“It depends what you mean by rumors, Factor. Maybe if you asked straight out what you want to know, I could answer your question.”
The Factor looked at her as if no one had spoken to him bluntly before. Maybe they hadn’t.
Orsaya waited for his response.
“Admiral Orsaya, you have a level ten of your own under contract. Surely it irks you that Lambert was elevated above him merely by a combination of circumstance and birth. Jordan Rossi is a strong ten. Possibly the strongest now that Rebekah Grimes has gone.”
He knew Grimes was dead even if Glenn didn’t.
“Yes, Rossi is strong.” Orsaya bared her teeth in another smile. “But Factor, don’t make the mistake of assuming Lambert is weak simply because of his reputation. It takes resilience and determination to get where he is.”
Was it a warning? Or a threat?
Abram joined them. The Factor nodded and turned to where Sale was explaining how they had integrated the human equipment alongside the alien boards. The guards were asking plenty of questions. Intelligent questions. Expert questions. Ean was pleased when Sale gave one of them a flat stare.
“That’s classified.”
Eventually, Abram glanced at his comms. “I’m afraid that’s all we have time for on this visit.”
“Surely a few more moments,” the Factor said, although Ean had the feeling he was as impatient as Ean was for this trip to be over.
Abram sounded regretful. “Apologies, but our time is heavily scheduled. I am sure your time is, as well. Governor Jade is to address the council this afternoon, and Admiral Orsaya and I have a meeting with Admirals MacClennan and Katida.”
“Of course.” The Factor smiled although his smile didn’t reach his eyes.
Jakob secreted one final device, and they all stepped back onto the cart.
Governor Jade gripped tight. “Surely the aliens had a better transport system than this. Or did they run all the way to the bridge?”
“We don’t know, Governor,” Abram said. “We certainly haven’t found anything we identify as transport yet.”
The ship was considering the single-level linesman again.
“Yes?”
“No,” Ean said. “She’s banned.”
“But she is promising,” the ship said.
“No.” He was singing in front of people he didn’t want to sing in front of, but he couldn’t stop there. “She works for bad people.”
“We like her.”
Ean sighed. “What’s your name?” he asked the single-level linesman. If Michelle did marry the Factor, then theoretically she could be one of the crew. And why was the ship suddenly considering who was suitable and who wasn’t?
“You said we could,” the ship reminded him.
He had?
The linesman didn’t give her name. Ean didn’t care. He’d get it later. Abram would know.
“I realize this is a miracle ship,” Governor Jade confessed to Sale, as the cart made its way back the way it had come. “But it still scares me. I’m happy to get back to something human.”
She didn’t have to say it aloud.
“We don’t mind,” the ship lines said comfortingly in Ean’s mind. “We don’t want her anyway.”
Ean didn’t answer that. There was nothing he could say.
The Confluence responded more to nonlinesman than the Eleven did. Was that because most of the people who came to it were nonlinesmen? Or was it because—being a larger ship—it had housed nonlinesmen in the past?
After the shuttle had left, Ean said, “Jakob is not coming back on this ship.”
“Give us a reason. We can’t ban someone just because you don’t like them.” Sale paused to think about that. “Or can we?”
“What about leaving bugs around?”
Ean sang them through the ship, finding the tiny line fives. As he found each one, he channeled the signal back to the other devices that had been placed. When he was done, the only things these little lines were communicating with were each other. Sale picked them off the wall as he located each one.
“Normally we’d leave them.” She tossed the last of them into a container. “Doctor them to send back misinformation. Are you sure that’s all, Ean?”
“I think so.”
“We’ll take these back as evidence. That woman. She was a linesman?”
“Did you know?”
“A blind man could have seen the way she reacted to the boards.”
Smugness washed through the lines. It came from the ship, not from Sale. You couldn’t fool its people.
Its people? “These are not your people. They’re Helmo’s.”
Did he imagine that the ship deliberately ignored that? Could lines indicate deliberate ignoring anyway?
“This ship,” Ean told Sale, “is acting strangely.”
“You have to expect that, Ean. It’s just had unpleasant visitors.”
Sale was as bad as the ship.
When he got back to Confluence Station, Ean called Vega. He made the line secure.
“No,” Vega said. “I haven’t heard anything. On jobs like this, Lambert, you don’t, and you don’t want to, either.”
He hadn’t been calling about that, but it was good to have the report.
“What if she’s in trouble?”
“We expect her to get out of it herself. The only time she’ll send a message is if she’s in so much trouble she can’t get out of it. It’s called a dead man’s message, for obvious reasons, so you’d better hope we don’t hear from her.”
Ean fervently hoped they wouldn’t, and equally fervently hoped she’d be back soon. “I need to talk to Linesman Glenn.” Glenn had mentioned an experimental line project, and Ean wanted to know more. He might not tell Ean, but he would tell Jordan Rossi. If Rossi chose to cooperate, and given it was line business, he would.
“You’re too late.”
He hoped she meant they’d sent Glenn home, and not the way she’d made it sound.
“Glenn had a line-induced heart attack on the way back in the shuttle. They couldn’t do anything for him.”
Ean stared at her image. “Line eleven’s been quiet all afternoon.”
Lemon-sour Vega washed over him. “So say the linesmen on board this ship. Someone didn’t like his being outed as a linesman.”
A heart attack. Someone had come well prepared.
“We’re going over ship records now,” Vega said. “If you can think of anything he said or did that might have triggered an outcome like that, let me know.”
“Glenn was about to start working on a top secret line project. House of Sandhurst was involved. And someone called Dr. Quinn. It’s probably not important, but Jakob didn’t like his talking about it.”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” Vega said.
The first thing Ean did after he clicked off was send a request to all the fleet lines. If Radko called, he wanted to know the instant it happened.
Vega called back half an hour later. “You have good instincts. We’ll never make a decent soldier of you, but you can be useful on occasion.”
That was just Vega’s manner. Ean could hear through the lines that she was pleased with what she had discovered. “Your friend Dr. Quinn works for TwoPaths Engineering.”
TwoPaths Engineering was a Redmond company. They made spaceships based on the plans of the Havortian, the alien spaceship that had been discovered five hundred years earlier. They didn’t realize the New Alliance knew that. Or the fact that TwoPaths’ sister company—FiveTrees Consolidated—was building weapons based on those same plans.