Free Duty Bound by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Page B

to
snort.
    "Doubtless, I hurt your ears..."
    "Well, at least you've hurt my
feelings."
    She looked at him quizzically.
    Clonak glanced away from his work, moving
his hand inside the Cloak to pull out a bit of paper towel and mop
his brow before continuing.
    "I clearly heard you ask
whose, ahhh....whose idea the Cloaks were. Very nearly they are
mine!"
    Shadia blinked.
    "Are you Momson, then?"
    "Me, Momson? Not a bit of that, at all."
Clonak continued, still busily taking the suit apart. "Momson is
some legendary Terran inventor, I gather. No, but the
Cloaks--they've only been on Scout ships for about 25 years. But
then, I guess you could blame Daav yos'Phelium, too, for having the
bad judgement to need a Cloak when he didn't have one..."
    "But I thought the nameplate says that some
Terran foundation gave us the money to start installation...."
    "Right you are. The Richard A. Davis
Portmaster Aid Foundation. But I'm afraid that's my fault. They
have a wonderful archive--at least equal to the open Scout
collections!--and I was looking for quick solutions. Headquarters
was already moving me into this pilot support track I've ended up
in, you see, and dea'Cort himself set me on them."
    "When it turned out that we didn't need
anything all that esoteric, really, the research librarian was
pleased to hand me over to the so-called Implementation Office and
they had me walking around in one of these things inside a day. I
brought a dozen dozen back for testing and barely a relumma after I
had posted off my thank-you note, Headquarters sent me off on a
secret mission--to pick up a shipload of these things, complete
with dispenser canisters."
    "Secret mission?" Shadia snorted. "They
didn't want other Scouts to know you were getting all the plush
flights?"
    Clonak chuckled briefly at his work.
    "Actually, it was far more sinister than
that. There's always a faction in the Council of Clans that wants
to shut funding for the Scouts off, or reduce it. Some of them
don't want us doing anything that might benefit Terrans, or they
want us to charge for our work, or be turned into pet courier
pilots for the High Houses. The idea that we might somehow be in
debt to a Terran foundation had to be kept super mum."
    Shadia heard the crinkle of the Momson Cloak
about her as she shook her head Terran-style and then flipped the
hand signal roughly translating as "Stupidly assessing the
situation, them, as dogs might."
    One-handed Clonak replied with "Affirm that
twice."
    Before Shadia could turn back to her work
Clonak stretched himself, permitting his legs to float higher than
his head, and held up a series of electronic modules linked by tiny
flat cables. At the end of the cables were several tiny power
units.
    "Shadia, what you see here is the work of a
genius,"
    "Of course," she said politely.
    Clonak ignored her. "It's too bad that I
nearly destroyed it getting it out of the suit. I can see several
more modifications I'll need to make, and then a box-lot of
paperwork once we are joyfully returned to Headquarters...."
    Shadia sighed. "What is it?"
    "A working transceiver set, of course! What
else could it be? Now all we need to do is decide what we might
safely say, on what frequency, and how often, for the right people
to hear and fetch us away from this lovely idyll of shared
pleasure." He moved a shoulder and his feet sank deckward. "I
believe we will need your location report by the end of the shift,
and since I'm essentailly done with this I'm available to act as
your clerk."
    * * *
    RIDE THE LUCK broke into normal space and reported that all was
well. Three breaths after, the position report center screen was
replaced by a tile of alarms and warnings as the meteor shields
went up a notch and the Scout's private hailing frequency was
crowded by messages and fragments:
    "...ard Jumped out before I could cross-hair
him; he definitely took out dea'Ladd!"
    "...was destroyed. Have adequate munitions
to continue search pattern..."
    Daav's hands