Deanne paused on the catwalk, blended herself with its shadows. She had heard nothing. She knew every inch of the great Flagship as she knew the limited dimensions of her own quarters; knew the main traffic corridors and the hours of each cycle when traffic was at its height and at its ebb. And she knew the mazed web of maintenance catwalks as well.
Her orders had read "Confined to quarters pending disposition of the following charges—" but her Section Commander knew nothing of men like Kane, knew nothing of the fire that could touch a man's soul and ignite the rebellion that now blazed so brightly in her own. The chances were few that it would even occur to Coltech Q-Jaax that she could be anywhere but in her quarters. At any rate, that was her gamble, and it was far less desperate a one than that which Kane had taken for what he believed.
The conference chamber loomed below her in the gloom of the ship's cavernous mid-section, and it would not be difficult to locate one of the many pressure duct leads. But she would need to remove a small transition piece, and—no! What would Kane have done—simply extract a single, strategic machine screw, and swing the piece aside! It would save minutes. Hearing the men below would then be as simple as though she stood in the chamber with them.
And she must hear, must know what they planned. So that somehow, Jon, if he still lived, could know.
Within seconds she had swung from the narrow walk and dropped soundlessly atop the wide expanse of the chamber's metal ceiling. Quickly she estimated the area beneath which the main council table lay, then sought the duct nearest the spot. In only seconds more, she was lying prone in the deep shadows, able to hear.
"—and to be quite blunt about it, I am genuinely worried...." It was her uncle. "My niece's extraordinary behavior can be discussed later, gentlemen. Right now this matter of the Gravity-Justifiers is of the most importance. First of all, Captech D-Yun, why was I not immediately notified of the perilous difficulty in Sol system? These people depend upon us for their very lives! Well?"
"There is no excuse, Sire."
"Yes, I think perhaps there is! If not excuse, then reason, at least! If my memory serves me correctly, it has been a scant eleven Periods since the Sol Gravity-Justifier was last serviced, a piece of work, gentlemen, that has in the past been valid for fifty at minimum! Was I, perhaps, to be kept from knowing that what work was performed eleven Periods ago was a failure?"
A tight pause. And then, "Certainly not, Sire," in a soft tone from D-Yun. "But these people have been such—well, nuisances. We have given them so much more than their share of service that sabotage of some sort naturally suggested itself. We had been in the process of analytical survey—"
"I'll have none of that, not from any of you! Sabotage indeed. Why, it is a matter of record that Sol is not the only system in which breakdown has occurred far ahead of schedule tolerance! Yes, I know that, too, gentlemen! There is another thing I know as well. I know that there is no sabotage. I know that my personal staff of copytechs has been overworked for a full period in an effort to keep the peoples of over twenty different star systems unaware of the major technical difficulties which have been increasingly frequent in each of the others! I know that propaganda, instead of technical skill, has been keeping the prestige of the Alliance intact! The fault cannot be laid to Captech D-Yun's saboteurs! It must be laid squarely at our own door step, gentlemen! For some reason which I would like to know, we have simply not been able to keep up. We are not the technicians our fathers were, and careful study will show that they were not technicians to match their fathers, nor they their fathers before them! Slowly but too surely, we are losing something! Why?"