Well, there wouldn't be any more of ihat Dear Papa was history now, and so was the unexplained s.p.a.ce- station collapse that had killed him and left OG Shipping in the hands of its directors until Darnell finished school. And last night's Stemerald debauch was also history-if only he could convince his queasy stomach and pounding head of that!

It wasn't fair that he should suffer like this after what had only been a perfectly reasonable indulgence to celebrate the end of schooling and the start of his new career. A pity neither of the girls had seen fit to continue the celebration in the logical manner. Well, they had two weeks to planetfall; they'd come around and see his at- tractions soon enough. After all, it wasn't as if he had any serious compet.i.tion on this droneship. De Gras- Waldheim was handsome enough, but a cold fish if Darnell had ever seen one. Something frightening about him, with those intense blue eyes burning like dry ice under the stiff Academy haircut. As for the Medoc boy, Bla.s.s or Blaze or whatever his name was, no girl was going to waste time on a kid with a face like a friendly gar- e. No> it would be old Darnell to the rescue again, the n man on board widi the social skills to entertain two lovely ladies all the way to their destination planets around Nyotayajaha.

And he could hear sounds in the central cabin. Was one of the girls up and about already? Darnell sucked in his gut, threw his shoulders as far back as they would go, and glanced at his reflection in the synth- ailoy wall once again. His face wasn't really soft and pufly like that, he told himself; it was a trick of the dis- torted reflection. Made him look middle-aged and flabby and tired. Nonsense. He was the handsome young heir to OG shipping and he was fit to take on anybody or anything....

But not, maybe, that cold fish, Polyon de Gras- Waldheim. Darnell clutched at the doorway and tried to stop his impulsive movement into the central cabin. His legs kept going while his arms tried to haul him back.

"Oh, come on in, OG," Polyon said impatiently, his back to the door. "Don't just cling to the doorframe waving your tentacles like a seasick jellyfish."

Seasick.

Jellyfish.

Darnell gulped down a wave of nausea and reminded himself again that s.p.a.ce travel on a grav- enhanced drone was not like being on an actual moving, swaying, shifting oldstyle sea vessel.

"What are you doing?"

Polyon released the chair controls and spun slowly round to face Darnell, long limbs relaxed as if to em- phasize his comfort in this environment. "Just. ..

playing games," he said with a queer smile. 'Just a few little games to pa.s.s the time."

"What'd you do, crash the s.p.a.cED OUT gameset so badly you lost the screens?"

"Something like that," Polyon agreed. "You can help me start it up again, if you like."

30.

6f 31.

It was the closest thing to a friendly overture Darnel!

had heard from Polyon since they met the previous night. Maybe, he thought forgivingly, maybe the poor guy didn't know how to make friends. Coming from a stiff-backed upper-crust lot like the de Gras- Waldheims, spending his life at military boarding schools, you couldn't expect him to have the savoir vivne and easy social manners that Darnell prided him- self on displaying. Well, he'd help old Polyon out, be his friend on this litde jaunt.

"Sure thing," he said, walking on into the room with a careful soft step that didn't jar his aching head. He sank into one of the cushioned pa.s.senger chairs, "Nothing to it, I used to play this stuff all the time in prep school. Tell you what - if I help you get into the computer, maybe you'll help me get into something else?" He winked laboriously at Polyon.

"What exactly did you have in mind?" The man didn't have a due how to make light conversation.

"Two of us," Darnell explained cheerfully, tapping away at the console keys. "Two of them. The black one is more your size. But I need a strategy to get into the del Parma skirt's pants. Tactics, maneuvers, advance and retreat - Got any suggestions?" Not, Darnell thought, that he really needed any help, but there was nothing like a round of good, bawdy male-to-male bonding talk to cement a friendship. And since Polyon evidently wanted to be friends, Darnell was more than ready to meet him halfway.

" I'm afraid you're on your own there," Polyon said dis- tantly. "I've... never had occasion to study the problem."

He nicked an invisible speck of dust off his pressed sleeve and affected to study the s.p.a.cED OUT screens as Darnell brought them back to fill the walls of the cabin.

The implication was clear; he'd never needed to work out tactics with the ladies. Well, of course not. With the de Gras-Waldheim name and fortune behind him - and that muscle-bound, oversized physique - still, he had no call to sneer at somebody who was just trying to he friendly. Darnell glowered at the console and tapped the commands that would set the game at - hmm, not Level 10, his reflexes weren't quite up to the interactive holowaniors just yet. Level 6. That should be high enough to scramble Polyon's moves and let him see what it was like dealing with an expert "It's a new version," Polyon said in surprise. "I don't remember that asteroid belt.''

Til bet five credits there's a due to the Hidden Hor- rors of Holmdale somewhere in the new asteroids,"

Darnell offered.

