What she did do was take one more step to confront Forester. Given her expression and obvious discomfort, the controlled, pleasant tone of her voice surprised Pardell almost as much as her clipped accent—unfamiliar to an ear used to station drawls. “Is there a problem, Administrator?”
“I’m not getting the cooperation I expected, Professor Smith.”
Hard to imagine a less exotic name, which strangely added to the mystique. Pardell found himself leaning forward expectantly with the rest, still keeping behind Tanya. Malley sent him a warning scowl. Professor Smith arched one slim, dark eyebrow, then looked away from Forester to survey the room. “I’m not surprised. What did you do?” she asked calmly. “Threaten to close the place? I wouldn’t cooperate either.”
Sammie almost smiled, then apparently remembered it wasn’t an expression that sat well on his square face and compromised with a nod. “Completely unnecessary, Madame,” he said briskly. “This is a peaceful—inn. The Administrator here, he comes in and disrupts my business. My patrons and I have been subjected to indignities.” He deepened his voice for emphasis: “And there’s been a distinct loss of dibs. I can tell you that without checking my tills.”
Her other eyebrow rose. “‘Dibs?’”
Pardell was amused by the contortions of Forester’s face as the stationer heroically managed to keep his mouth shut while Sammie went on to explain, at some length and with considerable gusto, the barter system allowing patrons to make their purchases based on recorded work exchanges. The crowd, growing bored and likely thirsty, became involved by way of throwing out examples, many of them totally incomprehensible and a couple profanely hopeful. The Earther woman appeared fascinated. “But we don’t call them in—the work, that is—very often anymore, Madame,” Sammie finished. “It’s coin of the realm these days.”
“I see. Mr. Leland—”
“Call me Sammie. Please.”
Pardell was sure he spotted the ghost of a dimple at the comer of her mouth; it could have been the poor lighting. “Thank you. Sammie. I believe there may have been a misunderstanding. I’m here to offer Mr. Pardell a job—a job for which I would pay him in other than ‘dibs,’ as you’ve ably explained them. I assure you I mean him no harm and that it has nothing to do with Administrator Forester or any other station personnel. So,” Smith raised her voice, although she had everyone’s rapt attention, turning in a slow circle to address the entire crowd. Her gaze passed over the bar as if it wasn’t there. Pardell fought the urge to duck. “Please relay this message to Mr. Pardell for me: if he’s interested, he should come to the docking ring, and introduce himself to any member of my crew. There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity waiting for him. In the meantime,” this as she faced Sammie again, “my sincere apologies for disturbing you and for any losses you’ve incurred.” Forester began to sputter. The professor bent down and picked up the broken remains of a cup to wave under his nose. She silenced him completely by adding: “Send the bill for the next three rounds to the ERC Deep Space Vessel Seeker.”
Professor Smith swept up her Earther troops, Administrator Forester, and her cloak, heading to the curtained door with a suddenness that suggested she either knew very well to get out of the way of the imminent stampede to the bar—or she’d accomplished what she wanted here and was in a hurry to do the same elsewhere.
Or both, Pardell thought uneasily, distracted as the bar’s bell rang automatically, its message to patrons lost in happy confusion.
Chapter 2
THE cup had been washed so many times, the letters walking around its base were faded and broken. Clear enough. Gail’s finger followed the “Merry Mate II” pensively, avoiding the razor-sharp edge where the cup had shattered, aware the three men in front of her traded puzzled looks.
They don’t appreciate the irony of it, she reminded herself, forcing down triumph and impatience with the ease of tedious practice. To be fair, they didn’t have the information to do so; she had no intention of providing it. She raised her eyes when she was ready and not an instant before.
“Have you briefed the guards you’ve posted on the dock?” she asked.
Commander Daniel R. Grant of the Sol System First Defense Unit 518—presently assigned to the Seeker—pressed his lips together in utter disapproval, an all-too familiar expression. Unlikely to change any time soon, she thought. The twenty-four FD troops and their leader disapproved of many things she required of them. “As you ordered, Dr. Smith,” Grant said in a tone so neutral it grated. “They are to wait for Pardell to arrive, then immediately bring him on board to you.”
