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  “I think they want you to find the TC records,” Pua said. It was at least a partial truth. “Or maybe the algae's broken out of the holding pens. There might have been a big storm or something.”

  Or something, was Angie's guess.

  Pua pushed away from the wall and crossed to the chaise. She leaned across it, resting her chin on her crossed hands. Her fingers dangled for a moment, then wrapped neatly around her wrists. “Do you know much about algae farming?”

  Angie shook her head. “The only waterfarms I've ever seen were on news holos. I once saw a pirated training tape on algae-farming techniques, but that's about it. I don't know anything about how they process the protein-conversion enzymes.” Only land-owning waterworlders and high-ranking Company scientists were privy to that information.

  Pua frowned.

  “Tell me about these records they're looking for,” Angie said. “How did they get lost?”

  Pua hesitated again, then again apparently settled on the truth. “My mom hid them before...” She looked down, then quickly back up. Her unblinking stare was defiant.

  “What are the records about?” Angie asked.

  “They tell how to process the new total-conversion enzyme my mom and dad made,” Pua said. “The Company wants to claim the rights to making it, so they can—”

  “A total protein-conversion enzyme?” Angie suddenly remembered Nori talking about a new total-conversion enzyme on Lesaat. Could he have been telling the truth? The Company had been promising such an advance for so long that very few took the claims seriously anymore.

  Pua was nodding. “It makes it so people can get all the protein they need from just eating grains. It makes all those amino acid things, or something. I tried it once, but I didn't like only eating cereal. There are too many good things to eat on the reef.”

  Angie frowned. “Pua, are you sure you know what you're talking about?”

  Pua straightened. “Ask Mr. Crawley, if you don't believe me. He keeps asking me about it.”

  “Mother of mountains,” Angie muttered. If a way had been found to allow humans to synthesize all the essential amino acids from just cereal grains, there could truly be an end to world hunger. This could provide a real chance for eventual large-scale human expansion through the wormhole nexus as well, since feeding large groups on extended journeys had so far proved to be a critically limiting factor.

  Angie shook her head. She wondered if she was experiencing a relapse into the hallucinations of her long sleep. Still, the existence of such a valuable commodity would explain why the Company was willing to take the chance of turning a ranking troubleshooter into a waterworlder against her will. The potential profits, not to mention the probable payoffs within the U.N. itself, would be enormous.

  “Uncle Fatu told me we could make enough TC just at Pukui to feed half the Earthers,” Pua said.

  “If this stuff is real, why did your folks hide it?” Angie asked. “I should think they'd have been eager to get it on the market. They could easily have convinced the Company to pay them a hefty percentage of the profits.”

  Again Pua hesitated. “I don't know,” she said finally. It was a very definite lie. Angie lifted a brow.

  Pua glared. “My dad refused to give the processing records to the Company because he was afraid if he gave up control, they would restrict production just to keep the price real high.”

  “Pua, not even World Life could afford to be that greedy. There are too many starving people here on Earth.”

  “They already restrict the partial-conversion enzyme. They have a big stockpile they never even use,” Pua said. “And that's the truth!”

  It was. At least the girl believed it to be. Angie tried again to fold her hands into fists. Even if she had a way to get her own hands back right now, she knew she couldn't use it. There was no way she could walk away from this. The troubleshooters had been trying to catch World Life in a major, provable criminal activity for as long as she had been in the service. It was the only hope the U.N. and the rest of the world governments had of ever breaking the Company's hold over the Earth.

  Slowly, awkwardly, Angie's fingers coiled inward toward her palms.

  * * * *

  “Total regrowth is expensive,” Crawley said later, when Angie made her demands.

  “So is my cooperation,” she replied. “I want guaranteed regrowth of my own hands as soon as the job on Lesaat is finished.”

  “What else?” His smile was smug. He hadn't even asked her why she had changed her mind.

