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hind her fake paneling. He was guarding a groggy Fassa who had just begun to
comeoutofthesleepgas.
"Sev, I need you to go with Caleb," Nancia announced.
"CN-935, please acknowledge receipt of formal or-
ders," Murasaki Base input on another channel.
"Can't," Sev answered without looking round.
"Have to guard the prisoner. Check regulations."
Nancia knew he was right The same stupid CS regs that forbade her to transport
Fassa without a brawn would also forbid her to take sole charge of a prisoner.
"Are regulations more important than Caleb's life?"
"Nancia, he's getting the best possible medical care.
What are you worried about?"
"CN-935 RESPOND!" Murasaki Base shouted.
The floatube was a speck on the horizon. They weren't stopping at the
spaceport; they were taking Caleb direct-
ly to Summerlands. Where Alpha bint Hezra-Fong could do anything, anything at
all, to him, and Nancia wouldn't even know until it was too late....
"Instructions received and accepted," she trans-
mitted to Murasaki Base in one short burst. "Now
GETTHAT BRAWN ON BOARD!" Forister Armon-
tillado-y-Medoc? Nancia remembered the short, quiet man she'd transported
somewhere, years earlier, to solve some crisis. The one who'd spent all his
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time on board reading. No matter what his records said, he wasn't her idea of
a brawn. But who cared? The sooner he was here, the sooner Sev could be
released from guard duty to go watch over Caleb.
Fassa was choking on the bottom of a lake. Weeds twined around her ankles, and
the dear air was impos-
sibly far away, miles above the green water that pressed her down and pushed
at her mouth and ears and nose widi gentle, implacable persistence. She tried
to kick free of the weeds; they clung tighter, reaching
up past ankle and calf and knee with green slimy fingers that pressed dose
against her thighs. When she looked down, the weeds shaped themselves into
pale green faces with open mouths and dosed eyes. All the men who'd given her
their hearts and their integrity and pieces of their souls were there on the
bottom of the lake, and they wanted to keep her there with them.
Her chest was bursting with the need to breathe. If she gave back their souls,
would they let her go?
She tried to strip off the charm bracelet on her left wrist, but the catch was
stuck; tried to break the chain, but it was too strong. Green lake water
seeped into her mouth with a bitter taste, and black spots danced before her
eyes. She tugged the chain over her hand, scraping a knuckle raw, and flung it
at the hungry ghosts. The sparkling charms of corydum and iridium floated
lazily down among the muddy weeds, and
Fassa was released to rise through rings of ever-
lightening water until she broke the surface and breathed in the air that hurt
like fire in her lungs.
She was lying on a bunk in a spaceship cabin. Sev
Bryley was seated cross-legged on the opposite bunk, watching her with
unsmiling attention. And the burn-
ing in her lungs was real, as was the throbbing pain in her head; sleepgas
hangover. Now she remembered:
surprise and violence and a fool who'd been where he had no business, and the
gas flooding the cargo bay while she tried to hold her breath.
It all added up to a failure so crushing she could not bear to think about it
yet. And Sev, the man who'd
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ArmeMcCaffrey & Margaret Ball never given her a piece of his soul to keep in
her charm bracelet # was he the one who'd engineered this disaster?
"What are you doing here?" she croaked.
"Making sure you came out of the sleepgas without complications," Sev said.
His voice sounded thin and strained, as if he were trying to reach her from a
great distance. "Some people have a convulsive reaction. It looked for a while
like you were going to be one of them."
And that had worried him? Perhaps he still cared for her a little, then.
Perhaps her experiment of taking him aboard the Xanadu hadn't been a total
failure, after all. Fassa stretched, experimentally, and saw the way his eyes
followed her movements. Perhaps some-
thing could yet be salvaged from this catastrophe.
After all, they were alone on the droneship...
"Not convulsions," she said, languorously wriggling
her toes and proceeding upward, muscle by muscle, to make certain that every
inch of her own amazing body.
was back under her command again. Just bad dreams."
"What sort of dreams?" Sev inquired.
Fassa sat up, rather more quickly than she had in-
tended, and fell back against the cabin wall. "The sort that make you afraid
to die."
"Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all," Sev agreed with no change of
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tone, and Fassa felt a stab of regret. She could have liked this man who so
quickly picked up on her thoughts, capping her unvoiced quotations. If only he
weren't so obstinately on the wrong side! Ah, well, perhaps that could be
changed.
It would damn well have to be changed if she hoped to get out of this, she
reminded herself
"Speak for yourself," she told him. "My conscience isn't all that troubled;
I've done nothing more than what everybody does, just trying to get ahead by
my own efforts." Wrong tone, wrong tone. She didn't want
PARTNERSHIP
169
to argue with Bryley; she wanted to seduce him. No.
Reeded to seduce him. That was all.
And she wasn't going to get anywhere in her present condition. Fassa pushed
sweaty, matted dark hair away from her forehead with a genuine moan of pain.
"God, I must look like hell," she said. "Would you mind very much getting out
of here so I can clean up?"
"Yes," said Sev, "I would. You're not to be left un-
guarded until we return to Central. Orders from
CenDip."
Fassa moaned again. If CenDip was interesting itself in her case, she was
worse off than she'd thought.
Never mind. Central was a long way off. For the present she was alone on a
droneship with this gor-
geous hunk, and with any luck at all she'd make him change his allegiances
before the official transports ar-
rived to carry her to trial.
After only a little pouting and posing she managed to persuade Sev that
propping himself against the wall outside her cabin would be adequate to
fulfill his guard duty. It was, Fassa thought with satisfaction, a beginning.
Now he would feel that this cabin was her territory. When he came in again, it
would be at her in-
vitation ... and invitations could lead to all sorts of interesting things.
She washed from head to foot, kick-
ed her stained and crumpled clothes in a corner under the bunk, splashed a
little extra cool water over her face, and wrapped a sheet around herself in
lieu of fresh clothes. This would be a real test of her abilities.
No cosmetics, hair combed straight with no styling, a scratchy Service-issue
sheet instead of a clinging gown, and this bare cabin for a romantic setting!
"fossa baby, you're so sweet, I just can't resist you," Paul del Parma used to
moan when he came into her room and buried himself in her. And she'd been aji
awkward, sullen Uttle girl then, with her black hair in thin tight braids.
She'd worn the ugliest, plainest
170
Anne McCaffrey & Margaret BaU
clothes she could find, but that didn't put Faul off.
For the first time Fassa deliberately summoned up the memories she'd tried for
so long to bury, seeking the confidence she needed to go on. She really was
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