Partnership (28 page)

Nancia called up her files from that first landing and superimposed the stored images on the green paradise below her. Yes, this had to be the Angalia landing field. The topographical features were a perfect match with her internal map. And there, at the edge of the mesa, was the plastifilm prefab hut with its sagging awning of woven grass, looking if anything slightly more derelict and tottering than it had appeared five years ago.

Intent on her image comparison, Nancia drained computing power from the navigation processor, forgot to monitor the approach, and came embarrassingly close to making a new crater on Angalia's landing field. She corrected the descent, hopped into mid-air, and came down more slowly the second time. Her auditory sensors picked up a variety of crashes, groans, and complaints from the cabins where Micaya and the three prisoners were housed.

"Apologies for the rough landing," she began, but Forister cut off her speakers for a moment and overrode her. "Local turbulence," he said. "Nancia recovered superbly, but even a brainship can't com-pensate for all the freak conditions on Angalia."

He swept his open hand over the palmpad with a caressing gesture, restoring speaker control to Nancia, and smiled at her benignly.

"I didn't need you to cover for me," Nancia transmitted a vibrant whisper through the main cabin speakers.

"Didn't you? I thought we were a team. If you can help me play tri-chess, I certainly have the right to preserve you from apologizing to those overindulged brats."

"I — well, thank you," Nancia conceded.

"Think nothing of it. By the way, what did happen just now?"

"I was distracted. This place doesn't look the way it did last time I landed." Nancia switched all her screens to external mode. Forister gazed appreciatively at the triple-screen display of a grassy paradise ringed by flowering terraces.

"What on earth is that?" Fassa cried from her cabin.

Darnell and Alpha joined her exclamations of surprise.

Nancia was gratified by this response. The screens in the passenger cabins weren't as dramatic as her central cabin's display walls, but at least they showed enough of Angalia to confirm that she wasn't losing her mind — or if she was, she wasn't alone. None of the prisoners had been expecting Angalia to look like the Garden of Eden.

"Do I take it," she asked mildly, "that the planet has changed since your last visit?"

"It certainly has," Fassa said. "Are you sure it's the same place? Only last year — oh, I see."

A prolonged silence followed. For once in her life Nancia longed for a softperson's physical extrusions.

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It would be enormously satisfying to take Fassa by the shoulders and shake her out of the trance in which she had fallen. MP%y couldn't softpersons keep transmitting datastreams while they were processing?

She had to content herself with blinking Fassa's cabin lights and assaulting her with raucous bursts of music from Flix's latest sonohedron.

"Do I take it," she inquired when satisfied that she had the girl's attention, "that you recognize some salient features?"

"Yes... I think so, anyway." Of course, Fassa would have no control over the visual detail, not to mention the accuracy, of whatever images she'd stored from her previous visit. She would be dependent on whatever her non-enhanced biological memory could provide. Recognizing this, Nancia didn't count on learning much.

"Those gardens on the side of the mountain," Fassa said. "He had the terraces in place a year ago, but nothing was planted. I thought it was something to do with the mine."

Nancia switched the signals going to Fassa's display screen to show the mine entrance. Blue-uniformed figures moved in and out, pushing wagons on railings that curved around the side of the mountain. A magnified display showed that the figures were shambling Angalia natives, neady dressed in blue shorts and shirts and working together with the precision of a choreographed dance. One native heaved a sack from the mine entrance and tossed it over his head; another casually moved into place just in time to catch it; by the time he'd turned, a third native had backed his wagon down the rail system and into place to receive the load.

"Amazing," Nancia commented. "I thought the An-galians couldn't be trained."

"Blake," Forister said hollowly, "has certainly been a busy little boy."

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"It doesn't look all that bad so far," Nancia pointed out * Fassa, do you — or the others — recognize anything else?"

She let the display screens sweep over a panoramic view of the mesa and the surrounding countryside.

Suddenly Fassa gave a cry of recognition. "Oh, God, he's left the volcano!"

Nancia halted the display and studied it. An evil-looking bubble of brown and green mud heaved and burst and formed again, roiling continuously in the midst of the tall grass covering the rest of the basin.

