“But don’t worry, Peddler boy. Your quarters are properly inconspicuous.” Brughel pointed out the forward window. There was a greenish speck, barely showing a disk. It was the Qeng Ho temp. “We have it parked in an eight-day orbit of the main jumble.”
Tomas Nau raised his hand politely, almost as if asking for the floor, and Brughel shut up. “We have only a moment, Mr. Vinh. I know that Anne Reynolt has given you an overview, but I want to make sure you understand your new responsibilities.” He did something with his cuff, and the image of the Qeng Ho temp swelled. Vinh swallowed; funny, it was just an ordinary field temp, barely one hundred meters on a side. His eyes searched the lumpy, quilted hull. He had lived in there less than 2Msec, cursed its squat economies a thousand times. But now, it was the closest thing to home that still existed; inside were many of Ezr’s surviving friends. A field temp is so easy to destroy. Yet all the cells looked fully inflated and there was no patchwork. Captain Park had set this one far from his ships, and Nau had spared it. “…so your new position is an important one. As my Fleet Manager, you have responsibilities comparable to the late Captain Park’s. You will have my consistent support; I will make sure that my people understand this.” A glance at Ritser Brughel. “But please remember: Our success—even our survival—now depends on our cooperation.”
TEN
When it came to personnel management, Ezr knew he was a little slow. What Nau was up to should have been instantly obvious. Vinh had even studied such things in school. When they reached the temp, Nau gave an unctuous little speech, introducing Vinh as the new “Qeng Ho Fleet Manager.” Nau made a special point of the fact that Ezr Vinh was the most senior member of a ship-owning Family present. The two Vinh starships had survived the recent ambush relatively undamaged. If there was any legitimate master for the Qeng Ho ships, it was Ezr Vinh. And if everyone cooperated with legitimate authority, there would yet be wealth for all. Then Ezr was pushed forward to mumble a few words about how glad he was to be back among friends, and how he hoped for their help.
In the days that followed, he came to understand the wedge that Nau had slipped between duty and loyalty. Ezr was home and yet he was not. Every day, he saw familiar faces. Benny Wen and Jimmy Diem had both survived. Ezr had known Benny since they were six years old; now he was like a stranger, a cooperative stranger.
And then one day, more by luck than planning, Ezr ran into Benny near the temp’s taxi locks. Ezr was alone. More and more, his Emergent assistants did not dog his moves. They trusted him? They had him bugged? They couldn’t imagine him doing harm? All the possibilities were obnoxious, but it was good to be free of them.
Benny was with a small crew of Qeng Ho right under the outermost balloon wall. Being near the locks, there was no exterior quilting here; every so often the lights of a passing taxi sent a moving glow across the fabric. Benny’s crew was spread out across the wall, working at the nodes of the approach automation. Their Emergent gang boss was at the far end of the open space.
Ezr glided out of the radial tunnel, saw Benny Wen, and bounced easily across the wall toward him.
Wen looked up from his work and nodded courteously. “Fleet Manager.” The formality was familiar now—and still as painful as a kick in the face.
“Hi, Benny. H-how are things going?”
Wen looked briefly down the length of the volume at the Emergent gang boss. That guy really stuck out, his work clothes gray and stark against the rampant individualism of most Qeng Ho. He was talking loudly to three of the work crew, but at this distance his words were muffled by the balloon fabric. Benny looked back at Ezr and shrugged. “Oh, just fine. You know what we’re doing here?”
“Replacing the comm inputs.” One of the Emergents’ first moves had been to confiscate all head-up displays. The huds and their associated input electronics were the classic tools of freedom.
Wen laughed softly, his eyes still on the gang boss. “Right the first time, Ezr old pal. You see, our new… employers… have a problem. They need our ships. They need our equipment. But none of that will work without the automation. And how can they trust that?” All effective machinery had embedded controllers. And of course the controllers were networked, with the invisible glue of their fleet’s local net that made everything work consistently.
