A mist issued from the walls, encircling them. Panglor drew back uneasily, but when the mist touched him with a gentle caress, he started to relax. It felt good. The mist deepened quickly, and a moment later he could barely see Taleena—just the outline of her face and arms, the points of her breasts. She stepped closer and put a finger to his chest. "Feel okay?" she asked quietly.
"Hhrruuu," said LePiep, from somewhere in the mist.
Panglor felt a curious pressure against his skin. It was the mist, kneading him with rippling compression waves. He stood silent, blinking; the warm vapors massaged him gently and fluidly. His neck and shoulder and back muscles relaxed, drained of tension. His face softened, and he almost smiled again.
When the mist receded, Taleena watched him with twinkling eyes. She looked down at LePiep and laughed. The ou-ralot was walking in a big circle, grinning, eyes wide, her fur fluffed as though dry cleaned, but glistening with a few droplets of moisture. Panglor was caught by simultaneous feelings: amused by LePiep, awed by the sight of Taleena's unclothed body, and disturbed by her warmth and apparent liking for him. Tension began to reenter his muscles, and he started to get another erection, a funny, twitchy one. Flushing with embarrassment, he turned away from Taleena, scooped up LePiep, and returned to their room.
Taleena seemed puzzled and hurt when she caught up with him. "Didn't you enjoy it?" she asked.
Panglor looked at her again and had trouble breathing. She stood with her legs parted, hands on her hips, her skin and pubic mound still damp, gleaming. "Yes," he said, choking. He tried to pull on his pants, but his erection was growing stronger, and he couldn't manage. He suddenly sat and covered his lap with his shirt. "Yes—yes, fine."
Now she's upset. Why'd you get her upset?
Taleena slipped on her robe, without fastening it. "What's wrong then? You paid the whole night. Are you going to leave?"
"Y-yes," he stuttered. "No." He thought frantically. A chance to stay with a woman, maybe the last ever. "I guess—I'll stay a little while." He couldn't look up at her, though; his feelings were too exposed in his confusion. What is the matter? he wondered. Why can't you just let it go like it was going, and don't make problems?
He looked up, finally. Her robe was partly open, and the frontal view it provided made his nervous system start ringing again.
She noticed his glance and pulled the robe closed, then sat down a few feet from him. "Is that better?"
He nodded and swallowed. Trouble was, he liked her, too. Why did she have to be friendly?
"You want to just talk?" Taleena said, lowering her gaze pointedly to his lap, where his clothes were bunched absurdly. He felt a twinge under his clothes and squinted, shrugging. She was just trying to lighten things. "Hey, it's okay," she said. "Not many spacers I meet in here want to do that, you know? It's kind of nice for a change." He looked at her in puzzlement, and she said, "It's okay to be shy, too." He looked away, red-faced, and reached out to scoop back LePiep, who was wandering away, gurgling in a troubled tone.
"Can I see her?" Taleena asked. Panglor hesitated, then guided LePiep over with his hand. The ou-ralot tiptoed forward and nuzzled Taleena's fingers. Taleena fussed over her for a minute, then said, "She's a honey." She stroked the ou-ralot again, and LePiep crooned with pleasure.
Panglor felt a twinge of jealousy. At once, LePiep hopped out of Taleena's lap and came back to him. "Hrruuu?" she said.
"I can see where her loyalties are," Taleena said good-naturedly. As she spoke, she leaned forward, and the top of her robe fell open, exposing her right breast. Panglor tensed, torn by confused desires. Taleena pulled her robe together again. "Sorry," she said gently.
"Why? It's your job." He looked away, scowling.
"I wasn't thinking of business. I just didn't want you to feel uncomfortable." She was clearly puzzled.
Panglor shrugged, nodded, shook his head. Sexual desire was dancing above his many other dark thoughts. He could give in to it if it was just business with her. But no—she liked him, she was concerned for his comfort, and any moment she would ask him what was troubling him. That terrified him—the prospect that someone could ask, could care. Perhaps he should get out of here before things got out of control.
"Do you want to talk about anything?" she asked. She peered at him, frowning.
