Yasmin s lips curled back in a snarl that would have earned her a severe scolding from her cosmetic surgeon for making unsightly creases in his work. While it was true that while in a vertical position, Yasmin was not an imaginative woman, she was after all an entertainer of sorts and as such had a highly developed flair for the dramatic. She wasn’t about to pass up an opening like this one.
Wishing she had the gauzy veils she had danced with and discarded in one other old numbers, the better to haunt Karina with, she settled for letting her low voice rumble through the replicator. “Beeeewaarrre …” she said, trying to sound all dead and ghostly.
“Well, yes,” Karina said. “I do realize that I should beware of a great many things. I’m afraid you’ll have to be a more specific erentity. Can you tell me who you are? I’ve never encountered a haunted replicator before.”
Yasmin was far too clever to give her own name, of course, especially since she had, very much in the flesh, confronted Karina, who nevertheless had failed thus far to mention the visitation to Hafiz. From that omission, Yasmin gathered that she must have been mistaken for one of Karina’s less corporeal acquaintances. The fat idiot thought she was a ghost.
Yasmin quickly stripped her right ring finger of the four rings she had piled on top of the dinky gold wedding band in the shape of a snake Hafiz had bought for her and sent the wedding band down the replicator chute. On the inside of the ring was her name entwined with Hafiz s, and their wedding date. Yasmin hated to let go of even that insignificant amount of gold, but it would almost be worth Karina’s weight in gold to see the stupid sows complacency shaken up.
Yasmin saw Karina’s plump fingers with the medium amethyst ring surrounded by moonstones scrabble in the replicator bale and remove the ring. “Uh, thanks,” she said. “A serpent-how, uh, emblematic of mother goddess, in a creepy crawly sort of way. But I am puzzled, oh spirit. I don’t see what it has to do with anything.”
Yasmin was trying to form a suitably cryptic clue, something to imply that Hafiz had murdered her and maybe a whole harem of other girls and kept their bodies locked in a subcellar someplace. Something like that to really put a scare into the smug little wifey. But before she could let out with so much as another ghostly moan, somebody knocked at the door. “Madame Harakamian, please join the master on the bridge and secure yourself for landing.”
“Hearing and obeying,” Karina declared.
Yasmin made haste to secure herself for landing as well. It would be very helpful if the lot of them left the ship so that she could have an opportunity to plant additional monitors throughout. She was having a certain amount of remorse about the ring now-gold was gold after all-but the stupid slut would probably lay it down somewhere soon and Yasmin would be able to retrieve it.
The Rushiman administrator, who was deep in negotiations with Rafik Harakamian, insisted on throwing a banquet for Rafik’s uncle and his new bride. Hafiz had been instrumental in gathering the forces which helped Rushima repel the invasion of the Khieevi and it had been his ward, Rafik’s “niece,” who had purified the putrid waters of the planet and ultimately arranged for Dr. Ngaen Xong Hoa, the meteorologist turned weather manipulation wizard, to help heal the planet’s climate.
That same climate had been damaged by Dr. Hoa’s techniques, while the man was being coerced by another group foiled by Harakamian’s niece. So it was for his connections, as well as his wealth and power, that Hafiz was made welcome on Rushima, and Hafiz, with his typical perspicacity, understood this distinction. He was uncharacteristically grateful, particularly in view? of the possible threat to his ward, of whom he was as fond as he was capable of being.
His business with Rafik was of the first priority, however, and since he did not wish to discuss it in front of Karina, he had, with the complicity of the captain and his Rushiman relatives, made certain arrangements to keep his beloved busy while he was otherwise engaged.