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secured cube on Vishnu by two men. They had vocal and visual records of the kidnapping, and he had seen the holoproj three times. Neither of the kidnapperswere familiar to him, but that in itself meant nothing. The men had managed to rascal their way in, but had made no attempt to stop the room's recorder from working, and they had known that somebody would collect the voices and images sooner or later. They could have been skinmasked and wearing voice distorters, of course, but even so, a computeraug could do wonders with somatic patterns and speech cadence based on the recordings.
    They had not seemed particularly worried. It was as if they wanted people to know what had happened.
    Why had they taken her?
    Khadaji stared, as if he could see across time and space to the event. If he knew the "why," he might be able to figure out the "who," and the "where."
    He had certain resources upon which he could draw. He had never traded on his status as the man who focused the revolution that toppled the Confed. It had been five years, but there were those who owed him, and others who might not reject a call for help. He would go to see Pen first and then he would call in his favors. The mother of his child—he had a daughter!—was in danger, and he would do whatever it took to try to save her.
    "How are you feeling, brat?"
    Geneva was sealed into a Healy medicator, and her voice when it came through the speaker sounded hollow behind the thick, clear plastic of the lid. "I've felt better. I itch all over."
    Dirisha smiled down at her lover, her teeth white against her dark sin. Geneva was naked, and the thin silk sheet put inside to cover her was bunched up under her feet. Even with the wound sealed under an ugly glob of mediflesh, she was still quite beautiful lying there. Dirisha put one hand onto the plastic, pressing down with her palm; inside the machine, Geneva matched her move so that their hands, the dark and the pale, were separated by no more than a half centimeter of the hard clearness. The danger had passed and Geneva would live. The medics had dug the metal shot from her, stapled and glued her punctured lung and torn blood vessels back together, and stuck her into the Healy. The machine's computer monitored every system and adjusted the flow of medicine and ultrasound and coherent healing light and magnetics as needed. Another week or ten days and the blonde could pick up her life where she'd left off, not much the worse for her experience.
    "I thought you knew how to roll without breaking your damned spetsdod barrel."
    "I'll work on it."
    Dirisha's smile beamed down brightly.
    "Hey, Rissy?Thanks."
    "No problem, brat. I didn't have anything better to do."
    "I love you, too. You find out anything about the reason they hit us?"
    "Not really. By the time the cools got there, a couple of them had come out of the shocktox and taken off. The cools got four of them in custody. They are contract workers, anything for money SOF's, and they got paid through a computer drop. Never saw the man or woman who hired them."
    "Why would mercenaries set up a splash on us?"
    "I dunno.Maybe somebody with an old grudge. They were definitely waiting for us—the aircar engine was rigged to blow from a coded pulse and one of them had the button. They knew which way we were heading and they were loaded for battle."
    "I don't remember pissing anybody off that bad," Geneva said.
    "Some people take things real personal."
    Dirisha tried another smile to hide what she wasn't ready to say, but the woman inside the Healy had been with her too long to miss the undercurrent.
    "What is it? There's something else, isn't there?"
    Dirisha shifted her stance a little. Might as well tell her; she wouldn't rest until she knew."Yeah. I got a call from Bork. He sends his best, by the way."
    Geneva nodded, but didn't speak, waiting for Dirisha to finish.
    "Bork got jumped around the same time we did."
    "Is he okay?"
    "Yeah, you know Bork. Drop him off a tall