"No bet on that. But I'll lay you five credits that I/it's there, I'll find it first. Choose your icon!"

Darnell chose one of the play icons displayed along the bottom of the central screen. He always liked to be Bonecrush, the cyborg monster who stalked the lower tunnels of the labyrinth but occasionally blasted out into s.p.a.ce with his secretly installed jetpacks and per- sonal force shield. Polyon, he noticed with pleasure, was taking the icon for Thingberry the Martian Mage, a wimp of a character if there ever was one. This game should be over in no time.

"So what brings you out to the Nyota system?"

Polyon asked after a few minutes of seemingly idle maneuvering and pointless commands.

Darnell scowled at the screen. How had Thingberry managed to surround two-thirds of the asteroid belt with a charm of impenetrability? Very well, he would let Bonecrush turn around and use his internal jetpacks as a weapon; that should blast through sneaky Thingberry's magic. "Taking up the old inheritance," he replied as he tapped in the commands that would give Bonecrush maximum blasting power. "OG Shipping, you know.

Can't think why old Cousin Wigran moved the firm's 32.

&f 33.

headquarters out to Vega subs.p.a.ce, but I'm sure he'll ex- plain everything when I get there."

"If he can," Polyon agreed. "You have that much faith in him?"

Darnell stealthily maneuvered Bonecrush into range.

That idiot Polyon was looking at him, not at the screen; he could get away with murder if he could keep Polyoris attention away from the game for a few more seconds.

"What d'you mean?" he asked, not really listening for the answer. "Why shouldn't I have faith in Wigran?"

Polyon looked shocked, and for a moment Darnell was afraid he'd noticed Bonecrush's moves on the central game screen. "My dear chap! You mean you haven't heard? Decom it," he cursed in a low vicious tone. "I didn't realize - Look, Darnell, I shouldn't be the one to tell you this. Haven't you been paying atten- tion to the newsbytes from Vega?"

"Management bores me," Darnell told him. "I'll be perfecdy happy to draw the profits from the company and let Cousin Wigran keep running the store." His hands were resting on the key that would activate Bonecrush's jet packs. Any minute now he'd execute a controlled power surge that should blast a hole right through Thingberry's defenses. But he wanted Polyon to be watching in the moment of defeat, not babbling on about some boring accountant's trial in the Vega system.

"Well, I suppose you'd have to know pretty soon anyway," Polyon was saying now. "I hate like h.e.l.l to be the one to tell you, though." He was watching Darnell's face more closely than he'd ever looked at the game screens.

"Tell me what?" For the first time Darnell felt a chill of apprehension creep over him.

"It's all been coming out in the trial," Polyon said.

"That accountant who was skimming his clients'

credits to play Lotto-Roids? OG Shipping was one of his biggest accounts. And your cousin Wigran knew exactly what the fellow was doing. He even helped kim _ for a share in the cash. Together, they've gambled away more than ninety per cent of OG Shipping'5 a.s.sets. I'm afraid all you're going to inherit on Bahati is one over-age AI drone and a bunch of debts."

Darnell's sweaty fingers slipped and punched the power key harder than he'd intended. Bonecrush's jet packs released their maximum thrust. The blast rebounded harmlessly off Thingberry's invisible charm-shield and propelled Bonecrush, too depleted of power to activate his personal force-shield, into the blackness of deep s.p.a.ce. His cyborg body exploded into a million stars of synthalloy debris.

"Wow," Polyon said, finally glancing at the dazzling light effects on the screen. "This is a great game! Will you look at those graphics? What is it, a supernova?"

"Me," said Darnell Overton-Glaxely. A gentleman knew when to bite the bullet. "I owe you five credits."

Blaize Oh, no, not another one!

Nancia briefly shut down all her internal sensors as Blaize Armontillado-Perez y Medoc stirred in his cabin. She had come to the conclusion that her pas- sengers were most bearable when they were sleeping it off. If only she could flood all their cabins with sleepgas and keep them unconscious until they reached the Nyota ya Jaha system.... Nancia caught herself in mid-thought. She was becoming as bad as they were!

How could she even think such a thing? Hadn't she made perfect marks in all her Integrity and Sh.e.l.l Ethics cla.s.ses? She should have been doubly guarded, by family heritage and Academy training, against even imagining such a betrayal of her ideals.

34 fcf There was nothing to stop her from leaving her in- ternal sensors inactive until they reached Nyota ya Jaha, though. Nancia considered this briefly before deciding against it. True, her pa.s.sengers wouldn't notice anything, since they already a.s.sumed she was a droneship programmed to carry them in privacy to their destination. And it was also true that she would rather perform the Singularity transformations that carried them through decomposition s.p.a.ce without the irritating distraction of these ... brats. But she shrank from the idea of spending days, more than a week, in the isolation of s.p.a.ce, with nothing to see but the wheeling stars, no other brain to communicate with - for if she opened a beam to Central, her cousin Polyon, with his propensity for snooping through the ship's computer systems, would be bound to notice the comm activity. Brainships were as human as any softpersons; Nancia knew that it would be unwise to expose herself for so long to the strain of partial sen- sory deprivation.

