Angelmass

She stayed in the room another half hour, pretending to arrange and rearrange her meager wardrobe in her locker and enduring the snide comments not quite directed her direction... and by the time she left, she had it down pat. All of it: every repetitious bit of slangy, every silly gesture, every bad joke, every word of gossip and school talk and clothes talk.

Everything that would let her pass herself off as one of them.

For a while she just wandered, poking around the edges of her section's public areas—dining rooms, lounges, recreation rooms and the like—and just generally getting a feel for the ship. The corridors themselves were pretty well deserted, most of the passengers who were out and about seated in the lounges getting a head start on their socializing. The delicate aromas of alcohol and other traditional reeks tugged at her, and more than once she was sorely tempted to join in and put off her exploring until morning. It wasn't like she was short on time—they'd told her when she bought the ticket that it would take the Xirrus six or seven days to get to Lorelei.

But she resisted the temptation. Long experience had taught her that mass confusion was the best cover for scoring tracks; and the day when twelve shuttles ungorged themselves of new passengers was probably going to be as confused as things got up here.

Besides which, if she didn't get busy and make other arrangements, she was going to be stuck spending at least one night with those puff-headed snobs back in her room.

From the different sizes of staterooms and cabins that the big floorplan had shown, it had been pretty obvious that the upper-class sections were the ones furthest forward. Directly behind them had been a narrow blank area; behind that the middle-class cabins, another blank area, and finally Chandris's own lower-class section. Another blank area ran up through the core of the ship, co

Blank areas on floorplans and maps were almost always worth checking out. Giving herself a quick orientation, she headed off toward the nearest to take a look.

It was surprisingly well hidden. There were no abrupt flat walls or red-lettered warnings anywhere advertising forbidden territory; nothing but smoothly curving corridors that kept passengers moving along in blissful ignorance that there was anything else lurking behind the scenes.

Without having seen the floorplan, it might have taken Chandris all of ten minutes to find a way in.

With the floorplan, it took her two. Sometimes the tracks scored themselves.

She'd expected it to be either a section of crew quarters or else part of the Xirrus's functional areas. It was, in fact, a combination of the two: a large room filled with machinery and pipes and bundles of wires, but with a pair of short door-lined corridors leading off of it. A handful of men and women were visible scattered around the room, moving around the machines or sitting at consoles, their conversation masked by the dull hum that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

For a moment Chandris watched the activity, gauging her chances of getting past them without being seen. If she could, it ought to give her a way into the middle- and upper-class sections without having to use the usual co

It was worth a try, anyway. Keeping close to the wall, trying to watch all the workers at once, she started forward.

"You, there—miss?"

Chandris's heart skipped a beat; but her face was all i

"Yes?" she said.

"Sorry, miss, but passengers aren't allowed in here," he said. "This part of the ship is for crewers only."

"Oh," Chandris said, letting her face fall a little. Not the kind of man who'd accept a sexual advance, she decided, at least not from a sixteen-year-old girl. But he might fall for the right mix of kid sister and eager student. "I'm sorry," she said, face and voice in her newly acquired middle-class college student role. "I just thought that—well, you see, I'm going to be studying catalytic nuclear drive in college and—" she waved at the room with a self-conscious shrug—"well, I just wanted to see what it was like in here."

Dead center score. His eyes widened, just noticeably, and when he spoke there was a new admiration in his voice. "You're kidding. Really? Which college are you going to?"

"Aha

"I'd hope so," he said with a little snort. "Aha

"I tried to get into Dar Korrati," Chandris said. "But they said the only scholarships they had left were for transfer students with high enough grades." She gazed into his face for a split second, then looked down, letting her shoulders sag slightly. "It's kind of scary," she confessed.

"Yeah," he agreed, and she could hear the sympathy in his voice. She held her pose, waiting for him to flip his mental coin... "Well, look, I guess it'd be okay, just this once. Come on—I'll give you a quick tour."

She gushed some appropriate words of thanks and then shut up, letting him do all the talking as he led her around the room, pointing out this and that and gabbing about a lot of stuff that made no sense whatsoever. But that was okay. Every word he said was going into her general mental grab bag of useful information, maybe to be pulled out someday.

"—but since they decay within a few microseconds, we have to keep making new ones," he commented as they passed an untended console. "The actual equipment is a little further forward, but we've got a monitor here to keep tabs on it." He pointed to a free-standing display a few meters away.

"I see," Chandris said; but her eyes were on the console right beside her. Lying on top of it, looking as if it had been casually dropped there by someone with more urgent things on his mind, was a flat plate that looked like a hand computer. Worth maybe a couple hundred on the open market... and she was going to be hitting Lorelei flat broke. "Which one of those lines is the actual production rate?" she asked her guide, gesturing toward the distant display.

"The blue one on top is flux rate," he said, pointing. "Red is particle temperature, green is interface transfer, and that heavy black line shows the confinement profile. Now, this thing over here..."

Taking her upper arm in a big-brotherly sort of way, he led her toward yet another giant incomprehensible machine. It was, Chandris reflected, just as well she hadn't tried a sexual approach on this one. A hand around her waist, instead of on her arm, would hardly have failed to notice the hard lump that had suddenly appeared hidden beneath the waistband of her skirt.

In all the tour took nearly twenty minutes. When it was over Chandris thanked the engineer profusely, let him escort her back through the door to the lower-class section, and said a warm and grateful good-bye.

Two minutes later she was back, slipping in through a second entrance she'd spotted across the room during the tour. Hidden from view of the crewers by a long thick pipe he'd called a catalytic-balance slifter, she made her way forward. The other end of the room opened onto a short corridor lined with unlocked doors; choosing one, she went inside.

The room was small and, inevitably, filled to the ceiling with equipment—pipes and pumping sorts of stuff this time. Turning on the dim overhead light, she pulled out her newly acquired toy and sat down cross-legged on the floor to take a closer look.