tung was loose and closest to the hole. He rammed headfirst into the wall melt, sucked through to his hips.

Somehow Qiwi had kept her place by the jammed taxi hatch. Now she had the L1-A hatch open, too. She turned back, grabbed her father, and boosted him into the lock beyond. The action was a single smooth motion, almost a dance. Nau had scarcely begun to react when she turned a second time, hooked a foot into a wall loop, and reached out to snag his sleeve with the tips of her fingers. She pulled gently, and as he came closer, grabbed him by main force and shoved him through to safety.

Safe. And I was as good as dead just five seconds ago.The hiss of escaping air was loud. The damaged docking collar could blow in a second.

Qiwi dropped back from hatchway. “I’ll get Marli and Ciret.”

“Yes!” Nau came back to the opening, and cursed himself for losing his wire gun in the chaos. He looked into the taxi. One guard was clearly dead: Tung’s legs weren’t even twitching. Marli was probably dead too, certainly out of it, though Qiwi was struggling to get both him and Ciret free. In a second she would have them out, as quick and effectively as she had saved himself and Ali Lin. Qiwi was just too dangerous, and this was his last sure opportunity to get her out of the picture.

Nau pushed on the L1-A hatch. It turned smoothly, pressed by the air currents, and slammed shut with an ear-numbing crash. His fingers danced across the access control, tapping out the code for an emergency jettison. From the other side of the wall there was the explosivewhump of exhausting gas, the banging of metal on metal. Nau imagined the airless taxi, floating out from the lock.Let Pham Nuwen take his target practice on the dead.

The lock’s pressure rose quickly to normal. Nau popped the inner hatch and took Ali Lin through, into the corridor beyond. The old man mumbled, semiconscious. At least his bleeding had stopped.Don’t die on me, damnit. Ali was worthless meat right now, but in the long run he was a treasure. Things would be expensive enough without losing him.

He coasted Ali gently up the long corridor. The walls around him were green plastic. This had been the security vault aboardCommon Good. Its irregular shape had made sense there; nowadays its value lay in its monolithic construction and its shielding, several meters of composites with the melting point of tungsten. All the firepower Pham Nuwen possessed couldn’t get him in here.

Till a few days ago, the vault had held most of the surviving heavy weapons in the OnOff system. Now it was almost empty, stripped to support the mission of theInvisible Hand. No matter. Nau had been very careful that enough nukes remained. If necessary, he could play the old, old game of total disaster management.

So what can be salvaged?He had only the vaguest idea how much Pham Nuwen controlled. For an instant, Nau quailed. All his life he had studied such men, and now he was pitted against one.But in winning, Iwill be all the more. There were a dozen things to be done, and only seconds to do them. Nau let Ali loose, free to slowly fall in the rockpile’s microgravity. A comm set and local huds were tacked to grabfelt by the door. He snatched them up and spoke brief commands. The automation here was primitive, but it would do. Now he could see out from the vault. The Peddlers’ temp was above his horizon, and there was no taxi traffic, there were no suited figures approaching around the rockpile’s surface.

He dove across the open space, unshipped a small torpedo. The flag at the corner of his view told him that his call to Hammerfest had made it through. The ring pattern disappeared, and Pham’s voice came in his ear.

“Nau?”

“Right the first time, sir.” Nau floated the nuke across to the launch tube that Kal Omo had installed just thirty-five days ago. It had seemed a maniac precaution then. Now it was his last chance.

“It’s time that you surrendered, Podmaster. My forces control all of L1 space. We—”

Pham’s voice held quiet certainty, with none of the bluster of Old Pham Trinli. Nau could imagine ordinary people gripped by that voice, led. But Tomas Nau was a pro himself. He had no trouble interrupting: “On the contrary, sir. I hold the only power that is worth noting.” He touched the panel by the launch tube. There was a thump as compressed air blew out the top end and cleared the snow. “I’ve programmed and loaded a tactical nuclear weapon. The target is the Peddlers’ temp. The weapon is ad hoc, but I’m sure it’s sufficient.”

“You can’t do that, Podmaster. Three hundred of your own people are over there.”

Nau laughed gently. “Oh, Ican do it. I lose a lot, but I still have some people in coldsleep. I—are you really Pham Nuwen?” The question slipped out, almost uncalculated.

There was a pause, and when Nuwen spoke, he sounded distracted, “Yes.” And you’re handling everything yourself, aren’t you? It made sense. An ordinary conspiracy would have been detected years ago. It had been just Pham Nuwen and Ezr Vinh, right from the beginning. Like a single man pulling his wagon across a continent, Nuwen had persevered, had almost conquered. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir. I’ve studied you for many years.” As he spoke, Nau popped up a view of the torpedo’s diagnostics. He was looking straight down the launch rail; the tube was clear. “Perhaps your only mistake is that you have not fully understood the Podmaster ethos. You see, we Podmasters grew out of disaster. That is our inner strength, our edge. If I destroy the temp, it will be an enormous setback for the L1 operation. But my personal situation willimprove. I will still have the rockpile. I will still have many of the zipheads. I will still have theInvisibleHand. “ He turned away from the launch tube. He looked across the equipment bays, at the remaining torpedoes; he might have to knock out the Hammerfest Attic, too.That had not been part of even the most extreme disaster plans. Maybe there was some way to do it that would leave some of the zipheads alive. Another part of his mind waited curiously for what Pham Nuwen would say. Would he cave in like an ordinary person, or did he have the true heart of a Podmaster? That question was the essence of Pham Nuwen’s moral weakness.

Abruptly, there was a clattering sound that echoed through the vault. Ali Lin had fallen beyond his view, into the downward end. But the sound came again and again, a million metal plates crashing together.Maybe theinward entrance? That was at the lowest point in the vault. Nau moved silently toward the edge of the drop-off.

Pham Nuwen’s voice was faint against the racket: “You’re wrong, Podmaster. You don’t have the—” Nau cut the audio with a swipe of his hand and moved slowly forward. He did a manual traverse of the vault’s fixed cameras. Nothing. The primitive automation was a salvation and a pest. Okay. Weapons. Was there anything smaller than a nuke around here? The database wasn’t set up for such trivia. He let the catalogue listings stream by his huds, and he moved close to wall, still out of sight from below. The clanking and banging continued.Ah, that was the lake-bed servos, theirnoise channeled down the tunnel! Quite a fanfare for a secret break-in.

The ambusher, such as he was, floated up into sight.

“Ah, Mr. Vinh. I thought you were well drowned.”

In fact, Vinh looked semiconscious, his face pasty pale. There was no sign of his wire-gun wounds.No, he stole one of my jackets. The full-press was trim and perfectly creased, but the right arm was subtly twisted, lumpy. Vinh held Ali gently against his left shoulder. He looked back at Nau, and hatred seemed to bring him more alertness.

But the downward end of the vault was empty of further intruders. And Nau’s catalogue search had completed: there were three wire guns in the cabinet immediately behind him! Nau breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at the Peddler. “You did well, Mr. Vinh.” A few seconds’ difference and Vinh would have been here first, setting a real ambush. Instead… the fellow appeared to be unarmed, one-armed, weak as a kitten. And Tomas Nau stood between him and the wire guns. “I don’t have time to talk, I’m afraid. Stand aside from Ali, please.” He spoke mildly, but didn’t take his eyes off the two. His left hand moved up to open the gun cabinet. Maybe the calm style would work on Vinh, and he would have a clean kill.

“Tomas!”

Qiwi stood above them, at the entrance to the vault’s open space.

For an instant, Nau just stared. She had a nosebleed. Her lacy dress was torn and splattered. But she was alive.The jettison must have jammedalong with the taxi hatch. With the taxi still in place, lock security would not reset—and somehow she had clawed her way back in.

“We were trapped, Tomas. Somehow the lock was defective.”

“Oh, yes!” The anguish in Nau’s voice was completely sincere. “It slammed shut and I heard venting. I—I was so sure you were dead.”

Qiwi came down from the ceiling, guiding the body of Rei Ciret onto a grabfelt rest. The guard might be alive, but he was clearly of no use just now. “I-I’m sorry, Tomas. I wasn’t able to save Marli.” She came across the room to hug him, but there was something tentative about the gesture. “Who are you talking to?” Then she saw Vinh and Ali. “Ezr?”

For once, some good luck: Vinh was perfect, his full-press jacket stained like a butcher’s smock, with Ali’s blood. From behind Vinh came the banging of the ruined park. The Peddler’s voice was gasping and harsh. “We’ve taken over L1, Qiwi. Except for a few of Nau’s thugs, we haven’t hurt anyone”—this while her own father lay bleeding in his arms! “Nau is using you like he always does. Only this time, he’s going to kill us all. Look around! He’s going to nuke the temp.”

