Partnership (33 page)

"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. / 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 introduc-260

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tions 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. 1 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?"

AU three softpersons laughed tolerandy, 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 dean 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."

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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'the?"

"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 unex-pectedly. "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 ofhis 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 un-monitored 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.

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"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 wantyou. 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 Pollster'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."

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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 Sheniali 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 due. 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 res-titution when a problem was brought to your attention.'*

Fassa smiled through her tears. "If 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 264

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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 die sanitized V.I.E 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 silverdoth 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.

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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 iU; he was in therapy for nerve damage when I left Bahati."

"Latest bulletins from Summer-lands 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 feeing 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 266

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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 die 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.

• CHAPTER SIXTEEN

To Polyon's shock and amazement, the cyborg freak and her partner actually managed to convince Governor Lyautey that they were entitled to arrest a de Gras-Waldheim and take him away. "Convince" was probably too strong a word. Polyon recognized with rueful amusement that he'd been caught in his own trap. The governor, like all the civilians left on Shemali, was constantly dosed with Alpha bint Hezra-Fong*s Seductron. Since Lyautey was in a nonessential job, Polyon kept his maintenance level of Seductron so high that the governor did little but nod amiably and agree with whoever spoke to him last

Somebody must have figured that out and thought of this way to use it against him. With his mouth covered by tanglefield, Polyon could do nothing but listen while this Micaya Questar-Benn and her partner rattled off official-sounding words, flourished their forged credentials — they had to be forged—and took him away in the very flyer he himself had sent to pick them up at the spaceport