Planet Pirates Omnibus Part 70

Drawers on one side held neatly folded garments she did not recognize even when she shook them out. Pajamas, lounging wear, all her size, and in colors she favored, but she'd never bought these. She chose an outfit she could even have worn in public, loose plush pants and a pullover top-and felt much better. That ridiculous hospital gown made anyone feel helpless and submissive. Dressed, with her hair clean and brushed, and her feet in sensible shoes, she was ready to take on the world. Whatever world this happened to be.

Back in the other room, she found the bed remade and rolled to one side. Now a small table centered the room, with a meal laid ready on it. Soup, fruit, bread: exactly what she would have chosen. But the room was empty, silent. Had she taken that long to clean up? She looked but found no clock.

She wondered whether the food was drugged, and then realized that it made no difference. If they . . . whoever they were . . . wanted to drug her, it would be easy enough to do it in other ways. She ate the excellent meal with full appreciation of its excellence. Tlien she investigated the locker the attendant had first 190.

pointed out. There were the rest of her clothes from the Diplo trip and all the other personal gear she'd taken along. Everything seemed to be freshly cleaned, but otherwise untouched.

FedCentral. The man had said she was on FedCentral. She'd never been there and knew nothing of it except for the standard media shots of the Council sessions. Who had secure medical facilities on FedCentral? Fleet? But if she was in Fleet's hands, surely Sa.s.sinak could identify her and get her out of here? Unless something had happened to Sa.s.sinak . . . and she didn't even want to think about that possibility.

Instead she tried to add up the elapsed time since she'd left the Zaid-Dayan. It must be very close to Tanegti's trial date when she would be called to give evidence. Unless, of course, she was still cooped up here. Was that what someone wanted? Had that been Zebara's plan all along? She rooted through her personal gear, looking for anything that might be the proof Zebara had promised her of the Diplo end of die conspiracy, but found nothing. Her clothes were all there and the one or two pieces of jewelry she had taken to Diplo.

Her little computer held only its software. Nothing stored in files with mysterious names and nothing new in the files she'd initiated. No mysterious lumps in her clothing, nothing tucked into a pocket of her dufiel. Even the clutter was still there. She wondered why no one had tossed out the copy of the program from Bitter Destinies or the baggage claim receipt from Diplo or the ragged sc.r.a.p on which she'd jotted the room number on Liaka where the medical team would a.s.semble. An advertising card from a dress shop she'd never had time to visit. She couldn't even remember if that was from before Ireta or after. Another torn sc.r.a.p of paper with the numbers of the cases that needed to be re-entered on cubes, the ones Bias had thrown that fit about. But nothing resembling Zebara's promised evidence. Finally, frustrated, she threw herself into the softly padded chair and glared at the door. With suspicious quickness, it opened.

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She did not recognize the old man who stood there. He clearly knew her, but waited, at ease, until she acknowledged him with a nod.

"May I come in?" he asked then.

As if I could stop you, she thought, but tried for a gracious smile and said, "Of course. Do come in."

Her voice carried more edge than she intended, but ft didn't bother him. He shut the door carefully behind him as she tried to figure out who, or what, he was.

Although he wore no uniform, she felt a uniform would look more natural on him. With that bearing, he would be an officer. At that age, for his silvery hair and fined brow put him into his sixties at least, he should have stars. Tall, much taller than average, piercing blue eyes. If his hair had been yellow or black or brown . . . a warm honey-brown . . .

It was always a shock, and it was going to stay a shock, as it had with Zebara. At least this man was healthy, his white hair a sign of age, but not decay.

"Admiral Coromell," she murmured softly. He smiled, the same charming smile she remembered on a much younger face. Not in his sixties, but upper eighties, at feast. "Your father?" He must be dead, but . . .

"He^ died about two decades ago, painlessly in his sleep," Coromell said. "And you have survived another long sleep! Remarkable."

Not remarkable, Lunzie thought, but disgusting. "I'm beginning to think myself that those superst.i.tious sail-Ore were right! I'm a Jonah."

^ He snorted, a curiously youthful snort. "Ireta's a planet. It doesn't count. My dear, much as I'd like to ^C&at with you and play verbal games, I can't allow either of us the luxury. We have a problem."

Lunzie contented herself with a raised eyebrow. As jfcr as she was concerned they had many more than one problem. He could say what he would. ;t "It's your descendant."

She had not expected that. "Descendant?" Fiona must Jdead by now. Who could he mean? But of course! ak?" He nodded. She felt a surge of fear. "What's led to her? Where is she?"

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"That's what we don't know. She was here. I mean, on FedCentral, while I was on leave over on Six, hunting. Unfortunately. Now she's gone. Disappeared. She and an Iretan native, by the name of Aygar ..."

"Ay gar!"

Lunzie felt foolish, repeating it, but could think of nothing else to say. Why was Sa.s.sinak going anywhere with Aygar? Unless she . . . but Lunzie did not believe that for a moment. Sa.s.sinak had never, for one moment, thought of anything but her ship first and Fleet second. She would not take off on a recreational jaunt with Aygar when Tanegli's trial was coming up.

