Chapter 6

Randon had a tendency to underestimate just how quickly I could assimilate information, and hitting the "high points," as he'd called it, took about an hour longer than was probably necessary. But at last we were done. Dropping the cyl he'd given me in my own stateroom on the way, I made straight for Calandra's cell to give her the good news.

Or what I had expected would be good news.

"No," she said firmly. "I'm not going."

I stared at her, trying through my stunned astonishment to read her. All I could get was anger and disgust, most of it directed at me. "Calandra, maybe you don't understand what this means—"

"Oh, I understand, all right," she growled. "You thought that I'd leap at the chance to get out of this room, to see the universe in all its glory again."

I gritted my teeth. Once again she was reading me with supremely casual ease. "And why not? Any normal person would."

She glared at me. "Well, then, maybe I'm not normal anymore. Maybe when you've been condemned to death you'll have a different outlook on life, too."

For a moment we stood facing each other. A thought occurred to me through the haze, and I reached out with every bit of skill I had... and this time I found it. Well buried beneath all the anger, I found the fear.

In retrospect, it was obvious. Sometime along the line, during or after the months of her trial and appeals, she'd finally resigned herself to her approaching death... and now I was threatening that acceptance. Threatening her once again with uncertainty. "I'm sorry," I said quietly. "I know this isn't going to be easy for you—"

"You know that, do you?" she said sarcastically.

"I'm trying to help you!" I snapped abruptly. What with Aikman and now Calandra, I'd finally had enough. "I'm your friend, Calandra. Whether you believe it or not; whether you like it or not. You're going with us tomorrow because maybe it'll get Randon Kelsey-Ramos on our side."

"Oh, wonderful," she sneered. "Well, it may come as a shock to you, but I don't happen to want your Kelsey-Ramos's help."

"Then you're going to die," I said bluntly.

"There are worse things than death," she shot back. "Such as helping the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else, for instance. If Carillon's money hadn't scraped all the ethics off your precious Watcher label I wouldn't have to tell you that."

A stab of fury slid white-hot through my heart. Fury, strongly edged with guilt. She saw it, and took an involuntary step backward, eyes suddenly wary. "Then don't help," I snarled at her. "You can act like the bottom of a growth tank tomorrow if you want. But you are coming along."

She was still standing there, staring at me, as I turned and stomped out.

She was still glowering the next morning when we got into the car with Randon, Dapper Schock, Kutzko, and Daiv Ifversn and headed for Cameo. She was still glowering, and I was still feeling guilty.

Unreasonably guilty, after all, considering that this was nothing less than an attempt to save her life. But the awareness of good motives had always been a feeble kind of comfort with me, and this case was no exception... especially since I wasn't fully convinced I was doing the right thing.

So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the Law and the Prophets... I was certainly willing to obey... but could I really know how I would want to be treated under these circumstances? Calandra was right; without being in her position, I could only guess at what she needed from me.

And if I guessed wrong, I would wind up making her last days of life that much harder to bear.

Absorbed in my own thoughts, I withdrew most of my attention from the world around me... and was therefore almost startled when I suddenly realized that Calandra was beginning to pay a somewhat grudging attention to our surroundings.

To a normal person, I supposed, it wasn't all that interesting a view. Once out of Rainbow's End itself, the few modestly tall spaceport buildings disappeared, replaced by the squatter structures that nearly always dominated underdeveloped places like this where land was cheap and plentiful. Beyond and between the buildings were scatterings of the giant, multi-trunked native plants that seemed to take the ecological place of trees on this world. Simple, quiet, and at first glance almost prosaic... but for Watchers, nothing about God's universe was really prosaic. For me, as for Calandra, the landscape outside was a rich and varied study into the spirit of a world.

A world of people, I quickly realized, who were still not at rest with their planet.

The tension manifested itself in a thousand different ways, through a thousand different details. Here, we passed a home whose owner was fighting to keep aloof from the planet, his property ringed with imported trees and bushes; elsewhere, there were the mute signs of others who'd given up such attempts but still hadn't found any peace. I'd felt all this the night before, and it was no less unsettling in the fall light of day... especially since I had no idea what it was they were all striving against. The Solitaran environment was supposed to be one of the most benign in the colonies.

"Perhaps it's the Cloud," Calandra murmured.

I looked at her, both startled and chagrined that she'd once again read my line of thought so easily. "The Cloud's not supposed to affect people," I reminded her.

"Unless they're already dead?" she retorted grimly.

