"Why, thank you! That's far more than I'd hoped for, and I'd be very happy to accept, if I may include my own accountant."
"Of course. I'll be taking my cargo shuttle back up at seventeen-thirty hours. Would you care to accompany me, or arrange your own transport?"
"If you won't mind seeing us home again, we'll ride up with you."
"No problem, Mister Fuchien. I'll expect you then."
-=0=-***-=0=-
Fuchien and his accountant—a short, stout woman with laugh wrinkles around computer- sharp eyes—arrived at the shuttle ramp precisely on time, and Alicia was waiting at its foot, tall and professional in her midnight blue uniform. Their brief handshakes lasted barely long enough
to skim the surface of their thoughts, but that was sufficient to confirm her suspicions.
"Captain, may I present Sondra McSwain, my accountant?"
"Pleased to meet you, Ms. McSwain."
"Likewise, Captain. After what Mister Fuchien's told me about your reputation, I expected you to be three meters tall!"
"Reputations always grow in the telling, I think." Alicia grinned back. McSwain's mind held neither the scummy taint she'd picked up from Labin nor the cultured avarice she read in Fuchien. It ticked like a precision instrument, skilled and professional but laced with a sense of humor, and Alicia's grin turned wry. How odd to find an incorruptible person on a planet like Dewent!
She shook herself and gestured at the ramp.
"Mister Fuchien. Ms. McSwain. We have clearance and my crew is preparing to roll out the carpet."
The flight up was routine, but the accountant's obvious delight made it seem otherwise. Ms. McSwain, Alicia decided, seldom saw the insides of the ships and shuttles that thronged Dewent's port facilities. Even this short jaunt was an exotic treat for her, yet she had the ability to recognize her own excitement for what it was and laugh at it. Alicia found herself explaining instruments and procedures with unfeigned cheer, and even Fuchien allowed himself to smile at her drum roll questions.
They were halfway to rendezvous when Tisiphone nudged Alicia.
"You are forgetting our purpose, Little One, and an illusion of this complexity requires preparation. May I suggest we begin?"
"I guess so," Alicia sighed, "but I think I'm going to enjoy this less than I expected. Why the hell does she have to be so nice?"
"Have no fear," the Fury said with unusual gentleness. "Megarea and I also like her. We will allow no harm to befall her, yet we must begin soon."
"Gotcha."
Alicia turned her head and smiled at McSwain as the accountant's questions temporarily ran down.
"There's a member of my crew I want you to meet, Ms. McSwain. A colleague of yours, you might say. Forgive us, but we were expecting a stringy, dried-up cold fish of a credit-cruncher." McSwain met her eyes, and they chuckled together. "I think Ruth is going to be pleasantly surprised."
"I once had a 'stringy, dried-up cold fish,'"Fuchien confessed, "but he fell afoul of an audit. Sondra is a vast improvement, I assure you."
"And I believe you." Alicia keyed a com screen alight with Ruth Tanner's face. "Ruth? Forget Plan A and go to Plan B. Mister Fuchien's accountant is human after all."
"Really? What a nice change," Megarea replied in Ruth's voice. Her image's eyes swept the cockpit until they found McSwain, and Ruth's face smiled. "Goodness! Who would've thought someone on this chauvinist backwater would have enough sense to hire a woman!" Her eyes cut to Fuchien's face, and her smile became a grin. "Oops! Did I just put my foot in my mouth?"
"Not with me," Fuchien assured her. "My colleagues' shortsightedness in that respect is my gain, Ms. Tanner. You are Ms. Tanner, I presume?"
"In the flesh," Megarea replied. "I hope you'll enjoy your visit. We don't entertain often, so we're putting our best foot forward, and ..."
The conversation rolled on, and neither Fuchien nor McSwain noticed when their eyes began to turn just a bit disoriented.
-=0=-***-=0=
This, Alicia thought, was the strangest thing they'd tried yet. In her present, straitened condition, Tisiphone would have found herself hard put to weave an illusion half this complex. But she wasn't forced to weave it alone, for Megarea had opened a direct tap to the Fury, throwing her own tremendous capacity behind the spell like a gigantic amplifier that restored Tisiphone, however briefly, to the peak of her long lost power.
And with that aid, the Fury surpassed herself. She wove her web with consummate skill, ensnaring both her guests and extending a tendril of herself to Alicia, as well. It was an eerie sensation, even for one who had become accustomed to the bizarre, for Alicia inhabited three worlds at once. She saw once through her own senses, again through Megarea's internal sensors, and last of all, she shared her guests' illusion. She sat with them at supper, chatting with Megarea's other selves while the AI provided their conversation and Tisiphone gave them flesh, even as she sat alone with them at the table. It was almost terrifying, for it wasn't what the Fury had done to Lieutenant Giolitti. There would be no hazed memories or implanted suggestions. This was real. Backed by the AI's enormous power, Tisiphone took them all one step out of phase with the universe and made her reality theirs.
Nor was that all she did. There was no rush, and she plumbed Lewis Fuchien's memories to their depths, filing away every scrap of a fact which might be of use. By supper's end, they knew everything he did, and the merchant was convinced Captain Mainwaring's crew was perfect for his needs.
The meal ended, and the entire crew—except Tanner— "excused" itself to return to duty. Fuchien lifted his brandy and sipped appreciatively.
"Well, Captain Mainwaring, you and your people have not only met my standards but far exceeded my hopes. I believe we can do business."
"I'm delighted to hear it." Alicia sat back with her own brandy and smiled, then gestured at the empty chair which held her purser's ghost. "In that case, why don't you and I sit back while Ruth and Sondra do battle?"
"An excellent idea, Captain." Fuchien beamed. "Simply excellent."
-=0=-***-=0=-
Dewent dwindled in the galley view screen as Megarea's velocity mounted, and Alicia watched it while she tried to define her own emotions. A complex broth of anticipation, hunger, and fear—fear that she might yet blow her chance—simmered within her, and over it all lay a haze of excitement as she looked ahead to Wyvern, mingled with relief at leaving Dewent astern.
She still didn't like Fuchien, but neither did she dislike him as much as she had expected. He was as ambitious and credit-hungry as Jacoby, but without the other's outright evil. He knew of his associate's drug deals yet took no part in them, and while he suspected his Wyvern contact of fencing goods for the pirates terrorizing the sector, he himself had had no direct dealings with them. He disapproved of them, in a depressingly mild sort of way, yet it was unrealistic to expect more from him. He was a Dewentan, and servicing "outlaws" was what Dewent did. By his own lights, Lewis Fuchien was an admirable and honest businessman, and Alicia could almost understand that.
That was one reason she was glad to leave, for she didn't want to understand it. On a more pragmatic level, their departure meant her and her "crew's" deception only had to stand up for one last planet. Only one, and then she didn't care who knew. Fleet was welcome to pursue her. Indeed, she would welcome their pursuit if her flight could lead them to the pirates.
She leaned her elbows on the edge of the console, propping her chin in her hands and brooding down on the rapidly diminishing image, and let her mind reach out ahead. Wyvern. The planet Wyvern and a man named Oscar Quintana, Lieutenant Commander Defiant. Wyvern had a peculiar aristocracy, with no use for titles like "baron" or "count." Their ancestors had been naval officers—little more than freebooter refuse from the centuries-past League Wars, perhaps, but naval officers— and the ship name appended to Quintana's tide indicated that he sprang from one of the founding noble houses. Peculiar as it might sound to off-world ears, he'd be a powerful man, probably a proud and dangerous one, and it behooved her to approach him with caution.