"Stimpad! Drug stores!" Alpha snapped over her shoulder. Nancia silently extruded the required equipment from her medtech drawers. Alpha's slim dark fingers darted among the ampules supplied and loaded the pad with a combination of drugs. Nancia recognized a general nervous stimulant, a breathing regulator, and at least two kinds of anesthetic.
"Er—are you sure those will work all right in combination?" she asked apologetically. Alpha was the doctor. But Nancia had been rigorously trained in the minor first aid and holding techniques she might expect to need until she could get an ailing brawn or passenger to a clinic; and one thing her instructor had been very, very firm about was the danger of unexpected side-effects from mixing two or more drugs.
"You wanted an expert," Alpha snapped, "you got one. I've got to stabilize his condition before I can treat the superficial lesions and check for internal damage. This should keep him breathing . . . if anything will. We haven't a lot of time to waste, you know."
Quietly, Fassa del Parma slid between Alpha and Sev's unconscious body, now prone on the padded examining bench that slid out of one wall in the narrow medtech chamber. "If the combination is harmless," she said, "try it on me first."
"Don't be silly," Alpha sneered, "you've less than half his body mass. You'll be out of it for two days if I give you the same dose I've prepared for Bryley!"
"Then just use half the stimpad," Fassa suggested. She pulled one sleeve down over her shoulder, exposing an expanse of creamy white skin, naked and vulnerable. "Here. I won't move. But I want to see a demonstration before you stick anything into . . . Sev." She gulped on his name, but otherwise her composure was unbroken.
Nancia, who alone had the luxury of viewing the scene from several angles, thought she saw Sev's eyelids flutter at the sound of Fassa's voice. Neither of the young women noticed; they were too intent on one another. From the door, Micaya Questar-Benn watched in concern. Behind her, Forister glanced up at one of Nancia's hall sensors. "Time to intervene?" he mouthed soundlessly.
"Wait a minute," Nancia whispered back, the merest thread of sound.
Alpha stared at Fassa's calm face and the exposed shoulder she was offering. Her own face worked angrily. "I ought to take you up on it," she said, "you interfering dolt. Always were soft on men, weren't you? All right, then!" She tossed the loaded stimpad in the general direction of a disposal chute; Nancia extended the chute's wing-edges and caught the thing before it slid down into the recycling chamber. She wanted to have an independent lab analyze the first mix when they got to a civilized planet.
Alpha prepared a second stimpad loaded with nothing more than a common stimulant. "Happier with this?" she asked the air, brows raised sarcastically.
"Yes, thank you," said Nancia and Fassa simultaneously. But Fassa still insisted that Alpha inject her with a sample of each medication she used to treat Sev.
"You're a fool," Alpha muttered, too low for General Questar-Benn to hear; Nancia had to amplify her audio sensors to catch the thread of speech. Alpha bent over Sev as she spoke, swabbing with short vicious strokes at the acid sores on his arms and legs. "He was in bad enough shape . . . if he'd never waked up, there'd be that much less evidence against you and me both. Do you feel that grateful to him for doing his best to put you in prison?"
"I've already killed once," Fassa said. "That's enough for me. What's that?"
"Antibiotic spray. Relax," Alpha told her. "We had our chance to get rid of some evidence, you blew it, it's too late now. Got that freak of a general and the old fart brawn peering over our shoulders, ready to slap me with a malpractice suit on top of everything else. I'll do my best to patch your detective up for you—and my best," she added with simple pride that was quite undiminished by her criminal record, "my best, Fassa dear, is very good indeed."
It was, too. Within the hour Sev was reclining on pillows, sipping camtea loaded with so much sugar and chalker that it was hardly recognizable, and explaining to Forister and Micaya the extent of what he'd uncovered on Shemali and why he'd been in such desperate straits when Nancia landed.
"I made a few mistakes," he admitted with a grimace. "Disguising myself as a prisoner on an incoming transport seemed like the only way to slip onto Shemali unnoticed. It worked, too. But there were a few things I hadn't counted on after that."
Sev had expected his faked "prison" records, showing expertise in metachip mathematics and computer network operation, to earn him a prison job somewhere in the administration, where he'd have a chance to poke around in Polyon's records and find what he was looking for. The position he was assigned to looked promising—but as soon as he started his search, everything had gone wrong.
"Ah—you didn't say exactly what you were looking for on Shemali," Forister hinted courteously.
Sev took a long gulp of his scalding camtea, coughed, gasped, and lay back looking a little weaker. "Not important. Important thing is, more going on than you can guess from outside. Don't have it all myself . . . but enough. . . ."
