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EARTH:
UNDOCKING

"Excuse me, Captain," said the beaming passenger just as Ran Colville's ear clip buzzed him. "I wonder if I might trouble you to stand by my wife for a picture? To show people back home that we were really here, you know."

The dip raided again. Somebody sure thought it was an emergency.

The center of the Social Hall—the Empress's First Class lounge—was a huge expanse, almost the worst room in the ship for Ran to find a place in which to flex his communicator to part of the structure. The walls sported holographic images of the buildings surrounding the Roman Forum in the time of Augustus, and the designers hadn't needed to modify the scale greatly to fit the available space.

Ordinary radio communications didn't work within the mass of metal and electronics that was the Empress of Earth. On so large a ship, a public address blaring audio requests from tannoys in every compartment was, for both practical and esthetic reasons, possible only in general emergencies. For most purposes, messages were pulsed in recipient-coded packets from infra-red lenses in the vessel's moldings. These were picked up and converted to audio alarms by the clip each crewman wore behind one ear.

For actual communication, the crewman switched on the commo unit on his waistbelt and turned so that the unit had a line of sight to a ceiling transceiver. When the commo unit was on and properly positioned, the system provided full two-way communication between all portions of the vessel's interior.

About a hundred passengers sat in the lounge or stood, viewing the holographic murals with awkward nonchalance. They had arrived early and, with their luggage stowed in their cabins, had nothing very obvious to do. Most of them were new to interstellar travel—old hands at the business tended to arrive hours or less before undocking, perhaps having first called "their" steward to see that "their" cabin (or often suite) would be ready for them to slip into with the ease of putting on a favorite pair of shoes.

The furniture in the Social Hall mimicked the curves and color of the ivory stools of Roman senators, but common sense (or Trident officials) had prevented the designer from more than suggesting that thoroughly uncomfortable fashion. The chairs and couches had backs—which adjusted to users' posture. They were upholstered in red-purple silk, the true color of "imperial purple," though few of the Empress's passengers were going to make that connection.

Silk was neither more comfortable nor more lustrous than many of the synthetics that might have been used in its place, but First Class clients of the Empress of Earth could be expected to tell the difference. Thin silk cover cloths were laid over a synthetic base, edge-bonded, and replaced as soon as they showed signs of wear.

The used covers were a perk of the stewards. They were in demand among dockside whores in each of the Empress's ports of call.

"Of course . . ." Ran said professionally while his eyes searched his immediate surroundings and his brain dealt with three problems:

What was the emergency?

Where was the IR head serving this huge worn?

How could he get shut of these lonesome passengers without off ending them?

Some minds lock up when faced with simultaneous tasks. Others deal stolidly with one problem at a time, even though everything's going to hell in a handbasket outside their immediate narrow focus. Ran Colville treated batches synergistically. His responses weren't deep and they didn't even attempt to be "best"; but he was very fast, and fast got you a long way in a crisis.

"Right over here, madam," he said.

The IR head would be central, so he needed to move the passengers if his commo unit was to face the correct direction. He took the female passenger by the arm and swept her a short distance to the side where a cleaning robot industriously polished the floor.

In keeping with the decor, the robot was disguised as a meter-high column base, covered with contorted acanthus vines. Ran toggled off the mechanical switch and dropped the unit firmly to the deck. With the woman in the crook of his left arm, he said, "Lieutenant Colville. Go ahead."

The passengers beamed, and Bridge—in this case the central control AI buried somewhere deep in the Empress—spewed information through the ship's structure and up the flex to the commo pod, which broadcast it to Ran's ear clip microphone.

Like her husband, the woman was well into middle age, overweight, and as desperately good-natured as a puppy. She was dressed in high style, a pleated dress of natural linen and a great deal of gold and faience jewelry, both mimicking Egyptian taste of the Amarna Period. She was obviously uncomfortable in such garb, but she was determined to be In on the voyage of a lifetime.

"Stateroom eight-two-four-one," said the artificial intelligence. "There has been a double booking. The Purser has requested aid."

The man's camera was a skeletonized handgrip supporting a body the size of a walnut. The triple lenses were of optical fibers as fine as spidersilk, with a 150-mm spread to create a three-dimensional image. The unit whirred as Ran turned to the woman and kissed the tips of her fingers. "Madam, sir," he said with a broad smile. "Enjoy your voyage on the finest vessel in the galaxy!"