"According to the ranking officer aboard the Zaid-Dayan, Arly ..." He paused to see if she knew the name. She nodded. "Commander Sa.s.sinak sent you to Diplo to some source you knew about, to get information on Diplo's connection to the Iretan mess. Is that right?"

"Yes, it is."

Quickly, Lunzie outlined Sa.s.sinak's thoughts, and her decision to offer to go to Diplo.

"I was best suited, in many ways ..."

"I wouldn't have thought so, not after your experience with the heavyworlders on Ireta," said Coromell. "The last person who should have had to go . .

"But I'm glad I did."

She stopped, wondering if she should tell him everything, and filled in with a brief account of her retraining on Liaka and the early part of the expedition.

"I presume, then, that you do have the information you sought?" When she didn't answer at once, he c.o.c.ked his head and grinned, "Or did they catch you snooping and send you home in a coldsleep pod just to frustrate us?"

"I ... I'm not sure."

He waited, quiet but curious, in just the att.i.tude of the experienced interrogator who knows the suspect will incriminate herself, given enough rope. She did not want to explain Zebara to a Fleet admiral, especially not this Fleet admiral, but there was no other way. How best to do it? She remembered Sa.s.sinak, chewing out one of the junior officers who had tried to conceal a mistake . . . "When all else fails, Mister, tell Ae truth." She didn't think she'd made that big a mistake, but she'd still better tell the truth, and all of tt- It took longer than she expected. Although Coromell didn't ask questions until she finished, she could tell by his expression when she'd lost him and needed to back-back and explain. And her leftover indignation at Bias, plus a natural reluctance to go into her emotional ties to Zebara, kept her ranting at the team leader's prudery far too long. At last she came to an end, trailing off with, ". . . and then I felt terribly sleepy in that stuffy car and, when I woke up, I was here."

A long pause, during which Lunzie endured the gaze of his brilliant blue eyes. Age had not fogged them at all. She felt they were seeing things she had not said. She had not said anything about the opera Bitter Destinies except that Zebara had taken her to an opera. He sighed, at last, the first thing he'd done that sounded old.

"So. And did Zebara give you the information he promised? Or will you go to Tanegli's trial with your testimony alone?"

"He hadn't when I left his home," Lunzie said. "He paid I was to get it by messenger. And then ... it was oyer."

9s, "But he had you put in coldsleep, and safely aboard a transport that brought you here in a cargo of muskie- cWOol carpets. And I hear that was quite a scene, when Customs found a metallic return on the scan and un-rolled the whole mess of them. Your little pod came rolling out like . . . Who was that Old Earth queen? Guinevere or Catherine or Cleopatra . . . someone like that. Rolled in a carpet to present herself to a long , fee*d fallen in love with. Anyway. So you don't know, you, whether he pa.s.sed that information with you or .

r Lunzie shook her head. "I've looked through my and found nothing. Surely your people looked, 194.

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"I'm afraid they did." His lips pursed. "We found nothing we recognized. We thought perhaps when you woke, you would know what to look for. You don't?"

"No. If he included it, I don't recognize it."

"He gave you nothing at ail?" Coromell's voice had a querulous edge now, age roughening it with impatience. He gave me a very good time, Lunzie thought to herself, and a lot of worries.

"Nothing." Then she frowned. He started to speak but she waved him to silence. "No, I think he did after all."

Quickly, she went to the locker and pulled out the duffel, pawing through it. She had not kept her copy of the Bitter Destinies program. She had not felt she needed it to remember that powerful work and she had not wanted to chance being teased by the team members if they saw her with it. She had not even been sure that Diplo customs would let her take it out. So Zebara must have put that program among her things. She found it, and brought it to Coromell.

"This isn't mine. I threw mine away. And this is signed. Look! All the singers autographed it."

Thick dark ink, in many different calligraphies, most of them extravagantly individual. Coromell took it gingerly from her hand.

"Ah! Perfect for a rather old-fashioned technology. It would take a dot only this size," and he pointed to one of the ellipsis dots between a performer's name and role, "to hold a great deal of information. We'll have to see He stood, then shook his head at her. "I'm sorry, dear Lunzie, but you must stay here, unknown, awhile longer. Without Sa.s.sinak, we must not lose your testimony, no matter what this gives us."

"But I. . ."

He had moved even as he spoke, more swiftly and fluidly than she would have supposed possible, and abruptly she faced a closed door again.

"Blast you!" she said, to that impa.s.sive surface, "I am not a stupid child, even if you are an arrogant old goat."

That got the response it deserved! Nothing. But she felt better. She felt considerably better when Coromell ;: returned very shortly to report that the program had --:. none of the expected microdots.

"I find myself annoyed with your Zebara," he said, dapping the program down on the table between them. **If there's a message in this thing, no one's found it yet.

