He could hear Anne punching out instructions to her people. But gone was his view of the orders and the threads of ziphead processing assigned to each project. This was like fighting blind. They could lose while they were staggering around in shock.

A hundred seconds later, Anne was back to him. "Ritser understands. My people are helping him set up a simple attack run. We can fine-tune the results later." She spoke with her old, calm impatience. Anne Reynolt had fought battles much harder than this, won a hundred times against overwhelming odds. If only all enemies could be so used.

"Very good. Have you spotted Trinli? I'll bet he's in the tunnels." If he isn't circling back for a second ambush.

"Yes, I think so. We're hearing movement off the old geophones." Emergent equipment.

"Good. Meantime, patch together some synthetic voice to keep the people at Benny's happy."

"Done," came her immediate reply. Already done.

Nau turned back to his guards and Ezr Vinh. A very small breathing space had been created. Long enough to get new orders to Ritser. Long enough to find out a little about what he was really up against.

Vinh had regained consciousness. There was a glaze of pain in his eyes-and a glitter of hatred. Nau smiled back at him. He gestured for Ciret to twist Vinh's maimed shoulder. "I need a few answers, Ezr."

The Peddler screamed.

Pham boosted himself faster and faster up the diamond corridor, guided by green images that smeared and wobbled...and dimmed toward total darkness. He coasted blind for a few seconds, still not slowing. He patted at his temples, trying to reset the localizers there. They were in place, and he knew there were thousands of localizers drifting through the length of the tunnel. Anne must have cut off the wireless power pulses, at least in this tunnel.

The woman is unbelievable! For years, Pham had avoided direct manipulation of the ziphead system. Yet somehow Anne had still noticed. The mindscrub had slowed her progress for a while, but this last year she had tightened the noose and tightened it, until...We were so close to disabling the power cutoff, and now we've lost everything. Almost everything. Ezr had died to give him one more chance.

The tunnel turned somewhere just ahead. He reached into the dark, touching the walls lightly, then harder, breaking his dive and turning himself feetfirst. The maneuver was a fraction of a second late. Feet, knees, hands, smashed into the unseen surface, about like a bad fall groundside-except that he bounced back, spinning into another wall.

He caught himself and finger-walked back to the turn. Four separate corridors branched from here. He felt for the openings, and started down the second one, but very quietly this time. Anne hadn't known for sure until a few seconds ago. The cache he had set in this tunnel should still be in place.

After a few meters, his hands touched a cloth bag tacked to the wall. Ha. Planting the cache had been a big risk, but endgame maneuvers usually are, and this one had paid off. He slipped the bag open, found the ring light inside. A glint of yellow glowed up around his hand. Pham grabbed at the rest of the gear, the light following his hands, rainbows and shadows hurtling back and forth around him. There were tiny balls in one of the packages. He bounced one of them down a side tunnel. It flew silently for a second, and then there was a thud and miscellaneous banging-a decoy for Anne's listening zipheads.

So our cover was blown, just a few Ksecs too soon. But screwups happen more often than not when plans finally meet reality. If things had gone right, he'd never have needed this pack-which was just why he'd planted it. One by one, Pham considered the contents of the pack: the respirator, the amplifying receiver, the medikit, the trick dart gun.

Nau and Company had some choices. They might gas the tunnels or dump them into vacuum-though that last would destroy a lot of valuable equipment. They might try to chase him around in here. That would be fun; Nau's goons would find just how dangerous their tunnels had become... Pham felt the old, old enthusiasm rising in him, the rush he always got when the crunch came, when the planning and thought became action. He tucked the gear into his pockets as the plan-of-the-moment grew sharper in his mind. Ezr, we'll win, I promise. We'll win despite Anne...and for her.

Quiet as a fog, he started up the tunnel, his ring light just bright enough for him to see the side tunnels up ahead. It was time to pay Anne a visit.

The Invisible Hand coasted 150 kilometers above the Spiders' world. It was so low that only a limited ground swath of Spiders might directly see them, yet when the time came it would pass precisely over the ordained targets. And whatever the lies they were telling Rita and the others at L1, aboard the Hand the Spider sites were called targets.

Jau Xin sat in the Pilot Manager's chair-once, when the Qeng Ho had owned this ship, it had been the executive officer's-and surveyed the gray curve of the horizon. He had three ziphead pilots on this, but only one was actually monitoring flight. The others were plugged into Bil Phuong's ordnance systems, plotting options. Jau tried to ignore the words he heard from the Captain's chair beside him. Ritser Brughel was enjoying this, giving his boss on Hammerfest a running account of what was happening on the ground.

Brughel paused in his perverse analysis, was mercifully silent for some seconds. Abruptly, the Vice-Podmaster swore. "Sir! What-" Suddenly he was shouting. "Phuong! There's shooting at North Paw. Omo is down and-pus, I've lost my huds link. Phuong!"

Xin turned in his chair, saw Brughel pounding on his console. The man's pale face was flushed. The Vice-Podmaster listened on his private channel for a moment. "But the Podmaster survived? Okay, put Reynolt on then. Put her on!"

Apparently Anne Reyolt was not immediately available. One hundred seconds passed. Two hundred. Brughel steamed and fumed, and even his goons backed away. Jau turned to his own displays, but they flowed by him meaninglessly. This wasn't in Tomas Nau's script.

"Slut! Where have you been? What-" Then Brughel was silent again. He grunted occasionally, but did not interrupt what must have been a monologue. When he spoke again, he sounded more thoughtful than enraged. "I understand. You tell the Podmaster he can count on me."

