The Ship Errant

Chapter One

"What say you, good Sir Frog?" Keff asked, peering over the head of the small, green, bipedal amphibioid at the pieces of the three-dimensional puzzle spinning in midair at the entrance of the great hall of Castle Aaargh. The green being glanced up at him. He gestured toward the conundrum then flicked the tip of his unnaturally long forefinger against his knobby temple.

"Not difficult," Tall Eyebrow signed. Swiftly, he pointed from one piece to another, indicating which edges fit against one another. As he made each match, the pieces flew together until there was only one object spinning before them. Keff studied it.

"The Mask of Mulhavey," he said, awed.

"What is this Mask of Mulhavey?" the globe-frog asked, combining sign language with the unfamiliar Standard words voiced in the high-pitched peep of his kind. "Is this an important artifact in your culture?"

"Just a pretend artifact, TE," Keff said, as a quick aside. "Carialle made it up for the game. Stay with it."

"Ah, make-believe." Tall Eyebrow nodded, and threw a self-deprecating gesture toward his host. "Forgive me. I forget this is but Myths and Legends." His signs grew more theatrical, in imitation of the human male. "What does this mean?"

"I know not, my lord," Keff said, replying in both frog sign language and Standard. "Perhaps if we looked through the eyeholes we would see a wonder."

"He's altogether too good at theoretical and combination spatial relations," Carialle said over the central room speaker as the two "adventurers" bent to see through the apertures of her creation. They made a curious picture. The man, of medium height for a human, had a broad chest, muscular arms and legs. He was dressed in a garment that reached to mid-thigh, not unlike a medieval tunic, over trousers and boots. His usual gentle countenance wore a watchful, inquiring scowl. Around his waist, a sword belt held a glow-tipped epee ready to hand. His companion stood less than a meter high, had shiny green skin, a short, narrow body and beady black eyes. His hands and feet were almost as large as those of the human beside him, the fingers of almost equal length to one another. He wore a beret, a short cape, and a belt around his small middle, its buckle a large, gold boss with five indentations in it that looked made for the fingertips to slide into.

"Better than I am, my lady," Keff laughed, shaking his head. "I give up, TE. You tell me what you think we need to do with it."

The game they were playing was Myths and Legends. Among the grounders, who occupied the safe and settled planets, it was a children's game. Keff had learned it in primary school, and had introduced it to his brain partner, Carialle, as a means of occupying the infinitely long intervals of space travel. To Keff it gave life a certain special meaning, to accomplish points of honor, to lay successes at the feet of his Lady Fair. He was a born knight errant. His private aim, ever since he had been a child, had been to do good, a goal that had gotten him into more than a few playground fights with schoolmates who lacked his natural devotion to the greater concept of truth. To Carialle, it provided an outlet for the creative bent that was so often lacking in the technical jobs given to shellpeople, even brainships. And it was fun. Over time, it had simply worked its way into their everyday lifestyle, to the despair of the Exploration arm of Central Worlds. To Exploration and Alien Outreach, Keff's globe-frog playmate was Tall Eyebrow, ambassador and representative from a shared colony world known to the humans who lived there as Ozran. To the knight and his lady, he was also occasionally the Frog Prince.

Tall Eyebrow gestured to Keff to look through the eyeholes. Carialle was amused when her brawn had to crouch down on the floor to put his head at the same level as the globe-frog's.

"It should have taken longer for him to solve that jigsaw," she said. "I'm going to have to make the puzzles harder. These little chappies have surprisingly deep minds. I am continually having to reevaluate my judgement of their ability to learn."

"Well, you've already surpassed my understanding, Cari," Keff said cheerfully, rising from his haunches with his hands on his thighs. He turned toward the titanium pillar that contained and protected her physical body, and winked. The two years that had passed since they had first met the globe-frogs had lightened a few more hairs on his curly head, and possibly slowed down his reactions by milliseconds, but hadn't taken a whit off his boundless good nature or enthusiasm. His muscle tone continued to be excellent, Carialle was pleased to note, and the bright blue eyes in his mild, bull-like face were clear and alert. Respiration and pulse, up a little, but that had to do with excitement over the game rather than exertion. He stretched his arms out and rotated his broad torso from side to side to ease his back. "Actually, I'm enjoying being TE's sidekick, if I allow the truth to be known. After adventuring on my own for so many years, a change is nice."

