As she entered the Guild Master's offices, the first thing she saw was the empty desk, its surface clear of pencil files or any work at all. She frowned. Trag? No, Trag was gone. Lars had not found a suitable assistant. He would have to. No wonder he had been snapping at her in the Ranges. She knew from the amount of work she had seen Lanzecki get through—and that with Trag's help—that the Guild Mastership was no sinecure. She snorted to herself: Lars had been a damned fool to get roped into the job. She bet he hadn't been sailing once since he had become Guild Master!

"When" was not a word she often used, but it suddenly flicked across her consciousness. When had he taken over from Lanzecki? She grunted, canceling that irritating consideration as she continued across the floor to the inner office.

Lars was deep in contemplation of whatever was on his desk screen. He had had time to shower and change; his hair was still damp. To one side, in front of the wide window that overlooked the immense doors of the Hangar, a table had been set, and the enticing odors of some of her favorite foods wafted to her. Becoming aware of someone else in the room, he looked up with a scowl that shifted into a smile as he jumped to his feet.

"Sunny!" He gestured for her to join him at the table, then seated her.

"What are you after now?" she asked, a teasing note in her voice to draw the sting of her cynicism.

"Ah, lovey," he said, dropping a kiss on her cheek before he took his own seat, "give me credit for some altruism."

"Why should I?"

Grinning at her, he searched her face and was evidently satisfied by what he saw. She cocked her head at him.

"So?"

"Eat first, talk later. I'd like to see a little more flesh on your bones before we go out again."

She groaned. "So we're not going back out as soon as the storm clears?"

In place of an answer, he served generous portions of her favorite foods on to her plate. When he started to help himself, she saw that he had ordered the nicco spikes she hated even to smell. He grinned when she twitched her nose in disgust.

"You see, I'm not catering entirely to you, Killa Ree, and no, we're not able to go out immediately. Black crystal's not the only one of our products in demand." He ended the sentence abruptly. "I'd be able to go quicker if you could see your way clear to giving me a little help."

"I thought helping you was finding black. I'll go alone."

"No!" The single word was so forceful that she stared at him in surprise. Lars hadn't used to take such a tone with her. She bristled, but he reached for her arm, shaking some of the milsi stalks from her half-raised spoon, before his touch softened in apology. "No, Killa. Too dangerous. You're not completely over the deprivation and you'd thrall. Especially if you were cutting black alone."

While she still resisted his prohibition, she had to admit that she would be extremely vulnerable to black thrall. She also had to admit that she had been in a terrible state when they had gone out: as near as made no never mind to being a crystallized cripple. They might have been searching for black crystal, but she was bloody lucky they hadn't found any. Green thrall had been deep enough. She owed him a lot for risking his own neck taking her out at all in that state.

"So, what do you need done, Guild Master?" she asked flippantly.

He smiled, with genuine relief. "Thanks, Sunny, I really appreciate it."

"So?"

"Eat first," he said. "I can't think when my stomach's clinging to my backbone."

She was hungrier than she had thought and quite willing to concentrate on eating. Odd how a full belly could reduce resistance to unpalatable business.

When they had cleared the last morsel from the platters, Lars leaned back, patting his stomach and smiling.

"That's better. Now, if you could finish rounding up the figures and prices on the accounts I have on the screen, then I can go salve wounded feelings."

"Whose?"

"Clarend and Ritwili have legitimate grievances which must be addressed, and I've a delegation to meet at Shankill that I can no longer postpone."

"I might be better with the delegation than with the files," she suggested warily.

"It's the sort of thing you've done for Lanzecki before. D'you remember the Apharian contingent? Well, I've got the Blackwell Triad looking for favors now. Similar circumstances, similar solution, but I need the account figures on hand."

"Bor-ring," she said, rolling her eyes.

"A lot of what I have to do is boring, and yet . . ." Lars regarded her, his wide mouth curling in a grin, "I rather like finding out how this Guild hangs together against all comers."

Killashandra snorted. "We've a unique product that no one else can produce, no matter how hard they try. We're in control."

"I like that 'we', Sunny." He reached across the table to fondle her hand. "I'll go heal fractured feelings; you find me figures."

"Just this once, because I owe you," she warned him, pulling her hand away and shaking her finger at him. "Don't think you can rope me into this full time. I'm a singer, not a key tapper! Find yourself a recruit with business training."

"I'm trying to," he said with a sly grin.

Once she became absorbed in the analysis, Killashandra found it more interesting than she had expected. Certainly the scope of the Guild's authority—and its unassailable position as the only source of communication crystal systems—was wider than she had imagined. Her job—the cutting—was but the beginning of a multitude of complex processes with end uses in constant demand throughout the inhabited galaxy. Deprive a world of Ballybran crystal, and its economy would collapse, so vital were the shafts, and even the splinters, to technology on all levels. The pure research buffos in the labs here kept finding new applications of crystal—even ground shards had uses as abrasives. The more brilliant of the smaller splinters could be made into resonating jewelry, much in vogue again. She wondered how the galaxy had let one Guild gain so much power. What had Lars been on about? Reorganizing? Modernizing? What? The Guild bought state-of-the-art technology in other fields.

Unable to resist the temptation of having unrestricted access to the Guild's master files, Killashandra ran some that she might never again have a chance to discover. Lars had said something about aggregate cutting figures. She wanted to know just how much she, Killashandra Ree, had contributed to the success of the Guild. Once in the ultraconfidential files, those entries were easy enough to find. But the dating of their first duet journey was a shock. They couldn't have been cutting that long. They couldn't . . .

She canceled the file and sat looking at the screen, patiently blinking a readiness to oblige her. She couldn't . . .

"Sunny?" Lars's voice on the comunit broke through the fugue such knowledge caused. "Sunny, got those figures for me? Sunny? Sunny, what's wrong?"

His voice, concerned and increasingly anxious, roused her.

"I got 'em . . . " She managed to get the words out.

"Sunny, what's the matter?"

"Am I old, Lars?"

There wasn't much of a pause and, later on, she was never sure if there had been any before he laughed. "Old? A singer never gets old, Sunny." His voice rippled with a laughter that sounded genuine to her critical ear. She couldn't even imagine that his amusement had been forced. "That's why we become singers. To never get old. Give me those figures, will you, and then I can get back from Shankill and show you just how ageless we both are! Don't get sidetracked by trivia like that, Killa. Now, what are those figures? Patch them through, will you?"

Like an AI, she performed the necessary function and then leaned back in the Guild Master's comfortable but too big chair and tried to remember how she could possibly have cut so many tons of crystal over so many decades.