Julia forgot the tea plantation, the bark pressing into her back, muggy air. She felt real good talking to him like this, treated as an equal, not the patronised boss's granddaughter, not a scatty teenage rich girl. Right now she was a real person, for the first time in a long time. Maybe the moment would stretch and stretch.
Commit GregTime. To sip and savour whenever she felt down.
"I had to keep working on the Zanthus data," she said carefully. "Like it wouldn't let me go."
He nodded, satisfied with her response. "It's up here. I can feel it, no messing."
Which sounded pretty strange. Was that what he'd meant by intuition? "What's up there?"
"The twist. We're overlooking something, Julia." He paused, eyes closed, an impression of effort. "What was the monolattice filament intended for, anything important? Are you going to get clobbered with penalty clauses for non-delivery?"
Julia used the nodes to plug into the company datanet, remonstrating with herself, it was an obvious question. She traced the monolattice-filament contracts, running a quick analysis. "Not that I can find," she said. "But I'll have the lawyer's office double-check to be on the safe side."
"Right. In the meantime, I'll start interviewing the monolattice-filament module people." He let out a long breath, rubbing his nose. "Lord, how many of them are there?"
"Seven. We don't make much monolattice filament."
"That's something. You'd better call Morgan Walshaw; bring him up to date, and have him round up those on their furlough. I'll have to vet them once I get down."
"Right."
"That was a terrific piece of work, Julia. Exactly the sort of proof I needed."
Julia watched his image intently. His camouflage of emotional detachment had slipped fractionally, he was keen now, animated. He looked much nicer this way, she decided. "What proof?"
"That the spoiler doesn't conform."
"But how does knowing it's odd help? That just makes it more confusing to me."
He winked. "Have faith. Now I know, I'll keep looking. And I can look in the weirdest places."
"Where?" she demanded eagerly.
"Right in my own heart. Now you'll have to excuse me, I've got to get Victor Tyo organised."
"Right, sure." Granting him a favour.
End GregTime.
His image winked out, what might have been a smile tantalising her. She reached out and plucked the cybofax from the tree. Grinning stupidly, feeling wonderful.
One of Wilholm's sentinel panthers was looking at her five metres away, violet saucer eyes unblinking. She clicked her fingers and it padded over. Warm damp breath fell on her cheek.
"Good girl." She stroked it behind pointed flattened ears. It yawned lazily at the affection, pink tongue licking its double row of shark-heritage teeth. Tobias snorted disapproval, shaking his thick neck, then went back to foraging the grass.
Right in his own heart?
CHAPTER TEN
Alexius McNamara dropped through the sick bay's hatch, dressed in the sky-blue flightsuit which all the microgee module workers wore. His jowls overflowed his helmet strap, fingers resembled sausages. It was the last week of his shift.
"Grab him," Greg said simply. He'd soon learnt to speak in a half-shout, sound didn't carry far in free fall.
Victor Tyo and Isabel Curtis were already anchored to the chamber's walls on either side of the hatch. They clamped him between them with the efficiency of a tag-wrestling team, his legs and arms immobilised. Don Howarth jabbed a shockrod into his neck.
Greg had recognised the mental genotype as soon as he appeared: fissures of lassitude, leprous self-loathing. One of the kamikazes. He wasn't taking chances with them any more. His interview with Norman Knowles, one of the five managers, had finished badly. Greg had sensed Knowles was the one who'd circumvented the security monitors at the same time as Knowles worked out he had a gland. Unfortunately, Greg hadn't sensed Knowles was one of the kamikazes in time. Jerry Masefield had taken the brunt of the attack before he had been subdued. There was something uniquely disquieting about small globules of blood spraying about in free fall.
"Fuck you!" McNamara shouted.
The shockrod dug deeper. Don Howarth was a man worried for his position and pension. McNamara snarled.
Greg pushed off the wall, and stopped himself ten centimetres from him. They were inverted, and Greg sensed how that irritated the man. The Zanthus crew put a lot of stock in orientating themselves to a universal visual horizon.
"Spit at me, and I'll shove that shockrod up your arse, no messing," Greg said calmly.
McNamara gave a start, thought about it, and swallowed.
"That's right. They sent me up here because I have a gland."
Frightened eyes peered at Greg from within wells of flaccid flesh.
"You've been screwing around with the monolattice-filament extruder 'ware, McNamara. Writing off perfectly good fibres. How long have you been doing it?"
"Hey, psycho freak, your gland gives you cancer, know that? You'll die rotting."
"Don't," said Greg. "The whole nine months? Eight? Seven?" He sighed. "Seven it is."
"Bastard."
"How did they get a lever on you?"
"Eat shit and die, boy-lover."
"We have this sweep going between us, you see. A flyer each, so you can understand we're anxious to know. With a lot it's sex. Drugs are quite popular. Then there's the gee-gees. Some are just cracking apart, can't take the stress. But I think you're a straight money man, McNamara. Greed, that's your bang, isn't it? Pure greed." Greg could smell breath heavy with herb seasoning. "Did they tell you why?"
"What?" McNamara was clenching his muscles rigid, trembling, his face hot.
"Why they only wanted that three per cent taken out? Why not go for the jackpot like the memox furnaces?"
There was nothing in his mind, no indication that he knew an answer, even the reference to the memox furnaces had surprised him. The tekmerc team had been good, Greg acknowledged, textbook. The furnace operators didn't know who'd circumvented the security monitors, McNamara hadn't known about the furnace operators. Tight thinking all the way down the line.
He stopped his gland secretion, and turned wearily to Bruce Parwez. "OK, I'm through with him. Stash him in the suit cabin."
"Right." He began to truss McNamara with nylon restrainer bands, arms, ankles, knees. The seething man was eventually hauled out of the sick bay by Isabel Curtis and Lewis Pelham.
"It must be getting crowded in that cabin, five furnace operators, now two from the filament modules," Greg said to Victor Tyo.
"Tough."
"Yeah. How many more?"
"McNamara was the last. Unless you want to work through the other microgee products."
"Christ, don't. Morgan Walshaw or Julia Evans would've been in contact if any other products were involved with the spoil."
"Yes, the last word I got from Walshaw was that he'd got up a team to analyse the output of every module." Victor fought against a smile. "I don't think he was too happy that Julia Evans had found another security breach."
Greg wedged his foot under one of the beds. His first impulse was to sit down, but the position made his stomach muscles ache. Everything about free fall was unnatural. There was a fish bowl on the wall beside the bed, a sealed metre-wide globe with a complicated-looking water filter grafted on to one side. Ten guppies were swimming slowly round. Even they were all keeping their bellies towards the wall, though the angle made it look as if they were standing on their broad rainbow tails.
"What was bothering him?" Greg asked. "That it was another breach, or that Julia Evans found it?"
"Both, I think."