"I, too, am enjoying it," Tall Eyebrow signed quickly. "Too much reality for so long, to strive without fear is high fun."

Keff grinned. "Well, that's why we do it- Yoicks!"

Carialle had chosen that moment to activate the next peril in the ongoing game. The human jumped back as the holographic "stone wall" beside them slid back to reveal four villains, armed with chains and machetes. He felt for the light-tipped sword at his side, and was soon engaged in healthy battle with his computer-generated adversaries.

The enemy was only a holograph, but Carialle made them look utterly real, using a combination of projective cameras like the ones that drove her navigation screentank. The setting, complete with cobwebs and rats, could have been any pre-industrial village, instead of the cabin of a sophisticated starship. The brain behind it was as clever as the swordplay of the villain facing him.

Completely into his part once again, Keff slashed his blade overhand and thwacked the scarred villain in the arm. The man dropped his guard, giving Keff a chance to fling himself forward with a thrust to quarte. The glowing cursor went home, and the villain collapsed to the floor with a wail. Keff threw back his head with a feral laugh. "Come on! Who's next? Together we cannot be beaten!" Another adversary stepped forward over the body of his fallen chief, saber flashing in the candlelight.

The globe-frog emitted an alarmed squeak. "What are those?" he signed, pointing at the sparks, like fireflies, that poured out of the dark hall after the human villains.

"Some foul, unknown peril," Keff called over his shoulder, not taking time to sign. "Catch them!"

The sparks flitted all over the room. Keff ducked a squadron of the small glows, then skillfully parried a chop from one of the hoods wielding a machete.

The globe-frog took a moment, translating Standard human language to his own, then his small brow rose in comprehension. He bounded up to clap his hand against the wall next to Keff's head, trapping a "firefly."

"That's one," Carialle said. "Fifteen to go."

"You're letting them get away!" Keff cried. He was cornered between two of the foe, who stood tossing their weapons from hand to hand. One of them feinted, and Keff parried, sweating. Tall Eyebrow ran toward another elusive spark.

"I will assist!" cried Small Spot. He was the more impetuous of the two aides who had accompanied Tall Eyebrow from Ozran. Small Spot, in spite of his diminutive sounding name, was large, as the amphibioids went. The "spot" was a lighter greenish patch in the center of his forehead. Unlike most of his species, his hide had a smooth color all over but for that. He sprang up from where he had been sitting on Keff's weight bench to aid his prince. The fingers of one hand slid into the five long grooves of his power amulet, and he rose five meters in the air to capture a "firefly" that had slipped Tall Eyebrow's grasp.

He floated down from the ceiling, looking sheepishly at his empty palm. He glanced up at the others shyly.

"I forget, there is nothing there to touch."

His companion, Long Hand, an older and more cautious female, perched out of the way of the action on the console, emitting the high-pitched creaking that meant one of their species was laughing. Small Spot returned to his place, skinny knees bent to show embarrassment.

"I do not understand human games," he admitted, small face set in a self-deprecatory grimace. "It is one more cultural oddity to which we must adapt."

"Relax, Small Spot," Carialle said. She made the image of a globe-frog appear on the wall at their level, and addressed him in sign. "There's no disgrace in being fooled by a good illusion. One of my better ones, I must say."

"She… gets… better… all the time," Keff panted, dancing away from an enemy whose skill matched his own.

"I had not been observing properly," Small Spot said.

In shame, he flapped one of his big flat hands away from his face, not looking at her simulacrum. To distract him, Carialle showed him a different hologram, a piece of technological schematic she had adapted from her observation of the Core of Ozran, the gigantic power complex that supplied the amphibioids' amulets. The mechanism connected each user to the Core by means of high frequency transmission. For the journey to the globe-frogs' homeworld, Carialle had installed a similar but much smaller system to serve their needs while they were aboard. Their delicate skins needed to be kept moist. With the amulets they could maintain an electrostatic charge that clothed them with a film of water all over except the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. It put a tremendous strain on her engines, but she and Keff felt it was necessary to allow them to have freedom of movement and so not everything on this ground-breaking trip would be strange. It was enough that they were the first of their kind to leave their planet for the first time in a thousand years. Carialle felt it was her duty to put the nervous amphibioids at their ease.

