by Andre Norton
"Welcome committee at ninety degrees," Jellico said. "Must have radioed ahead."
Rael nodded. At first she could barely get up when the restraints snapped away, but then she realized it wasn’t the weakening aftermath of an incredible adrenaline rush, but the 1.6 gees.
"Let’s be quick," she said as the three Shver moved toward them with elephantine grace.
Rael and Jellico toiled as fast as they could toward an exit, and Rael saw that Jellico was familiar with high gee, too: despite their haste he planted each foot deliberately, knees slightly bent to cushion vulnerable knee cartilage.
She was beginning to feel the strain in her thighs when the captain turned aside into a narrow corridor that debouched into a lift station.
There was no one there, and no one in the pod that answered their summons.
With deep, twinned sighs they stood and watched as the crowd of Shver, arriving too late, looked up at them. The pod accelerated, back toward the Spin Axis and the Queen.
For a moment neither said anything.
"The napuir fruit!" she gasped finally.
Jellico’s smile stretched into a grin, and suddenly he was laughing too. "The candy," he said huskily. "Those arms and legs." He motioned in a windmill shape, and Rael bent double.
"The Toa... th-the Toas-s-s..." She couldn’t get the words out.
They laughed harder, reviewing in gasped one-word exclamations their wild trip through the habitat. Each time Rael thought she was going to stop, she’d remember the howls, curses, gibbering wails of dismay, and gusted into new mirth.
They laughed together. They were alone, or she felt they were alone, walled off from the rest of the universe by the experience they had shared, by their hilarity, by the attraction that had never been so strong.
Still laughing, she chanced to look up, to find his gray eyes—alight with merriment—gazing back at her. And then his expression changed. It was nothing dramatic, like in the vids. A slight widening of the eyes, and a catch of the breath, but she felt his physical awareness ringing through muscle and bones, and watched him feel it in his turn, and before either of them could speak, he took a step, and she reached with a hand, and their lips met in a kiss.
It was an awkward first kiss, half awry, both of them still breathing fast, but the singing of her nerves promised much better. For a moment she leaned against his powerful body, and the kiss deepened—and suddenly he broke away. His eyes were now dark, with passion, with confusion, with wariness.
"We’re not safe." he started. His voice was hoarse; he stopped, and faint color ridged his cheekbones.
"Right," she said, striving for balance. "You know ’em?" she asked, when she had caught her breath.
He shook his head. "Not the one or two I saw. You?"
"Nothing from my past," she said. And, glad to have something to look at, she said, "Here we are—change point."
In silence they stepped out of the pod and moved a ways up the concourse toward the maglev that would take them to the docks. Rael had never felt so attuned to Jellico; she listened to the light sound of his breathing, watched the little frown between his eyes, and felt the swiftness of his thoughts.
"Damn," he said presently, indicating the maglev with his chin. "Unless this was random—which I doubt—they know who we are. Which means they know where we dock."
"Which means they might be waiting when we do debark," she said.
Jellico’s mouth was grim again. "We chased halfway up into the light zone and I never saw a Monitor. Convenient, isn’t it?"
"For whom?" she countered lightly. "We did enough damage to guarantee complaints against us."
He gave his head a shake. "At first I wanted to get their attention, but now. it’s hard not to see some kind of conspiracy against us, at least passively abetted by the authorities." He squinted up at the alien tangle of cylindrical buildings, all reflecting light in a way never seen on any planet. The weirdness of the place had never seemed so profound. "Well. You ready for another round?" he asked as they walked back onto the maglev concourse. "Or shall we take the long way back to the docks?"
She shook her head. "As you said, they seem to know who we are, so why bother? We can debark almost in sight of the Queen, certainly in earshot. If they are waiting for us, maybe we’ll learn something this way." She indicated the maglev.
A few seconds later another pod drew up with a hiss, and they went inside and dropped onto a bench. No one was in their immediate vicinity.
