contract just because you were a mere thousand light-years away! It was ridiculous even thinking about it. But here was a colony of a hundred thousand sesheyans sitting on Grith and defying their rightful employers. And the Concord actually bought the ridiculous story about an alien transfer in the deeps of time. It should have been obvious to anyone with even the brains of a weren that the Grith-based sesheyans had somehow taken advantage of the chaos of the Second Galactic War to elope from their contracts and set up here as scions of a fake alien civilization. But Ari Madhra, the Concord Administrator ruling on the case, bought into the myth and declared the colony independent, an 'indigenous race.' It obviously wasn't an independent or unbiased judgment. Sander often wondered who had gotten to her and for how much. Someone should have outbid them, ideally the Company. The knowledge that they had not done so made UU563 56VIW think the unthinkable, that someone at a very high level had messed up.
But now Sander sat looking down at Grith and keeping himself busy with the company's business here, which was to find a way to bring these runaway sesheyans back into the fold. The company's long-term strategy indicated perhaps fifty to a hundred years of slow pressure exerted both on Grith itself and on the planets trading with it, wherever they might be, as well as more concrete pressure on the Concord, on Administrators old and new, and on the higher reaches of power in all stellar nations to rescind the old decision or to 're-evaluate' the situation with an eye to making a new one. Slow and steady would win this race. The point was to do nothing too precipitate, to let the sesheyans toughing it out here learn that conditions were much better for their brothers who were in the blessed state of Employment and that attempting to make a go of it by themselves in this system where there was so much competition from other sources just wasn't going to work for them. Time would make the difference, and the Company had plenty of that.
In the meantime, Sander was allowed some leeway to implement short-term solutions that were estimated to have a better than two percent chance of increasing the speed of the fifty-to-a-hundred year plan without otherwise being of detriment to it. The Company saw no reasons why the non-Employee sesheyans on and near Grith shouldn't experience personally how difficult, how foolish it was, to attempt to take on a stellar nation single- handed, especially when they were in the wrong. The 'free implementation' exercises also gave local Employees a chance to demonstrate their usefulness and resourcefulness to the Company.
Or for them to help shake themselves out if they're incompetent, UU563 56VIW thought. Well, that was one thing he definitely was not. This present business was sticky, but he would find his way through it and out the other side. And when he did-
'Sir,' his assistant's voice came out of the air, 'QI440 76RIC is waiting to speak to you.' 'Let him wait a few minutes,' Sander said, almost in a growl, as he settled himself back in his chair. 'He's lucky I don't have him sent to Iphus with nothing but a pail and shovel and let him find his own beach chair.'
His assistant broke carrier without saying anything further. Wise, for Sander was in a foul mood about QI140. It would have been such a subtle piece of work, UU563 56VTW thought bitterly. Subtlety was somewhat out of fashion at VoidCorp, mostly for lack of anyone in the place who would recognize it if it ran up and bit him or her in the knee while wearing a T-slick reading FIRST GALACTIC CONCORD SUBTLETY IDENTIFICATION CHALLENGE. That the work probably would not have been recognized for what it was for a year or two didn't bother Sander overly. He had enough other projects in hand to keep him busy, and then he could have been pleasantly 'taken by surprise' by the praise and advancement that would inevitably have followed. Instead he would have to duck and cover and pretend that none of it had ever happened, but that was unavoidable. Nothing was worse than failure, except for the identification of failure and the publicizing of it afterwards.
And why shouldn't he have a little? UU563 56VTW thought furiously. 'All right,' he said to the air, 'put him through.'
A human shape appeared in the air before him, standing slightly off the floor. Sander resolved one more time to have the engineering people up to do something about the projector's focus. He was tired of having to compensate for it. The hologram hovered there looking somewhat uncertain. The figure was in shadow, probably in a private booth, and his face was indistinct because of the lighting and its combination with the cryptography programming.
'Well?' UU563 56VIW said. 'What haye you got to say for yourself?'
'The asset you were concerned about has been neutralized,' said the man hanging in the air.
'Will you speak in language that other human beings can understand for a change?' Sander said. 'For
'Corp's sake, what's all this hardware and software for if we can't communicate securely? What do you want to do, scribble it on a notepad and send it to me by some passing infotrader? Did you kill the asset, or what?'
'No,' said the man, 'but he's dead all the same.' 'If you didn't kill him, who did?' 'He had an accident.'
'I'm not going to tell you again, if you don't just say-'
'That's what I'm trying to tell you, he had an accident,' the other man said, just briefly furious, or as much so as he dared to be. 'Nothing prepared. Something to do with his e-suit.'
'What?'
'His e-suit gave out on him. There was an accident aboard the ship, some kind of explosive decompression. He either suited up too fast and missed a gasket somewhere, or the e-suit just failed from lack of maintenance. They're still investigating it.'
'Are they?' Sander said, sitting up a little straighter at that. 'Any unusual attention to the matter from up above?'
'Nothing that our sources were able to identify.'
'All right.' Sander sat back. 'Maybe it's for the best. Anyway, it might throw them off. It sure throws me off. Meanwhile, what about our others aboard? Any news from the lost lamb?' 'Not a word. He took his discharge chit and walked, apparently.' 'Alone?'
'No. He's with a fraal.' 'What fraal?'
'No one knows. They're trying to work up some intelligence now.'
Sander sat tight-lipped for the moment and considered the likelihood that intelligence was the one thing these people would never work up, no matter how much information they managed to find. 'What's he doing? He leave the system yet?'
'Just sitting there at the moment. Probably in shock, they say.'
'Huh. He would've been a lot more shocked if he'd kept going the way he was going,' Sander said. 'No matter. I want to make sure that he stays well away from you know where. In particular, I want to know the minute he leaves the system. One move toward Corrivale and I want to know all about it. It might seem harmless, might be just a transit, but I don't want anyone second-guessing me until he actually leaves Corrivale system for somewhere else. And even then I want him tagged and trailed for a good long time, him and his fraal both. Who is that fraal? Has someone sent him help we don't know about?' 'They're working on it.'
Sander wanted to growl again, but restrained himself. 'There's only one other thing I want from you, and probably I'm not going to get it. Did he actually find out anything useful for us?'
'One thing. Just one. The last thing we sent him for. The first two were no-shows.'
'One out of three,' Sander said reflectively. 'Not that bad for a throwaway, I guess. Did he make anything of it? Did he say anything to anyone?'
'Not that we were able to discover. We got the trial transcripts at the same time everyone else did. Nothing in them made any sense in terms of-'
'Don't say it,' said UU563 56VIW hurriedly. 'That far, not even I trust the encryption. Well, good. Make sure the poor fool gets out of the system and stays out. These minimal assets,' Sander said, 'you have to wonder why we acquire them. Still, when the recruitment's stale, or as a throwaway . . .' He shrugged. 'All right. Go on, go back to work. Where are they posting you next?' 'The scuttlebutt says Aegis. We have to go pick up some other hotshot Administrator.'
'Yeah, well, be more careful with this one.' UU563 56VIW chuckled, more to himself than to the other, and broke the connection.
He leaned back again and sighed. It was very sad in its own way. Subtlety, wearing its T-slick and doing a little dance, was fast retreating into the wilderness. Oh well. Six months' work, what's that? I'll think of something else. And not depend on them this time.
Meanwhile ... He waved his hand over the desk to see what it would list and said to the air, 'Anything new for me?'
'Those files you asked for.'