"Maybe you can help me," she said to Small Spot. "I felt another odd surge, another sonic feedback, when you used your amulet just now. If I've adjusted the receptors correctly you should be able to draw power from my engines without this much signal noise. I think the problem comes from here." A portion of the diagram enlarged, bulging out from the rest as if under a magnifying glass.

"Let me see," Small Spot signed, gesturing it closer, clearly grateful for the chance to save face. Long Hand bounded down from the console with leggy grace, and trotted over to help. In no time at all, the two were signing away energetically over the faulty circuit diagram. At the other end of the room, Keff and Tall Eyebrow had moved on to the next part of the game, where they had to figure out the mystery that the Mask of Mulhavey was concealing, in spite of other pretend perils that occasionally distracted them. Tall Eyebrow grinned as Carialle responded to his questions, showing some of the hidden map and key as he answered each one correctly. Though make-believe was an unfamiliar concept to his species, Tall Eyebrow was embracing it as if he'd been brought up to it. In fact, the small aliens had adapted with remarkable speed to space travel, too.

The amphibioids, whom Keff and Carialle had dubbed "globe-frogs," for their mode of transportation (clear plastic bubbles partly filled with water) and their resemblance to Earth amphibians, had a very flexible outlook indeed. To ascend as they had from a marginal, swamp-bound existence where computer technology and particle science were taught in theory on clay tablets for lack of equipment in the lonely dream that one day they'd be able to use their handed-down education, to an equal partnership with technically capable but theoretically ignorant humans was a certifiable miracle. To then bring their shared planet forward centuries in only two Standard years was a more than respectable achievement. A human autocracy had been replaced by a republic governed by representatives of both races, human and globe-frog. When conditions had improved to a point where Tall Eyebrow and his conclave decided that the combined society would prosper without constant supervision, they sent a message to the Central Worlds, and asked for transportation to their native planet, Cridi, particularly requesting the CK-963 as their escort.

The team had been called home with a message coded urgent. They were briefed and rebriefed and re-rebriefed as to what to say and how to behave to the homeworld amphibioids. Carialle knew they weren't Alien Outreach Department's favorite team. The upper brass considered them too odd, too idiosyncratic to be good representatives of humanity and the Central Worlds. Still, it had been the CK-963, and not a more traditional team, that had discovered and reinstated the globe-frogs, and it was the CK-963 who must convey the visiting party from Ozran to Cridi. Carialle preferred to call their peculiarity "imagination" rather than "idiosyncracy," but looking at it from the perspective of people who ate pureed mush of unreconstructed proteins and carbs for lunch lest they be troubled by form, color, and texture, she supposed she and Keff must be as strange as… well, another alien race.

Several departments of CW had carefully examined all the tapes Keff and Carialle had made, and they wanted the power control technology. The team had warned that a high level of telepathic ability was necessary to operate it, and that unlimited use was destructive to the environment, but all the brass could see was effortless, remote manipulation of solid objects. Credit balances of high digits followed by endless zeroes danced before their eyes. Whatever obstacles needed to be overcome would be examined after the power control system was in their hands. Surely the Central Worlds had much they could offer in exchange. Carialle and Keff were to bend over backward and whistle if that was what was needed to ensure diplomatic ties with this fully mature, space-ready race of intelligent beings. Nothing must come between humanity and the Cridi, and the Cridi's wonderful scientific advances. The diplomatic arm warned the team to behave themselves, and put dozens of strictures upon them, punishable by fines and penalties too horrible to name. The brass weren't going to be best pleased that the "Odd Couple" had polluted the minds of the visiting party of frogs, teaching them their fantasy game to while away the long voyages. The slack cut for the CK-963 because of their big discovery would only go so far. Silly folderol would not be tolerated.

Carialle didn't care, and she knew Keff didn't, either. All they wanted was the opportunity to revisit Ozran, and they got it. They had been amazed at the difference after only a two-year absence. The almost-desert world of Ozran had become lush. Verdant cropland burgeoned, thousands of young trees sprouted, and the skies rained, rained, rained. Keff had found it dreary, but all Ozrans, shades of green and brown alike, stared up at the gray thunderclouds with expressions of bliss. It all depended upon your outlook, Carialle thought.

