Bedivere was a flawless navigator…and just as sensitive as the rest.
So Catherine backed up and came at it from a different angle. If she pushed Bedivere too hard he would dig in and out-stubborn her. So she had to coax. “The Staffers are extremists, but if you got any human drunk enough they would probably admit they’re glad the Staffers are there.”
Bedivere frowned. “That’s your strategy? Offending me?”
She held up her hand. “You don’t like Staffers because they think humans are supreme and that any other lifeform, including sentient computers, are a threat that should be dealt with as directly and swiftly as possible.”
“And he was one of their enforcers!” Bedivere threw out his hand. “He even admitted he still believes in the doctrine!”
“So he’s a prejudiced bigot, is what you’re saying?”
Bedivere scowled.
“So you are,” she added softly.
Surprise and hurt registered at the same time, in the way his eyes widened and his lips parted.
“You’re judging him because of his beliefs, before even trying to learn anything about him.” Catherine kept her tone soft and reasonable.
“And you’re going to bring a man who will kill a sentient computer on sight onto a ship that has a single AI!” His voice was low, his tone furious. “It’s one of the most insane ideas you’ve ever had. It’s beyond insane. It’s dangerous.”
“So we don’t let him find out there’s really only one AI.” She shrugged. “He’s a Staffer, Bedivere. He’s going to avoid computer interaction as much as possible. It’s built into their creed. He’ll use a keyboard when he can, voice prompts when he must and he’ll ignore the AI the rest of the time.”
Bedivere shook his head. He was about to switch to stubborn mode. She could tell by the way his jaw was flexing.
“Look,” she said, keeping her tone light. Reasonable. “We’re here for four things. We bought the Itinerary and the second is also done.” She pushed her hair over her shoulder, a reminder that when they had first hit Federation space, it had been almost completely grey. Now it was back to red once more. “So we have two more items on the agenda. The tech and the mule. Then we’re done. We dump Brant on the nearest planet…hell, we can even leave him wherever we happen to be when we’re done, if that makes you happier. Then we can pick how to spend the rest of our lives.”
Bedivere crossed his arms once more. “As far as I’m concerned, we can cross both of them off the list right now and jump somewhere obscure tomorrow. I can live without them.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Nuh-uh. You get your mule and we track down that tech. We agreed on this…hell, twenty-two years ago.”
“If it means having him aboard, I’ll pass.” He took a half step closer to her, almost like he was compelled by his emotions. The mix of emotions on his face and in his eyes was intense. “How can you think of doing it? After what they did to you on Egemon?”
“Having him on board is the only way this is going to happen,” Catherine replied.
He looked startled.
“Trying to hire a legitimate mercenary will tip off the Federation. The only way we get the muscle we need is to find someone exactly like Brant—someone the Federation would never think of as even a possibility.”
“Because it’s so insane,” Bedivere said, like he was finishing her thought and eerily, he was.
She nodded.
His arms loosened and he ruffled his hair. The ends shone a dark golden brown in the weak overhead light. “I’m not going to try and like him,” he warned.
“I’m not asking you to like him. Just work with him. And keep in mind that he wasn’t personally on Egemon. He wasn’t a part of that.”
“You don’t know that.”
Catherine stared at him. Now she was startled. “I do know that. He’s a Staffer, Bedivere. At most, he’s maybe fifty years old. He couldn’t have been at Egemon. He wasn’t even born yet.”
And Bedivere should have figured that out for himself. That he hadn’t told her that he was arguing purely from an emotion viewpoint. He wasn’t processing this in any way that was logical.
In the nearly one hundred years she had known him, she couldn’t recall Bedivere disengaging from the non-emotional reasoning at the base of his personality and reacting based purely on how he felt.
She looked up at him as he digested the fact that Brant looked older than either of them, but was in fact much younger.
“Don’t forget—he’s nearing the end of his life.” She gave him a small smile. “He won’t regenerate. It’s not part of their religion.”
Bedivere nodded. “I hadn’t forgotten.” Then he smiled a little himself. “I think I conveniently ignored it.” He stepped back and took in a deep breath that lifted his shoulders and blew it out. “It felt much better to blame Brant for everything the Staffers have ever done.” His gaze flickered away from her face. “Especially to you.” Then he straightened up with a snap. “I was judging unfairly.” He added softly, almost like he was tasting the fact experimentally, “I am prejudiced.”
“Of course you are,” Catherine said quickly. “Everyone is. It’s natural, an outcome of the way the mind thinks. Most biases are unconscious. It’s what we do with them once we are aware of them that makes the difference.”
Bedivere let out another heavy breath, looking at her directly once more. “It’s not a pleasant feeling, finding this flaw in myself.” His smile was tentative.
“No, it’s not. But time’s ticking, Bedivere. I’ll get the bio pins. You start digging into Fareed Brant’s life.”
He nodded. “Shouldn’t take long,” he said, sounding more normal. “He hasn’t lived long enough to make it a challenge.”
