"I'll be glad to take over the job, Podmaster," said Trinli.
But Nau was no fool. He shook his head. "No, you're much more valuable in your overall supervisory role. In fact, I want you and Anne to chat about this. When he comes on-Watch, Ritser will be interested, too. There should be a number of public safety applications for these gadgets."
So Pham Trinli had handed the Emergents even better manacles and chains. For an instant something like chagrined understanding flickered across the old man's face.
Ezr did his best not to talk to anyone for the rest of the day. He had never imagined that he could hate a stupid clown so much. Pham Trinli was no mass murderer, and his devious nature was written large across his every foolish move. But his stupidity had betrayed a secret the enemy had never guessed, a secret that Ezr himself had never known, a secret that others must have taken to their deaths rather than give to Tomas Nau and Ritser Brughel.
Before, he had thought that Nau kept Trinli around for laughs. Now Ezr knew better. And not since that long-ago night in the temp park had Ezr felt so coldly murderous. If there ever came a time when Pham Trinli could have a fatal accident...
After second mess, Ezr stayed in his quarters. His behavior shouldn't be suspicious. The live-music people took over Benny's every day about this time, and jamming was one Qeng Ho custom that Ezr had never enjoyed, even as a listener. Besides, there was plenty of work to catch up on. Some of it didn't even require that he talk to others. He slipped on the new head-up display, and looked at the Fleet Library.
In some sense, the survival of the Fleet Library was Captain Park's greatest failure. Every fleet had elaborate precautions for destroying critical parts of their local library if capture was imminent. Such schemes couldn't be complete. Libraries existed in a distributed form across the ships of their fleet. Pieces would be cached in a thousand nodes depending on the usage of the moment. Individual chips—those damnable localizers—contained extensive maintenance and operations manuals. Yet major databases should have been zeroed in very short order. What was left would have some usefulness, but the capital insights, the terabytes of hard experimental data would be gone—or left only as hardware instantiations, understandable only by painstaking reverse engineering. Somehow that destruction had not happened, even when it was obvious that the Emergent ambush would overwhelm all the ships of Park's fleet. Or maybe Park had acted and there had been off-net nodes or backups that—contrary to all policy—had contained full copies of the library.
Tomas Nau knew a treasure when he saw it. Anne Reynolt's slaves were dissecting the thing with the inhuman precision of the Focused. Sooner or later, they would know every Trader secret. But that would take years; zipheads didn't know where to start. So Nau was using various unFocused staff to wander about the library and report on the big picture. Ezr had spent Msecs at it so far. It was a dicey job, because he had to produce some good results...and at the same time he tried subtly to guide their research away from things that might be immediately useful. He knew he might slip up, and eventually Nau would sense the lack of cooperation. The monster was subtle; more than once Ezr wondered who was using whom.
But today...Pham Trinli had just given away so much.
Ezr forced calmness on himself.Just look at the library. Write somesilly report. That would count as duty time and he wouldn't have to freak out in any visible way. He played with the hand control that came with the new, "sanitized" head-up display. At least it recognized the simpler command chords: the huds seamlessly replaced his natural vision of his cabin with a view of the library's entry layer. As he looked around, the automation tracked his head motion and the images slid past almost as smoothly as if the documents were real objects floating in his room. But...he fiddled with the control. Damn. Almost no customization was possible. They had gutted the interface, or changed it to some Emergent standard. This wasn't much better than ordinary wallpaper!
He reached up to pull the thing from his face, to crumple it.Calmdown. He was still too ticked by Trinli's screwup. Besides, this really was an improvement over wall displays. He smiled for a moment, remembering Gonle Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards.
So what to look at today? Something that would seem natural to Nau, but couldn't give them any more than they already had. Ah, yes, Trinli's super localizers. They'd be sitting in an out-of-the-way niche in some secure section. He followed a couple of threads, the obvious directions. This was a view of the library that no mere apprentice would have. Nau had obtained—in ways that Ezr imagined, and still gave him nightmares—top-level passwords and security parameters. Now Ezr had the same view that Captain Park himself could have had.
