Caleb recovered with amazing speed. Two hours after his arrival at the clinic, forty minutes after Alpha bint Hezra-Fong had analyzed the poisons in his blood and slapped on stimpatches of the appropriate antidotes, the nervous convulsions had stopped. Nancia knew exactly when that happened, because by then she had thought to send Sev Bryley to Summerlands with a contact button discreetly replacing the top stud in his dress tunic and a second contact button to dip onto Caleb's hospital gown. While Forister remained on board as a nominal guard for Fassa, Sev lounged about the public rooms at Summerlands trying to look like a worried friend-or-relative and chatting up the recuperating VIPs. Nancia watched the clinic from two angles: the convulsive shuddering view of a cracked white ceiling, emanating from Caleb's contact button, and the repetitive views of artificial potted palms and doddering old celebrities to whom Sev talked. On the whole, the potted palms were more valuable than the celebrities; at least they didn't waste Sev's time with their reminiscences of events a century past.
"None of these people know anything about Hopkirk," she whispered through Sev's contact button.
"I've noticed," he replied as the senile director emeritus of the Bahati Musical College, aged one hundred seventy-five Standard Central Years, tottered away for his noon meds.
"Can't you do something more productive?"
"Give me time. We don't want to be obvious. And stop hissing at me. They'll think I'm talking to myself and hearing voices."
"From what I've seen of these befuddled gentry, that'll make you fit right in."
"Only," said Sev grimly, "if they don't hear the voices too."
Nancia hated to leave him with the last word in an argument, but she was distracted at that moment. Something had happened—or stopped happening. Caleb's sensor button was no longer transmitting a jiggling view of the cracks on the ceiling; the image was still and perfectly clear.
Not quite still. A regular, gentle motion assured her that he still breathed.
A moment later, two aides exchanged a flurry of rapid, low-voiced but mainly cheerful comments over Caleb's bed. Nancia gathered that the news was good; his (three-syllable Greek root) was up, his (four-syllable Latin derivation) was down, they were putting him on a regular dosage of (two-word Denebian form), and as soon as he was conscious they were to start him on a physical therapy routine.
She complained to Forister about the jargon.
"Now you know how the rest of the world feels about brains and brawns," he said soothingly. "You know, there are people who think decomposition theory is just a little hard to follow. They accuse us of mystifying the mathematics on purpose."
"Huh. There's nothing mystical about mathematics," Nancia grumbled. "This medical stuff is something else again."
"Why don't you translate the terms and find out what they mean?"
"I didn't have a classical education," Nancia told him. "I'm going to buy one when we get back to civilization, though. I want full datahedra of Latin, Greek, and medical terminology. With these new hyperchips I should be able to access the terms almost as fast as a native speaker."
Somebody shouted just out of visual range of Caleb's sensor button. The view of the hospital ceiling swayed, blurred, and was replaced by glass windows, green fields, and a white-clothed arm coming from the left. "Here," said a calm, competent voice just before Caleb bent over the permalloy bowl before him and gave up the contents of his last meal.
The contact button gave Nancia a very clear, sharply detailed close-up view of the results.
After that, though, he recovered his strength with amazing speed. Throughout the day Nancia followed his sessions with the physical therapist. At the same time she tracked Sev while he prowled the hallways of Summerlands Clinic and listened for any scrap of information about a patient named Valden Allen Hopkirk.
By mid-afternoon a new aide was able to assure Caleb that there would be no permanent nerve damage as a result of the attack.
"You're weak, though, and we'll need to retrain some of the nerve pathways; the stuff your space pirate used was a neural scrambler. Damage is reversible," the aide said briskly, "but I'd advise a prolonged course of therapy. You certainly won't be cleared to act as a brawn for some time. Has your ship been notified?"
"She knows everything that goes on here," said Caleb, placing one finger briefly on the edge of the contact button.
Nancia got a good look at the aide's face. The man looked thoughtful, perhaps worried. "I . . . see. And, um, I suppose the button has a dead-man switch? Some alarm if it's inactivated or removed?"
"Absolutely," Nancia responded through the contact button before Caleb could tell the truth. Some such arrangement would be a great safeguard for Caleb, and she wished Central had thought of it. But failing that, the illusion of the arrangement might give him some protection. She went on through the tiny speaker, ignoring Caleb's attempts to interrupt her. "Please notify all staff concerned of the arrangement. I would be sorry to have to sound a general alarm just because some ignorant staff member accidentally interfered with my monitoring system."