Polyon's entire computer system was laced with coded traps and alarms; the first time Sev tried to access secure data, Polyon and his trusties were alerted and caught him in the act before he'd more than downloaded a handful of innocuous records. Sev then showed them his Central Worlds pass and explained that he was on an investigative mission having nothing to do with Polyon or Shemali.
"They didn't believe me," he sighed. "Even though it happened to be true."
"Then what were you doing?" Micaya Questar-Benn demanded.
"Later." Sev went on with his story. The trusties had beaten him up, stripped him, located and disabled the thin sliver of spyderplate which he'd meant to use as a distress beacon to Nancia in case he got into trouble. "Those things are supposed to start emitting an all-frequencies distress signal hooking into the Net if they're damaged," Sev complained. "So at first I wasn't too worried. But then when you didn't come, and it got to be two days, I thought I might be on my own."
"De Gras-Waldheim must know some way to disable them," Forister nodded.
"Reasonable," Nancia put in from the speaker. "He invented them. They're essentially single-purpose hyperchips—and nobody knows more about hyperchips than Polyon."
Sev's next discovery was that Polyon had stepped up the new plants' production of hyperchips by ignoring all safety precautions. Sent to the hyperchip burnoff lines, where prisoners' life expectancy amid the clouds of nerve-destroying gas could be measured in days rather than years, Sev had resolved to make a break for freedom when the first ship touched down on Shemali—especially when he recognized the slim lines of Nancia's Courier Service hull behind the disguising frieze of OG Shipping logos and mauve stripes. The escape hadn't been too difficult; all the other prisoners had been terrorized out of even thinking about escape, and the guards were lazy and careless and unwilling to spend much time in the burnoff rooms.
"And besides," finished Forister with a grin, "nobody would expect a prisoner on the run to go to an OG Shipping drone for help. Nancia, your paint job has served us well. I don't suppose you'd consider keeping it after this is over?"
"Most certainly not!" Nancia told him. "And it wouldn't work, anyway. When we've finished in the Nyota system, there won't be any more OG Shipping. But—what do we do now?"
Sev's story had demonstrated enough irregularities to justify arresting Polyon twice over. But he was just one man, with no datacordings or computer records to exhibit in proof of his story. If they took Polyon away now without making sure of their evidence, Sev predicted that Shemali would be cleaned up by the time they got back.
"Impossible," said Forister with feeling.
Sev nodded weakly. "Not the planet's surface, I grant you. But you can be sure there'll be nothing inside the factories for an investigative committee to quarrel with. It'll all be clean assembly lines, strict safety features."
"And the prisoners who've already been damaged by exposure to acids and gases?"
"I don't think," said Sev somberly, "that any of them will be able to testify by that time."
"Then we'll have to go down now and get the evidence," Forister said.
Sev shook his head. "Won't work. He's clever—there's a VIP tour arranged—the disfigured prisoners and the dangerous work lines are all kept well out of sight. Mostly at the secondary plants hidden backplanet. I know how to find one of the worst plants. I was there. But without me, he'll whisk you from one end of the central prison factory to the other, and you won't see anything, and every time you try to turn around there'll be six guards in your way. I'll have to go with you." He tried to raise himself from the pillows, started coughing and fell back again.
"You can't!" Fassa exclaimed.
"May have to," said Micaya Questar-Benn. "Duty." She and Sev nodded at one another. "You two," she jerked her head at Fassa and Alpha—"back to your cabins now. Nothing to do with you—shouldn't have let you hear this much."
"Wait!" Fassa cried as Forister took her by the arm. "There has to be another way. It won't work, taking Sev with you, can't you see that? Even if he were stronger, the sight of his face will warn Polyon at once that there's something wrong. None of you—none of us will get away alive."
"Oh, come now," said Forister gently. "Your friend can't be that dangerous."
Fassa's face hardened. "If you don't believe me, ask the others. Alpha?"
Alpha bint Hezra-Fong nodded once, reluctantly.
Fassa looked up at the room sensor. "Nancia, can you connect us with Blaize and Darnell? Just for a moment?"
Both men agreed with Fassa's assessment of the situation.
"Then what can we do?" Forister demanded. "Damn it, I'm not going to turn tail and run off-planet for fear of some spoiled High Families brat who's got hold of some dangerous toys!"
"I think," Fassa said slowly, "that you're going to use me." She was very pale. "Take Alpha back to her cabin, and I'll explain what I think we can do." She looked apologetically at Alpha.
"Traitor! When Polyon finds out—"
Fassa's lips were pinched. She was not pretty at all, now. But she was almost beautiful, in a cold remote way. "I'll have to take that chance, won't I?"
