"Who?"

"I'm not at liberty to say just now. If all goes well-" Forister broke off and rather fussily adjusted the portable folding shelf where he had stowed his books, tightening the spring-bindings that would keep them in place in case of any rapid ship's movements. "But whether it comes off or not," he said, more slowly, "I won't be here to help. And And I won't have any free time afterwards to visit in this system. I'll be on my way back to Central with you, and once I land there, G.o.d knows what six urgent a.s.signments will be waiting." He looked up, directly into Nancia's primary cabin sensor. "So you see, dear lady, this a.s.signment is no more to my liking than it is to yours. I hope we can sink our differences for the duration-" I won't have any free time afterwards to visit in this system. I'll be on my way back to Central with you, and once I land there, G.o.d knows what six urgent a.s.signments will be waiting." He looked up, directly into Nancia's primary cabin sensor. "So you see, dear lady, this a.s.signment is no more to my liking than it is to yours. I hope we can sink our differences for the duration-"

"Hush." The conversation in Fa.s.sa's cabin had suddenly become very interesting; Nancia didn't want to have to wait and replay it, she wanted to know what was going on right now.

It appeared that Fa.s.sa was trying to plea bargain with information on some of the other young people who'd been involved in that vicious wager. She began by hinting to Sev that she might be able to inform on a whole gang of criminals in the Nyota system if doing so would get her a reduced sentence. Sev, quite properly, told her that he wasn't authorized to make such promises.

"Oh, what the h.e.l.l," Fa.s.sa said wearily at last. "If I'm going down, I won't go alone. You might as well know everything. At least then you'll see that I'm not the worst of the bunch by a long shot."

She began telling Sev all she knew about Darnell Overton-Glaxely and the ways in which he'd worked his illegal Net access, first to bring in shipping bids that were always just a shade lower than those of his compet.i.tors, then to destroy the credit and acquire the stock of any small businesses he felt like adding to his empire.

"All very interesting," Sev told her. "But if Overton-Glaxely is as clever as you say at accessing private Net datastreams, he'll have been clever enough to leave no traces of his taps."

"Oh, he's not clever at all," Fa.s.sa said. "He was taught how to tap into the datastream-"

"By?" Sev prompted gently.

Fa.s.sa shook her head. She had gone rather white about the lips. "It doesn't matter. n.o.body you're likely to catch up with. Not me, if that's what you're thinking; I haven't got that kind of brains."

"I never suspected you had," Sev said, rather too solemnly. Fa.s.sa gave him a suspicious glance. His lips were twitching. She aimed a mock blow at him.

"That's right, insult my intelligence!"

Sev caught her wrist and held it for a long moment while Nancia wondered if it was time to interrupt. At last his fingers relaxed. Fa.s.sa subsided onto her bunk. There was a white ring about her wrist where Sev had held her; she rubbed it absently while she went on talking. "Never mind about the Net, then. There's other ways to prove it. One of the men Darnell ruined found out a little too much about his methods, and Darnell sent him to Summerlands."

At that point Nancia decided that Forister had better hear this too. Whatever she thought of the man as a replacement for her Caleb, he was was a trusted CenDip senior civil servant. He had friends in Summerlands. And he seemed to share her opinion of Dr. bint Hezra-Fong. She piped the input from Fa.s.sa's cabin through her speakers in Forister's cabin. After a moment's stunned silence, Forister sat down amid the piles of antiques on his bunk and listened carefully. a trusted CenDip senior civil servant. He had friends in Summerlands. And he seemed to share her opinion of Dr. bint Hezra-Fong. She piped the input from Fa.s.sa's cabin through her speakers in Forister's cabin. After a moment's stunned silence, Forister sat down amid the piles of antiques on his bunk and listened carefully.

"Darnell thought Alpha would kill the man for him. She'd had a bunch of accidents with the tests she ran on her charity patients; she was getting quite good at faking death certificates with innocent-seeming causes of death. She used to boast about it at our annual meetings. One more wouldn't have been any problem for her. But she didn't kill him. She keeps him so full of Seductron that he doesn't know who he is, and whenever she wants Darnell to do her a favor, she threatens to cut the man's Seductron dosage."

"His name?" Sev demanded.

