Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  “You want to know what the substance was that damaged your station today.” Mercury sounded smug. “I knew you’d want to buy what we know about it.”

  “Not all you know.” I doubt I could afford that. “I’d like the name of it.”

  Mercury’s large dark eyes locked onto Daya like the gaze of a raptor. But Daya had dealt with raptors and Angels before. Daya waited. “Emberalm,” the Angel finally said.

  Surprised, Daya said, “That is a word out of legend. The legends say the Old Alliance used something called emberalm to cleanse Star Pitfall of its great nest of monsters, but the legends fail to describe what emberalm was.”

  Mercury smirked. “Now you know.”

  “Fair trade.” Daya handed the Angel a Station credit disk. The credit could be used in any of the Station’s dispensers of food and fresh clothing or the printers for tools and parts. From experience, she knew that the credit would soon be used with no one reporting having seen an Angel do it. That was how trading with the Angels worked.

  She wondered what the auditor would make of it.

  Two

  The next morning, Rik went to Tattujayan’s office before it was scheduled to open for the day. He found her already at her desk. “I have a question or two about your accounts.”

  She steepled her hands under her chin.

  Actually, he had six or eight questions, and some of them had sharp points, but it was always good to start with the most harmless of questions. “Why is there an expense for dog food? Most space places have a cat. And cat food should be listed under pest control.”

  “We’ve no need for cats. We don’t have commodities such as grain in storage to harbor rodents. We do have several guard dogs, as you will see, if you let me show you Star Corner Station today.”

  Rik followed her to the nearest vator. He enjoyed the walk. She was as attractive from behind as from other angles. She wore practical coveralls under her red Steppe tunic, which was well-fitting and probably kept her warm. Rik had definitely not found the Station to be wastefully over-heated. It was cold everywhere.

  Going upward in the vator, she told him, “The Station has a large hub from which extend five long service spines. It resembles a hand.” She held her own hand up to illustrate. “Cargo handling is what everything in the thumb was designed for. Passenger transportation facilities were the first finger. So you arrived in the docks between thumb and forefinger. Administration areas were in the middle finger. There’s an ancient and obscene hand gesture that involved a middle finger, and the gesture still survives only in the form of jokes about the clumsy joint administration of the Station by Goya, Faxe, and Wendis!

  “Science facilities—laboratories, biological containment facilities, telescopes—were in the fourth finger. And military operations were in the little finger. Originally each finger was a long service spine full of modules. Now, the modules are either removed or closed except for what’s at the base of the fingers. The palm of the station, meanwhile, is the ore processing facility. Here.” It was a well-timed little speech, concluded just as the door of the vator opened.

  Rik found the ore processing plant to be an old but well-designed facility of its kind. It received unmanned ore haulers from Trove, processing the ore into metal and generating tailings that were loaded back into ore haulers and launched back to Trove.

  There seemed to be the right number of personnel for this operation—neither so many as to indicate a padded payroll nor so few as to be overworked. They greeted Tattujayan with waves or bows as suited their cultural backgrounds. Rik saw no disrespectful scowls or malicious grins behind her back, much less any rude finger gestures. He saw no signs of disrespect for himself either—a nice change from some of his jobs where a FINFINA auditor was unwelcome.

  His help in the emergency yesterday seemed to have won him extraordinary respect here. He wouldn’t waste it.

  A narrow window gave a constricted view of the yard. Rik would have liked a better view, but any window in the ore yard was subject to collision from loose objects ranging from asteroids to errant ore haulers. A wide and unprotected window would have been an accident waiting to happen. He craned his neck to watch an ore hauler glide toward the web of cables in the palm of the Station-hand. Caught in the web of cables, the hauler slowed, shivered, and moved toward a processing port on the edge of the Station.

  Tattujayan abruptly asked, “Do you know the Station’s history?”

  “It was largely decommissioned when it ceased to be profitable about forty years ago.”