I swallowed, the sharp-acrid reminder of what she was facing curling my stomach. "Point, I suppose. But a lot of researchers have studied the Cloud, and none of them has ever mentioned any effect on the living."

"How long have any of them been in it?" she countered. "Some of these people have probably lived here all their lives. Even then, you can see how subtle it is. Would the average researcher even notice it?"

"Unlikely," I admitted. It would almost certainly take a Watcher to see it... and according to Randon, we were the first Watchers to come here.

A slight movement across the car caught the corner of my attention, and I looked over to see Randon eying me in obvious question. "There's a tension overhanging this place, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos," I explained. "A feeling that the people living here aren't really comfortable with their world."

I could tell by the slight cringing in Calandra's sense that she half expected Randon to ridicule either our assessment or us or both. But he just sat there, occasionally turning to gaze thoughtfully out the window, as I tried to put into words what it was she and I had felt.

"So you think it's a side effect of the Cloud?" he asked when I'd finished.

"Or else the paranoia of knowing that their whole existence rests on human sacrifice—" I broke off at the strained patience in Randon's eye. "Or it could be something entirely different," I added. "At the moment all we know is that the tension's there."

He nodded absently, gazing out the window again.

"Any idea," he asked slowly, "how long a person would have to be here for this tension to manifest itself? A year? More? Less?"

"No idea," I shook my head. "You're wondering if that could be part of Aikman's trouble?"

Randon turned to Schock. "How long has Aikman been on Solitaire?"

Schock had his computer out; seated to Randon's other side, Kutzko was fingering the controls of his visorcomp. "Three years," Schock reported. "Station Chief Li, on the other hand, has been here for—bozhe moi!—for eighteen years, ever since HTI got the place going. Assistant Managers Blake and Karash twelve and four, respectively."

Randon nodded. "Yes, I remember those numbers," he said absently. Already, I could see, he was calculating how he might use this insight into Solitaire's planetary ethos to his advantage. The sense of him had altered subtly from the evening before, and I could tell he was rethinking his earlier conclusion that having a Watcher around was merely a crutch. And if he could think that about one Watcher...

I felt Calandra's presence at my side. She is far beyond the price of rubies... I could only hope Randon would come to see that, too.

Behind his visorcomp, I could see Kutzko's eyes still moving slightly as he read, and I knew what records he was checking. Tense security guards had a tendency to make their opposite numbers equally nervous. "Well?" I asked him.

"Shouldn't be a problem," he said. He didn't elaborate.

Like most of the rest of Solitaire, Cameo was built relatively flat, with the tallest buildings being only three stories high. The psychology of corporations regarding height and power being what it was, I wasn't surprised that HTI's headquarters was one of the latter, though I wondered on the way in what they could need with even that much room. The autopark guided the car to a VIP spot by one of the Elegy-style columns flanking the main entrance, and as we stepped out a man in a middle-level business capelet emerged from the wrought-styraline doors. A memory clicked as we approached him: HTI's president, O'Rielly, had been wearing an identical capelet clasp when Lord Kelsey-Ramos called to announce Carillon's acquisition of his company. Apparently HTI was one of those corporations which went in for the trappings of team spirit; whether those trappings actually accomplished what they were intended to was something we would soon find out.

"Good day to you, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos; welcome," the man greeted us, nodding with the appropriate deference. His sense belied his words: we were considerably less than welcome here. "I'm Brandeis Pyatt of HTI Transport, Station Chief Chun Li's chief assistant."

"Good day to you as well," Randon nodded back. "I trust Mr. Chun Li is still expecting us."

"Yes, sir, he's waiting inside in the board room." Pyatt's eyes flicked once to me, recognition clearly there, as he turned to lead us inside. "If you'll follow me...?"

We walked in silence down a corridor lined with attractive stonework. A few employees and guards watched with varying degrees of interest—and varying degrees of distrust—as we made our way. Once, I remembered, I'd likened this trip to an ambassadorial visit to a conquered country; now, it was beginning to feel more like an espionage penetration.

Eventually, we reached an inner door. Two guards with duplicates of Pyatt's capelet clasp as collar insignia stood flanking it; at Pyatt's nod, one reached over and pulled the heavy wooden panel open.

It was as if we'd suddenly been transported from Solitaire to a major corporation headquarters on one of the Patri worlds. Nothing in the hallway had prepared me for the vast expanse of space or the lavish display of furnishings, all of them that I could identify having been imported from off-world. A carefully orchestrated sensory bombardment, probably designed to both intimidate the visitor and heighten his subconscious estimation of HTI in the bargain. A thought occurred to me, and a quick check confirmed that the room could indeed be converted with only minimal effort from its current business setup to one more suitable for entertainment.