Fa.s.sa looked down. "I'd like some a.s.surances that you'll see my sentence reduced."

"You know I can't do that," Sev told her.

She twisted her fingers together. "You could lose the records of this last trip, though. Without your testimony and the recordings, there wouldn't be any hard evidence against me." She looked up, eyes brilliant with unshed tears. "Please, Sev? I thought you cared for me a little." Sev? I thought you cared for me a little."

"You were wrong," said Sev in a voice as dead and even as any droneship's artificially generated speech.

"Then what do I have? Why should I give you a d.a.m.ned thing?" Fa.s.sa pounded on the yielding surface of the bunk in frustration. Her fists sank into the plasmaform and left momentary dents that smoothed out as soon as she lifted her hands. "Oh, all right. Go ahead and see me mindwiped, or sent to prison until I'm too old to care," she said wearily. "Why should the others get away with it when my life is ruined? The man's name is Valden Allen Hopkirk, and he used to own Hopkirk Glimware right here on Bahati. Is that enough for you, or would you like his Central Citizen Code as well?"

"Any little thing you can tell us would be much appreciated," said Sev carefully.

"Well, I don't happen to know his CCC, so you're out of luck!" Fa.s.sa snapped. "Wait-wait-there's more."

"There is?"

"Find Hopkirk, and you'll have evidence on Alpha and Darnell both," Fa.s.sa said rapidly. "But there's another one you ought to get. His name's Blaize...."

In the brawn's cabin, Forister lowered his head to rest on his clenched hands. "Blaize Armontillado-Perez y Medoc," he whispered. "No. No."

I've family in the Nyota system...I was going to visit after I left Summerlands...

Nancia cut off the audio transmission to Forister's cabin and shut down her own sensors there. She listened alone while Fa.s.sa babbled out the details of Blaize's felonious career on Angalia; the diverting of PTA shipments, the slave labor and torture of the native population he was supposed to be guarding.

Some day Forister would have to know and face those details, but not yet. She would leave him alone until he requested the recordings of this conversation, and then she would let him listen in privacy.

And so Nancia was the only witness when Fa.s.sa's confessional came to an abrupt ending. After she finished the tale of Blaize's misdeeds, Sev probed her.

"I've looked up the records of that first voyage," he said, almost casually. "There were five of you in it together, weren't there? You, Dr. bint Hezra-Fong, Overton-Glaxely, Armontillado-Perez y Medoc, and one other. Polyon de Gras-Waldheim, newly commissioned from the Academy. What was his part in the wager?"

Fa.s.sa clamped her lips shut and slowly shook her head. "I can't tell you any more," she whispered. "Only-don't let them send me to Shemali. Kill me first. I know you never cared for me, but as one human being to another-kill me first. Please."

"You're wrong in thinking I never cared for you," Sev said after a long silence.

"You said so yourself."

"You asked if I liked you a little," he corrected her. "And I don't. You're vain and self-centered and you may have killed a good man and you've yet to show any interest at all in Caleb's fete. I don't much like you at all."

"Yes, I know."

"Unfortunately," he went on with no change of expression, "like it or not-and believe me, I'm not at all happy about the situation-I do seem to love you. Not," he said almost gently, "that it'll do either of us much good, under the circ.u.mstances. But I did think you ought to know."

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Caleb recovered with amazing speed. Two hours after his arrival at the clinic, forty minutes after Alpha bint Hezra-Fong had a.n.a.lyzed the poisons in his blood and slapped on stimpatches of the appropriate antidotes, the nervous convulsions had stopped. Nancia knew exactly when that happened, because by then she had thought to send Sev Bryley to Summerlands with a contact b.u.t.ton discreetly replacing the top stud in his dress tunic and a second contact b.u.t.ton to dip onto Caleb's hospital gown. While Forister remained on board as a nominal guard for Fa.s.sa, Sev lounged about the public rooms at Summerlands trying to look like a worried friend-or-relative and chatting up the recuperating VIPs. Nancia watched the clinic from two angles: the convulsive shuddering view of a cracked white ceiling, emanating from Caleb's contact b.u.t.ton, and the repet.i.tive views of artificial potted palms and doddering old celebrities to whom Sev talked. On the whole, the potted palms were more valuable than the celebrities; at least they didn't waste Sev's time with their reminiscences of events a century past.