Besides, she wanted to know what her pa.s.sengers were up to.

When Nancia reactivated the central cabin's sen- sors, Darnell was already stalking down the hall to his cabin and Polyon, lips taut with rage, was about to fol- low him. "I don't care for that name," he told Blaize.

Nancia hastily scanned the cabin's automatic recording system. Blaize had been teasing his cousin by calling him "Polly." Academy records on Polyon de Gras-Waldheim mentioned this nickname as the basis for several vicious fights that had occurred during Polyon's Academy training, including one in which Polyon's opponent was so badly injured that he had to drop out of the officer training program. Witnesses had attested that Polyon went on twisting the boy's bones and listening to them splinter long after his op- ponent was begging for mercy.35.

Following that incident, Polyon's file had been flagged with warning signals that would forever preclude his being a.s.signed to a responsible military post. . * and he had been verbally notified of this decision in an interview with retired General Mack Erricott, Dean of the s.p.a.ce Academy - What was sfo doing? Nancia dosed down all her infor- mation channels momentarily. Where had all this private information come from? She reopened her channels and traced the dataflow. It came through the Net, and she shouldn't have had access to any of this material; it came from the s.p.a.ce Academy's private personnel files. Somehow the Net had responded to her momentary curiosity by opening up material that should have been shielded under the Dean's personal pa.s.sword.

After a moment's confusion, Nancia realized what had happened. Polyon's meddling with the ship's security system had extended to some very sophisti- cated tampering in the Net itself. He had, in effect, defined Nancia as the node of origin for a system con- troller with unlimited powers to access and change files and codes in any computer on the Net. Nancia's instinctive intervention had then made the "System Controller" ident.i.ty unavailable to Polyon himself...

but had left the node definition in place, allowing her access to all the files he had scanned, and a great deal more besides.

Nancia felt as embarra.s.sed as if she'd been caught peeking into an anesthetized cla.s.smate's open sh.e.l.l during synaptic remodeling... the invasion of privacy was that great. / didn't realize what I was doing! She defended herself, and hastily erased the super-user node definition before she could be tempted into look- ing at anybody else's private files.

But she couldn't forget the shocking and disturbing things she'd just read about Polyon. And she was 36.

67 37.

relieved that he'd left the central cabin to Blaize, stalk- ing back to his own cabin in a pose of offended dignity far more impressive than Darnell's pout Blaize looked directly at Nancia's t.i.tanium column and winked. "Bet you thought he was going to beat me up, didn't you?"

Nancia responded without thinking to this, the first direct address she'd received since her pa.s.sengers boarded and she lifted off from Central. "I hope you weren't counting on me to protect you!"

Blaize gave a soft, satisfied chuckle. "Not at all, dear lady. Until this moment I wasn't even sure what - or who - you were." He lifted an imaginary cap and mimed an extravagant bow. "Allow me to introduce myself," he murmured as he straightened again. "Blaize Armontillado-Perez y Medoc. And you?"

It was too late to retreat into the silence that had protected her so for. Nancia gave a mental shrug - no more than a quick flashing of connectors - and decided that she might as well converse with the brat.

She'd been starting to get lonely, anyway; the isolation of deep s.p.a.ce was too great a contrast after her years of comfortable, constant multi-channel input and output with her cla.s.smates in Laboratory Schools. "XN-935,"

Nancia said grudgingly. And then, because the call let- ters seemed inadequate, "Nancia Perez y de Gras."

"A cousin, a veritable cousin!" Blaize crowed with unabashed delight. "So tell me, cousin, what's a nice girl like you doing convoying a rabble of riffraff like us?"

The question was uncomfortably close to Nancia's own opinion of her pa.s.sengers. "How did you know I was a brainship?" she countered.

"The liftoff procedures could have been performed by an AI drone. But somehow I didn't really think the Medoc clan and the rest of our loving families would have sent us off to jaunt through Singularity on auto- matic. Wouldn't be fitting to the dignity of the High Families, y'know, to have a packet of metachips responsible for our safety instead of a human brain."

"You don't have much respect for your family, do you? No wonder they're sending you off to a fringe world. They're probably afraid you'll embarra.s.s them-"

For a moment Blaize's freckled race looked cold and hard and infinitely sad. Then, so quickly that a human eye would hardly have recognized the brief betrayal, he grinned and flashed a salute at Nancia's column.

"Absolutely. Just one minor correction. They're not afraid I'll embarra.s.s them. They're b.l.o.o.d.y sure of it!"