His eyes refused to focus for a moment. This was all wrong. He had come here for a mindless, high-intensity stoking—just flush out the glands, clear the mind, and get out—but look what was happening. She wanted to touch him as a woman, not just a stoker. But he had other worries, he had to get his life in order—no, Grakoff-Garikoff had already done that, hadn't they?—but he still had to do it for himself.
He sat ruminating for some time, before he became aware of Taleena touching his hand, and saying, "Hey. Come on. Come on."
Jerking his head up, he met her gaze. But he couldn't answer. She liked him, for God's sake.
"It's nothing," he muttered finally, managing an unhappy smile. He was sweaty, and he felt clumsy, rumbling at his tangled clothing.
"Do you want to get dressed? We can just sit here all night, if you want. Maybe you'll feel like talking later." Her gaze was soft and real, and it was killing him. So warm, so human. Why couldn't she have remained a ghost? Now she was going to be angry because he was failing to respond, and that would be human, too.
LePiep was burrowing nervously into the turned-back coverlet on the mat. He watched her dumbly for a few seconds. "I—" he said. "I—" He looked at his hands, and up at Taleena, and away again, and he blurted, "I—have to go. Now." He struggled to his feet, conscious of his nakedness but no longer caring, and he started putting on his clothes. LePiep whistled unhappily, but he was too busy avoiding Taleena's gaze to worry about LePiep. His left foot caught in the pant leg, and he jammed it through anyway, ripping the fabric. Taleena's expression was narrow and disappointed—he hadn't meant to look; it had just happened—but he couldn't do anything to make her feel better, either. He thumbed down his shirt and pants fastenings, and clipped on his shoes. He looked around. LePiep. "Hup!" he said harshly, and caught her when she jumped. She trembled silently in his arms.
His eyes got blurry as he faced Taleena. She was standing, too, and he thought that she was upset, and maybe crying, but actually he couldn't see clearly to tell. "Uh—" he said.
"Well," said Taleena.
"I—"
"If you have to, then—well, I guess you should if you have to."
"But I—" Blood was rushing so hard through his head that all he could hear was the thunder of falling water, a waterfall drowning thoughts that got swept into the current. Space, tomorrow he'd be in space, and—the waterfall was louder, and a woman who might have touched him was disappearing downstream—rushing water, get away, get clear!
He edged toward the door. Taleena nodded—her disappointment, her humanity stabbing at him. You're a ghost, you can't hurt me, can't.
Closer to the door now, he hesitated one last time, waiting for Taleena to put back on her professional indifference; only she didn't, wouldn't, or couldn't, and he had to walk away from her humanity. He went out quickly, LePiep trembling in his arms. But it was the wrong door. He turned and walked back through, face burning as he walked past Taleena's eyes, and out the correct exit.
The Nest was quiet. He hurried through the parlor and out into the night.
* * *
Nolaran fell away beneath him right on schedule the next afternoon. He couldn't see it happen, because all he could see was a scarred green bulkhead in front of his seat, the worst in the shuttle. But he could picture it; and good riddance to the hellhole. The shuttle lurched and banged around, giving him and the rest of the passengers an inexcusably rough ride through Veti IV's atmosphere. He gripped his armrests and thought about getting back into space. That part was okay. What was bad was the worrying about what Grakoff-Garikoff had planned for him.
The shuttle docked late, after a traffic tie-up at the orbital spaceyar
ds. Panglor found his way to the dispatcher's office, where he was given a set of command papers for a foreshortening freighter—Driscoll-class, a dead giveaway that the ship was some damned ancient relic. He studied the flight plan, directing him to jump for Dreznelles 3 and wait for further instructions. According to the schedule dictated here, he had an hour to get over to the ship at her mooring and get her powered up for flight—no time for preflight inspection. That stunk. Panglor Balef never took a ship into deep space, much less foreshortening, without a thorough preflight.
Bastards. He'd see about that; he'd change the flight plan.
He tapped in an opening code for the ship on the com-console. As he did so, he noticed a spacer nearby, a station man, staring at him in a particularly unfriendly manner, clicking his thumbnails together. Callused, strong-looking hands. A Garikoff agent? Probably.