Ran spun on his heel and strode from the Social Hall with a set expression that dissuaded other passengers from accosting him. Three steps along, he realized that he'd forgotten to turn the cleaning robot back on.

The hell with it. That was a problem the stewards could handle.

* * *

The prefix 8 indicated a First Class cabin. 241 was a location: Deck B, starboard rank. Deck A cabins were often thought to be the premium units because entrances to the main public rooms were off that lower deck, but a number of sophisticated travelers preferred the higher level for just that reason. Traffic in Deck B corridors was only a small fraction of that on A

Passengers, stewards, and luggage on static-repulsion floats littered the halls in sluggish movement, like cells in human blood vessels. Cabin doors stood open as stewards fed cases inside one at a time while occupants discussed shrilly where the items should be stowed. It would all get where it was going, eventually; but Ran Colville at the moment regarded the bustle as a moving obstacle course.

A party of Rialvans stood with their backs to the stretch of balcony overlooking the Dining Salon. They waited stolidly while, across the corridor, the dominant Rialvan female looked over their two-cabin suite with the steward. The process might take more than an hour, but it wasn't a problem. The heavy-bodied Rialvans were painstaking to a degree that would be considered insane in any human culture, but they tipped well and they never made active problems for the staff.

No, the trouble was down toward the end of the corridor. Two stewards, dark-skinned men from New Sarawak like most of the Trident cabin staff, snapped to attention when Ran appeared—not because of his rank, but because they were so glad to pass the problem on to someone else.

A pair of male passengers, Caucasians who looked to be about 70 years old, waited in the corridor as well. One of them was a trim, tall man who stood with military stiffness. His fellow was short, soft, bald, and seated on a cabin trunk. The plump man leaned against the corridor wall—a mural of a prairie in late summer, with the milkweed pods beginning to open—with his right ankle crossed over his left knee.

"Ah," said the tall passenger as he noticed Ran. "Lieutenant, I believe? Very good to see you. I'm Richard Wade, this is my friend Tom Belgeddes—"

The shorter man grunted to his feet. "Charmed," he said in a friendly tone. He sounded rather as if he meant something more than conventional pleasantry.

"—and there seems to be a bit of a problem with our cabin," Wade continued without having paused for his friend to speak.

The cabin door was open. Another man popped his head out, then disappeared back inside.

"You'll take it from here, sir?" a steward asked Ran.

"Stick around," Ran replied. "There's going to be some luggage to move in a little bit."

He stood in the doorway. Wade and Belgeddes closed in to either side, making it look as though the Third Officer was the shock troop for their point of view—which was the last thing the situation called for. Ran stepped into the cabin and switched the door down behind him, closing the passengers out in the, corridor.

Luggage, much of it in the form of bales and packets instead of purpose-built cases, filled the center of the bed-sitting room. A family of six was positioned around the gear like the Huns at Chalons prepared to defend their leader on a pile of saddles.

"I am Parvashtisinga Sadek," announced the man who'd looked into the corridor. "This is my cabin. See!"

He offered Ran his ticket, a data crystal etched on the outside with the company's trident. The crystal was a wafer, 1-cm by 2. Its information could have been contained on a microscopic speck: the additional size was necessary for handling by life-forms rather than by computers.

Ran put the ticket in the palm-sized reader on his belt and projected the data in the form of a hologram that hung forty centimeters in front of his eyes. It was an Earth to Tellichery ticket, via the Empress of Earth in Cabin 8241, with everything in order. Five-person occupancy, which might be arguable, but a babe in arms would normally travel free. Date of issue was the twelfth of last month, three weeks before. The only unusual circumstance was that the ticket had been cut on Am al-Mahdi rather than either of the terminus worlds.

"Thank you, sir," Ran said as he returned the wafer. "I'll check the other gentlemen's tickets, now."

"This is our room!" Sadek said in a shrill, forceful voice. "We will not move."

He, his wife, and three of the children stared at Ran as if they expected the white-uniformed ship's officer to draw a long knife at any moment and begin to butcher them. The infant on the mother's breast looked up, hid his/her face with a happy gurgle, and peeked out again.

Ran winked, drawing another gurgle.

