So, what did he know about Pham Trinli? In particular, what did he know that had escaped the notice of Nau and Brughel? The fellow had an uncanny ability in hand-to-hand fighting—mugging, more accurately. And he cloaked the ability from the Emergents; he was playing a game with them....And after today, he must know thatVinh knew this.
Maybe Trinli was simply an aging criminal doing his best to blend in and survive. But then what about the localizers? Trinli had revealed their secret to Tomas Nau, and that secret had increased Nau's power a hundredfold. The tiny flecks of automation were everywhere. There on his knuckle—that might be a glint of sweat, but it also might be a localizer. The little glints and flecks could be reporting the position of his arms, some of his fingers, the angle of his head. Nau's snoops could know it all.
Those capabilities were simply not documented in the fleet library, even with top-level passwords. So Pham Trinli knew secrets that went deep in the Qeng Ho past. And very likely what he had revealed to Tomas Nau was just a cover for...what?
Ezr pounded on that question for a few moments, got nowhere. Think about the man. Pham Trinli. He was an old thug. He knew important secretsabove the level of Qeng Ho fleet secrets. Most likely, he had been in at the founding of the modern Qeng Ho, when Pham Nuwen and Sura Vinh and the Council of the Gap had done their work. So Trinli was enormously old in objective years. That was not impossible, nor even excessively rare. Long trading missions could take a Trader across a thousand years of objective time. His parents had had one or two friends who had actually walked on Old Earth. Yet it was highly unlikely any of them had access to the founding layers of Qeng Ho automation.
No, if Trinli was what Ezr's insane reasoning implied, then he would likely be a figure visible in the histories. Who?
Vinh's fingers tapped at the keyboard. His ongoing assignment was a good cover for the questions he wanted to ask. Nau had an insatiable interest in everything Qeng Ho. Vinh was to write him summaries, and propose research tracks for the zipheads. However mellow and diplomatic he might seem, Ezr had long ago realized that Nau was even crazier than Brughel. Nau studied in order to someday rule.
Be careful.The places he really wanted to look must be fully covered by the needs of his report writing. On top of it all, he must keep up a random pattern of truly irrelevant references. Let the snoops try to find his intent in those!
He needed a list: Qeng Ho males, alive at the beginning of the modern Qeng Ho, who were not known to be dead at the time Captain Park's expedition left Triland. The list shrank substantially when he also eliminated those known to be far from this corner of Human Space. It shrank again when he required that they be present at Brisgo Gap. The conjunction of five booleans, the work of a spoken command or a column of keystrokes—but Ezr could not afford such simplicity. Each boolean was part of other searches, in support of things he really needed for the report. The results were scattered across pages of analysis, a name here, a name there. The orrery floating by the ceiling showed less than 15Ksec remaining before the walls of his quarters would begin to glow dawnlight...but he had his list. Did it mean anything? A handful of names, some pale and improbable. The booleans themselves were very hazy. The Qeng Ho interstellar net was an enormous thing, in a sense the largest structure in the histories of Humankind. But it was all out of date, by years or centuries. And even the Qeng Ho sometimes lied among themselves, especially where the distances were short and confusion could give commercial advantage. A handful of names. How many and who? Even scanning the list was painstakingly slow, else the hidden watchers would surely notice. Some names he recognized: Tran Vinh.21, that was Sura Vinh's g'grandson and the male-side founder of Ezr's own branch of the Vinh Family; King Xen.03, Sura's chief armsman at Brisgo Gap. Xen could not have been Trinli. He was just over 120 centimeters tall, and nearly as wide. Other names belonged to people who had never been famous. Jung, Trap, Park...Park?
