Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [235]
"Hold still," Forister called, "we'll get a rope to you—we'll do something—"
Blaize turned over onto his back. A thick layer of mud coated his body, barely preserving the decencies. He thrashed around in what Nancia belatedly recognized as an attempt at the backstroke.
"Come on in, Uncle Forister," he called up. "The mud's fine today!"
"Are you all right?" Micaya shouted while Forister, for once, struggled to find his voice.
"Couldn't be better. Mud's just at sauna heat today." Blaize stretched and wriggled luxuriously and grinned up at them through mud-spattered cheeks. "I don't usually dive from that high up—knocked the breath out of me for a minute—but I thought you needed the demonstration. Care to join me?"
Micaya looked quizzically at Forister. The brawn kicked off his shoes and rolled his trouser legs up. "Oh, I'm going down, all right," he said between clenched teeth. "It's the quickest way to get my hands on that boy. And then I'm going to—to—" Words failed him.
"Torture him in a boiling mud hole?" Micaya suggested.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Nancia deliberately slowed her speed for the short hop from Angalia to Shemali. She needed time to check her records, time to access the Net and look for evidence of Polyon's scam. Somewhere in all the past five years' records of metachip and hyperchip transactions there must be some clue to his criminal activities—for she could not believe he had totally given up on the plans he'd announced during her maiden voyage. Not Polyon de Gras-Waldheim.
Even Net access was not always instantaneous, particularly when one was gathering and collating all the public records on sale, transfer or use of hyperchips in the known galaxy. Nancia idled and hoped that her passengers would not notice how long the voyage was taking.
Fortunately, they all seemed wrapped up in their own concerns. Fassa, Alpha and Darnell were all being held in separate cabins, dealing with the long spells of solitary imprisonment in their own ways. Alpha requested medical and surgical journals from Net libraries and studied the technical material Nancia downloaded for her with intense concentration, just as if she thought she would be permitted to practice her chosen profession again. Not if I have anything to say about it, Nancia vowed silently. But the truth was, she didn't have much to say. She could record her testimony and the images she'd received via contact buttons, and those depositions would go into evidence at Alpha's trial. But after that, all would be up to those softpersons who controlled the high courts on Central. Most of them were High Families; half of them had some connection, kinship or financial, with the Hezra-Fong clan. Alpha might very well be free—not immediately, but in five years or ten or twenty, a mere blip in the life of a High Families girl with fewer than thirty chronological years behind her and access to the best rejuv technology to expand her life span close to two hundred years.
Not for me to decide, Nancia reminded herself, and turned her attention to the other two. As a safety precaution she kept sensors in all their cabins active at all times, but she tried not to pay too much attention unless the sensor receptors flashed to indicate unusual activity.
Darnell's activities were usual enough, Nancia supposed, for someone enslaved to a softperson's pitifully limited array of sense-receptors. He had requested Stemerald, Rigellian smokefowl and an array of Dorg Jesen's feelieporn hedra; Nancia had supplied nonalcoholic nearbeer, synthobird slices, and the hedra which Forister told her were the nearest things to porn in her library. Darnell spent most of his time reclining on his bunk, washing down synthobird and candied brancake with the nearbeer and watching a remake of an Old Earth novel over and over again. Nancia couldn't understand what he saw in the datacorded adventures of this Tom Jones, but then,