Embrace the Romance

by S. E. Smith

  “The Union starfleet would respond with force,” Rik said with conviction. “It always does when Faxen possessions are seized.”

  “That’s why I wonder! Faxe doesn’t own Star Corner. It’s operated per a very old contract, drawn up a thousand years ago, between Goya, Wendis and Faxe. I’ve read the contract. All six hundred clauses of it.”

  “Mattiz is a legalist,” Daya told Rik. “He studied interstellar law at the University in Wendis.”

  “The Star Corner Station contract came up once in class, and a question posed as an academic exercise was how Goya, Wendis, or Faxe could divest themselves of what’s now become a white elephant—a very large and useless possession. It wasn’t easy to boil down, but it became clear that the contract would voided in two cases. One is malfeasance in the administration of the Station.”

  “There isn’t that,” Rik said impatiently.

  “No. There isn’t.” Daya looked relieved to hear him say it, though.

  “The other eventuality that would void the contract is war.”

  “War with who?” Rik asked. “Pirates don’t have legal standing as a state.”

  Daya said, “The struggle with the Disunion terrorists is more and more spoken of as war.”

  “We’ll soon get the best of them. Or are you harboring some of those too?”

  She parried his hard look with a one of her own. “Not that I know of. I do know that I must alert the Station to the possibility of pirates attacking us. Even if the whole Union Fleet were to come to our rescue, Rik, it would be better for us not to need it.”

  She left him wondering exactly what Star Corner Station could do if pirates, or for that matter Disunion terrorists, did strike. Feeling discontented, he finally looked at the message in the capsule in his hand. And then he stared.

  Yes, it was from FINFINA.

  It ordered him to find malfeasance in the administration of Star Corner Station. It told him exactly what kind of malfeasance to find and write into a report. And to do so immediately.

  Struggling to keep his face expressionless—luckily Mattiz was busy packing bubbles, reusing two and unpacking two fresh ones—Rik tried to keep his voice casual. “What kind of malfeasance would void the contract? That sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

  “It would have to be a persistent pattern of profiteering, or wrongful and persistent negligence in the operation of the station resulting in the decay or deterioration of the facility, and it would have to be knowing and intentional—not misfeasance and not nonfeasance,” Mattiz said absently.

  That was precisely what the message from FINFINA instructed Rik to document in his audit report. He crushed the message film in his fist. It dissolved as, being high-security, it was meant to.

  But it left a bitter, poisoned taste in his mind.

  Daya was not going to make a general announcement about the situation. Pirates or Disunionists could have operatives anywhere, even here. Knowing what she knew about Star Corner Station, in fact, it was one of the first places in interstellar space that she would have planted a spy.

  She found Jax Trover and Romeo Ito in Jax’s office with a bottle of Firewater and the hugwort on the desk between them. Romeo held up a small glass of the fiery alcohol. “To honorable opponents!” Jax raised a glass too. “To wily opponents!” They tossed back their Firewater, then noticed Daya.

  At what she told them, their faces went sober. “We’ll put the Station on notice, Manager,” said Jax. He looked for the Firewater bottle stopper.

  Romeo rifled Jesse’s leaves and produced the stopper.

  Daya went to the anteroom of the passenger ring. This was not the time of day she usually came calling. Mercury met her there anyway. “What do you want?” Mercury asked scornfully.

  “I have news for you. Starway is sending SOS bubbles. The bubble we got said Starway is under attack from pirates.”

  The Angel gave a cold startled hiss.

  Maybe Daya was a fool for trading such news to the Angels. But Daya came from Steppe-people who knew how to judge traders. The Angels were remorseless but, unless Daya was utterly mistaken about them, they rigidly played by their own rules.

  “What do you want in trade for that?” Mercury asked.

  “Only a very simple piece of information. Did you sell news of the emberalm—” An instinct told Daya to bite her tongue and not say to pirates as she had intended. Too specific a question is too easy to deny. Daya definitely refrained from asking Mercury, How could you sell the news so soon? It was much better not to know that. Rumor spoken in hushed voices said the Angels could cross the stars apart from turning points, shining ships, or even time. Any outsider who had ever found out the truth of it had never been heard from again.

  Mercury gave her that piercing, raptor look. Daya didn’t flinch. Mercury finally said. “Yes, and we don’t have fair trade unless I give you more than that, but I don’t know what I’m allowed to say. You will be paid in full. Now go away.”

  Daya had long guessed that Star Corner Station was not the Angels’ only foothold in the Starcross Nebula, and that if they could, they would even have a foothold or at least a meddling influence in Starway. Now, to a much higher degree of certainty, she knew that. She also knew that the news of emberalm had already reached pirates. No, more accurately, the news had reached some party or parties who had been interested enough to pay the Angels very well for it. She couldn’t imagine a use for the deadly stuff. There had never been such a weapon since the Time of Terror. Even then it was only used against monsters. The thought of emberalm getting loose in the roiled field of interstellar politics and piracy made her shudder.

  From yesterday, Daya still had the master key in the pocket of her coverall. She used it to let herself into the military depot. It was as Jax had described: the bulging emberalm containers, one cracked open on the broken floor, with tailings heaped around it to dam the stuff still inside. No containers were missing. That did not surprise her. As far as she knew, Angels didn’t traffic in goods or contraband. Just news.

