Unfortunately, physical isolation was no protection against a mindrot runaway. Runaway was triggered by emotional imbalance in the Focused mind. That meant it could propagate across communications networks, though normally that only happened between closely cooperating zipheads. Back in civilization, runaway was a constant, low-level concern, just another reason for having hot swaps available. Here in the godforsaken nowhere, it was a deadly threat. Ritser had been aware of the runaway almost as quickly as Reynolt—but he couldn't afford to shut down his zips. As usual, Reynolt gave him second-class service, but he managed. They split the snoops into small groups, and ran each separately from the others. The resulting intelligence was fragmented; their logs would require lots of later analysis. But they had missed nothing big...and eventually they would catch up with all the details.
In the first 20Ksec, Ritser lost three snoops to the runaway. He had Omo flush them and keep the others running. He went down to Hammerfest, had a long meeting with Tomas Nau. It looked like Reynolt was going to lose at least six people, including a big hunk of her translation department. The Senior Podmaster was properly impressed with Brughel's lower casualties. "Keep your people online, Ritser. Anne thinks the translators chose sides in that damn Spider debate, that the runaway rot was an escalation of a normal ziphead disagreement. Maybe so, but the debate was well removed from center of the translators' Focus. Once things stabilize, I want you to go over every second of your records, comb it for suspicious events."
After another 60Ksec, Brughel and Nau agreed that the crisis was past, at least for the Security zips. Podsergeant Omo put the snoops back into consultation with Reynolt's people, but via a buffered link. He began a detailed scan of the immediate past. The debacle had indeed blown away Ritser's operation, albeit very briefly. For about one thousand seconds, they had totally lost emission security. Closer investigation showed that nothing had been beamed toward any outside system; their long-term secrecy was intact. Locally, the translators had screamed something past the controllers, but the Spiders had not noticed; not surprising, since the chaotic transmissions would have seemed like transient noise.
In the end, Ritser was forced to conclude that the runway was simply very bad luck. But amid the trivia there were some very interesting tidbits:
Normally Ritser stayed up on theHand 's bridge, where he could maintain a command perspective on the L1 rubble pile and Arachna far beyond. But with Ciret and Marli helping out on Hammerfest, there were just Tan and Kal Omo to run nearly one hundred Security snoops. So today he was mucking around in the guts of the operation with Omo and Tan.
"Vinh has tripped three flags this Watch, Podmaster. Two times during the runaway, as matter of fact."
As he floated in over Omo, Ritser glanced down at the zipheads on Watch. About a third were asleep in their saddles. The rest were immersed in data streams, reviewing the logs, correlating their results with Reynolt's Focused on Hammerfest. "Okay, so what do you have on him?"
"This is camera analysis of Reynolt's lab and a corridor near Podmaster Nau's residence." The scenes flickered by quickly, highlighted where the snoops had seen exceptionable body language.
"Nothing overt?"
Omo's hatchetlike face spread in a humorless smile. "Plenty that would be actionable back home, but not under the current RoE."
"I'll bet." Podmaster Nau's Rules of Enforcement would have been reason for his instant removal anywhere in the Emergency. For more than twenty years, the Senior Podmaster had let the Peddler swine get away with their excesses, perverting law-abiding Followers in the process. It had driven Ritser to distraction at first. Now...Now he could understand. Tomas was right about so many things. They had no margin for further destruction. And letting people talk yielded a lot of information, secrets they could use when the noose was retightened. "So what's different about this time?"
"Analysts Seven and Eight both correlate on the last two events." Seven and Eight were the zipheads at the end of the first row. As children they might have had names, but that was long ago and before they entered the Police Academy. Frivolous names and "Doctor" titles might be used in civilian work, but not in a serious police shop. "Vinh is intent on something that goes beyond his normal anxiety. Look at this head tracking."
It didn't mean anything to Ritser, but then his job was to lead, not to understand forensic details. Omo continued, "He's watching Trinli with great suspicion. It happens again in the corridor by the taxi locks."
