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the Fury scolded.

  Megarea added in unusual support of Tisiphone.

 

  Alicia suggested pointedly, and stepped forward to shake the inspector’s hand.

  Giolitti was a bit surprised to find only the captain waiting for him, but he had to give her tailor high marks. That severe, midnight-blue uniform and silver-braided bolero suited the tall, sable-haired woman perfectly.

  “Lieutenant Giolitti, MaGuire Customs Service,” he introduced himself, and the woman smiled.

  “Captain Theodosia Mainwaring.”

  She had a nice voice—low and almost furry-sounding. He found himself beaming back at her and wondered vaguely why he felt so cheerful.

  “Welcome to MaGuire, Captain.”

  “Thanks.” She released his hand, and he brought out his notepad.

  “You have your crew’s updated med forms, Captain?”

  “Right here.” She extended a folio of chips, and Giolitti plugged them into the notepad, punching buttons with practiced fingers and scanning the display. Looked good. He supposed he really ought to insist on meeting the others immediately, but there was time for that before he left.

  “Ready for inspection, Captain?” he asked, and Mainwaring nodded.

  “Follow me,” she invited, and led him into the lift.

  The customs officer’s vaguely disoriented eyes were a vast relief, but Alicia made a point of punching the lift buttons. Tisiphone chuckled deep inside her mind, enjoying herself as she worked her wiles upon their visitor, yet Alicia knew the fewer perceptions the Fury had to fuzz the better, and there was no point letting Megarea move the lift without instructions.

  She escorted Lieutenant Giolitti into her quarters and watched him carry out his inspection. He clearly knew the best places to conceal contraband, yet there was a mechanical air to his actions. His voice sounded completely alert as he carried on a cheerful conversation with her, but its very normality was almost bizarre against the backdrop of his robotic search.

  He finished his examination with a smile, and she drew a deep breath and led him back outside. She paused for just a moment, watching his eyes go even more unfocused, then turned and escorted him right back into her cabin.

  “My engineer’s quarters,” she said, and he nodded and went to work . . . totally oblivious to the fact that he had just searched exactly the same room.

  Alicia hardly believed what she was seeing. She’d counted on it, but actually seeing it was eerie and unreal, and she felt Megarea’s matching reaction. Tisiphone, on the other hand, took it completely for granted, though she was obviously bending all her will upon the lieutenant to bring it off.

  Giolitti completed his second examination and turned to her.

  “Who’s next?” he asked cheerfully.

  “My astrogator,” Alicia said, and led him back out into the passage.

  Giolitti made the last entry and wished all his inspections could go this smoothly. Captain Mainwaring ran a taut ship. Even her cargo hold was spotless, and Star Runner was one of the very few free traders whose crew hadn’t left something illegal—or at least closely regulated—lying around where he could find it. Which made them improbably law-abiding or fiendishly clever at hiding their personal stashes. “Given his impression of Mainwaring’s people, Giolitti suspected the latter, and more power to them.

  It was funny, though. He’d been impressed by their competence, but they hadn’t really registered the way people usually did. Probably because he’d been concentrating so hard on their captain, he thought a bit guiltily, and glanced at her from the corner of his eye as she escorted him back to the personnel lock. It was unusual for a captain to spend his or her precious time escorting a customs man about in person. Even the best of them seemed to regard inspectors as one step lower than a Rish, an intruder—and, still worse, an official intruder— in their domains. Giolitti didn’t really blame them, but it was a tremendous relief when he met one of the rare good ones.

  And, come to think of it, it wasn’t really all that strange that the rest of her crew seemed somehow faded beside her. He’d never met anyone with quite the personal magnetism Theodosia Mainwaring radiated. She was a striking woman, friendly and completely at her ease, yet he had the strangest impression she could be a very dangerous person if she chose. Of course, no shrinking violet would be skippering a free trader at such a relatively young age, but it went deeper than that. He remembered the grizzled petty officer who’d overseen the hand-to-hand training of the “young gentlemen” at OCS. He’d moved the way Mainwaring did, and he’d been sudden death on two feet.

  The lieutenant shook the thought aside and ejected the clearance chip from his notepad. He held it out to the captain, then extended his hand.

  “It’s been a pleasure, Captain Mainwaring. I wish every ship I inspected were as shipshape as yours. I hope you do well in our area.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” Mainwaring clasped his hand firmly, and for just an instant, he seemed to feel an odd, hard angularity in her palm, but the sensation vanished. A moment later, he didn’t even remember having felt it. “I hope we run into one another again,” the captain continued.