Pulling out one of the padded chairs, he seated himself cross-legged in the middle of the cabin, arms folded, and beamed at Nancia's column as though he hadn't a care in the world. She retrieved the image of his race a moment earlier and projected it on interior s.p.a.ce, comparing the bleak-eyed young man of the record- ing with the smiling boy in the cabin. What could be hurting him so deeply? Against her will, she felt a twinge of sympathy for this spoiled scion, this disgrace to the High Families.

"And do you intend to?" she asked in carefully neutral tones.

"What? Oh-disgrace them?" Blaize shrugged a lit- tle too gracefully. Nancia began to wonder how many of his seemingly casual gestures were rehea.r.s.ed. "No, it's too late now. Sure, I had fantasies when I was a kid.

But I'm a little old for running away now, don't you think?"

"What-to join the circus?"

For another split second, the mobile face before her matched the bleak image she'd stored. "No. The s.p.a.ce Academy. Actually," Blaize said in a voice as carefully neutral as Nancia's own, "I used to think I'd train as a brawn - Don't laugh; it was a kid's idea. But I never 38.

& could imagine anything better than working with a brainship. To fly between the stars, saving lives and worlds, partnered with a living ship to learn the dance of s.p.a.ce...." His voice cracked on the last word. "I told you. Kids have dumb ideas."

"It doesn't seem like such a dumb idea to me," Nan- tia told him. "Why did you give it up? Did somebody tell you brawns have to be six feet tall and built like...

like Polyon de Gras-Waldheim?"

"Give it up!" Blaize echoed. "I didn't give it up. Iran away three times. The first time I actually got into the s.p.a.ce Academy, too. Took the open tests, forged papers saying I was a war orphan, won a scholarship.

It was three weeks before my tutor found me." The momentary, unguarded joy in his face as he remem- bered those weeks wrenched at Nancia's heart. "The second and third times they knew where I'd go; there was a squad of House Medoc private guards waiting for me at the Academy."

"Your family seems to have been rather violently against die idea."

Blaize's mobile, ugly face twisted into a sneer.

"Wouldn't do for folks in our position, y'know. Not quite the thing. My cousin Jillia is in line to be the next Planetary Governor of Kaza-uri, and my buddy Hene- quin - m'father's best friend's son," Blaize explained parenthetically, "is already in charge of the Vega branch of Planetary Technical Aid. A son who's in brawn training doesn't quite match up with those stel- lar accomplishments for after-dinner bragging."

"I wonder if my family feels that way," Nancia said.

Was that why Daddy hadn't made time for her graduation?

"Shouldn't think so. They sent you to Laboratory Schools, didn't they?"

"They didn't," Nancia said, "have many options. I would not have survived a normal birth.**

39.

"Oh. Well. Anyway," Blaize said carefully, "I don't think your branch of the family is quite as sn.o.bbish as ours- And neither one can beat the de Gras-Waldheims for exclusiveness. Polly got to go to the Academy, but he was supposed to turn into a general, not a lowly s.p.a.ce jockey; I can't imagine what he's doing on his way to administer a metachip plant on Shemali. Must have been some scandal at the Academy. I thought I knew all the family gossip, but whatever he got into, they hushed it up exceedingly well. You probably have access to the files, though - or - anyway, I bet you could find out if you wanted to."

"I imagine," Nancia said, "they are in need of his technical expertise." She felt no impulse whatever to share the details of Polyon's Academy problems with this gossipy boy. Didn't the High Families train their softperson children in any kind of discretion? First Polyon, using his computer expertise to hack through security checks and find out the other pa.s.sengers'

secrets, and now Blaize, turning his charm on her to the same end.

"You don't approve of gossip, do you?" Blaize guessed. "All right. Have it your way. You will be a suitably discreet Courier Service brainship and a credit to the family, and I'll be a nice little PTA ad- ministrator on Angalia and try not to disgrace my side of the family, and we can all drift on in boredom forever."

"Planetary Technical Aid isn't so bad," Nancia told him. "My sister Jinevra is an area administrator, and she's only twenty-nine. You could rise rapidly - "

"Fromy4ftgtt&a?" Blaize's eyebrows shot up like red exclamation marks, giving his face a look of comical astonishment. "Dear Cousin Nancia, you really don't pry, do you? If you'd read my file you would know bet- ter than to try and stir up my ambitions for Angalia.

The sum total of civilization there consists of one PTA 40.

fcf 41.

office, one coryrium mine, and a bunch of humanoid natives with the collective IQ of a zucchini. Asmall zuc- chini. It's amazing they even qualify for Planetary Aid; somebody must have filled out the FCF wrong, and whoever later determined that they didn't have ISS forgot to correct the PTA data. The wheels of the bureaucracy grind on and on.... So here I go to An- galia, less than the dust beneath old Henequin's chariot wheels."