Feeling slightly happier, Catherine hurried through the ship to the medical bay for the bio pins and supplies she’d need to sample Brant. That fine edge of sarcasm, an outgrowth of arrogance built upon expertise…that was more like the Bedivere she knew.
Chapter Six
A couple of days after Brant picked out a stateroom from the six empty ones in the crew quarters and settled in, Catherine took him with her to do her milk run.
The milk run was a round trip of all the taverns and cafes and draft houses, feelies, brothels, spas, tank bars and casinos that operated along the terminal concourse. Passengers in transit, stevedores and other terminal workers spent time in at least one of these places and space-faring crew blew their wages on the distractions and entertainment on offer.
Catherine couldn’t tap the Federation job boards or freight auctions in any official capacity, so she found paying passengers and cargo assignments by word of mouth instead. There was rarely any need to go dirt-side because everyone who knew anything about spacing ended up in one of these joints sooner or later.
She hit pay-dirt the first stop on the route. It was a tank bar and when they stepped inside out of the harsh artificial daylight out on the concourse, the bar was silent and dark. The tank didn’t have a game going on in it, so no one was sitting around the wide bar that surrounded the tank. Even the booths along the three edges of the room were mostly empty.
The barman looked up when they entered and his brow lifted. He was standing at the long servery on the back wall and Catherine drifted over to him.
The barman was heavyset and florid and his jowls wobbled as he nodded at her. “I wondered when you’d stop by. Good timing. There’s a man looking for passage to Soward. Said he’d pay premium for non-Fed and under the radar.” His gaze flickered toward Brant standing silently at her side.
“He’s with me,” Catherine said.
The barman nodded again and relaxed. “He didn’t say, but I think there’s more than Feds he’s trying to shake.”
Catherine considered it for a moment. A near-normal run to anywhere would help everyone settle in to shipboard life with a new member. “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to him. Where can I find him?”
“He said he’ll be back tonight
for the game.”
“Sounds good.” She shook the barman’s hand and left folding yen behind, then headed back out onto the concourse and blinked at the brightness.
Brant was still with her, moving like a shadow just behind and to one side of her. It was the perfect body-man position. “You’ve done body work?” she asked him, dropping back even with him.
“I’ve done a lot of everything since I left Gry.”
“Which cadre was yours?” Catherine asked. “The last I heard, there were only five cadres on Gry. The best of the best of the enforcers.”
Brant glanced at her, before letting his gaze return to roaming around the concourse. It was a very wide strip that ran around the outer edge of the spoked-wheel station. The commercial district took up half the circumference, split almost evenly on both sides, giving space-farers quick access no matter what landing bay was their dock assignment.
Once, a long time ago, the station used spin to provide gravity. But now that energy was so cheap and bountiful—at least, it was in the Federation core—artificial gravity was used and landing bays were built along the perimeter instead of being confined to the no-gravity center. Instead, the center was used as the termination point for the sky hook down to the surface of Darwin.
The commercial districts were the real center of the terminal, though. They were busy at any time of the artificial day/night schedule. Darwin terminal was similar to hundreds of other terminals, stations, endpoints, platforms and other variations of geosynchronous orbiting ports servicing their worlds’ jump gates and the interstellar traffic that used them. Catherine could have found her way around this one without benefit of the station map that had been zap loaded into the Venturer as they had docked.
She glanced at Brant as the silence lengthened. “Rather not talk about Gry?”
“Is it true you’re a direct descendant of Glave of Summanus?” he asked.
“Old history, best forgotten,” she said. “I get it.” As he dropped back once more she shook her head. “I don’t want to advertise your role.”
He moved up level with her again.
“Besides, nothing is likely to happen here.”
“I’ll come with you tonight, just the same.” His tone implied it wasn’t open to question. Then he added, “Unless you would prefer Lilita?”
“She’s far too young.”
“Ah. Then it must be me.”
Catherine laughed. “You realize I can deal with anyone who comes at me with anything short of a nuclear device?”
“You hired me as muscle.”
“You’ll earn your pay, later.”
“Indulge my whim,” he said, his voice soft.
“Your whim, or your conscience?” They were nearing the end of the commercial section. The doors of their bay were two hundred meters into the administration section and on the inner rim. Some of the bays came off the sides of the original rim. Accessing them involved sloping catwalks and shifting gravity fields as you walked “up” the wall to the doors. Catherine preferred to pay extra for same-level docks.
Brant wasn’t answering her again.
“Are you not used to meeting new people, or are you just shy?” she asked.
“If I’m talking, I can’t listen.”
“You like listening that much?”
“That’s the best way to learn.”
“Is that why you spent all last night sitting at the mess table?”
“Instead of consulting the computer for ship data?”
“Computers are faster,” Catherine pointed out. “Especially for hard data.”
“And it is all that. Hard, I mean. Learning from watching and listening is far more organic and you retain it better.”
“Not if you’ve learned how to remember properly.”
“For someone as old as you, wouldn’t memory management be the more vital skill? The more you remember, the more places you have to find to keep it all.”
“That’s why I like computers. Saves me from having to remember.”