At this, the man beside the commander, Captain Tomoki Tobo, gave another theatrically-dismayed sigh. For once, he seemed to have found common ground with his military counterpart. Neither of them approved of bringing a stationer—any stationer—on the Seeker. Their novel alliance had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the thousands of angry would-be immigrants on the other side of the air lock.
She didn’t, Gail thought with sudden revulsion, need to be reminded. As if anyone from Earth could forget what had happened in those first months after the Quill: the swarming and overloading of unguarded ships, the pathetic broadcasts for help still traveling through the space that had swallowed their senders whole, the riots and near anarchy.
As if any from a station could forget—or forgive—Earth’s panicked response to the desperate flood of returning immigrants, brought on by terror that they carried the Quill and would contaminate humanity’s center. The Patrol had been ordered to turn back any station-origin ship trying to enter Sol System, to fire on and destroy those who refused to believe they couldn’t go home. To defend against their own.
Stationers try to take an Earth ship to Sol today? Only if they had a death wish, Gail decided. And any of that particular bent would have readily found their desire satisfied long before the Seeker docked.
On the surface, twenty years later, things were more civilized. There was an assumption of some responsibility for the stranded immigrants by Earth, motivated by guilt as well as self-interest, the latter an awareness that casting aside the stations entirely could come back to haunt the home system. Not that the stations looked to Earth any longer for help or hope of a future. Like Thromberg, twelve of the thirty-three original stations had been stable for a decade or more. Some were close to sustaining themselves, if not of growth.
The others? Well, no one spoke of those.
Gail looked from Grant to Tobo, finding it ironic that the survival of humanity under such desperate conditions had become a source of fear; sufficient at least to bind these two together against her for the first time.
Until now, the two officers had maintained a relationship comprised of equal parts disdain and respect: Tobo’s disdain and Grant’s respect. Tobo—short to Grant’s regulation height, chubby to Grant’s regulation fitness, and of pure Kanshu lineage to Grant’s peculiar blend of who knew how many ethnicities comprised the military’s ideal soldier these days—spent much of his time inventing ways to demonstrate how little the troops understood about life on a starship. Grant, Gail had noticed, appeared torn between his awareness that, onboard the Seeker, Tobo was a superior officer, and an obsessive need to prove he and his people could handle anything. The Seeker’s journey from Sol System had been punctuated by the results—inconvenient at best and often messy. Gail had managed to convince Grant that Tobo’s idea of randomly shutting down lowerdecks’ gravity in the middle of shipnight wasn’t essential to his troops’ training for space. Convincing the vastly entertained Tobo, whom she suspected of hiding a vid in the troops’ quarters, had taken a fair amount of outright yelling.
Her inner smile faded as the third man spoke, his voice high-pitched and scornful. “At the risk of repeating myself, this is ridiculous. With that plan, you’ll end up with a hundred ‘Pardells’ in your lap by shipnight.” Manuel Reinsez, like Gail, sat at his ease while Grant and Tobo stood almost at attention. The semi-retired Chilean xenopathologi
st was old even by the standards of Earth, which granted the risky rejuv treatments sparingly, based on an arcane formula combining health factors and projected contributions to society. Gail suspected Reinsez had had more than one, or had qualified unfortunately late in life for his first. The man’s face wasn’t merely wrinkled—his sallow skin was so limp it draped free from brow, cheek, and jawbones. When he felt in the mood—or had had too much sherry—Reinsez would pull the loose skin of his jowls back to hide his ears, pursing his lips to imitate a fish. A dead fish.
A shark, more like it, Gail reminded herself, careful not to show any response beyond polite attention. She could handle Grant’s anxious efficiency. The man was patently a superb officer, simply out of his depth in their current situation. The stats and vids of the station he had to rely on for information were so dated as to be laughable and Tobo’s campaign hadn’t exactly boosted Grant’s self-confidence.
She’d probably been wrong to turn a blind eye to Tobo’s peculiar sense of humor, but he was the closest thing to a friend and confidant she’d had on this trip; a closeness which didn’t mean he knew everything about what she was doing here.