The software for that system had been developed over millennia, refined by the Qeng Ho over centuries. Destroy it and the fleet would be barely more than scrap metal. But how could any conqueror trust what all those centuries had built in? In most such situations, the losers’ gear was simply destroyed. But as Tomas Nau admitted, no one could afford to lose any more resources.
“Their own work gangs are going through every node, you know. Not just here, but on all our surviving ships. Bit by bit they are rehosting them.”
“There’s no way they can replace everything.” I hope. The worst tyrannies were the ones where a government required its own logic on every embedded node.
“You’d be surprised what they are replacing. I’ve seen them work. Their computer techs are… strange. They’ve dug up stuff in the system that I never suspected.” Benny shrugged. “But you’re right, they aren’t touching the lowest-level embedded stuff. It’s mainly the I/O logic that gets jerked. In return, we get brand-new interfaces.” Benny’s face twisted in a little smile. He pulled a black plastic oblong from his belt. Some kind of keyboard. “This is the only thing we’ll be using for a while.”
“Lord, that looks ancient.”
“Simple, not ancient. I think these are just backups the Emergents had floating around.” Benny sent another look in the direction of the gang boss. “The important thing is, the comm gear in these boxes is known to the Emergents. Tamper with it, and there’ll be alarms up the local net. In principle they can filter everything we do.” Benny looked down at the box, hefted it. Benny was just another apprentice, like Ezr. He wasn’t much sharper about technical things than Ezr, but he always had a nose for clever deals. “Strange. What I’ve seen of Emergent technology looks pretty dull. Yet these guys really intend to dredge and monitor everything. There’s something about their automation that we don’t understand.” He was almost talking to himself.
On the wall behind him a light grew and grew, shifted slowly sideways. A taxi was approaching the docking bay. The light slid around the curve of the wall, and a second later there was a mutedkchunk. Shallow ripples chased out across the fabric from the docking cylinder. The lock pumps kicked in. Here, their whine was louder than at the dock entrance itself. Ezr hesitated. The noise was enough to mask their conversation from the gang boss.Sure, and any surveillance bugs could hear through the racketbetter than our own ears. So when he spoke, it was not a conspiratorial murmur, but loud against the racket of the pumps. “Benny, lots has happened. I just want you to know I haven’t changed. I’m not—“I’m not atraitor, damn it!
For a moment, Benny’s expression was opaque… and then he suddenly smiled. “I know, Ezr. I know.”
Benny led him along the wall in the general direction of the rest of his work crew. “Let me show you the other things that we are up to.” Ezr followed as the other pointed to this and that, described the changes the Emergents were making in the dock protocols. And suddenly he understood a little more of the game.The enemy needs us, expects to be working us foryears. There’s lots we can say to each other. They won’t kill us for exchanginginformation to get their jobs done. They won’t kill us for speculating aboutwhat’s going on.
The whine of the pumps died. Somewhere beyond the plastic of the docking cylinder, people and cargo would be debarking.
Wen swung close to the open hatch of a utility duct. “They’re bringing in lots of their own people, I hear.”
“Yes, four hundred soon, maybe more.” This temp was just some balloons, inflated a few Msecs earlier, upon the fleet’s arrival. But it was large enough for all the crews that had been packed as corpsicles for the fifty-light-year transit from Triland. That had been three thousand
people. Now it held only three hundred.
Benny raised an eyebrow. “I thought they had their own temp, and better than this.”
“I—” The gang boss was almost within earshot.But this isn’t conspiracy. Lord of Trade, we have to be able to talk about our jobs. “I think they lost more than they’re letting on.” I think we came within centimeters of winning, even though we were ambushed, even though they had knocked usdown with their war disease.
Benny nodded, and Ezr guessed that he already knew. But did he know this: “That will still leave a lot of space. Tomas Nau is thinking of bringing more of us out of coldsleep, maybe some officers.” Sure, the senior people would be more of a risk to the Emergents, but if Nau really wanted effective cooperation… Unfortunately, the Podmaster was much less forthcoming about the “Focused.” Trixia.