"That would indeed be . . . unfortunate," said the aide thoughtfully.
After he left, Caleb said quietly into the contact button, "That was a lie, Nancia."
"Was it?" Nancia parried. "Do you think you know all my capabilities? Who's the 'brain' of this partnership?"
"I see!"
Nancia rather hoped he didn't. At least she'd avoided lying directly to Caleb. That was something . . . but not enough.
She had never before minded her inability to move about freely on planetary surfaces. Psych Department's testing before she entered brainship training showed that she valued the ability to fly between the stars far more than the limited mobility of planet-bound creatures. "I could have told them that," Nancia responded when the test results were reported to her. "Who wants to roll about on surface when they could have all of deep space to play in? If I want anything planetside, they can bring it to me at the spaceport."
But they couldn't bring her Caleb. And she couldn't go to the Summerlands clinic to watch over him. Nancia could see and hear everything that passed within range of those buttons. She could even send instructions to the wearers. But she could not act. She was reduced to fretting over the slow progress they were making and worrying about the medications being inserted into Caleb's blood stream.
"Haven't you found anything yet?" she demanded of Forister. Since Fassa had spent the day crying quietly in her cabin, Forister interpreted his "guard" duties rather liberally. He was on board and available in case of any escape attempt, but he told Nancia that he saw no reason to waste his time sitting on a hard bench outside Fassa's cabin door. Instead, he sat before a touchscreen in the central cabin, inserting delicate computer linkages into Alpha's clinic records and scanning for some hint of where she'd put the witness they needed.
Forister straightened and sighed. "I have found," he told her, "four hundred gigamegs of patient charts, containing detailed records of all their medications, treatments, and data readouts."
"Well, then, why don't you just look up Hopkirk and find out what she's done with him?" Nancia demanded.
In response, Forister tapped one finger on the touchscreen and slapped his palm over Nancia's analog input. The data he had retrieved was shunted directly into Nancia's conscious memory stores. It felt like having the contents of a medical library injected directly into her skull. Nancia winced, shut down her instinctive read-responses, and opened a minuscule slit of awareness onto a tiny portion of the data.
It was an incomprehensible jumble of medical terminology, packed without regard for paragraphing or spacing, with peculiar symbolic codes punctuating the strings of jargon.
She opened another slit and "saw" the same tightly-packed gibberish.
"It's not indexed by patient name," Forister explained. "Names are encoded—for privacy reasons, I suppose. If the data is indexed by anything, it might be on type of treatment. Or it might be based on a hashed list of meds. I really can't find any organizing principle yet. Also," he added, unnecessarily, "it's compressed."
"We know he's being kept quiet by controlled overdoses of Seductron," Nancia said. "Why not . . . oh." As she spoke, she had been scanning the datastream. There was no mention of Seductron. "Illicit drug," she groaned. "Officially, there's no such treatment. She'll have encoded it as something else."
"I should have taken Latin," Forister nodded. "Capellan seemed so much more useful for a diplomat . . . Ah, well."
"Can you keep hacking into the records?" Nancia asked. "There might be a clue somewhere else."
Forister looked mildly offended. "Please, dear lady. 'Hacking' is a criminal offense."
"But isn't that what you're doing?"
"I may be temporarily on brawn service," Forister said, "but I am a permanent member of the Central 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 hacking." 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.
"I 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 fact 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." Humming 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 segment 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 fun 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 Summerlands 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 instinct prompted her to plant the spyder; she had just felt that the amount of Net communications traffic concerning this particular brainship and brawn suggested they were more important than they looked. Infuriatingly, the datastreams coming from Central over the Net were in a code Alpha had not yet succeeded in breaking, so the spyder was her only source of information.
So far, though, it had proved a remarkably effective tool. Alpha preened herself on her cleverness in dropping one of the expensive spyders where it was most needed. She drummed her fingers on the palmpad of 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 competitors. She'd always felt the del Parma kid didn't have what it took to make it in the big time. Too emotional. 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 concerns. Alpha was willing to bet the little snip had never thought of compiling a dossier on each of her competitors, 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, Darnell 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 conversation 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 faster; 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 extreme 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 suffered 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 explained to them that the Blissto addiction had only been replaced by a much more serious drug, a variant of Seductron with the unfortunate 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 servants. 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 enough medical background to be genuinely useful as aides in the clinic, but were far too stupid to replicate her work on Seductron. If she died or were incapacitated, Baynes and Moss would die too: inevitably, slowly, and painfully.