  “While I'm in the field, I want twice the top-rank troubleshooters’ pay and full privileges—that means total cooperation from the Company and its local reps, Crawley.”

  “I'm familiar with troubleshooters’ field rules,” he said.

  “I also want all off-world bonuses, I want to take Pua with me, and I want to leave immediately.”

  The last brought a momentary frown. They want me out there, but not quite yet, she thought. I wonder why. She remembered that Waight had shown concern at her earlier-than-expected awakening.

  “You'll need at least two weeks of training with those hands before you go,” Crawley said.

  “Two weeks as Waight's guinea pig, you mean,” Angie said. “I'm not interested. Pua can teach me what I need to know. I don't plan to keep these things long. Also, Pua knows Lesaat. She cares about it. I want someone with me I can trust.”

  “You would trust Pua?” He laughed. “Warden, you disappoint me.”

  “I also want full title to the Central Forest Preserve.”

  Crawley's breath caught. “That's impossible! The Company never gives away ownership of Earth properties.”

  Angie relaxed against the back of the chaise. He stared at her.

  “I might be able to arrange a lease,” he said slowly.

  “Clear title,” she said.

  To her surprise, he remained silent. He actually seemed to be considering her demand. World Life never gave up land titles. She had only asked for the preserve to take a measure of how seriously they needed her on Lesaat.

  “All right,” he said. “I'll arrange it. But you get the title transfer and medical payoff after the job is finished, and only if it's finished.”

  “Post the contract on the public net,” she said quickly, to disguise her amazement. There was little doubt now that at least part of what Pua had told her was true.

  Crawley frowned again. “High-security channels only.”

  “Good enough.” Angie knew enough people with security access to be certain the contract would be noticed and remembered. The details would remain private to all but a very few, but numerous copies would be placed in protected storage. There would be no way for the terms to be changed after she had left Earth. Crawley's expression made it clear that he understood her reasoning.

  “Tell me something, Crawley,” she said. “Why did you choose me for this particular assignment?”

  He glanced down at her hands, then returned his cool look to her face. “You were the only ranking shooter we could find who was interested in going off-planet.”

  Slowly, Angie reminded herself. Breathe very slowly.

  “Just what is it you want me to do?” she asked in a dead-calm voice. “I'm sure you know my troubleshooting experience has been primarily land-based.”

  His smile was slow, but telling. It made it clear that he knew about her river accident, and was pleased to be sending her to a place where she would have to face her fear of the water. This had become a very personal contest between them. He picked at the sealant bandage on his cheek, realized what he was doing, and pulled his hand away.

  “You've already heard about the TC enzyme,” he said. “Your job is to find the missing records and save Pukui Reef. We want you to salvage the samples that are hidden somewhere in the growing pens before the winter storms spill the overgrown Earth algae into the open lagoon. If that happens, the algae will grow wild and eventually kill the reef.”

  It disgusted but
did not surprise Angie that Crawley had been monitoring her talk with Pua. She had already guessed that the girl hadn't reached her so easily by accident. It had occurred to her that Pua might be part of the deception, but somehow that didn't feel right.

  “Is what Pua said about the Company restricting the partial-conversion enzyme true?” she asked. “That would be highly illegal if I'm not mistaken.”

  “Of course it's not true,” he said. His lie was as clear to her as the bandage that covered his scarred cheek.

  Oh, Sally, she thought, I hope you have your investigator's nose to the ground out there, because I am caught in this one deep and dirty. There's no way in hell they're going to let me come back to Earth to expose all this. And there's no way at all that I can refuse to go. Not with the entire human future at stake.

  “I'll need access to waterfarm production techniques and information on local politics and lifestyle,” she told Crawley. “I presume you have tapes on both.”

  “You can study the farm-management holos during transit,” he said. “As for the other, you'll be going in as temporary farm boss. Your authority, as long as you stay within the law, will be absolute as far as the waterworlders are concerned. There's no reason for you to be concerned with local customs.”