Ran left the door in the up, open, position as he stepped back into the corridor. "Mr. Wade, Mr. Belgeddes," he said, "might I—"

He paused, because Wade was already extending his hand with the two ticket chips in it

"Of course, of course, my boy," Wade said. "By the book, just as it should be. I've been an officer myself, you know—at least a dozen times, if you count all the penny-ante rebellions that somebody decided to make me a general."

"That's right," said Belgeddes as Ran fed a ticket into the reader. "Dickie here, he never could keep out of trouble."

The ticket was Belgeddes' own, and it was perfectly hi order: Cabin 8241, round-trip, Port Northern at both termini. Issued through Trident's home office in Halifax on the first of the previous month. Eleven days earlier than the Sadek family's ticket

Before he spoke, because it was a lot easier to check now than clean up the mess later, Ran switched Belgeddes' ticket for Wade's in the reader. The ticket data were identical save for the name and retinal print of the passenger.

Pity. It'd have been a hair easier if the proper cabin-holders were the people holding the cabin at present . . . but if they were all easy, Trident Starlines wouldn't need people like Ran Colville to back up the Empress's stewards.

Ran aimed his transceiver link toward the IR head above the doorjamb. The Sadek family stared at him: the husband stiff, as though he faced a firing squad; the wife fierce, the children obviously frightened . . . and the infant gurgled again.

"Colville to Bridge," Ran said. "Project a First Class occupancy plan through my reader."

"Do you remember on Matson's Home, how the government made me a colonel after the rebels ambushed the sight-seeing train and I potted a few of them just to keep us from being shot?" Wade said. "Heaven knows, I didn't care anything about their politics."

The Empress's controlling artificial intelligence obediently shunted data through deck-conduction radio to Ran's hologram projector. The lens system couldn't handle a double spread, so it switched rapidly between the A and B levels.

All the cabins in both arrays were coded red, occupied.

"Oh, for pity's sake!" Ran snapped. "Bridge, give me a list of empty cabins. The whole ship isn't full."

"Be fair, Dickie," Belgeddes was saying. The two men were clearly playing out a well-practiced skit. "The general was going to make you a captain until he threw his arms around you and you knocked him down because you weren't sure of just what he had in mind. Then he made you a colonel."

"The whole ship is not full," the AI replied tartly. "All the First Class cabins are occupied, however—as the plan I projected at your request clearly shows."

"Why on earth are—"Ran began; and stopped himself, because it was the wrong thing to worry about when he had a real problem to solve.

The artificial intelligence answered the half-spoken question anyway. "A Szgranian noblewoman has taken a block of sixty-four cabins and the Wu-Ti Suite, for herself and her entourage," it said. A long row on A Deck, starboard outboard—the rank of cabins directly beneath 8241, in fact—glowed yellow, then returned to red highlighting.

"All right," Ran said, "tell me what is open."

Cabin Class was a ring of accommodations amidships. They were designed for multiple occupancy by strangers, with two pairs of bunk beds in each room and relatively spartan facilities otherwise. There were only 204 places in Cabin. The real purpose of the class was to provide a physical separation of First Class and the packed mass of Third Class passengers further aft. Some people who could afford First preferred Cabin, however, because the very small number of passengers traveling together fostered friendliness and camaraderie.

There were about a dozen empty bunks, scattered throughout the Cabin Class area.

"Right," Ran said. "Bridge, clear me compartments four-thirty-two and four-thirty-four. Assign them to the Sadek party, six persons, in place of the eight-two-four-one assignment made in error."

"Passengers already assigned aren't going to like moving," one of the stewards said, ostensibly to his fellow.

"Berths in Cabin Class are assigned in accordance with the company's pleasure," Ran responded sharply. "If you mean that some stewards have already pocketed bribes for arranging lower bunks for people who'll have to move to top ones—that sounds like a personal problem to me."

"We will not move!" Mr. Sadek cried. "Our ticket is correct!"

"Sir," Ran said, "you have a valid ticket, and responsibility for the error rests with Trident Starlines. But there was an error, and—"

"You say our ticket is correct and you say that the fault is yours!" Sadek said. His eldest daughter edged closer to her mother, and the two-year-old boy began to cry. "Racism is the only reason that you move us and not them!"

