Two minutes later she was back, slipping in through a second entrance she'd spotted across the room during the tour. Hidden from view of the crewers by a long thick pipe he'd called a catalytic-balance slifter, she made her way forward. The other end of the room opened onto a short corridor lined with unlocked doors; choosing one, she went inside.

The room was small and, inevitably, filled to the ceiling with equipment-pipes and pumping sorts of stuff this time. Turning on the dim overhead light, she pulled out her newly acquired toy and sat down cross-legged on the floor to take a closer look.

It was a hand computer, all right. An expensive one, too, from the look of it. She turned it over- "Nurk it," she muttered to herself. Stamped into the back of the casing was the Xirrus's logo. A ship's computer, then, tied into the Xirrus's central nexus and hard-programmed only with ship's data and business. On the open market, worth just fractionally above zero.

For a moment she glared at the flat little plate, letting her annoyance at it subside. It wouldn't have brought in that much money; and anyway, it would probably have taken her forever to locate a safe buyer in an unfamiliar market. Besides, it wasn't like the thing was completely useless.

It took her a minute to locate a wall power plate, and another minute to pry the back off the computer with her little pocket multi-knife. The computer's ID register... there it was. Snapping out two of the knife's blades and the specially insulated screwdriver, she eased one of the blades into the lowest voltage socket on the plate and brought the computer's ID register up to lightly touch the other blade. There was a small spark, hardly visible; carefully, she shifted the knife point to two other spots on the instrument, with similar results. She gave it a quick examination, then pulled the blade from the socket and folded the knife back up. a.s.suming she'd done it right, the computer would now still have full access to the ship's central nexus, but the nexus wouldn't be able to either identify the particular computer she was using or to keep any record of which files she pulled up.

It was a trick that for years she'd had to pay Trilling or someone else to do for her. One day he'd foolishly let her watch.

She replaced the back cover and keyed the computer on. First on her list of things to do was to pull up a set of the Xirrus's floorplans-a real set, including all the crew and equipment areas. She leafed through them, memorizing each with a glance, and by the time she was through she'd found half a dozen ways to get from one end of the ship to the other without anyone having a ghost's chance of spotting her.

Second on her list was to find a place to stay, preferably one that would be a step up from her present cabin and roommates. Hunting around a little, she found a pa.s.senger accommodations list, which after a little study yielded the information that there were sixteen empty cabins on the ship, three of them fancy staterooms in the upper-cla.s.s section. A crewer roster was next, with particular attention given to which servitors were on duty at the moment and which cabins they were a.s.signed to.

And finally came the triskiest part: coaxing the nexus to give her the general pa.s.scode for servitor entry into the pa.s.senger rooms.

It took awhile, but the people who'd set up the Xirrus's security hadn't been very bright. In the end, she got it.

And that was that. She could return the computer now, her tampering a cinch to be missed until long after she disappeared into the barrios of Lorelei. And in the meantime she could mingle with the people in the upper-cla.s.s section whenever she liked, scoring whatever tracks she could. Preferably with people who wouldn't be stopping at Lorelei; if they didn't notice their losses until afterwards, it would take that much longer for them to howl the police onto her tail.

On idle impulse, she keyed the computer for the Xirrus's itinerary. Not that it really mattered; but the next stop after Lorelei was- Seraph system.

She stared at the display, stomach suddenly fluttering. Seraph system. The place where angels came from.

She leaned against the wall, watching all her neat plans twisting themselves into skidly-talk with new possibilities. Angels. Things only politicians and rich people could get-she remembered a news story once that had talked about them, with a big security type from the Gabriel Corporation opening up a box and handing over a chain and pendant to a High Senator type, who turned around and put it around another High Senator type's neck. The chain had looked pretty cla.s.sy, at least from the one close-up she'd seen, and she remembered trying to sit down and watch more. But then Trilling had started yelling about something, and she'd yelled back, and somehow she'd never gotten around to finding out more.

But the angels came from Seraph system-that much everyone knew. They were made out in s.p.a.ce by something called Angelma.s.s, and a whole bunch of little ships went out there every day to bring them back.

Little ships. With little crews...

Don't be stupid, she growled at herself. They'd been turning out angels for years. By now they must have filled in every single gap in their security.

But if they hadn't, and if she could somehow crack into the system...

