Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [16]
Running an all-view holo to check his appearance, he didn’t recognize himself. He looked like a pirate on vacation.
Good. Onidi Louchard wouldn’t take him for a rich, regimented fool then, a company flunky who had risen to power on his father’s reputation. More and more he was starting to feel that people around him viewed him in that light, and he hated it.
Fortunately, he had experience at disguising himself on company business. A little fiddling with the computers altered the identity codes to provide him with yet another persona. His shuttle was an Intergal rental registered to M’sser J. LaFitte, a gem dealer from Burroughs Canal, Mars.
He had come to Ponopei II often enough that he was known there, so he was gratified when none of the docking authorities recognized him, nor the florist where he bought his leis, one for himself and one to seal the deal with Louchard. The maitre d’ at his favorite restaurant failed to recognize, him as well, saying only, on consulting the reservation, “Ah, M’sser LaFitte, your companion has not yet arrived, but your chamber is ready. This way, sir.”
Torkel spent the next fifteen minutes sizing up the people who entered after him, wondering which one could be Louchard. After watching three men in shorts and sandals, another in a yellow business suit similar to his own, five giggling young girls, and one slightly older, petite, demure looker, dressed to kill—a society trophy wife, he guessed—he thought he had been stood up.
Then the trophy wife in the soft lavender and blue sarong dress turned her snappy high-heeled sandals his way. Her legs were very nice, he noted. Pity women seldom showed them in public anymore—except here, of course, where they showed everything. In taking in her appearance, he saw that she was somewhat older than he had assumed at first, her dark blond hair tufted at the ears and crowned with silver. Then he realized she was wearing a blue frangipani behind one ear. Louchard’s communiqué had melodramatically mentioned a blue flower and that he was to bring leis.
The woman with the blue flower smiled and extended a tiny, beringed hand. All the rings had gems that matched her dress except for a prodigious stack of gold ones on the ring finger of her right hand. He admitted her to the chamber, and shut out the sights and sounds of the soft pink sands of the beach, the lime green waters, and the multicolored gardens by closing the hatch of the privacy bubble behind her and drawing the beaded curtain.
“It’s Captain LaFitte, surely, isn’t it?” the woman inquired, sliding neatly across from him.
“It’s Captain Fiske, as your organization was told,” he said. “And I was told I would negotiate with Louchard.”
“Louchard couldn’t make it,” the woman said with a charming show of teeth in a pink-lipsticked mouth. “I represent the organization. We understood you had business to discuss, and I am the business manager, Dinah O’Neill.”
“I see,” he said, and he did. She was no more a business manager than he was Jean LaFitte. The appearance of Onidi Louchard was a carefully guarded secret, but he had heard that the pirate was female. And this lady’s eyes were as cold and calculating as he always fancied himself to be. They understood each other quite well already. “The deal is simply this. I recently met some gentlemen in business with Louchard on the planet known to the locals as Petaybee. It’s a treacherous world that refuses to give up its secrets to outsiders, but seems to have a fondness for certain people who live there. Three of those people are now on Gal Three. The one I’m concerned with is a former company corps officer, Yanaba Maddock. She and her paramour, a suspicious local named Shongili, have maneuvered themselves into being named coadministrators of the governmental affairs of Terraform B. They’re the ones who threw a monkey wrench in your operation on the planet, and they’re now the ones in charge of future resource use. Maddock is pregnant. Her husband is, for a variety of complicated reasons, unable to leave the planet. The teenagers