Ran looked at the smaller man, considered his next words and their possible side effects—and spoke the flat truth anyway. "No sir," he said. "I said your ticket is valid, but it's not correct."

He took a deep breath. "And I said Trident is responsible for the error . . . but as for what actually happened, I'd guess you knew the Empress was fully booked, but you got a friend at Golconda Travel Agency—"the issuing agency on the Sadeks' ticket"—to cut you a ticket through their Ain al-Mahdi office where the data base hadn't been updated. If necessary, I'll see to it that the company reviews its arrangements with Golconda—"

Mrs. Sadek gasped and tugged her husband's sleeve. It was long odds that Golconda Travel Agency would turn out to be a relative from her side of the family.

"—but for the moment, what's important is that they were authorized to ticket for the Empress at the time they did so, even though the space had been assigned some weeks earlier. Therefore, on behalf of the company, I'm arranging a double cabin for you with a little more than twice the space—full First Class entertainment in both cabins—"

The hologram feeds were run to all living spaces as part of the emergency information net. Entertainment programming required only a software change.

"—and of course, use of all the First Class public spaces. What I can't offer you—" Ran smiled tightly to underline the irony "—are programmable murals. Yours will be one scene apiece."

"Cabin four-three-two is a Kalahari display," Bridge volunteered. "Cabin four-three-four is a coral reef."

"You'll have a desert and an underwater scene," Ran said. "Or you can turn them off."

Mrs Sadek tugged her husband's attention again and whispered furiously into his ear while he continued to watch Ran. The cadence of her voice was audible, though her words were not.

Sadek suddenly and unexpectedly smiled. "Twice as large?" he said. "And a separate room for the children?"

"You bet," Ran said. "It'll take a moment to configure the beds the way you decide you want them, but it'll be more comfortable than this."

8241 was set up with two twin beds. The Sadek's steward had brought a crib and an inflatable which now rested in the corridor on the opposite side of the door from the Wade/Belgeddes luggage.

Mrs. Sadek whispered again.

"And there will be no difficulty for my brother-in-law?"

"Not on this one," Ran agreed. "But you might pass on the word that if I personally have a situation like this arise on a Golconda ticket again . . . then I personally will see to it that the next time's the last time."

Sadek giggled. "Yes," he said, "yes, of course." He straightened. "Let us go, then!"

Ran glanced at the stewards. "Your move, gentlemen. Four-three-two and four. Oh—and make sure full holo is enabled."

He nodded to Wade and Belgeddes as he backed away from the cabin.

Wade stepped close and murmured, "Fine job, my boy. Good to see that the sons of Earth haven't forgotten how to handle these fringe-worlders. Why, I remember when I was supervising a prospecting team on Hobilo before the Long Troubles—"

"Thank you, sir," Ran said firmly. "I very much regret the delay, but I trust you'll enjoy your trip with us nonetheless."

He strode off down the corridor, heading toward the bow to permit him to turn his back on Wade. He didn't like having Sadek call him a racist. He liked much less to have Wade approving of him as a racist.

And while the Sadeks' home planet, Tellichery, had a highly developed industry and culture, Ran Colville's own Bifrost was a fringe world in every disparaging sense of the term.

* * *

"Whoopie ti-yi-yo," Mohacks sang in a low voice, "git along, little doggie. . . ."

"Don't you let Commander Kneale hear you saying that sorta crap," Babanguida warned. "He'd have your guts for garters."

"It's your misfortune and none of my own. . . ." Mohacks continued.

Third Class loaded along a single meter-wide walkway instead of a broad ramp like that which accommodated First and Cabin Class. The passengers were segregated by sex rather than family, with the only exceptions being children less than ten years old who were permitted to stay with their mothers upon request

"Where's this lot going?" Mohacks asked.

"Biscay, the most of them," said his partner. "A few of them's for Hobilo, for the mines."

Ground personnel conducted the mass movement—Trident's Emigrant Staff here, officials from the labor contractor or other receiving agency on the destination world. All aspects of the Empress of Earth's loading were ultimately the responsibility of the ship's crew, however. Mohacks and Babanguida stood at the head of the gangway where they could see both the interior of the hold and the long column shuffling forward.

The emigrants were nervous but hopeful. Each wore company-issue coveralls and carried the company-issued 20-liter pack which contained absolutely all the personal effects an emigrant was permitted to bring aboard. A few mothers staggered under two or three packs, their offspring's allotment as well as their own.

