Anne McCaffrey Ship 02 Partner Ship

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Diplomatic Service. Code G, if that means anything to you. As such, I have
diplomatic immunity. Hacking is illegal; whatever I do is not illegal; hence,
it's not hack-
ing." He smiled benignly and traced a spiraling path inward from the
boundaries of the touchscreen, wiping the previous search and opening a new
way into the labyrinth of the Summerlands Clinic records.
"/ should have taken logic," Nancia muttered. "I
think there's something wrong with your syllogism.
Code G. That means you're a spy?" Caleb would never forgive her for this.
Consorting with spies, breaking into private records... The feet that she was
working as much to save him as to track down criminals wouldn't palliate her
offense in his eyes.
"Mmm. You may call me X-39 if you like." Hum-
ming to himself, Forister smoothed out the path he had begun and traced a new,
more complex pattern on the touchscreen.
"Isn't that rather pointless," Nancia inquired, "seeing that I already know
your name?"
"Hmm? Ah, yes # there we go!" Forister chuckled with satisfaction as he
opened his access to a new seg-
ment of Summerlands Clinic's computer system.
"Supremely pointless, like most espionage. Most diplomacy, too, come to think
of it. No, we don't use code names. But I've always thought it would be rather
fiin to be known as X-39."
"Have you indeed, fungus-brain?" Alpha bint
Hezra-Fong muttered from the security of her inner office. "How'd you like to
be known as Seductron Test
Failure 106 Mark 7? If I'd known who you were # "
She bit off the empty threats. She knew now. And if
Forister made the mistake of coming back to Summer-
lands for any reason, she'd have her revenge.
Neither Forister nor Nancia had thought to check
Nancia's decks for transmitters # and even if they had, they might not have
recognized Alpha's personal spyder, a sliver-thin enhanced metachip device
that clung to any permalloy wall and, chameleon-like, mimicked the colors of
its surroundings. In all the fuss attendant on getting the wounded brawn into
the floatube, Alpha had found it easy enough to leave one of the spyders
attached to Nancia's central corridor.
From there it picked up any conversation in the cabins, although the voices
were distorted by distance and interference.
At the time, Alpha hadn't been exactly sure what in-
stinct prompted her to plant the spyder; she had just felt that the amount of
Net communications traffic concerning this particular brainship and brawn sug-
gested they were more important than they looked.
Infuriatingly, the datastreams coming from Central over the Net were in a code
Alpha had not yet suc-
ceeded in breaking, so the spyder was her only source of information.
So #ar, though, it had proved a remarkably effective tool. Alpha preened
herself on her cleverness in drop-
ping one of the expensive spyders where it was most needed. She drummed her
fingers on the palmpad of
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the workstation while she mentally reviewed what she'd done so far and the
steps she'd taken to counteract the danger. The rhythm of her fingertips was
repeated on the screen as a jagged display of colored lines, breaking and
recombining in a hypnotic jazzy dance.
First had come the surprising sound of Fassa del
Parma's voice. While admiring the dramatic range
Fassa put into pleading with her captor, Alpha hadn't
been too surprised when the girl rapidly broke down and began spilling what
she knew about her com-
petitors. She'd always felt the del Parma kid didn't have what it took to make
it in the big time. Too emo-
tional. She cried in her sleep and then she gloated over her victims. Real
success came from being like Alpha or Polyon, cool, unmoved, above feeling
triumph or fear, concentrating always on the desired goal.
Fortunately, Fassa didn't know much; she'd been too stupid to think much
beyond her personal con-
cerns. Alpha was willing to bet the little snip had never thought of compiling
a dossier on each of her com-
petitors, with good hard data that could be traded in emergency. All she had
were gossip and innuendo and stories from the annual meetings. Blaize was
nasty to the natives, Alpha had developed an illicit drug, Dar-
nell was less than totally ethical in his business takeovers.
Hearsay! Without hard evidence to back up the stories, Central would never
make charges like these stick, and they were too smart to try. Alpha grinned
and slapped her open hand down on the palmpad, jolting the computer into a
random display of medical jargon and meaningless symbols mixed with sentences
pulled at random from patient reports. She'd prepared that program years ago,
as protection against a computer attack like the one Forister was trying now.
And to judge from the snippets of conver-
sation between him and Nancia, it was working. They would waste all their
energy trying to decipher a code that had no meaning.
And while they worked, Alpha would take steps to deal with the one piece of
hard evidence Fassa had pointed out to them. Her fingers drummed fester; she
slapped the palmpad again to enter voice mode.
"Send Baynes and Moss to my office # no, to Test
Room Four," she said. Baynes could safely be pulled off the task of watching
that brawn for a while; Caleb was too weak to be any danger, and anyway he was
protected by his brainship's monitor button.
Alpha didn't think her office was infested with spyders; she was absolutely
certain about Test Room 4, a gleaming permalloy shell with no crack in the
walls, no furnishings but the permalloy benches and table.
Alpha had commissioned the building of this room out of her profits from the
first illicit street sales of
Seductron. The official purpose of the lab room was for Alpha's experiments on
bioactive agents; the ex-
treme simplicity of its design was to aid in complete sterilization of the
chamber after experiments were completed.
It served well enough for these purposes. And the contractor who'd installed
nets of electronic impulse
chargers behind the permalloy skin, making the room impervious to any known
external monitors, had suf-
fered a fatal overdose of Blissto shortly after the completion of the room.
Alpha shook her head and sighed with everyone else that she'd never have
guessed the man was an addict. And the secret of the room was safe.
Baynes and Moss really were addicts. Alpha had
"cured" their Blissto addiction, found them jobs at the clinic, and then
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explained to them that the Blissto ad-
diction had only been replaced by a much more serious drug, a variant of
Seductron with the unfor-
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tunate side effect of causing complete nervous collapse in victims who were
suddenly cut off from their regular dosage. Alpha had been experimenting with
a mildly addictive form of Seductron that would create a captive market in
anyone who ever tried the stuff;
Seductron-B4 was an overresponse to the problem.
She was afraid to release the stuff to street markets.
But it was incredibly useful in creating willing ser-
vants. It had only taken one or two delicately timed delays in the
Seductron-B4 doses to convince Baynes and Moss that their only hope of life
lay in total loyalty to her. She had picked her tools carefully; they had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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