a coffee, he would bring her a cup of hot tea. He sought her opinion, and he would ask her seemingly random things. Did she have a chance to go to the Botanical Gardens? Has she been to the Terraces?
He must've been something else on the bionet. She would never know. He would never see her on the bionet either.
Lucky for her, her ability to control her emotions was never in question. She was never less than professional in their interactions.
The office door slid open. Claire stepped inside.
Venturo turned. She read fury in his eyes. His mind churned and broiled. "We're about to lose the Sangori account."
What? "To whom?" she asked.
"De Solis Security."
DSS. Guardian's biggest rival.
Claire reviewed the facts. Bionet safety consisted of two phases: the establishment and the maintenance. The establishment meant installation of static security mechanisms and structuring the bionet in a way that would lead an intruder into these defenses. The maintenance consisted of responding to active threats. Of the two, the establishment phase was the most costly and the most labor-intensive. Because of the danger involved, the maintenance brought in a larger amount of money but required fewer man-hours.
Venturo had given the Sangori a very good deal on the establishment to entice them into employing Guardian, Inc. He had been planning to recoup his costs on the maintenance fees.
The contract had been signed. They'd been working on the establishment phase for the past three weeks and it was completed this morning. Giving it up would mean DSS would reap all of the benefits of their groundwork.
A clause in the contract gave Sangori legal means to terminate it after the establishment. The clause was standard, but in every meeting with Venturo and Savien, the head of the Sangori family, had asserted his intention to continue with the maintenance phase. He broke his word.
The anger in Ven's mind told her they had no legal recourse.
"How much do we stand to lose?" she asked.
"Two million credits," he said. "It's not the money."
"I don't understand," she said.
"Savien Sangori doesn't have the expertise to engineer this scheme on his own. He knows money; he doesn't understand the bionet. This took a psycher, someone who had looked at the amount of work involved and quoted him exact numbers prior to him ever walking into my building. DDS has conspired with him. They must've offered him monthly maintenance at a lower price if he managed to get the establishment out of me. They set us up."
Now she understood. "It's about pride then."
He faced her. "Yes. More, it's about business. I've been double-crossed. Suckered like a fool. I provide security. Would you want a gullible fool to protect your data?"
"A psycher's gullibility has no bearing on the destructive potential of his mind." She almost bit the last word. She shouldn't have said that.
Ven looked at her, his mind focusing on hers. If he looked too closely, she would be outed.
"Forgive me," Claire said. "I've been trying to read some research in my spare time. I may have misunderstood."
He considered it for a long second and let it go.
"You understand perfectly," he said. "But not many other people do."
He pulled his doublet off the back of his chair.
"Where are you going?"
"To have a conversation with Savien Sangori. I'm going to attempt to explain the facts of life to him."
"Those facts being?" she asked.
"I make a dangerous enemy," he said, "and Sangori is an old provincial family. They have never before betrayed the integrity of their family name to make a credit. I'm curious why they decided to start now."
"What if he refuses to talk to you?"
"I'm not planning on giving him a chance to decline."
Alarm dashed through her. She set her pseudopapers in the chair and plucked her tablet out from the bottom of the stack.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I'm coming with you."
"Why?"
"Because you shouldn't go alone."
He peered at her, incredulous. "And you're planning to come as my bodyguard?"
"I am."
It would take her at least three minutes to break through the shell over her mind, bringing her to combat readiness. It would be an eternity in a psycher fight, where death was instant. Still, she couldn't let him go alone and she didn't need to listen to his mind to realize he wouldn't take anyone he considered capable of delivering damage to watch his back. Venturo Escana, arrogant beast that he was, would consider backup beneath him.
"Just out of purely academic curiosity, how exactly are you planning to defend me?" Ven asked. "You have