Seated around the massive formite-topped gemrock table filling out the room's center were two men and a woman I recognized from Schock's data cyl: Station Chief Wilmin Chun Li, First Assistant Manager Tomus Blake, and Second Assistant Manager Angli Karash. Between and around them at the table itself were scattered another half dozen aides and assistants; behind them, against the walls, other aides and guards stood or sat at auxiliary work stations.

"Good day to you," Chun Li nodded gravely, rising to his feet as the others at the table followed suit. "I'm Station Chief Wilmin Chun Li; on behalf of HTI's Solitaire operation, I welcome you."

A proud man, I saw, though not necessarily in the bad sense of that word. Proud of his accomplishments, proud of his organization and of the job he had done here... and more than a little nervous. Worried that Carillon would summarily dismiss him? It was a reasonable possibility, and a sadly not unreasonable fear: in corporate acquisitions like this a long and loyal work record often became a liability. Over it all, covering the other emotions like a translucent glaze, was a general sense of tension. The same tension, perhaps, that Calandra and I had sensed in Solitaire as a whole...

"Good day to you as well, sir," Randon returned the nod. "I'm honored to be here." He gestured to Schock and me. "May I present my aides: Dapper Schock and Gilead Raca Benedar."

There wasn't a single wisp of surprise from anyone at the table over my name. Not that I really needed further confirmation that they were expecting me.

Chun Li exchanged polite nods with each of us and gestured to his sides. "My assistant managers: Tomus Blake and Angli Karash."

Blake was angry, and he was making little effort to hide it. Tight-lipped, he nodded to Randon with barely adequate courtesy and barely glanced at Schock and me. It wasn't Aikman's version of anti-Watcher prejudice, though: Blake was angry at all of us. Perhaps he felt betrayed at HTI's inability to keep Carillon from taking over; perhaps it was simply that he was now likely to be frozen out of contention for Chun Li's position, a position he very clearly wanted.

Karash, in contrast, was much more phlegmatic than either of the two men; certainly more polite than Blake. Her sense was that of a capable, politically-minded supervisor maintaining a neutral wait-and-see attitude and preparing to roll with whatever rocking occurred. Though with fewer years invested in the Solitaire operation, she of course also had less to lose than they did. All things considered, she was still the most promising potential ally among the three.

The ritual exchange of nods over, Chun Li waved us into our chairs. "Please be seated, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos; gentlemen. I'm sure you have many questions you'd like to ask."

"Yes, indeed," Randon agreed. We sat down, Calandra and the two shields moving to the wall behind us. "First of all, I'd like to bring you greetings from my father, Lord Kelsey-Ramos, and the entire Carillon Group board."

Seated against the wall almost directly behind Chun Li, impossible to miss whenever I looked that direction, was a stunningly beautiful woman.

It was an old ploy, but no less effective for all that, and the woman herself was better at it than many I'd seen. Her almost casual posture subtly emphasized the allure of breasts and legs; while her face, framed delicately by a hairsculpt much too expensive for her indicated corporate position, was coyly provocative. Each time our eyes met—which was practically every time I looked her direction—her lips curled in a barely detectable but nevertheless sultry half smile.

But however many times she'd laid out this snare, it was clear that she'd never tried it on a Watcher. Even as I felt my body stirring with the lust she was trying to distract me with, the rest of her sense came through the allure... and of its own accord my desire drained quietly away. She was cold, manipulating, arrogantly amused—so totally opposite, in fact, to the softly sensuous image she was trying to project that her seduction became little more than a gross parody; pitiful and disgusting instead of being alluring. I gazed into her eyes one last time, seeing there that she knew she'd failed—but had no idea why—and turned my eyes deliberately away.

"First of all," Randon continued, "let me assure you that, unlike some corporations, Carillon is not in the habit of automatically replacing the directors and employees of freshly acquired companies..."

Perhaps they'd suspected that the long-distance seduction would fail; perhaps they were merely being cautious. Whatever the reason, they'd arranged a second distraction for me... a distraction that turned out to be far more effective than the first.

He was one of the HTI guards—or perhaps more precisely, he was dressed in an HTI guard's uniform: a fascinatingly twitch-faced man standing against the wall just inside the range of my peripheral vision. Twitch-faced, and radiating the most unstable emotional state I had ever sensed.

