Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [227]
"We work as a team," Nancia told her.
She certainly hoped that was true. For Forister's sake—for both their sakes. He didn't need to get through this grief alone; she was there to steady him.
"Ah. I see what you mean." Forister bent over the board and surprised Nancia with a third move, one so apparently disastrous that she had not even considered it in her initial calculations.
With a subdued whoop of glee, Micaya Questar-Benn took Forister's second Satellite—and watched dumbfounded as he proceeded to shift an unconsidered knight from the second rank and place her Brainship in check.
"Thank you for the hint, Nancia," Forister said. "Until you forced me to consider the alternative move, I hadn't even thought of using the Jigo Kanaka advance in this situation."
"I . . . ah . . . you're quite welcome," Nancia managed to tell him between the three subsequent moves that brought the game to its slashing conclusion, with Micaya's forces immobilized, her Brawn taken and her Brainship checkmated.
Perhaps Forister didn't need quite so much help as she'd anticipated.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Nancia's landing on Angalia was one of the worst she'd ever executed. The planet took her completely by surprise.
Initial navigation maneuvers went normally. It wasn't until she was in visual range of the landing field that she became confused. The green terraced cliffs behind the mesa and the grassy basin surrounding it looked nothing at all like her memories of the landing five years ago. Could she possibly have miscalculated, come down in some hitherto unknown section of the planet?
Nancia called up her files from that first landing and superimposed the stored images on the green paradise below her. Yes, this had to be the Angalia landing field. The topographical features were a perfect match with her internal map. And there, at the edge of the mesa, was the plastifilm prefab hut with its sagging awning of woven grass, looking if anything slightly more derelict and tottering than it had appeared five years ago.
Intent on her image comparison, Nancia drained computing power from the navigation processor, forgot to monitor the approach, and came embarrassingly close to making a new crater on Angalia's landing field. She corrected the descent, hopped into mid-air, and came down more slowly the second time. Her auditory sensors picked up a variety of crashes, groans, and complaints from the cabins where Micaya and the three prisoners were housed.
"Apologies for the rough landing," she began, but Forister cut off her speakers for a moment and overrode her. "Local turbulence," he said. "Nancia recovered superbly, but even a brainship can't compensate for all the freak conditions on Angalia."
He swept his open hand over the palmpad with a caressing gesture, restoring speaker control to Nancia, and smiled at her benignly.
"I didn't need you to cover for me," Nancia transmitted a vibrant whisper through the main cabin speakers.
"Didn't you? I thought we were a team. If you can help me play tri-chess, I certainly have the right to preserve you from apologizing to those overindulged brats."
"I—well, thank you," Nancia conceded.
"Think nothing of it. By the way, what did happen just now?"
"I was distracted. This place doesn't look the way it did last time I landed." Nancia switched all her screens to external mode. Forister gazed appreciatively at the triple-screen display of a grassy paradise ringed by flowering terraces.
"What on earth is that?" Fassa cried from her cabin. Darnell and Alpha joined her exclamations of surprise.
Nancia was gratified by this response. The screens in the passenger cabins weren't as dramatic as her central cabin's display walls, but at least they showed enough of Angalia to confirm that she wasn't losing her mind—or if she was, she wasn't alone. None of the prisoners had been expecting Angalia to look like the Garden of Eden.
"Do I take it," she asked mildly, "that the planet has changed since your last visit?"
"It certainly has," Fassa said. "Are you sure it's the same place? Only last year—oh, I see."