The yewners were used to chaos. They were used to looking for rebellion and conspiracy and greed. They weren’t used to people being happy. They didn’t understand. This was another world. His world. He would not let them turn him against it.
He would not.
After Michael stormed out, Philip got up out of his chair and closed the cubicle door. “Well,” Angela said mildly. “I don’t think he’s going to be able to kid himself for more than three days, maybe four, tops.”
Philip shook his head and returned to his seat. “Less than that. He’s good people, at bottom. He knows where his own lines are, and they’ve been crossed.”
“They’ve been erased.” Angie fell back on her pillows. “If we’re right.”
“You’ve got to be kidding? How could we be wrong?”
“We could always be wrong.” She let her head flop toward him. God, it felt good to have those earphones off. “We’ve got more simulations than direct evidence. One good lawyer, and we’re suspended for negligent harassment and God knows what else.”
“Won’t stay that way.” Phil picked a spot at the tip of her fingers that didn’t have any tubes sticking out and patted it. “I just wish we could have got to him before the Cusmanoses had to die.”
“Yeah,” Angela coughed. Phil practically jumped to hand her the water. She smiled as she took it. “Thanks.”
She drank. It tasted good. It felt good going down. The pain was almost gone. She couldn’t believe how good it felt, just to move an arm under the sheets and not have it feel like hot sandpaper. To be able to turn her neck freely, to not have every sound screaming straight through to her brain. “I wish we could have told him we know about the C.A.C. accusations. That might have pushed him over.”
“Now, now, we don’t want him to know how many of his landmines we did get around.” Phil looked at the door thoughtfully and fingered his beard. “We might be wrong about how long it takes him to come around. I want a back-up plan, just in case.”
“Let’s get to it.” Angela pushed herself up a little higher on her pillows. Work felt good. Working was easier than thinking about what was waiting outside the walls. Aliens. Living creatures, intelligent creatures right here, right next door to Mother Earth, and they’d saved her life. Saved all their lives.
And Helen Failia might have known about them for years. She might have defrauded to keep her secret. She might have killed. She was definitely in contempt of committee.
And right now this woman, this maybe-murderer, was controlling all human contact with these new people. That could not be allowed to continue.
Chapter Sixteen
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS.” VEE shoved her briefcase back on the scarab’s kitchen nook table. “Why don’t we just fly over there? We know where they are.”
“Maybe because we’ve been told to stay here?” suggested Josh.
“We haven’t been told anything lately.” Vee glanced toward the main window. The perches and the holobubble sat there in the gray twilight, unattended. Naturally, they’d been out to take a look at it all, and they had good measurements and great pictures, but they had completely failed to elicit any response out of the nobby “cortex box” at its base that functioned as translator.
“Not to mention that if we left,” Josh went on, “we wouldn’t be able to talk to any of the People we met.” He waved his hand at the plans for the modified survey drone they had been hashing out on the briefcase screen. “This is a long way from finished.”
Vee and Josh were working up simulations for a mobile communications drone which used parts scavenged from survey drones and his lab. The problem was, of course, that while the drones had all kinds of recording equipment attached to them, they had zilch in the way of projection equipment.
Vee found herself wishing she could talk to Derek Cusmanos. He’d done such a job on the laser in the Discovery, they could use him now. She shook her head, a little sad, a little angry, a little confused. First he’d blown his talents on a fraud, then he got caught, then he went and died from a bad batch of yeast.
How did you even start to deal with something like that? Especially when you were the one who helped catch him in the first place? Guilt, cold and unfamiliar, took hold, and she set it aside with difficulty.
“We don’t need to talk to them; we just need to let them know we’re still here.” Vee chewed her lip thoughtfully. “T’sha said they have politics. Maybe the local bureaucracy is having a hard time deciding on a replacement for her. If we showed ourselves, it might be a motivator.”