Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [213]
After he left, Caleb said quietly into the contact button, "That was a lie, Nancia."
"Was it?" Nancia parried. "Do you think you know all my capabilities? Who's the 'brain' of this partnership?"
"I see!"
Nancia rather hoped he didn't. At least she'd avoided lying directly to Caleb. That was something . . . but not enough.
She had never before minded her inability to move about freely on planetary surfaces. Psych Department's testing before she entered brainship training showed that she valued the ability to fly between the stars far more than the limited mobility of planet-bound creatures. "I could have told them that," Nancia responded when the test results were reported to her. "Who wants to roll about on surface when they could have all of deep space to play in? If I want anything planetside, they can bring it to me at the spaceport."
But they couldn't bring her Caleb. And she couldn't go to the Summerlands clinic to watch over him. Nancia could see and hear everything that passed within range of those buttons. She could even send instructions to the wearers. But she could not act. She was reduced to fretting over the slow progress they were making and worrying about the medications being inserted into Caleb's blood stream.
"Haven't you found anything yet?" she demanded of Forister. Since Fassa had spent the day crying quietly in her cabin, Forister interpreted his "guard" duties rather liberally. He was on board and available in case of any escape attempt, but he told Nancia that he saw no reason to waste his time sitting on a hard bench outside Fassa's cabin door. Instead, he sat before a touchscreen in the central cabin, inserting delicate computer linkages into Alpha's clinic records and scanning for some hint of where she'd put the witness they needed.
Forister straightened and sighed. "I have found," he told her, "four hundred gigamegs of patient charts, containing detailed records of all their medications, treatments, and data readouts."
"Well, then, why don't you just look up Hopkirk and find out what she's done with him?" Nancia demanded.
In response, Forister tapped one finger on the touchscreen and slapped his palm over Nancia's analog input. The data he had retrieved was shunted directly into Nancia's conscious memory stores. It felt like having the contents of a medical library injected directly into her skull. Nancia winced, shut down her instinctive read-responses, and opened a minuscule slit of awareness onto a tiny portion of the data.
It was an incomprehensible jumble of medical terminology, packed without regard for paragraphing or spacing, with peculiar symbolic codes punctuating the strings of jargon.
She opened another slit and "saw" the same tightly-packed gibberish.
"It's not indexed by patient name," Forister explained. "Names are encoded—for privacy reasons, I suppose. If the data is indexed by anything, it might be on type of treatment. Or it might be based on a hashed list of meds. I really can't find any organizing principle yet. Also," he added, unnecessarily, "it's compressed."
"We know he's being kept quiet by controlled overdoses of Seductron," Nancia said. "Why not . . . oh." As she spoke, she had been scanning the datastream. There was no mention of Seductron. "Illicit drug," she groaned. "Officially, there's no such treatment. She'll have encoded it as something else."
"I should have taken Latin," Forister nodded. "Capellan seemed so much more useful for a diplomat . . . Ah, well."
"Can you keep hacking into the records?" Nancia asked. "There might be a clue somewhere else."
Forister looked mildly offended. "Please, dear lady. 'Hacking' is a criminal offense."
"But isn't that what you're doing?"
"I may be temporarily on brawn service," Forister said, "but I am a permanent member of the Central Diplomatic Service. Code G, if that means anything to you. As such, I have diplomatic immunity. Hacking is illegal; whatever I do is not illegal; hence, it's not hacking." He smiled benignly and traced a spiraling path inward from