  Angie lifted her brows, but he didn't seem to notice.

  “I'll give you a list of people we want you to locate and question,” he said. “Your troubleshooter's rank, and the U.N.'s Statement of Urgent Need we've acquired, will empower you to truth-probe as many waterworlders as you need to get the information we want.”

  Angie felt a cold chill of anger go down her back. So that was it. Only a fully ranked troubleshooter could administer truth drugs against an individual's will, and then only under specific and very critical circumstances. She wasn't being sent out to solve a humanitarian problem, or even an ecological one. She was being sent out to secure the Company's future profits.

  She remembered that Nori had said something about the Company needing a ranking troubleshooter on Lesaat. She wondered what would have happened if she had fallen for his recruitment pitch earlier? Would he have stopped her from going out to that fire? Would there have been a fire?

  “There are already Company security guards at Pukui to assist you,” Crawley said. “We've been authorized to send Earth waterguards out if that becomes necessary.”

  “Why would I need Company marines?” she asked. World Life's gilled police force was only called on for the most violent of Earth's conflicts. To her knowledge, they had never been sent off-planet. “I should think everyone involved would be eager for the missing records to be found. As both farm boss and an official U.N. rep, I should be receiving full cooperation.”

  “There are ... factions on Lesaat,” he said, “that would rather see Pukui Reef lost than give up control of the TC's potential profits. It's not the Company that wants to restrict processing, Warden. It's the damn waterworlders who think they can take the law into their own hands and get away with it.”

  It became dirtier and dirtier.

  “What about Pua?” Angie said. Now that her decision was made, Angie found herself eager to go. Crawley was clearly not going to give her any further useful information. Remaining in his presence would only fuel her anger, and she already had a surfeit of that.

  “We want you to find out as much as you can about Pua, too,” Crawley said.

  Angie laughed. “I'm sure you do, Admin, but that's not what I meant, and it's not part of the contract. Whoever—whatever—Pua is, is her own business. I just want to know the legalities of taking her with me.”

  Crawley stared at her for a moment. “You'll be certified as Pua's legal guardian for the length of your stay on Lesaat. When you return to Earth, you'll have to bring her back here. Minors can't stay on Lesaat without family.” His smile was entirely without humor. “She won't be pleased when she learns her little trick to get back home didn't work.”

  Angie smiled back. “You might be interested to know that Pua wasn't the first one to tell me about the total-conversion enzyme.”

  “What?” Crawley's dark skin paled. His eyes turned hard. “Who told you?”

  “Your ‘recruitment’ officer,” she said. “Back at the forest preserve, before the fire.”

  “Yoshida?” Crawley's voice had turned to ice.

  Welcome to hell, Nori love, Angie mused.

  * * * *

  Angie stared at the great mound of Mauna Loa as she and Pua were ferried from the recon station in South Kona to the Ka'u spaceport on the southeast shore of Hawaii Island. Mauna Loa, like her sister mountain, Mauna Kea, rose to almost fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Measured from the sea floor, they were the two tallest mountains on earth.

  Their peaks each bore a layer of snow, incongruously white against the fierce azure sky. Observatory domes, once used by Earth's best astronomers, stood stark and empty. They housed museums now, the pilot explained, but few people cared to brave the altitude to visit them.

  Great swaths of hardened lava streaked Mauna Loa's smooth slopes. Some stretched all the way to the sea, particularly near the southern tip of the island. On the flatlands, near the shore, the ground was dry and barren. There was a tropical rain forest to the northeast, Angie knew, but it was hard to believe any such lushness could exist so near this windswept lava desert.

  Somewhat to Angie's surprise, Pua remained silent throughout the long ride. She sat slumped against the back of her seat. The only time she glanced up was when the pilot pointed out the Hawaiian settlement at South Point.

  “Government gave the Point to the Hawaiians a couple of decades ago,” the pilot said. “Officially, it was part of the Native Reparations Act, repayment for the U.S. overthrow of the monarchy a century or more before that. It was really just a payoff, to get the locals to stop opposing the spaceport.”

