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  An image of him jumped into her head—his big frame lounging against the bar, his dark eyes dancing as he looked at her. In those few short minutes of anonymity with him, she had been just an ordinary chic, flirting with a bloke at a pub. A girl who could be wild, perhaps even a little bit bad. A girl who might actually interest a man like him. Not an ice princess at all.

  She stared out the window at the shining sliver of the elevator cable and twisted her fingers together absently. I have to get out of here. I have to get home, back where I belong.

  “Excuse me.”

  Startled, Bianca turned toward the voice. Piat Singh stood in the open doorway, watching her with an inscrutable expression. “I wondered if I might have a private word with you.”

  “Of course,” she said, quickly dragging her focus back to business.

  The older woman came to stand next to her at the viewport, gazing out at the view in contemplative silence. Bianca watched her attentively. The RedIce office manager had been both exquisitely polite and completely unhelpful so far. What did she have to say that couldn’t be said in front of the others? It was bound to be informative, one way or another.

  After a moment, Singh said, “Have you spoken to Shen M’Chan yet, M’Ross?”

  “No, in fact, I haven’t,” Bianca said. On her first arrival at the RedIce offices, she had been greeted not by Shen Chan himself, but by a vid message the supposed president had left for the StarLine personnel. The rad-cooked looking old man in the vid had stared hollowly out of the screen and muttered that he was going on holiday for an indefinite period, and he was leaving the entire matter of the sale to his lawyers.

  “Then perhaps you are unfamiliar with the relationship between Cesare and his father.”

  “Cesare...Cesare Chan? Shen Chan’s son?”

  Singh nodded once.

  “No,” Bianca said slowly, wondering what this had to do with RedIce business. “I’m not familiar with anything having to do with Cesare Chan.”

  Singh turned a dark look on her. “Cesare has been an integral part of the RedIce field operations for years, M’Ross. It’s fair to say that RedIce would not exist as it is today without him.”

  Bianca struggled not to show her surprise. The RedIce files she had managed to wrest away from the StarLine legal team had made no mention of this. She hadn’t known that Shen Chan’s son even had an active role in the company, let alone an important one.

  Maybe that’s what all this furtiveness is about, Bianca thought in a flash of intuition. The RedIcers are trying to protect this Cesare Chan. Protect him from what, though? Was he trying to skim off assets, or hide a major business failure to protect the value of his shares? The possibilities were limitless. “Where is Cesare Chan? If he’s invested in RedIce, why isn’t he here helping work out this transition?”

  Singh hesitated, as if deciding how to answer. “I haven’t spoken to Cesare for several days. However, I believe he has been in communication with StarLine.”

  Another little detail someone on my team neglected to tell me about. She put that aside for later, focusing on Singh’s original topic. “So tell me about the relationship between Cesare and Shen.”

  The office manager shrugged. “They are very different men. Their business practices often conflict, especially in terms of hiring.”

  “Hiring...” Bianca said, feeling her way. “Is Cesare the one who makes a practice of hiring Earthers?”

  “Ay. Cesare hired many of the people working out in the mines these days. I think you’ll find they are quite loyal to him personally.”

  “But not to his father.”

  Singh didn’t answer her.

  Bianca felt a distinct urge to yank her hair out in frustration. What exactly was the office manager trying to tell her? Every word she said sounded like it had a hidden meaning. She turned to face the other woman, who looked straight back at her, giving nothing away.

  “M’Singh, may I ask you a direct question?”

  Singh waited, her expression closed.

  “Does anyone at RedIce need help? Is anyone being hurt, or frightened?”

  A hint of wary surprise flashed over Singh’s face. “By Cesare you mean? No.” She paused. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I do not tolerate abuse of any kind.”

  Singh was silent for a long moment. “That’s good to know,” she finally said. “But believe me, the idea of Cesare hurting or threatening anyone is simply absurd.”

  “I hope that’s true,” Bianca murmured half to herself.

  Singh looked at her wonderingly. “I think you actually do.”

  Eris Space Elevator Station

  Cesare lounged back on his habsuite’s luxurious sofa and scanned through his notes from the previous day’s negotiations. Sam and his team would appear any minute now to start this morning’s grueling session at the workstations, and he had to be ready. But he just couldn’t seem to concentrate.

  Maybe because he was caged up here on a space station with a batch of two-faced StarLine feckers. Or maybe it was just because he had no time for chics lately. Unless I want to take Victoria up on her generous offer, he thought with a grimace.

  Giving up on his notes, he got to his feet and started prowling around the luxury guest chamber he had been assigned. Too bad this overdecorated habsuite didn’t come equipped with some free weights. A few bench presses and a quick jack in the cleanser would be useful to take off the edge.

  Just then, the door chime sounded and Briggs sauntered in, eyes on his cuff pad as usual. “Good morning. Ready to get back in the saddle, space cowboy?”

  “Ni hao, Sam.” Cesare went to lean one hip on the back of the sofa.

  Briggs walked over to a nearby chair and sat, crossing his long, slender legs. “How did the meet with Victoria Ross go last night?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Briggs looked at him narrowly. “You didn’t do anything stupid, did you?”