Tall Eyebrow had succeeded in trapping all the dragonflies, and Keff was out of swordsmen to kill, so Carialle slowly shifted the holographic view forward, engulfing them in the darkness of "the great hall."

"Great suns, the lights are disappearing," Keff complained. Worried cheeps erupted from the two globe-frogs at the far side of the cabin, whose sole light source now was the hovering circuit diagram.

"Mulhavey," a tiny voice peeped.

Carialle smiled to herself. Tall Eyebrow had amazing powers of observation. On infrared, she watched his skinny form lope towards the spinning mask. He bent to look through it. It allowed you to see in the dark. He followed the floating hologram, grabbing Keff on the way, to three doors concealed behind a tapestry at the end of the room.

"Bend down," TE chirped in Standard, since his sign language was useless in the dark. He prodded Keff to look through the eyeholes at the three doors. They started a low discussion about which door to choose. Carialle left them to it, and made a crosscheck of her systems, and took a look at the long-range monitors. Hmm, number three engine was running a trifle too hot. She damped down the carburetion filter until all five engines were running in harmony.

Tall Eyebrow and his people had been out of touch with their homeworld, ever since the advent of the second alien race. Carialle reviewed the combination sign the Ozran globe-frogs had for these others, one hand with two fingers pointed downward like legs, but with the knees facing backward, and the other stretching the eyelids of one eye wide. No verbal name existed. The Crook-knees learned how the power system worked, commandeered all the power units in one single lightning grab, then moved their population base into the mountains, far out of reach of the Cridi. Without their devices, the globe-frogs were helpless. They couldn't range far from water, and had grown too dependent upon using the amulets to know how to survive without them. But a thousand years of subsistence living had taught them everything there was to know about making use of natural resources. Vulnerable to every hazard and large animal on the planet, sensitive to the atmosphere, and deprived of even basic luxuries they were forced to use the only resource left to them: their intellect. They lived virtually without waste, made use of all available resources, and appreciated every benefit that came their way. Carialle thought that such an admirable attitude would be a better import for the Central Worlds than the amulets.

The adventurers in her cabin passed through the correct doorway, and found themselves in a torchlit corridor, which in normal use was the passageway that led to Keff's quarters, the spare cabin, and the lift down to the storage bay. TE, letting the mask hologram float off, put his hand up flat to his face with the three middle fingers bunched together, and the long pinkie and almost equally long thumb slightly apart from the others so his round black eyes could peep through. It was his symbol for Carialle, "the One Who Watches From Behind the Wall."

"Yes?" Carialle asked at once.

"We have succeeded to the next stage. Food and water now?" the globe-frog asked, his small face plaintive.

"How thoughtless of me! Keff, you can go on for days without sustenance, and I have my own feeding systems, of course. Certainly, TE!" To keep within the context of the game, she had a floating globe appear that led the two adventurers toward the food synthesizer at the end of the cabin near the weight bench and the other two globe-frogs.

"I'd have just left the castle and gone to find a pub," Keff said apologetically. "Sorry, TE. You're not familiar with the conventions."

The hatch opened to disgorge in succession a bowl of succulent marsh greens, a glass of water, a glass of beer, some amorphous proteins shaped like Ozran grubs, and a plate containing one of Keff's favorite set lunches. Traveling with the globe-frogs was good not only for Keff, but for her as well. She had a chance to stretch her synthesizer's repertoire.

"There is not a strong enough resistor here," Small Spot said, pointing to the schematic. Carialle, distracted from her musings, noted his correction, tested it, found it good, and directed her internal mechanisms to make the adjustment.

"All right, try floating again," she instructed Small Spot. Obediently, the amphibioid put his fingertips into the niches on his amulet and took to the air.

But monitoring the game, meals, and the schematic took only a small portion of Carialle's attention. She had an oil painting in process, a globe-frog paddling its way across the dusty fields of Ozran, the way they were when she and Keff had first seen them, two years earlier. The canvas was meant to be a gift to the new joint government, to remind them of what they had left behind them. Her custom painting equipment took up as much space at one end of the cabin as Keff's exerciser did at the other. Critically, she examined each pixel she had done so far of the special microfiber-cell canvas, and with the greatest of care, flooded ten more cells of the thin, porous surface with medium green, and five with dark green, creating a minute stripe and highlight along a globe-frog's back. The result looked like a brush-stroke with a very fine sable brush, exactly as she wanted it to. She ought to be finished with the painting by the time they returned to Ozran. Carialle also gave her own hardware a good going over, to make certain the boffins in the repair bay at SSS-900-C, the last space station they had visited, hadn't left any screws untightened when they had examined her innards to install a ton of new memory. It appeared nothing had shaken loose since her last diagnostic. Their friend Simeon, the shellperson station manager, ran a tight ship. But Carialle liked to look after her own innards.