“I—” But Qiwi did look around, and Nau didn’t like what he saw in her eyes.

“Qiwi,” said Nau, “look at me. We’re up against the same group that was behind Jimmy Diem.”

“You murdered Jimmy!” shouted Vinh.

Qiwi wiped her bloody nose on the fine white fabric of her sleeve. For a moment she looked very young and lost, as lost as when he’d first taken her. She caught her foot on a wall stop and turned toward him, considering. Somehow, he had to make time, just a handful of seconds:

“Qiwi, think who’s saying these things.” Nau gestured in the direction of Vinh and Ali Lin. It was a terrible risk he was taking, a desperate manipulation. But it was working! She actually turned a bit, her gaze shifting away from him. He slipped his hand into the cabinet, feeling for the butt of a wire gun.

“Qiwi, think who’s saying these things.” Nau gestured in the direction of Ezr and Ali Lin. Poor Qiwi actually turned to look. Behind her, Ezr saw a smile flicker across Tomas Nau’s face.

“You know Ezr. He tried to kill your father back at North Paw; he thought he could get at me through Ali. If he had a knife, he would be cutting into your father right now. You know what a sadist Ezr Vinh is. You remember the beating he gave you; you remember how I held you afterwards.”

The words were for Qiwi, but they hit Ezr like battering rams, horrid truths mixed with deadly lies.

Qiwi was motionless for a moment. But now her fists were clenched; her shoulders seemed to hunch down with some terrible tension. And Ezr thought,Nau is going to win, and I’m the reason. He pushed back the grayness that seemed to close on him from all sides and made one last try: “Not for me, Qiwi. For all the others. For your mother. Please. Nau has lied to you for forty years. Whenever you learn the truth, he scrubs your mind. Over and over again. And you can never remember.”

Recognition and stark horror spread across Qiwi’s face. “This time Iwill remember.” She turned as Nau pulled something from the cabinet behind them. Her elbow jabbed into his chest. There was a sound like snapping branches; Nau bounced back against the cabinet and floated outward, into the vault’s open space. A wire gun floated after him. Nau lunged for the weapon, but it was centimeters beyond his reach and he had only thin air to brace upon.

Qiwi stood out from the wall, stretched, and snagged the wire gun. She pointed the muzzle at the Podmaster’s head.

Nau was slowly tumbling; he twisted about to track on Qiwi. He opened his mouth, the mouth that had a persuasive lie for every occasion. “Qiwi, you can’t—” he began, and then he must have seen the look on Qiwi’s face. Nau’s arrogance, the smooth cool arrogance that Ezr had watched for half a lifetime, was suddenly melted away. Nau’s voice became a whisper. “No,no. “

Qiwi’s head and shoulders trembled, but her words were stony hard. “I remember.” She shifted her aim away from Nau’s face, to below his waist… and fired a long burst. Nau’s scream became a shriek that ended as the wire-fire spun him around and struck his head.

SIXTY-TWO

Things were very dark, and then there was light. She floated upward toward it.Who am I? The answer came quickly, on a crest of terror.AnneReynolt.

Memories. The retreat into the mountains. The final days of hide-and-seek, the Balacrean invaders finding her every cave. The traitor, unmasked too late. The last of her people ambushed from the air. Standing on a mountain hillside, circled by Balacrean armor. The stench of burnt flesh was strong even in the chill morning air, but the enemy had stopped shooting. They had captured her alive.

“Anne?” The voice was soft, solicitous. The voice of a torturer, building the mood toward greater horror. “Anne?”

She opened her eyes. Balacrean torture gear bulked large around her, just at the limits of her peripheral vision. It was all the horror she expected, except that they were in free fall.For fifteen years, they’ve owned our cities.Why take me into space?

Her interrogator drifted into view. Black hair, typical Balacrean skin tone, a young-old face. This must be a senior Podmaster. But he wore a strange fractille jacket, like no Podmaster Anne had ever seen. There was a look of false anxiety pasted on his face.A fool; he’s overacting. He floated a bouquet of soft white flowers into her lap, as though making a gift. They smelled of warm summers passed.There must be some way to die. Theremust be some way to die. Her arms were tied down, of course. But if he came close enough, she still had her teeth. Maybe, if he was enough of a fool—

He reached out, gently touched her shoulder. Anne twisted hard around, caught a bite from the Podmaster’s groping hand. He pulled back, leaving a trail of tiny red drops floating in the air between them. But he wasn’t enough of a fool to kill her on the spot. Instead, he glared across the ranked equipment at someone out of sight. “Trud! What the devil have you done to her?”

She heard a whiny voice that was somehow familiar. “Pham, I warned you this was a difficult procedure. Without her guidance, we can’t be sure—” The speaker came into view. He was a small and nervous-looking fellow in a Balacrean tech’s uniform. His eyes widened as he saw the blood in the air. The look he gave Anne was satisfyingly—and inexplicably—full of fear. “Al and I can do only so much. We should have waited till we get Bil back…. Look, maybe it’s just temporary memory loss.”

The older fellow flared into anger, but he seemed afraid, too. “I wanted a deFocus, not a god-damned mindscrub!”

The little man, Trud… Trud Silipan,retreated. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she’ll come around. We didn’t touch the memory structures, I swear.” He shot another fearful glance her way. “Maybe… I don’t know, maybe the deFocus worked fine and we’re seeing some kind of autorepression.” He came a little closer, still beyond her hands and teeth, and gave her a sickly smile. “Boss? You remember me, Trud Silipan? We’ve worked together for years of Watch time, and before that back on Balacrea, under Alan Nau. Don’t you remember?”

Anne stared at the round face, the weak smile. Alan Nau. Tomas Nau. Oh… dear… God. She had wakened to a nightmare that had never ended. The torture pits, and then the Focus, and then a lifetime of being the enemy.

Silipan’s face had blurred, but his voice was suddenly cheerful. “See, Pham! She’s crying. She does remember!”

Yes. Everything.

But now Pham Nuwen’s voice sounded even angrier. “Get out, Trud. Just get out.”

“It’s easy to verify. We can—”

“Get out!”

She didn’t hear Silipan after that. The world had collapsed into pain, sobbing grief that took away her breath and senses.

She felt an arm across her shoulders, and this time she knew it wasn’t the touch of a torturer.Who am I? That had been the easy question. The real question,What am I?, had eluded her a few seconds more, but now the memories were flooding in, the monstrous evil she had been since that day in the mountains above Arnham.

She shuddered from Pham’s arm, only to encounter the straps that held her down.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and she heard the shackles fall away. And now it didn’t matter. She curled up into a ball, barely aware of his comfort. He was talking to her, simple things, repeated over and over in different ways. “It’s all right now, Anne. Tomas Nau is dead. He’s been dead for four days. You’re free. We’re all free….”

After a while, he was quiet, only the touch of his arm on her shoulders announcing his presence. Her tearing sobs wound down. There was no terror now. The worst had happened, over and over, and what was left was dead and empty.

Time passed.

She felt her body slowly relax, unbend. She forced open her tight-shut eyes, forced herself to turn and face Pham. Her facehurt with the crying, and how she wished she could be hurt a million times more. “You… damn you for bringing me back. Let me die now.”

Pham looked back at her quietly, his eyes wide and attentive. Gone was the bluster she had always guessed was a fake. In its place, intelligence… awe? No, that couldn’t be. He reached down beside her and laid the white andelirs back in her lap. The damn things were warm, furry. Beautiful. He seemed to consider her demand, but then he shook his head. “You can’t go yet, Anne. There are more than two thousand Focused persons left here. You can free them, Anne.” He gestured to the Focusing gear behind her head. “I got the feeling that Al Hom was playing roulette when he worked on you.”

I can free them.The thought was the first lightness in all the years since that morning in the mountains. It must have leaked out into her expression, because a hopeful smile appeared on Pham’s lips. Anne felt her eyes narrow down. She knew as much about Focus as any Balacrean. She knew all the tricks of reFocusing, of redirecting loyalty. “Pham Trinli—Pham Whoever-You-Really-Are—I’ve watched you for many years. Almost from the beginning, I thought you were working against Tomas. But I could also see how much you loved the idea of Focus. You lusted after that power, didn’t you?”

The smile left his face. He nodded slowly. “I saw… I saw it could give me what I had spent a lifetime fighting for. And in the end, I saw the price was too high.” He shrugged, and looked down, as if ashamed.

