Pham watched the timer that hung at the back of his vision. In twenty seconds, he would depart in the other direction. The localizers had fed two thousand seconds of carefully planned lies back to Brughel's snoops. Later, Pham would check it over for consistency with what was really going on throughout the rest of the temp. There would be some patching necessary, no doubt. This kind of meeting would have been easy if the enemy had been ordinary analysts. With ziphead snoops, covering your ass was a major exercise in paranoia.

Ten seconds. He stared into the dimness at where Ezr Vinh had just disappeared. Pham Nuwen had a lifetime of experience in diplomacy and deception.So why the bloody hell wasn't I smoother with the kid? The ghost of Sura Vinh seemed suddenly very close, and she was laughing.

• • •

"You know, we really need to get localizers aboard Hammerfest." The request had become a ritual at the beginning of Ritser Brughel's security briefings. Today, maybe Ritser was in for a surprise.

"Anne's people haven't finished their evaluation."

The Vice-Podmaster leaned forward. Over the years, Ritser had changed more than most. Nowadays, he was on-Watch almost fifty percent, but he was also making heavy use of medical support and the Hammerfest gym. He actually looked healthier than he had during the early years. And somewhere along the way, he had learned to satisfy his...needs...without producing an unending stream of dead zipheads. He had grown to be a dependable Podmaster. "Have you seen Reynolt's latest report, sir?"

"Yes. She's saying five more years." Anne's search for security holes in the Peddler localizers was close to impossible. In the early years, Tomas had been more hopeful. After all, the Qeng Ho security hackers had had no ziphead support. But the quagmire of Qeng Ho software was almost eight thousand years deep. Every year, Anne's zipheads pushed back their deadline for certainty another year or two. And now this latest report.

"Five more years, sir. She might as well be saying ‘never.' We both know how unlikely it is that these localizers are a danger. My zipheads have been using them for twelve years on the temp and in the junked starships. My zips aren't programmer specialists, but I'll tell you, in all that time the localizers have come up as clean as anything Qeng Ho. These gadgets are so useful, sir. Nothing gets past them.Not using them has its own risks."

"Such as?"

Nau saw the other's faint start of surprise; this was more encouragement than Ritser had received in some time. "Um. Such as the things we miss because we aren't using them. Let's just look at the current briefing." There followed a not-too-relevant discourse on all the recent security concerns: Gonle Fong's attempts to acquire automation for her black-market farms; the perverse affection people of all factions had developed for the Spiders—a desirable sublimation, but a potential problem when the time for real action finally arrived; the proper level for Anne's paranoia. "I know you monitor her, sir, but I think she's drifting. It's not just this fixation about system trapdoors. She's become significantly more possessive of ‘her' zipheads."

"It's possible I've tuned her too edgy." Anne's suspicions about sabotaged zipheads were totally amorphous, quite unlike her usual analytical precision. "But what does that have to do with enabling localizers in Hammerfest?"

"With localizer support in Hammerfest, my snoops could do constant, fine-grain analysis—correlate the net traffic with exactly what is happening physically. It's...it's a scandal that our weakest security is in the place where we need the strongest."

"Hmm." He looked back into Ritser's eyes. As a child, Tomas Nau had learned an important rule: Whatever else, never lie to yourself. Throughout history, self-deception had ruined great men from Helmun Dire to Pham Nuwen. Be honest: He reallyreally wanted the lake that Qiwi had shown him under Hammerfest. With such a park, he would have made something of this squalor, a splendor that the Qeng Ho rarely exceeded even in civilized systems. All that was no excuse to break security—but maybe his self-denial was itself making things worse.Take a different tack: Whoappears to be pushing this? Ritser Brughel was awfully enthusiastic about it. He must not be underestimated. Less directly, Qiwi had created this dilemma: "What about Qiwi Lisolet, Ritser? What do your analysts say about her?"

Something glittered in Ritser's eyes. He still held a homicidal hatred for Qiwi. "We both know how fast she can twig the truth—close surveillance is more important than ever. But at the moment, she's absolutely, totally clean. She doesn't love you, but her admiration for you is nearly as strong as love. She is a masterpiece, sir."

Qiwi was twigging about every other Watch now. But her last scrubbing was very recent—and extending the localizer coverage would keep her under an even tighter watch. Nau thought it over for a moment more, then nodded. "Okay, Vice-Podmaster, let's bring the localizers to Hammerfest."

Of course, the Qeng Ho localizers were already aboard Hammerfest. The dustlike motes spread on air currents, stuck to clothes and hair and even skin. They were ubiquitous throughout all inhabited spaces around the rockpile.

Ubiquitous they might be, but without power the localizers were harmless pieces of metallic glass. Now Anne's people reprogrammed Hammerfest's cable spines—and extended them into the newly dug caves beneath. Now, ten times a second, microwaves pulsed in every open space. The energy was far below biological-damage thresholds, so low that it didn't interfere with the other utilities in place. The Qeng Ho localizers didn't need much power, just enough to run their tiny sensors and communicate with their nearest neighbors. Ten Ksec after the microwave pulses were turned on, Ritser reported that the net had stabilized and was providing good data. Millions of processors, scattered across a diameter of four hundred meters. Each was scarcely more powerful than a Dawn Age computer. In principle, they were the most powerful computer net at L1.

In four days, Qiwi finished digging out the cave, and emplaced the wave servos. Her father was already brewing soil on the uplands. The water would come last, but it would come.

After the fact, Nau wondered how they had managed without the localizers all this time. Ritser Brughel had been absolutely correct. Before, their security had been all but blind in Hammerfest. Before, the Qeng Ho temp had in fact been a safer place for secure operations. Nau supervised Brughel and his snoops in a thorough, many-day sweep of all Hammerfest, and then of the starships and the warehouse cloud. He even broke with tradition and ran the localizers for 100Ksec in the L1-A arsenal vault. It was like shining a spotlight into dark places. They found and closed dozens of security lapses...and found not a single trace of subversion. Altogether, the experience was a wonderful confidence builder, as when you check for house parasites, find none, but also see where to put poison and barriers against future infestation.

And now, Tomas Nau had greater knowledge of his own domain than any Podmaster in Emergent history. Ritser's snoops, using the localizers, could give Nau the location and emotional state—even cognitive state—of anyone in Hammerfest. After a time, he realized that there were experiments he should have undertaken long before.

Ezr Vinh. Maybe something more could be done with him. Nau studied the fellow's biography again. At the next briefing, he was ready. This was Vinh's standard meeting time. It was just the two of them, but by this time the Peddler was very used to the interaction. Vinh showed up at Nau's office to discuss his summaries for the last ten days, the progress he was seeing with the ziphead groups in their understanding of the Spider world.