"...Our policy is to try wherever possible to maintain continuity and existing relationships, particularly when such relationships are clearly working well..."

He wasn't insane, at least not in any way I would have expected to read insanity. His emotions were simply on a permanent scattercoast. One minute he would be tense and nervous, the next fearful, the next inordinately pleased with himself, the next sullen and withdrawn.... "What we do demand is ability. There's no place in the Carillon Group for incompetence. Any employee that has been getting a downhill coast while others looked the other way or covered up will be in for an extremely rude shock..."

No corporate guard chief could possibly tolerate a man that emotionally unbalanced, which left it a tossup as to whether HTI had raided a treatment hospital or weirded up one of their own guards with some schizm-inducing drug. But at this point the method didn't really matter. Try as I might, I couldn't entirely ignore the man; and the mental effort to do so threatened to become a distraction in itself.

"...So. There will be memos and perhaps some reorganizational papers coming down the line over the next few months, I imagine, as soon as we've had time to sift through all the records. But that ought to give you at least a brief overview of our plans. Are there any questions?"

The twitch wasn't just in his face, either. There were echoing spasms in varying degrees from shoulders, knees, and hands.

Including the hand hovering tautly beside the butt of his holstered needler.

I licked the inside of my lip. No danger, was my first, back-brain feeling; but under the circumstances that was hardly the sort of conclusion I could afford to trust to a subconscious synthesis of unidentified cues. A schizoid man armed with a needler could almost literally mow this entire roomful of people down in the space of a few heartbeats.

On the other hand, none of the other HTI guards were directing any worry at all in his direction. Was that the cue I'd picked up on, that they hadn't picked up any danger themselves? Perhaps; but my sense of had felt stronger than that.

"I think I speak for all of us," Chun Li spoke up, "when I say that we'll all do our best to make this transition as smooth as possible, both for Carillon and ourselves..."

My phone vibrated its silent call signal. Dropping my gaze with an effort from the twitchy guard, I eased the instrument from its belt case and keyed for nonverbal. Behind me I could hear a faint and unintelligible voice—Kutzko's—while, under the edge of the table, I watched his words flow across the tiny screen:

CALANDRA SAYS TO TELL YOU HIS NEEDLER ISN'T LOADED. THAT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?

An eerie feeling crept across the back of my neck. She'd done it again. Read my mind with complete ease... and this time without even having to see my face.

She was right, too, of course. Looking back at the guard—his sense that of almost childlike cunning at the moment—it was obvious that his needler was riding much too high in its holster to be carrying even a partially filled clip. That, plus the way it swung against his leg when he twitched—the cues had all been there, and clearly my back-brain had picked up on them in deciding he wasn't a danger to us. I only wished I could have identified them faster. At least as fast as Calandra had.

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall... and, after all, it didn't really matter which of us picked up on which fact, as long as together we got all of it. Taking a deep breath, I chased away the tinge of jealousy from my mind and, my vision clear again, turned my attention back to Chun Li.

"...I presume you'll want to go over our records; we have them for you right here." Reaching beneath his capelet, he withdrew a cyl. "This is everything for the past five years," he added, placing it on the formite surface in front of him and giving it a gentle push. The tube rolled across the table, picking up speed as the formite first concaved, then convexed, coming at last to a stop in front of Randon. "All previous records will be on Portslava, where I presume your associates will be picking them up."

"Thank you," Randon nodded, scooping up the cyl and pocketing it. "I presume you've also got copies of those older records on hand?"

A touch of uneasiness flickered through Chun Li's sense, though he was able to control his face and voice remarkably well. "Yes, of course," he acknowledged. "If you'd like copies I can have them sent to your ship this afternoon."

"Why can't I have them now?"

Blake and Karash were registering heightened tension, too, and it was in fact Blake who answered Randon's question. "The problem is that they're scattered around through the system in rather unreadable code," he said in clipped tones. "It would take at least an hour to chase them all down and put them into coherent form."

"Oh, that won't be a problem," Randon said, voice almost lazy but with a hard edge underneath it. "Schock, here, is quite good at that sort of excavation. If he can borrow a hard terminal for a few minutes he can probably get that out of the way while we finish our talk."

Blake visibly clenched his teeth. "I don't mean to be obstructive, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos, but the data is really so scattered through different files and even different listings that it'll take a good deal of time to gather it all."

My eyes turned elsewhere, I could still sense Randon smile. "The wonders of modern technology, Mr. Blake. Ever heard of a Templex decoder?"