She felt quiet satisfaction, as always, at seeing two men to whom her life was, literally, as valuable as their own. And for all that little snip Fossa vaunts her sex appeal, no man who's rutted after her cares about her life the way these two care about mine.
She gave her instructions quickly and confidently, expecting nothing but instant obedience. The patient carried on Summerlands' lists as Varian Alexander was to be removed to the charity side of the clinic at once. There was an empty bed in Ward 6, where the recovering Blissto addicts and alcoholics were housed; he would do very well there for the moment.
"Excuse me, Doctor, but are you sure—" Baynes began.
"He'll stand the move," Alpha said.
"Yes, but—"
"It's simple enough even for your drug-logged brain, I should think!"
"It's not Alexander that worries him, Doctor," said the quicker Moss. "It's that half-cyborg freak in Ward 6. Qualia Benton. Been asking a lot of questions, she has. Too many."
Alpha drummed her fingers on the permalloy table. Benton. Qualia Benton. Ah, yes. An interesting case. Presented as an alcoholic veteran of the Capellan Wars who was too shaky and brain-damaged to keep up her own periodic maintenance on her cyborg limb and organ replacements. All parts had appeared to be in good working order, but Alpha had approved the series of tests and maintenance anyway; Veterans' Aid would pay for the work, and if Qualia Benton was too far out of it to do her own maintenance, she'd never think to question whether the work the clinic charged was absolutely necessary—or whether it had even been done.
"What sort of questions?"
Baynes shrugged. "Anything. Everything. How do we like our jobs. How did we get our jobs. How many rooms are there in this wonderful big building, and what all goes on here besides taking care of poor old freaks like her. Supposing she wanted to get work at a nice clean place like this, would we put in a good word for her."
"No harm in all that."
"Yeah, but . . ." Baynes shifted his weight from one foot to the other and fell silent.
Moss took up the story. "Last Friday she was rolling about in her bed, claiming she had nervous pains something awful in her left foot, which it isn't there any more, Doctor, and nothing wrong with the prosthesis connections, I checked 'em out twice. Wouldn't go out for exercise with the rest of the winos, so I left her while we shoved the others out for their healthful walk around the park. Only thing is, I had to come back early on account of old Charlie Blissed-Out collapsed with chest pains and I wanted a floatube to bring him back. And I found her on the floor outside the staff room. She claimed she'd been trying to work the prosthesis and it collapsed on her."
"Possibly true," said Alpha.
"Yeah. But . . . the staff room door was unlocked. I swear I locked up like always, Doctor, but it was open then."
Alpha considered Moss's sweating face for a long moment. He could be trying to cover up his own carelessness in leaving the staff room door unlocked and a patient alone in the ward. But he hadn't had to tell her about the incident in the first place. He would only be risking her anger if he were afraid of something even worse—like a threat to her position at the clinic, something that would take her away and end his supply of Seductron-B4.
"Put the two of them in a private room," Alpha ordered.
"Aren't any on the charity side," Baynes objected glumly.
Moss rolled his eyes. "God give me strength," he pleaded. "Doctor knows that, Baynes. Forget about moving Victor Alexander to the charity side. We're to put Qualia Benton in a private room with him on the V.I.P. side, and don't worry about the fact that Veterans Aid won't pay; I reckon she won't be there long enough to run up much of a bill. Right, Doctor?"
He gave Alpha a conspiratorial smile which she did not return.
"Benton's is an interesting case," Alpha said neutrally. "I wish to investigate this prosthesis trouble myself. Any charges incurred will be billed to the experimental lab. Meanwhile, I wish you to keep an eye on the visitor Bryley. He's supposed to be here as escort to that brawn, but he's been spending entirely too much time talking to too many people in the public rooms."
Bryley might not be an immediate threat, but it wouldn't do any harm to have Baynes and Moss keep an eye on him. As for the other two, Alpha had no intention of leaving the disposal of her problems to this pair of bunglers, one stupid and the other trying to wriggle himself into her good graces. Nor did she intend to risk their being able to give direct evidence against her, if worst came to the worst.
