Angelmass

CHAPTER 3

Chandris's goal when putting her outfit together had been to try and end up with something that would look upper-class without costing money she didn't have. She'd been rather pleased with the results, or at least she had been until those puff-heads back in her lower-class cabin had started giggling.

A single pass by one of the upper-class lounges showed her why they'd giggled.

It was a humiliating moment, not to mention a dangerous one. Luckily, it was also very quickly over.

A really good look at the expensive outfits wasn't necessary; all she needed this time through was to get the style of uniform worn by servitors in this section. That knowledge in hand, she slipped back through the nearest crewer door and made her way down to the maids' quarters. With the work schedule and cabin assignment information she'd read off the computer, it was simple enough to locate an unoccupied room. One of the general passcodes got her inside, and she began her search.

There were, as she'd expected, several different types of uniforms for the different parts of the ship, and she had to raid a dozen rooms before she found a maid's uniform that was both the right style and the right size. Fifteen minutes later, having changed in a conveniently isolated emergencybattery room, she returned to the upper-class section.

No one gave her a second look as she slipped silently past wandering and chattering passengers; very few gave her even a first look. It was the perfect camouflage, particularly for someone like Chandris, who had played the role so many times before that she had the mental attitude and body language of a servant down cold. Even in operations a lot smaller than a spaceliner, she'd sometimes blended into the identity so well that other workers had totally missed the fact that she was a stranger. On a ship this size, assuming she was careful, they didn't have a hope of fingering her.

She reached one of the empty staterooms without incident and let herself in. The place wasn't as flatout luxurious, somehow, as she'd expected it to be, but it stomped the snot out of her own cramped cabin. More important to her plans at the moment was the fancy computer system built into the entertainment center, a system that should give her access to the ship's public library. Pulling out her pocket knife, she stepped over to it—

And stopped short. "Nurk," she muttered. She'd expected it to be a floating nexus-connect type like the hand-held job she'd used earlier. Instead, it was hard-wired in through the entertainment lines.

Which pretty much popped the cord on the uncoupling trick she'd used earlier. If she wanted to get into the library without the computer howling up a stink, she was going to have to do it from a room that wasn't supposed to be vacant.

Mentally, she shrugged. No big deal—she'd planned on mingling with the paying passengers anyway. It was high time she got started.

The room had been fully made up, with an impressive selection of fluffy towels laid out in the bathroom. Taking two of the larger ones, she folded and stacked them for carrying and slipped out of the room. Given the crowd in the lounge she'd passed earlier, it seemed likely that most of the rooms along here would be vacant. An ideal time to go shopping.

It was a more difficult search than the hunt for her maid's uniform had been. Not only did she have to find clothes that would fit her, she also had to find them in closets so bulging that there would be a good chance the owner would never notice the loss. Upper-class people, she'd always heard, were so rich that they threw their money away on everything they saw. Unfortunately, the image didn't seem to apply to spaceliner passengers. Up and down the corridors she went, hitting stateroom after stateroom: knocking, apologizing about having the wrong room if there was an answer, letting herself in if there wasn't. And she was just about to concede defeat and move down to the middleclass section when she finally scored.

It was a huge room, easily twice the size of the vacant one she'd moved into an hour earlier. With twice the storage space, too; and every bit of it stuffed to the throat. A family of five, judging from the various sizes represented, with the teenage daughter taking more than her fair share of the closet space. Chandris sorted through the dresses, chose two of the plainest layer-style ones, and folded them up inside her towels. An equally bulging jewelry box beckoned from the top of one of the dressers, and for a moment she was tempted. But only for a moment. An upper-class teen might not miss a dress or two; but everyone kept tabs on their jewelry.

She took the dresses back to her borrowed room, added a third towel to her pile, and returned to the hunt. Her newly changed luck held: the very next stateroom she tried contained not only too many dresses, but too many shoes as well. Neither set was exactly her size, but close enough. Again selecting a layer-style dress, she hid it and a pair of shoes inside her stack of towels and went back to her room.

There, using her knife and the compact sewing kit she'd brought from her luggage, she set to work stripping the various layers of the dresses apart. There'd been a girl from the Barrio once who'd swiped a fancy outfit during a score and gotten cracked two days later when the original owner spotted her wearing it on the street, and Chandris had no intention of doing something that puffheaded herself. The alterations took her nearly two hours; but when she was finished she had combined parts from the three dresses to form three entirely new and—hopefully—unrecognizable ones.

Altering herself was next. First step was to get the damn blonding out of her hair, returning it to its natural shiny black. She cleaned her face and hands next, getting rid of both the cosmetic stuff and the underbase that had lightened her skin into line with the blonded hair. Redoing the makeup was easy enough—from what she'd seen, the upper-class women aboard the Xirrus used far less makeup than was common among middle-class or even Barrio women. Possibly because they didn't need to try and make themselves attractive; more likely because they could afford to go with cosmetic surgery instead. Still, as Trilling used to say, vanity had its uses, provided it was in other people.

Redoing her hair was a little harder. Most of the women she'd seen while hunting for clothes had been pretty free with the frostsprays, fancy holdings, and jeweled clips, none of which Chandris had available even if she'd known how to fasten them in. Fortunately, she'd also spotted a few who had simply put their hair into elaborate braidings, and she'd passed close enough to one of them to get a good look at the pattern. Actually recreating it was trickier than she'd expected, but with persistence and several false starts she finally got it more or less right.

