Brughel riffled through the video index of Vinh's visit to Hammerfest. "Okay. He fought Trinli. He harassed Trud Silipan. Lordy—" Brughel couldn't help laughing. "—heassaulted Tomas Nau's private whore. But you say the security flags are for eye contact and body language?"
Omo shrugged. "The overt behavior fits with the guy's known problems, sir. And it doesn't come under the RoE."
So Qiwi Lisolet got slapped around, right on Tomas's doorstep. Ritser found himself grinning at the irony. All these years, Tomas had fooled the little slut. The periodic mindscrubs had come to be a bright spot in Ritser's life, especially since he saw her reaction to a certain video. Still, he couldn't deny his envy. He, Ritser Brughel, couldn't have maintained a masquerade, even with mindscrubs. Ritser's own women just didn't last. A couple of times a year, he had go back to Tomas and wheedle more playthings out of him. Ritser had used up the most attractive expendables. Sometimes he had a bit of luck, as with Floria Peres. She would have noticed Qiwi's mindscrub for sure; chemical engineer or no, she had to be taken down. But there were limits to such good fortune...and the Exile stretched out years more ahead of him. The thought was dark and familiar, and he resolutely pushed it away.
"Okay. So your point is, Seven and Eight figure that Vinh is hiding something that wasn't in his consciousness before—at least not at this level of intensity."
Back in civilization, there'd have been no problem. They'd just bring the perp in and cut the answers out of him. Here...well, they'd had their chance to do some cutting; they had learned disappointingly little. Too many of the Qeng Ho had effective blocks, and too many couldn't be properly infected with mindrot.
He cycled through the highlighted incidents. "Hmm. Do you suppose he's figured out that Trinli is really Zamle Eng?" The Peddlers were crazy; they tolerated almost any corruption, but had blood hatred for one of their own simply because he traded in flesh. Ritser's lip turned in disgust.Pus.How far we've fallen. Blackmail was a fitting weapon between Podmasters,but simple terror should suffice for people like Pham Trinli. He scanned once more through Omo's evidence. It was really frail. "Sometimes I wonder, maybe we have the trigger threshold set too low on our snoops."
That was something that Omo had suggested before. The podsergeant was too clever to gloat, however. "It's possible, sir. On the other hand, if there weren't questions left for managers to decide, there would be no need for real people." The vision of one Podmaster ruling a universe of Focused was fantasy fiction. "You know what I wish, Podmaster Brughel?"
"What?"
"I wish we could bring those run-alone Qeng Ho localizers aboard Hammerfest. There's something perverse about havingworse security in our own space than we do in the Qeng Ho temp. If these incidents had happened aboard the temp, we would have had Vinh's blood pressure, his heart rate—hell, if the localizers are on the subject's scalp, we'd have EEG. Between the Peddlers' signal processors and our zipheads, we could practically read the subject's bloody mind."
"Yeah, I know." The Qeng Ho localizers were an almost magical improvement over previous standards of law enforcement. There were hundreds of thousands of the millimeter-size devices all through the Peddler temp—probably hundreds in the open areas of Hammerfest since Nau had relaxed the frat rules. All they had to do was reprogram Hammerfest's utility system for pulsed microwave, and the localizers' reach would be instantly extended. They could say goodbye to camera patches and similar clumsy gear. "I'll bring this up again with Podmaster Nau." Anne's programmers had been studying the Peddler localizers for more than two years, futilely searching for hidden gotchas.
In the meantime..."Well, Ezr Vinh is back aboard the temp now, with all the localizer coverage you could dream of." He grinned at Omo. "Divert a couple more zipheads onto him. Let's see how much an intense analysis can show."
Ezr got through the emergency without cracking up again. Regular reports emerged from Hammerfest. The mindrot runaway had been stopped. Xopi Reung and eight other Focused persons had died. Three more were "seriously damaged."But Trixia was marked as "returned to service, undamaged."
