Qiwi helped her set the bonsai bubble and its wood stand in brackets beneath the room's main light. "I can get you lots more wood. Gonle really, really wants you to program for meta-crylates. You might want to panel your home with polished wood, like old-time captains did their inner cabins."

Floria looked around her little space, and played along. "I could indeed. Tell her, maybe we can do a deal."

And then Qiwi was standing at the lock's inner door, and pulling down her coverall hood. For a moment, the fear was back in Floria's face. "Be careful, Qiwi."

"I will."

• • •

Qiwi took her taxi through the rest of its stops, inspecting the rockpile, posting problems and changes to the ziphead net. Meantime, her mind raced down scary corridors. It was just as well she had this time to think. If Floria was right, then even with Tomas on her side, this could be very dangerous. Ritser was just into too many things. If he was sabotaging the coldsleep or falsifying death records, then big parts of Tomas's net had been subverted.

Does Ritser suspect that I know?Qiwi glided down across the canyon that separated Diamond Three from Diamond Four. Arachna's blue light shone from directly behind her, illuminating the caves that were the rough interface between the blocks. There was sublimation from some of the water glue. It was too fine to show on the sensor grid, but when she hovered with her face just centimeters from the surface she could see it. Even as she called in the problem, another part of her mind was turning on the deadlier question: Floria was clever enough to sweep her little cabin, even the outside. And Qiwi was very careful with her suit. Tomas had given her permission to disable all its bugs, both official and covert. On the net it was a different story. If Ritser was doing what Floria thought, then very likely he was monitoring even pod communications. It would be tricky to discover anything without tipping him off.

So be very, very careful.She needed an excuse for anything she did now.Ah. The personnel studies that she and Ezr had been assigned. Coasting up from her inspection of the rockpile, it would be reasonable for her to work on that. She put in a low-priority call to Ezr asking for a conference, then downloaded a large block of the Watch and personnel database. The records on Luan would be in there, but they were now cached locally, and her processors were covered by Tomas's own security.

She brought up the bio on Luan Peres. Yes, reported dead in coldsleep. Qiwi flicker-read down through the text. There was lots of jargon, conjecture about how the unit had failed. Qiwi had had years to practice with coldsleep gear, if only as a front-end technician. She could more or less follow the discussion, though it seemed like the florid overkill of a rambling ziphead, what you might get if youasked a Focused person to invent a credible failure.

The taxi floated out of the rockpile's shadow and the sunlight washed away the quiet blues of Arachna-light. The rockpile sunside was naked rock, graphite on diamond. Qiwi dimmed the view and turned back to the report on Luan. It was almost a clean report. It might have fooled her if she hadn't been suspicious or if she hadn't known all the requirements of Emergent doc. Where were the third and fourth crosschecks on the autopsy? Reynolt always wanted her zips to do that; the woman lost what little flexibility she had when it came to ziphead fatalities.

The report was bogus. Tomas would understand that the moment she pointed it out to him.

A chime sounded in her ear. "Ezr, hello." Damn. Her call to him had just been a cover, an excuse to download a big block and look at Luan's records. But here he was. For a moment, he seemed to be sitting next to her in the taxi. Then the image flickered as her huds figured out they couldn't manage the illusion, and settled for putting him in a fixed position pseudo-display. Behind him were the blue-green walls of the Hammerfest attic. He was visiting Trixia, of course.

The picture was more than good enough to show the impatience in his face. "I decided to get right back to you. You know I go off-Watch in sixty Ksec."

"Yes, sorry to bother you. I've been looking over the personnel stats. For that planning committee stuff you and I are stuck with? Anyway, I came up with a question." Her mind raced ahead of her words, searching madly for some issue that would justify this call. Funny how the least attempt at deception always seemed to make life more complicated. She stumbled along for a few sentences, finally came up with a really stupid question about specialist mixing.

Ezr was looking at her a little strangely now. He shrugged. "You're asking about the end of the Exile, Qiwi. Who knows what we'll need when the Spiders are ready for contact. I thought we were going to bring all specialties out of coldsleep then, and run flat out."

"Of course, that's the plan, but there are details—" Qiwi weaseled her way toward credibility. The main thing was just to end the conversation. "—so I'll think about this some more. Let's have a real meeting after you get back on from coldsleep."

Ezr grimaced. "That will be a while. I'm off for fifty Msec." Most of two years.

"What?" That was more than four times as long as his usual off-Watch.

"You know, new faces and all that." There were branches of his Watch tree that had not had much time. Tomas and the manager committee—Qiwi and Ezr included!—had thought everyone should get hands-on time and exposure to the usual training courses.

"You're starting a little early." And 50Msec was longer than she expected.

"Yeah. Well, you have to start someplace." He looked away from the video pov. At Trixia? When he looked back, his tone was less impatient but somehow more urgent. "Look, Qiwi. I'm going to be on ice for a big fifty, and even afterwards I'll be on a low duty cycle for a while." He raised a hand as if to forestall objections. "I'm not complaining! I participated in the decisions myself....But Trixia will be on-Watch all that time. That's longer than she has ever been alone. There'll be nobody to stand up for her."

Qiwi wished she could reach out and comfort him. "No one will harm her, Ezr."

"Yeah, I know. She's toovaluable to harm. Just like your father." Something flickered in his eyes, but it wasn't the usual anger. Poor Ezr was begging her. "They'll keep her body working, they'll keep her moderately clean. But I don't want her hassled any more than she already is. Keep an eye on her, Qiwi. You have real power, at least over small fish like Trud Silipan."

It was the first time Ezr had really asked her for help.

"I'll watch out for her, Ezr," Qiwi said softly. "I promise."

After he rang off, Qiwi sat unmoving for several seconds. Strange that a phone call that was an accident and a scam should have such an impact. But Ezr had always had that effect on her. When she was thirteen, Ezr Vinh had seemed the most wonderful man in the universe—and the only way she could get his attention was by goading him. Such teenage crushes should vape away, right? Occasionally she wondered if the Diem massacre had somehow stunted her soul, trapped her affections as they were in the last innocent days before all the death....Whatever the reason, it felt good that she could do something for him.

Maybe paranoia was contagious. Luan Peres dead. Now Ezr gone for even longer than they had planned.I wonder who actually specified thatWatch change? Qiwi looked back through her cache. The schedule change was nominally from the Watch-manager committee...with Ritser Brughel doing the actual sign-off. That happened often enough; one Podmaster or the other had to sign for all such changes.

Qiwi's taxi continued its slow coast upward. From this distance, the rockpile was a craggy jumble, Diamond Two in sunlight, the glare obscuring all but the brightest stars. It might have been a wilderness scene except for the regular form of the Qeng Ho temp gleaming off to the side. With augmented vision, Qiwi could see the dozens of warehouses of the L1 system. Down in the shade of the rockpile were Hammerfest and the distillery, and the arsenal at L1-A. In the spaces around orbited the temp, the warehouses, the junked and semi-junked starships that had brought them all here. Qiwi used them as a kind of soft auxiliary to the electric jets. It was a well-tended dynamical system, even though it did look like chaos compared to the close mooring of the early Exile.