A Deepness in the Sky (87 page)

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."

The voice from theInvisible 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."

"Phamwho ?"

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 wassmiling. "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. Trinliwas Pham Nuwen. 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 speaker's 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?

Smith stepped back until she was even with him. "Come with me, Sergeant. I saw someone I've been wanting to talk to for a long time." There would be a vote called later in the day. Before that there could well be follow-up questions for the General. There was plenty of time for political maneuver. He and Downing followed the General to the far end of the proscenium, blocking the exit. A scruffy cobber in extravagant leggings was coming toward them. Pedure. The years had not been kind to her—or maybe the stories about the attempted assassinations were true. She made to sidle around Victory Smith, but the General stepped into her path.

Smith smiled at her. "Hello, Cobblie Killer. So nice to meet you in person."

The other hissed. "Yes. And if you don't move from my path, I will be very pleased to kill you." The words were heavily accented, but the tiny knife on her hand was clear enough.

Smith stretched her arms sideways, an extravagant shrug that would catch notice all across the hall. "In front of all these people, Honored Pedure? I don't think so. You're—"

Smith hesitated, raised a pair of hands to her head, and seemed to listen. To her telephone?

Pedure just stared, her entire aspect full of suspicion. Pedure was a small female with galled chitin, and gestures that were just a bit too quick. A totally untrustworthy picture. She must be so used to killing from afar that personal charm and facility with language were long-discarded talents. She was out of her element here, managing things directly. It made Unnerby just a shade more confident.

Something buzzed in Pedure's jacket. Her little knife disappeared and she grabbed her phone. For a moment, the two spy chiefs looked like old friends, communing with their memories.

"No!"Pedure spasmed; her voice was a scream. She grabbed the phone with her eating hands, all but stuffed it into her maw. "Not here! Not now!" The fact that they were a sudden spectacle did not seem to matter to her.

General Smith turned toward Unnerby. "Everyone's schemes just went down the toilet, Sergeant. Three ice-launched missiles are coming our way. We've got about seven minutes." For an instant, Unnerby's gaze caught on the dome above them. It was a thousand feet underground, proof against tactical fission bombs. But he knew the Kindred fleet had progressed to much bigger things. A triple launch would most likely be a deep-penetration strike. Even so...I helped design this place.There were stairs nearby, access to much deeper places. He reached for one of Smith's arms. "Please, General. Follow me." They started back across the proscenium.