  “Maybe we will.” Giolitti released her hand and stood back, then raised an admonishing finger. “Remember, any of your people who come dirtside will be subject to individual med-scans to confirm their certification.”

  “Don’t worry, Lieutenant.” Mainwaring’s rather amused smile made him feel even younger. “I don’t expect we’ll be here long enough for liberty—in fact, most of my people are going to be busy running maintenance checks on the Fasset drive before we pull out—but we’ll check in with the medics if we are.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Giolitti gave her a crisp salute. “In that case, allow me to extend an official welcome to MaGuire and bid you good bye.”

  Mainwaring returned his salute, and the lieutenant headed back for his shuttle. He had two more inspections to make by shift end, and he wished, more wistfully than hopefully, that they might go as smoothly.

  Alicia let herself sag against the bulkhead and sucked in a deep, lung-stretching breath. Dear God, she’d known Tisiphone was good, but the Fury’s performance had surpassed her most extravagant hopes.

  She doubted they were likely to meet a brighter, more conscientious customs inspector than young Lieutenant Giolitti, and she no longer doubted their ability to razzle-dazzle him if they did. It had been unnerving enough to watch him “search” her quarters five separate times, but that had been nothing compared to watching him walk right past the feed tubes from the main missile magazine without even batting an eye. He’d had to climb a ladder to cross one of them, yet it simply hadn’t been there for him, and neither had the energy batteries or the armory. He’d seemed perfectly content with his “inspection” of the control room, as well, though only an idiot—or someone under Tisiphone’s spell—could have looked at those blank gray walls and the alpha link headset without realizing what he was seeing.

  Tisiphone observed. she added graciously,

  “Yeah.” Alicia drew another breath and straightened. “Still, you seemed to be concentrating pretty hard. Could you have handled more people?”

 
nce, to include a disinclination to discuss their inspection at a later date lest they discover too great a degree of similarity among their recollections.>

  Megarea put in,

  “I know.” Alicia stepped back into the lift and punched for the flight deck. “Are we clear on our docking and service fees, Megarea?”

 

  “What about service personnel?”

 

  “You’re a sweetheart,” Alicia said fervently. She’d been astounded by the verisimilitude of the computer images and voices Megarea could produce. It was a good thing the AI could, too, since they had to convince anyone who got curious— No, scratch that. They had to keep anyone from getting curious, which meant they had to provide crewmen other than Captain Mainwaring in one form or another. Megarea’s ability to carry on com conversations, or even several of them at once, would be invaluable in that regard.

 

 

  “You got that right, Lady,” Alicia agreed. “But I take it no one raised an eyebrow over your faces?”

 

  “Sure.” The lift slid to a halt and Alicia stepped out onto the flight deck. “Let her roll.”

 

  The flat screen flickered for just an instant, then cleared with the face of a thin, auburn-haired man with heavy-lidded eyes.

  “How do I look, thir?” the image asked, and Alicia grinned.

  “I think maybe you got the lisp down a little too pat, Megarea.”

  “That’th eathy for you to thay,” “Lieutenant Chisholm” returned aggrievedly. “You haven’t been teathed about it all your life. I tell you, it’th been a real pain in the ath for me!”

  “Do you say that, or do you spray it?” Alicia giggled, and the image raised a hand into the field of the pickup and made a rude gesture.

  “Oh, that’s perfect, Megarea! Of course, I imagine poor Chisholm won’t be handling much of the com traffic, given his lisp.”

  “No.” Chisholm’s baritone was replaced by a soprano and the image changed to that of a square-faced, silver-haired woman Alicia recognized as Ruth Tanner, her purser. “Poor Andy hates it when he has to talk to strangers. That’s why I usually handle the com watch when you’re not aboard, ma’am.”

  “So I see,” Alicia propped a hip against a console and grinned. The AI had outdone herself. No one who spoke to any of Megarea’s talking heads would suspect there was only a single human aboard Star Runner. Coupled with the AI’s ability to handle both shuttles through her telemetry links, Captain Mainwaring’s crew would be very much in evidence—so much so that no one would ever realize that they’d never actually laid eyes on any of them.

  “Okay, I think we’re set. But if it’s all the same to you two, I need a good night’s sleep before I get started hunting up a cargo.”

  The screen blanked as Megarea returned to direct contact, and Alicia started back towards her quarters, shedding her tight jacket as she went. She tossed the garment to one of Megarea’s waiting remotes, which whisked it neatly into a closet.

  Megarea said as she undressed,

  “You know I haven’t.” Alicia paused with her blouse half off. “Why?”

