He tapped his fingers angrily. The door slid open, and he floated through into the silent room. The clinic was brightly lit, but the vision behind his eyes was suddenly dark and vacant. He moved cautiously, like a man suddenly struck blind. The localizers from the tunnel, and what he shook out from his clothing, spread out around him, slowly giving him back his vision. He moved quickly to the MRI control table, trying to ignore the absence of vision in the corners and dead spaces. The clinic was one place where the localizers could not survive long-term. When the big magnets were pulsed on, they fried the electronics in the localizers. Trud had taken to vacuuming them out after a magnet-accelerated dustmote had cut his ear.

But Pham Nuwen had no intention of pulsing the magnets, and his little spies would stay alive and well for the time it took him to set his trap. He moved across the room, quickly cataloguing the gear. As always, the clinic was an orderly maze of pale cabinets. Here wireless was not an option. Optical cables and short laser links connected automation to magnets. Superconducting power cables snaked back into areas he couldn't see yet.Ah. His localizers drifted near the controller cabinet. It was set just the way Trud had left it the last time he had been here. Nowadays, Pham spent many Ksecs each Watch with Trud in the clinic. Pham Trinli had never seemed pointedly curious about the workings of the Focus gear, but Trud liked to brag and Pham was gradually learning more and more.

Focus could kill easily enough. Pham floated above the alignment coils. The inner region of the MRI was less than fifty centimeters across, not even big enough for whole-body imaging. But this gear was for the head only, and imaging was only part of the game. It was the bank of high-frequency modulators that made this different from any conventional imagers. Under program control—programs mostly maintained by Anne Reynolt, despite Trud's claims—the modulators could tweak and stimulate the Focus virus in the victim's head. Millimeter by cubic millimeter the mindrot could be orchestrated in their psychoactive secretion. Even done perfectly, the disease had to be retuned every few Msecs, or the ziphead would drift into catatonia or hyperactivity. Small errors could produce dysfunction—about a quarter of Trud's work had to be redone. Moderate errors could easily destroy memory. Large errors could provoke a massive stroke, the victim dying even faster than Xopi Reung had.

Anne Reynolt was due for such a massive cerebral accident the next time she retuned herself.

He'd been gone from the Lake Park for almost one hundred seconds. Jau Xin was taking small groups for rides in the boat. Someone had finally fallen in the lake.Good. That will buy more time.

Pham pulled the hood off the controller box. There were interfaces to the superconductors. Things like that could fail, on rare occasions with no warning. Weaken the switch, tweak the management programs to recognize Reynolt when next she used the gear on herself... .

Since he'd entered the clinic, the active localizers he'd brought with him had spread across the clinic. It was a little like light spreading farther and farther into absolute dark, revealing more and more of the room. He'd set the images at a low priority while he examined the SC switch with nearly microscopic vision.

A flicker of motion.He glimpsed a pants leg passing near one of the background views. Someone was hiding in the dead space behind the cabinets. Pham oriented on the localizers and dived for the open space above the cabinets.

A woman's voice: "Grab a stop and freeze!"

It was Anne Reynolt. She emerged from between the cabinets, just beyond where he could reach. She was holding a pointing device as though it were some kind of weapon.

Reynolt steadied herself on the ceiling and waggled the pointer at him. "Hand over hand, walk yourself back to the wall."

For an instant, Pham teetered on the edge of a frontal attack. The pointer could be a bluff, but even if it were guiding a cannon, what did it matter? The game was up. The only option left was swift and overwhelming violence, here and with the localizers all across Hammerfest.And maybe not... Pham retreated as instructed.

Reynolt came out from behind the cabinets. She hooked a foot under a restraint. The pointer in her hand did not waver. "So. Mr. Pham Trinli. It's nice to finally know." With her free hand, she brushed her hair back from her face. Her huds were clear, and he had a good view into her eyes. There was something strange about her. Her face was as pale and cold as always, but the usual impatience and indifference was overlaid with a kind of triumph, a conscious arrogance. And...there was a smile, faint yet unmistakable, on her lips.

"You set me up, Anne, didn't you?" Back at Nau's lodge, he took another, longer look at what he thought had been Anne Reynolt. It was a patch of wallpaper, lying loosely on a bed. She had blinded the eyes that could get really close, and fooled him with a crude video.

She nodded. "I didn't know tas you, but yes. It's been clear for a long time that someone was manipulating my systems. At first, I thought it was Ritser or Kal Omo, playing political games. You were an outside bet, the fellow who was too often in the middle of things. First you were an old fool, then an old slavemaster in hiding as a fool. Now I see that you are something more, Mr. Trinli. Did you really think you could outsmart the Podmaster's systems forever?"

"I—" Pham's vision swept out of the room, roamed across Lake Park. The party was continuing. Tomas Nau himself and Qiwi had joined Jau Xin on the little sailboat. Pham zoomed in on Nau's face: he was not wearing huds. He was not a man overseeing an ambush.He doesn't know! "I was very afraid I couldn't outsmart his systems forever—you, in particular."

She nodded. "I guessed whoever-it-was would target me. I'm the critical component." She glanced briefly away from him, at the uncovered controller box. "You knew I was retuning in the next Msec, didn't you?"

"Yes."And you need retuning more than I knew. Hope surged in him. She was behaving like a character in an idiot adventure. She hadn't told her boss what she was up to. She probably had no backups. And now she was just floating there, talking!Keep her talking. "I figured I could weaken the SC switches. When you used the device, it would jam high and—"

"—And I'd have a capillary blowout? Very crude, very fatal, Mr. Trinli. But then, you're not clever enough to try real reprogramming, are you?"

"No."How far out of calibration is she? Hit at emotion. "Besides, I wanted you dead. You and Nau and Brughel are the only real monsters here. For now, you're the only one I can reach."

Her smile widened. "You're crazy."

"No,you are. Once upon a time you were a Podmaster just like them. Your problem is you lost. Or don't you remember? The Xevalle clique?"

Her arrogant smile vanished and for a moment her gaze was the usual frowning indifference. Then she was smiling again. "I remember very well. You're right, I was a loser—but tas a century before Xevalle, and I was fighting all the Podmasters." She advanced slowly across the room. Her pointer never wavered from Pham's chest. "The Emergents had invaded Frenk. I was an ancient-lit major at Arnham University....I learned to be other things. For fifteen years we fought them. They had technology, they had Focus. At first, we had numbers. We lost and lost, but we made them pay for every victory. Toward the end we were better-armed, but by then there were so few of us. And still we fought."

The look in her eyes was...joyous. He was hearing the history of Frenk from the other side. "You—you're the Frenkisch Orc!"

Reynolt's smile broadened and she came even nearer, her slim body straightening out of zero-gee crouch. "Yes indeed. The Podmasters wisely decided to rewrite the histories. The ‘Frenkisch Orc' makes a better villain than ‘Anne of Arnham.' Rescuing Frenks from a mutant subspecies makes a better story than massacre and Focus."