Qualia Benton might be no more than an alcoholic old fool who couldn't keep from snooping into other people's business, or she might be considerably more than that. If the first, she would be no loss; if the second, she had to be disposed of immediately. As for Valden Allen Hopkirk—Alpha hated to waste a potential tool like Hopkirk, especially after going to the trouble of keeping him lightly drugged and available for all this time, but she prided herself on the ability to face facts and cut her losses. There were suddenly too many people asking too many questions around Summerlands.
Alpha dismissed Baynes and Moss and went back into her private storage room to prepare. "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself," she murmured as she prepared two stimpads, each loaded with a massive overdose of Seductron-B4.
The woman known as Qualia Benton knew something was wrong when the two aides who were Doctor Hezra-Fong's shadows came to transfer her from the charity side of the clinic. She'd been ready to act then, fingers tensed against the side of her left-leg prosthesis, adrenalin keeping her unnaturally aware of every shadow and change of intonation.
And nothing happened. "You're moving to a private room," the big one called Baynes said.
"Who'll pay?" Qualia Benton demanded in the fretful, shrill tone to be expected from an old soak whose nerves were jangling for just one more drink.
"Doctor's interested in your case," said the little black-haired one, Moss. "She wants to run some special tests. On the clinic, if Veteran's Aid won't cover it. You could get into the next issue of the Medical Research Journal."
"I'm honored," said Qualia Benton politely. She let the men transfer her to a wheelchair and rode quietly down the long silent corridors of Summerlands clinic, watching the myriad reflections of herself and the aides in the polished tiles of floor and walls and ceiling, ready for the slightest move that would warn her it was time to act.
It won't happen in the halls. They'll move when I'm in a room alone, she told herself. But what if they expected her to count on that, and took her by surprise in one of these long empty hallways? She dared not relax.
Even when they wheeled her into a room with two beds, the one nearest the window already occupied, she was tense with expectation.
"Here now, you said I was getting a private room!" she whined. Qualia Benton would whine; what's more, she would be suspicious and distrustful like most recovering addicts, almost paranoid. God knew, it wasn't hard to fake that part.
"Might as well be private," said the one called Moss. "He won't bother you much. Will you, Varian?"
The patient in the other bed nodded and shook his head alternately, smiling with a loose, open-lipped grin that chilled her spirits. Blissto addict. Or worse . . . if there is anything worse? And they're maintaining him in that condition, instead of trying to break the addiction. That's criminal!
Qualia Benton, chronic alcoholic, too woozy to take proper care of her own prostheses and replacement organs, wouldn't care about somebody else's problems. She said nothing.
The aides helped her into the free bed.
"Here you go," said the small black-haired man cheerfully. He slapped a stimpad downwards; she recoiled but could not quite escape the stinging contact against her shoulder. "Just a little relaxation med before the tests," he said.
"Don't wanna relax," she muttered. The thickness in her speech was natural. She was suddenly finding it hard to think. Something was infiltrating her bloodstream, something soft as a cloud and warm as sunshine, floating her away to the Isles of the Blest—bless—bliss—Blissto! That was it!
The man in the other bed—was he really a Blissto addict, or had he been drugged in the same manner? Foolish, foolish not to have anticipated this. Once the aides had caught her out of bed and snooping where she had no business, she should have known her time at the clinic was limited.
She set her will to resisting the power of the drug. And not only her will. One thing about being underestimated, being seen as an old lush without the sense to care for her own artificial organs: Dr. Hezra-Fong hadn't, apparently, run any serious tests on those hyperchip-enhanced organs. The Blissto was carrying her away; but if she could only gain an hour or two, all might yet be well.
Did she have that hour's grace? No way to tell; she could only watch and wait, and that not very effectively. The hard hospital pillow beneath her head was soft as a Denebian flufftuff. Her left hand still rested against the smooth hard prosthesis, but she could barely feel the permaskin; the Blissto was interposing a fluffy cloud of blissful illusion between her and reality.
Doctor wants to run some tests . . . Was that truly all this meant? Surely not. So important a person as Dr. Hezra-Fong, assistant director of Summerlands, wouldn't go to all this trouble to prove that an old lush was faking disability. There had to be more going on here.
By late afternoon Sev noticed that the same two aides kept walking through the public visiting rooms. They were both rather striking in their appearance—one a burly, blue-chinned man with a lumbering walk, the other neat and quick and given to slicking down his black hair with short nervous strokes. And they would have looked more natural at a portside bar than in a luxury medical clinic.