Maybe he wouldn't change the flight plan.
He cleared his throat and looked over the ship's registry. According to the listing here, the ship had no name. He supplied one: The Fighting Cur.
Clearing the console, he picked up LePiep in her quarantine bag. Then he went and found a taxi, and hurried out to look over this ship he was going to fly.
Chapter 5
Dreznelles 3. Third-day, 0345.
Panglor eyed the clock grumpily and closed his eyes again. He cared not a damn about these corporations, with their cutthroat rivalries. But they hadn't asked him if he cared.
All of known space was an amoeba seventy light-years long and fifty across the middle, sprinkled with star systems inhabited by man and peppered with systems as yet unexplored. To corporate heads, space was a gameboard in three vast dimensions—and corporate heads were the ones who held the stones and played the game. Not that it was such an inaccurate way of viewing things, or inherently bad—but the games grew extremely fierce. Interstellar business was a strange mixture of courageous enterprise, vain intelligence, trickery and deceit, backstabbing and extortion. None of it made sense to him. With thousands of worlds awaiting exploration, they killed each other for morsels—usually under the guise of peaceful operations and the umbrella of the Foreshortening Trade Coalition. Sabotage and trickery were simply facets of the game. Perhaps the fear of foreshortening hardened corporate hearts; definitely, it increased the stakes.
0358.
Foreshortening—there was the irony. Foreshortening had opened the stars to mankind; it had not been meant as a tool for treachery. Surely it was hard enough to face the uncertainty of transit, frightening in itself, without treachery. And yet, there it was. A capsule of distorted space. A pulled stitch, a kink, a Lang dimensional stress in space—a ten-thousandfold collapse!—and all it took was for the stitch to pop, the kink to straighten, the stress to come undone at the wrong time, and a man was adrift to die, in his own universe if he was lucky or in some limbo if he was not. And here: people deliberately knocking ships into faulty insertions. Was this what foreshortening had been meant for?
0412.
0420.
He came alert with a start. 0425. No putting it off any longer. Time to check out of the waystation and get back to the Cur. The flight plan was logged and computed, both the phony and the real, and the Cur would leave mooring in four hours, less than one hour behind Deerfield.
He had been doing a lot of thinking, all right, but none of it had helped him find a way out of this.
"Hooeep?" whistled LePiep, complaining for attention. She caught his eye and tossed her head insolently.
Panglor rubbed her neck with his knuckles. "Sorry, honey." It had really been more like a brooding stupor than what one would actually call thinking. "Don't see a way out of it, old buddy. We want to still be alive next week, wherever we are, so I guess we're going to bump that ship right into limbo." He hesitated, then shrugged. "They never did anything for us, anyway."
He got up and packed his duffel. There was one loose wafer, which he fed to the ou-ralot. He scratched her, shaking his head.
By 0525, they were back aboard The Fighting Cur. LePiep began hopping about, burrowing into the clutter they'd left in the control room. Panglor logged the flight program into the ship's console from his pocket computer, then set about checking the ship. She had been worked over by station techs, and her small cargo of Veti IV metals products off-loaded; but that was all the more reason to check her thoroughly. Panglor never liked leaving a ship in the care of others. He walked through the habitable sections: cabin, galley, airlock, repair cubicle, lifesystems, power room. He sniffed about warily, but found nothing to arouse suspicion.
On second thought, he returned to the power room and checked the remote readings. Internal power and grav-control were fine, but—sure enough—some numbskull tech had failed to tighten an alignment on the neutrino flux. Cursing, he set about making the correction himself; with the overpower circuits G-G had built into the main drivers, he wanted to be damn sure the pile was tuned. No point in blowing himself to kingdom come. That job, by the time he was done, took two hours. He had to hurry the rest of the preflight, then he battened down and went to power up the control room for flight.