"Poor stupid bastards," Mohacks said. "Don't they know what they're getting into—for the rest of their life?"

"You don't know what they're leaving behind," Babanguida replied.

"I don't need to," Mohacks said with a snort. "I've seen Biscay mebbe fifty times since I've been working this route. Each trip is one more time too many."

The emigrants moved in units of forty-eight, each led by a member of the Emigrant Staff with a blazing red holographic arrow. Unoccupied segments of the Third Class section were open and lighted in bright pastel colors. The single bunks, laid with plaid or paisley bedding, were in four-high stacks.

The guides took their groups left or right alternatively at the head of the walkway. Individual barracks areas were set out by lines glowing on the deck. Only when a group had been marshaled within the proper position did bulkheads drop smoothly from the ceiling.

The guides remained inside the barracks rectangle until the emigrants' first trapped panic had subsided. This was where the Emigrant Staff earned its pay. The guides spoke calmly, either through the translators on their shoulders or directly if they knew the dialect of the emigrants. Only when a section was calm did a guide back out through the door keyed to staff ID chips.

If necessary, ceiling nozzles could spray contact anesthetic. With a full manifest of four thousand plus, it would normally come to that at least once during loading.

"You think Colville's got a bleeding heart for the Thirds, the way Ms. Holly does?" Mohacks asked idly.

"That one?" Babanguida sneered. "His heart don't bleed for nobody, starting with himself. But I don't think he likes us, Howie boy. Saying something about the cattle sheds—"

Babanguida waggled an elbow toward the interior of Third Class.

"—where he can hear us would be just the kind of excuse he'd like to bust us back to Ship Side and get a couple newbies he could snow."

The black rating snorted. "He's got games of his own, you bet. He knows we'd see through him and he'd have to cut us in."

The barracks sections were being filled in a checkerboard pattern rather than solidly from the ends to the middle. When the bulkheads were down, they outlined a narrow corridor in woven shades of gray and pastels. Once the ship was under way, the corridor bulkheads would become transparent though those between sections remained opaque.

"Like a prison in there," Mohacks said as his eyes followed the spaced column of emigrants. "Get out for two hours exercise in twenty-four, and that with a thousand others. Never see a woman—or a man, if you are one, 'cepting the crew."

"Bloody little of that this run," Babanguida muttered. "Not till we suss out Colville, and I'm not real hopeful."

He chuckled, then went on, "Still, so far as these Chinks go . . . It's clean in there and it's safe. The food's not fancy but it's good enough. I ate worse when I signed on with Union Traders out of Grantholm. You don't need to feel sorry for them."

When a staff guide had delivered a group, he or she returned quickly along the even narrower passage mounted on one side of the emigrant's walkway. Occasionally an emigrant would be startled to see someone in uniform going in the opposite direction. The guides patted the passengers' shoulders and murmured reassurance before they moved on.

"Sorry for them?" Mohacks said. "Not me, buddy. My brother Buck was on a tramp carrying a Mahgrabi labor battalion around the Rutskoy Cluster—harvesters, you know."

"Your brother Buck?" Babanguida interjected. "You were on the Ildis in the Rutskoy, and I know it because I saw your experience record on your ID."

"That may have been," Mohacks said in an aloof voice, "but this happened to Buck. Like I was saying, they got to Marignano for the vintage and it was just good luck that there was a squad of hardcase Grantholm labor supervisors aboard because they could catch a scheduled run home from Marignano. You know that sort—they didn't trust anybody with a dark complexion."

"Happens I do know them, you bet," Babanguida agreed grimly.

"So there's Buck on watch, half asleep and nothing but a pistol by him. The Ildis, the tramp, she comes out of sponge space, and bingo! up come four hundred Mahgrabis and tear down the bulkheads. He shouts and drops the first five—"

"He just started shooting?" Babanguida said. "At passengers?"

"At Thirds," Mohacks replied, "except on the Ildis they called them cargo. Anyway, one of Buck's rules is 'When in doubt, empty the magazine.' It wouldn't have done much good, though, only about the time Buck got to the hatch with the other three hundred and some screaming Mahgrabis behind him, down come the Grantholm crew. They carried shotguns and submachine guns in their cabin baggage, and I don't mind telling you the next thirty seconds was pretty busy."