Anne stared into that face, thinking. Once upon a time, not even Tomas Nau could deceive her. When Anne was Focused, the edges of her mind had been sharp as razors, unencumbered by distraction and wishful thinking—and knowing Tomas’s true intent was no more use to her than a hatchet knowing it is for murdering. Now, she wasn’t sure. This man could be lying, but what he asked of her was what she yearned to do more than anything else in the world. And then, having paid back as best she could, then she could die. She returned his shrug with one of her own. “Tomas Nau lied to you about deFocus.”

“He lied about many things.”

“I can do better than Trud Silipan and Bil Phuong, but still there will be failures.” The greatest horror of all: There would be some who would damn her for bringing them back.

Pham reached across the flowers and took her hand. “Okay. But you will do your best.”

She looked down at his hand. Blood still oozed from the gash she had opened on the side of his palm. Somehow the man was lying, but if he let her deFocus the others… Play along. “You’re running things now?”

Pham chuckled. “I have some say. Certain Spiders have a bigger say. It’s complicated, and it’s still in chaos. Four hundred Ksec ago, Tomas Nau was still running things.” His smile widened with enthusiasm. “But a hundred Msec from now, two hundred Msec, I think you are going to see a renaissance. We’ll have our ships repaired. Hell, we may have new ones. I’ve never seen an opportunity like this.”

Just play along. “And what do you want of me?” How long till I am reFocused as your tool?

“I—I just want you to be free, Anne.” He looked away. “I know what you were before, Anne. I’ve seen the story of what you did on Frenk, your final capture. You remind me of someone I knew when I was a child. She also stood up against impossible odds, and she also was crushed.” His face half-turned back to her. “There were times I’ve feared you more than Tomas Nau. But ever since I’ve known you were the Frenkisch Orc, I’ve prayed you could have another day.”

He was such a very good liar. Too bad for him that his lie was so bald-faced, so pandering. She felt an overwhelming urge to push it over the edge: “So in a few years we’ll have functioning starships again?”

“Yes, and probably better-equipped than we came with. You know the physics we’ve discovered here. And it looks like there are other things—”

“And you will control those ships?”

“Several of them.” He was still nodding, blundering his deception forward.

“And you just want to help. Me, the Frenkisch Orc. Well, sir, you are uniquely qualified. Lend me those ships. Come with me to Balacrea and Frenk and Gaspr. Help me freeall the Focused.”

It was amusing to see Pham’s smile freeze as he boggled on her words. “You want to take down a starfaring empire, an empire with Focus, with just a handful of ships? That’s…” Words for such insanity failed to come, and he just stared at her for a moment. Then, amazingly, his smile was back. “That’s marvelous! Anne, give me time to prepare, time to make alliances here. Give me a dozen of your years. We may not win. But I swear, we’ll make the attempt.”

Whatever she asked he simply agreed to. It had to be a lie. Yet if true, it was the only promise that could make her want to live. She stared into Pham’s eyes, trying to see behind the lie. Maybe the inevitable destruction of deFocus had taken her sharpness, for however deeply she looked, she only saw awed enthusiasm.He’s a genius. And lie or truth, now he has me for twelve years. For just a moment she relaxed into belief. For just a moment she fantasized that this man was not a liar. The Frenkisch Orc might yet free them all. The strangest thrill flowed out from her heart, tingling through her body. It took her a moment to recognize something that had been lost to her for so very long: joy.

SIXTY-THREE

Pham sent Ezr Vinh groundside to negotiate.

“Why me, Pham?” This was the most extraordinary trade situation in the history of Humankind. It was also a war waiting to happen. “You should—”

Nuwen held up his hand, interrupting. “There are reasons for sending you. You know the Spiders better than any of our other unFocused people, certainly better than me.”

“I could be staff. I could help you.”

“No, I’ll be onyour staff.” He paused, and Ezr saw a glint of worry. “You’re right, son, this is tricky. In the short run they hold the whip hand, and they have plenty of reason to hate us. We think the Lighthill faction still has the ear of the King, but—”

There were other factions in the Accord regime. Some of them thought Focused translators were a negotiable commodity.

“That’s why it’s even more important you go, Pham.”

“It’s not our choice. You see, they’ve asked for you specifically.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I guess over the years, working with Trixia, they think they’ve got you figured out.” He grinned. “They want to see you close up.”

That almost made sense. “Okay.” He thought a moment. “But they’re not getting Trixia. I go down with some other translator.” He glared at Pham. “She’s the star; Underville’s crew would love to get their hands on her.”

“Hm. Maybe someone down there is thinking the same way. The King asked for Zinmin to accompany you.” He noticed the expression on Ezr’s face. “There’s more?”

“I—yes. I want Trixia deFocused. Soon.”

“Of course. I’ve given you my word. I’ve given Anne the same promise.”

Ezr stared at him for a moment.And you’ve changed inside; given upthat dream. After all that had happened, Ezr didn’t doubt. But suddenly he couldn’t wait anymore. “Move her to the front of the queue, Pham. I don’t care that you need her translations. Move her up. I want her deFocused by the time I get back.”

Pham raised an eyebrow. “An ultimatum?”

“No. Yes!”

The older man sighed. “You got it. We’ll start on Trixia immediately. I—I confess. We’ve been holding back on the translators. We need them so much.” He pursed his lips. “Don’t expect perfection, Ezr. This is just another place where Nau lied to us. Some of the deFocused are almost as sharp as Anne. Some—”

“I know.” Some came back vegetables, the mindrot in an explosive runaway, triggered by the deFocus process. “But sooner or later we have to try. Sooner or later you have to give up using them.” He bounced up and left Pham’s office. More talk would have just torn them both.

The transport to Arachna was a humble thing, Jau Xin’s pinnace with ad hoc software revised specially by Qiwi. Humankind had the high ground and the remnants of high technology—and precious little in the way of physical resources or automation. As their zipheads were deFocused, the Emergent software became useless junk—and it would be some time before the Qeng Ho automation could be adapted to the hybrid jumble that remained at L1. They were trapped in a nearly empty solar system, with the only industrial ecology down on Arachna. They might drop a few rocks on the planet, or even a few nukes, but Humankind was nearly toothless. The Spiders were powerless, too, but that would change. They knew about the invaders now, and they knew what could be done with technology. They had large parts of theInvisible Hand intact. Sometime soon, the Spiders would be out here in force. Pham thought they had maybe a year to turn things around, to establish some basis of trust. Qiwi said that ifshe were a Spider, she could do it in far less than a year.

The temp’s axial corridor was filled from end to end when Ezr and Zinmin entered the taxi lock. Almost every unFocused human at L1 was here.

Pham and Anne were there. They floated close, a pair that Ezr Vinh would never have guessed in years past. “We’ve started the deFocus prep,” Anne said. She didn’t have to say who she was talking about. “We’ll do our best, Ezr.”

Qiwi wished him luck, as solemn as he had ever seen her. She seemed uncertain for a moment, then abruptly shook his hand, another thing she had never done before. “Come back safe, Ezr.”

Somehow Rita Liao had put herself right before the hatch, blocking his way. Ezr reached out to comfort her. “I’ll bring Jau back, Rita.” I’ll do my best was what he thought, not having the courage to show his doubts.

Rita’s eyes were bloodshot. She looked even more distracted than when they had talked a few Ksecs before. “I know, Ezr. I know. The Spiders are good people. They’ll know Jau didn’t want to harm them.” She had spent much of her lifetime enamored with the life on Arachna, but her faith in the translations seemed to be slipping away. “But, but if they won’t let you have him… Please. Give him…” She pushed a clear little box into his hand. It had a thumb lock, presumably keyed to Jau Xin. He saw a ’membrance gem inside. She broke off and melted back into the crowd.

SIXTY-FOUR

It was 200Ksec to Lands Command. On the ground, the Spiders drove them up that long valley road. Eerie memories floated through Ezr’s mind. Many of the buildings here were new, butI was here before it all began. It had been so unknowable then. Now there was the superficial gloss of information on everything. Zinmin Broute bounced from window to window and boggled with enthusiasm, naming everything he saw. They passed the library he had raided with Benny Wen. The Museum of the Dark Time. And the statues at the head of King’s Way, that was Gokna’s Reaching for Accord. Zinmin could tell you about every one of the twisted figures.