Jellico looked about him. He was back in control now, his emotions shut away as effectively as ever. "So you don’t think we’re in danger either?"
She sighed. "They’re either astoundingly rotten shots or else there’s something else going on."
"Most obvious reason is that they don’t want to risk a capital crime—like using blasters. Pellets are nasty, but they’re legal here, and they’re also not fatal. If they wanted to kill us, there are plenty of other illegal weapons that won’t punch holes in the habitat walls."
"If they really wanted us dead, they’d hire the Deathguard," Rael said.
"The Shver outcasts?" Jellico’s brows lifted. "I take it they are nonpartisan about their trade?"
"Whoever pays them the most," Rael said. "Those people after us weren’t trained in that kind of thing, or we wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did. And those pellets wouldn’t kill, just make us helpless."
"They might have wanted to get hold of us," Jellico said. "Though why grab us, I can’t guess. We don’t know anything that anyone would want, and as for the usual grab-and-ransom, we’ve got to be the most cash-strapped Traders in the entire habitat."
"Mmmm, just as well they didn’t succeed, no matter what they wanted," Rael said. "There are places on Exchange I’d just as soon not visit, not without weapons of my own and a crew of heavies to back me up."
Jellico nodded. "On the other hand, it could be they didn’t want to hit us at all, but scare us."
"Into leaving Exchange?" she said.
"And abandoning whatever it is someone doesn’t want us finding out."
Rael sighed. "You don’t want to go to the authorities?"
Jellico ran his hand through his short hair, and grimaced slightly. "As I said, I don’t ordinarily have much patience with those who see conspiracies everywhere. I suppose we can go see Ross again. but I think I want to try solving this ourselves. Or at least find out more data as ammunition when we do contact the authorities."
The pod stopped then, and a tall Shver stepped in, sitting on the opposite bench with the great care of heavy-grav beings in light grav.
Rael felt the tension in Jellico, and was not sorry to have the opportunity for talk taken away. She wanted very badly to get back to the Queen, to retire to her cabin and think things through. And, she reflected wryly, unless she missed her guess, the captain probably felt just the same.
When they finally reached their destination, Rael braced herself for anything—but no one at all was on the concourse, and no one appeared. Unmolested, they reached the docks and soon were on board the Queen.
She was about to go straight to her cabin when Mura called, "Captain?"
His voice was angry. Alarm flooded through Rael; she saw Jellico’s jaw harden.
They walked into the galley, to see half the crew gathered there. But they weren’t what drew her attention.
Gripped in Dane Thorson’s big hands was a small, greenish-blue, raggedly clad being with a webbed crest, now sadly fallen, and thin webbed fingers and toes.
"Found a stowaway," Thorson said.
"And a thief," Mura added.
Johan Stotz put in sourly, "And a saboteur."
11
”Mr. Ya,” Captain Jellico said, "contact the Monitors."
Dane Thorson felt the little being twitch in his grasp, but it was so small his feet were in no danger of lifting off the deck even though he
hadn’t magged his boots.
"No thief, me!" it declared in a fluting voice
. "I trade, I trade everythings!"
"What were you doing in our engine compartment?" Stotz asked, his eyes flinty. "That was trading?"
"No! I stop you move, me," came the prompt answer in heavily accented universal Trade speech. "No take cable, turn it. You not move to heavy zone, far away other side."
The captain sat down in a chair directly opposite the little blue-green person. Seated, he and the prisoner were eye to eye. Dane didn’t envy the stowaway’s view of an angry captain. Even at his most mild, Jellico looked tough, and he was obviously not in a good mood now.
"Who are you?" the captain asked. "And why are you on my ship?"
"I Tooe," was the prompt answer. "I Trader, me. No thief! Goo," the stowaway added in a sound midway between a cry and a whistle. Its frustration was palpable as it added some rapid words in Kanddoyd and then in Rigelian.
At the latter, Dane saw Rael Cofort’s eyes widen. The doctor turned to the captain and said, "I can speak some Rigelian. Would you like me to question her?"