"I don't believe you've got a brother," Babanguida said.

"Sure I do," his companion said. "Well, when the smoke cleared, damned if the captain didn't sober up enough to see there was an intra-system packet bearing down on a converging course. It blew two magnetics, trying to brake when it saw the Ildis wasn't stopping. Buck hopes they went sailing on out till they all froze, 'cause a hundred to one they were going to crew the ship once the labor battalion took it over. It was all planned."

Babanguida sniffed.

"It happened just like I said," Mohacks protested. "Any starship, even a tramp, is worth a fortune. What the Empress's worth, well . . . if you ask me, they could mount flamethrowers down here in Third and I wouldn't mind."

"That I might believe," Babanguida said. "But if you've got a brother, then I'm President of Trident Starlines."

Gray-clad emigrants moved along. A child began to sing in a loud voice. His mother shushed him, then flashed a nervous smile at Mohacks and Babanguida as she passed.

Her expression glowed with inner hope.

* * *

The male Szgranian facing Kneale in the VIP Lounge was twenty centimeters shorter than the commander and, though relatively broad in proportion to the human, had a flattened look. He wore a parcel-gilt silver breastplate covered with jagged symbols which Kneale supposed were writing, and his harness was hung with six holstered weapons.

One for each hand.

A generation or so ago, Trident Starlines had accepted the argument that the weapons of a Szgranian warrior were cultural artifacts which the warrior had to be allowed on shipboard. Even then, the company had forbidden projectile weapons, but the swords which Szgranians wielded with their upper pair of arms and the broad-bladed push daggers for the middle pair were permitted.

That ended with an unfortunate incident on the old Princess Royal. An aide to the female head of a Szgranian clan decided his mistress had been defiled by the offer of a birthday cake. It was the chef's unfortunate notion to mold the cake in the lady's own likeness, but the table steward paid the price. He was lopped into several pieces before four of the vessel's officers piled onto the aide and overpowered him.

Since then, Szgranians wore cultural artifacts of demonstrably non-functional plastic, for so long as they were in spaces controlled by Trident Starlines. Nevertheless, the aide had a set of teeth developed to pulp hard-shelled grain—Szgranians were vegetarians, not omnivores—and which could go through major human bones like a hammermill.

"You are the captain?" the aide squeaked forcefully. He was accompanied by five other Szgranians. They were presumably of lower rank, because their rig-outs were less glittering in precisely regulated stages. Despite the strong jaws, most Szgranians could be mistaken for Terrans from the neck up.

"I'm Commander Hiram Kneale," Kneale boomed back. No one familiar with Terran hippos expected a species to be placid because it was vegetarian. "If you want a starship navigated, Captain Kanawa is your ma*. If you want honor done to a passenger, I am the highest ranking officer for the purpose in Trident Starlines. I represent the Empress of Earth!"

The aide snorted and stepped back to the group of his subordinates. They chittered at one another, waving their arms like a storm in a pine thicket, while Kneale waited stolidly.

Szgranians per capita traveled about as frequently as any other non-human race with which mankind had come in contact. The handiworks of the Szgranian craftsman class, particularly carvings in the round accomplished on a jig with double mirrors, were exquisite and in demand at high prices throughout the civilized universe. The foreign exchange they earned permitted the upper level of Szgranian society to travel at will.

Despite that, relatively few starship officers had experience with Szgranians. The mistress of a clan traveled with a huge entourage—several hundred in the present case of Lady Scour—but no individual ever left the planet. Either you had scores of Szgranians on your plate, or none. Given that most of the travelers were nobles, warriors by birth and breeding and extremely punctilious of their clan's honor, learning to deal with Szgranians was much like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool.

This was Kneale's third experience with a party of Szgranians, but it would be the first for Holly and Colville. They were both solid officers, though; and they had to learn some time.

The aide returned. Szgranians moved with the grace of gazelles. They seemed stiff until you realized how fast and precisely they accomplished every physical task.

"Commander Hiram Kneale," the aide trilled. He curtsied to indicate Kneale's high rank—a prerequisite if the clan mistress was to be entrusted to him. "Lady Scour will honor you with her presence. Please await her."