It was a wonder that the human race hadn't met the amphibioid race at least in passing. The coordinates that TE had given Carialle for his homeworld weren't far from P-sector, where Carialle herself had traveled many years before. Had no bored scientist with a radio-digital telescope ever swung it toward that system and picked up the traces of RF transmission? There could be a thousand explanations for failing to spot Cridi, but the result was, Carialle thought smugly, that she and Keff would be the first to meet the frogs, and the credit would be all theirs. Score two for the screwball crew, Carialle thought, her attention passing lightly over a cluster of unused memory cells. Alien Outreach didn't want a byte of possibly useful information about humankind's newest neighbor sacrificed for lack of space. They'd loaded her with new chips and controllers along every available circuit. Carialle felt that if she coughed she would rattle.

She scanned space around her. P-sector had only begun to be opened up in the last thirty years or so by exploration teams. It contained numerous spatial anomalies that frightened commercial shippers as much as it intrigued them as to what salable wonders might lie upon some of those as yet undiscovered planets circling the only just charted stars. When she herself had visited part of P-sector years ago, it was in the course of an investigation, with her first brawn, Fanine Takajima-Morrow, the mission had ended disastrously. A bomb planted by saboteurs in Carialle's fuel tank exploded, killing Fanine Takajima-Morrow, and leaving Carialle floating derelict, to wait weeks for rescue. She had survived, only narrowly avoiding the madness that haunts sensory deprivation.

It was right near here, in fact. Something long buried in her memory nudged her that she was passing within a few hundred thousand klicks of the exact spot. She did not even need to check the coordinates to know that that was true-how could she not have taken that into her calculations when she was planning the course to the Cridi system? Her thought processes must have been taken up with other things.

Still, her navigation program must have observed details about their route. Undoubtedly, her subconscious had told her she had old business to deal with, and steered her this way. Keff would have warned her to avoid the spot, if he had known. Bad luck, or some other softshell notion. But she wasn't superstitious-shellpeople weren't. Luck had little bearing on their situations. Considerable thought went into every facet of their lives, from pre-natal survival to the last hookup in their shells. Carialle's own disability had been diagnosed while she was still in her mother's womb, and she had been enshelled at once to save her life. So why did she feel, as they said in the old saw Keff had once dug up in his linguistical research, as if a goose had walked over her grave? Could there be leftover psychic vibration in a place where a trauma had occurred? That had to be a myth, and yet she began to experience the anxieties she had suffered when she was marooned here. These-yes, these were the last stars she had seen before the bomb in her fuel tank exploded, destroying her first ship and killing Fanine. Adrenaline surged through her system. Frozen, Carialle felt panic rise, not stopping it as it turned her nerves to barbed wire. It could happen again! Frantically, she ran a safety check on the fuel mix in her tanks, measuring carbon levels, looking for the telltales that might indicate the presence of foreign substances.

"Cari!"

A millisecond passed before she recognized the voice, and responded.

"Keff?"

"Cari, what happened? The game holos are gone. Why did you fire off a message probe? What's wrong?"

That question brought her immediately back to the present. The cabin had indeed lost its veneer of medieval neglect. Keff and Tall Eyebrow stood in the center of the plain, enamel-painted room looking incongruous in tunics and swordbelts. Keff stared at her pillar.

"Are you all right?"

"What message probe?" she demanded, then checked her own telemetry. Sure enough, one of her small emergency rockets was streaking away into endless night, following a vector that would take it toward their last point of contact with the Central Worlds. Carialle searched the chips which supplied her with hard drive storage, found nothing, and extended the search to her other components.

"I didn't do that on purpose," Carialle said, crossly. "It must have been a malfunction caused by a bad connection. Darn it, and I was certain they'd checked everything in dry-dock!" Frantically she traced the circuits leading back from the controller in the rocket port.