She rubbed her finger over her lower lip, stomach acid swirling again with indecision. It might be a total waste of time, sure; but even if scoring an angel turned out to be a popped cord it might still be worth continuing on to Seraph just to throw Trilling that much farther off her trail. And it would be easy enough to do. With the stuff she'd already pulled out of the computer- The thought stopped short. The computer, whose circuits she'd just scorched, secure in the knowledge that no one was likely to notice for the six or seven days till they got to Lorelei.

But if she continued on to Seraph, which the computer said would take another five or six days after that...

She smiled tightly. No one ever gets anywhere if they never take chances. Trilling had said that a lot, usually when puffing some particularly trisky job he wanted her to do. But even Trilling was right sometimes. And if she really could pull this off...

Abruptly, she got to her feet. First thing would be to get the computer back without being seen. Not necessarily to the same spot; people never remembered where they left things, and in a place like this they'd probably a.s.sume someone else had borrowed it.

And after that, it would be time to rearrange her accommodations. Before, getting access to the upper-cla.s.s section had just been something she wanted to do. Now, it was something she needed to do.

Trilling had always said that her touchiness would never let her fit in with upper-cla.s.s society. She was about to find out if that was true.

CHAPTER 3.

Chandris's goal when putting her outfit together had been to try and end up with something that would look upper-cla.s.s without costing money she didn't have. She'd been rather pleased with the results, or at least she had been until those puff-heads back in her lower-cla.s.s cabin had started giggling.

A single pa.s.s by one of the upper-cla.s.s lounges showed her why they'd giggled.

It was a humiliating moment, not to mention a dangerous one. Luckily, it was also very quickly over. A really good look at the expensive outfits wasn't necessary; all she needed this time through was to get the style of uniform worn by servitors in this section. That knowledge in hand, she slipped back through the nearest crewer door and made her way down to the maids' quarters. With the work schedule and cabin a.s.signment information she'd read off the computer, it was simple enough to locate an unoccupied room. One of the general pa.s.scodes got her inside, and she began her search.

There were, as she'd expected, several different types of uniforms for the different parts of the ship, and she had to raid a dozen rooms before she found a maid's uniform that was both the right style and the right size. Fifteen minutes later, having changed in a conveniently isolated emergency-battery room, she returned to the upper-cla.s.s section.

No one gave her a second look as she slipped silently past wandering and chattering pa.s.sengers; very few gave her even a first look. It was the perfect camouflage, particularly for someone like Chandris, who had played the role so many times before that she had the mental att.i.tude and body language of a servant down cold. Even in operations a lot smaller than a s.p.a.celiner, she'd sometimes blended into the ident.i.ty so well that other workers had totally missed the fact that she was a stranger. On a ship this size, a.s.suming she was careful, they didn't have a hope of fingering her.

She reached one of the empty staterooms without incident and let herself in. The place wasn't as flat-out luxurious, somehow, as she'd expected it to be, but it stomped the snot out of her own cramped cabin. More important to her plans at the moment was the fancy computer system built into the entertainment center, a system that should give her access to the ship's public library. Pulling out her pocket knife, she stepped over to it- And stopped short. "Nurk," she muttered. She'd expected it to be a floating nexus-connect type like the hand-held job she'd used earlier. Instead, it was hard-wired in through the entertainment lines.

Which pretty much popped the cord on the uncoupling trick she'd used earlier. If she wanted to get into the library without the computer howling up a stink, she was going to have to do it from a room that wasn't supposed to be vacant.

Mentally, she shrugged. No big deal-she'd planned on mingling with the paying pa.s.sengers anyway. It was high time she got started.

The room had been fully made up, with an impressive selection of fluffy towels laid out in the bathroom. Taking two of the larger ones, she folded and stacked them for carrying and slipped out of the room. Given the crowd in the lounge she'd pa.s.sed earlier, it seemed likely that most of the rooms along here would be vacant. An ideal time to go shopping.

It was a more difficult search than the hunt for her maid's uniform had been. Not only did she have to find clothes that would fit her, she also had to find them in closets so bulging that there would be a good chance the owner would never notice the loss. Upper-cla.s.s people, she'd always heard, were so rich that they threw their money away on everything they saw. Unfortunately, the image didn't seem to apply to s.p.a.celiner pa.s.sengers. Up and down the corridors she went, hitting stateroom after stateroom: knocking, apologizing about having the wrong room if there was an answer, letting herself in if there wasn't. And she was just about to concede defeat and move down to the middle-cla.s.s section when she finally scored.