"None of these people know anything about Hopkirk," she whispered through Sev's contact b.u.t.ton.

"I've noticed," he replied as the senile director emeritus of the Bahati Musical College, aged one hundred seventy-five Standard Central Years, tottered away for his noon meds.

"Can't you do something more productive?"

"Give me time. We don't want to be obvious. And stop hissing at me. They'll think I'm talking to myself and hearing voices."

"From what I've seen of these befuddled gentry, that'll make you fit right in."

"Only," said Sev grimly, "if they don't hear the voices too."

Nancia hated to leave him with the last word in an argument, but she was distracted at that moment. Something had happened-or stopped happening. Caleb's sensor b.u.t.ton was no longer transmitting a jiggling view of the cracks on the ceiling; the image was still and perfectly clear.

Not quite still. A regular, gentle motion a.s.sured her that he still breathed.

A moment later, two aides exchanged a flurry of rapid, low-voiced but mainly cheerful comments over Caleb's bed. Nancia gathered that the news was good; his (three-syllable Greek root) was up, his (four-syllable Latin derivation) was down, they were putting him on a regular dosage of (two-word Denebian form), and as soon as he was conscious they were to start him on a physical therapy routine.

She complained to Forister about the jargon.

"Now you know how the rest of the world feels about brains and brawns," he said soothingly. "You know, there are people who think decomposition theory is just a little hard to follow. They accuse us of mystifying the mathematics on purpose."

"Huh. There's nothing mystical about mathematics," Nancia grumbled. "This medical stuff is something else again."

"Why don't you translate the terms and find out what they mean?"

"I didn't have a cla.s.sical education," Nancia told him. "I'm going to buy one when we get back to civilization, though. I want full datahedra of Latin, Greek, and medical terminology. With these new hyperchips I should be able to access the terms almost as fast as a native speaker."

Somebody shouted just out of visual range of Caleb's sensor b.u.t.ton. The view of the hospital ceiling swayed, blurred, and was replaced by gla.s.s windows, green fields, and a white-clothed arm coming from the left. "Here," said a calm, competent voice just before Caleb bent over the permalloy bowl before him and gave up the contents of his last meal.

The contact b.u.t.ton gave Nancia a very clear, sharply detailed close-up view of the results.

After that, though, he recovered his strength with amazing speed. Throughout the day Nancia followed his sessions with the physical therapist. At the same time she tracked Sev while he prowled the hallways of Summerlands Clinic and listened for any sc.r.a.p of information about a patient named Valden Allen Hopkirk.

By mid-afternoon a new aide was able to a.s.sure Caleb that there would be no permanent nerve damage as a result of the attack.

"You're weak, though, and we'll need to retrain some of the nerve pathways; the stuff your s.p.a.ce pirate used was a neural scrambler. Damage is reversible," the aide said briskly, "but I'd advise a prolonged course of therapy. You certainly won't be cleared to act as a brawn for some time. Has your ship been notified?"

"She knows everything that goes on here," said Caleb, placing one finger briefly on the edge of the contact b.u.t.ton.

Nancia got a good look at the aide's face. The man looked thoughtful, perhaps worried. "I...see. And, um, I suppose the b.u.t.ton has a dead-man switch? Some alarm if it's inactivated or removed?"

"Absolutely," Nancia responded through the contact b.u.t.ton before Caleb could tell the truth. Some such arrangement would be a great safeguard for Caleb, and she wished Central had thought of it. But failing that, the illusion of the arrangement might give him some protection. She went on through the tiny speaker, ignoring Caleb's attempts to interrupt her. "Please notify all staff concerned of the arrangement. I would be sorry to have to sound a general alarm just because some ignorant staff member accidentally interfered with my monitoring system."

"That would indeed be...unfortunate," said the aide thoughtfully.

After he left, Caleb said quietly into the contact b.u.t.ton, "That was a lie, Nancia."

"Was it?" Nancia parried. "Do you think you know all all my capabilities? Who's the 'brain' of this partnership?" my capabilities? Who's the 'brain' of this partnership?"

"I see!"

Nancia rather hoped he didn't. At least she'd avoided lying directly to Caleb. That was something...but not enough.

