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death, often without even knowing what they were supposed to have done. After such public admonishment they would all be on their best behavior for quite awhile.
     
    Jessica knew if she was careful that she could move through the ship unseen and unmolested. She could, after all, move with great speed, stealth and precision. Her vision—even with one eye—was so sharp that she could see even the slightest movement. Her hearing was so superb that she was neither worried about accidentally running into a guard nor of one sneaking up on her. Her reflexes were lighting fast, her body actually moving in many cases before she was aware of her brain telling it to do so. The only thing she really had to worry about was the ship's detection equipment. She had noticed that there were no cameras in the halls or offices. However, she was sure that something as expensive and therefore as important as a computer would be rigged to sound an alarm if anyone tampered with it. She would have to disconnect this alarm. The problem was that she wasn't going to have a lot of time to figure it out, and Argy technology was different from Reliance technology; not a lot, but enough. Her knowledge of it was very limited, and she wasn't going to have days or even hours to figure out all the ways it was different and how their anti-tampering devices might work.
     
    She found the computer and power supply she wanted and dove under the console. She looked at the tangle of fiber optics and cringed. Like trying to pull the legs off a spider without actually killing it.
     
    Everything she needed would fit easily into the ore bucket she'd brought with her. She looked at the tangle of cables, trying to decide which one was the alarm. She couldn't figure it out; maybe there was no alarm. Maybe they weren't worried about theft. Perhaps because of their empathic powers the Argy didn't worry about such things, thinking that it would be easy to root out a thief because he would have guilt and fear radiating from him.
     
    Of course Jessica wasn't worried about that. She didn't feel guilty about stealing the equipment, and she wasn't really afraid of anything. She was also very good at emitting one emotion while actually feeling another.
     
    About the time she was ready to just start yanking cables she found the security link. Now she had to disconnect it in such a way that the link still thought it was hooked up. It turned out to be easier than she had anticipated. All she had to do was sever the cable instead of unscrewing it.
     
    It seemed like it had taken hours, but in mere minutes Jessica had disconnected both the computer and the power supply. She dumped the ore out of the bottom of her bucket, slipped the equipment into a heavy plastic sack and stuffed it back into the bucket. Then she covered it back up with the ore and carefully headed back towards the cargo bay. She stood in the hallway and waited for a moment when neither guard nor slave was in the quickly filling hold, then she snuck out and was dumping the ore off the top of her bucket just as a guard and two workers came in. She loaded her bucket into her wheelbarrow and then wiped her brow as if she'd worked up a sweat. She took a deep breath as if trying to cool off, then she took off her shirt—not unusual for either sex on Pete—slung it over the bucket and headed back out for another load.
     
    Of course she didn't actually go get another load. Instead she told the foreman she was feeling ill, turned in her wheelbarrow for the day, grabbed her bucket and headed home.
     
    Once there she made sure no one, including Right, was looking and she dumped the contents of the bucket into the composting shit and shoved it down with a stick. She smiled. No one would look there. By the time the shit wagon came around they would have stopped their investigation and she would have retrieved her prize from the shit.
     
    She didn't trust Right not to cave, so she had no intention of telling him, and since