It was a huge room, easily twice the size of the vacant one she'd moved into an hour earlier. With twice the storage s.p.a.ce, too; and every bit of it stuffed to the throat. A family of five, judging from the various sizes represented, with the teenage daughter taking more than her fair share of the closet s.p.a.ce. Chandris sorted through the dresses, chose two of the plainest layer-style ones, and folded them up inside her towels. An equally bulging jewelry box beckoned from the top of one of the dressers, and for a moment she was tempted. But only for a moment. An upper-cla.s.s teen might not miss a dress or two; but everyone kept tabs on their jewelry.

She took the dresses back to her borrowed room, added a third towel to her pile, and returned to the hunt. Her newly changed luck held: the very next stateroom she tried contained not only too many dresses, but too many shoes as well. Neither set was exactly her size, but close enough. Again selecting a layer-style dress, she hid it and a pair of shoes inside her stack of towels and went back to her room.

There, using her knife and the compact sewing kit she'd brought from her luggage, she set to work stripping the various layers of the dresses apart. There'd been a girl from the Barrio once who'd swiped a fancy outfit during a score and gotten cracked two days later when the original owner spotted her wearing it on the street, and Chandris had no intention of doing something that puffheaded herself. The alterations took her nearly two hours; but when she was finished she had combined parts from the three dresses to form three entirely new and-hopefully-unrecognizable ones.

Altering herself was next. First step was to get the d.a.m.n blonding out of her hair, returning it to its natural shiny black. She cleaned her face and hands next, getting rid of both the cosmetic stuff and the underbase that had lightened her skin into line with the blonded hair. Redoing the makeup was easy enough-from what she'd seen, the upper-cla.s.s women aboard the Xirrus used far less makeup than was common among middle-cla.s.s or even Barrio women. Possibly because they didn't need to try and make themselves attractive; more likely because they could afford to go with cosmetic surgery instead. Still, as Trilling used to say, vanity had its uses, provided it was in other people.

Redoing her hair was a little harder. Most of the women she'd seen while hunting for clothes had been pretty free with the frostsprays, fancy holdings, and jeweled clips, none of which Chandris had available even if she'd known how to fasten them in. Fortunately, she'd also spotted a few who had simply put their hair into elaborate braidings, and she'd pa.s.sed close enough to one of them to get a good look at the pattern. Actually recreating it was trickier than she'd expected, but with persistence and several false starts she finally got it more or less right.

And now came the easy part. Giving herself a careful examination in the long foyer mirror, she keyed off the lights and left the stateroom. With the outer woman transformed from lower-cla.s.s scorer to upper-cla.s.s leech, it was time to do the same for the inner woman.

Earlier, she'd given herself a leisurely half hour to learn how to play a newly middle-cla.s.s college student. Now, wandering between the various upper-cla.s.s lounges, she had her new role down in half that time. Part of that was sheer necessity-she hadn't eaten since late morning, and was starting to feel the familiar pangs of hunger-but mostly it was that the mannerisms of these people were genuinely less complicated. Perhaps, she thought once, their money and power did their talking for them.

A fresh rumble ran through her stomach; but fortunately the solution was already close at hand. He was hovering not quite obviously at the edge of her vision, and had been there since the second of the lounges she had visited. Around fifty years old, he was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and jeweled neck clasp and the look of a man on the hunt.

Under other circ.u.mstances she would probably have let him make the first move. With her stomach starting to hurt, she wasn't in the mood to be patient. Drifting toward him, her eyes turned elsewhere, she shifted direction with smooth suddenness and b.u.mped gently into him. "Oh!-excuse me," she said, looking up into his eyes. "That wasn't very graceful of me, was it?"

"Don't worry about it," he said, smiling a hunter's smile back at her. "s.p.a.celiner travel does that all the time to people. Shifting engine thrusts throw the pseudogravity off, and all."

She raised her eyebrows fractionally and returned the smile. "You sound like someone who travels a lot."

It was an obvious setup line, and he grabbed it with both hands. "More than I wish, sometimes," he said. "My company's headquartered on Seraph, but we're also heavily involved in Lorelei asteroid mining and Balmoral orbital refining. Makes for a busy schedule. Stardust Metals-you might possibly have heard of us."

