Melody laughed. “That’s right. I heard him fail to negate.”
They moved on down the hall, Melody walking, Llume rolling, neither using her natural mode of travel. The magnet hovered in place, ignoring them. But Melody’s human flesh crawled as she passed it, and not merely because of Yael’s terror. A living cannonball…
“I suspect the bomb was placed aboard the shuttle before it left Outworld,” Dash said. “It was intended to destroy both the equipment—which it did—and the operative.”
“The operative,” Melody said, feeling cold. “Me?”
“You. For this reason I feel it would be better for you to remain aboard this ship for the time being. Evidently someone on the Imperial Planet is aware of your mission, so you are not safe there. Until that entity is located and neutralized, you are safest here where your identity is unknown.”
“Yes…” Melody agreed. She had already decided to remain for a while, but the notion that a direct attempt had been made on her life was appalling, and it unnerved her. But for an accident of timing, that bomb…
The Captain put his human arm around her shoulders. Suddenly she was crying in very human style against his shoulder. “Oh, Dash—I’m afraid!”
“Perfectly normal reaction. But there is no need to be concerned—now. I have established very thoroughly that no attempt on your life originated here. I regret I had no chance to explain what I was doing, before, but of course I could not be sure until we had investigated. I regret that the equipment was destroyed, but that can be replaced in due course. All is well so long as you are well, and I shall ensure that you remain well.”
He addressed his magnet. “Slammer, you will accompany Yael of Dragon until further notice, protecting her from any threat whatsoever. Understood?”
The magnet bobbed.
Oh, no! “Captain, I’d really rather not have the magnet—”
“The magnet is your friend,” the Captain assured her. “Pay attention.” He pointed to a metal chair anchored to the floor of Melody’s cabin. “I believe that object intends harm to Yael of—”
A blast of air rocked them back. The chair exploded. And Slammer hovered back where he had been, the heat of sudden motion dissipating from his shell.
Only Dash’s strong arm around her had prevented Melody from being blown over by the impact of the magnet’s motion. The chair was a flattened mass of partly melted metal. Yet it had been done so quickly that Melody had not even seen it happen.
The Captain gave her a final squeeze and let her go. “No one will even think of harming you now,” he said. “You are safe. Believe.”
Melody believed.
“I was always a sucker for fortunes,” the Chief of Coordinations said.
“You must understand, I make no claims for the supernatural,” Melody informed him, tapping the Cluster deck lightly. She had combed out her hair so that it was long and loose, parted in the center and coursing down in brown streams just outside her eyes, in the fashion of the ancient human witches. Yael had been delighted, and had offered pointers on details.
“Well, as long as it doesn’t take too long,” he said. “I do have other business.”
Melody leaned forward carefully, holding the deck in both hands so that her arms pressed against the sides of her breasts, making them bulge out of the artfully low-cut décolletage. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,” she murmured.
His eyes did a little male-animal dance upon her cleavage. “Oh, no inconvenience. Take your time.”
“Do you know your Significator? The card that represents you?”
He glanced at her face momentarily, brow wrinkling. “Is there a card named Hath?”
She smiled. “I don’t believe so. What is your planet of origin?”
“Conquest,” he said.
“Well, Hath of Conquest, let’s look through these cards and see if any of the faces reflect your home. I am not familiar with it, so you will have to make the selection.” She showed him the first of the Major Arcana, numbered Zero in the deck. “This we call the Fool, though he is not really foolish. It is just that his tremendous vision outreaches his footing.” The picture showed a young man about to step off a cliff. She flexed the face, bringing up an alternate. “This is the same key, but in this aspect he is called the Nameless One. There are over a hundred versions of each card; I have only a representative sampling here.” She flexed it to the third face.
“No, wait,” Hath said. “That second one; I believe that will do.”
“Oh?” She flexed it back. “Why?”
“The arthropod. This typifies my world.”
“There are spiders on your world?”
“No. But related creatures, yes. We cultivate them; they are our primary food. So arthropods are most important to us.”
“That makes sense,” Melody agreed. “Very well. This is your Significator, and we shall use this facet of the deck. It is called the New Tarot, though it is not new any more. It was one of the decks created in honor of the so-called Aquarian Age of astrological Earth. It has been modified to fit the standard hundred card format, but otherwise it is reasonably authentic.”
She continued talking, careful to provide him a continuing view of her front so as to hold his attention, but her thoughts wandered. In fact, she had read of Planet Conquest, as it had a certain historical value. It had been the first human extra-Solar colony, the start of Sphere Sol.
A million Solarians had been moved by matter transmission at phenomenal energy expense to the system of Gienah, sixty-three light-years distant from Sol, there to colonize a supposedly ideal virgin world. But the preliminary survey had overlooked a critical element of the planet’s ecology, and it had very nearly wiped out the colony in the first year. The near-fiasco had been hushed up by the Solarian bureaucracy, but it was only a fraction of the disasters that beset the “Fool” period of Earth’s history. How aptly the Tarot reflected that situation! Yet, Melody reminded herself, the vision of Paul of Tarot also stemmed from that conflux…
Of course, such information was also available to the Andromedans. So if a spy or hostage wanted to claim origin on a planet of Sphere Sol, this would do. And a hostage entity would have no reason to pretend; it could draw from its host’s mind. She would be wasting her time trying to trap it by means of misinformation. In fact, a person could have a great deal of misinformation about his home planet, since of course most people here in the fleet would be second- or third-generation émigrés whose ancestors had shipped at half-light speed from those planets. A man could call a planet “home” as a matter of cultural pride, when he had never been there. This was another reason it was generally considered that the only sure way to identify a given entity was by aural analysis. “Now these hundred cards are arranged in order,” Melody was saying meanwhile. She spread them in her hands, not forgetting to give her impressive bust another jiggle. “First the Major Arcana, the important secrets, as it were, all thirty of them. Actually there are even more than that, but they don’t all have separate cards. This one, the Ghost, has fifteen alternate keys. It really stands for all the missing secrets, whose number may well be infinite. So the full extent of the theoretical deck—”
“I don’t really understand about such things,” Hath said. “And I do have duties elsewhere. Would you mind doing the reading now?”
So her bosom would not hold him forever. Well, he had a typical human reaction. Few sapients were sincerely interested in Tarot; they only wanted a slice of their future handed to them conveniently. This would not be a good reading. The querist really had to understand the cards for that. But then, the reading was not her purpose. “Please shuffle the cards now,” she told him, handing him the pack.