But today they were not lurkers stealing through someone else’s sleep. Today the lights were very bright, and when they finally moved underground, it was as stark and alien as Ritser Brughel’s Spiderish nightmares. The stairs were steep as ladders, and ordinary rooms were so low-ceilinged that Ezr and Zinmin had to crouch to move from place to place. Despite ancient drugs and millennia of gengineering, the full pull of planetary gravity was a constant, debilitating distraction. They were housed in what Zinmin claimed were royalty-class apartments, rooms with hairy floors and ceilings high enough to stand in. The negotiations began the next day.

The Spiders they had known in the translations were mostly absent. Belga Underville, Elno Coldhaven—those were names that Ezr recognized, but they had always been at a distance. They had not been part of Sherkaner Underhill’s counterlurk. They must be consulting Victory Lighthill, though. As often as not during the negotiations, Underville would withdraw and there would be hissing conversations with persons unseen.

After the first couple of days, Ezr realized that some of those persons werevery far away: Trixia. Back in their rooms, Ezr called L1. Of course, the link went through Spider control. Ezr didn’t care. “You told me that Trixia was in deFocus.”

The pause seemed much longer than ten seconds. Suddenly Ezr couldn’t wait for the excuses and the evasions. “Listen, damn you! The promise was that she would be in deFocus. Sooner or later you have to stop using her!”

Then Pham’s voice came back. “I know, Ezr. The problem is, the Spiders have insisted that she be available, still Focused. It’s a dealbreaker if we refuse… and Trixia refuses to cooperate with us in deFocus. We’d have to force it on her.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care! They don’t own her any more than Tomas Nau.” He choked on the fear, and almost started bawling. Across the room, Zinmin Broute looked as happy as any ziphead Ezr had ever seen. He was sitting cross-legged on the hairy carpet, paging through some kind of Spider picture book.We’re using him, too. We have to, just for a short while more.

“Ezr, it’s only for a short time. This is breaking Anne up, too, but it’s the only sure insight the Spiders have on us. They almost trust the Focused. Everything we say, every assertion, they are talking over with the zips. We don’t have a chance of getting theHand people back without that trust. We don’t have a chance of undoing Nau’s work without that.”

Rita and Jau. The thumb-locked box sat at the top of Ezr’s kit. Strange. The Spiders had not insisted on getting into it or his other things. Ezr crumpled. “Okay. But, after this meeting, no oneowns anyone. The deal dies—I kill the deal—otherwise.” He cut the connection before any answer could come back. After all, it didn’t matter what the other replied.

Almost every day, they took the tortuous climb down to the same ghastly conference room. Zinmin claimed that this was the chief of Intelligence’s private office, a “bright and open-storied room, with nooks and isolated perches.” Well, there were nooks, dark fluting chimneys with hidden lairs at the top. And the video along the walls was a constant nonsense. He and Zinmin had to cross cold stone to sit on piled furs. Four or five Spiders were usually present, and almost always Underville or Coldhaven.

But the negotiations were actually going well. With the Focused to back up his story, the Spiders seemed to believe what Ezr had to say. They seemed to understand how good things could become with only a little cooperation. Certainly, the Spiders could have a presence at the rockpile. Technology would be transferred downward without restriction, in return for human access to the ground. In time, the rockpile and the temps would be moved into high Arachna orbit and there would be joint construction of a shipyard.

Sitting with the Spiders for Ksecs each day was a wearing experience. The human mind was not designed to warm to such creatures. They seemed not to have eyes, just the crystal carapaces that saw better than any human vision. You could never tell what they were looking at. Their eating hands were in constant motion, with meanings that Ezr was only beginning to understand. And when they gestured with their principal arms, the movement was abrupt and aggressive, like a creature on the attack. The air had a bitter, stale smell, which was strongest when extra spiders crowded around.And next time, we bring our own toilets. Ezr was getting bowlegged trying to accommodate himself to the local facilities.

Zinmin did most of the interactive translations. But Trixia and the others were there, and sometimes when the greatest precision was desired, it was her voice that would speak Underville’s or Coldhaven’s words: Underville the implacable cop, Coldhaven the sleek young general officer. Trixia’s voice, others’ souls.

At night, there were dreams, often more unpleasant than the reality he faced in the day. The worst were the ones he could understand. Trixia appeared to him, her voice and thoughts slipping back and forth between the young woman he once knew and the alien minds that owned her now. Sometimes her face would morph into a glassy carapace as she spoke, and when he asked about the change she would say he was imagining things. It was a Trixia who would remain forever Focused, ensorcelled, lost. Qiwi was in many of the dreams, sometimes the bratling, sometimes as she had been when she killed Tomas Nau. They would talk, and often she would give him advice. In the dreams it always made sense—and when he woke he could never remember the details.

One by one, the issues were resolved. They had gone from genocide to commerce in less than one million seconds. From L1, Pham Nuwen’s voice was filled with pleasure at the progress. “These guys negotiate like Traders, not governments.”

“We’re giving up plenty, Pham. Since when have Customers had a site presence like we’ll be giving the Spiders?”

The usual long pause. But Pham’s tone was still bright: “Even that may work out, son. I’ll wager some of these Spiders may eventually want to be partners.” Qeng Ho.

“…One other thing,” Pham continued. “Get through the POW negotiations”—the single remaining agenda item—“and we’ll be able to take Trixia off the case. Lighthill got that as a promise from the Underville faction.”

The last day of negotiation started like the others. Zinmin and Ezr were guided down a—“spiral staircase” was what Zinmin called it. In human terms, it was a vertical shaft cut straight downward through the rock. An endless draft of warm air swept up past them. The shaft was almost two meters across, the walls set with five-centimeter ledges. Their guards had no trouble; they could reach from one side of the shaft to the other, supporting themselves on all sides. As they descended, the Spiders slowly turned round and round with the spiral. Every ten meters or so, there was an offset, a “landing” for them to catch their breath. Ezr was both grateful for and uneasy about the harness/leash outfit the guards insisted he wear.

“These stairs are really just to intimidate us, aren’t they, Zinmin?” He’d asked the question on earlier climbs, but Zinmin Broute had not deigned to answer.

The Focused translator was even more unsteady than Ezr on the narrow ledges, especially since he tried to imitate the splayed stance that made sense only for Spiders. Today he responded to the question. “Yes…. No. This is the main staircase down to the Royal Deepness. Very old. Traditional. An honor—” He slipped, swung out over the chasm, for a moment suspended by his rope and harness from the guard above them. Ezr hugged the damp wall, was almost knocked loose himself as Broute regained his footing.

They reached the final landing. The ceiling was low even by Spider standards, just over a meter high. Surrounded by their guards, they stooped and hobbled toward wide, wide doors. Beyond, the lighting was faint and blue. The Spiders could see across such a wide range. You’d think their preferred lighting would be sun-spectrum broad. But as often as not they went in for faint glimmers—or lights beyond where a human could see.

There was a familiar hiss from the dimness ahead of them.

“Come in. Sit down,” Zinmin Broute said, but the thought was from the Spider within the room. Ezr and Zinmin crossed the stone flags to their “perches.” He could see the other now, a large female on a slightly higher perch. Her smell was strong in the closed air. “General Underville,” Ezr said politely.

The POW issue should have been simple compared with the problems already solved. But he noticed that this time they were alone with Underville. There were no comm links to the outside here; at least none were offered. They were alone, almost in the dark, and Zinmin Broute’s phrasing drifted into threatening turns of phrase. Frightening… yet somewhere out of the depths of Ezr Vinh’s Trader childhood, insights drifted up. This was deliberately intimidating. Underville had promised Lighthill that the translators would be freeafter the POW negotiations were complete. She had been beaten down on so many things; this was her last stab at saving face.

He opened his pack and put on a pair of huds. According to the Spiders, all the humans aboard theHand had survived its forced landing. The starship’s wreckage was strewn across twenty thousand meters of ocean ice, the occupied crew decks virtually the only intact pieces of the vehicle. That anyone had survived was a miracle of Pham’s advice to the ziphead pilots. Once on the ground, however, there had been numerous fatalities. Against all sanity, Brughel and his goons started a firefight with the arriving Spider troops. The goons had all died. With the agility of a true Podmaster, Brughel had abandoned them at the last moment, and attempted to hide among the surviving crew. The Spiders claimed there had been no fatalities after that initial shootout.

“The zipheads you can have back,” said Underville via Zinmin. “We know that they are not responsible, and some of them made our victory possible.” Zinmin’s tone was irritable. “The rest are criminals. They killed hundreds. They attempted to kill millions.”

“No, only a small minority were in on that. The rest resisted—or were simply lied to about the operation.”