He took a spherical gong of chiseled iron from his belt and struck it with the fingertips of the middle hand on the opposite side. An angelically clear note filled the lounge.

The aides crouched like a party of Hindu gods preparing for a footrace, their culture's attention posture. In the bottom pairs of their holsters, above the "quaint" swords and knives, were non-functioning copies of pistols every bit as modern as those in the Empress of Earth's small armory.

The same wealth on which Szgranians traveled the galaxy allowed them to import the advanced weapons which guaranteed planetary independence. Szgrane's nearest neighbor through sponge space was Grantholm. The degree of Grantholm influence was limited sharply by knowledge that a planet with a suicidally brave warrior class and energy weapons could be destroyed but not ruled by outsiders.

Commander Kneale braced his back and clicked his heels together. In theory, every First Class passenger boarding the Empress of Earth was a VIP. Certainly most thought of themselves in that fashion. Realistically, though, a foreign potentate who took a block of sixty-four cabins and an imperial suite expected bowing and scraping beyond the general norm. Thus the VIP lounge, though it was officially called the Special Needs Room of the Trident terminal.

A double line of Szgranian attendants entered the room and flared to either side. Lady Scour stepped between them like shot from the muzzle of a blunderbuss. Commander Kneale bowed low, thinking, Good lord, she's beautiful!

Szgranian females of the upper class were larger than the males—a common occurrence in polyandrous species. Lady Scour was Kneale's height though of a willowy build. She moved with a suppleness so strikingly different from that of her male attendants that the commander wondered whether their metal breastplates made them awkward. Again, it was possible that the clan mistress was simply unique of her species. Kneale was willing to believe that.

Lady Scour's garment was a one-piece trouser-suit of purple silk matched perfectly to the color of the irises of her large eyes. Instead of sleeves, her arms extended through a fringed slit on either side. Her skin was covered with a light down like the belly fur of a cat, and the thin fabric left no doubt that Szgranians were mammals—albeit four-dugged mammals.

"You may rise, Commander Kneale, and lead me to my quarters," Lady Scour announced, speaking Standard in a well-modulated voice. Szgranians of all classes were notable linguists. Those who traveled beyond their planet rarely needed AI translators. Even so, Lady Scour's accent and enunciation were exceptionally good.

"Thank you, milady," Kneale replied. He touched his commo transceiver to the inner doorway of the , lounge and said, "Kneale here. Is our path clear? Over."

Bridge replied to the prepared question by throwing' a holographic chart up from the commander's reader. Kneale had arranged a route to the Szgranian wing which, though not the most direct, was fully controllable. It went through the Cabin Class areas in which Bridge could lock passengers in their compartments while stewards cleared the corridors. That sort of highhandedness in First Class would cause problems.

Fewer problems, though, than running a party of hot-tempered Szgranians—not human, and not civilized by human standards—through a mass of people, some of whom were certainly arrogant enough to gawp and laugh. During most of the voyage, Lady Scour's party could be expected to stay within the wing blocked off for their use. Commander Kneale was determined to avoid insults—and retribution—during boarding and disembarking. If he'd had to cleara First Class corridor, he'd have done so.

Lady Scour offered her lower right arm. Szgranians used their various pairs of arms for socially distinct purposes. No doubt she was making a statement regarding their relative rank, but that was her affair. Kneale had only to keep her happy. He crooked the arm in his and stepped through the automatically opened inner doorway.

Kneale's two ratings, Bechtel and Blavatsky, had manually draped the portion of the gangway beyond into a red velvet tunnel. Kneale strode up it with Lady Scour beside him. Her entourage, except for the aide with the gong who marched alone, followed the leaders in double column.

"How did you get along with Rawsl?" Lady Scour asked. "My chief aide?"

"Hmm?" said Kneale. Szgranian hearing was within human parameters, though biased toward slightly higher pitches. Rawsl could certainly listen to diem. "Quite well, madam. He appeared very—" Professional? Alert? "—gallant."

"I rather fancied him at one time," the clan mistress said coolly. "Indeed, he's quite well born, and I was thinking of adding him to my lovers—until one of my maids mentioned that she thought Rawsl was handsome. Don't you find that things are terribly denied by the appreciation of the lower orders, Commander?"

"Umm," said Kneale. "That's a—an understandable attitude, madam."