"Her?" the captain said, with a curious smile. "I might have known you’d speak Rigelian."
Dr. Cofort’s lovely face glowed with color. "We traded quite a bit with certain Rigelian colonies when I was very small," she said. Then she turned to the stowaway and addressed her slowly in the hissing saurian tongue: "Tell us who you are and why you are here."
Dane understood that much, but none of the answer that spilled at terrific speed from Tooe in response.
No one spoke as the little stowaway talked, sometimes gesturing with her thin webbed hands. Dane watched with fascination as the fervor of her animated movements lifted her off the deck; she merely hooked out a foot
under the edge of the table and pulled herself back down with impossible grace—and left her leg cocked up as though the position were perfectly natural. She now stood at an angle to everyone else in the room.
He looked down at the little head with its smooth, faintly scaled skin, colored much more blue than the normal Rigelian green. He saw Tooe’s crest flicker, rise, flatten in anger, then fold as she talked. She was obviously a hybrid between a Rigelian and one of the other races seeded by the same saurians millennia ago. The Rigelians did not countenance hybrids; unlike Terrans, who mostly welcomed diversity in the human genome, they were exceedingly purist in outlook, and just as antagonistic toward those with similar biologies as they were toward those of far different backgrounds. He wondered how old she was.
Finally she came to a stop, and Dr. Cofort rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "It’s been a long time, and the dialect Tooe speaks is... unique, but I think I have most of her story."
"Let’s hear it," the captain said.
"She came on board just after we landed, and has been hiding in the cargo area ever since. She brought along a stash of items she thought we could use, and has been leaving them out, one at a time, since she ran out of her own food and had to start using ours. She insists she would have come forward as soon as we blasted out, but it was taking us a long time to do so. She wants to be a Trader, and thinks this was her only chance."
"Does her family concur?"
"She claims her only family is a group of other. castaways. They live up at the Spin Axis," Cofort said. "Her age works out to be about nineteen Standard years, which is technically adulthood by Terran law, at least. So she’s an independent entity."
Jellico tapped his fingers lightly on the table, then looked up at Dane. "Lock her in the brig for now. We have things to discuss."
Dane gently pulled his prisoner back and turned toward the door; she was so small her mass seemed utterly negligible. He hated this kind of duty, especially when it involved a being so small and flimsy. As he passed by Dr. Cofort he saw her wince in silent sympathy for the little Rigelian, which made Dane feel even worse.
Tooe made no protest as they descended to the brig, Dane keeping a firm grip on her spindly arm. Having seen her performance at the table, he had no doubt that he’d never catch her in free fall.
And yet Stotz did.
He looked at her thoughtfully when they reached the bare cabin that served as the Queen's brig and he had pushed her gently through the door. She drifted across the tiny room, folded down the bench from one wall, and sat upside down under the seat, curling her limbs up into a ball and putting her chin on her knees. Vertigo seized Dane as the utter naturalness of her motions upended his perceptions—now he was the one on the ceiling. He magged his boots, feeling himself click firmly to the deckplates, and he breathed deeply, forcing the vertigo away.
She said nothing; big deep yellow eyes looked up at Dane. He hastily closed the door, by now feeling like the biggest villain in the universe.
It wasn’t until he got back to the gallery and heard the others talking that he was able to rid himself of the sensation of walking on the ceiling.
"We’ve been in microgee too long," he muttered under his breath as he ducked through the hatch.
"... biggest discrepancy in what she was saying," Stotz’s voice carried over the others. "If she wanted to blast off with us, then why did I catch her sabotaging my drive?"
Dr. Cofort said, "She insisted it was a measure to keep us from moving up to the heavy zone. She must have been listening when the captain issued the order to prepare for the move, just before we left to visit the legate."
Jasper Weeks said softly, "Have to admit it was clever, to reverse the cable connecting the ignition system to the drive. It would have taken us hours to check all those cables, but it wasn’t really damage."