  Going spingravity-up a vator, she ascended to the power plant in the center of the Station. It was of an ancient sort that ran on uranium, of which there was enough on Trove to fuel the power plant to the end of time, and no demand elsewhere: it was too dirty a fuel with too much potential to turn into a bomb. The power plant crew were far more carefully selected than any other personnel in the Station. None of them would be a pirates’ spy.

  Her touch opened the central plant panel. It probably hadn’t been open in thirty years, yet the cover slid aside with a whisper. It gave the power plant crew many more options than they would otherwise have had, to damp down or ramp up the reactor, or give a Station sector more power and air—or none.

  As she made her way through other sectors, she realized that something was different. Like a ripple in a pond, the news about Starway was causing the Station’s mood to darken, sharpen, and become watchful. Many personnel in the Station were, like the central plant crew, the sons and daughters of generations who had worked here. It was in their blood to circle the wagons when trouble was afoot—not for the first time—in the Starcross Nebula. She didn’t need to give orders, just use her authority to open a cabinet here and a tube there. She also asked for an exact accounting of the access keys in each sector.

  On the way back to the administrative sector, she discovered the hugwort crawling in the corridor ahead of her. It didn’t usually stir so openly during station day. Could it sense the Station’s unsettled mood, just as it sometimes seemed to sense her mood—as improbable as it was for a plantimal to sense human feelings—? She followed it. At the ladder to the adjoining levels, it swung itself onto the ladder and purposefully crawled up.

  As Jesse went up the ladder, Rik Gole started to come down. It froze. So did he, reluctant to put a foot into the midst of the hugwort’s quivering tendrils. By his own account, his Faxen upbringing had given him reasons to be wary of plants. There was a standoff on the ladder.

&n
bsp; Over the hugwort, Rik asked, “Can I help with whatever preparations you’re making? I don’t want to be a pirate’s hostage any more than you do.” His voice was low and yet intense. It could have cut through a din of conversation like a knife.

  Then she noticed Jesse’s bloom. Sometimes the hugwort bloomed suddenly and for no apparent reason. It was doing so now. The diaphanous, pale purple flower pointed at Rik like an antenna.

  He stared at it, crouching down for a closer look at the hugwort. “This thing wasn’t made by a desperate dying colony. It’s too sophisticated an organism for that.”

  Well, genetic engineering by a vanished colony was the best explanation for the existence of hugworts. That did not mean the true or only explanation. As the Manager of Star Corner Station, she’d learned that the stars had secrets coiled inside of secrets. “You think not?”

  “It reminds me of what another ancient poet said. ‘Tiger Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?’”

  Poetic allusions aside, he was an unusually observant individual—that was the genius of his work as an auditor. “Rik, would you help us by watching for trouble that likely won’t come?”

  He leaped over the hugwort, lightly landing on the corridor floor with perfect coordination. “How?”

  Glad she’d thought to put a universal security disk in her pocket, she took it out and pressed her hand against it. The disk gave a brief blue glow. “Go to the Grave. You remember how to find it? Good. Put this in the access slot and you’ll get in. This disk will remember my handprint for three hours. That will let you come and go if you need to refresh yourself.” As she gave him the disk, their fingers nearly touched.

  The sexual tension between them almost made a physical spark between her fingertips and his.

  “Is watching all I can do? Machines do that much.”

  “Our machines scan the stars and the corridors but machines only see what their programming lets them see. And programming can be corrupted.”

  He jumped as though stung.

  “Put this disk in an access slot on the communicator and call me if you see anything amiss. My code is two twice. That will reach me anywhere in the Station. You may not have noticed, since we have little need for them, but comm stations are everywhere.”

  He nodded, turned, and strode away.

  He’d changed. She’d already seen him change from the calculating auditor, once as he took part in the wargame, and again when they were together in the Grave. Now he seemed to have become that change. He was like—he’d given her the words for it: he was like a bright tiger. Who made you, Darik? She wondered. Like stars, hearts had secrets coiled inside secrets.

  Jesse proceeded up the ladder to the next level. There it extended two long tendrils upward to the grating over an airduct. It neatly opened the tabs that held the grating in place. It let the grating rotate down on the hook on the lower corner of it. Then Jesse pulled itself up into the airduct. Extended several tendrils to reposition the grating and refasten the tabs. And crawled away in the airduct with the faintest of rustling sounds.

  More than she’d realized, the hugwort was beautifully suited to a space place. Strong, supple, smart, subtle and sneaky, as well as compressible enough to fit into an air duct. No wonder the Wendisan Stationers admired it enough to make it their mascot.

  In her office she found Mattiz backing up Station status reports into suresafe form—a crystal stored in a fire-and impact-proof vault. That kind of backup would happen automatically at the first sign of a calamity like an asteroid impact or critical mass in the power plant, so investigating authorities could learn what happened even in the absence of survivors. In this case, Mattiz was manually suresafing the records. He said, “The auditor was here. He sent three bubbles—to the Faxen, Wendisan and Goyan offices that govern us!”

