Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

"Yes, indeed," Randon agreed. We sat down, Calandra and the two shields moving to the wall behind us. "First of all, I'd like to bring you greetings from my father, Lord Kelsey-Ramos, and the entire Carillon Group board."

Seated against the wall almost directly behind Chun Li, impossible to miss whenever I looked that direction, was a stunningly beautiful woman.

It was an old ploy, but no less effective for all that, and the woman herself was better at it than many I'd seen. Her almost casual posture subtly emphasized the allure of breasts and legs; while her face, framed delicately by a hairsculpt much too expensive for her indicated corporate position, was coyly provocative. Each time our eyes met—which was practically every time I looked her direction—her lips curled in a barely detectable but nevertheless sultry half smile.

But however many times she'd laid out this snare, it was clear that she'd never tried it on a Watcher. Even as I felt my body stirring with the lust she was trying to distract me with, the rest of her sense came through the allure... and of its own accord my desire drained quietly away. She was cold, manipulating, arrogantly amused—so totally opposite, in fact, to the softly sensuous image she was trying to project that her seduction became little more than a gross parody; pitiful and disgusting instead of being alluring. I gazed into her eyes one last time, seeing there that she knew she'd failed—but had no idea why—and turned my eyes deliberately away.

"First of all," Randon continued, "let me assure you that, unlike some corporations, Carillon is not in the habit of automatically replacing the directors and employees of freshly acquired companies..."

Perhaps they'd suspected that the long-distance seduction would fail; perhaps they were merely being cautious. Whatever the reason, they'd arranged a second distraction for me... a distraction that turned out to be far more effective than the first.

He was one of the HTI guards—or perhaps more precisely, he was dressed in an HTI guard's uniform: a fascinatingly twitch-faced man standing against the wall just inside the range of my peripheral vision. Twitch-faced, and radiating the most unstable emotional state I had ever sensed.

"...Our policy is to try wherever possible to maintain continuity and existing relationships, particularly when such relationships are clearly working well..."

He wasn't insane, at least not in any way I would have expected to read insanity. His emotions were simply on a permanent scattercoast. One minute he would be tense and nervous, the next fearful, the next inordinately pleased with himself, the next sullen and withdrawn.... "What we do demand is ability. There's no place in the Carillon Group for incompetence. Any employee that has been getting a downhill coast while others looked the other way or covered up will be in for an extremely rude shock..."

No corporate guard chief could possibly tolerate a man that emotionally unbalanced, which left it a tossup as to whether HTI had raided a treatment hospital or weirded up one of their own guards with some schizm-inducing drug. But at this point the method didn't really matter. Try as I might, I couldn't entirely ignore the man; and the mental effort to do so threatened to become a distraction in itself.

"...So. There will be memos and perhaps some reorganizational papers coming down the line over the next few months, I imagine, as soon as we've had time to sift through all the records. But that ought to give you at least a brief overview of our plans. Are there any questions?"

The twitch wasn't just in his face, either. There were echoing spasms in varying degrees from shoulders, knees, and hands.

Including the hand hovering tautly beside the butt of his holstered needler.

I licked the inside of my lip. No danger, was my first, back-brain feeling; but under the circumstances that was hardly the sort of conclusion I could afford to trust to a subconscious synthesis of unidentified cues. A schizoid man armed with a needler could almost literally mow this entire roomful of people down in the space of a few heartbeats.

On the other hand, none of the other HTI guards were directing any worry at all in his direction. Was that the cue I'd picked up on, that they hadn't picked up any danger themselves? Perhaps; but my sense of had felt stronger than that.

"I think I speak for all of us," Chun Li spoke up, "when I say that we'll all do our best to make this transition as smooth as possible, both for Carillon and ourselves..."

My phone vibrated its silent call signal. Dropping my gaze with an effort from the twitchy guard, I eased the instrument from its belt case and keyed for nonverbal. Behind me I could hear a faint and unintelligible voice—Kutzko's—while, under the edge of the table, I watched his words flow across the tiny screen:

CALANDRA SAYS TO TELL YOU HIS NEEDLER ISN'T LOADED. THAT MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?

An eerie feeling crept across the back of my neck. She'd done it again. Read my mind with complete ease... and this time without even having to see my face.

She was right, too, of course. Looking back at the guard—his sense that of almost childlike cunning at the moment—it was obvious that his needler was riding much too high in its holster to be carrying even a partially filled clip. That, plus the way it swung against his leg when he twitched—the cues had all been there, and clearly my back-brain had picked up on them in deciding he wasn't a danger to us. I only wished I could have identified them faster. At least as fast as Calandra had.

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall... and, after all, it didn't really matter which of us picked up on which fact, as long as together we got all of it. Taking a deep breath, I chased away the tinge of jealousy from my mind and, my vision clear again, turned my attention back to Chun Li.

"...I presume you'll want to go over our records; we have them for you right here." Reaching beneath his capelet, he withdrew a cyl. "This is everything for the past five years," he added, placing it on the formite surface in front of him and giving it a gentle push. The tube rolled across the table, picking up speed as the formite first concaved, then convexed, coming at last to a stop in front of Randon. "All previous records will be on Portslava, where I presume your associates will be picking them up."

"Thank you," Randon nodded, scooping up the cyl and pocketing it. "I presume you've also got copies of those older records on hand?"

A touch of uneasiness flickered through Chun Li's sense, though he was able to control his face and voice remarkably well. "Yes, of course," he acknowledged. "If you'd like copies I can have them sent to your ship this afternoon."

"Why can't I have them now?"

Blake and Karash were registering heightened tension, too, and it was in fact Blake who answered Randon's question. "The problem is that they're scattered around through the system in rather unreadable code," he said in clipped tones. "It would take at least an hour to chase them all down and put them into coherent form."

"Oh, that won't be a problem," Randon said, voice almost lazy but with a hard edge underneath it. "Schock, here, is quite good at that sort of excavation. If he can borrow a hard terminal for a few minutes he can probably get that out of the way while we finish our talk."

Blake visibly clenched his teeth. "I don't mean to be obstructive, Mr. Kelsey-Ramos, but the data is really so scattered through different files and even different listings that it'll take a good deal of time to gather it all."

My eyes turned elsewhere, I could still sense Randon smile. "The wonders of modern technology, Mr. Blake. Ever heard of a Templex decoder?"

From the senses of the others, I could tell none of them had... and that none of them was looking forward to hearing about it. "I'm afraid not," Chun Li admitted cautiously. "I take it it's something used for this kind of data retrieval?"