Sev reckoned he was supposed to notice them and to be scared off. That was annoying. The doddering old CenDip widow he was talking to had finally mentioned a patient named Varian Alexander, a Blissto addict. That could be an alias for Valden Allen Hopkirk; the information that Alexander had just been moved to a semi-private room supported the theory. He was ready to get back to Nancia and check out the records on this Alexander, and he hated like hell to let these two petty thugs think they'd frightened him.
"You will not start anything with those two," Nancia instructed him when he muttered his complaints into the contact button. "They're minor. You get back and watch Caleb. I'll send Forister to take care of our friend Hopkirk."
"And who," Sev inquired sweetly, "will guard Fassa?"
Nancia assaulted his eardrums with a burst of static that attracted the attention of two other visitors. Glancing doubtfully at the artificial Capella fern beside Sev, they moved to the other side of the room and seated themselves well away from the strange, dour young man and his talking plant.
"You're attracting attention," Sev said sweetly. "Better let me handle this in my own way."
"Don't blame me if you end up in a recycler," Nancia grumbled in an undertone. "And don't expect me to send Forister to fish you out of trouble, either. After all, as you pointed out, somebody has to guard Fassa."
"I don't," said Sev loudly and clearly, "need anybody to get me out of trouble."
The other visitors whispered among themselves and somebody giggled. Sev felt his face turning red. Two shapes materialized at his elbows, one large and lumbering, one darting in quick as a hummingbird.
"Forgetting your meds again, sonny?" asked the small one in a kindly, concerned voice. He turned towards the other visitors in the room. "Sorry about the disturbance. He hears voices. Should improve with therapeu—ahh!"
Sev drove one fist into the small man's chin and wheeled to confront the big one. A hand like a small boulder descended on his head. The room whirled around him. An old lady screamed. He saw something sharp in the rock-like hand. Should have guessed. The danger is never where you're looking. The hand came down for a second time, like an earthquake or an avalanche, vast, implacable, and as Sev twisted away the needle slid into flesh, quiet as a whisper, smooth as sleep.
When she heard the sounds of the fracas in the public waiting rooms, Alpha slipped into the semi-private room she'd assigned to Hopkirk and the snoopy derelict. Damn Baynes and Moss! Couldn't they handle a minor surveillance task without starting a fight? There must be something about Blissto that permanently destroyed the brain cells.
Oh, well, at least the disturbance in the waiting room would draw everybody's attention; there'd be no inconvenient witnesses to her actions here. Not that she expected to be here long enough for any problems to develop. Hopkirk was grinning in his usual loose-lipped, amiable way, and the derelict Benton was limp against her pillow in a Blissto dream. Better take care of her first; she knew Hopkirk was too sedated to give trouble.
As she pushed up the old lush's sleeve to apply the stimpad, Alpha wondered whether Qualia Benton were really a snoop, or just a brain-damaged bag lady who'd had the bad luck to stumble into private places at the wrong time. Not that it made much difference. She wouldn't be answering any questions now.
The stimpad slapped down on chill, firm flesh. The array of needles clicked but did not sink in. Alpha felt a moment's cold apprehension. Something is wrong here. Something is very wrong.
And Qualia Benton's dark eyes were wide open, watching her with amusement.
"The right arm prosthesis is real lifelike," she said cheerfully, "but you won't get stimpad needles through the plastiskin. And now—oh, no, dear. I wouldn't do that. I really wouldn't."
From under the bedclothes she had produced an ugly, snub-nosed needler. Where did that come from? The old bitch isn't wearing anything but a hospital gown.
"Whatever you had in that stimpad, the charge is wasted now," Qualia Benton informed her in that same cheerful tone. "There should be just enough left for a lab on Central to analyze. Please don't try to throw it away; I'll want to put it in an evidence bag for the trial."
"Trial," Alpha croaked. "Evidence bag." She backed up a step, frozen with horror, while her intended victim swung one real leg and one permalloy prosthesis out of bed, fussily straightened her gown, and produced a plastic bag from under the pillow.
"Just drop it in here, dear, and don't make any sudden moves. You wouldn't want to startle a poor nervous old woman. This needler is set on wide spray, and it's loaded with ParaVen. I don't really want to paralyze you," she said thoughtfully, "but if necessary . . ."