From the senses of the others, I could tell none of them had... and that none of them was looking forward to hearing about it. "I'm afraid not," Chun Li admitted cautiously. "I take it it's something used for this kind of data retrieval?"

"And also for bypassing various blockages," Randon said, choosing his words with care. "Split files, scattered data—that sort of thing."

As well as for getting around intentional barriers. The three across the table picked up on that one at once, and the play of emotions twisting through them became even more interesting. There was just the briefest hesitation, then Karash rose to her feet. "Well, then. If you'll come over here, Mr. Schock...?"

Schock pushed his chair back and got up; Chun Li and Blake followed his motion with their eyes. "Now," Randon said briskly, "while they're doing that, I'd like to hear what sort of projects you've got going at present. Mr. Blake?"

Blake turned his attention back from Schock with an effort. "As you may know, a new Rockhound 606—number four—has recently gone to work in the rings. It's slightly modified to allow it to take in and break up rocheoids of up to a hundred meters across—"

"I was under the impression," Randon broke in calmly, "that it was the pebble-sized rocheoids that contained the purest ores."

An almost-glare leaked out before Blake could stop it. "Yes, sir, that's true," he said with strained politeness. "Though the surfaces of most of the larger rocheoids, down to a few centimeters of depth in some cases, are also rich in heavy metals. However, in this case what turns out to be more important is that the interiors of these larger ones contain a more standard distribution of light and heavy elements, and some of those light elements are used in the extraction and refining processes. Getting them directly from the rings will save us having to ship them out from Solitaire."

"I see," Randon said blandly. He'd known all this already, I could tell; as could most of the others. Again simply reminding everyone of his control of the conversation. "So. Rockhound Four is in operation...?"

Blake pursed his lips, smoothed them out. "Yes, sir. Anyway, we're negotiating with them for a share of their light element harvest, as well as for a contract to handle some of their molybdenum and tungsten output. We're also—"

"I was under the impression that you were at your full transport capacity already," Randon interrupted again. "You're authorized for, what, a hundred trips in and out per year?"

The twitch-faced guard made an almost-serious reach for his needler. Even schizoid, I noted, he was careful to stop before he got close enough to the weapon to trigger either of our shields' own combat reflexes. "We're already at our full trip capacity, yes," Blake said stiffly, his tension level rising markedly. "As I was about to say, we also have an order in for a pair of new Fafnir-class freighters. Once those are delivered our total carrying capacity will increase significantly."

"Assuming the Fafnirs are able to keep flying," Randon commented offhandedly. "Those things are right up against the Mjollnir Limit, and I don't know as I'd trust them for more than a couple of trips."

Blake's face darkened; clearly, the Fafnir purchase was his own pet project, and he wasn't the kind to take even implied criticism well. But before he could say anything more, Chun Li jumped in. "We'll make sure they come with an adequate guarantee," he said dryly. "In addition, we have a petition pending before the Patri seeking to raise our trip quota to one hundred twenty per year." A soft beep came from the back wall, where Schock was working under Karash's watchful eye, and the sound seemed to throw Chun Li off stride a little. "We think it may be worth trying to revive the old idea of using terminally ill patients and voluntary suicides to supplement the currently available number of zombis," he went on, a bit distractedly.

"If not, perhaps the crime rate will go up?" Randon said cynically.

Chun Li flushed with anger. "That's not fair, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos."

Randon met his gaze without flinching... but he realized he'd indeed gone a step too far with that one. "Perhaps not," he conceded. "My apologies, Mr. Chun Li. Ah—Schock. Finished already?"

The others twisted their heads to look as Schock and Karash returned to the table. "Yes, sir," Schock nodded, holding up three cyls. "I think I've got it all."

I had no doubt of that, myself. Karash's face, as she trailed behind him, was a nice mixture of amazement and tension, with the tension winning.

Randon nodded back. "Well, then, I suppose that will about do it for now," he said, rising to his feet as Schock came around the table. I stood up, too, feeling Kutzko, Calandra, and Ifversn come up behind us, the two shields moving unobtrusively into flanking positions at our sides. "Thank you for your time and hospitality, Mr. Chun Li; Mr. Blake, Ms. Karash. I'm looking forward to our tour of the ring mines later this week; until then, I'll be keeping in touch."

And that was that. In the space of a few minutes we'd gone in, learned everything of importance—or at least gotten it on cyl—and walked out again... leaving tension and perhaps even the first signs of panic in our wake.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos would have been pleased.

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