Professor Reinsez thought he did. His presence was Titan University’s latest grip on her project and its tightest. Without Reinsez on the Seeker, they’d still be in synchronous orbit over the campus, battling endless red tape and obstructions, her already minimal funding sucked dry by bribes to faceless individuals and shapeless organizations to keep fuel in the ship’s belly, let alone gain support to move her project up the waiting list.
Dibs, Gail thought wryly. The stationers had no idea how much cleaner that concept sounded.
“I’m well aware we may have to screen a multitude of impostors, Dr. Reinsez,” she said out loud. “But unless you have a better suggestion . . . ?”
Reinsez waved both hands in denial, slouching more comfortably into his chair. “Not I, Dr. Smith. Not I. This is your show. I’m along for the entertainment value.”
“And to report our findings to Titan’s Directors,” Gail added gently, a reminder intended for Grant’s ears. It never hurt to keep the cards in view, she thought. Theirs, if not hers.
“But of course, Dr. Smith,” Reinsez agreed, eyes glistening within their deeply creased lids. “That goes without saying.”
“Then we’re done here.” Gail put the cup shard on top of the pile of studies she planned to read later this shipnight, after pulling free the topmost, withdrawing her attention from the others in the certain expectation they each had their own tasks to pursue and knew better than to waste her time.
Sure enough, Tobo and Reinsez left without another word, but Grant closed the door behind them, turning back to stand in front of her again. Gail glanced up, lifting one brow interrogatively. “What is it, Commander?”
“Have you heard from Thromberg about the remotes, Dr. Smith?”
Gail leaned back in her chair, a tactic she’d developed to avoid craning her head at a bad angle in order to look attentively at anyone whose own head endangered doorways. Maybe, Gail hoped, he’d think she was relaxing. Not for the first time, Gail pondered the rumors about cloning in the military—Grant’s deeply chiseled features, long-limbed form, and stiff bearing resembled his troops so closely they might have been younger versions of the man before her now—then dismissed them. It was simply that the military had long ago adopted a policy of physically coordinating its units to produce the desired look for a specific political event, like a matched team of horses to draw a ceremonial coach. These days, Earth had little other need for her soldiers: police forces dealt with on-planet issues, and Sol System had its patrol to handle off-planet ones. Most citizens only knew there was still a planetary military during parades or state funerals.
A few, such as herself, bothered to notice Earth’s military continued to zealously train its men and women for a new role: to protect humanity against what might be out there. First Defense.
A mandate they’d failed with the faceless Quill, dying or retreating to safety with everyone else. Now, for some unknown reason, Earth’s military might, represented here and now by these twenty-five cookie-cutter soldiers, guarded her. Gail tried not to scowl. A little overzealously, too, considering humanity remained quite alone in the intelligent life department.
“I haven’t heard, Commander,” she told him. “If you still feel it’s necessary to deploy your satellites outside the station, I can press the issue with Administrator Forester. But I don’t hold out much chance of success. They’re—prickly—about surveillance here.”
Vids, familiar from every street corner and hallway on Earth and her system companions, were conspicuous by their absence on Thromberg. They’d all noticed it and, when she’d asked, Forester had almost refused to help them further, spouting what amounted to a rant about the right to privacy. The Earthers, herself included, settled for feeling mystified and, in Grant’s case, more vulnerable. The remotes he was so passionately set on using were his answer—independent bundles of cameras and other devices which could be set to watch the station from a distance, giving them advance warning of ship movements.
“Yes, completely essential,” the commander insisted. “You know I objected strenuously to docking the Seeker in the first place. You could have sent us on a shuttle, stayed in safety—and kept our only weapon free.”
“They wouldn’t have let a shuttle dock under those circumstances,” Gail reminded him. “You know that. And as for keeping me safe . . . ?” she left the sentence hanging between them like a challenge, daring him to pick it up. She’d made it clear from the moment the military approached with its offer of protection that she’d accept it for her work, not her person. Less publicly, but just as adamantly, Gail had insisted Grant’s unit be under her direct authority, not Reinsez’s. They’d surprised her by complying. Anything to get the troops a little practice, she told herself, not for the first time.