The long-distance conversation continued through one more exchange, and Jau began to guess what was coming. Jau couldn't help himself; his gaze slid sideways, toward the Vice-Podmaster. Brughel was looking back at him. "Pilot Manager Xin. Our present position?"

"Sir, we're southbound over the ocean, about sixteen hundred kilometers from Southmost."

Brughel glanced over his head, taking in a more precise view coming up on his huds. "So, and I see on this pass we'll overfly the Accord's missile fields as we progress north."

There was a hard lump in Xin's throat. This moment had been inevitable, but I thought I had more time. "...We'll pass some hundreds of kilometers east of the fields, sir."

Brughel gestured dismissively. "A main torch burn would correct that... Phuong, you're tracking this? Yes, we're advancing things by seven Ksec. So? Maybe they will notice us, but it'll be too late to matter. Have your people generate a new ops sequence. Of course it'll mean more direct involvement. Reynolt is diverting all her loose zips to your disposal. Synch 'em up as best you can... Good."

Brughel relaxed on his Qeng Ho Captain's chair, and smiled. "The only drawback to all this is we won't have time to get Pedure out of Southmost. Pedure we had figured out; I think she would have made a good native viceroy... But, you know, for myself I'm not fond of any of them." He saw that Xin was following his words with undisguised horror. "Careful, careful, Pilot Manager. You've been too long with your Qeng Ho friends. Whatever they just tried, it failed. Do you have that straight? The Podmaster survived and still has his resources." He looked beyond Jau, seeing something in his huds. "Synch your pilots with Bil Phuong's zipheads. You'll have concrete numbers in a few seconds. Over Southmost we won't fire any of our own weapons. Instead you'll locate and trigger the short-range rockets the Kindred have offshore, the 'Accord sneak attack' we already had planned. Your real job will come a few hundred seconds later. Your people will take out the Accord's missile fields." That would involve using the small number of rockets and beam weapons that remained to the humans. But those weapons were quite sufficient against the Spiders' more primitive antimissile defenses...and after that, thousands of Kindred missiles would murder cities across half the planet.

"I-" Xin choked, horror-struck. If he didn't do this, they would murder Rita. Brughel would kill Rita and then Jau. But if he followed orders...I know too much.

Brughel watched him intently. It was a look Jau had never seen in Ritser Brughel before...a cool, assessing, almost Nauly look. Brughel cocked his head, and spoke mildly. "You have nothing to fear in following orders. Oh, maybe a mindscrub; you'll lose a little. But we need you, Jau. You and Rita can serve us for many years, a good life. If only you follow orders now."

Before everything blew up, Reynolt had been in the Attic. Pham guessed she'd be there even now, camped in the grouproom with Trud and every bit of comm access she could manage, doing her best to protect and manage her people...and use their combined genius to do Nau's will.

Pham flitted upward through the darkness, easing through tunnels that finally narrowed to less than eighty centimeters across. These had been machine-carved over decades, beginning when Hammerfest's roots were driven into Diamond One. Sometime in the third decade of the Exile, Pham had penetrated the Emergents' architecture programs, and the tunnels-some of them-had simply been lost; other connections had been added. He was betting that not even Anne knew all the places he could go.

At every turning point, he slowed himself with easy hand presses, and flickered his light briefly. Searching, searching. Even without external power, the localizers' capacitors could drive a last, brief computation. With the amplifying receiver he could still get clues-he knew he was high in the Hammerfest tower, on the grouproom side of the structure.

But the nearby localizers were almost exhausted. He drifted around a corner, past what he'd thought was the most likely spot. The walls glittered dim rainbows, unblemished. A few more meters. There! A faint circle etched in the wall of diamond. He coasted up to it and gently touched a control code to the surface. There was a click. Light blazed all around the disk as it turned back, revealing a storeroom beyond. Pham slipped through the opening. There were racks of food rations and toiletries.

He came around the racks, was almost across the room, almost to its more official entrance-when someone opened that door. Pham dove to the side of the doorway, and as the visitor stepped through, he reached out and lightly plucked off his huds. It was Trud Silipan.

"Pham!" Silipan looked more surprised than frightened. "What the devil-do you know, Anne is having a fit about you? She's gone nuts, says you've killed Kal Omo and taken over North Paw." His words guttered to a stop as he realized that Pham's presence here was equally unlikely.

Pham grinned at Silipan, and shut the door behind him. "Oh, the stories are all true, Trud. I've come to take back my fleet."

"Your...fleet." Trud just stared for a moment, fear and wonder playing across his face. "Pus, Pham. What are you on? You look strange." A little adrenaline, a little freedom. Amazing what it can do for you. Silipan shrank before the smile that was growing on Pham's face. "You're crazy, man. You know you can't win. You're trapped here. Give up. Maybe we can pass this off as-as temporary insanity."

Pham shook his head. "I'm here to win, Trud." He raised his little dart gun up where Silipan could see. "And you're going to help. We're going out to the grouproom, and you're going to cut off all ziphead support-"

Silipan brushed irritably at Nuwen's gun hand. "Impossible. There's a critical need for them, supporting the ground op."

"Supporting Nau's Spider-extermination program? All the better to cut them off right now. It should have an interesting effect on the Podmaster's lake, too."

Pham could almost see the Emergent balancing the risks in his mind: Pham Trinli, his old drinking buddy and fellow-braggart, now armed with a debatably effective dart gun-against all the Podmasters' lethal power. "No way, Pham. You got yourself into this, and now you're stuck with it."

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 fizz bar, 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, Naufloated 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?"