"Don't be modest," she chided gently. "Of course I've heard of you." She hadn't, actually, until she'd caught a pa.s.sing reference ten minutes earlier. But he didn't need to know that. "And what is it you do for them?"

He grinned, the hunter's smile again. "Mostly try to keep them as profitable as possible," he said, offering his hand. "I'm Amberson Toomes; part owner and CMD."

She raised her eyebrows, higher this time. "Really!" she said, wondering what the h.e.l.l a CMD was. "I'm impressed."

He shrugged modestly. "Don't be. Most of the people here are considerably more important than I am."

"If importance is judged by how well you ignore strangers, they're definitely more important than you," she said ruefully, dropping her eyes a bit. "I've been walking around for-oh, I don't know how long-and you're the first person who's bothered to speak with me."

He patted her shoulder. "Don't judge them by first night out," he warned. "Anyway, you haven't exactly been working hard to elbow your way into conversations."

She let her lip twitch in a coquettish smile. "And how would you know that?" she challenged. "Unless you'd been watching me, that is."

He smiled back. "I might have noticed you," he acknowledged. "But only because I happen to like looking at beautiful women."

"Flatterer."

"Connoisseur," he corrected with a slight bow.

She laughed. "My name's Chandris Adriessa," she told him. "I don't suppose that in and around all that looking you happened to find the dining room?"

"I did indeed," he said, gently but firmly taking her arm. Not big-brotherly, like the engineer had, but like a hunter who's caught his prey. "All six of them, in fact. Come; I'll show you which one's the best."

He insisted from the start on charging her dinner to his bill, a gallantry she accepted with a maximum of verbal grat.i.tude and a minimum of token protest. The issue had never been in doubt, of course; no one at this end of the ship seemed to use money or cards, and she could hardly charge her meal to an unoccupied stateroom. But by making the offer up front he saved her the trouble of maneuvering him into doing so later.

The food was good enough, though not as filling as she might have wished. As they ate she worked at getting her companion talking about himself, with an eye toward filling in some of her ignorance about upper-cla.s.s life.

No hard task, as it turned out. Toomes was a braggart-a refined and cultured braggart, but a braggart just the same-and after the first couple of questions all Chandris had to do was listen and nod and act fascinated by it all. By the time he remembered his manners and began asking her about herself, she had everything she needed to puff him a convincing spider web of lies, right down to a convoluted story about how her parents' manufacturing firm on Uhuru had made enough the past year on superconductor contracts to send her to college on Seraph.

Not that he was in any shape to notice small slips anyway. It was clear even before they got to the dining room that Toomes had gotten an early start on the Xirrus's supply of reeks, giving him a slight mental haze that the alcoholic drinks he'd washed his dinner down with had made even hazier. It was a personality type Chandris had had more than her fill of back in the Barrio: men who measured themselves by how much they could drink or sniff or swallow before their brains were so nurked they couldn't see straight.

She'd lost track of how many evenings Trilling and his friends had ruined for her with those stupid contests of theirs. It was only fair that, just this once, it should work to her advantage.

And so she talked, and listened, and kept the floaters and relaxers and drinks coming; and by the time they headed back to his stateroom he needed to hold onto her arm to keep upright. She got the door unlocked and maneuvered him to the bed, sitting him down there and helping him off with his jacket and neck clasp.

He was fumbling with the fasteners on her dress when he fell asleep.

She took his shoes off and, with some effort, managed to get him straightened out on the bed. For a moment she considered stripping him all the way down, then decided against it. If he woke up thinking he'd already scored he might drop her back at square one and go looking for someone more challenging. Better to keep him dangling, at least for another day or two, before considering any alterations to the script.

Kicking off her own ill-fitting shoes, she snared a chair and pulled it over to the room's computer terminal. A minute later she'd pulled up the Xirrus library's complete index of articles pertaining to s.p.a.ceship operation. With Toomes snoring gently behind her, she called up the first article on the list and began to read.

CHAPTER 4.

"...But first I'd like to clear up any questions about how I see this new job you're sending me off to do. The first duty of a High Senator, it seems to me, is to the whole Empyrean. Not one district or another, not even one world or another; but to all the people."

The man on the screen paused, and Arkin Forsythe took a moment to let his eyes trace out the other's face. A care-lined, middle-aged face, with receding sandy hair, blue-gray eyes, and an oddly intense set to the square jaw. A serious face; a face whose strong aura of professionalism formed a perfect counterpoint to the casual, common-man pattern of his speech. A face that would inspire loyalty in some and contempt in others, but nothing in between.