"Better you than me," Alpha said. She turned to go. "All right. Lock me up. I don't even want to hear this plan. Maybe he won't hold it against me, if I'm not even here when you discuss it." She didn't sound too hopeful of that.
When Fassa explained her plan, there was a brief silence while Forister, Nancia and Micaya all thought it over.
"You think he'll fall for it?" Forister queried.
"He thinks Nancia is an OG drone," Fassa pointed out. "He believes her passengers cremated Sev for being a nuisance; if he hadn't swallowed that story, believe me, we'd be hearing from him by now." She gave them a strained smile. "Murderers in the escort of OG shipping—what better credentials could you have? And with me to front the introductions—"
"I won't let you!" Sev said hoarsely.
"Fassa stays on board Nancia," Micaya interrupted. "That's understood." She looked at the girl. "No offense, Fassa. But from the ship, we can monitor what you say. And I think you'd better wear these." She bent over briefly, fiddled with the prosthesis replacing her left leg, and straightened with two lengths of shining, thread-fine wire. "Hold out your wrists."
Fassa obeyed and Micaya encircled each wrist with a length of the wire. Where she twisted the ends shut, the wires seemed to collapse and seal invisibly upon themselves.
"Tanglefield? Is that really necessary?"
Micaya nodded. "Security measure, no more. Field won't be activated unless we run into trouble on Shemali. Clear, Nancia?"
"Affirmed."
Micaya touched her synthetic arm. "I've got a portable tanglefield generator built in here," she told Forister. "Might come in handy on Shemali. Want some wires?"
Forister took a handful of the gleaming wires and regarded them dubiously. "I prefer to solve my problems more elegantly than this."
"Me, too." Micaya tugged her dark green pants leg down over the prosthesis. "Isn't always possible, though. Everybody tells me there'll be terrible political complications if we harm a hair on the head of this High Families brat. So . . ." She patted her prosthetic leg again and straightened. "I've stashed the needler. Agree with you, taking him out straightaway would be simpler, but you insisted on doing this by the book."
"That wasn't," Forister said, "quite what I meant by an elegant solution."
Micaya regarded him with a hint of amusement on her solemn, dark face. "Know it. Usually is the most 'elegant' way, though. Leave little tyrants to run loose, they grow up into big tyrants. Then you get the Capellan mess, or something like. Wars," she pointed out, "aren't elegant." She nodded once to Fassa, by way of apology. "Understand, not accusing you of treachery, just not taking chances. Want you to be warned—"
"That a secret signal to Polyon will do me more harm than good," Fassa finished calmly. "You don't trust me. That's all right. I wouldn't trust me, either."
She was white to the lips now, and her hands were shaking, but she led the way from the medtech room without pausing.
Nancia could see that Sev was fretting enough to damage himself by trying to go after them, so she switched displays to give him visual and auditory sensor taps to the main cabin.
Fassa was still pale when Nancia initiated the signal sequence that would open a comm link with planetside authorities, but she managed the promised introductions with perfect composure. For Polyon's benefit Forister and Micaya became Forrest Perez and Qualia Benton, a pair of potential hyperchip customers with cash to invest in the operation. She hinted delicately that "Qualia Benton" was really a high-ranking general from Central, and Micaya started forward to stop her. Forister laid one hand on Micaya's arm. "Trust the young lady, Mic," he murmured. "She has—er—more experience in this sort of thing than you or I."
So it proved. Far from being alarmed by Micaya's military standing, Polyon accepted her presence with Fassa, on an OG ship, as proof that she was as corrupt as his friends. And he was clearly delighted to have made the contact. Within minutes he was arranging to meet Fassa's "friends" and give them a tour of the newest hyperchip plant.
"I don't know why, but Polyon's always been eager to get more hyperchips sold to the military," Fassa told the others after she cut the contact. "It's not the money, either; he offered Space Academy a cut rate once, but the Ration Board stopped him. I knew your rank would be the thing to draw him in, Micaya. A back door into the military supply system is Polyon's dream."
"I suppose he wants to impress his old teachers and classmates by making sure they all use his inventions," Forister surmised.
Nancia was confused. "But surely he doesn't imagine that selling hyperchips on the black market is the way to high standing in the Academy?"
All three softpersons laughed tolerantly, and Nancia heard a weak chuckle from the sensor link to the medtech cabin where Sev rested. "Investigate the sources of a few High Families fortunes some time, Nancia," Sev recommended to her. "Money washes clean of most any taint—and more rapidly than you'd believe possible."
"Not," Nancia said, "in the Academy. And not in House Perez y de Gras, either."