Ezr went down the crew list, explaining the roles of the different members. There had been twenty poor souls in coldsleep, Ritser’s special toys. Clearly,they were victims, but Underville didn’t want to give up the equipment. One by one, Ezr got Underville’s permission for release, contingent on access to specialists who could explain the ruins that her agency now owned. Finally, they were down to the toughest cases. “Jau Xin. Pilot Manager.”

“Jau Xin, the trigger man!” said the general. Ezr had pumped up the amplification in his huds. His view was not as dim as before. All through the conversation, Underville had sat very still, the only movement being the ceaseless play of her feeding hands. It was a posture that Zinmin represented as face-forward alertness. “Jau Xin was charged with initiating the actual attacks.”

“General, we’ve looked at the records. Your interviews with Jau’s Focused pilots are probably even more complete. It’s clear to us that Jau Xin sabotaged much of the Emergent attack. I know Jau, ma’am. I know his wife. Both wish your people well.” The ziphead analysts, Trixia among them, thought that such family references might mean something. Maybe. But Belga Underville might be much more the classical “national interest” type.

Zinmin Broute tapped away on his tiny console, putting Ezr’s words into an intermediate language and then guiding the audio output. Ghostly hissing came from Broute’s soundbox, Ezr’s thoughts as a Spider might speak them.

Underville was silent for a moment, then gave forth a shrill squeak. Ezr knew that counted as a disdainful snort.

But this interview could ultimately be shown to other Spiders.I’m notletting you off the hook, Underville. Ezr reached into his pack and held up Rita’s tiny box.

“And what is that?” said Underville. There was no hint of curiosity in Broute-as-Underville’s voice.

“A gift to Jau Xin from his wife. A remembrance, in case you still refuse to free him.”

Underville was sitting almost two meters away, but even now Ezr didn’t realize just how far a Spider’s forearms could reach. Four spearlike black arms flashed out at him, plucking the box from his grasp. Undervile’s arms flickered back, held the box close to first one part and then another of her glassy carapace. Her stiletto hands made little scritching noises as she pried at box’s top and thumb lock.

“It’s keyed to Jau Xin. If you force it open, the contents will be destroyed.”

“So be it then.” But the Spider stopped pressing the pointed tips of her limbs into the box. She held it a moment more, then gave a screeching hiss, and flung it back at Ezr’s chest.

The ugly screeching continued as Zinmin Broute began translating. “Damn your cobblie eyes!” Broute’s voice was tight and angry. “Take back this gift for a murderer. Take back Xin and the other staff.”

“Thank you, General. Thank you.” Ezr scrambled to recover Rita’s gift.

The Spider’s voice tumbled into silence, then resumed more quietly, sounding somehow like drops of water spatting off hot metal. “And I suppose you think to rescue Ritser Brughel also?”

“Not to rescue him, ma’am. Over the years, Ritser Brughel has probably killed more of our people than ever he did of yours. He has much to answer for.”

“Indeed. But there is no way we will give that one up to you.” Now Broute’s voice was smug, and Ezr guessed this was one point where there were no divisions on the Spider side.

And maybe that was for the best. Ezr shrugged. “Very well. It is for you to punish him.”

The Spider had become very still, even unto her eating hands. “Punish? You misunderstand. This silly negotiation has left us with only a single functioning human. Any punishment will necessarily be incidental. We’re learning much from dissecting the human corpses, but we desperately need a living experimental subject. What are your physical limitations? How do you creatures respond to extremes of pain and fear? We want to test with stimuli we don’t see in your databases. I intend that Ritser Brughel live a long, long time.”

Ritser Brughel is about as weird a human type as you can find.But somehow that might not be the wisest thing to say here and now. Instead, Ezr simply nodded. And for the first time he saw how Ritser might find a fate to match his crimes. The Podmaster’s nightmare of Spiders would be the rest of his life.

SIXTY-FIVE

Ezr Vinh returned a hero to L1. It was possible that no owner or fleet partner had every been greeted with the enthusiasm he saw at the rockpile. He brought with him the first of the released prisoners, including Jau Xin. He also brought with him the first of their new partners: The first Spiders to fly in space.

Ezr scarcely noticed. He smiled, he talked, and when he saw Rita and Jau together he felt a distant pleasure.

Last out of the pinnace was Floria Peres. She had been one of the coldsleep victims in Ritser’s hidden cache, saved up unused until the very end. Even after 200Ksec, the woman had a terrible, lost look about her. As Ezr guided her out into the open, a silence came upon the crowd in the corridor. Qiwi glided forward. She had asked to help the victims, but when she came to a stop just short of Floria, Qiwi’s eyes got very wide and her lips trembled. The two stared at each other for a moment. Then Qiwi offered Floria her hand, and the crowd opened behind them.

Ezr watched them depart, but his mind’s eye was elsewhere: Anne Reynolt had begun Trixia’s deFocus a Ksec after he left Arachna. During the 200Ksec of transit back to the rockpile, Pham had reported regularly on her progress. This time there was no backing out. Trixia was beyond the prep stage. First, the mindrot had been rendered quiescent, and then Trixia had been put into an artificial coma. From there, the rot’s pattern of drug release was slowly altered. “Anne has done this hundreds of times now, Ezr,” said Pham. “She says this is going well. She should be out of the clinic just a few Ksecs after you get back here.”

No more delays. Trixia would finally be free.

Two days later, the word came.Trixia is ready.

Ezr visited Qiwi before he went to the deFocus clinic. Qiwi was working with her father, remaking the lake park. Most of the trees had died, but Ali Lin thought he could bring them back. Even deFocused, Ali had wonderful ideas for the park. But now the man could love his daughter, too.Trixiawill be like this, as free as before the nightmare.

Qiwi was talking to the Spiders when Ezr came down the path through the ruined forest. Kittens circled high above them, curiosity battling with arachnophobia.

“We want to do something new with the lake, some kind of free form, with its own special ecology.” The Spiders stood a little taller than Qiwi. In microgravity, they were no longer low, wide creatures. The natural tension in their limbs produced a Spider version of zero-gee crouch; their arms and legs extended long beneath them, making them tall and slender. The smallest one—probably Rhapsa Lighthill—was talking now. The hissing voice was almost musical compared to Belga Underville’s voice.

“We’ll watch, but I doubt if many will want to live here. We want to experiment with our own temps.” Broute Zinmin was translating, his tone happy and conversational. As of now, he might be the last of the Focused translators.

Qiwi grinned at the Spider. “Yeah, I’m so curious about what you’ll finally do. I—” She looked up, saw Ezr.

“Qiwi, can I talk to you?”

She was already moving toward him. “A moment, Rhapsa, please?”

“Sure.” The Spiders tiptoed away, Zinmin continuing to spout questions at Ali Lin.

Ezr and Qiwi faced each other across thirty centimeters. “Qiwi. They deFocused Trixia about two thousand seconds ago.”

The girl smiled, a bright gesture. There was still a childlike intensity about her. Somehow through it all, Qiwi had remained an open human being. And now she was at the center of their dealings with the Spiders, the engineer they sought over all others. Now he could truly see how bright her wits extended, from dynamics to bioscience to very sharp trading. Qiwi was very much like the spirit of the Qeng Ho.

“Is—is she going to be okay?” Qiwi’s eyes were large, and her hands were tightly clasped in front of her.

“Yes! A little disorientation, Anne says, but her mind and personality are intact, and… and I can go see her later today.”

“Oh, Ezr! I’m so happy for her.” Qiwi’s hands let go of each other, and reached out to his shoulders. Suddenly her face was very close and lips brushed across his cheek.

“I wanted to see you before I talked to her—”

“Yes?”

“I—I just wanted to thank you for saving my life, for saving us all.” I want to thank you for giving me back my soul. “If Trixia and I can ever do anything to help you…”

And she was back at arm’s length, and her smile seemed a little odd. “You’re welcome, Ezr. But… no thanks needed. I’m glad you have a happy ending.”

Ezr let go, and was already turning toward the guide ropes Ali had installed for his reconstruction work. “It’s more a happy beginning, Qiwi. All these years have been dead time, and now finally… Hey, I’ll talk to you later!” He waved and pulled himself faster and faster, back toward the cavern’s entrance.

Reynolt had converted the Attic grouproom into a recovery ward. Where zipheads had spent Watch after Watch Focused in Podmaster service, now they were being freed.

Anne stopped him in the corridor just outside the grouproom. “Before you go in, keep in mind—”

Vinh was already edging around her. He stopped. “You said she was coming out okay.”

