"Yes?" Sassinak rummaged in her memory for any wealthy or socially prominent woman she might have known. An admiral, or an admiral's wife? And came up short.
"Your mentor, my dear, when you were a girl, Abe."
She could not have been more startled if Fleur had poured a bucket of ice over her. "Abe? You knew Abe?"
The older woman nodded. "Yes, indeed. I knew him before he was captured, and after. Although I never met you, I would have, in time. But as it was…"
"I know." The grief broke over her again, as startling in its intensity as the surprise that this woman - this old woman - had known Abe. But Abe, if he'd lived, would be old. That, too, shocked her. In her memory, he'd stayed the same, an age she gradually learned was not so old as the child had thought.
"I'm sorry to distress you, but I needed to speak to you. About Abe, about his past and mine. And about your future."
"My future?" What could this woman possibly have to do with her future? It must have shown on her lace, because Fleur shook her head.
"A silly old woman, you think, intruding on your life. You admire the clothes I design, but you don't need a rich woman's sycophant reminding you of Abe. Yes?"
It was uncomfortably close to what she'd been thinking. "I'm sorry," she said, apologizing for being obvious, if for nothing else.
"That's all right. He said you were practical, tenacious, clear-headed, and so you must be. But there are things you should know. Since we may be interrupted at any time - after all, this is a business - first let me suggest that if you find yourself in need of help, in any difficult situation in the city, mention my name. I have contacts. Perhaps Abe mentioned Samizdat?"
"Yes, he did." Sassinak came fully alert at that. She had never found any trace of the organization Abe had told her about once she was out of the Academy. Did it still exist?
"Good. Had Abe lived, he would have made sure you knew how to contact some of its members. But, as it was, no one knew you well enough to trust you, even with your background. This meeting should remedy that."
"But then you…"
Fleur's smile this time had an edge of bitterness. "I have my own story. We all do. If there's time, you'll hear mine. For now, know that I knew Abe, and loved him dearly, and I have watched your career, as it appears in the news, with great interest."
"But how…"As she spoke, the door opened again, and three women came in, chattering gaily. Fleur stood at once and greeted them, smiling. Sassinak, uncertain, sat where she was. The women, it seemed, had come in hopes of finding Fleur free. They glanced at Sassinak, then away, saying that they simply must have Fleur's advice on something of great importance.
"Why of course," she said. "Do come into my sitting room." One of them must have murmured something about Sassinak, for she said, "No, no. Mirelle will be right back to speak to the commander."
Mirelle reappeared, as if by magic, bearing a tray with tiny sandwiches and cookies in fanciful shapes.
"Fleur says you're quite welcome to stay, but she doesn't think she'll be free for several hours. That's an old customer, with her daughters-in-law, and they come to gossip as much as for advice. She's very sorry. You will have a snack, won't you?"
For courtesy's sake, Sassinak took a sandwich. Mirelle hovered, clearly uneasy about something. When Sassinak insisted on leaving, Mirelle exhibited both disappointment and relief.
"You.will come again?"
"When I can. Please tell Fleur I was honored to meet her, but I can't say when I'll be able to come onplanet again."
That should give Sassinak time to think, and if she hadn't made a decision by the next required conference, she could always go by a different street. Outside again, she found herself thinking again of Dupaynil, simply because of his specialties. She wished she had some way of getting into the databases herself, without going through Aygar, and without being detected. She would like very much to know who 'Fleur de Paris' was, and why her name was supposed to be a joke.
In his days on the Zaid-Dayan, Dupaynil would have sworn that he was capable of intercepting any data link and resetting any control panel on any ship. All he had to do was reconfigure the controls on the escort vessel's fifteen escape pods so that he could control them. It should have been simple. It was not simple. He had not slept but for the briefest naps. He dared not sleep until it was done. And yet he had to appear to sleep, as he appeared to eat, to play cards, to chat idly, to take the exercise that had become regular to him, up and down the ladders.
He had no access to the ship's computer, no time to himself in the compartments where his sabotage would have been easiest. He had to do it all from his tiny cabin, in the few hours he could legitimately be alone, 'sleeping.'
And they had already found one of his taps. It frightened him in a way he had never been frightened before. He was good at the minutiae of his work, one of the neatest, his instructors had said, a natural. To have a but like Ollery find one of his taps meant that he had been clumsy and careless. Or he had misjudged them, another way of being clumsy and careless.
He would not have lived this long had he really been clumsy or careless, but he had depended on the confusion, the complexity, of large ships. Fear only made his hands shake. Coldly, he considered himself as if he were a new trainee in Methods of Surveillance. Think, he told himself, the nervous trainee. You have die brains or they wouldn't have assigned you here. Use your wits. He set aside the odds against him. Beyond 'high,' what good were precise percentages? He considered the whole problem. He simply had to get those escape pods slaved to his control.
A crew which had spent five years together on a ship this small would know everything, would notice everything, especially as they now suspected him. But since they were already planning to space him, would they really worry about his taps? Wouldn't they, instead, snigger to each other about his apparent progress, enjoy letting him think he was spying on them, while knowing that nothing he found would ever be seen? He thought they would.
The question was, when would they spring their trap, and could he spring his before? And assuming he did gain control of the escape pods, so that they could not eject his, and he could eject theirs, he still had to get them all into the pods. They would know - at least the captain and mate would know - that the evacuation drill was a fake. So there was a chance, a good chance, that they would not be in pods at all. But thinking this far had quieted the tremor in his hands and cured his dry mouth.
Wiring diagrams and logic relays flicked through his mind, along with die possible modifications a renegade crew might have made. His audio tap into the captain's cabin still functioned. Listening on a still operative tap, he learned diat the one that the mate had discovered had fallen victim to a rare bout of cleaning. As far as he knew, and as far as they said, they had not found any of the others. On the other hand, he had found two of theirs. He left them alone, unworried.
The personal kit he always had with him included the very best antisurveillance chip, bonded to his shaver. Through his own taps, he picked his way delicately toward control functions. Some were too well guarded for his limited set of tools. He could not lock the captain in his cabin, or shut off air circulation to any crew compartment. He could not override the captain's control of bridge access. He knew they were watching, suspecting just such a trick. He could not roam the computer's files too broadly, eidier. But he could get into such open files as the maintenance and repair records, and find that the galley hatch had repeatedly jammed. As an experiment, to see if he could do it widiout anyone noticing, Dupaynil changed the pressure on the upper hatch runner. It should jam, and be repaired, with only a few cusswords for the pesky thing.