Drowning World (28 page)

What else could she do? She had learned something from Pandusky's illegal but efficacious probe of various financial records. She had learned something more from her tense interview with the Sakuntala business-Hata Geladu-tiv. In gambler's parlance, she was on a roll. What did one do when she was on a roll? Leaning forward slightly, she addressed herself to the air. The appropriate concealed pickup relayed her voice to the outer office.

“Sanuel. If he can be found, bring in the independent bioprospector Sethwyn Case.”

“Straightaway, Administrator.” While Pandusky did not respond with enthusiasm, neither was he audibly upset. More than anything, he was plainly relieved that he was not being asked yet again to break into someone's restricted private financial records.

18

H
e did not look very happy. It was something of a shock. She was used to seeing him happy. Happy-go-lucky, at ease, grinning and laughing, ready to tease her with smile and laugh and eyes. Those eyes, she reflected. Those goddamned gorgeous, penetrating, seductive eyes. With an effort of will, she forced herself to meet them.

Shaking himself free of the two peaceforcers who had escorted him into her office, Case spared them a single lingering murderous glance before shifting his attention to the quiet, poised redheaded woman seated behind the desk. On previous occasions he had always tried to read her mind. He did not know how fortunate he was that he could not.

“I don't know what's going on, Lauren, but it isn't funny.”

Her reply was one of studied calm. “You're right, Seth. It isn't funny.” Looking past him, she dismissed the peaceforcers. They retired to the outer office, leaving her alone with the bioprospector.

As soon as the doorway sealed behind them, he turned back to her. His face was by turns flustered and furious. “Something's up, beautiful. Want to let me in on what it is?”

“Right away, Seth. And from here on in it might be best if you address me as Administrator.” Her insides were churning again, but her voice was steady as strilk.

He drew back from her, straightening stiffly. “Oh. So it's like that, is it?”

She nodded slowly, painfully. “Yes, Seth. It's like that. I won't waste your valuable time.” She continued to study his face, his eyes. “I know that you're the one responsible for sabotaging the instrumentation of the two missing skimmers: the one piloted by the bioprospector Shadrach Hasselemoga, also known as Hasa, and the rescue craft that was sent to find him.”

Mouth open, lips more than slightly parted, he stared down at her in disbelief. Then his familiar grin returned, jaunty and disarming. But it did not return, she felt, quite quickly enough.

“You don't know anything of the sort,” he retorted with becoming self-confidence, “because it isn't true.”

“Sure it is,” she replied with an assurance she was nowhere near feeling. “Hasselemoga is a competitor of yours. He took off to work the same territory where you were looking to make important discoveries. Probably boasted about where he was heading. Remember me asking you not long ago how your luck was going, and you telling me that you had some good prospects down south?”

“Means nothing.” He shrugged it off. “The southern Viisiiviisii is an enormous place. In case you haven't noticed lately, there are only four cardinal bearings on the compass.”

She pressed on, grimly self-possessed. “You were seen working around both of the missing craft. I have an eyewitness. You've received credit, a very large sum of credit, from an extremist Sakuntala Hata-yuiqueru, funneled through a legitimate Sakuntala company. The credit was disguised to conceal the magnitude of the overall amount, which makes the transfers even more suspicious.”

“So what?” he challenged her. “Maybe my political leanings are morally hard for some people to understand, but they're not illegal. If I choose to support one Sakuntala political faction over another one, that's my decision.”

She nodded appreciatively. “Thank you for telling me that. It explains why you told me you weren't worried about the Sakuntala giving you trouble during your explorations. ‘They won't bother me,' you said. No wonder you were so sure of yourself. You had a deal with a prominent war chief and could operate freely under his protection, even in the deep south.”

He sighed heavily. “Look, if you don't have anything else—
Administrator
—unlike some people, I have real work to do.”

