A Deepness in the Sky

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."Ifhe 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.