She had never before minded her inability to move about freely on planetary surfaces. Psych Department's testing before she entered brainship training showed that she valued the ability to fly between the stars far more than the limited mobility of planet-bound creatures. "I could have told them that," Nancia responded when the test results were reported to her. "Who wants to roll about on surface when they could have all of deep s.p.a.ce to play in? If I want anything planetside, they can bring it to me at the s.p.a.ceport."

But they couldn't bring her Caleb. And she couldn't go to the Summerlands clinic to watch over him. Nancia could see and hear everything that pa.s.sed within range of those b.u.t.tons. She could even send instructions to the wearers. But she could not act. act. She was reduced to fretting over the slow progress they were making and worrying about the medications being inserted into Caleb's blood stream. She was reduced to fretting over the slow progress they were making and worrying about the medications being inserted into Caleb's blood stream.

"Haven't you found anything yet?" she demanded of Forister. Since Fa.s.sa had spent the day crying quietly in her cabin, Forister interpreted his "guard" duties rather liberally. He was on board and available in case of any escape attempt, but he told Nancia that he saw no reason to waste his time sitting on a hard bench outside Fa.s.sa's cabin door. Instead, he sat before a touchscreen in the central cabin, inserting delicate computer linkages into Alpha's clinic records and scanning for some hint of where she'd put the witness they needed.

Forister straightened and sighed. "I have found," he told her, "four hundred gigamegs of patient charts, containing detailed records of all their medications, treatments, and data readouts."

"Well, then, why don't you just look up Hopkirk and find out what she's done with him?" Nancia demanded.

In response, Forister tapped one finger on the touchscreen and slapped his palm over Nancia's a.n.a.log input. The data he had retrieved was shunted directly into Nancia's conscious memory stores. It felt like having the contents of a medical library injected directly into her skull. Nancia winced, shut down her instinctive read-responses, and opened a minuscule slit of awareness onto a tiny portion of the data.

It was an incomprehensible jumble of medical terminology, packed without regard for paragraphing or s.p.a.cing, with peculiar symbolic codes punctuating the strings of jargon.

She opened another slit and "saw" the same tightly-packed gibberish.

"It's not indexed by patient name," Forister explained. "Names are encoded-for privacy reasons, I suppose. If the data is indexed by anything, it might be on type of treatment. Or it might be based on a hashed list of meds. I really can't find any organizing principle yet. Also," he added, unnecessarily, "it's compressed."

"We know he's being kept quiet by controlled overdoses of Seductron," Nancia said. "Why not...oh." As she spoke, she had been scanning the datastream. There was no mention of Seductron. "Illicit drug," she groaned. "Officially, there's no such treatment. She'll have encoded it as something else."

"I should have taken Latin," Forister nodded. "Capellan seemed so much more useful for a diplomat...Ah, well."

"Can you keep hacking into the records?" Nancia asked. "There might be a clue somewhere else."

Forister looked mildly offended. "Please, dear lady. 'Hacking' is a criminal offense."

"But isn't that what you're doing?"

"I may be temporarily on brawn service," Forister said, "but I am a permanent member of the Central Diplomatic Service. Code G, if that means anything to you. As such, I have diplomatic immunity. Hacking is illegal; whatever I do is not illegal; hence, it's not hacking." He smiled benignly and traced a spiraling path inward from the boundaries of the touchscreen, wiping the previous search and opening a new way into the labyrinth of the Summerlands Clinic records.

"I should have taken should have taken logic, logic," Nancia muttered. "I think there's something wrong with your syllogism. Code G. That means you're a spy spy?" Caleb would never forgive her for this. Consorting with spies, breaking into private records...The fact that she was working as much to save him as to track down criminals wouldn't palliate her offense in his eyes.

"Mmm. You may call me X-39 if you like." Humming to himself, Forister smoothed out the path he had begun and traced a new, more complex pattern on the touchscreen.

"Isn't that rather pointless," Nancia inquired, "seeing that I already know your name?"

"Hmm? Ah, yes-there we go!" Forister chuckled with satisfaction as he opened his access to a new segment of Summerlands Clinic's computer system. "Supremely pointless, like most espionage. Most diplomacy, too, come to think of it. No, we don't use code names. But I've always thought it would be rather fun fun to be known as X-39." to be known as X-39."