Brant wrinkled his nose. “While sitting at the table last night I observed that Lilita, despite her age, has an advanced understanding of engineering principles. That sort of training generally leaves a person disposed toward thinking in terms of closed systems and circuits. Despite that bias, Lilita thinks in terms of flow. Tides, pressure, release. Channels.”
“That probably means she studied engineering even though she isn’t naturally disposed toward it.” Catherine shrugged. “It’s a good starter profession. It can take you all over the galaxy and that’s exactly what she’s doing.”
“I also learned from my time in the mess hall last night that you are a strategist. You think in overall patterns. It’s not a learned skill. You were born with it. But despite that, you force yourself toward therapy fields.”
Catherine let out a breath, careful not to let him see the silent sigh.
“Are you, perhaps, trying to live up to your ancestor’s great heritage?”
“Did you learn anything about Bedivere?” she asked. “Because I’ve known him for a hundred years and I’m still trying to figure him out.”
Brant smiled. “Bedivere…X, shall we call him? He really has no last name? Not even an assumed one?”
Catherine shrugged. “He’s from Griswold. What can I say?”
“Is that a fringe world?”
“It’s a village on a lump of rock on the far rim of known space, a light year beyond the Last Gate. Griswoldens are a little strange.”
Brant looked genuinely interested instead of politely curious. “It’s in the Silent Sector?”
“About as far inside the sector as anyone cares to get. I think something like sixty percent of the mineral makeup of the planet is beryllium. The Griswoldens mine it and load up the one freighter they possess. When the freighter is full, it heads for the Last Gate and jumps to the nearest Federation metal exchange. The proceeds from that let them buy what they can’t produce themselves and the whole village lives from payload to payload.”
“It sounds like a desperate life.”
“They live in the silent sector and there’s about three thousand of them, barely enough to keep the gene pool viable.” Catherine shrugged. “I’m more surprised Bedivere doesn’t behave far more strangely than he sometimes does.”
“I imagine his social skills went through some adjustments after he left.”
“The adjustment is on-going,” Catherine said dryly.
Brant smiled. “I think the most curious thing I learned last night was that you and he are not intimate. You like him despite his faults and he regards you most highly.”
Catherine laughed. “We have a good working relationship. Sex would mess it up.”
“Then you don’t get lonely?”
“Are you offering a contract, Brant?”
He smiled, not offended by her reprisal for the nosy question. “I don’t know you well enough to know if you would cut my throat in my sleep, were you to accept a contract. I’m familiar with the events on Egemon, you see.”
Catherine ignored the parry. “I’m an old-fashioned woman, Brant. Endless partners don’t suit my temperament and shipboard life doesn’t help. Although Bedivere manages to stay busy.”
“Then it would not bother you if I mention that he and Lilita have already established some sort of arrangement?”
“I knew,” Catherine assured him. “Lilita is a pillow talker.”
Brant’s smile this time was a delighted one, making his face light up and making him seem much younger.
“But I’m fairly sure the arrangement is already ended,” Catherine added. “I like to stay on top of such things. Even the most casual of sex can ruin working relationships. But Bedivere seems to have extricated himself without complications, as usual.”
They reached the docking bay doors and Catherine pressed her hand against the scanner and leaned against the door to open it. “So you learned a lot with one night of observation,” she concluded. “Is th
at your hobby, measuring people?”
“I thought it was my job,” Brant said gravely. “Security doesn’t stop at the airlock.”
That gave Catherine something to think about other than the endlessly fascinating problem of making a living.
Chapter Seven
Kemp Rodagh stepped aboard the next day and stowed his gear in the best of the passenger rooms. Bedivere ran all the usual background checks and Catherine matched Kemp’s DNA to the fedcore banks.
Once the jump was initiated, it would take two weeks to reach the Soward gates. It was considered to be a small jump, one that the really big Federation cruisers could do in a few days. But Kemp was paying for a non-Federation vessel and an extra degree of discretion.
“Soward isn’t only home to the best wine in the universe,” Brant pointed out as they headed back to the dock after meeting Kemp for the first time.
“The Jourden Cartel is still in business?” Catherine asked.
“Not in a way that draws Federation attention, but they objected to the preaching we did, so we had our run-ins with them.”
“They’re anti-humanist?”
“They’re pro-profit and they’ve been around for a couple of centuries. Kemp says he’s going back to comfort a dying relative. It might even be true, but if he was cartel, he wouldn’t be looking for discreet passage. He would take the cheapest Federation shuttle he could find, or his cartel buddies would put up for a luxury berth on one of the really fast ones.”
“The cartel used to have the Soward system locked down pretty tight. As they’re still in business, that probably hasn’t changed. If he’s trying to get home without the Cartel knowing, I’d do it the way he is.” Catherine glanced at Brant. “This could be interesting.”
Kemp’s background checked out as clear. Bedivere specifically searched for possible cartel connections, but came up empty. “There’s no signs of tampering on anything,” he said, flipping through screens of information. “I think he’s exactly what he says he is, a family man heading back to see a dying relative, who doesn’t want to have to deal with the Cartel to do so.”
Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance Page 5