“Yes. Total affect is normal. General cognition is as good as before; she has even retained her specialized knowledge. We’re doing almost three thousand deFocus operations, more manumissions than any team in Emergent history. We’re getting very good.” She frowned, but it was not the impatient gesture of her old Focus. This was a frown of pain. “I—I wish we could redo the first ones. I think I could do better now.”

Ezr could see the pain, and he felt shame for his sudden joy:So thedelay has been for the best. Trixia had had the benefit of all the earlier experience. Maybe she would have been okay anyway. After all, Reynolt had come through all right. But either way, things had worked out. And just beyond Reynolt, down the cool green corridor, was Trixia Bonsol, the princess now finally wakened. He slipped past Reynolt, flew down through the blueness.

Behind him Anne called, “But, Ezr… Look, Pham wants to talk to you when you get done.”

“Okay. Okay.” But he wasn’t really listening now. And then he was into the grouproom. Part of it was still open, and ten or fifteen of the chairs were even occupied, people sitting in little circles, talking. Heads turned in his direction, eyes filled with curiosity that would have been impossible before. Some of the faces were fearful. Many had the sad, lost look of Hunte Wen after he was deFocused. The Emergents among them had no one to go back to. They woke to freedom, but a lifetime and light-years from everything they had known.

Ezr smiled embarrassment and slipped past them.Things have turnedout right for Trixia and me, but these lost ones must be helped.

The far side of the room had been partitioned into cubicles. Ezr flitted past the opened doors, stopped at the closed ones just long enough to read the patient labels. And finally… TRIXIA BONSOL. His headlong rush suddenly ended, and he realized he was wearing work clothes and his hair floated all spiky. Like some ziphead, he had ignored everything except his focus.

He brushed his hair down as best he could… and tapped on the light plastic of the privacy hatch.

“Come in.”

…“Hi, Trixia.”

She floated in a hammock not much different from an ordinary bed. Medical instrumentation was a fine haze around her head. It didn’t matter, Ezr had been expecting it. Anne had begun instrumenting the patients, using the data to guide the deFocusing, and afterward to monitor for stroke and infection.

It made it hard to hug someone as thoroughly as Ezr Vinh wanted. He floated near, looking into Trixia’s face, lost in it. Trixia looked back—not around him, not impatient that he was blocking her data—but directly into his eyes. A faint, tremulous smile hovered on her lips.

“Ezr.”

And then she was in his arms, her hands reaching up to him. Her lips were soft and warm. He held her for a moment, gently encircling her within her hammock. Then he backed his head away, angling carefully around the medical gear. “So many times I thought we’d never make it back. Do you remember all the times”—years of life time, literally—“that I sat with you in your damn little cell?”

“Yes. You suffered far more than I. For me, it was a kind of dream, and time was a slippery thing. Everything outside of Focus was a blur. I could hear your words but they never seemed to matter.” Her hand came up to the side of his neck, gently stroking, a gesture from their real time together.

Ezr smiled.We’re talking. Really. Finally. “And now you’re back, and we can live again. I have so many plans. I’ve had years to think on them, what we might do if Nau could be destroyed and you could be saved. After all the death, the mission is turning out to be a greater treasure than we ever imagined.” Great risks, great treasure. But the risks had been taken, the sacrifices made, and now— “With our share of the mission bounty we… we can do anything. We could set up our own Great Family!” Vinh.23.7, Vinh-Bonsol, Bonsol.1, it didn’t matter; it would be theirs.

Trixia was still smiling, but there was the beginning of tears in her eyes. She shook her head. “Ezr, I don’t—”

Vinh rushed on. “Trixia, I know what you’re going to say. If you don’t want a Family—that’s okay too.” In the years under Tomas Nau, there had been plenty of time to think things through, to see what sacrifices were really not sacrifices at all. He took a deep breath and said, “Trixia, even if you want to go back to Triland… I’m willing to go there, to leave the Qeng Ho.” The Family wouldn’t like it; he was no longer a junior heir. This expedition would make the Vinh.23 Family fabulously richer, but… he knew that Ezr Vinh had scarcely been responsible for that. “You can be whatever you want, and we can still be together.”

He leaned closer, but this time she pushed him gently back. “No, Ezr, that’s not it. You and I, we’re years older. I—it’s been a long, long time since we were together.”

Ezr’s voice came out high-pitched. “It’s been years for me! But for you? You said Focus is like a dream, where time didn’t matter.”

“Not exactly. For some things, for the things at the center of my Focus, I probably remember the time better than you.”

“But—” She raised her hand, and he was silent.

“I had it easier than you. I was Focused, and something more, though I never consciously realized it and—thank goodness—neither did Brughel or Tomas Nau. I had a world to escape to, a world that I could build out of my translations.”

Despite himself: “I wondered. There was so much that seemed to be Dawn Age fantasy. So… that was fiction, not the real Spiders?”

“No. It was as close as we could come to the Spider viewpoint in a human mind. And if you read carefully, you get hints of where it can’t be literally true…. I think you guessed, Ezr. Arachna was my escape. As a translator, everything about being a Spider was within my Focus. Knowing what it was to be a free Spider consumed us. And when dear Sherkaner understood, even at the beginning when he thought we were machines, it was suddenly a world that accepted us, too.”

That was what had undone Nau, and saved them all, but—“But now you are back, Trixia. This isn’t the nightmare anymore. We can be together, better than we ever thought!”

She was shaking her head again. “Don’t you see, Ezr? We both have changed, and I have changed even more than you, even though I was—” She thought a second. “—even though I spent the years ‘ensorcelled.’ See? I do remember what you used to say to me. But Ezr, it’s not the same anymore. I and the Spiders, we have a future—”

He tried to keep his voice in an even, persuasive tone, but what came out sounded half-panicked even to his own ears.Dear Lord of Trade, I can’t lose her now! “I know. You’re still identifying with the Spiders. We’re the aliens to you.”

She touched his shoulder. “A little. During the first stages of the deFocus, it was like wakinginto a nightmare. I know how humans look to Arachnans. Pale, soft, grublike. There are pests and food animals like that. But we aren’t as gruesome to them as the reverse.” She looked up at him and her smile was momentarily wider. “The way you have to turn your head to see is endearing. You don’t realize it, but any Arachnan with paternal fur on his back, and most females too, are enthralled when they talk to you close up.”

Like the dreams he had had groundside. In Trixia’s mind, she was still part Spider. “Trixia, look. I’ll come and see you every day. Things will change. You’ll get over this.”

“Oh, Ezr, Ezr.” Her tears floated into the air between them, but she was crying for him and not for herself or for the two of them. “Thisis what I want to be, a translator, a bridge between you all and my new Family.”

A bridge.She’s not out of Focus. Somehow Pham and Anne had frozen her partway between Focus and freedom. The realization was like a fist in the belly… nausea, followed by rage.

He caught Anne in her new office. “Finish the job, Anne! The mindrot is still running Trixia.”

Reynolt’s face seemed even paler than usual. He suddenly guessed that she’d been waiting for him. “You know there’s no way we can destroy the virus, Ezr. Tune them down, make them dormant, yes, but…” Her voice was tentative, utterly unlike the Anne Reynolt of times past.

“You know what I mean, Anne.She’s still in Focus. She’s still fixed on the Spiders, on her Focused mission.”

Anne was silent. She knew.

“Bring her all the way back, Anne.”

Reynolt’s mouth twisted, as if stifling physical pain. “The structures are so deep. She’d lose knowledge she’s gained, probably her born language talent. She’d be like Hunte Wen.”

“But she would befree ! She could learn new things, just like Hunte has.”

“I—I understand. Till yesterday, I thought we could bring it off. We were down to triggering the last restructuring—but Ezr, Trixia doesn’t want us to take it any further!”

That was just too much, and suddenly Ezr was shouting. “By damn, what do you expect? She’s Focused!” He brought his voice down, but the words had the intensity of deadly threat. “I know. You and Pham still need slaves, especially ones like Trixia. You never meant to free her.”

Reynolt’s eyes grew wide and her features flushed bright red. It was something he had never seen in her, though Ritser Brughel had always turned that shade when he climbed into a towering rage. Her mouth opened and shut but no words came out.

There was a solidthump on the office wall, someone arriving in a hell of a hurry. An instant later, Pham came through the door. “Anne, please. Let me handle this.” His voice was gentle. After a moment, Anne sucked in a breath. She nodded, seemed to be coughing. She came over her desk without saying anything, but Ezr noticed how fiercely she grasped Pham’s hand.

Pham shut the door quietly behind her. When he turned back to Ezr, his expression was not gentle. He jerked a finger at the seat in front of Reynolt’s desk. “Tie down, mister.”