Unable to contain herself, she started to rise from her chair. “The Sakuntala radicals approached you with an offer to make the Deyzara look bad, thus helping to mute human and therefore Commonwealth objections to the uprising against the Deyzara. Needing money in order to keep operating—and your financial records show that you were in serious fiscal straits before receiving the credit from Poutukaa—you offered to sabotage Hasselemoga's skimmer and spread the rumor that the Deyzara were somehow responsible. This opportunity dovetailed neatly with your desire to get rid of a dangerously efficient competitor nobody liked anyway. Then you had to do the same to the rescue skimmer to make sure no one would find your handiwork and possibly trace it back to you.” When he didn't respond, she pushed on.

“You're finished, Seth. Your dire financial situation, your direct connection to the Sakuntala radicals, your need to eliminate Hasselemoga, plus the eyewitness who saw you monkeying with not one but both missing skimmers that I'm reliably told no Deyzara could have manipulated so subtly—it all fits together rather neatly, doesn't it? Not to mention your own words to me.” She glanced in the direction of floating time. “I'm expecting the Sakuntala Hata-yuiqueru Aniolo-jat any minute. He'll confirm what I've just said. Not that I need his confirmation to have you indicted.”

For the first time since he'd been brought into her office, Case looked unsettled instead of irate. “You can't bring Aniolo-jat here. You don't know where he is.”

Her eyes snapped sharply back up to lock onto his. “Don't I? I had an interview a while ago with Geladu-tiv, the head of the company Poutukaa. Your financial go-between. Think
he
doesn't know where the Hata he regularly pays off is residing?” She tried not to hold her breath, to remain calm, to give away nothing. Which, she knew, was what she had.

From the moment she'd first met him, she'd thought of Sethwyn Case as indestructible, unyielding. A fit individual to challenge the lethal Viisiiviisii single-handedly. Tough, courageous, charming, knowledgeable, able to look Death in the face with one eye and stare it down even as he was enchanting someone like herself with the other. As the silence continued, she became convinced that there was no way this was going to work, no chance that she would gain the final piece of the rank, unfinished puzzle. He was going to turn and walk out of her office and she was not going to be able to do a damn thing about it.

As she was contemplating the maddening failure that lay spread out before her in all its malign grandeur, he cracked.

Though still outwardly defiant, he seemed to shrink before her. How she had ever thought this miserable narcissistic sorry slab of ambulating testosterone worthy of contemplated infidelity she now could not understand. The press of too much work was the only excuse she could come up with. She had been blinded by perspiration as much as by flattery. Given time, perhaps she could do better.

She consoled herself with the knowledge that she was not the first woman in history who occupied a position of importance to have been so deceived.

“I need the name of the individual in Port Security you paid off to help you circumvent interior surveillance.”

Anesthetized by events, wholly preoccupied, he responded with a barely perceptible nod. That's when he pulled the injector.

It was very small. Still, the peaceforcers who had brought him in should have found the medical device. Maybe they had, she thought, and Case had protested at having it confiscated. Or perhaps they had been preoccupied in the search for more overt weaponry. She would have to have a word with Security. Her serenity in the face of the device, loaded with chemicals of what potential deadliness she could not imagine, astonished her. It was possible she was too weary to be frightened.

She kept her hands in plain sight. A sharp word would raise a defensive screen between her desk and the rest of the office. Unfortunately, he was too close and inside the potential barrier. A different word would bring the waiting peaceforcers running from the outer office. That might, she reflected calmly, take too much time. She favored him with a mixture of sadness and pity.

“Are you going to shoot me with something, Seth? Here, in my office, in the heart of Administration? If you do, it had better be instantly lethal. Suppose you do? What happens afterward? You can't just walk out of here. I'd first have to tell the officers waiting in the outer room that it's okay for you to leave. Even if you could somehow con your way past them, then what? Where would you go? This is Fluva. You'd never be able to get off-world. Is that the existence you want to look forward to for the rest of your life, hiding out in the Viisiiviisii? Because you'd have to hide, you know. With the offer of a modest reward you'd have every Deyzara and Sakuntala on the planet looking for you.”