Stotz grunted. "Knows her way around an engine, then."
Mura said, "And these other things she left for me to find. Some of them are odd, but they’re not useless."
Jellico looked across at the doctor. "Did she say why she picked our ship?"
"Yes, she did," Cofort answered. "She said it was clean, and the animals were happy. She said she couldn’t believe that a ship of villains would be kind to their animals."
"Villains!" Ali exclaimed. "That’s a loud one, coming from a saboteur!"
"What I don’t like," the captain said, "is the fact that her being here is one more strange thing going on in a series that is far too long for my peace of mind."
Van Ryke pushed himself back down the bulkhead, where he had slowly drifted during the discussion. "But if what she says is true, she got here before things started going sour on us."
"Which was the day we tried to track down the old owners of the Starvenger," Rip said.
Jellico nodded. "Right. But none of you know this: the doctor and I were shot at when we were returning just now. Shot at with taste-agains, and chased halfway back to the docks—and no Monitors in sight."
The crew stared in amazed silence.
"So you can see why I don’t like any more coincidences showing up."
"So what do we do with her?" Dr. Cofort asked, frowning slightly.
"I have to admit, if she is a free agent, and if the authorities are corrupt, the idea of turning her over to them sticks in my craw," Jellico said. "But I don’t want her wandering around my ship unsupervised. Though she didn’t do any real damage up until now, our situation is too ticklish to risk any more problems. And though she claims to be honest, didn’t she admit to coming from one of the Spin Axis gangs? I thought that was where the detritus of the three civilizations hid out."
"Behind every being in such ’detritus’ usually lies some kind of personal tragedy," Cofort said in a quiet voice. "People, especially those so young, seldom choose a life beyond the law. They are usually driven to it." The doctor shook her head. "Tooe did mention she lived in a creche when she
was very small, but they threw her out for nonpayment."
Jellico grunted. "Rigelian. they don’t take kindly to hybrids. If her other parent was a spacehound and thought he or she’d make it back, but didn’t, that might explain the nonpayment."
"But not why a small child was thrown out to live hand to mouth," Van Ryke growled. "The name ’Harmonious E
xchange’ seems to fit this canister less every hour we’re here."
The captain frowned for a long time, during which no one spoke. Then he surprised Dane by looking up at him. "What do you think we should do with her?"
Dane rubbed his jaw, trying to think. He hated the idea of any of the others thinking him sentimental, but the more he heard of Tooe’s story—if it was true—the more it reminded him of his early years in the Federation Home. Of course no one had thrown him out, but there had been times he’d half wished they would, so bleak was the life there, with the constant hard work in order to strive for the grades that would get one into the Training Pool, and thence to Service, and the constant reminders about how grateful the orphans should be for their free education and board.
He felt that if she spoke the truth, she deserved a fair chance at a decent trade, just like he’d had. So he said, "I’ll take charge of her for now, if you like."
"I’ll help," Ali spoke up, which surprised Dane. It seemed to surprise the others as well, for there were lifted brows and questioning glances, to which Ali returned a wry smile and an elegant shrug. Dane remembered what little he’d heard about Ali Kamil’s past, and realized he probably felt the same as Dane.
"And I," Rip Shannon said, with his easy smile. "Thorson and I dead-ended on our search, anyway."
Jellico grunted again. "That was my next question." He dropped his hands onto his knees; Dane could see the muscles in his leg bunch as they compensated by curling up under the bench he was seated on to cancel the reaction of his gesture. "Well, then, let’s try this. You boys take charge of this stowaway. If she offers you any trouble, any at all, or lies to you, then over to the Monitors she goes, corrupt or not. I won’t have a troublemaker
on board, especially now. But if she seems useful. we’ll talk again. Maybe she can earn passage elsewhere, at least."
Dane nodded, feeling pleased.
"As for our other matter, it’s beginning to look like someone doesn’t want us finding out anything about our derelict.