  “My mom was born at South Point,” Pua said so softly Angie almost didn't hear. “That's where they were supposed to take me after she and Daddy died.” She slumped back in her seat again, head bent forward so that her hair blocked Angie's view of her face. Moisture splashed onto the back of the bulky gloves Crawley had insisted they both wear while they were still on Earth. She quickly rubbed it away.

  “Good riddance to bad real estate, if you ask me,” the pilot said.

  Angie watched Pua for a time, then looked down again. It disturbed her to think that this flat, desolate stretch of land might be her last view of Earth. She turned her look back to the mountain, but gathering clouds had obscured its distant peak.

  Chapter 5

  At the ship captain's order, Angie and Pua were billeted separately from the other Lesaat immigrants.

  “New tankers and management personnel don't mix,” the captain explained. “I don't like trouble on my ship, so I want you and the girl to stay out of sight up here in crew quarters. The girl especially. Some of the squids were forced to leave kids of their own behind. They won't take well to her at all.”

  Angie was pleased to note that she could now consciously form her hands into fists. Forcing them to relax after the captain left proved considerably more difficult.

  As soon as they were under way, Pua established a regimen of exercises that Angie followed assiduously during the ten-day passage. She rolled weighted fingers and squeezed tension bars even while eating or studying holotapes of Lessat's algae-production techniques.

  There was frustratingly little information about the latter.

  There was no mention of the new TC enzyme in the tapes, of course, but Angie had expected at least a comprehensive explanation of the everyday algae-farm operations—not to mention better quality holos.

  “What're you doing?” Pua asked as she attempted to adjust one of the tapes for proper viewing.

  “Trying to change the damn color.”

  “Why?”

  Angie shifted her gaze from the holo's shimmering sea to Pua's curious look. “Are you telling me it's supposed to be yellow?”

 
; “I told you that Earth ocean was the wrong color,” Pua replied.

  Angie frowned and turned back to the holo. She asked the computer for a water-content analysis.

  Like Earth's oceans, the Lesaat seas were alive with microorganisms. To a depth of about twelve meters, single-celled dinoflagellates created a rich layer of plankton. On Lesaat, this microscopic algae reflected light in the yellow and orange wavelengths rather than in the blue as on Earth, and thus turned the sea gold. The waterworld plankton was bioluminescent as well, the computer went on, so that the seas were lit at night from below the surface.

  “The coral and trees and stuff light up at night, too,” Pua said. “It never gets real dark like on Earth, only a little when Shadow's high. And not even then if either of the moons is up.”

  “Shadow?” Angie asked.

  “The shadow the planet makes on the rings when the sun is on the other side,” Pua replied. “It's called an eclipse.”

  Angie took a deep breath and returned her attention to the production tape.

  “What's all this about pumping cold water up from the deep ocean?” she asked later, while viewing a particularly vague tape. “I understand the need for the energy-conversion chamber, but I thought Lesaat was supposed to provide the perfect environment for growing Earth-based algae.”

  “It does,” Pua replied. “There's lots of natural inflows of deep ocean water—that's what keeps the lagoons clean. But we need the pipes and pumps to control how fast the algae grows.”

  She pointed into the holo to a large pipe that ran along the center of the inner reef under the algae pens. “Water from down deep has lots of nutrients. So, when we want the algae to grow faster, we open the valves along this main feeder pipe. The ocean water mixes with the lagoon water and feeds the algae.”

  She shifted her pointing fingers to two smaller pipes running parallel, one to each side of the larger, central tube. “When we want the algae to stop growing so fast, we make the water go through these secondary pipes. They don't have outlets, and they're not insulated, so the lagoon water around them gets real cold. I guess algae doesn't like to be cold. I don't either, but sometimes I have to do it when I want to swim deep, especially outside the lagoon.”