"Oh?"

"Yes." Major Quillan looked broodingly at his drink for a moment. "There they sit," he remarked suddenly, "with their stupid plastic faces hanging out! Rows of them. You feed them something you don't understand.

They don't understand it either. n.o.body can tell me they can. But they kick it around and giggle a bit, and out comes some unG.o.dly suggestion."

"So they helped you find me?" she said cautiously. It was clear that the major had strong feelings about computers.

"Oh, sure," he said. "It usually turns out it was a good idea to do what those CCs say. Anything unusual that shows up in the area you're working on gets chunked into the things as a matter of course. We were on the liners. Dawn City reports back a couple of murders. 'Dawn City to the head of the list!' cry the computers. n.o.body asks why. They just plow into the ticket purchase records. And right there are the little Argee thumbprints!"

He looked at Trigger. "My own bet," he said, somewhat accusingly, "was that you were one of those that had just taken off. We didn't know about that ticket reservation."

"What I don't see," Trigger said, changing the subject, "is why two murders should seem so very unusual. There must be quite a few of them, after all."

"True," said Quillan. "But not murders that look like cata.s.sin killings."

"Oh!" she said startled. "Is that what these were?"

"That's what Ship Security thinks."

Trigger frowned. "But what could be the connection--"

Quillan reached across the table and patted her hand. "You've got it!"

he said with approval. "Exactly! No connection. Some day I'm going to walk down those rows and give them each a blast where it will do the most good. It will be worth being broken for."

Trigger said, "I thought that cata.s.sin planet was being guarded."

"It is. It would be very hard to sneak one out nowadays. But somebody's breeding them in the Hub. Just a few. Keeps the price up."

Trigger grimaced uncomfortably. She'd seen recordings of those swift, clever, const.i.tutionally murderous creatures in action. "You say it looked like cata.s.sin killings. They haven't found it?"

"No. But they think they got rid of it. Emptied the air from most of the ship after they surfaced and combed over the rest of it with life detectors. They've got a detector system set up now that would spot a cata.s.sin if it moved twenty feet in any direction."

"Life detectors go haywire out of normal s.p.a.ce, don't they?" she said.

"That's why they surfaced then."

Quillan nodded. "You're a well-informed doll. They're pretty certain it's been sucked into s.p.a.ce or disposed of by its owner, but they'll go on looking till we dive beyond Garth."

"Who got killed?"

"A Rest Warden and a Security officer. In the rest cubicle area. It might have been sent after somebody there. Apparently it ran into the two men and killed them on the spot. The officer got off one shot and that set off the automatic alarms. So p.u.s.s.y cat couldn't finish the job that time."

"It's all sort of gruesome, isn't it?" Trigger said.

"Cata.s.sins are," Quillan agreed. "That's a fact."

Trigger took another sip. She set down her gla.s.s. "There's something else," she said reluctantly.

"Yes?"

"When you said you'd come on board to see I got to Manon, I was thinking none of the people who'd been after me on Maccadon could know I was on the Dawn City. They might though. Quite easily."

"Oh?" said Quillan.

"Yes. You see I made two calls to the ticket office. One from a street ComWeb and one from the bank. If they already had spotted me by that tracer material, they could have had an audio pick-up on me, I suppose."

"I think we'd better suppose it," said Quillan. "You had a tail when you came out of the bank anyway." His glance went past her. "We'll get back to that later. Right now, take a look at that entrance, will you?"

Trigger turned in the direction he'd indicated.

"They do look like they're somebody important," she said. "Do you know them?"

"Some of them. That gentleman who looks like he almost has to be the Dawn City's First Captain really is the Dawn City's First Captain. The lady he's escorting into the lounge is Lyad Ermetyne. The Ermetyne.

You've heard of the Ermetynes?"

"The Ermetyne Wars? Tranest?" Trigger said doubtfully.

"They're the ones. Lyad is the current head of the clan."

The history of Hub systems other than one's own became so involved so rapidly that its detailed study was engaged in only by specialists.

Trigger wasn't one. "Tranest is one of the restricted planets now, isn't it?" she ventured.

"It is. Restriction is supposed to be a handicap. But Tranest is also one of the wealthiest individual worlds in the Hub."

Trigger watched the woman with some interest as the party moved along a dim corridor, followed by the viewer circuit's invisible pick-up. Lyad Ermetyne didn't look more than a few years older than she was herself.

Rather small, slender, with delicately pretty features. She wore something ankle-length and long-sleeved in l.u.s.terless gray with an odd, smoky quality to it.

"Isn't she the empress of Tranest or something of the sort?" Trigger asked.

Quillan shook his head. "They've had no emperors there, technically, since they had to sign their treaty with the Federation. She just owns the planet, that's all."

"What would she be doing, going to Manon?"

"I'd like to know," Quillan said. "The Ermetyne's a lady of many interests. Now--see the plump elderly man just behind her?"

"The ugly one with the big head who sort of keeps blinking?"

"That one. He's Belchik Pluly and--"

"Pluly?" Trigger interrupted. "The Pluly Lines?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Oh--nothing really. I heard--a friend of mine--Pluly's got a yacht out in the Manon System. And a daughter."

Quillan nodded. "Nelauk."

"How did you know?"

"I've met her. Quite a girl, that Nelauk. Only child of Pluly's old age, and he dotes on her. Anyway, he's been on the verge of being black-listed by Grand Commerce off and on through the past three decades. But n.o.body's ever been able to pin anything more culpable on him than that he keeps skimming extremely close to the limits of a large number of laws."