Two more backward steps brought Alpha to the door. She dropped and rolled into the corridor, momentarily out of range of the needler. "Baynes! Moss!" she shrieked. "32-A, patient out of control, Code Z, stat!"
Running feet pounded down the corridor and Alpha closed her eyes in momentary relief. That heavy tread had to belong to Baynes. Let this crazy snoop of a woman waste her needler charge on the aides—then Alpha would spirit her away to the violent ward. She promised herself a long and entertaining series of experiments on the bitch, once they got that damned needler away from her.
"Stop right there," the old woman called in a voice too clear for her apparent age. "I am a legally constituted representative of Central Worlds Internal Investigation. Any attack on my person is treason, punishable by law. You're under arrest."
"The hell I am," countered a voice that most certainly did not belong to the thick-witted Baynes. Alpha looked up and saw that Bryley man, the one she'd sent Baynes and Moss to take care of. "I'm the Central Worlds rep here, and you're under arrest. What have you done to my witness?"
"The guy in the next bed?" For the first time, the Benton woman sounded uncertain. "He's not going to be a lot of good to you. Too blissed-out to know his own name. But you're welcome to him, if you want him. I expect she was going to kill him next, after she took care of me."
"Kill? You?" Now Bryley sounded equally confused.
From her crouching position, Alpha saw the Benton woman bend and fumble along the side of her leg prosthesis. A crack opened and she drew out a thin holographic strip that shimmered with rainbow colors in the hallway lights. So that's where she hid the needler. . . .
"General Micaya Questar-Benn," the woman introduced herself. She was standing straighter now, without the hunch and the bent leg that had made her look so small and helpless before. "Undercover assignment for Central, checking out the suspiciously high death rate on the charity side of Summerlands. My colleague Forister Armontillado y Medoc should be somewhere around; he can vouch for me. And you?"
"Sevareid Bryley-Sorensen, on temporary assignment to investigate fraud in a Bahati construction company." He looked down at Alpha; she had a dizzying glimpse of blue eyes and an expression as if the cat had dragged in something better left in a back alley. "I think our cases may be connected. I was here to collect Valden Allen Hopkirk, witness to a case of criminal Net interference by one of the del Parma girl's friends. Apparently this 'lady' is another of the gang; she's been concealing the witness and—from what you say—keeping him too doped up to testify. You think she was going to kill him?"
"We'll have to wait until that stimpad in her hand has been analyzed for drug traces," General Questar-Benn said mildly, "but I certainly don't think she was dispensing routine meds. Fortunately, she slapped the stimpad on my upper-arm prosthesis. I think I was supposed to be too drugged to notice her; one of those thugs she uses for aides dosed me with Blissto, or something like it, about an hour ago."
Alpha slowly uncurled herself and stood up. If she was lost, she'd go with that much dignity. She was half a head taller than this Sev Bryley; it helped, a little, to look down on him.
"So what are you," she demanded, "a robot? Nobody's immune to Seduc—Blissto," she caught herself. No reason to give away information.
General Questar-Benn chuckled. "No, dear girl, I'm not quite as badly off as the Tin Woodman. The valves may be helped along by hyperchips, but I still have a heart—something that appears to have been left out of your makeup. But the liver and kidneys are replacements, and last year I had a new hyperchip-enhanced blood filtering function installed so that I could monitor my own internal prostheses. If you'd shown up right after your goon drugged me, I might have been in trouble. But an hour was more than enough time to filter the drug out of my bloodstream."
Alpha glowered at her and Bryley impartially. "And what about you?" she demanded of Bryley. "You looked like a man, but I guess you're another fucking cyborg freak."
"I am a man," Bryley said mildly. "I'm also fast—and I learned Capellan hand fighting in the war. Your big thug tripped over his own feet—with a little help—and slapped himself with the stimpad he was aiming at me. I don't know what was in it; perhaps you'd like to tell me whether he'll survive the experience? As for the little one, he collided with one of those big ceramic pots you've got decorating the waiting room. He'll have one hell of a headache when he wakes up, but he'll be in perfectly good shape to testify against you."
"No, he won't," Alpha snapped. "You don't know as much as you think you do! The man's addicted to—something you won't be able to supply. Without his next fix, he'll die in agony before the week's out!"
Bryley raised one eyebrow. "Then," he said cheerfully, "we'd better make sure to get his testimony on datahedron before he dies, hadn't we? Thanks for the warning."