Partnership (5 page)

"Well, I suppose you'd have to know pretty soon anyway," Polyon was saying now. "I hate like hell 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 assets. 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 space. 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 passengers 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 Shell Ethics classes? She should have been doubly guarded, by family heritage and Academy training, against even imagining such a betrayal of her ideals.

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There was nothing to stop her from leaving her internal sensors inactive until they reached Nyota ya Jaha, though. Nancia considered this briefly before deciding against it. True, her passengers wouldn't notice anything, since they already assumed 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 space without the irritating distraction of these ... brats. But she shrank from the idea of spending days, more than a week, in the isolation of space, 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 sensory deprivation.

Besides, she wanted to know what her passengers were up to.

When Nancia reactivated the central cabin's sensors, Darnell was already stalking down the hall to his cabin and Polyon, lips taut with rage, was about to follow 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 opponent was begging for mercy.

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Following that incident, Polyon's file had been flagged with warning signals that would forever preclude his being assigned 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 Space Academy —

What was sfo doing? Nancia dosed down all her information 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 Space 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 password.

After a moment's confusion, Nancia realized what had happened. Polyon's meddling with the ship's security system had extended to some very sophisticated tampering in the Net itself. He had, in effect, defined Nancia as the node of origin for a system controller 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" identity 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 embarrassed as if she'd been caught peeking into an anesthetized classmate's open shell 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 looking 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

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relieved that he'd left the central cabin to Blaize, stalking back to his own cabin in a pose of offended dignity far more impressive than Darnell's pout

Blaize looked directly at Nancia's titanium 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 passengers 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 space was too great a contrast after her years of comfortable, constant multi-channel input and output with her classmates in Laboratory Schools. "XN-935,"

Nancia said grudgingly. And then, because the call letters 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 passengers. "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 automatic. 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 embarrass 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 embarrass them. They're bloody 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 space, comparing the bleak-eyed young man of the recording 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 little too gracefully. Nancia began to wonder how many of his seemingly casual gestures were rehearsed. "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 Space 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

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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 space...." 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," Nantia 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 Space 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 remembered 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 Henequin — 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.**

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"Oh. Well. Anyway," Blaize said carefully, "I don't think your branch of the family is quite as snobbish 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 space 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 passengers'

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 administrator 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 better than to try and stir up my ambitions for Angalia.

The sum total of civilization there consists of one PTA 40

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office, one coryrium mine, and a bunch of humanoid natives with the collective IQ of a zucchini. Asmall zucchini. 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 Angalia, less than the dust beneath old Henequin's chariot wheels."

"You should do well enough," Nancia said. "You've certainly got the jargon of the bureaucracy down pat"

She scanned her data files for translations of the initials Blaize had used. PTA was Planetary Technical Aid, of course, and FCF turned out to be a First Contact Form, and ISS — ah. Intelligent Sentient Status. Nancia had learned all the regulations for dealing with alien sentients in Basic Courier Diplomacy and Development 101, but she wasn't used to hearing the abbreviations tossed about so casually. Daddy, when he visited and told her about his work, was always careful to give each bureaucratic office its full name, each official his full tide.