And now came the easy part. Giving herself a careful examination in the long foyer mirror, she keyed off the lights and left the stateroom. With the outer woman transformed from lower-class scorer to upper-class leech, it was time to do the same for the inner woman.

Earlier, she'd given herself a leisurely half hour to learn how to play a newly middle-class college student. Now, wandering between the various upper-class lounges, she had her new role down in half that time. Part of that was sheer necessity—she hadn't eaten since late morning, and was starting to feel the familiar pangs of hunger—but mostly it was that the mannerisms of these people were genuinely less complicated. Perhaps, she thought once, their money and power did their talking for them.

A fresh rumble ran through her stomach; but fortunately the solution was already close at hand. He was hovering not quite obviously at the edge of her vision, and had been there since the second of the lounges she had visited. Around fifty years old, he was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and jeweled neck clasp and the look of a man on the hunt.

Under other circumstances she would probably have let him make the first move. With her stomach starting to hurt, she wasn't in the mood to be patient. Drifting toward him, her eyes turned elsewhere, she shifted direction with smooth suddenness and bumped gently into him. "Oh!—excuse me," she said, looking up into his eyes. "That wasn't very graceful of me, was it?"

"Don't worry about it," he said, smiling a hunter's smile back at her. "Spaceliner travel does that all the time to people. Shifting engine thrusts throw the pseudogravity off, and all."

She raised her eyebrows fractionally and returned the smile. "You sound like someone who travels a lot."

It was an obvious setup line, and he grabbed it with both hands. "More than I wish, sometimes," he said. "My company's headquartered on Seraph, but we're also heavily involved in Lorelei asteroid mining and Balmoral orbital refining. Makes for a busy schedule. Stardust Metals—you might possibly have heard of us."

"Don't be modest," she chided gently. "Of course I've heard of you." She hadn't, actually, until she'd caught a passing reference ten minutes earlier. But he didn't need to know that. "And what is it you do for them?"

He grinned, the hunter's smile again. "Mostly try to keep them as profitable as possible," he said, offering his hand. "I'm Amberson Toomes; part owner and CMD."

She raised her eyebrows, higher this time. "Really!" she said, wondering what the hell a CMD was.

"I'm impressed."

He shrugged modestly. "Don't be. Most of the people here are considerably more important than I am."

"If importance is judged by how well you ignore strangers, they're definitely more important than you," she said ruefully, dropping her eyes a bit. "I've been walking around for—oh, I don't know how long—and you're the first person who's bothered to speak with me."

He patted her shoulder. "Don't judge them by first night out," he warned. "Anyway, you haven't exactly been working hard to elbow your way into conversations."

She let her lip twitch in a coquettish smile. "And how would you know that?" she challenged.

"Unless you'd been watching me, that is."

He smiled back. "I might have noticed you," he acknowledged. "But only because I happen to like looking at beautiful women."

"Flatterer."

"Connoisseur," he corrected with a slight bow.

She laughed. "My name's Chandris Adriessa," she told him. "I don't suppose that in and around all that looking you happened to find the dining room?"

"I did indeed," he said, gently but firmly taking her arm. Not big-brotherly, like the engineer had, but like a hunter who's caught his prey. "All six of them, in fact. Come; I'll show you which one's the best."

He insisted from the start on charging her dinner to his bill, a gallantry she accepted with a maximum of verbal gratitude and a minimum of token protest. The issue had never been in doubt, of course; no one at this end of the ship seemed to use money or cards, and she could hardly charge her meal to an unoccupied stateroom. But by making the offer up front he saved her the trouble of maneuvering him into doing so later.

The food was good enough, though not as filling as she might have wished. As they ate she worked at getting her companion talking about himself, with an eye toward filling in some of her ignorance about upper-class life.

No hard task, as it turned out. Toomes was a braggart—a refined and cultured braggart, but a braggart just the same—and after the first couple of questions all Chandris had to do was listen and nod and act fascinated by it all. By the time he remembered his manners and began asking her about herself, she had everything she needed to puff him a convincing spider web of lies, right down to a convoluted story about how her parents' manufacturing firm on Uhuru had made enough the past year on superconductor contracts to send her to college on Seraph.

Not that he was in any shape to notice small slips anyway. It was clear even before they got to the dining room that Toomes had gotten an early start on the Xirrus's supply of reeks, giving him a slight mental haze that the alcoholic drinks he'd washed his dinner down with had made even hazier.

It was a personality type Chandris had had more than her fill of back in the Barrio: men who measured themselves by how much they could drink or sniff or swallow before their brains were so nurked they couldn't see straight.

She'd lost track of how many evenings Trilling and his friends had ruined for her with those stupid contests of theirs. It was only fair that, just this once, it should work to her advantage.

And so she talked, and listened, and kept the floaters and relaxers and drinks coming; and by the time they headed back to his stateroom he needed to hold onto her arm to keep upright. She got the door unlocked and maneuvered him to the bed, sitting him down there and helping him off with his jacket and neck clasp.

He was fumbling with the fasteners on her dress when he fell asleep.

She took his shoes off and, with some effort, managed to get him straightened out on the bed. For a moment she considered stripping him all the way down, then decided against it. If he woke up thinking he'd already scored he might drop her back at square one and go looking for someone more challenging. Better to keep him dangling, at least for another day or two, before considering any alterations to the script.

Kicking off her own ill-fitting shoes, she snared a chair and pulled it over to the room's computer terminal. A minute later she'd pulled up the Xirrus library's complete index of articles pertaining to spaceship operation. With Toomes snoring gently behind her, she called up the first article on the list and began to read.