The man waiting at the other end of the connection picked up instantly. With the word manipulative running through her mind, Alison launched into the report she hadn't wanted Taneem to hear.
Fortunately, this one was much shorter than the conversation with Uncle Virge had been. Within a minute she was finished and had signed off. Resetting the controls to their original positions, she rejoined Taneem in the main office.
The K'da was by the door, her ear leaned against it. "Any change?" Alison called softy as she sat down at Neverlin's desk.
Taneem shook her head as she moved away from the door. "Both guards are still there," she said, coming to Alison's side. "You have a plan?"
"I do," Alison said as she keyed on the desk computer terminal. The system was code-locked, of course, but Alison had her own version of Jack's sewer-rat technique for getting into uncooperative computers. "The trick with military organizations like this is to know how things get done," she continued. "The key is that every order goes through at least two levels of command before it gets where it's supposed to go."
"Even in a group this small?"
"Even here," Alison assured her. The mole program did its work, and the menu came up. Scrolling down the assignment roster, she found that the two guards currently standing outside the office door were a human named Rennie and a Brummga named Grisfel.
"What I'm doing now is issuing a new set of orders to the night duty officer," she explained as she typed. "I'm telling him to send our guards out there to the main conference room for a brief consultation with Colonel Frost."
Taneem was silent a moment. "But surely they'll quickly discover the orders are false."
"Of course they will," Alison said. "But they won't be able to trace which of the ship's computers sent the message." She smiled grimly as she added a second order to the list. "And you might be surprised how easily suspicious minds like Neverlin's and Frost's can be nudged in the wrong direction."
She logged both orders and shut down the computer. "Come on aboard," she said, holding out her hand. "One last job and we'll be ready to go."
Selecting the largest and longest-range needle transmitter from her sewing kit, she slid it into the carpet beside one of the desk legs, out of the normal traffic pattern, the way her father had taught her. The carpet wasn't thick enough to hide the needle completely, but no one was likely to see it unless he was specifically looking for it.
Then, making sure she hadn't left behind any other trace of her presence, she stepped to the door and set her burglar's pickup microphone against the panel.
Frost's mercenaries were nothing if not efficient. Barely two minutes later she heard a faint comm clip voice from outside the office. There was a short, half-heard conversation, followed by a quiet order to the guard's companion.
Followed by the sound of two sets of footsteps moving away down the corridor.
"Is that it?" Taneem murmured from Alison's shoulder when the footsteps had faded into silence.
"That's it," Alison said. Steeling herself, she opened the door.
She'd half-expected to discover that the trick had failed, that she would find herself facing men and Brummgas with drawn weapons and evil grins. But the corridor was deserted. Getting her bearings, she headed forward. "Where are we going?" Taneem whispered.
"You'll see," Alison whispered back. Another corridor cut across theirs directly ahead. She paused to check around the corner, then turned into the cross-corridor and headed outward toward the ship's hull.
A minute later, they had reached their destination.
"What is this?" Taneem asked, lifting her head from Alison's shoulder to study the red-rimmed door in front of them.
"One of the ship's lifepods," Alison said, running a finger across the thin, multicolored seal pasted across the edge of the door. "Two weeks' worth of food and water and air for four people. Perfect place to hide until we reach the rendezvous."
Taneem seemed to digest that. "And the catch?"
Alison lifted her eyebrows at her symbiont as she pulled a small coil of nearly invisible but incredibly strong monofilament thread from her shirt cuff. "The catch?"
Taneem shrugged, a sideways flip of her crest. "Jack says that when something looks too good or too easy there's always a catch."
"Talk about cynical," Alison commented, taking the cap off her pen and carefully setting the loops at the ends of the monofilament into small grooves in both cap and pen.
"Is he wrong?"
"In this case, no," Alison said. Setting the pen and cap on the deck, she pulled out a pair of thumb caps and worked them onto the tips of her thumbs. "See this seal? It's designed to break easily so that people can get into the lifepod in an emergency. But once it's broken, it's broken."
"Showing that someone has been inside?"
"Exactly," Alison said. "It's supposed to discourage people from sneaking inside and pilfering any of the goodies."
"But you have a way to repair it?"
"Not exactly." Picking up the monofilament again, Alison gripped the pen and cap in opposite hands and set the thread against the door by the end of the seal. Pressing the thread firmly against the metal with her protected thumbs, she eased the thread beneath the seal. "The plan is to get the seal off but keep it intact."
It was a technique she'd practiced many times under her father's watchful eye. But she'd never had to do it in the field, and rather to her surprise she discovered it actually worked. The monofilament slid smoothly beneath the seal, cutting through its adhesive and releasing it from the metal.
Her biggest fear was that the seal would simply fold itself back onto the door as the thread passed beneath it. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Instead, the seal curled slightly away from the metal as she worked, eliminating that danger.
A minute later, she was finished. Praying that Neverlin hadn't added any entry alarms, she touched the release.
He hadn't. The door slid open, the pod's lights came on, and she slipped inside.
"Are we going to close the door?" Taneem prompted, peering out Alison's shirt back into the ship.
"Patience," Alison said, pulling out her multitool and getting to work on the control panel plate beside the door. "Closing the door normally starts a ten-second eject countdown."
"Oh."
"Oh, indeed," Alison said. "We'd really like to keep that from happening. Especially since I'm not sure what happens to a lifepod ejected while the ship's still running on the ECHO stardrive."
"But you can keep that from happening?"
Alison grimaced. "We'll find out in a minute."
The plate came off. Nudging the bundle of wires out of the way with her screwdriver, she located the right one and popped the end out of its socket. "That should do it," she said, tapping the door control.
She watched the status display carefully as the door slid shut, counting down the seconds to herself. Fifteen of them later, she finally started breathing again. "Yes," she said, closing the multi-tool. "That did it."
"Not quite," Taneem said. "Would you press your back against the door a moment?"
Frowning, Alison complied. Taneem shifted around on her back, probably checking the corridor one last time.
But no. Something else was happening, something that felt subtly different from anything else Alison had experienced with her companion.
She squeezed her hand into a fist, a fresh wave of tension flowing into her. If Taneem fell off into the corridor, this whole thing would have been for nothing.
And then, to her relief, she felt the K'da's weight shift again as she came fully back onto Alison's skin. "There," Taneem said with satisfaction. "I've smoothed the seal back into place on the door."
Alison blinked. "How in the world did you do that?"