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THIRTY-FOUR

Oomalo Waunter took away the sheet of paper from the bulkhead, leaning against a foam pad on the scaffolding. If there was the faintest hint of a seam, he'd find it. He was convinced the ship had secret hiding places. The conviction wasn't entirely rational—the Crocerians would almost certainly have found any hidden artifacts of value. But it was something to do. While he did it, he worried.

Since the seizure by the USC ship, Alae had brooded and done very little work. They'd left the Ring Stars and set up a deep-space orbit around galactic center while they considered where to go next. Perhaps that was what she was brooding about.

He took a graphite block and marked an X on the bulkhead to indicate how far he'd searched. When he shined a light from below, the X would reflect the glare and he could tell where to move the scaffold. He'd covered a tenth of the ship this way.

His allotted work for the wake-period done, he went to the sea-tanks, scattering his clothes along the way. Under the ceiling's strip sunlight—the inner perimeter of the ship's hull—he swam for kilometers, circumnavigating the tanks. The water was faintly slippery from some reaction with the metal bottom, but he was used to that. The ineradicable smell of iodine didn't bother him either. The Aighors had kept this artificial ocean stocked with several varieties of dangerous aquatic life, to "play" with on long voyages—mainly to keep fit and maintain social order. Dozens of ship's commanders had been chosen through combat in the tanks. Now they were quiet, except for the slap of waves on the far bulkheads and the sounds of his splashing.

Alae sat in the oblong booth which looked down across the port warp node generators. The old transparent metal had taken on a beautiful green tint across the millennia. Below, even when dormant, the generators which started the chain reactions of spacial shifting were surrounded by spikes of red fluorescence.

A half-broken tapas pad sat on her lap. It was good only for writing with a scriber and erasing with a finger. She had had it since childhood, and it served her as a kind of doodle pad. Written on its screen now were the words, "Baubles, toys, blue skies."

She had bought all the information she could about Anna Sigrid Nestor. She had studied the woman again and again during the judgment, covertly glancing at her, measuring her. What the USC loytnant had said about Nestor and Kawashita made sense. Nestor had planned, schemed, hidden, won. They—Alae and Oomalo, most deserving—had lost. The Centrum, as always, had ruled against independents. Glamor over labor and discovery. Power over—

She put the pad aside slowly and backed out of the booth. Without the subtle presence of her body's energy field, the sensitive spikes on the generators cooled to a deep, steady blue.

Oomalo was on his second lap when he heard Alae calling his name. "Waunter!"

"What?" He stopped swimming and lifted his head out of the water.

"We're going." She walked along the edge of the tanks. He swam in place with slow, regular strokes. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"To claim our property."

"How?"

"I don't know. But we're going."

 

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Framed