  “Na, I just turned down her offer to jump up and down on my rod.”

  Briggs stared at him for a minute, then flung up his thin arms. “This is exactly the kind of stupid I’m talking about! You turned down Victoria Ross? For the love of Heaven, why?”

  Cesare shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. In order to protect Briggs he hadn’t been able to tell him much about the slaves he had rescued from Victoria’s hospitality. His friend didn’t know what kind of a stone-cold snake she really was.

  “The perfect chance to get an in, and you toss it. Not to mention the chic is a prime piece. I know you’re used to having yin flung at you everywhere you go—”

  “Speaking of the Ross family, have you managed to track down Bianca Ross yet?” he said, cutting Briggs off mid rant.

  Briggs huffed. “Ay. One of your sources just commed to let us know that Bianca showed up at RedIce headquarters this morning. Apparently she’s taking over the acquisition process.”

  Cesare swore. “Victoria told me she didn’t know where Bianca was or what she was doing.”

  “More games,” Briggs said, shrugging. “But I wouldn’t worry about Bianca too much. From everything I’ve heard, she’s not very impressive. The gossip is that her family keeps her out of the way doing odd jobs on the surface so she doesn’t feck up the company.”

  Cesare thought for a moment as an idea began to form. “Sam, if what you heard was right, I’m thinking we might be able to get Bianca to feck up her company in our favor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something Victoria said last night makes me think there’s tension between the two of them. I think maybe we could play them against each other.”

  Briggs shook his head. “Sounds shaky to me. I say we stick with our legal strategy. We stall, we put up road blocks, we wear them down with lawsuits and appeals in the Trade Courts. We
make ourselves too much trouble for them to bother with.”

  Cesare couldn’t fault the guerilla warfare strategy. It was the best resistance he could muster against a giant like StarLine. Unless his hunch was right, and he had stumbled across a weakness he could exploit.

  “I still want to get a line on Bianca before she has a chance to cause us any trouble.” Cesare started moving around the hab with new purpose, collecting his datapads. “We’ll com her directly after breakfast. I don’t think I can face another Ross on an empty stomach. We can go over everything we have on her while we eat.” He started for the door.

  Briggs called after him, “You aren’t going out with your suit like that, are you? Don’t want to shock the spacers.”

  Cesare stopped, looking down at himself in alarm. His carbonsuit’s micron seals were all closed, and the nanocomputers woven into the silky fabric were molding the suit perfectly to his body. The temp regulation and self-cleansing apps were fine. Everything seemed all right to him. “What’s the matter with the suit?” he said.

  “Fashion program, mate.”

  “Oh. Right.” He always forgot the dusted fashion programs. No one ever bothered with that shite in the Outback. But this wasn’t the Outback now, was it?

  He tapped on his cuff pad as Briggs rose to his feet. A variety of color and texture programs scrolled over the cuff, and he quickly settled on a subdued navy with red accents. Instantly the color program rippled over the surface of the fabric, replacing the neutral matte black. He turned toward Briggs and spread out his newly navy-and-red arms. “Civilized enough?” he asked.

  Briggs lifted one sandy eyebrow and straightened the collar on his own suit, today in a flamboyant peacock green. “You’ll do, I suppose. You know, you’re lucky you have such a pretty face, because you have absolutely no sense of style.”

  Cesare grinned at his old friend. “We can’t all be as Heaven-blessed as you, Sam.” Briggs’s mouth ticked up in a sour smile, but Cesare was already headed for the door and barely noticed.

  RedIce Main Office, Pavonis

  Predictably, Bianca had been assigned the barest, most cramped office in the entire RedIce complex, “just temporarily.” At least it had a desk and a private vidscreen, which was all she really needed. So, she had decided to put off dealing with the office jockeying until later. Right now she was trying to settle into her worn plaz office chair for a nice long session in the DataCloud.

  She touched the console. Under her fingertips she could almost feel collations and predictions flowing through her comps. She felt herself begin to flow, too, relaxing into the comforting current of data.

  In the Cloud, everything she saw made sense. When she worked the data, she often fancied she could trace the course of cause and effect from a planet-wide network down to a single electron if she really wanted to. It was seductive, a world of such perfection and precision. Not like the real world, full of people and their incomprehensible actions and desires.

  But there was no time to mess about in the Cloud today, not while Eris needed monitoring. Bianca liked to keep a close eye on StarLine’s inner workings, closer than anyone guessed. Though she was entitled to full disclosure of all StarLine information, she had long suspected that she had accidentally-on-purpose been left out of several important company feeds. She also suspected that any attempt to rectify the situation through official channels would get the slow shuffle into oblivion.

  Fortunately, she didn’t need to go through official channels. Growing up with an intimate knowledge of the Eris systems made it easy for her to create her own private loops and hatches in the company network.

  Her fingers flickered over the console, and the firewalls guarding the StarLine data chambers obediently drew back, opening up a corridor to let her in. She pulled up her secret data caches, scanning them thoroughly and quickly. Everything looked in order. Transport, com, materials, security... Wait. What on Mars is this?