  She crossed her arms. “That is so gaunt an explanation as to border on falsehood, so let me tell you the truth. This used to be Starcrossing Station. It was a great interstellar crossroads. But star travel turning points can creep and shift relative to real space. Forty years ago the major starjump point here moved away. What’s left is a minor point that was here all along. Wendis built a new facility where the major point is now—the facility called Starway. It’s much more compact than this.”

  Rik nodded. “I’ve stayed in the hotel there.”

  “Wendis maintains this Station, now called Star Corner. Goya keeps the mining operations going. And Faxe has not backed out of the ancient contract that describes the complicated ownership of the Station.” She raised an elegantly curved dark eyebrow at him. “Yet.”

  “I’m not a legalist who parses contractual obligations,” he said smoothly. “I only assess the accounting and the financial ramifications of the operations.”

  Out in the yard, the ore hauler disappeared into a port on the wall of the Station. “The processing ports are specific to various ores and different materials,” she told him. “This is the Port level. It makes a complete ring around the hollow of the hand.”

  “How many processing ports are active?”

  “Twenty of an original hundred.”

  “Has ore production on Trove scaled back that much?”

  “No. The Station no longer processes many of the original materials.”

  That word again. Materials. He raised his own eyebrow.

  “When there was a major starjump point here, it gave access to the strangest place in all of known space. That way.” She indicated a thick knot of dark dust and bright blue and pink nebular gas. “In the midst of that lurked a brown dwarf star surrounded by a cluster of terminal points, also called star pits. These were points that could be arrived at by starjump, but not departed from. The dead space around the brown dwarf star was called Star Pitfall. It was a place of shipwreck and stranding, full of the wrecks of a thousand dead civilizations’ worth of ships. It was infested with monsters that feasted on the infallen ships and their unlucky crews. The Old Alliance finally eradicated the monsters with the red stuff you saw yesterday. The name of it is emberalm.

  “Salvage operations, based here, went on for centuries for the wreckage of the ancient ships. Some of the materials discovered were exotic and some extremely dangerous. Some of the ports were clean rooms, and some were explosion-resistant bunkers. Don’t they teach ancient history on Faxe?”

  As a matter of fact, Rik was vaguely aware what she’d said—the place of wreck and ruin called Star Pitfall, the thousand-year salvage of it, and more generally, the existence of the ruins of long-dead civilizations across the stars. Still, his honest answer would have been, Who cares? Rik shrugged.

  She peered through the window at a sharp angle, said, “Ah,” led him to another narrow window down the corridor, and tapped the window significantly. “Look.”

  Something smaller and more irregular than an ore hauler was moving out there. It spidered along a cable. As Rik watched, it reached out—with what looked like a tentacle—to snare a floating piece of metal. Which it stuffed into a gaping maw of a mouth.

  Rik found his own mouth hanging open in astonishment. He shut it.

  “The monsters of Star Pitfall turned out to have been genetically engineered by some long-gone civilization from those creatures, which subsist on orbital debris. One o
f the science laboratories recreated them. They’re smart enough to stay away from the ore haulers and cheaper than having personnel or robots patrol for debris. They do need occasional supplementation of their diet with organic material. Thus the dog food. They also make it hard for vandals or saboteurs to operate in the ore yard because they have a taste for fresh meat. So they are our ore-yard guard dogs.” She looked at his face and laughed. “Surprise.”

  More than the ore-yard dog surprised him. So did she. And so did he himself. Something about her was like an electromagnetic field that attracted him powerfully. He turned away from the window.

  The remainder of the morning consisted of a tour through the bases of the fingers, with no further surprises. Finally they returned to the Main level of the Station, where they’d started, and she showed him the recreation center. It looked too big and empty—better suited to the thousand who used to crew this Station than to the hundred who were here now. In one corner stood another goldfish tank. On a shelf above the tank another large, untidy plant dangled a tendril in the water. Like all well-appointed space places, the Station had plants around, and fish tanks—both soothing to human nerves. The plant, though, was remarkably identical to the one in her office. Maybe somebody had moved it.

