Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [271]
"I can deal with that," Nancia said dryly. It would be a long time indeed before she let any chip designed by Polyon de Gras-Waldheim within connecting distance of her motherboards!
Forister still hadn't mentioned the two people whose fate concerned her most "And Blaize?" It couldn't be too bad, or Forister wouldn't be celebrating like that.
"Five years' community service," Forister told her. "Could be worse. They've dug up a planet in Deneb subspace—sort of like Angalia, only worse, and the only sentient life form resembles giant spiders, and nobody's ever been able to communicate with them. Blaize was moaning and groaning, but I suspect he can't wait to start teaching the spiders ASL. We'll have to drop by after the next assignment and see how he's doing."
"Next assignment?"
"Here's the datacording." Forister dropped a hedron into Nancia's reader slot. She scanned the instructions while he and Micaya broke open the bottle of Badacsonyi Keknyelu. The three of them had been assigned as a team to Theta Szentmari . . . a very, very long way from Central, through three separate Singularity points. One Singularity transition brought them briefly into Deneb subspace.
"And what," she inquired, "do we do when we get there?" Assuming they still want me as a brainship . . . I suppose they do. But why hasn't anybody said a word about Fassa?
"Sealed orders." Forister tossed a second hedron into the reader; Nancia found to her chagrin that she could not decrypt the information on this one. "Supposed to be self-decrypting when we pass through the third Singularity," Forister explained. "Apparently whatever's going on there is too hot to explain on Central . . . they're that worried about leaks. They've been discussing the possibility of making the three of us a permanent investigative team for hot little scandals like whatever is wrong on Theta Szentmari."
"And what," Nancia asked carefully, "do the two of you think about that? Now that the trial's over? And . . . you never did tell me about Fassa."
"Ah, yes. Fassa." Forister's merry twinkle diminished slightly. "Sev's going out to Rigel IV with her, did you know that? He says he'll try to pick up P.I. or security work there, wait out her term."
"Twenty-five years?"
"Ten. They recommended clemency in view of her apparent rehabilitation . . . helping us trap Polyon, and that very moving attempt to defend me when Polyon was holding us all hostage inside Singularity. Most of which came through brilliantly in your image datacordings, Nancia." Forister smiled benignly. "There were a few gaps, though."
Here it comes. She'd been trying not to think about that aspect of the trial. "I did tell you I'd suffered some memory loss," Nancia reminded him.
"So you did, so you did. . . . Anyway. The court wasn't sure what to make of all that; she'd already been arrested, after all, and she could just have been trying to put herself in the best possible light for the trial. But there was one thing from earlier, well before she was arrested, that convinced them she wasn't quite as self-centeredly fraudulent as her partners in crime." Forister twinkled. "It seems that when a factory she built on Shemali collapsed, she put up the new building free of charge. Sev Bryley brought that into evidence. Now, it seems to me that I heard Polyon saying he'd terrorized her into that replacement. But Polyon's trial was over before Sev brought out the story of the Shemali buildings, so he couldn't be recalled for cross-examination. And one of those little blips in your datacording happened just at the moment when Polyon was explaining that little matter to us."
Nancia felt a glowing heat from all her upper-deck circuits. "I did tell you I'd suffered some memory loss," she repeated.
"Very conveniently arranged, though."
"All right. I canceled that part of the datacording. I—Fassa's had problems to deal with worse than