Do you have any idea how many little specks there are / in an opera program? Every single person credited with .

anything in the production has a row of them, and we had to check every one." "But it has to be this," said Lunzie. She picked up the program, and flipped through it. She still thought the cover design looked pretentious. Even with heavy-: worlder pride at full blast on this thing, she noticed that .K the opera had needed corporate sponsorship. The ads ; covered the inside front and back pages. Then came photographs of the lead singers, then scenes from the opera itself, then the outline of the libretto, and the east list. More photographs, an interview with the conductor. She realized she was reading the Diplo dialect . much better than she ever had. It almost seemed natu-:,f"; 1. She found herself humming the aria of the suicide y who refused to eat even re-synthesized meat. Coromell .

-: looked at her oddly.

"I don't know ..." she said. She didn't want to speak r Standard! She wanted to sing! Sing? Something flut- ,^, tered in her mind like great feathered wings and the "fvf1"*= tlternative slang meaning of "sing" popped up, along j;if with the anagram "sign." Suddenly she knew. "Sing a ^ng of sixpence . . . sing a sign . . . good heavens, that Ji^jnan is so devious a corkscrew would get lost in him."

I;!; "What!" Coromell fairly barked at her, his patience ;gte, looking now very like his boisterously bossy father.

^;l "It's here, but it's . . . it's in my head. It's a key . . .

n implant, keyed to this program. I think . . . Just be .$*. patient!"

She looked a bit longer, let her mind drift with the forces. Zebara had known she was a Disciple. had eased his pain, she had touched his mind just a and his heart somewhat more. She looked on the program, not knowing exactly what she was 196.

to find, but knowing she would find it. On the final page, the star's sprawling signature half covered her face, her broad bosom, the necklace . . . the necklace Zebara had . . . had not given her. So he said. The necklace . . . nearly priceless, he'd said. She'd said. A gift of the former lieutenant governor's son ... no ... that was not the link.

The necklace Zebara had not given her . . . her! He had not given her a necklace, and the necklace he had not given her lay innocently among her things. Cheap but a good design, she'd bought it ... she'd bought it before the Ireta voyage, hadn't she? She couldn't remember, now. Did it matter? It did.

She snapped out of that near-trance and without a word to Coromell dove back into her duffel, coming up with the necklace. An innocent enough accessory, itemized among her effects on her way into Diplo. She remembered filling out the form. Not expensive enough to require duty on any world, but handy for formal occasions, a pattern of linked leaves in coppertoned metal, with streaks of enamel in blues and greens.

She laid it on the table, and pushed Coromell's hand back when he reached for it. She gave it her whole attention. Did it have the same number of links? She wasn't sure. Was it the same clasp? She wasn't sure. She prodded it with a finger, hoping for inspiration. She had worn it that last day. It had caught on something in Zebara's house. That fluffy pillow? He had unsnagged it for her, unhooking the clasp and refasten-ing it later. She remembered being afraid of his hands so near her neck, and hating herself for that fear. The clasp it had now screwed together, making a little cylinder. Before, it had had an elegant hook, shaped like a tendril of the vine those leaves were taken from.

"The clasp," she said, quietly, without looking up at Coromell. "It's the clasp. It's not the same."

"Shall I?" he asked, reaching.

She shook her head. "No. I want to see." Carefully, as if it might explode for she felt a trickle of icy fear, she took it up and worked at the tiny clasp. Most such things unscrewed easily, two or three turns. This one

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was stuck, cross-threaded or not threaded at all. She heard Coromell shift restlessly in his chair. "Patience," she said.

Discipline fbcussed her attention. The real join was not in the middle, where a groove suggested it, but at the end. It required not a twist, but a pull-a straight pull, pinching the last link hard-and out came a delicate pin with its tip caught in a lump of something dark. She pulled the pin free and held on her hand that tiny, waxy cylinder.

"This has to be it. Whatever it is."

What it was, she heard later, was a complete record of Diplo's dealings with the Paradens and the Seti for the past century: names, dates, codes, the whole thing. Everything that Zebara had promised, and more.

"Enough," Coromell said, "to bring their government down . . . even revoke their charter."

"No." Lunzie shook her head. "It's not just the heavy-worlders. They were the victims first. We can't take vengeance on the innocent, the ones who aren't part of it"

"You know something I don't?" He was giving her a look that had no doubt quelled generations of junior officers. Lunzie felt what he intended her to feel, but fought against it.

"I do," she said firmly, against the pressure of the stars on his uniform and his age. "I've been there myself. I've been to their opera!"

"Opera!" That came out as a bark of amus.e.m.e.nt.

Lunzie glared and he choked it back. "Their very, very beautiful opera, Admiral Coromell. With singers better than I've heard in most systems. Composed by heavyworlders to dramatize poems written by heavyworlders, and for all its political bias, we don't come off very well. Tell me! What do you know about the early settlement of Diplo?"

He shrugged, clearly baffled at the intent of the question. "Not much. Heavyworlders settled it because ft was too dense for the rest of us without protective It's cold, isn't it? And it was one of the first 198.