  When she saw it, Tattujayan hissed. She pulled the tendril out of the water. Then she counted the goldfish.

  Rik knew a deliberate distraction when he saw one. “Your tour is over?”

  “Yes,” she snapped.

  “There are areas you’ve not shown me.”

  She looked over her shoulder, meeting his stern look with an unflinching look of her own. “They are decommissioned and sealed. In some cases, they’re contaminated. My financial accounts list those areas and the drain they make on Station energy resources—in most cases, no drain at all, sometimes some climate control. Whatever you do, Auditor, don’t go anywhere like that alone.”

  Rik returned to his small but adequate cabin in a very thoughtful mood. He started his audit report, opening the template in his notebook. He had enough information now for a preliminary report, so he submitted the report to the template.

  He got back a one-word evaluation from the template. Unacceptable.

  Rik stared at that word.

  Audit templates were a sophisticated piece of technology, with a fair degree of machine intelligence. He’d never had his template flatly refuse his findings, though he’d had a few arguments with it. He’d learned how to win those arguments. More than most auditors, Rik understood the audit template and how to get to the bottom of its arguments and programmed objections. So he did.

  What he found startled him. Deep in his audit template, there was new programming. He hadn’t put it there: it had to have come from the Authority. The new programming had an unprecedented bias. It wanted evidence of Manager Tattujayan’s dishonesty and evidence that she was embezzling Station funds, profiteering, or engaging in bribery.

  That couldn’t be right.

  Even an overworked manager, one with her hands very full, could still be dishonest by incorporating dishonesty into her work routines. But dishonesty didn’t match the impression Rik was forming of her character and style. And Rik had good reason to trust his impressions. He was the most experienced interstellar auditor in FINFINA.

  She might be in over her head, though. Even more likely, she might have alienated the wrong people. It would surprise Rik if a Steppe-Goyan understood the intricacies of interstellar administrative politics. At the end of the Station’s workday. Rik went to Tattujayan’s office. She wasn’t there but her Service Chief was. “Where is she? I’d like talk to her very confidentially.”

  One of Romeo Ito’s eyebrows quirked up. A slight and knowing smile appeared on his smooth face. “She likes to retire to her quarters to read before dinner.” Romeo handed Rik a finder disk. “Knock two times twice to say you’re a friend. Good luck!”

  Daya thought the tour of Star Corner Station had gone well enough. She just hoped Rik Gole didn’t take it upon himself to prowl into the areas she hadn’t shown him. It would be exceedingly hard to explain a missing or dead auditor.

  She set her concerns aside when she went to her own quarters for a precious few minutes of time for herself. She liked it here. Most stationers inhabited a single room—in some cases a room so full of possessions in so little order that it resembled a packrat nest. She had divided hers, making a separate, narrow but comfortable room in which to relax and receive friends for a cup of Darling tea. The walls were hung with intricately patterned blankets that kept the cold of Star Corner Station out. It looked like the winter tents of home.

  She was reading a recent history of interstellar civilization. The author was an Albioni historian. Albion was one of the planets in the Faxen Union, but the least slavish one. The book was edifying. As usual, Jesse Greenfinger joined her in her reading chair. Jesse’s warm, furry root-mass snuggled in her lap. It purred.

  Two knocks, twice, came from her door. “Enter.” She marked her place in the book, expecting Mattiz or possibly Dr. Anahita Lee. To her surprise, it was the auditor who entered.

  His face showed incredulity with good enough reason. Jesse’s leaves and tendrils spilled onto the floor all around her chair. She probably looked like a woman out of a fairy tale, reading an enchanted book that stopped time for her so long that vines grew up around her

  Jesse slipped off her lap, carefully bundling its root mass in vines and leaves. It retreated to a corner and went motionless. Nothing to see here but a harmless house plant. Ah. It had picked up on her distrust of the auditor.

