“Wait in the corridor, Bandeng,” he ordered without taking his eyes off Adele. Part of his mind was probably considering the fact that he hadn’t bothered to reprogram the automated system while the Goldenfels was still in the Matrix. “Go on, now.”
Bandeng glared at him and ostentatiously stuck the pistol in the waistband of his fatigues before he obeyed; but he did obey. Greiner hand-locked the hatch behind him.
The Alliance officer forced a smile. When the interview began, he’d believed the power was in his hands. Now that Adele had demonstrated Greiner’s lapse in security—and had done so in front of a subordinate present because of Greiner’s own decision—he was extremely vulnerable.
She returned the smile coldly. Based on what she knew of the Alliance intelligence services, Mr. Bandeng would have to be careful if he were to avoid dying in a freak accident before the Goldenfels reached her home port.
“You’re obviously a resourceful person, Mistress Mundy,” Greiner said. “If matters work out as you say they will, I’ll arrange a career path for you more suitable than nursemaiding farmers. But just how is it you propose to hand the Princess Cecile and her cargo over to us?”
Adele brought out her handheld unit. “I’ve built a program to modify all the yacht’s control codes,” she said nonchalantly. “I’ll download them into your system.”
She gestured to the nearest console, the one where Bandeng had been sitting. In fact Adele hadn’t had anything to do with creating the program: that was primarily Daniel, with input from Pasternak, Vesey, and even Chewning. The actual work was done by the ship’s navigational computer, but devising the pathways by which to achieve the plan was the job of human minds. Very resourceful human minds.
“When you send the program via a signal to the yacht over the normal watch frequency,” she continued, “everything including the fusion bottle will shut down. They won’t be able to fire the plasma cannons, close their hatches, or do anything at all else. They have backup controls, of course, but it’ll take minutes if not hours before the ship will be operable again. By that time it’ll be in your hands—and the Earth Diamond with it.”
“It strikes me that if this doesn’t work . . . ,” Greiner said. His voice was completely expressionless, but his tongue clipped the syllables out like individual projectiles. “That the Goldenfels herself will be in a very dangerous position. Half her crew would be between the vessels, in what would turn into a killing zone if the Princess Cecile’s cannon were not disabled.”
“Yes, of course,” Adele said, as if unaware that Greiner was suggesting the possibility of her treachery rather than merely simple failure. She seated herself at Bandeng’s console and brought it live. “We’ll test it before we leave here. You can display the yacht in realtime, can’t you?”
As if the matter were already decided, Adele synched her handheld unit with the console’s input port. Greiner opened his mouth to protest, then reverted to the vaguely superior sneer which he’d affected at the start of the conversation. “Yes, of course,” he said, switching the standby milkiness of a second console’s display to a three-dimensional hologram of the Princess Cecile, a hundred and fifty yards from the Goldenfels.
Adele kept her expression blank as she worked, but her heart was singing in triumph. Like most of a librarian’s triumphs, of course, it was completely invisible to everybody else.
The results, however, would be quite evident. Of that she was sure.
The sun had been setting when the Sissie’s officers trekked across the smoldering meadow to dinner, a performance commanded by the Alliance vessel’s vastly greater power. The Goldenfels had landed more than a mile upstream where she wasn’t vulnerable to the corvette’s plasma bolts while she was setting down. The Alliance captain hadn’t been concerned about damaging the natives’ weirs while his ship thundered a few feet off the ground toward a spot beside the Princess Cecile.
At this hour the Princess Cecile lay in a darkness which the gleam of her many open hatches picked out. Four guards sat on upturned buckets under a tarpaulin stretched into a marquee from bitts above the main access port. One man—the image was crystal clear but too small to show facial features—was playing a harmonica or ocarina.