Vinh moaned weakly as they shoved him onto a chair. Nau came over the table to look more closely at the man. It looked like he'd taken a wire-gun nick across the shoulder. It was bloody, but it wasn't spouting. Vinh would live...long enough.

"Pus, that Trinli was fast," Tung said, blabbering with released tension. "All these years he was just a loud old fart and then—bam—he scragged the podsergeant. Scragged him and then got clean away."

"Wouldn't have been clean if this one hadn't gotten in the way." Ciret prodded Vinh's head with the muzzle of his wire-gun. "They were both fast."

Too fast.Nau slipped the huds off his eyes, and stared at them for a moment. Qeng Ho huds, driven by data off the localizer net. He crumpled the huds into a wad, and dug out the fiberphone that Reynolt had insisted upon as backup. "Anne, can you hear me? Did you see what happened?"

"Yes. Trinli was in motion the moment you signaled Kal Omo."

"Heknew. He could hear your side of the conversation." Pestilence! How could Anne detect the subversion and not notice that Trinli had broken into their comm?

"...Yes. I only guessed a part of what he was up to." So the localizers were Trinli's customized weapon. A trap built across millennia.Who am Ifighting?

"Anne. I want you to cut the wireless power to all the localizers." But localizers were the backbone of Plague knew how many critical systems. Localizers maintained the stability of the lake itself. "Inside North Paw, leave the stabilizers on. Have your zipheads manage them directly, over the fiber."

"Done. Things will be rough, but we can manage. What about the ground ops?"

"Get in touch with Ritser. Things are too complicated to be subtle. We have to advance the groundside time line."

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."Ifhe 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 disablingthe 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 feet first. 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 untila 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 forher.

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.

TheInvisible 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 theHand the Spider sites were calledtargets.

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.