by Vernor Vinge
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 stun dart 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 fizzbar, 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 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 might as well be Qeng Ho.
Marli grinned suddenly. “Our session link to the Invisible 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 should walk, 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. The Hand’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, the Hand 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 the Invisible 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 was smiling. “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. Trinli was Pham Nuw
en. 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 speakers 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?