There was something about his voice that froze Ezr’s rage, and forced him to sit down.

Pham settled himself by the other side of the desk. For a moment, he just stared at the younger man. It was strange. Pham Nuwen had always had a presence, but suddenly it felt like before this, he had never really turned it on. Finally, Pham said, “A couple of years ago you gave me some straight talk. You forced me to see that I was wrong and that I must change.”

Ezr stared back coldly. “Looks like I failed.” You’re in the slave business anyway.

“You’re wrong, son. You succeeded. Not many people have turned me around. Even Sura couldn’t do it.” A strange sadness seemed to flicker across him, and he was silent for a moment. Then, “You’ve done Anne a great disservice, Ezr. I think someday you’ll want to apologize to her for it.”

“Not likely! You two have things so neatly rationalized. DeFocusing is just too expensive for you.”

“Um. You’re right, it’s expensive. It’s been a near calamity. Under the Emergent system, the zipheads were supporting virtually all of our automation, their work mixed seamlessly with the real machines’. Worse, all the maintenance programming in the fleet has been done by Focused persons; we’re left with millions of lines of incoherent junk. It will be some time before we have our old systems working well…. But you know that Anne is the Frenkisch Orc, the ‘monster’ in all the diamond friezes.”

“Y-yes.”

“Then you know that she would die to give the Focused freedom. It was her one nonnegotiable demand of me when she came back from Focus. It is her life’s meaning.” He stopped, looked away from Ezr. “You know the most evil thing about Focus? It’s not that it’s effective slavery, though Lord knows that puts it worse than most any other villainy. No, the greatest evil is that the rescuers become a type of killer themselves, and the original victims are mutilated a second time. Even Anne didn’t fully understand that, now it’s tearing her apart.”

“So because they want to be slaves, we leave them that way?”

“No! But a Focused person is a still a human being, not too different from certain rare types that have always existed. If they can live on their own, if they can clearly express their wishes—well at that point, you have to listen…. Until about half a day ago, we thought everything was going to be okay with Trixia Bonsol. Anne had prevented the rot from doing a random runaway. Trixia wasn’t going to be one of the psychotics or one of the vegetables. She was free of Emergent loyalty fixation. She could be talked to, evaluated, comforted. But she absolutely refuses to give up any more deep structure. Understanding the Spiders is the center of her life, and she wants it to stay that way.”

They sat in silence for a moment. The most terrible thing was, Pham might not be lying. He might not even be rationalizing. Maybe they were just talking about one of life’s tragedies. In that case, Tomas Nau’s evil would ride Ezr for the rest of his life.Lord, this is hard. And even though Reynolt’s office was brightly lit, it reminded him of that dark time in the temp’s park, right after Jimmy was murdered. Pham had been there too, and giving comfort that Ezr couldn’t understand. Ezr wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Okay. So Trixia is free. Then she’s also free to change in the future.”

“Yes, of course. Human nature will always be beyond analysis.”

“I waited half my life for her. As long as it takes, I’ll wait for her.”

Pham sighed. “I’m just afraid you might do that.”

“Huh?”

“You’re one of the more dedicated types I’ve met. And you have a talent for people. More than most, it was you who kept the Qeng Ho going in the face of Nau’s thuggery.”

“No! I could never stand up to the man. All I could do was nibble around the edges, try to make things a little less hellish. And it still got people killed. I had no backbone, no admin ability; I was just an idiot that Nau could use to keep better people in line.”

Pham was shaking his head. “You were the only person I trusted for conspiracy, Ezr.” He stopped abruptly, grinned. “Of course, part of that was you were the only one clever enough to figure out who I was. You didn’t bend, and you didn’t break. You even jerked my chain…. You know how far I go back.”

Ezr looked up. “Of course. So?”

“I’ve seen a lot of hotshots.” A lopsided grin. “Sura and I founded many of the Great Families in this end of Qeng Ho space. But you measure up, Ezr Vinh. I’m proud we are related.”

“Hmm.” Ezr didn’t quite think that Pham would lie about something like this, but what he was saying was just too—extravagant—to be true.

But the other wasn’t finished. “There’s a downside to your virtues, though. You had the patience to play a role for hundreds of Msecs. You stuck to your goals when lots of other people had started whole new lives. Now you’re talking about waiting for Trixia however longthat may take. And I believe you really would wait… forever. Ezr, have you ever thought, you don’t always need the mindrot to get Focused? Some people can get fixated all by themselves. I should know! Their will is so strong—or their mind is so rigid—that they can exclude everything outside of the central fixation. That’s what you needed during the years under Nau and Brughel. It was the thing that saved you, and helped carry the rest of the Qeng Ho along. But think now, recognize the problem. Don’t throw your life away.”

Ezr swallowed. He remembered the Emergents’ claims that society had always depended on people who “didn’t have a life.” But, “Trixia Bonsolis a worthwhile goal, Pham.”

“Agreed. But you’re talking about a very high price, waiting the rest of your life for something that may never happen.” He stopped, cocked his head to one side. “It’s a shame you aren’t Focused with the Emergent bug; that might be easier to undo! You’re so fixated on Trixia that you can’t see what’s going on around you, can’t see the people that you are hurting, or the person who could love you.”

“Huh. Who?”

“Think, Ezr. Who engineered the rockpile stability system? Who persuaded Nau to loosen the leash? Who made Benny’s parlor and Gonle’s farms possible? And did it in spite of repeated mindscrubs? Who saved your butt when the crunch finally came?”

“Oh.” The word came out small and embarrassed. “Qiwi… Qiwi is a good person.”

Real anger showed in Pham’s face, the first time he’d seen that since the fall of Tomas Nau. “Wake up, damn you!”

“I mean she’s smart, and brave, and—”

“Yes, yes, yes! Fact is, she’s a flaming genius in almost every department. I’ve only seen a couple like her in all my life.”

“I—”

“Ezr, I don’t believe you’re a moral idiot or I wouldn’t be talking to you now, and I certainly wouldn’t be telling you about Qiwi. Butwake up ! You should have seen it years ago—but you were too fixed on Trixia and your own guilt trips. And now Qiwi is waiting for you, but without much hope since she’s so honorable she respects what you want for Trixia. Think about what she has been like, since we got rid of Nau.”

“…She’s been into everything…. I guess I see her every day.” He took a deep breath. Thiswas like deFocus—seeing what you saw before, in a totally new way. It was true, he depended on Qiwi even more than he did Pham or Anne. But Qiwi had her own burdens. He remembered the look on her face when she greeted Floria Peres. He remembered her smile when she said she was happy for his happy ending. It was strange to feel shame for something you’d been totally unaware of a moment before. “I’m so sorry…. I just… never thought.”

Pham eased back. “That’s what I hoped, Ezr. You and I, we have this little problem: We’re long on high principles and short on simple human understanding. It’s something we have to work on. I praised you a second ago, and it wasn’t a lie. But, truly, Qiwi is the wonder.”

For a moment, Ezr couldn’t say anything. Someone was rearranging the furniture inside his soul. Trixia, the dream of half a lifetime, wasslippingaway…. “I’ve got to think.”

“Do so. But talk to Qiwi about it, okay? You’re both hiding behind walls. You’d be amazed what can come from just talking straight out.”

Another idea that was like a new sun.Just talk to Qiwi about it. “I will…. I will!”

SIXTY-SIX

Time passed, but Arachna still had a long way to cool. The last dry hurricanes still blew fitfully through the midlatitudes, edging ever nearer to the world’s equator.

Their flyer had no wings, no jets or rockets. It came down along a ballistic arc, and slowed to a gentle touchdown on the naked rock of the altiplano.

Two space-suited figures emerged, one tall and slim, the other low, with limbs spreading in all directions.

Major Victory Lighthill tapped at the ground with the tips of her hands. “Our bad luck that there is no snow cover here. No footprints to track.” She waved at the rocky hillside a few dozen yards away. There was snow there, caught in crevices, lying in the windshade of the moment. It glimmered ghostly reddish in the sunlight. “And where there is snow, the wind is always blowing it around. Can you feel wind?”

Trixia Bonsol leaned into the breeze. She could hear it singing beyond her hood. She laughed. “More than you. I’ve got to stand up in it with only two legs.”

They walked toward a hillside. Trixia had her net-link audio turned way down. This was a place and a time she wanted to experience firsthand, without interruptions. Yet the buzz of sound and the displays at the upper corners of her vision kept her in tenuous contact with what was going on in space, and at Princeton. In the real world beyond her hood display, the light was barely brighter than Trilander moonlight, and the only movement was the low scudding of the frost dust beneath the wind. “And this is our best guess where Sherkaner left the helicopter?”