"No, wait… Somebody planted a post-hypnotic suggestion on me."

Keff shook his head. "You can't be hypnotized, Cari."

"It's the shellperson equivalent," Carialle said, her voice becoming crisp and cold. "Programming has been inserted into my circuits to respond to certain stimuli under certain very precise conditions, with the result you have just observed. There are microfilaments inserted into my nutrient storage tanks. They are probably there to monitor unusual demand for brain chemicals and carbos in a combination that approximates paranoid hysteria with pseudo-psychotic overtones, a condition that I admit I submitted to momentarily just now."

"Who?" Keff asked, his face setting into a grim mask.

"Who do you think?" Carialle countered. "Who's been trying to Section-Eight me for the last twenty years? Who thinks I'm a flying emotional time bomb who should be relegated to controlling traffic on a Central Worlds ground station? Maxwell-Corey, of course. That afterburning, fardling collection of random neural firings Inspector General!"

"Are you sure?" Keff asked.

"Who else would Rube-Goldberg me without my knowledge?" Her blood pressure rose, so she adjusted slightly her intake of saline and gave herself five micrograms of a mood leveler. The panic attack had left behind its debris of epinephrines and excess gastric acids that were fast disappearing down the blood-cleansing apparatus. "He doesn't trust me. He never has."

"This is harassment," Keff said, all his protective tendencies coming out at once. "We should report it to SPRIM and MM." SPRIM was the Society for the Protection of the Rights of Intelligent Minorities, and MM, Mutant Minorities, two agencies that spoke up on behalf of shellpeople who ran into difficulties with unshelled bureaucracy. Dr. Sennet Maxwell-Corey, a psychiatrist by training and a nuisance by avocation, was a particular bugbear to both of them, but he had a special animus toward Carialle. He had never been convinced she had recovered from being marooned. The fact that she and Keff took a lighthearted view toward the naming of the indigenous species they encountered on their missions for Exploration, and their devotion to playing Myths and Legends, made her sanity all the more suspect to the unimaginative bureaucrat.

"I am composing something scathing right now," Carialle said, "while I destroy the implant with extreme prejudice." Her self-repair facilities, micromachines of various designs, crawled along the electronic neural extenders and yanked the filaments out of her tanks and filled in the drillmarks. Others traced down the filaments to the control boxes carefully hidden in deadware like the bottom of her waste tanks.

"Don't send the message without my input," Keff insisted. He got up from his chair and paced back and forth in front of her pillar. "I have something to say about imperiling my partner's well-being. And I want to tell them just what I think of his big-brotherism." He smacked one fist into the other palm. Tall Eyebrow and the other two globe-frogs jumped away from him. He was sorry to frighten them, but he was unspeakably angry.

"Why did it happen?" he asked, stopping short and looking up into her nearest camera eye.

"We're in P-sector," Carialle said flatly.

Keff's eyes went wide. He knew all about her history, and always had been extremely supportive in helping her heal from her traumatic experience. "Are we… there?"

"Yes."

Keff noticed the emergency lights on the console board, and went to shut off the alarms. "Are you all right now?"

"Yes." Carialle's voice was thin with anger. "Damn him! I passed my last six psych tests, two of them-two!-since our trip to Ozran. I feel violated. There's a message box in my memory, with all kinds of circumventions to make certain I couldn't detect it. Planted among the microdiodes at the same time as the uninitialized chips. Nowhere near the new stuff, which the wily bastard knew would be the first things I'd suspect. It's a custom job, too…"

Keff interrupted. "But why would you have reacted like that? Why would you have set it off at all?"

"I know every inch of this parsec," Carialle said unhappily. "I spent an eternity here, Keff. Not that far from here is where my fuel tanks blew up. There." A holoview of the sector appeared, with their path indicated in blue. A red X blossomed at a distance from their present location and floated toward them, crossing the blue line and passing toward a cluster of stars to their starboard stern. She squared up their current location on the tank, and Keff looked at it solemnly. "I was disabled here for weeks. And just for a moment, I was reliving that experience. I was counting, counting the seconds to keep from going insane. Then I remember feeling those footsteps on my hull, feeling those hands dismembering my components, stripping what they must have thought was a wreck, and hearing myself screaming. 'Who are you?' " she wailed.

Keff shuddered and covered his ears. "But it's been almost twenty years, Cari."

