"Cari!"
A millisecond passed before she recognized the voice, and responded.
"Keff?"
"Cari, what happened? The game holos are gone. Why did you fire off a message probe? What's wrong?"
That question brought her immediately back to the present. The cabin had indeed lost its veneer of medieval neglect. Keff and Tall Eyebrow stood in the center of the plain, enamel-painted room looking incongruous in tunics and swordbelts. Keff stared at her pillar.
"Are you all right?"
"What message probe?" she demanded, then checked her own telemetry. Sure enough, one of her small emergency rockets was streaking away into endless night, following a vector that would take it toward their last point of contact with the Central Worlds. Carialle searched the chips which supplied her with hard drive storage, found nothing, and extended the search to her other components.
"I didn't do that on purpose," Carialle said, crossly. "It must have been a malfunction caused by a bad connection. Darn it, and I was certain they'd checked everything in dry-dock!" Frantically she traced the circuits leading back from the controller in the rocket port.
"No, wait… Somebody planted a post-hypnotic suggestion on me."
Keff shook his head. "You can't be hypnotized, Cari."
"It's the shellperson equivalent," Carialle said, her voice becoming crisp and cold. "Programming has been inserted into my circuits to respond to certain stimuli under certain very precise conditions, with the result you have just observed. There are microfilaments inserted into my nutrient storage tanks. They are probably there to monitor unusual demand for brain chemicals and carbos in a combination that approximates paranoid hysteria with pseudo-psychotic overtones, a condition that I admit I submitted to momentarily just now."
"Who?" Keff asked, his face setting into a grim mask.
"Who do you think?" Carialle countered. "Who's been trying to Section-Eight me for the last twenty years? Who thinks I'm a flying emotional time bomb who should be relegated to controlling traffic on a Central Worlds ground station? Maxwell-Corey, of course. That afterburning, fardling collection of random neural firings Inspector General!"
"Are you sure?" Keff asked.
"Who else would Rube-Goldberg me without my knowledge?" Her blood pressure rose, so she adjusted slightly her intake of saline and gave herself five micrograms of a mood leveler. The panic attack had left behind its debris of epinephrines and excess gastric acids that were fast disappearing down the blood-cleansing apparatus. "He doesn't trust me. He never has."
"This is harassment," Keff said, all his protective tendencies coming out at once. "We should report it to SPRIM and MM." SPRIM was the Society for the Protection of the Rights of Intelligent Minorities, and MM, Mutant Minorities, two agencies that spoke up on behalf of shellpeople who ran into difficulties with unshelled bureaucracy. Dr. Sennet Maxwell-Corey, a psychiatrist by training and a nuisance by avocation, was a particular bugbear to both of them, but he had a special animus toward Carialle. He had never been convinced she had recovered from being marooned. The fact that she and Keff took a lighthearted view toward the naming of the indigenous species they encountered on their missions for Exploration, and their devotion to playing Myths and Legends, made her sanity all the more suspect to the unimaginative bureaucrat.
"I am composing something scathing right now," Carialle said, "while I destroy the implant with extreme prejudice." Her self-repair facilities, micromachines of various designs, crawled along the electronic neural extenders and yanked the filaments out of her tanks and filled in the drillmarks. Others traced down the filaments to the control boxes carefully hidden in deadware like the bottom of her waste tanks.
"Don't send the message without my input," Keff insisted. He got up from his chair and paced back and forth in front of her pillar. "I have something to say about imperiling my partner's well-being. And I want to tell them just what I think of his big-brotherism." He smacked one fist into the other palm. Tall Eyebrow and the other two globe-frogs jumped away from him. He was sorry to frighten them, but he was unspeakably angry.
"Why did it happen?" he asked, stopping short and looking up into her nearest camera eye.
"We're in P-sector," Carialle said flatly.
Keff's eyes went wide. He knew all about her history, and always had been extremely supportive in helping her heal from her traumatic experience. "Are we… there?"
"Yes."
Keff noticed the emergency lights on the console board, and went to shut off the alarms. "Are you all right now?"
"Yes." Carialle's voice was thin with anger. "Damn him! I passed my last six psych tests, two of them-two!-since our trip to Ozran. I feel violated. There's a message box in my memory, with all kinds of circumventions to make certain I couldn't detect it. Planted among the microdiodes at the same time as the uninitialized chips. Nowhere near the new stuff, which the wily bastard knew would be the first things I'd suspect. It's a custom job, too…"
Keff interrupted. "But why would you have reacted like that? Why would you have set it off at all?"
"I know every inch of this parsec," Carialle said unhappily. "I spent an eternity here, Keff. Not that far from here is where my fuel tanks blew up. There." A holoview of the sector appeared, with their path indicated in blue. A red X blossomed at a distance from their present location and floated toward them, crossing the blue line and passing toward a cluster of stars to their starboard stern. She squared up their current location on the tank, and Keff looked at it solemnly. "I was disabled here for weeks. And just for a moment, I was reliving that experience. I was counting, counting the seconds to keep from going insane. Then I remember feeling those footsteps on my hull, feeling those hands dismembering my components, stripping what they must have thought was a wreck, and hearing myself screaming. 'Who are you?' " she wailed.
Keff shuddered and covered his ears. "But it's been almost twenty years, Cari."
"You know what my memory is capable of. The sensation is as clear and intense as if it was just this minute for me! I was desperately afraid those unknowns would break open my shell and leave me to die in space. I was helpless! It affected me so deeply that no matter how well I think I am, subconsciously I have never gotten over it. I never found out who was performing salvage on my skin. The headshrinkers still don't believe that there was anyone there. M-C still must think I had a psychotic episode, dreamed the whole thing. That's why he's has been dogging me all these years. He's been so sure I would flip out. And he made doubly sure I would launch a message probe to him if ever I did, so he could drag me out of my ship and lock me in a padded room. I wonder what else is buried in there," she added bitterly.