She reached one of the empty staterooms without incident and let herself in. The place wasn't as flatout luxurious, somehow, as she'd expected it to be, but it stomped the snot out of her own cramped cabin. More important to her plans at the moment was the fancy computer system built into the entertainment center, a system that should give her access to the ship's public library. Pulling out her pocket knife, she stepped over to it—

And stopped short. "Nurk," she muttered. She'd expected it to be a floating nexus-connect type like the hand-held job she'd used earlier. Instead, it was hard-wired in through the entertainment lines.

Which pretty much popped the cord on the uncoupling trick she'd used earlier. If she wanted to get into the library without the computer howling up a stink, she was going to have to do it from a room that wasn't supposed to be vacant.

Mentally, she shrugged. No big deal—she'd planned on mingling with the paying passengers anyway. It was high time she got started.

The room had been fully made up, with an impressive selection of fluffy towels laid out in the bathroom. Taking two of the larger ones, she folded and stacked them for carrying and slipped out of the room. Given the crowd in the lounge she'd passed earlier, it seemed likely that most of the rooms along here would be vacant. An ideal time to go shopping.

It was a more difficult search than the hunt for her maid's uniform had been. Not only did she have to find clothes that would fit her, she also had to find them in closets so bulging that there would be a good chance the owner would never notice the loss. Upper-class people, she'd always heard, were so rich that they threw their money away on everything they saw. Unfortunately, the image didn't seem to apply to spaceliner passengers. Up and down the corridors she went, hitting stateroom after stateroom: knocking, apologizing about having the wrong room if there was an answer, letting herself in if there wasn't. And she was just about to concede defeat and move down to the middleclass section when she finally scored.

It was a huge room, easily twice the size of the vacant one she'd moved into an hour earlier. With twice the storage space, too; and every bit of it stuffed to the throat. A family of five, judging from the various sizes represented, with the teenage daughter taking more than her fair share of the closet space. Chandris sorted through the dresses, chose two of the plainest layer-style ones, and folded them up inside her towels. An equally bulging jewelry box beckoned from the top of one of the dressers, and for a moment she was tempted. But only for a moment. An upper-class teen might not miss a dress or two; but everyone kept tabs on their jewelry.

She took the dresses back to her borrowed room, added a third towel to her pile, and returned to the hunt. Her newly changed luck held: the very next stateroom she tried contained not only too many dresses, but too many shoes as well. Neither set was exactly her size, but close enough. Again selecting a layer-style dress, she hid it and a pair of shoes inside her stack of towels and went back to her room.

There, using her knife and the compact sewing kit she'd brought from her luggage, she set to work stripping the various layers of the dresses apart. There'd been a girl from the Barrio once who'd swiped a fancy outfit during a score and gotten cracked two days later when the original owner spotted her wearing it on the street, and Chandris had no intention of doing something that puffheaded herself. The alterations took her nearly two hours; but when she was finished she had combined parts from the three dresses to form three entirely new and—hopefully—unrecognizable ones.

Altering herself was next. First step was to get the damn blonding out of her hair, returning it to its natural shiny black. She cleaned her face and hands next, getting rid of both the cosmetic stuff and the underbase that had lightened her skin into line with the blonded hair. Redoing the makeup was easy enough—from what she'd seen, the upper-class women aboard the Xirrus used far less makeup than was common among middle-class or even Barrio women. Possibly because they didn't need to try and make themselves attractive; more likely because they could afford to go with cosmetic surgery instead. Still, as Trilling used to say, vanity had its uses, provided it was in other people.

Redoing her hair was a little harder. Most of the women she'd seen while hunting for clothes had been pretty free with the frostsprays, fancy holdings, and jeweled clips, none of which Chandris had available even if she'd known how to fasten them in. Fortunately, she'd also spotted a few who had simply put their hair into elaborate braidings, and she'd passed close enough to one of them to get a good look at the pattern. Actually recreating it was trickier than she'd expected, but with persistence and several false starts she finally got it more or less right.

And now came the easy part. Giving herself a careful examination in the long foyer mirror, she keyed off the lights and left the stateroom. With the outer woman transformed from lower-class scorer to upper-class leech, it was time to do the same for the inner woman.

Earlier, she'd given herself a leisurely half hour to learn how to play a newly middle-class college student. Now, wandering between the various upper-class lounges, she had her new role down in half that time. Part of that was sheer necessity—she hadn't eaten since late morning, and was starting to feel the familiar pangs of hunger—but mostly it was that the mannerisms of these people were genuinely less complicated. Perhaps, she thought once, their money and power did their talking for them.

A fresh rumble ran through her stomach; but fortunately the solution was already close at hand. He was hovering not quite obviously at the edge of her vision, and had been there since the second of the lounges she had visited. Around fifty years old, he was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and jeweled neck clasp and the look of a man on the hunt.

Under other circumstances she would probably have let him make the first move. With her stomach starting to hurt, she wasn't in the mood to be patient. Drifting toward him, her eyes turned elsewhere, she shifted direction with smooth suddenness and bumped gently into him. "Oh!—excuse me," she said, looking up into his eyes. "That wasn't very graceful of me, was it?"

"Don't worry about it," he said, smiling a hunter's smile back at her. "Spaceliner travel does that all the time to people. Shifting engine thrusts throw the pseudogravity off, and all."

She raised her eyebrows fractionally and returned the smile. "You sound like someone who travels a lot."

It was an obvious setup line, and he grabbed it with both hands. "More than I wish, sometimes," he said. "My company's headquartered on Seraph, but we're also heavily involved in Lorelei asteroid mining and Balmoral orbital refining. Makes for a busy schedule. Stardust Metals—you might possibly have heard of us."

"Don't be modest," she chided gently. "Of course I've heard of you." She hadn't, actually, until she'd caught a passing reference ten minutes earlier. But he didn't need to know that. "And what is it you do for them?"

He grinned, the hunter's smile again. "Mostly try to keep them as profitable as possible," he said, offering his hand. "I'm Amberson Toomes; part owner and CMD."

She raised her eyebrows, higher this time. "Really!" she said, wondering what the hell a CMD was.

"I'm impressed."

He shrugged modestly. "Don't be. Most of the people here are considerably more important than I am."

"If importance is judged by how well you ignore strangers, they're definitely more important than you," she said ruefully, dropping her eyes a bit. "I've been walking around for—oh, I don't know how long—and you're the first person who's bothered to speak with me."