"You know what my memory is capable of. The sensation is as clear and intense as if it was just this minute for me! I was desperately afraid those unknowns would break open my shell and leave me to die in space. I was helpless! It affected me so deeply that no matter how well I think I am, subconsciously I have never gotten over it. I never found out who was performing salvage on my skin. The headshrinkers still don't believe that there was anyone there. M-C still must think I had a psychotic episode, dreamed the whole thing. That's why he's has been dogging me all these years. He's been so sure I would flip out. And he made doubly sure I would launch a message probe to him if ever I did, so he could drag me out of my ship and lock me in a padded room. I wonder what else is buried in there," she added bitterly.

"Nothing," Keff said, firmly. "He's not that imaginative. There won't even be a backup mechanism in case that failed. Look, Lady Fair." Sheathing his light sword, he stepped forward to plant both palms earnestly on her pillar. He looked up at the nearest camera eye. "When this is over, we'll find an independent, trustworthy memory doctor and have you scoped for other intruders. I'll stay there the whole time, if you want. I promise."

"I thank you for your courtesy, good Sir Knight."

The lady's face appeared and smiled at him, but the image wavered slightly. Carialle's heart wasn't in it. Keff's insides twisted with sympathy.

"We'll find those bastards one day," he promised her.

"Game is ended?" Tall Eyebrow piped up from behind him. "Enjoy games. Interruptedness?" The little alien stood in the passage opening, looking disappointed. Keff gave his forgotten playmate a rueful grin.

"Sorry, TE," Keff said. He moved away from the pillar, but kept an eye on it, wishing there was something he could do for her.

"I apologize," Carialle said contritely. "I didn't mean to let everything drop. Computer malfunction. Minor. It won't happen again." In a moment, the castle corridor rose around Keff again, and a three-dimensional letter puzzle appeared between them. Tall Eyebrow happily waddled over to it. As he moved his finger through the image of each two- or three-letter piece, it enunciated its sound. Some of them were syllables, and some were just noises, thrown in by Carialle for fun. With a delighted chuckle, the globe-frog began to construct Standard words out of the assorted noises, touching them again and again.

"Ook." "Hind." "Honk!" "Eeuu." "Be." "Aaa-OOO-ga!" "Be." "Loo." Ding!" "Ook." "Loo-ook," emerged from the audible babble as Tall Eyebrow found a match. Keff grinned.

"When all this is over, let's go find the parasites who were hacking you up, Cari," Keff said, making use of the sublingual implant in his jaw so the others couldn't hear him. "What with the bonuses from Ozran still in the bank, and the booty from this trip, we can afford to take even a year off."

"I hope the answers are still there to find," Carialle said in his aural implant.

"Look-be-hind-you," Tall Eyebrow spelled out aloud. "Look behind you," he signed suddenly to Keff. He spun in a circle, clutching his amulet in his long fingers.

"He's good," Carialle said. "Twenty-eight seconds, and it's not his native language."

More villains began to pour into the newly reconstructed great hall. Some were humans, brandishing weapons at Keff. Some were waist-high foes, snarling as they sought to surround Tall Eyebrow. Keff drew his sword, then hesitated, blade in midair. TE stood, gazing curiously at Keff, wondering why the man wasn't charging. The brawn looked at him, feeling as if he had seen them just now for the first time.

"I just had a horrible thought," Keff said, subvocally to Carialle. "What if it was TE's people, the Cridi, who were the ones stealing your components?"

"Don't think it hasn't occurred to me," Carialle said, her voice crisp in his ear. "I hope not. I'm going to be watching them like a bank guard every minute. But I so hope not."

"I hope not, too. I wouldn't be able to behave the same towards them if they almost killed you, inadvertently or not."

"I refuse to theorize in advance of the facts, as someone once said," Carialle stated firmly. "Right now the important thing is to get TE and his party safely to Cridi. When this is over, we'll go and find out the truth."

"When you will and where you will, my lady," Keff said, swallowing his concern. His partner was under control again. If he pushed for more details he might risk making her relive her ordeal. He raised his sword before his face in salute and, with a gallant bow toward her holographic image, charged into the fray.

"Well, come on, TE!" he shouted at the surprised globe-frog. "You're on the threshold of your first big battle. Hop to it!"