  There went a month’s bubble budget! She was offended at the auditor for acting so summarily and without saying anything to her. Then she grew alarmed wondering what he had said. “Did you get a look at the messages?”

  “No, and he took the cloned copies. Manager, did you know his real name is Darik-Arn?”

  “Yes, at least the Darik part.” Trading familiar names had been a pleasure, startling as a ray of sunlight in a dark tent. If the tent flap were to open, what kind of landscape would that reveal—a desolation, a Faxen wilderness of shocks? Or a summer grassland?

  Mattiz looked at her with a solemn expression. “On Faxe, everyone’s first-name combination is as unique as possible. There’s even a central database of already-used names to check when you name a child. Except in the uppermost class, the ones who live on top of Strata, it’s become popular for parents to name their children after themselves. Maybe it has to do with implicit class privilege. They keep it a kind of secret and I didn’t know about it until I studied at the University of Wendis and it came up in a contemporary anthropology class. Anyway, there’s a famous Faxen named Darik-Arn Gole who might be our auditor’s father.”

  “Famous? Why?”

  “He’s one of the Quinvirate.”

  “What?! The five syndexecutives who rule the Faxen Union?”

  Mattiz nodded. “With a father like that, he might not be just an auditor. He might really be an agent of Faxe. Faxe does that—seeds other planets and space places with harmless-looking agents who have Faxe’s interests at heart. Unlike re-using a parent’s name, everybody knows Faxe does that.”

  Her nervous energy ran out of her like water out of water-bag and left her feeling limp. She had to sit down. She felt the Eye of Fate on her. It hadn’t just winked at her. Its stare was boring into her.

  Good thing she’d asked the auditor to go where she had. There weren’t any controls in the Grave that he could use. And she could remotely lock him in.

  In front of the Control Room’s wide window, Rik sat in the large—rather regal, in fact—Chair of the old Station Director. He was conscious of the irony.

  His head hurt.

  He still had the message capsule in his clenched fist. At first he hadn’t been able to believe that its poisonous message came from FINFINA. Then he’d realized it might have come through the Financial Authority: an important distinction. Rik had it on excellent authority that SECINTAG, the Secret Intelligence Agency, could work through any Authority in the Faxen Union, and did so more and more often, given the Disunion terror. Rumor even had it that SECINTAG now fought terror with terror, inventing devices and methods to counter-terrorize the enemies of the state. If so, that was ugly.

  With his headache getting worse, he put his hurting head in his hands. He’d believed that making a career in interstellar accounting would work for him. That investigating the accountability and operational soundness of various interstellar organizations was a safe path to take—an endeavor as neutral as any could be. His father had thought so too. Yet not prevented Rik from taking that path. Rik had always believed that his father had written him off as an insignificant loss. Maybe his father had foreseen how auditing could prove useful.

  He wrenched his head out of his hands to look up. Keeping watch through the wide window was both the least and the most he could do now.

  Nebula light—cold and blue, with the blue star shining bright—reflected on the service spines of the Station. That must be daya, he thought, a daya of harsh starlight. If the Station was a hand, the spine’s fingers were a skeleton of what they had been in the days that had seen a thousand cargo, passenger, administrative, scientific and military modules attached to the spines. Oddly, there was one ring-shaped module attached to the passenger service spine. It looked like a ring on a skeletal finger.

  Between third and fourth, or little, fingers, a rift in the nebulosity showed some of the galaxy’s more typical starry space. That way, Rik thought jaggedly, lay the Faxen Union. It was really only a few stars across and only a few millennia deep in the vastness of space and time.

  It was his father’s ambition that
it not remain a Union of the planets of just a few stars. His father wanted Faxe to rule countless worlds across the sea of stars, to be like Rome and England of ancient Earth—empires across the known world—and like Terra Nova in the Star Age before Terra Nova turned into the Terror.

  Rik toyed with the disk Daya had given him. He felt achingly lonely and would have liked to use the communicator to hear her voice. But he had nothing of any substance to communicate to her. And he probably wouldn’t. Not now or ever.

  Several keys were missing. One of them was important—a master key for access to the service spines’ hollow cores.

  Daya was suspicious about that. In this regard, she wasn’t suspicious of Rik Gole. Even if he were a calculating tool of Faxe, he certainly hadn’t pilfered a handful of assorted keys. It was entirely possible that three different sectors of the Station had each misplaced a key since the last key inventory. Those three were minor. The fourth was not.

  Someone who worked here might have stolen the master key. If so, it had probably been someone among the less prominent ranks of personnel, possibly a worker in the ore plant, where the lower-ranking personnel were most numerous and least security-checked. The ore plant never stopped operating. So some personnel hadn’t attended the war game. With everyone else away at the game, that would have been a good time to steal a key from almost anywhere in the Station.

  If such a thing had actually happened, the guilty person or persons would still be on duty, their shift not ending until later.

  Daya easily explained her presence in the ore plant to the personnel she encountered. She made a point of using a quaint and harmless Goyanism. “For some reason the hugwort has gone walkaway and I’m trying to find it. Have you seen it?”

  Seven of the eight personnel she encountered said no.