A Deepness in the Sky (34 page)

Finally, Sherkaner spoke. "The General likes you very much, Hrunk. You were her dearest cobber-in-arms—but more, you were decent to her when she was a new lieutenant and it looked like her career would end on the trash pile."

"She's the best. She couldn't help when she was born."

"...Granted. But that's also why she's been making your life so hard lately. She thought that you, of all people, would accept what she and I are doing."

"I know, Sherk, but Ican't. You saw me today. I did my best, but your cobblies saw through me. Junior did anyway."

"Heh, heh. She did indeed. It's not just her name; Little Victory is smart like her mother. But—as you say—she's going to have to face much worse....Look, Hrunk. I'm going to have a little chat with the General. She should accept what she can get, learn a little tolerance—even if it is tolerance for your intolerance."

"I—that would help, Sherk. Thanks."

"In the meantime, we'll need you up here more often. But you can come on your own terms. The children would like to see you, but at whatever distance you prefer."

"Okay. I do like them. I'm just afraid I can't be what they want."

"Ha. Then finding the right distance will be their little experiment." He smiled. "They can be pretty flexible if they look at you that way."

TWENTY

In Pre-Flight, Pham Trinli had been a distant curiosity to Ezr Vinh. What little he had seen of the guy seemed sullen, lazy, and probably incompetent. He was "somebody's relative"; it was the only explanation for how he had made the crew. It was only since the ambush that Trinli's boorish, loudmouth behavior had made its impact on Ezr. Occasionally he was amusing; much more often he was loathsome. Trinli's Watch time overlapped Ezr's by sixty percent. When he went over to Hammerfest, there was Pham Trinli trading dirty stories with Reynolt's techs. When he visited Benny's booze parlor, there was Trinli with a gang of Emergents, loud and pompous as ever. It had been years—really since Jimmy Diem died—since anyone would think his behavior traitorous. Qeng Ho and Emergents had to get along, and there were plenty of Traders in Trinli's circle.

Today Ezr's loathing for the man had changed to something darker. It was the once-per-Msec Watch-manager meeting, chaired as always by Tomas Nau. This was not the empty propaganda of Ezr's fake "Fleet Management Committee." The expertise of both sides was needed if they were to survive here. And though there was never a question of who was boss, Nau actually heeded much of the advice given at these meetings. Ritser Brughel was currently off-Watch, so this meeting would proceed without pathological overtones. With the exception of Pham Trinli, the managers were people who really could make things work.

All had gone smoothly through the first Ksec. Kal Omo's programmers had sanitized a batch of head-up displays for Qeng Ho use. The new interface was limited, but better than nothing. Anne Reynolt had a new Focused roster. The full schedule was still a secret, but it looked like Trixia might get more time off. Gonle Fong proposed some Watch changes. Ezr knew were these were secret payoffs for various deals she had on the side, but Nau blandly accepted them. The underground economy she and Benny had masterminded was surely known to Tomas Nau...but the years had passed and he had consistently ignored it.And he has consistently benefitedby it. Ezr Vinh would never have thought that free trading could add much efficiency in such a small and closed society as this little camp at L1, but it clearly had improved life. Most people had their favored Watch companions. Many had Qiwi Lisolet's little bonsai bubbles in their rooms. Equipment allocation was about as slick as it could be. Maybe it just showed how screwed up the original Emergent allocation system had been. Ezr still clung to the secret belief that Tomas Nau was the deepest villain he had ever known, a mass murderer, who murdered simply to advance a lie. But he was so clever, so outwardly conciliatory. Tomas Nau was more than smart enough to allow this underground trade that helped him to proceed.

"Very well, last item." He smiled down the length of the table. "As usual, the most interesting and difficult item. Qiwi?"

Qiwi Lisolet rose smoothly, stopped herself with a hand on the low ceiling. Gravity existed on Hammerfest, but it was barely good enough to keep the drinking bulbs on the table. "Interesting? I guess." She made a face. "But it's also a very irritating problem." Qiwi opened a deep pocket and pulled out a bundle of head-up displays—all tagged with "cleared-for-Peddler-use" seals. "Let's try out Kal Omo's toys." She passed them out to the various Watch managers. Ezr took one, smiled back at her shy grin. Qiwi was still child-short, but she was as compact and nearly as tall as an average Strentmannian adult. She was no longer a little girl, or even the devastated orphan of the Relighting. Qiwi had lived Watch-on-Watch in the years after the Relight; she had aged a full year for every year that passed. Since OnOff's light had faded to a more manageable level, she'd had some time off-Watch, but Ezr could see tiny creases beginning at the corners of her eyes.She's what now? Older than I am. The old playfulness sometimes showed even still, but she never teased Ezr anymore. And he knew the stories about Qiwi and Tomas Nau were true. Poor, damned Qiwi.