“It was, but there’s no sign of him here. The log files are all jumbled. Daddy was controlling Rachner’s aircraft through the net. Maybe he was going someplace special. More likely he was heading for random nowhere.” Trixia was not hearing Little Victory’s true voice. Those sounds were down-shifted and processed in Trixia’s hood. The result was not a human speech and certainly not Spider sound, but Trixia could understand it as easily as Nese, and listening left her eyes and hands free for other things.

“But…” Trixia waved her arm at the tumbled land ahead of them. “Sherkaner sounded rational to me, even at the end when everything was coming apart.” She spoke in the same intermediate language she listened to. The suit processor took care of the routine shifting of sounds to what Viki could hear.

“Wanderdeep can be like that,” said Victory. “He had just lost Mom. Nizhnimor and Jaybert and the counterlurk center had just been blown out from under him.”

At the bottom of her view, Trixia saw the twitch in Viki’s forearms. That was the equivalent of pursed lips, of a person confronting pain. In her years of Focus, she had always imagined herself talking to them head to head, on the same level. In free fall, that was more or less how things worked. But on the ground… well, human bodies extended upward, and Spider bodies sideways. If she didn’t keep a downward view, she missed out on “facial” expressions—and even worse, she might walk into her best friends.

“Thanks for coming with me, Trixia.” The cues in the intermediate language showed that Viki’s voice was tremulous. “I’ve been here and at Southmost before, officially, and with my brothers and sister. We promised each other we’d leave it alone for a while, but… I can’t… and I can’t face it alone either.”

Trixia waggled her hand in a way that meant comfort, understanding. “I’ve wanted to come here ever since I came out of Focus. I feel like I’m a person finally, and being with you I feel I have a family.”

One of Viki’s free arms reached up to rub Trixia’s elbow. “You were always a person to me. I can remember when Gokna died, when the General told us about you. Daddy showed us the logs, all the way back to when you first contacted him. Back then, he still thought you translators were some kind of AI. But you seemed to be a person to me, and I could tell you liked Dad very much.”

Trixia gestured a smile. “Dear Sherk was so sure of impossible things like AI. For me, Focus was like a dream. My mission was to understand you Spiders perfectly, and the emotions just came along with it. It was the side effect Tomas Nau never expected.” Personhood as a Spider had come slowly, growing with each advance in language knowledge. The radio debate had been the turning point, where Trixia and Zinmin Broute and the others had actually transformed and taken sides in the perfection of their craft.I’m so sorry, Xopi. We were Focused and suddenly you were the enemy. Whenwe scrambled your MRI codes, we didn’t really know we’d murdered you.Any of us could have been the Pedure translator, any of us could have beenin your place. And that had been when Trixia first reached down across the comm links and revealed herself to Sherkaner Underhill.

The smooth rock was broken now, rising into the hillside. Here there were patches of snow, and clefts shadowed from sun-and starlight. Victory and Trixia scrambled over the lower rocks of the hill, and peered into the shadows. This wasn’t a serious search; it was more an act of reverence. Air and orbit surveys had been completed many days before.

“Do—do you think we’ll ever find him, Victory?” During most of her years of Focus, Sherkaner Underhill had been the center of Trixia Bonsol’s universe. She’d been scarcely aware of Anne Reynolt or Ezr’s hundreds of faithful visits, but Sherkaner Underhill had been real. She remembered the old cobber who needed a guide-bug to keep from walking in circles. How could he be gone?

Victory was silent for a moment. She was several meters up the hillside, poking around beneath an overhang. Like all of her race, she was more than humanly good at rock climbing. “Yes, eventually. We know he’s not on the surface. Maybe… I think Mobiy must have lucked out, found a hole more than a few yards deep. But even that wouldn’t be a viable deepness; Dad’s body would dry to death in a short time.” She pulled out from under the rock. “It’s funny. When the Plan was coming apart, I thought it was Mom we had lost and Dad we could save. But now… you know the humans just made new sonograms of the bottom of Southmost? The Kindred nukes crushed Parliament Hall and the upper layers. Below that there are millions of tons of fractured bedrock—but there is open space, what’s left of the Southlanders’ superdeepness. If Mother and Hrunk made it alive to one of those…”

Trixia frowned; she had seen the news. “But the report says it’s too dangerous to dig, that it would just crush the open spaces.” And when the New Sun came, those millions of tons of rock would surely collapse upon the deepness.

“Ah, but we have time to plan. We’ll improve on the humans’ digging technology. Maybe we can come in from miles out and tunnel really deep, maintaining the balance with cavorite. Someday before the next New Sun, we’ll know what’s in those superdeeps. And if Mother and Hrunk are down there, we’ll rescue them.”

They walked northward, around the hillock. Even if this were the hill where Sherkaner left Thract, they were well away from where Rachner could have landed. Still, Victory peeped into every shadow.

Trixia couldn’t keep up. She straightened and looked away from the hillside. The sky above the southern horizon glowed, as if over a city. And it almost was. The old missile fields were gone, but now the world had a better use for the altiplano. Cavorite mines. Companies from all over the waking world had descended on it. From orbit, you could see the open pit mines stretching from the original Kindred operation, a thousand miles across the wasteland. A million Spiders worked there now. Even if they never figured out how to synthesize the magic substance, cavorite would revolutionize local spaceflight, partly making up for the lack of other bodies in this solar system.

Victory seemed to notice that Trixia’s pace had faltered. The Spider found a rounded knob of rock, shaded from the wind, and settled on it. Trixia sat down beside her, pleased that they could be on the same level. Across the plains to the south, they could see hundreds of hillocks, any one of which might mark Sherkaner’s final rest. But in the sky glow beyond the horizon, tiny dots of light drifted slowly upward, antigrav freighters hauling mass into space. In all human histories, antigravity had been one of the Failed Dreams. And here it was.

Viki didn’t speak for a time. A human who didn’t know the Spiders might think she was asleep. But Trixia could see the telltale movements of eating hands, and she heard untranslated keening. Every so often Viki would be like this; every so often she had to shed the image that she projected to her team and Belga Underville and the aliens from space. Little Victory had done very well, at least as well as her mother could have done, Trixia was sure. She had managed the final triumph of her parents’ Great Lurk. In her own huds, Trixia could see a dozen calls pending for Major Lighthill. An hour or two alone, that was all Victory could spare these days. Outside of Brent, Trixia was probably the only person who knew the doubts that lived inside Victory Lighthill.

OnOff climbed into the sky, turning the shadows across the tumbled lands. This was the warmest High Equatoria would be for the next two hundred years, yet the best that OnOff could do was raise a soft haze of sublimation.

“I hope for the best, Trixia. The General and Dad, they were so very clever. They can’t both be dead. But they—and I—had to do so many hard things. People who trusted us died.”

“It was a war, Victory. Against Pedure, against the Emergents.” That was what Trixia told herself now, when she thought about Xopi Reung.

“Yeah. And the ones who survived are doing well. Even Rachner Thract. He’s never coming back to the King’s Service. He feels betrayed. Hewas betrayed. But he’s up there with Jirlib and Didi now”—she jerked a hand in the direction of L1—“becoming a kind of Spiderish Qeng Ho.” She was quiet, then abruptly slapped at the rock of her perch. Trixia could hear that her real voice was angry, defensive. “Damn it, Mother was a good general! I could never have done what she did; there’s too much of Daddy in me. And in the early years it worked; his genius and hers multiplied together. But it got harder and harder to disguise the counterlurk. Videomancy was a great cover, it let us have independent hardware and a covert data stream right under the humans’ snouts. But if there were evenone slip, if the humans ever guessed, they could kill us all. That corroded Mom’s heart.”

Her eating hands fluttered aimlessly and there was a choked hissing sound. Victory was weeping. “I just hope she told Hrunkner. He was the most loyal friend we ever had. He loved us even though he thought we were a perversion. But Mother just could not accept that. She wanted too much from Uncle Hrunk, and when he couldn’t change she—”

Trixia slid her arm across the other’s midback. It was the closest a human could come to giving a multi-arm hug.

“You know how much Daddy wanted to tell Hrunk about the counterlurk. That last time in Princeton, Daddy and I thought we could manage it, that Mother would go along. But no. The General was so… unforgiving. In the end… well, she wanted Hrunk along on her trip to Southmost. If she trusted him with that, surely she would tell him the rest. Wouldn’t she? She’d tell him that it was not all in vain.”