Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [225]
The general tapped the slight indentations on the surface of the card and it projected a hologram of a partitioned cube, shimmering with rainbow light at the edges. Another series of taps produced the translucent images of playing pieces aligned at two opposing edges of the cube. Nancia twiddled with her sensor magnification and focus until she could make out the details. Yes, those were the standard tri-chess pieces: she recognized the age-old triple ordering. Pawns in the first and lowest rank; above them, the King and Queen with their Bishops and Knights and Castles. Above them the highest rank was poised to swoop down over the gamecube, the Brainship and Brawn with their supporting pieces, the Scouts and Hovercraft and Satellites. The images were blurred and kept flickering in and out, giving Nancia a sensation of tight bands pulled across her sensor connections if she tried to look at them for any length of time.
"Pawn to Brain's Scout 4,2," Forister grunted a standardized opening move.
Nothing happened.
"My portable set isn't equipped with voice recognition," Micaya apologized. "You'll have to tap in the code."
As she indicated the row of fingertip-sized indentations, Nancia hummed softly—her substitute for the rasps and hawks of "throat-clearing" with which softshells began an unscheduled interruption. Both players looked up, and after a startled moment Forister inclined his head to Nancia's titanium column.
"Yes, Nancia?"
"If you'll give me a moment to study the configuration," Nancia suggested, "I believe I can replicate your play-holo with a somewhat clearer display. And I, of course, can supply the voice recognition processing."
Even as she spoke, she assigned a virtual memory space and a graphics co-processor to the problem. Before the sound of her voice had died away, a new and much clearer holographic projection shimmered beside the original one. Forister exclaimed in delight at the perfect detailing of the miniaturized pieces; Micaya put out her hand as if to touch a perfectly shaped little Satellite with its three living and storage globes, complete with tiny access doors and linking spacetubes.
"Beautiful," Forister sighed in delight. "But won't this take too much processing capability, Nancia?"
"Not when we're just sitting dirtside," Nancia told him. "I don't even use that processor when we're doing regular navigation. Might have to shut down briefly when we're in Singularity, that does take some concentration, but—"
Forister closed his eyes briefly. "That's perfectly all right, Nancia. To tell you the truth, it never occurred to me to play tri-chess in Singularity anyway."
"Me either," said Micaya, looking slightly green at the very thought. "You don't want to think about spatial relationships at a moment like that."
"I do," said Nancia cheerfully.
* * *
Less than two Central Standard Hours later, Sev interrupted the first tri-chess game to deliver a subdued Darnell Glaxely-Overton for transport to Central. "He broke when I showed him the hedron of Hopkirk's evidence," he told the others after Darnell had been confined in a cabin. "Funny—almost as if he'd expected somebody to come after him one of these days. Spent most of the flyer trip back telling all he knows about the other three. Here's the recording."
"Four," Nancia corrected Sev as he slid a datacard into her reader.
"Three," Sev said again. "Fassa. Alpha. And . . . Blaize." He carefully avoided looking at Forister as he pronounced the last name.
"Neither of them has said anything implicating Polyon de Gras-Waldheim?" Nancia couldn't believe this.
Sev shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe there isn't anything to say. You never know, there could be one good apple in this barrel of rotten ones."
Not Polyon. But Nancia refrained from voicing her protest. After the conversations she'd heard on her maiden voyage, she was convinced that Polyon de Gras-Waldheim was completely amoral. But would it be ethical to reveal those conversations? Caleb had been so adamantly