But Qiwi Lin Lisolet had become something more than Ezr ever expected. Now Qiwi balanced mountains.

She waited until they all were wearing their huds. Then: "You know I manage our halo-orbit around L1." Above the middle of the table, the rockpile suddenly materialized. A tiny Hammerfest stuck out of the jumble on Ezr's side; a taxi was just mooring on the high tower. The image was crisp, cutting precisely across the wall and people behind it. But when he turned his head quickly from the rockpile to Qiwi and back, the pile blurred slightly. The placement automation couldn't quite keep up with the motion, and the visual fraud failed. No doubt, Kal Omo's programmers had been forced to replace some of the optimizations. Still, what was left was close to Qeng Ho quality, the images separately coordinated in the field of each head-up display.

Dozens of tiny red lights appeared across the surface of the rockpile. "Those are the electric-jet emplacements"—and then even more yellow spots of light—"and that is the sensor grid." She laughed, as light and playful as he remembered. "Altogether it looks like a finite element solution grid, doesn't it? But then, that's just what it is, though the grid points are real machines collecting data. Anyway, my people and I have two problems. Either one of them is fairly easy: We need to keep the jumble in orbit around L1." The jumble shrank to a stylized symbol, tracing an everchanging Lissajous figure around the glyphL1. On one side hung Arachna; far away but on the same line was the OnOff star. "We have it set so we're always near the sun's limb as seen by the Spiders. It will be many years before they have the technology to detect us here....But the other goal of the stabilization is to keep Hammerfest and the remaining blocks of ocean ice and airsnow all in the shadow." Back to the original view of the jumble, but now the volatiles were marked in blue and green. Every year that precious resource shrank, consumed by the humans and by evaporation into space. "Unfortunately these two goals are somewhat inconsistent. The rubble pile isloose. Sometimes our L1 stationkeeping causes torques and the rocks slide."

"The rubble quakes," said Jau Xin.

"Yes. Down here at Hammerfest, you feel them all the time. Without constant supervision, the problem would be worse." The surface of the meeting table became a model of the juncture of Diamonds One and Two. Qiwi motioned across the blocks and a forty-centimeter swath of surface turned pink. "That's a shift that almost got away from us. But we can't afford the human resources to—"

Pham Trinli had sat through all this in silence, his eyes squinted down in a look of angry concentration. As Nau's original choice to manage the stabilization, Trinli had a long history of humiliation on this subject. Finally he exploded. "Crap. I thought you were going to spend some of the water, melt it into a glue you could inject between the Diamonds."

"We did that. It helps some, but—"

"But you still can't keep things settled, can you?" Trinli turned to Nau, and half rose from his chair. "Podmaster, I've told you before that I'm best for the job. The Lisolet girl knows how to run a dynamics program, and she works as hard as anyone—but she doesn't have any depth of experience."Depth of experience? How many years of hands-on does she need, old man?

But Nau just smiled at Trinli. No matter how absurd the idiot's contentions, Nau always invited him back. For a long time, Ezr had suspected it was some sadistic humor on the Podmaster's part.

"Well, then perhaps I should give you the job, Armsman. But consider, even now it would mean at least one-third time on-Watch." Nau's tone was courteous, but Trinli caught the dare in it. Ezr could just see the anger growing in the old man.

"One-third?" said Trinli. "I could do it on a one-fifth Watch, even if the other crewmembers were novices. No matter how cleverly the jets are emplaced, success comes down to the quality of the guidance network. Miss Lisolet doesn't understand all the features of the localizer devices she is using."

"Explain," said Anne Reynolt. "A localizer is a localizer. We've been using both ours and yours in this project." Localizers were a basic tool of any technical civilization. The tiny devices chirped their impulse codes at one another, using time of flight and distributed algorithms to accurately locate each participating device. Several thousand of them formed the positioning grid on the rubble pile. Together they were a kind of low-level network, providing information on the orientation, position, and relative velocity of the electric jets and the rubble.

"Not so." Trinli smiled patronizingly. "Ours work with yours well enough, but at the price of degrading their natural performance. Here's what the units look like." The old man fiddled with his hand pad. "Miss Lisolet, these interfaces are worthless."

