“Give me office scanner repair records for all victims,” Lacey demanded with a non-flick of his ring finger.
“The information you have requested is under Security block. Please punch your access code.”
Lacey paused, shocked for the first time in the investigation. That the Security terminal had again come on the line meant that the data was covered by a block not associated with the assassinations—which would have seemed absurd, had he not already begun to realize that Security—at least for the Southern Region—had been involved in something very strange which the deaths had begun to make public. Lacey lifted his helmet in order to punch the unfamiliar letters of Hanse’s name. He caught the eyes of his driver on him.
“Bleeding idiots!” Lacey screamed, “They know I can’t work with women!” He fell back against his seat, his body trembling and his complexion a sudden yellow-green. She had touched him, hadn’t she? Though her sexlessness beneath crash suit and mirrored visor had kept the act from immediate impact, memory now sifted nausea through Lacey’s body. He leaned over the side of the halted car. After a minute he got his blurring vision focused on the asphalt of the landing pad without having had to vomit first.
“Will you please put your visor down?” Lacey asked in a small voice. A thump indicated that he had been obeyed. It had been an attractive face in many ways, high cheekbones and blue eyes framed by jet hair. His mind still superimposed it on the hard plastic of the helmet.
“Why?” the driver asked. Her throaty voice was slightly camouflaged by the shield, but Lacey could no longer understand how he had imagined it to be masculine.
He turned to the now-blank visor. “I want you out of the car, please. I’ll have them send another with a male driver and you can switch with him.”
“No, I’m your driver and the people who determined that won’t be overruled,” she said calmly. “But why does it matter?”
“Why?” whispered Lacey, his face as hard as a headsman’s axe. “Because my brain got wet-scrubbed, friend. Because I was frozen in a nutrient bath for three months while a Psycomp made sure that I never raped another woman. Never willingly touched another woman, as a matter of fact, though that may have been a little farther than the computer meant to go.” He had the trembling of his hands under control and the bright sun was baking the sweat off his face now.
The driver considered him silently. After a moment she said, “I’m the best in your section, you know. I can do things with a car that none of the others can. Or would try to.”
“You dropped us on that Sepo like you were reading my mind,” Lacey agreed. “But I still don’t want to share a car with you.”
“Look, you don’t have to touch me, you know.” There was an odd tension in her voice, a need that went beyond anything the situation seemed to call for. “Can you work with a driver who drives and who takes orders like nobody else you’ll find?”
He looked away, up at a sky that had become blue and pleasant again. Belatedly he punched Hanse’s access code. “Do you have a name,” he asked, “or do I just call you Fireball?”
“You can call me anything you please,” the girl said quietly, “but my name is Tamara Damien.”
The data began to fire out of Lacey’s implant and he let it carry him out of his personal situation. Of the fifty-four cameras in the victims’ offices, only one had ever malfunctioned up to five years before. After that, one after another, brief failures began to show up in the maintenance records. Two to five minutes at a time, ten or a dozen times a year. Long enough to read and memorize a note, enough even to scribble one off. Three victims had no scanner failures at all until Lacey followed up with records of their vehicle units.
“Okay, what other scanners have similar malfunction records?” Lacey asked, his voice still a flat purr with only a trace of hoarseness.
“Vehicle unit, Southern Regional Pool Car 138814; vehicle unit, Southern Regional Pool Car 759541; vehicle unit, Southern Regional Pool Car, 294773. No other units.”