Gonle Fong had lived her whole life by that principle. The mission to the OnOff star had been a long shot, the sort of thing that appealed mainly to scientists. But Gonle had seen angles. Then had come the Emergent ambush, and the long shot had been turned into servitude and exile. A prison run by thugs. But even then there was an angle. For almost twenty years of her life she had played the angles and prospered—if only by the standards of this dump. Now things were changing. Jau Xin had been gone for more than four days, at least since the beginning of her current Watch. At first the rumor was that he and Rita had been unofficially moved to Watch tree C, and that they were still in coldsleep. That screwed some of the programming deals she had planned with Rita—and it was also as unusual as hell. Then Trinli reported that two pilot zipheads were missing from the Hammerfest Attic. So. Rita might still be on ice, but Jau Xin and his zipheads were...elsewhere. The rumors grew from there: Jau was on an expedition to the dead sun, Jau was landing on the Spider world.