"Allow me," said Nau. He spoke into the air, "here are the two types of localizers we're using."

The landscape vanished, and two pieces of vacuum-rated electronics appeared on the table. No matter how often Ezr saw this sort of demonstration, it was hard to get used to. In a practiced presentation, with a predetermined display sequence, it was easy to use voice recognition to guide things. What Nau had just done was subtly beyond any Qeng Ho interface. Somewhere up in Hammerfest's attic, one or more of his ziphead slaves was listening to every word spoken here, giving context to Nau's words and mapping them through to the fleet's automation or other ziphead specialists. And here were the resulting images, as quick as if Nau's own mind contained the fleet's entire database.

Of course, Pham Trinli was oblivious to the magic. "Right." He leaned closer to the equipment. "Except that these are really more than the localizers themselves."

Qiwi: "I don't understand. We need a power supply, the sensor probes."

Trinli grinned at her, triumph dripping in his smile. "That's what you think—and perhaps it was true in the early years when ol' OnOff was frying everything. But now—" He reached closer and his finger disappeared into the side of the smaller package. "Can you show the localizer core, Podmaster?"

Nau nodded. "Right." And the image of the Qeng Ho package was cut away, component layer by component layer. In the end, all that was left was a tiny blackened fleck, not more than a millimeter across.

Sitting next to him, Ezr caught an instant of tension in Tomas Nau. The other was suddenly, intensely interested. The moment passed before Ezr was even sure it existed. "My, that is small. Let's take a closer look."

The dustmote image swelled until it was a meter across and almost forty centimeters high. The head-up display automation painted appropriate reflections and shadows.

"Thanks." Trinli stood so they could all see him over the top of the lens-shaped gadget. "This is the basic Qeng Ho localizer—normally embedded in protective barriers, and so on. But see, in a benign environment—even outside in the shade—it is quite self-sufficient."

"Power?" said Reynolt.

Trinli waved his hand dismissively. "Just pulse them with microwaves, maybe a dozen times a second. I don't know the details, but I've seen them used in much larger numbers on some projects. I'm sure that would give finer control. As for sensors, these puppies have several simple things built in—temperature, light levels, sonics."

Jau Xin: "But how could Qiwi and the rest be ignorant of all this?"

Ezr could see where it was all going, but there wasn't a thing he could do about it.

Trinli shrugged magnanimously. He still did not realize how far his ego had taken him. "As I've been saying all along: Qiwi Lin Lisolet is young and inexperienced. Coarse-grain localizers are good enough for most projects. Besides, the advanced characteristics are most useful in military work, and I wager that the texts she studies are deliberately vague on those issues. I, on the other hand, have worked as both an engineer and an armsman. Though it's not permitted normally, the localizers are an excellent oversight facility."

"Certainly," Nau said, looking thoughtful. "Localizers and attached sensors are the heart of proper security." And these dustmotes already had sensors and independence built in. They weren't an embedded component of a system; they could be the system itself.

"What do you think, Qiwi? Would a slew of these make things simpler for you?"

"Maybe. This is all news to me; I never thought a tech book would lie to me." She thought a moment. "But yes, if we had lots more localizers and the processing power scales properly fitted, then we could probably cut back on the human supervision."

"Very well. I want you to get the details from Armsman Trinli, and install an extended network."

"I'll be glad to take over the job, Podmaster," said Trinli.

But Nau was no fool. He shook his head. "No, you're much more valuable in your overall supervisory role. In fact, I want you and Anne to chat about this. When he comes on-Watch, Ritser will be interested, too. There should be a number of public safety applications for these gadgets."

So Pham Trinli had handed the Emergents even better manacles and chains. For an instant something like chagrined understanding flickered across the old man's face.

Ezr did his best not to talk to anyone for the rest of the day. He had never imagined that he could hate a stupid clown so much. Pham Trinli was no mass murderer, and his devious nature was written large across his every foolish move. But his stupidity had betrayed a secret the enemy had never guessed, a secret that Ezr himself had never known, a secret that others must have taken to their deaths rather than give to Tomas Nau and Ritser Brughel.

Before, he had thought that Nau kept Trinli around for laughs. Now Ezr knew better. And not since that long-ago night in the temp park had Ezr felt so coldly murderous. If there ever came a time when Pham Trinli could have a fatal accident...