Across the room, there was a knock on the door. "Come," Forsythe called, tapping the freeze b.u.t.ton and looking up. The door opened, to reveal Ranjh Pirbazari. "Have you a minute, High Senator-elect?"

"Sure, Zar, come on in," Forsythe waved him over, noting the data cyl in the other's hand. "What have we got?"

"The official follow-up report on that Pax incursion out in the belt three days ago," Pirbazari told him, crossing to Forsythe's desk and handing him the cyl. "They've done some more a.n.a.lyses of the ship and the battle, but there's nothing really new in the way of fresh data. They were able to pull a name off the bow, though: the Komitadji. It was the name of some guerrilla or mercenary group in the Balkans, I'm told, sometime in Earth's distant past."

"Mm," Forsythe said, eyeing the slender cylinder distastefully. Official follow-up reports, in his experience, were nearly always a waste of time for everyone concerned. "Any fresh excuses as to why it took them so long to kick the d.a.m.n thing out of the system?"

Pirbazari shook his head. "They still say the catapult simply wasn't designed for anything that big, and that it took them that long to recalibrate." He hesitated. "I'd have to say, though, that that's probably more an explanation than it is an excuse. There's really no way anyone could have antic.i.p.ated the Pax having a warship that big. Certainly they never showed anything even approaching that size during the contact negotiations. From everything I've read about the incident, EmDef did as well as could be expected under the circ.u.mstances."

Forsythe nodded, still not happy but experienced enough to recognize a dead-end when he found himself driving down one. Finding tails to pin the blame on was standard political instinct; but Pirbazari had twenty years of Empyreal Defense Force service under his belt, and if he said they'd done all they could then they probably had. "Subject closed then, I guess," he grunted. "Any fresh ideas as to what the Pax was trying to prove with this stunt?"

Pirbazari shrugged. "Number one theory is still that they've decided to escalate their little psychological pinp.r.i.c.k campaign and wanted to see what kind of reception they could expect if they sent in a warship and started shooting. Second place goes to the possibility that they wanted to map out the net's physical configuration and figured that using a ship outside our normal catapult range would buy them more time to study it."

"Or maybe they wanted to drop something and hoped all the noise and smoke would hide it?"

"If they did, it worked," Pirbazari said dryly. "EmDef had ships quartering the area for several hours afterward and none of them picked up anything but normal asteroids. If anything was dropped, it had to have been pretty small."

"Or else shielded like crazy," Forsythe said.

"True," Pirbazari agreed. "Still, we're talking an awful lot of trouble and risk just to smuggle in a spy or two. Especially given that they've already got either a spy or data-sifter system in place here already."

Forsythe nodded sourly. "One at the very least. I don't suppose there's anything new on that data-pulse transmission?"

"Only that the timing of the pulse, with the Komitadji 'pulting in just in time to intercept it, meant they had the whole thing carefully planned out," Pirbazari said.

"Still no idea where on Lorelei the pulse originated?"

"No," Pirbazari conceded. "And if they haven't been able to backtrack it by now, they never will. Whatever this phase-and-relay scheme is the Pax is using, it's a real charmer."

"It ought to be," Forsythe growled. "They had five months to set it up before we kicked them out. For all we know they could have smuggled in an entire fifth column."

"Yes, sir," Pirbazari murmured.

Forsythe eyed him, noted the quiet battle of current and former loyalties in his expression. "I'm not blaming EmDef for that," he told the other. "It wasn't their fault that we had Pax ships and people swarming all over the place. The High Senate had no business holding those useless talks in Empyreal s.p.a.ce in the first place. They should have insisted on neutral ground."

Pirbazari's face cleared, loyalties back in line again. "None of us liked it very much either," he admitted. "I have to say, though, that I really don't think more than a handful of Pax spies could have gotten past us."

"A handful could be enough." Forsythe looked at the cyl still in his hand, set it down on the desk. "Well, I'll take a look later. For whatever it's worth."

"Yes, sir." Pirbazari nodded to Forsythe's left. "Your father?"

Forsythe looked over at the still-frozen image on the screen. "Yes. His s.p.a.ceport speech, the day he left Lorelei to take his own High Senate seat."

"I remember that day," Pirbazari mused. "My parents watched the speech at home, my father grumping the whole time about how he was going to make a hash of the job."