“Oh?” Benny’s voice was noncommittal, but his gaze was suddenly sharp. He looked away. “That would make a big difference, especially to some of us… like the little lady I have working in this duct.” He stuck his head partway through the hatch and shouted. “Hey, Qiwi, are you done in there yet?”
The Brat? Ezr had only seen her two or three times since the ambush, enough to know she wasn’t injured and not a hostage. But more than most, she had spent time outside of the temp and with the Emergents. Maybe she just seemed too young to be a threat. A moment passed; a tiny figure in a screwball harlequin outfit slipped out of the duct.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m all done. I strung the tamperproof all—” She saw Ezr. “Hi, Ezr!” For once, the little girl did not swarm on him. She just nodded and kind of smiled. Maybe she was growing up. If so, this was the hard way to do it. “I strung it all the way past the locks, no problem. You gotta wonder why these guys don’t just use encryption, though.” She was smiling, but there were dark shadows around her eyes. It was a face Ezr would expect in someone older. Qiwi stood in the relaxed crouch of zero gee, with one checkered boot slipped under a wall stop. But she held her arms close at her sides, her hands clasping her elbows. The expansive, grabbing and punching little monster of before the ambush was gone. Qiwi’s father was one of the still-infected, like Trixia. Like Trixia, he might never come back. And Kira Pen Lisolet was a senior armsman.
The little girl continued talking about the setup inside the duct. She was well qualified. Other children might have toys and games and playmates; Qiwi’s home had been a near-empty ramship, out between the stars. That long alone-time had left her on the verge of being several kinds of specialist.
She had several ideas for how they might save time with the cable-pulling the Emergents required. Benny was nodding, taking notes.
Then Qiwi was on a different topic. “I hear we’re gonna have new people in the temp.”
“Yes—”
“Who? Who?”
“Emergents. Then some of our own people, I think.”
Her smile blazed for an instant, and then she forced her enthusiasm down with a visible effort. “I—I was over at Hammerfest. Podmaster Nau wanted me to check out the coldsleep gear before they move it to Far Treasure. I… I saw Mama, Ezr. I could see her face through the transp. I could see her slow-breathe.”
Benny said, “Don’t worry, kid. We’ll… Things will be okay for both your mom and pop.”
“I know. That’s what Podmaster Nau told me, too.”
He could see the hope in her eyes. So Nau was making vague promises to her, becoming poor Qiwi’s lifeline. And some of the promises might even be true. Maybe they would finally cure her father of their damn war disease. But armsmen like Kira Pen Lisolet would be terribly dangerous to any tyrant. Short of a counterambush, Kira Lisolet might sleep for a long, long time… Short of a counterambush.His glance flickered across to Benny. His friend’s stare was completely blank, a return to the earlier opacity. And suddenly Ezr knew that there really was a conspiracy. In a few Msecs at most, some among the Qeng Ho would act.
I can help; I know I can.The official coordination of all Emergent orders passed through Ezr Vinh. If he were on the inside… But he was also the most closely watched of all, even if Tomas Nau had no real respect for him. For a moment, fury rose in Ezr. Benny knew he wasn’t a traitor—but there was no way he could help without giving the conspiracy away.
The Qeng Ho temp had escaped the ambush without a scratch. There had not even been pulse damage; before they maimed the local net, the Emergents had a great time mining the databases there.
What was left worked well enough for routine ops. Every few days, a few more people were added to the temp’s population. Most were Emergents, but some were low-rank Qeng Ho released from coldsleep detention. Emergents and Qeng Ho, they all looked like refugees from disaster. There was no disguising the damage the Emergents had suffered, the equipment they had lost.And maybe Trixia is dead. The “Focused” were kept in the Emergents’ new habitat, Hammerfest. But no one had seen any of them.
