A Deepness in the Sky

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 offline."

"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."