 

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?”

 

  Tisiphone asked curiously.

 

  “Meaning what?” Alicia asked sharply. “That they know where we’re headed or something?”

 

  “What last little bit?”

  Megarea said. Alicia swallowed, but the AI wasn’t quite done. Alicia sat down on the bed with a thump as Megarea finished her report.

 

  Chapter Seventeen

  Benjamin McIlheny racked his headset and stood, rubbing his aching eyes and trying to remember when he’d last had six hours’ sleep at a stretch.

  He lowered his hands and glowered at the record chips and hard-copy heaped about his office aboard the accommodation ship HMS Donegal. Somewhere in all that crap, he knew, was the answer—or the clues which would lead to the answer—if only he could find it.

  It seemed a law of nature that any intelligence service always had the critical data in its grasp . . . and didn’t know it. After all, how did you cull the one, crucial truth from the heap of untruth, half-truth, and plain lunacy? Answer: hindsight invariably recognized it after the fact. Which, of course, was the reason the intelligence community was constantly being kicked by people who thought it was so damned easy.

  McIlheny snorted bitterly and began to pace. He’d seen it too many times, especially from Senate staffers. They had an image of intelligence officers as Machiavellian spy-masters, usually in pursuit of some hidden agenda. That was why you had to watch the sneaky bastards so closely. And since they were so damned clever, obviously they never told all they knew, even when they had a constitutional duty to do so. Which, naturally, meant any “failure” to spot the critical datum actually represented some deep-seated plot to suppress an embarrassing truth.

  People like that neither knew nor cared what true intelligence work was. Holovid might pander to the notion of the Daring Interstellar Agent carrying the vital data chip in a hollow tooth, but the real secret was sweat. Insight and trained instinct were invaluable, but it was the painstaking pursuit of every lead, the collection of every scrap of evidence and its equally exhaustive analysis, which provided the real breakthroughs.

  Unfortunately, he admitted with a sigh, analysis took time, sometimes more than you had, and in this case it wasn’t providing what he needed. He knew there was a link between the pirates and someone high up. It was the only possible answer. Admiral Gomez’s full strength would have had a tough time fighting its way into Elysium orbit against its space defenses, yet the pirates had gotten inside in the first rush. McIlheny had no detailed sensor data to back his hunch, but he was morally certain the rai
ders had slipped a capital ship into SLAM range under some sort of cover. The shocked survivors all agreed on the blazing speed with which the orbital defenses had been annihilated, and only a capital ship could have done it.

  But how? How had they fooled Commodore Trang and all of his people? Simple ECM couldn’t be the answer after all the sector had been through. No, somehow they’d given Trang a legitimate cover, something he knew was friendly, and there was simply no way they could have without access to information they should never have been able to reach.

  It all fit a pattern—even Treadwell was showing signs of accepting that—but the colonel was damned if he could make it all come together. Even Ben Belkassem had thrown up his hands and departed for Old Earth in the faint hope that his superiors there might be able to see something from their distant perspective which had eluded everyone in the Franconian Sector.

  The colonel hoped so, because what bothered him even more than how was why. What in God’s name were these people up to? He hadn’t said so (except very privately to Admiral Gomez and Brigadier Keita), but it passed sanity that they could be garden-variety pirates. That didn’t make sense just based on cost effectiveness! Anybody who could field a force the size of the one these people had to have didn’t need whatever they were making off their loot.

  No doubt plunder helped defray their operational costs, but his most generous estimate of their take fell short of what it must cost to supply and maintain their ships. Just look at what they were taking: colony support equipment, spaceport beacon arrays, industrial machinery, for God’s sake! They scooped up some luxury goods, of course—they’d scored over a half-billion in direcat pelts, alone, from Mathison’s World—but no normal hijacker or pirate would touch most of what they took.

  And even aside from their unlikely loot, there were the casualties. McIlheny didn’t believe in Attila the Hun in starships. Stupid people, by and large, didn’t become starship captains, and only someone who was stupid could fail to see the inevitable result of pursuing some bizarre scorched-earth policy against the Empire. That was why massacre for the sake of massacre wasn’t a normal piratical trait; it didn’t pay their bills, and it did guarantee a massive response. Yet these people were deliberately maximizing the devastation in their wake. From everything the Elysium survivors could tell him, they hadn’t even tried to loot beyond the limits of the capital, but they’d nuked every city from orbit! Nine million dead. What in hell’s name could be behind that kind of slaughter? It was almost as if they were taunting the Fleet, daring it to deal with them.

 
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