Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [183]
Nancia cut the sound transmission at that point.
"Perhaps," she said now, "undercover work is not our metier."
"I hate lies and spying," Caleb confirmed moodily. "We should have refused this mission." He looked up with a glimmer of hope in his eyes. "Unless . . . did you get anything?"
Nancia had used the brief minutes of the vidcom link to insert feelers into Jesen's private computer system, so private that it didn't even have a Net connection. Central had surmised he might have such a system in addition to the open accounts he maintained via Net, but nothing could be checked until they arrived planetside.
"Nothing," she told him. "I did get into his supply acquisition database, but all the metachips in the records there show perfectly legitimate Shemali Base control numbers."
Caleb made a fist again. "Then you didn't get into the right records. Somebody's counterfeiting metachips, and Jesen could lead us to the source . . . could have led us. He must be keeping three sets of books. Do you think if I got him on vidcom again . . ."
An incoming transmission reached Nancia, and she activated her central display screen. Dorg Jesen's narrow face appeared. "Been doing a little research of my own," he announced, almost pleasantly. "Got your Central ID now to add in to my report. CN-935, lift your Courier Service tailfins offplanet in fifteen minutes and we'll forget this episode ever happened. Otherwise I'll file a formal complaint with CS, charging you and your brawn with entrapment."
"You can't win them all," Nancia tried to soothe Caleb when they were offplanet and on their way back to Central. "We do many things well. Lying doesn't happen to be among them, that's all." But I'm lying, right now, by saying nothing. Nancia made an internal playback of the datacordings she'd made four years earlier, on her maiden voyage. There was Polyon, cheerfully announcing his plan to slip metachips past the SUM board and sell them to unauthorized operations like Dorg Jesen's feelieporn empire. If only Caleb knew what she knew, he could make a report to Central that would send them straight to Shemali.
Except . . . he wouldn't do it. In the four years of their partnership, Caleb had never once wavered or compromised his moral principles. He would never stoop to using a datacording made without the knowledge or consent of the passengers. And he would never respect Nancia again, once he knew what she'd done on that first voyage.
Sadly, Nancia ended the replay and slapped five more levels of security classifications on the datacording. Caleb must never know. But there must be some way to point Central's investigations towards Shemali, to stop them thinking in terms of counterfeit metachips and start them thinking about the prison factory.
Shemali, Central Date 2754:
Polyon
Polyon slapped the palmboard built into his armchair and activated a vidcom link with Bahati.
"Summerlands Clinic, Alpha bint Hezra-Fong, private transmission, code CX22." That would scramble his message so that only someone with the CX22 decoding hedron would be able to see and hear anything but gibberish. "Alpha, my sweet, you were just a tad premature in announcing that you'd finished your Seductron research. The free sample you sent up has one of my key techs too blissed-out to do any useful work. I've no idea when he'll stop contemplating his toenails, so you'd better find out—and fast. Unless you want to be the next test subject." He smiled sweetly into the vidcom unit. "I can arrange it, you know."
The next message went to Darnell, using a similar scrambling technique. In a few words Polyon informed Darnell that IntraManager, the small commlink manufacturing company Darnell was presently trying to take over, was not to be touched. "It's one of mine," he said pleasantly. "I'm sure you wouldn't have made a takeover move if you'd known that, would you now? By the way—did I show you the latest vids of the metachip line?" A tap of his fingers on the palmboard called up a datacording from the lowest circles