Perhaps Grant felt the same way. “Understood, Dr. Smith,” he said, lips twitching as though about to smile. It was the closest to an outright expression she’d caught on his face. “But perhaps I can suggest a compromise. Let me send out one probe—” before she could utter her immediate objection, he raised a hand to ask her silence, continuing quickly “—if they object, we can say it was a maintenance ’bot out to check the ship that went astray. It would make one spiral orbit of the main station cylinder, sending us the image, then drift off into space.”
“And if they haul it in? I need their cooperation, Commander. I can’t afford to alienate these people in any way.”
“If they haul it in, it will be an ordinary ’bot, like the ones their own facilities would use. The transmitter’s a bit more powerful, that’s all, but they’d need an expert in current Earth tech to know.” Grant paused as if for emphasis. “I think we’re pretty safe in that regard, since Earth doesn’t let her experts migrate outsystem.”
Gail sat forward, chin on the heel of one hand, and studied Grant’s face more closely than she ever had before. He bore her scrutiny solemnly, his wide-set, brown eyes almost pleading. There was a pulse visible in one temple, beating strongly beneath the faint whiteness of a puckered, oddly circular scar. Otherwise, his smooth, olive-toned skin was unmarked, and unrevealing. “If they haul it in,” she said at last, “and have any complaints about it whatsoever, I’d have to claim no knowledge or approval of your actions. For whatever that might count with them—” Gail began to shake her head. “It’s too risky, Commander. What are you expecting to find out there to make it worthwhile?”
Commander Grant reached out and lifted the cup shard from its place on her pile of studies. A thrill of alarm fingered Gail’s spine as he turned the shard in his hands, but all he said was: “You’re a scientist, Dr. Smith; I’m a soldier. Our jobs aren’t all that different, you know. Like you, to do mine I need to observe what’s around me. Right now, that’s a station without external or internal vid feed for my people to tap; it’s a population that, if not actively ho
stile, is as close as I’d ever want to come to it; and it’s an environment we can’t hope to explore in person. We’re no use to you—to your project—if we can’t see what’s out there. Let me do this. For all our sakes.”
Gail tried not to look relieved as Grant put down the cup shard, then she slowly nodded, just once. “We didn’t have this conversation, Commander,” she advised him coolly. “And I didn’t ask you to work with Captain Tobo to have a maintenance ’bot do a routine check on the Seeker while we’re in dock. Are we clear?”
Gods, an actual smile, Gail told herself, though the expression strangely increased Grant’s resemblance to a hunting cat rather than diminished it. A definite smile accompanied by a snappier-than-usual salute. “I didn’t hear a thing, Dr. Smith,” he assured her. “And thank you.” He rushed out, obviously eager to be at his spying.
Gail picked up the cup shard and idly followed its lettering with her finger.
No need for Grant to know she was every bit as eager as he was to see what else might be docked to Thromberg Station.
No need at all.
Chapter 3
It wasn’t fair! Pardell rammed his foot into its boot. Despite an anger sending spots before his eyes and shortening his breath, he took care nothing was folded or pinched in the process. Next, he tightened the straps that kept the overly-large mags attached to the soles; unlike the Earthers’ new gear, his was cobbled together from a sequence of other space suits, and the mags to hold him safely to the station’s outer plates were cut from ones originally three sizes too big. From Aaron Raner’s suit.
He may have grown since, but he’d never fill them.
Thinking about the dead was unlucky, especially here, where so many of the dead had been stored for identification. The only place inside cold enough. Pardell could see his breath when it passed through the thin cone of light from his wrist lamp.
Thromberg itself had bled that day, ripped along a fragile seam during the frantic exodus of too many people, in too few ships. There had been repairs and reclamation efforts in the years since, but none in this section of the aft docking ring, not yet anyway. Here remained only freezing air, darkness, and those ruined, twisted structures no one was desperate enough to salvage. Yet.
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