Nancia fussed over Forister and Micaya until the last minute, fitting them out with contact buttons, spyderplates, and every other remote protection device she could think of. "I don't know what good you think this will do," Forister complained. "De Gras-Waldheim disabled Sev's spyderplate without alerting anybody, didn't he?"
"Sev didn't have me monitoring him," Nancia pointed out.
She should have confined Fassa to her cabin before the other two left, but she didn't have the heart to. "Somebody should stay with Sev," Fassa pleaded.
"Oh, let the child stay with him," Forister put in unexpectedly. "She's not worth much as a hostage anyway. If even half of what Sev told us about the hyperchip factory conditions is true, Polyon de Gras-Waldheim is a murderer a dozen times over who'd think nothing of sacrificing a ship full of his former friends."
Fassa nodded. "Yes, that's about right. Except—I wouldn't say he'd 'think nothing of it.' He'd probably enjoy it."
"Why didn't any of you tell us about Polyon before this?" Nancia demanded. "You were all babbling your stupid heads off, pointing the finger at one another to get some credit for your own plea bargains, and you never warned us about Polyon."
"Afraid to," Fassa said sadly.
"So afraid that you let Sev go off to Shemali without a word of warning? I'd never have let him go unmonitored if I'd guessed."
"I didn't know Sev had gone to Shemali," Fassa defended herself. "Nobody told me anything. I didn't even know he wasn't on board when we left Bahati. All I knew was that he didn't come to see me again, and I thought, I thought . . . and quite right, too; why should he bother with someone like me?" Tears filled her eyes; Nancia thought that for once they were genuine.
"Fassa del Parma, you are a prime idiot!" Sev's weary, hoarse whisper startled all of them; Nancia had forgotten that she'd left the connections between the main cabin and the medtech room wide open. "Get in here and hold my hand and smooth my fevered brow. I'm an injured man. I need attention."
"Call Alpha. She's a doctor," Fassa gulped.
"I want you. Now are you coming, or do I have to get up and get you?"
Fassa fled. And Nancia watched, satisfied, and feeling only a little bit like an eavesdropper, as she burst through the door of the medtech room. Hadn't Sev given her explicit instructions to keep full sensors open whenever he was with Fassa del Parma?
Those two were too wrapped up in each other for Fassa to pose any danger to anybody. All the same, Nancia kept those sensors open while she concentrated most of her attention on the images and sounds coming in from Forister's and Micaya's contact buttons. Polyon was losing no time; he'd met them on the landing field in a flyer that swooped directly to the newest hyperchip production facility, a squat featureless building set in a valley that might have been beautiful before Polyon's construction teams sliced through the earth and the waste products from his factory killed off the trees. Now the building stood alone at the top of a sloping hill ringed round by stagnant, poisonous-looking waters and the broken stumps of dead trees. Nancia felt her sensors contracting in repulsion at the image.
"General, can you handle this flyer?" she murmured through Micaya's contact button.
"I'm glad to see you have such up-to-date equipment, de Gras," Micaya said loudly for Nancia's benefit. "I tested the prototype versions of this flyer recently, but I had no idea the model was in general distribution already."
Good. Micaya would be able to bring the three of them back. Nancia listened in on Sev's and Fassa's conversation while Polyon landed the flyer and took Forister and Micaya into the factory.
"You think too much," Sev was saying firmly to Fassa. "I meant what I told you before, and I still mean it. You idiot, I went to Shemali on your account!"
"On my account?" Fassa echoed, sounding as if she was unable to think at all.
Sev nodded. "Here I'd been pacing Nancia's corridors every night, trying to think out a way to save you, and then Darnell gave me a clue. He said you'd contracted to build a hyperchip factory for Polyon, and that when the original building collapsed you replaced it free of charge. I thought if I could prove that, your lawyer might argue that you never intended to do substandard work—that any problems with your buildings were the result of incompetence, of sending a young girl to manage a business she was unfamiliar with—and that he could prove it by demonstrating how willingly you'd made restitution when a problem was brought to your attention."
Fassa smiled through her tears. "It's a lovely, lovely argument, Sev. Unfortunately, not a word of that is true. I am," said Fassa, "or rather, I was an extremely competent contractor." She sniffed. "Damn Daddy. He accidentally sent me into a business I had a real talent for."
"That being the case," said Sev softly, "why the hell couldn't you just be a contractor, instead of slinking around in those dresses that kept falling off your shoulders and driving middle-aged men crazy?"
Fassa's face hardened. "Ask Daddy." She tried to turn away, but Sev had hold of both her hands.
"I guessed some time ago," he said. "And . . . I've been checking old gossipbytes. Was that why your mother killed herself?"
