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.”