Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [246]
"General, can you handle this flyer?" she murmured through Micaya's contact button.
"I'm glad to see you have such up-to-date equipment, de Gras," Micaya said loudly for Nancia's benefit. "I tested the prototype versions of this flyer recently, but I had no idea the model was in general distribution already."
Good. Micaya would be able to bring the three of them back. Nancia listened in on Sev's and Fassa's conversation while Polyon landed the flyer and took Forister and Micaya into the factory.
"You think too much," Sev was saying firmly to Fassa. "I meant what I told you before, and I still mean it. You idiot, I went to Shemali on your account!"
"On my account?" Fassa echoed, sounding as if she was unable to think at all.
Sev nodded. "Here I'd been pacing Nancia's corridors every night, trying to think out a way to save you, and then Darnell gave me a clue. He said you'd contracted to build a hyperchip factory for Polyon, and that when the original building collapsed you replaced it free of charge. I thought if I could prove that, your lawyer might argue that you never intended to do substandard work—that any problems with your buildings were the result of incompetence, of sending a young girl to manage a business she was unfamiliar with—and that he could prove it by demonstrating how willingly you'd made restitution when a problem was brought to your attention."
Fassa smiled through her tears. "It's a lovely, lovely argument, Sev. Unfortunately, not a word of that is true. I am," said Fassa, "or rather, I was an extremely competent contractor." She sniffed. "Damn Daddy. He accidentally sent me into a business I had a real talent for."
"That being the case," said Sev softly, "why the hell couldn't you just be a contractor, instead of slinking around in those dresses that kept falling off your shoulders and driving middle-aged men crazy?"
Fassa's face hardened. "Ask Daddy." She tried to turn away, but Sev had hold of both her hands.
"I guessed some time ago," he said. "And . . . I've been checking old gossipbytes. Was that why your mother killed herself?"
Fassa nodded. Tears were streaming down her face unchecked. "Well, then. You won't want to have anything more to do with me. I understand. I'm not, I'm not . . . it's not just Daddy, you know. There've been all those other men. . . ." She gulped down a sob.
For a man who'd been on the verge of collapse a few hours earlier, Sev demonstrated remarkable powers of recovery. Nancia was impressed by the strength with which he drew Fassa into his arms against her resistance. "You," he said deliberately, "are the woman I love, and nothing that happened before today matters in the slightest to me." He paused for a moment and Nancia blacked out her visual sensors. She didn't really think that the requirements of surveillance on Fassa included watching Sev Bryley-Sorenson kiss her as desperately as a man in vacuum gasping for oxygen.
* * *
On Shemali, Micaya Questar-Benn had finally persuaded Polyon to drop the sanitized V.I.P. tour of his factory. She didn't believe he could produce enough hyperchips to satisfy her requirements, she told him, and what was more, she didn't believe he would be able to extend the factory's production fast enough for her. The safety requirements mandated by the Trade Commission simply took too long to set up and maintain.
Polyon suggested that the Trade Commission could, collectively, do something anatomically impossible for the individual members. And if the General wanted