Fassa nodded. Tears were streaming down her face unchecked. "Well, then. You won't want to have anything more to do with me. I understand. I'm not, I'm not . . . it's not just Daddy, you know. There've been all those other men. . . ." She gulped down a sob.
For a man who'd been on the verge of collapse a few hours earlier, Sev demonstrated remarkable powers of recovery. Nancia was impressed by the strength with which he drew Fassa into his arms against her resistance. "You," he said deliberately, "are the woman I love, and nothing that happened before today matters in the slightest to me." He paused for a moment and Nancia blacked out her visual sensors. She didn't really think that the requirements of surveillance on Fassa included watching Sev Bryley-Sorenson kiss her as desperately as a man in vacuum gasping for oxygen.
On Shemali, Micaya Questar-Benn had finally persuaded Polyon to drop the sanitized V.I.P. tour of his factory. She didn't believe he could produce enough hyperchips to satisfy her requirements, she told him, and what was more, she didn't believe he would be able to extend the factory's production fast enough for her. The safety requirements mandated by the Trade Commission simply took too long to set up and maintain.
Polyon suggested that the Trade Commission could, collectively, do something anatomically impossible for the individual members. And if the General wanted to see just how fast he could turn out hyperchips, he added, she and her friend could just follow him. They'd have to wear protective gear, though, he said, struggling into a silvercloth suit himself as he spoke.
While Micaya and Forister put on the suits provided for guests, Micaya commented innocently that the cost of suiting up an entire production line of prisoners must be prohibitive, and that she didn't see how they maintained the dexterity necessary for the assembly process while working from inside the bulky silvercloth gloves.
Polyon chuckled and agreed that the difficulties posed were enormous.
On board, Sev and Fassa were talking again; Nancia discreetly tuned in to their conversation, but there wasn't much in it to require her attention. Fassa was gloomy about the prospect of years in prison. Sev wasn't any too cheerful about it himself, but he assured Fassa that he'd wait for her.
"I don't think they let murderers out," Fassa said. "Unless they decide to mindwipe me."
"Fassa, you are not a murderer. Caleb isn't dead."
Fassa's slender body became quite still. "He isn't?"
"You were right," Sev said. "Nobody tells you anything. He isn't dead. He isn't even seriously ill; he was in therapy for nerve damage when I left Bahati."
"Latest bulletins from Summerlands say that he should recover full function quite soon and will probably be restored to active brawn status within the next few weeks," Nancia confirmed.
Sev and Fassa broke apart and looked up at the overhead speaker.
"Nancia!" Sev exclaimed. "I didn't know you were listening."
"You gave me the orders yourself," Nancia reminded him.
"Oh. Well." Sev thought. "Can I cancel the orders? Will you obey me if I do?"
"I really shouldn't."
"Lock the door on us both," Sev suggested. "I don't mind. But please, could we have some privacy now? This voyage back to Central is likely to be my last chance to be alone with my girl for a long, long time."
Fassa looked ridiculously happy for someone facing trial and a stiff prison sentence. Nancia left them to it.
She didn't have much to occupy her on Shemali, either. Micaya and Forister hadn't waited to take the full tour of the hyperchip assembly line; a few images of prisoners working unshielded with skin-destroying acids, in rooms that leaked poisonous gas, were all the evidence they needed to bolster Sev's detailed eyewitness testimony. The datacordings were particularly damning when accompanied, as they were, by Polyon's pleasant, cultured voice explaining just how he had cut costs and speeded up production by condemning the prisoners in his care to lingering, painful deaths by industrial poisoning. By the time Nancia had scanned those images, Micaya had already slapped tanglewires around Polyon's wrists, ankles, and even his neck. With the ankle field activated, she read him the formal statement of arrest.
"You can't do this!" Polyon protested. "Do you know who I am? I'm a de Gras-Waldheim. And I have Governor Lyautey's approval for everything I've done here!"
"My brainship has already transmitted a request for drug testing on Lyautey and all other civilian personnel," Forister told him. "I suspected Blissto when I heard your spaceport controller talking. What did you do, make addicts of anybody who could blow the whistle on you?"
"You can't arrest me," Polyon repeated as though he hadn't understood a word.
Micaya Questar-Benn had a smile that would have chilled steel to the snapping point. "Want to bet, son? Walk in front of me. Slowly, now. Wouldn't want the tanglefield to think you're trying to escape and cut off your feet; it's too quick and easy a death for your sort." And when Polyon opened his mouth again, she activated the extended tanglefield from the neck wire to keep him from flapping his tongue about any more.
As they left the assembly lines, a ragged cheer went up from the prisoners behind them.