By the time he had stashed enough of the clutter to make the bay look like a ship's bridge, the com-console was chirping at him, warning of departure time. "LePiep!" he called, slapping the second couch. The ou-ralot poked her head up, sniffed, and scurried out of sight. He glared. "Peep! Get up here!" he roared. Sighing audibly, the ou-ralot hopped up beside him. He grunted. "Stay there," he said, powering up the board. The viewscreen came alive, and the control bay lights went down. "Waystation Control," he growled into the com. "The Fighting Cur to undock and proceed." Control responded and then it became a matter of waiting.
The spidery tugs soon came and latched and pulled the Cur out of mooring, and Panglor watched the immense cluster of the D3 Waystation shrink against space like a glittering surrealistic beehive. Then the tugs broke and departed, and he took control over his ship and locked her into the acceleration run in the outbound linear-shift field. For several hours he accelerated under external field power alone; then he engaged the Cur's drivers and used both ship's power and the station's field power to accelerate toward the insertion orbit. They would drive at about four gees for a day, before insertion.
Things would happen fast tomorrow, and he had to be right on the beam to make it work. He would be traveling at one hell of a clip, and so would Deerfield. The traffic patrol usually moved fast on regular watch, as well—though not that fast—and if Garikoff was shadowing him, his ship would be doing the same. Quite a party, speeding toward the collapsing-field. Panglor had two main worries. One was having a hole punched in him by the patrol craft if he deviated from flight path, or by Garikoff if he did not. The other was the actual maneuver. Deerfield and the Cur would be plunging through the collapsing-field at different angles, for different insertions. He had to deviate enough to put him on collision course, count on Deerfield to swerve out of his path, and still have his own course set for good insertion.
It was going to be tough.
Once everything was on auto, he frowned at LePiep. "Hungry, bud?" She whistled in the affirmative. He was hungry, too, so they went back into the galley. He had a flatwrap cake and moke, and LePiep had the usual. When they returned to the control room, he brooded on the instruments and the stars for a while, then shrugged and closed his eyes. "Wake me if anything happens, Peep," he muttered, and with that he dozed off.
He woke with thoughts crawling through his mind like termites. It was all he could do to focus his eyes. Was he really going to do what Garikoff wanted? Which was the greater wrath—Garikoff's or the law's? Garikoff would probably be watching him more closely, but still . . . if he was going to risk his neck under the gun either way, why should he do what Garikoff wanted? Maybe they didn't think he would rebel. Maybe they didn't give him enough credit.
Maybe he could bluff.
"Hey, Piglor!" he heard.
His heart nearly seized. He twisted right, then le
ft. Sitting in the corner of the control bay, watching him, was Alontelida Castley—the little twitch who had plagued him back at the station.
He began to choke. He squeezed his eyes closed and forced himself to breathe slowly and regularly. His eyes popped open. The girl was watching him with amusement. "What are you doing here?" he yelled.
Alo chuckled and got up from where she was sitting. "I'm stowing away."
"What do you mean, you're stowing away?" He rose from his couch—and staggered, dizzy with rage.
"I'm here, aren't I?" She shrugged, then backed away slowly. "Now, don't get excited—"
Panglor fumed, staring at her. This was incredible. What the hell? Of all the people in the universe . . . of all the incredibly goddamn stupid things for any human being to do . . .
Alo took a deep breath, then blurted: "I know where you're going, and I want to go along. I can help you with the ship—I know a lot about ships." She shut her mouth. Then she shrugged again, eyes glinting.
"You think you know where I'm going," he said sarcastically. He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. This was impossible. "You think you know where I'm going?" he growled. He snorted.
"Yeah. I checked your flight log. You're going to Quetzal, in the Formi system." She looked at the viewscreen, then at him, then nodded.
"Oh," he said. Christ! he thought. For a moment, he said nothing more, because there was this incredible pressure building in his forehead, right behind the frontal sinuses. "Oh," he said tightly. "It never occurred to you that maybe I was going to Dreznelles 17, then Atruba, then the Elacian National Worlds. That never occurred to you."
"No. Should it have?" She lifted her chin insolently, but her eyes showed confusion. "Are we?"
He cursed silently. His hand stopped LePiep, who was bobbing her head suspiciously toward Alo. Waves of alarm touched him. "What did you do it for?" he demanded.
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