"Have you indeed, fungus-brain?" Alpha bint Hezra-Fong muttered from the security of her inner office. "How'd you like to be known as Seductron Test Failure 106 Mark 7? If I'd known who you were-" She bit off the empty threats. She knew now. And if Forister made the mistake of coming back to Summerlands for any reason, she'd have her revenge.

Neither Forister nor Nancia had thought to check Nancia's decks for transmitters-and even if they had, they might not have recognized Alpha's personal spyder, a sliver-thin enhanced metachip device that clung to any permalloy wall and, chameleon-like, mimicked the colors of its surroundings. In all the fuss attendant on getting the wounded brawn into the floatube, Alpha had found it easy enough to leave one of the spyders attached to Nancia's central corridor. From there it picked up any conversation in the cabins, although the voices were distorted by distance and interference.

At the time, Alpha hadn't been exactly sure what instinct prompted her to plant the spyder; she had just felt that the amount of Net communications traffic concerning this particular brainship and brawn suggested they were more important than they looked. Infuriatingly, the datastreams coming from Central over the Net were in a code Alpha had not yet succeeded in breaking, so the spyder was her only source of information.

So far, though, it had proved a remarkably effective tool. Alpha preened herself on her cleverness in dropping one of the expensive spyders where it was most needed. She drummed her fingers on the palmpad of the workstation while she mentally reviewed what she'd done so far and the steps she'd taken to counteract the danger. The rhythm of her fingertips was repeated on the screen as a jagged display of colored lines, breaking and recombining in a hypnotic jazzy dance.

First had come the surprising sound of Fa.s.sa del Parma's voice. While admiring the dramatic range Fa.s.sa put into pleading with her captor, Alpha hadn't been too surprised when the girl rapidly broke down and began spilling what she knew about her compet.i.tors. She'd always felt the del Parma kid didn't have what it took to make it in the big time. Too emotional. She cried in her sleep and then she gloated over her victims. Real success came from being like Alpha or Polyon, cool, unmoved, above feeling triumph or fear, concentrating always on the desired goal.

Fortunately, Fa.s.sa didn't know much; she'd been too stupid to think much beyond her personal concerns. Alpha was willing to bet the little snip had never thought of compiling a dossier on each of her compet.i.tors, with good hard data that could be traded in emergency. All she had were gossip and innuendo and stories from the annual meetings. Blaize was nasty to the natives, Alpha had developed an illicit drug, Darnell was less than totally ethical in his business takeovers.

Hearsay! Without hard evidence to back up the stories, Central would never make charges like these stick, and they were too smart to try. Alpha grinned and slapped her open hand down on the palmpad, jolting the computer into a random display of medical jargon and meaningless symbols mixed with sentences pulled at random from patient reports. She'd prepared that program years ago, as protection against a computer attack like the one Forister was trying now. And to judge from the snippets of conversation between him and Nancia, it was working. They would waste all their energy trying to decipher a code that had no meaning.

And while they worked, Alpha would take steps to deal with the one piece of hard evidence Fa.s.sa had pointed out to them. Her fingers drummed faster; she slapped the palmpad again to enter voice mode.

"Send Baynes and Moss to my office-no, to Test Room Four," she said. Baynes could safely be pulled off the task of watching that brawn for a while; Caleb was too weak to be any danger, and anyway he was protected by his brainship's monitor b.u.t.ton.

Alpha didn't think her office was infested with spyders; she was absolutely certain about Test Room 4, a gleaming permalloy sh.e.l.l with no crack in the walls, no furnishings but the permalloy benches and table. Alpha had commissioned the building of this room out of her profits from the first illicit street sales of Seductron. The official purpose of the lab room was for Alpha's experiments on bioactive agents; the extreme simplicity of its design was to aid in complete sterilization of the chamber after experiments were completed.

It served well enough for these purposes. And the contractor who'd installed nets of electronic impulse chargers behind the permalloy skin, making the room impervious to any known external monitors, had suffered a fatal overdose of Blissto shortly after the completion of the room. Alpha shook her head and sighed with everyone else that she'd never have guessed the man was an addict. And the secret of the room was safe.