Meantime, conditions in the Qeng Ho temp slowly got worse. They were at less than one-third the temp’s design population, yet systems were failing. Part of it was the maimed automation. Part of it—and this was a subtle effect—was that people weren’t doing their jobs properly. Between the damaged automation and the Emergents’ clumsiness with life-systems, the other side hadn’t caught on. Fortunately for the conspirators, Qiwi spent most of her time off the temp. Ezr knew she could have detected the scam instantly. Ezr’s contribution to the conspiracy was silence, simply not noticing what was going on. He moved from petty emergency to petty emergency, doing the obvious—and wondering what his friends were really up to.
The temp was actually beginning to stink. Ezr and his Emergent assistants took a trip down to the bactry pools at the innermost core of the temp, the place where Apprentice Vinh had spent so many Ksecs… before. He would give anything to be an apprentice forever down here, if only it would bring back Captain Park and the others.
The stench in the bactry was worse than Ezr had known outside of a failed school exercise. The walls behind the bio-weirs were covered with soft black goo. It swayed like old flesh in the breeze of the ventilators. Ciret and Marli retched, one barfing inside his respirator. Marli gasped out, “Pus! I’m not putting up with this. We’ll be just outside when you’re done.”
They splashed and spattered their way out, and the door sealed. And Ezr was alone with the smells. He stood for a moment, suddenly realizing that if he ever wanted to be completely alone, this was the place!
As he started to survey the contamination, a figure in goo-spattered waterproofs and a respirator drifted out from the filth. It raised one hand for silence, and passed a signals unit across Vinh’s body. “Mmph. You’re clean,” came a muffled voice. “Or maybe they just trust you.”
It was Jimmy Diem. Ezr almost hugged him, bactry shit and all. Against all odds, the conspiracy had found a way to talk to him. But there was no happy relief in Diem’s voice. His eyes were invisible behind goggles, but tension coiled in his posture. “Why are you toadying, Vinh?”
“I’m not! I’m just playing for time.”
“That’s what… some of us think. But Nau has laid so many perks on you, and you’re the guy we have to clear every little thing with. Do you really think you own what’s left of us?”
That was the line that Nau pushed even now. “No!Maybe they think they’ve bought me, but… Lord of Trade, sir, wasn’t I a solid crewmember?”
A muffled chuckle, and some of the tension seemed to leave Diem’s shoulders. “Yeah. You were a daydreamer who could never quite keep his eye on the ball”—words from familiar critiques, but spoken almost fondly—“but you’re not stupid and you never traded on your Family connections…. Okay, Apprentice, welcome aboard.”
It was the most joyful promotion Ezr Vinh had ever received. He stifled a hundred questions that percolated up; most had answers that he shouldn’t be told. But still, just one, about Trixia—
Diem was already talking. “I’ve got some code schemes for you to memorize, but we may have to
meet face-to-face again. So the stink will get better, but it’s going to continue to be a problem; you’ll have plenty of excuse to visit. A couple of general things for now: We need to get outdoors.”
Vinh thought of theFar Treasure and the Qeng Ho armsmen in cold-sleep there. Or maybe there were weapons caches in secret places aboard the surviving Qeng Hoships. “Hm. There are several outside repair projects where we’re the experts.”
“I know. The main thing is to get the right people on the crews, and in the right job slots. We’ll get you some names.”
“Right.”
“Another thing: We need to know about the ‘Focused ones.’ Where exactly are they being held? Can they be moved fast?”
“I’m trying to learn about them,” more than you may know, Crewleader. “Reynolt says they’re alive, that they’ve stopped the progression of the disease.” The mindrot. That chilling term was not from Reynolt, but the slip of tongue he’d heard from an ordinary Emergent. “I’m trying to get permission to see—”
“Yeah. Trixia Bonsol, right?” Goo-sticky fingers patted Vinh’s arm sympathetically. “Hmm. You’ve got a solid motive to keep after them on this. Be a good boy in every other way, but pushhard on this. You know, like it’s the big favor that will keep you in line, if only they’ll grant it…. Okay. Get yourself out of here.”
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