Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [200]
* * *
Fassa del Parma paced the loading dock of Bahati SpaceBase II, biting her lip. Ever since that near-debacle over SpaceBase I, she had been unwilling to delegate the ambiguous details of her business. That had been a near thing. Who'd have thought Sev Bryley would be so persistent? She'd taken him aboard the Xanadu and given him what he wanted, hadn't she? And when that hadn't proved sufficient to shut the man up—Fassa stopped pacing and bit her lip. All she'd wanted from Darnell was to fake a minor gambling and embezzling record that would discredit Sev with his employers. There'd been no need to go as far as he had, even if Sev had come sniffing around the Pair-a-Dice to find out who was framing him. There were other ways to discourage people besides dumping their unconscious bodies in a recycling bin. She should have recognized Darnell's sadistic tendencies, she should have remembered the whispers about mysterious disappearances from the Pair-a-Dice.
Oblivious to the soft thump and the vibration through the base walls that announced the docking of Darnell's OG Shipping drone, Fassa leaned her head against the wall for a moment. It gave slightly where her forehead pressed against it; that was what happened when you replaced the contracted synthosteel with steel-painted plastifilm. Not that she cared. Not that anybody cared about anything. That was how the world was, and nobody bothered to stop any of the corruption. Why should she trouble herself about one man caught up in the general unfeeling way of the world? Nobody had ever cared about her, had they?
Certainly not Sev Bryley. All he'd been after was a scandalous case that would build up his career. He'd taken what she offered and then attacked her again as if none of it meant anything. Well, it didn't.
Did it?
Fassa blinked rapidly and activated the series of locks that would automatically check on the seal between an attached ship and the spacebase itself, equalize pressures and open the spacebase for loading and unloading. She hadn't economized on that part of the work. She was clever enough to keep well above standards on any part of a contract that might jeopardize her personal safety. Clever enough, she thought as the spacebase doors irised open, to handle any problem that came up . . . except, maybe, her own memories.
Which were no problem!
She was about to call the loading crew to shift the permasteel beams and other expensive materials onto Darnell's drone when a thought stopped her. You couldn't be too careful these days. She walked through the spaceport iris, through the extruded pressure chambers and into the empty loading bays of the OG Shipping droneship.
Everything seemed to be as it should. The loading layout was rather strange, but Darnell had a habit of taking ships from the other companies he acquired and retrofitting them to suit his own needs. Certainly there was plenty of space. And everywhere she looked, on columns and walls and internal panels, Fassa saw the puce-and-mauve logo of OG Shipping stenciled. Rather sloppily stenciled, in some cases: lines wobbled and droplets of paint spattered the borders of the stencils. Looked like a rush job. Darnell didn't take the trouble to oversee his people personally as she did hers, she thought, and the difference showed.
"Droneship, are you prepared to accept cargo?" she queried the air.
"Prepared. To accept. Cargo. Begin. Transfer." The answer came back from a speaker somewhere behind her, metallic and uninflected like all AI speech. Fassa remembered reading that AI linguists were perfectly capable of designing a more human-sounding speech system, especially with the help of the sophisticated metachips of Shemali design, but that marketing forces wouldn't let them release it. Drones and other