The injector wavered along with the look on his face. Keeping the business end aimed in her direction, he worked his way around the desk until he was standing next to the window. The same window through which she had stared so long and so often ever since she had accepted her promotion to her present position. Beyond the protective exterior overhang, a light rain was visible.

Still keeping his attention focused on her, he reached back with his free hand and tried to open the window. He failed, because there was no lock and no handle. She shook her head slowly.

“Like so much else in this office, Seth, it only responds to my voice. Like the screen that's been up between you and me ever since you pulled that toy out of your pocket.”

“You're lying.” His eyes flicked from side to side, searching for suggestions of an ethereal shield.

She shrugged. “Then go ahead and try to shoot me. If you succeed, you're further damned. If you fail, I'll see you put up on charges of making the attempt. In addition to everything else.”

He hesitated a moment longer. Then he put the nasty little power injector down on her desk and stepped back. A ghost of the familiar captivating smile she knew all too well played around the corners of his mouth.

“You're smarter than me, Lauren. You always were. I just thought that this one time I could stay a step ahead of you.”

“You
were
a step ahead of me,” she replied coldly. “It just took me a while to catch up.”

Nodding, he looked momentarily hopeful. “I just want you to know that however things turn out, I always meant what I said about your attractiveness. That was no lie. I loved your personality as well as your—”

“Shut up, Seth.”

The two peaceforcers took him away. He departed with a smile. Or maybe it was a smirk. She marveled that until now she had not been able to tell the difference. Fine details, she told herself as she stared at the resealed portal. Little things she ought to have noticed. So many little things . . .

She began to cry, long, heaving sobs that were punctuated by ferocious obscenities. Not only was she furious at the apprehended bioprospector, she was equally angry at herself. How could she have been so gullible? It had been so easy for him to fool, to flatter, and, ultimately, to betray. All the engaging conversation, the sweet words, the cunning kissing up—it hadn't been for her. Everything had been said and done to advance Case's own private agenda. He might have brought it off, too, if not for the suspicions of a low-level maintenance tech unwilling to see an innocent species unfairly vilified.

For most of a full hour she raged against Case and against herself, ignoring the brightly colored points of floating light that twinkled just above the surface of her restless desk. Then she went back to work.

As she was about to leave the building, Pandusky informed her that word had just come in from an extremely remote southern village of the arrival, tattered and tired but otherwise in good physical shape, of both the missing bioprospector Hasselemoga and the two members of the team that had been sent to rescue him.

“Wonderful news, isn't it, Administrator?” Her assistant was beaming. “After so many days missing in the Viisiiviisii, it's a miracle that they've turned up alive.”

“Yes, wonderful.” Her voice was a whisper.

Pandusky's brows drew toward each other. It looked as if—no. Surely Administrator Matthias had not been crying. It was the strain she was working under. That was it. Too much on her plate these past few days. And now this unpleasant business with the prospector Case. No wonder she looked so worn out.

“Should I authorize sending a third crew down to pick them up?” When she didn't reply, he repeated the query, adding, “Administrator?”

She blinked, looked over at him. “Yes, of course. Authorize it.” She started past him.

“I'll take care of it, Administrator—Lauren. Don't worry. I'll remind whoever's picked to go down there to take extra precautions with both predeparture and in-flight procedures.”

She glanced back. “Won't be necessary, Sanuel. There won't be any trouble—this time.”

“As you say, Administrator.” He dithered briefly. “If you don't mind my saying so, Lauren, you could do with a day off. A little rest would do you . . .”

His words trailed away. She was already out of hearing range.

By the time she got home she had convinced herself she was over it. She was wrong. Jack was waiting for her in the center room of their dwelling. Good Jack, kind Jack, faithful Jack. He had supper waiting for her. Again. That was all it took to start her weeping once more.

“Hey,” he murmured in bewilderment as she slumped, sobbing, into his arms, “I'm not
that
bad a cook.”