  She scanned through a section of data again. There was a decided spike in security expenses. And in maintenance. And in food and luxury goods. She scanned some more. There were a fleet of elevator cars under high-security protocol scheduled to leave Pavonis in two weeks. One of those was under MGA-1 Sec, the personal security of the Secretary General of Mars.

  She ran through it all again, hardly believing what she was seeing, though it was plain as the sun. A large number of the Martian leadership, including the Secretary General himself, was assembling on Eris in less than two weeks. And no one had seen fit to inform her. A spark of anger flared, but she pressed it down, trying to think rationally.

  She could be misinterpreting this. Maybe Victoria was just planning an innocent social gathering, not a political summit. Maybe the fact that no one had told Bianca about it was a simple oversight.

  And maybe the little green men will show up with birthday presents, she thought as she tapped on the com to Victoria’s private vidscreen.

  She expected to get the long shuffle before she finally got through, so she was astonished when Victoria appeared on her screen with her first com.

  The StarLine CEO was posed in her usual regal splendor, her overstuffed habsuite glittering in a retina-melting display behind her. Bianca didn’t pay it any attention. She had grown immune to that brand of intimidation years ago. She settled into her beat-up office chair like it was a fecking throne, and eyed her father’s wife.

  “Ni hao, Bianca,” Victoria said in her warm, cultured voice. “I thought I might be hearing from you. Are you having trouble with the RedIce acquisition already?”

  “Everything’s fine down here,” she replied. “I was worried about how busy you must be up there on Eris, getting ready for your big business meeting in two weeks.”

  For an instant here was dead silence from the other end of the com, and Victoria’s pale eyes flashed with something Bianca couldn’t quite identify. Then she smiled. “Oh, that,” she said. “It’s just a casual little get-together with some friends of mine. Nothing that concerns you.”

  “I didn’t know you were so intimate with the Secretary General and the members of the MBC,” Bianca said, watching the other woman closely.

  Victoria hung onto her smile. “Ay, we’ve all been moving in the same circles for years. Really, Bianca, there’s no need for you to pry into my social schedule.”

  “Does my father know about this get-together?”

  “Of course,” Victoria said. “It was a pity he had to miss it, but you know how tedious he finds these affairs.”

  It would be typical of her father to ignore a business summit like this, Bianca reluctantly acknowledged. “Since my father can’t be there, I should come up to Eris with our guests to help you host this party on his behalf.”

  “There isn’t the slightest need for you to come back to Eris right now,” Victoria said, an edge creeping into her voice. “And you shouldn’t take time away from your own responsibilities. I don’t want to have to inform the board of directors that you were incapable of performing your assignment.”

  “I am aware of my responsibilities. I’ll have the RedIce deal well in hand by the time of the meeting.”

  Victoria’s lip curled slightly. “I find that difficult to imagine.” She subsided into her carved chair, and they studied each other for a moment.

  “Bianca,” Victoria finally said, “I can’t allow you to make another space journey so soon. Forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look well. Your skin seems a bit pasty.” Her voice took on an utterly false tone of warm concern. “Was there anything unusual in your disembarkation biosample?”

  Bianca was so used to these little jabs about her looks that she almost ignored this altogether. But then, she paused. “Actually, I refused the biodraw.”

  Victoria’s face went carefully blank. “Did you,” she whispered.

  For an instant, Bianca could do nothing
but stare into the blue eyes watching her from the vidscreen. Her skin was suddenly crawling with the same icy prickle she had felt yesterday under that pushy medic’s fearful, calculating stare.

  With an effort, she shook off the unnerving sensation curling around her. “In my opinion, this policy is completely unnecessary, not to mention harassing,” she said. “I’ve called for its suspension. In fact, I think I’ll bring it up for review before the board when I come to Eris.”

  “The decisions I make are in the best interests of StarLine, and it’s past time you learned to accept my judgment.”

  “Actually I think it’s time I begin making my own judgments about company policy,” Bianca said between her teeth. “I’m coming to this party, and I’m going to take part in any business meetings, as is my right as a principal of the Eris charter.”

  “Don’t try to interfere in things you can’t understand,” Victoria said tightly. “You’ll only make a fool of yourself.”

  Bianca smiled sweetly. “If you’re concerned about my ignorance, you could help bring me up to speed. Why don’t you tap over a list of the expected guests and a summary of all the issues under discussion?”

  Victoria looked at her for a long moment. Her gilded nails drummed once on the silk arm of her chair. Then her lips curved in a stiff smile. “If you insist on inviting yourself to my party you can’t appear to be an idiot, I suppose. Very well, I’ll send along the data you request. By courier, of course, not the common band. It will be more secure, and some of my guests are sensitive about their private concerns.”

  “All right,” Bianca said, taken aback by the quick capitulation. “As long as it gets here soon enough.”

  “I’ll send it down the elevator today. Now, if there’s nothing else, I have some work to do,” Victoria said, and cut the com without waiting for an answer.

  Bianca pushed away from her vidscreen, thinking, That was way too easy. She had expected a lot more stalling, and a much more forceful attempt at manipulation. Submitting to questions and demands was just not Victoria’s style. The woman had to have something devious up her sleeve, some plan to hide or twist valuable data.