"All right, then." Deliberately, Randon turned his gaze from Aikman onto the two prisoners. "They can go. Give them back their capelets."
Seqoya hesitated, then moved to comply. "Not the scrubber, of course," Randon added. "We'll want to let Schock take a look at it."
"That device is customs property," the elder man insisted, his courage clearly having come back with his perception that Randon was giving in. "I must insist on having it back."
Randon gave him a tight smile. "Certainly. Your superior can pick it up in the morning... along with Your IDs."
Both men froze in the act of putting on their capelets. "We need our IDs to do our jobs," the elder said through a suddenly tight mouth.
"Then you'd better get your superior over here tonight, hadn't you?" Randon told him coldly. "Seqoya: escort them to the edge of the perimeter. Make sure they leave."
Seqoya nodded. "Yes, sir."
Behind me, Aikman took a deep breath. Randon heard him, too, and turned around. "You have something to say, counselor?"
Aikman did; and he thought seriously about saying it. But he'd lost, and he knew it... and like Randon, he recognized the futility of simply lashing out in anger. "No, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos," he sighed at last.
Randon watched him for another moment, just to make sure. Then he turned back, and we all watched Seqoya usher the would-be intruders out of the gatelock. "A-minus for effort," he murmured, more to himself than to any of us. "Come on, Benedar, let's go see what Schock can tell us about that scrubber. Kutzko, keep the shields alert—they may not be ready to give up yet."
Behind me, Aikman turned and stalked back into the ship, his sense a silent blaze of anger. "Yes, sir," Kutzko nodded. "Will you be wanting to head back to the governor's dinner later?"
Randon glanced at his watch, shook his head. "No point to it now." He threw me a sly look. "Besides, someone there may be sweating at our sudden departure. Let's give him time to do it right."
—
"Cute," Schock muttered, turning the flexible rectangular mesh over in his hand and peering at its other side with his magnifier. "Very cute indeed. Cute and nasty." He waved Randon over. "Look here, sir—this sicet here, the one with the number partly scratched off? Odds are it's a preprogrammed bookbug, designed to get into the ship's data records and rescramble selected portions according to a new code."
Randon snorted gently. "Pretty primitive," he growled contemptuously. "Also useless. Even if the main sentinel missed it, there are at least two programs in our library for redecoding data that's gotten fouled up."
"True, but then this wasn't supposed to be anything more than a distraction," Schock shook his head. "Something to keep the sentinel—and us—occupied while these other two sicets got to work." He tapped the pair with his probe. "This is the real attack: a highly sophisticated codex mimic, and a miniature phone system switching station. The mimic can—theoretically, anyway—fool a computer into handing control of the phone system over to it, at which point the switching station can set up a link to a phone outside the ship. Without our knowing it, naturally."
Randon swore, the earlier smugness vanished into black anger. The Bellwether's computer could easily defend itself against an autosystem simple enough to fit on a single sicet; defending itself from a human expert with access to a full-range computer was something else entirely. "How hard would it have been for them to hook this into the Bellwether's systems?" he asked.
"Simplicity itself," Schock told him. "There are three induction portals on it, each set to a different voltage and frequency."
"Meaning...?"
"Meaning that all they would have had to do was plant it within electronic spitting distance of any of our electronics," Schock said bluntly. "In a phone, a repeater terminal, even one of the remote locks."
For a long moment Randon was silent, and I could feel the anger growing steadily within him. "Could they possibly have had the thing just sitting around, ready to go?"
"You mean was it put together specifically for us?" Schock shrugged. "Hard to tell. For all I know, everyone on Solitaire could be backstabbing each other with these all the time."
Wordlessly, Randon plucked the thing from Schock's fingers and handed it to me.
One look was all I needed. "It was assembled in a rush," I confirmed. "There are traces of connector fluid on some of the sicets that would normally be cleaned off, and the sealant has ripples in it that imply it was force-dried instead of being allowed to set naturally." I handed it back to Schock.
"Huh," he said in a bemused tone, peering at it again himself. "They're there, all right."
"Which means," Randon said thoughtfully, "that they did throw this together solely for our benefit. Hard to do?"
Schock considered. "Not for someone willing to pay the price."
Randon pursed his lips. "There must be something very interesting on those HTI cyls."
"Well, we can find out for sure any time now," Schock offered. "They're clean enough to put into the system and take a look. Incidentally, they'd loaded a passive tapsnake on the cyl they gave us, designed to root around for anything else in our files with an HTI keymark on it. Nothing fancy; it looked almost like they just threw it in out of habit."
"Paranoia," Randon murmured, and I could tell he was remembering the conversation we'd had on the way to the HTI meeting that morning. Remembering the odd tension Calandra and I had sensed overlaying all of Solitaire... "Benedar, you said Governor Rybakov reacted when I had Kutzko pull the fake security matter gambit, right? What was she like when we left?"
I thought back. "Much the same," I told him. "Only worse. But also strangely... resigned, I think. As if she knew she'd lost a battle or something and was mentally preparing to pull back to a new position."
He stared off into space a minute. "Sort of like the way Aikman acted when I told him I was keeping his friends' IDs?"
"Similar, but more intense." I hesitated, sorely tempted to skip over the next point. But omission of truth was just another form of lying. "For the record, though, I don't believe Aikman was actually in on the scheme, at least not beforehand. He was genuinely surprised to find those men trying to break into the ship."
"Then why did he try to get them off?" Randon demanded.
"Oh, he figured out quickly enough what was going on," I shrugged. "It was obvious that he was trying to get whoever sent them off the hot seat with as little damage as possible."
Randon grunted. "The difference between accessory before the fact and afterwards, in other words."
"More or less."
Randon made a face, then shrugged. "All right, forget Aikman for the moment. Back to Rybakov. What was this battle she'd lost, and where was she trying to pull back to?"
I had to search my memory to find the part of the conversation he was referring to. "My feeling is that she was involved, somehow, with the attempt to get aboard," I said slowly, trying to remember every nuance of the governor's sense. "Perhaps only in knowledge—maybe she was just asked to make sure we didn't leave dinner early."
"Or maybe she was asked to provide someone with a pair of official IDs?" Randon suggested.
I blinked. That thought hadn't even occurred to me. "That's... yes, that's possible," I agreed carefully.
"Just a second, here," Schock put in, clearly aghast. "Sir, are you accusing a planetary governor of involvement in industrial sabotage?"
"Why not?" Randon countered. "Just because the Patri thought she was qualified to run a minor system doesn't mean she can't be bribed. Or blackmailed or threatened, for that matter."