I nodded. “Fine with me. I have a lot of work to do here before I leave, anyway—company work, don’t get that stricken look. But there are two other things.”
He started looking uneasy again. “What do you mean? We had a deal.”
I nodded. “And I’ll stick to it. The other two are in the form of favors. One is simply that I be able to get an appointment, maybe a business lunch, with the acting corporate comptroller once in a while. Just to keep my hand in and find out the latest company gossip.”
He relaxed a bit. “That’s easy enough.”
“The second’s a very different favor, and it’s not a requirement or condition. If necessary I can handle it in an underhanded manner, But it would be easier if you could do it normally.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s a young woman who did us both a real service, and she’s stuck in the motherhood and doesn’t want to be. That’s bad enough, but she’s extremely bright and talented and has a lot of guts. I’d like to get her out—I kind of owe it to her.”
He thought for a moment. “I can see your reasons, but it’s pretty tough, you know. I don’t know of anybody with the power to do it unless you could force a judgment—catching somebody committing a crime against her. And that’d be pretty rough on her.”
I nodded. “Just thought I’d ask in case there was some way out.”
“Look, tell you what. Give me some time on this, a couple of months at least, and I’ll see if anything can be done. Fair enough?”
I agreed. “It’ll wait. She’ll have sixty days’ leave coming soon, so it’s not that pressing. Only if you can’t, tell me, won’t you? And don’t you want her name and address?”
He grinned. “Don’t need it. I keep very good track of my employees.”
That brought a little feeling of admiration from me. Still, I felt compelled to nail him down a bit.
“As you can see, I’m a good friend—and a loyal one, Mr. Sugal. I won’t cross you now or in the future as long as you don’t cross me either. Just remember we have a mutual stake in each other’s protection. If you get in trouble, a psych probe could smoke me out. If I do, the reverse is true. So we have a stake in each other’s welfare.”
“Funny,” he replied. “I was about to give the same speech to you.”
Events proceeded in a slow, relaxed fashion after that, but right on schedule. Sugal was promoted, and within the month Tooker quotas were slashed and an industrial investigation team from the government evaluated maximum production potential with the staff we had against the quotas imposed and declared the quotas unrealistic and false. That gave us a great deal of breathing space.
Also during this period a particular fire district had a completely new alarm system installed, and our night janitorial supervisory staff was changed and its cleaning methods modified. Several staff members, including me, were discreetly questioned, known associates, that sort of thing. The investigators found nothing, of course, and the heat was off as quickly as it had appeared.
At the end of the month Sanda had her baby, a little girl, and within a week after was looking and sounding more like her old self again. I’d told her I was working on her problem, but that it might take time, and she seemed to accept that. After our little caper, she had the utmost trust and confidence in my ability to deliver—and of course that meant I felt honor-bound to do so.
Shortly afterward Tooker was reorganized, with a new manager appointed and many of my colleagues and co-workers promoted, moved around, and in a few cases, canned—particularly if they had been known Khamgirt people. As for me, I was made president of Hroyasail Limited, a wholly owned Tooker subsidiary. The job paid extremely well, but as I knew, wasn’t all that necessary, being one of those ornamental posts mostly used to pasture people like Khamgirt. My promotion raised no eyebrows, since it was explained as a personal decision based on my relationship with Dylan.
And so it was I had the upper offices of the Akeba marina cleaned and redecorated. There I was, a company president in less than a year—never mind that it was a dead-end job. Technically I was in charge of a fleet of four hunter-killer boats and sixty-two trawlers, plus assorted warehouses and processing centers for the catch.
The offices were a three-story affair overlooking the harbor and perched in the branches of a couple of huge trees. One branch had been cut and a deck put on it that extended, bridgelike, back to the offices, so there was a clear walk down to the boats themselves.
The lower floors contained basic administration and records processing and the initial holding tanks for the skrit, a reddish little creature somewhere between a plant and an animal whose internal body chemistry provided, among other things, chemicals that made superb electrical conductors. Once a week or so, more often if business was good, a big industrial flier would arrive, take the tank off to Tooker for processing, and then drop oft a new, empty one.
The upper floor, however, had been closed off since the last president, at least eight years before. I spent Tooker’s expense money lavishly, fixing up not only a comfortable office suite but also a huge luxury apartment with all the amenities. I moved in quickly. Shortly after, Dylan moved in as well, and we drew up and filed a marriage contract. Marriages were not usual nor necessary on Cerberus and existed mostly among people belonging to religious communities, but there were reasons for this one. On a practical level, it clearly defined joint and separate property and allowed us to establish a joint credit line. In that sense, it fulfilled my original promise of full partnership, and her position in Hroyasail suddenly became, as the boss’s spouse, one of greatest among equals.
And of course our relationship made my request for the Hroyasail position all the more credible to any suspicious onlookers. But there was more to it than that. I felt comfortable around Dylan, and not as comfortable away from her. She was a close friend and absolute confidante, and I’d never had that close a relationship. It was more than that. Being with her felt good, somehow—having her there, to know she was there even when we were in different parts of the place doing different things. However, this dependency bothered me, because up until now I’d considered myself immune to such human emotional weaknesses.
We slept together as a couple, too, causing frequent body switches that bothered neither of us. As Class I’s we did our regular job no matter who looked like who, and the experience brought us closer than any couple I could remember.
As for Dylan—well, all I can say is that I seemed to fit into a hollow space in her life, possibly left over from her previous career in the motherhood. She needed someone very close, and sleeping together without shields was more important to her than to me.
The only two things that bothered me were her cigars, which were pretty smelly even with the blower system on full, and the fact that most mornings she’d go out on that damned boat and risk her life. I wasn’t on my post more than a couple of weeks when they brought the first bodies back, mangled and bleeding if the sailors had been lucky, or in parts in body bags if they hadn’t been. I didn’t want to see Dylan come home like that, but I couldn’t talk her out of it. It was her life, In her blood, and no matter how she felt about me I knew I’d always come second to the sea.
Sanda, of course, was the extra element in all this, but it wasn’t really so bad. Both Dylan and I were nearby now, constantly within a quick elevator ride of Akeba House. So Sanda couldn’t have been happier, although there was a wistful envy inside her that she could witness this but was prohibited by virtue of the motherhood from its paradoxical freedom and stability.