Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [265]
The rest of the story could wait until she had absolute privacy. There was no need to alert the galaxy to the fact that an unknown number of their computer systems were contaminated by Shemali hyperchips.
"Is everything under control now?"
"You could say that," Nancia replied dryly, turning up her remaining sensors and looking over her internal condition. Half her processors burned out, sleeping bodies littering the passenger quarters, three High Families brats secured in tanglefield and mad as hell, Forister twitching with the pins-and-needles of paravenin recovery, and a crippled general bringing them safe into RealSpace—
"Yes," she told Simeon. "Everything's under control."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the days of repair work that followed, Nancia began tounderstand just how much Caleb must have hated being grounded on Summerlands while she went on with a new brawn to complete the task they had begun. Now she, too, was "convalescent" and temporarily out of the action. To protect herself from the insidious effects of Polyon's hyperchips she had, in effect, crippled herself, rendering large parts of her own system inoperable; to keep the worm program he had implanted from contacting other hyperchips once they got out of Singularity and could make Net contact again, she had slashed through her own memory, ruthlessly excising whole sections of memory banks and operating code.
"It's a miracle you made it back here in one piece," Simeon of Vega Base told her, "and you're not leaving Base until you've had a very thorough overhaul and repair. Those aren't my orders, they're a beam from CS. So no argument!"
"I wasn't planning to argue," said Nancia with, for her, unaccustomed meekness. Indeed, after the stresses of that prolonged stay in Singularity, followed by the limping return voyage on one-third power, she had very little desire to do anything but park herself in orbit around Vega Base and watch the stars wheel by.
Or so she told herself. She was tired and injured; she wasn't up to the stressful task of transporting the prisoners and witnesses back to Central for trial. It was far more sensible to prepare a datahedron of her own testimony, something that could be sent back on the bright new Courier Service ship that came to collect the others.
"I'll miss you," Forister said, "but you'll be back in action soon, Nancia. Why, at the speed Central works, you'll probably be returning before the trial's over! And if you don't"—he hefted the gleaming weight of the megahedron in one hand—"this is as good, for all legal purposes, as having you there. You've transferred datacordings of everything that happened on board or that you perceived through your contact buttons, right? Should be the most complete—and most damning—record we could ask for."
"It—may not be as complete as you expect," Nancia said. "I have some memory gaps, you know."
"Yes, I know. But having you there in person—well, via contact button, I suppose—wouldn't make any difference to that, would it? If something's been lost from your memory banks, it won't come back under cross-examination."
That was true enough, Nancia supposed; and if the damage to her memory banks were the only cause of gaps in the recording, there'd be no reason at all for her to undergo cross-examination. The subject was not one she wished to discuss in any detail. She said good-bye to Forister, tried to control the twinge of loneliness she felt when the new CS ship took off, and went back to her observations of the stars of Vega subspace. Stars were restful; bright and calm, in unchanging patterns as familiar to her as—as—
Nancia discovered that she could no longer "remember" the names of the constellations as they appeared in Vega subspace. She had never spent long enough in this subspace to establish the look of the sky in her own human memory; and the navigational maps that she relied on had been erased. So had her tables of Singularity points and decomposition algorithms, her Capellan music recordings. . . .
"Do you know, I'm sorry I used to laugh at softpersons," she