"I don't suppose planting flowers would do much to disguise it," she agreed.

"You don't understand." Fassa sounded close to tears. "That's how he controls them — how he makes them do things for them. If the Loosies don't please him, he cooks them alive in that boiling mud! I saw it done last time — I'll never forget those screams."

"Alpha? Darnell?" Nancia queried the other two.

"That's right," Darnell told her. "Revolting."

Alpha nodded silently, the movement barely visible to Nancia's visual sensors.

She could think of no more encouraging words for Forister.

Micaya persuaded Forister to let her confront Blaize initially. "I'll wear a contact button," she promised him. "You and Nancia can see and hear everything that goes on."

"It's my duty—" Forister began.

"Mine too," Micaya interrupted him. "The young man is more likely to confess if he doesn't think he can bring family influence to bear."

"He can't," Forister said grimly. "I'm not here to in-tercede for him."

"Yes, but he doesn't know that," Micaya pointed out-Nancia kept all her external sensors trained on 222

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Micaya'as the general picked her way along a path of rounded volcanic stones to the door of the permalloy hut. On both sides of the path, feathery grasses and blazing tropical flowers grew in exuberant, uncontrolled patterning, throwing up their seed-heads and blooms above Micaya's crisp silver-sprinkled hair.

Nancia recognized Old Earth species mixed with Denebian starflowers and the singing grasses of Fomalhaut II, a joyous blaze of pink and orange and purple flowers.

Micaya entered the hut and Nancia's field of vision contracted to the half-circle covered by the contact button. In the shadowy hut, stacked high with papers and bits of machinery, Blaize's red head glowed like a burning ember before the computer screen that held his attention.

"Blaize Armontillado-Perez y Medoc," Micaya said formally.

"Urn. PTA shipment? I'll sign for it in a minute. Just got to finish this one thing...."

The contact button's resolution wasn't enough for Nancia to read the words on the computer screen, but she recognized the seven-tone response code that chimed out when Blaize slapped his open hand on the palmpad. An interplanetary transmission — no, inter-subspace; he had just sent something to ... Nancia rummaged through her files and identified the code. To Central Diplomatic headquarters? What could they have to do with Angalia, a planet where no intelligent sentients existed? Had Blaize's net of corruption drawn in some of her father's and Forister's own colleagues?

"There!" As the last notes of the code chimed out, Blaize swung round, a seraphic smile on his freckled face. "And what — "

His expression changed rapidly and almost comical-ly at the sight of Micaya Questar-Benn in full uniform.

"You," he said slowly, "are not PTA."

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"Quite correct," said Micaya. "Your activities have attracted some attention in other quarters."

Blaize's jaw thrust out and his freckles seemed to take on a glowing life of their own. "Well, it's too late.

You can't stop me now!"

"Can't I?" Micaya's tone was deceptively mild.

"I've sent a full report to CenDip. I don't care who your friends in PTA may be, they'll have to leave Angalia alone now."

"My dear boy," said Micaya, "haven't you got it backwards? You're the one employed by Planetary Technical Aid. Or rather, you were."

Nancia had been so caught up in the dialogue, she never noticed when Forister slipped out of her central cabin and made his way down the stairs. She was as starded as Blaize when Forister appeared in the doorway of the hut, just on the periphery of her view from the contact button.

"Uncle Forister!" Blaize exclaimed. "What's going on here? Can you help—"

"Don't call me uncle," Forister said between his teeth. "I'm here with General Questar-Benn to stop you, boy, not to help you!"

Blaize went green between the spattering of freckles. He closed his eyes for a moment and looked as if he wanted to be sick. "Not you too?"

"You didn't think family feeling would extend so far as helping you exploit and torture these innocents?"

"Torture? Exploit?" Blaize gasped. "I — oh, no.

Uncle Forister, have you by any chance been talking to a girl named Fassa del Parma y Polo? Or Alpha bint Hezra-Fong? Or Darnell — "

"All three of them," Forister confirmed, "and —

what the devil is so funny about that?"