  “What is that thing?” the auditor asked.

  “A plantimal, genetically engineered from both plant and animal genes. It’s called a hugwort.”

  His eyebrows came down only a fraction of an inch. “Something else from your old laboratories?”

  “No, the species is from a distant ocean moon world, newly discovered, or maybe rediscovered. There’s a historical footnote about such a world with an early starship colony lost to the Time of Terror. The colony died out, there’s no trace of it, but some xenobotanists hypothesize that they invented the hugworts.”

  Rik Gole flicked his head as though he understood and dismissed the existence of hugworts. “Your Service Chief told me how to find you. We need to talk.”

  “There will be talk, all right,” she said drily. Damn that matchmaking Wendisan. There were no better service personnel than Wendisans, but they were inveterate matchmakers. Romeo in particular aspired to live up to the romantic implications of his name. Not that he misfired often: two couples and a threesome in Star Corner Station had found each other because of his matchmaking.

  She knew he yearned to find a match for her. But—the auditor?!

  “This is off the record.” The auditor sounded serious, even portentous. “You need the kind of report I can make, you need it more than you know, and you need to cooperate fully.”

  Daya felt sudden dismay edged with anger. “You think I haven’t cooperated so far?”

  “Your Station has decommissioned areas drawing more than a trickle of power. Your budget has a credit leak—a few hundred credits a month are going somewhere unspecified. Your last three inventories have discrepancies not explained by materials and supplies officially listed as shipped away, discarded, acquired, or manufactured. And every month you have an excess expense for medical supplies not corresponding to accidents and injuries in the workforce.”

  Daya let her breath out through her teeth in an inaudible hiss. Evidently Rik Gole was very good at his work. He’d already sifted a massive amount of accounting and found nuggets of fact that Daya would have a hard time explaining.

  He took a step closer to her. “It’s clear to me that you’re a superb manager. That makes you invaluable in this godsforsaken outpost. Cooperate with me, spell out whatever secrets you’re keeping, take a salary cut to compensate for the missing credits, and you’ll still have a job and a good reputation in the end, I ca
n assure you.”

  Knowing all she knew, and being in the middle of an accurate history of interstellar civilization, his words struck a nerve. “If Faxe wants to rid itself of this station by accusing Goya and Wendis of tolerating maladministration—do you think any report of yours will matter?”

  “Of course it will. I’m a senior auditor.”

  Her temper flared. “Are you that naïve? Or are you a tool of your state?”

  Anger flushed his face. She would have welcomed an argument—the more furious the better—but he turned on his heel. With his hand on the lever of her door, he pointed at Jesse. “Does it eat goldfish?”

  “Yes, and I replace them out of my own personal funds!”

  The confrontation with Tattujayan got under Rik’s skin like a shocknettle. It wasn’t so much that she doubted his integrity. He had a ten-year record of honest and able auditing to prove his integrity to anyone who read his resume.

  It was that she thought he could be a tool of the state. That was what shocked and irritated him.

  The Faxen government did have its tools. He knew that. But he wasn’t one of them. Neither was the Faxen Interstellar Financial Authority. That was why he worked for FINFINA.

  To make the nettling effect worse, he’d actually seen her in her own private space, which he’d liked. The blankets on the walls kept the place warmer than the rest of the Station, making it all the more tempting to get to know the woman under the exotic clothes better and more personally.

  It was a temptation that he had every professional reason to resist. He ought to be glad she’d insulted him. That line of reasoning did not help. For the first time ever, he felt his career offering him only a narrow, confining future in a universe of stars and possibilities.

  He was brooding over his dinner, attacking his steak with a viciousness that the tender and tasty synthmeat did not deserve, when Brina Trover approached him, walking with a crutch. “Auditor, I’m already on the casualty list. That I’m not injured any worse than I am is thanks to you, it is. But we’ve got a war tomorrow. Would you take my place?”