After second mess, Ezr stayed in his quarters. His behavior shouldn't be suspicious. The live-music people took over Benny's every day about this time, and jamming was one Qeng Ho custom that Ezr had never enjoyed, even as a listener. Besides, there was plenty of work to catch up on. Some of it didn't even require that he talk to others. He slipped on the new head-up display, and looked at the Fleet Library.

In some sense, the survival of the Fleet Library was Captain Park's greatest failure. Every fleet had elaborate precautions for destroying critical parts of their local library if capture was imminent. Such schemes couldn't be complete. Libraries existed in a distributed form across the ships of their fleet. Pieces would be cached in a thousand nodes depending on the usage of the moment. Individual chips—those damnable localizers—contained extensive maintenance and operations manuals. Yet major databases should have been zeroed in very short order. What was left would have some usefulness, but the capital insights, the terabytes of hard experimental data would be gone—or left only as hardware instantiations, understandable only by painstaking reverse engineering. Somehow that destruction had not happened, even when it was obvious that the Emergent ambush would overwhelm all the ships of Park's fleet. Or maybe Park had acted and there had been off-net nodes or backups that—contrary to all policy—had contained full copies of the library.

Tomas Nau knew a treasure when he saw it. Anne Reynolt's slaves were dissecting the thing with the inhuman precision of the Focused. Sooner or later, they would know every Trader secret. But that would take years; zipheads didn't know where to start. So Nau was using various unFocused staff to wander about the library and report on the big picture. Ezr had spent Msecs at it so far. It was a dicey job, because he had to produce some good results...and at the same time he tried subtly to guide their research away from things that might be immediately useful. He knew he might slip up, and eventually Nau would sense the lack of cooperation. The monster was subtle; more than once Ezr wondered who was using whom.

But today...Pham Trinli had just given away so much.

Ezr forced calmness on himself.Just look at the library. Write somesilly report. That would count as duty time and he wouldn't have to freak out in any visible way. He played with the hand control that came with the new, "sanitized" head-up display. At least it recognized the simpler command chords: the huds seamlessly replaced his natural vision of his cabin with a view of the library's entry layer. As he looked around, the automation tracked his head motion and the images slid past almost as smoothly as if the documents were real objects floating in his room. But...he fiddled with the control. Damn. Almost no customization was possible. They had gutted the interface, or changed it to some Emergent standard. This wasn't much better than ordinary wallpaper!

He reached up to pull the thing from his face, to crumple it.Calmdown. He was still too ticked by Trinli's screwup. Besides, this really was an improvement over wall displays. He smiled for a moment, remembering Gonle Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards.

So what to look at today? Something that would seem natural to Nau, but couldn't give them any more than they already had. Ah, yes, Trinli's super localizers. They'd be sitting in an out-of-the-way niche in some secure section. He followed a couple of threads, the obvious directions. This was a view of the library that no mere apprentice would have. Nau had obtained—in ways that Ezr imagined, and still gave him nightmares—top-level passwords and security parameters. Now Ezr had the same view that Captain Park himself could have had.

No luck. The pointers showed the localizers clearly. Their small size was not really a secret, but even their incidentals manifest did not show them as carrying sensors. The on-chip manuals were just as innocent of strange features.Hunh. So Trinli was claiming there were trapdoors in the manuals that were invisible even in a captain's view of the library?

The anger that had been churning his guts was momentarily forgotten. Ezr stared out at the data lands ranged around him, feeling suddenly relieved. Tomas Nau would see nothing strange in this situation. Except for Ezr Vinh, there might not be a single surviving Trader who would realize how absurd Trinli's story must be.

But Ezr Vinh had grown up in the heart of a great trading Family. As a child he had sat at the dinner table, listening to discussions of fleet strategies as they were really practiced. A Captain's level of access to his fleet library did not normally admit of further hidden features. Things—as always—could be lost; legacy applications were often so old that the search engines couldn't find relevance. But short of sabotage or a customizing, nonstandard Captain, there should be no isolated secrets. In the long run, such measures were simply too painful for the system maintainers.

Ezr would have laughed, except he suspected that these sanitized huds were reporting every sound he made back to Brughel's zipheads. Yet this was the first happy thought of the day.Trinli was bullshitting us! The old fraud bluffed about a lot of things, but he was usually careful with Tomas Nau. When it came time to give Reynolt the details, Trinli would scrounge in the chip manuals...and come up empty-handed. Somehow Ezr couldn't feel much sympathy for him; for once the old bastard would get what he deserved.