For Blaize had all but doubled up, snorting with repressed laughter. "My sins come back to haunt me,"

he gasped between snorts.

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"I don't see what's so funny about it." Pollster's own face had gone white and there was a pinched look about the corners of his mouth.

"You wouldn't. Not yet. But when I — Oh, Lord!

This is one complication I never — " Blaize sputtered into hysterical laughter that ended only when Forister slammed a fist into his belly. Blaize was still crowing and wheezing for breath when a second blow to the jaw knocked his head back and flung him in an undignified collapse against the rickety table where his computing equipment had been stacked. Blaize's legs folded under him and he slid gendy to the floor. Behind him, the table rocked and wobbled dangerously.

The palmpad skated to one corner of the table top and hung on a splinter. A shower of flimsy blue hardcopies fluttered down over Blaize in a gentle, rustling rain of reports and accounting figures and FTA instructions.

Forister snatched one sheet as it drifted down and studied the column of figures for a moment, brows raised. When his eyes reached the bottom of the page, he looked tired and gray and showed every year ofhis age.

"Proof positive," he commented as he passed the paper to Micaya, "if any was needed."

Micaya held the paper where Nancia could focus on it through the contact button. The figures wobbled and danced in Micaya's hand; grimly Nancia compen-sated for movement and enlarged the blurred letters and numbers until she too could read the flimsy.

It was a statement of Blaize's Net account balance for the previous month. The pattern of deposits and withdrawals of large sums made no immediate sense to Nancia, but one thing was clear: any single figure was considerably larger than Blaize's PTA salary, and the total at the bottom was damning — more than thirty times as much credit as he could have accumulated if he'd saved every penny ofhis legitimate pay.

"Uncle Forister," said Blaize from the floor, tenderly massaging his aching jaw, "you have got it all wrong.

Trust me."

"After the evidence before my eyes," Forister spat out, "what could you possibly say that would incline me to trust you?"

Blaize grinned up at him. His lip was bleeding and one ftont tooth wobbled alarmingly. "You'd be surprised."

"If you were thinking of a small bribe out of your ill-gotten gains," Micaya told him, "you can think again."

She lowered her head to speak directly into the contact button and Nancia hastily reduced the amplification, Softshells never could quite understand that they didn't need to shout at a conduct button; the speaker might be tinny, but the input lines were as powerful as any of a brainship's on-board sensors. "Nancia, please enter the Net with my personal ID code. That's Q-B76, JPJ, 450, MIC. Under that code you will be authorized to freeze all credit accounts under the personal code o£ let me see...." She squinted at the top of the flimsy, peering to make out a code sequence that Nancia could read perfectly well with the vision cor-rectors damping down movement and enhancing blurred letters. "Oh, never mind, I guess you can read it," Micaya recalled a moment later.

"Correct," Nancia sent a vocal signal over the contact link.

"Don't do that!" Blaize scrambled to his feet, swaying slightly. "You don't understand—"

Forister moved to one side more rapidly than Nancia had ever seen him step, a blur of motion that placed him between Blaize and Micaya with her copy of the account balance. "I understand that you've been exploiting nonintelligent sentients to enrich yourself,"

he said. "You can make your explanation to the authorities. Nancia, I want you to file a formal record of the charges now, just in case anything goes wrong here."

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"Done," Nancia replied.

Blaize shook his head and winced at the motion. "Ow.

No. Uncle Forister, you really have got the wrong end of the story. And there's no way you can have me up on charges of— what did you say? — exploiting nonintelligent sentients. On the contrary. The Loosies are entitled to Intelligent Sentient Status and I can prove it—

and nobody can stop me now; I've just sent the final documentation to CenDip. Even if you silence me, there'll be an independent CenDip investigation now."

"Silence you, silence you?" Forister looked at Micaya.

His gray eyebrows shot up. "No question of that. We don't deal in coverups. You'll have the opportunity to say anything you like at your trial. And so will I, God help me," he murmured, so low that only Nancia's contact button picked up the words. "So will I."