Maybe somebody understood it. Kneale wasn't sure he wanted to meet that person, though.

Their feet touched the firm resilience of the Empress of Earth's deck. Lady Scour's fine legs flexed like a cat's.

"Welcome to the finest ship in the galaxy, Lady Scour," Kneale said, glad to be able to change the subject.

The bulkhead at the head of the gangway was mirrored. In its reflection, Commander Kneale saw that Rawsl's fists were clenched, all six of them.

* * *

Abraham Chekoumian looked at the Social Hall's bandstand—a copy of the Rostra, complete with projecting bronze rams like those the Romans had taken from captured Carthaginian ships. Holographic temples cloaked the wall beyond. Chekoumian thrust his hands in his pockets, flaring the skirt of his magenta jacket, and laughed loudly.

"Pardon, sir?" asked a female crewman passing at that moment. She was attractively short and plump, with shingled black hair that contrasted nicely with her brilliantly white uniform.

"Oh, I—"Chekoumian said. He grinned broadly. "I'm very happy, you see. I'm here in this—"he took out one hand and pointed, waggling the index finger in a circle "—this luxury, I who worked my passage from Tblisi five years ago in the hold of a tramp freighter as a baggage handler. And—"

He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a pack of letters in durable spacemail envelopes. Chekoumian's garments were cut and styled to the moment. His trousers were pale pink, while his shirt and shoes were identical shades of teal—the Now Neutral, according the arbiters of Terran fashion. The slight shimmer at the seams came from threads of metallic gold used in the stitching.

"—I'm going to be married!" he cried. "Do you know what these are, ah—Blavatsky! But what is your real name?" He waved at her nametag. It rested at a slant on the rating's breast because of the swell of the bosom beneath it. "Your given name?"

"Well, Marie, sir," Blavatsky admitted, "but I think Commander Kneale would prefer that with passengers—"

"Poof, Commander Kneale!" Chekoumian said with a theatrical flourish of his letters. "When you have the same name as my beloved Marie, I should call you 'Blavatsky' as if you were some cargo pusher in my warehouse? And I am Abraham Chekoumian, but you must call me Abraham."

"Well, I certainly wish you and your fiancee every happiness, Mr. Chekoumian," Blavatsky replied. She'd come to the conclusion that the passenger was simply very happy, as he'd said, rather than a madman about to erupt; but it was her job to check dining table assignments with the Chief Steward in three minutes, and she couldn't dismiss Commander Kneale with the aplomb of a First Class passenger.

"I came to Earth to make my fortune," Chekoumian said, looking around the Social Hall with satisfaction. "And so I have done!"

There were already several hundred passengers present, many of them with their seat backs reclined so that they could look upward. On the morning and afternoon before undocking, it was traditional for First Class passengers to gather in the lounge. A bird's-eye holographic projection on the ceiling showed the Empress of Earth in her berth as ground crews and their machinery swarmed about with the final preparations.

Blavatsky realized that Chekoumian wasn't bragging about his wealth, precisely. He knew that no matter how successful he had been, a substantial part of the Empress's passenger list could buy him a dozen times over. His was the self-made man's pride in his success—a matter worthy of the emotion, in Blavatsky's terms.

"Well, sir," she said, "you've picked the right ship to go home on, then. The Empress means success!"

Unless you rode her in Third Class, in the spaces that would double as cattle byres when the Empress of Earth lifted from Calicheman.

The passenger beamed at Blavatsky. He wasn't listening, but he was glad of her presence because he needed an audience to burble his joy aloud. "Marie doesn't know I'm coming back," he explained, waving the sealed letters again. "I'd return when I'd made my fortune, we agreed, and every two weeks of those five years she's sent me a letter. By the Brasil or by the Empress, voyage and voyage. And what I've done—"

Chekoumian looked around to see who else might be listening. No one was. He added in a confidential voice anyway, "—you see, these past three months, when I knew I was going home to marry Marie, I've saved her letters. I'm going to read one at each planet-fall, and then when we reach Tblisi—I'll have my Marie herself."

Blavatsky looked at the passenger. He was a sophisticated man as well as being rich and successful. Unlike many of those in the Social Hall, Chekoumian wore his stylish clothes with practiced ease. He wasn't dressing up for the voyage; he looked as he did to his business associates, at what must be a very high level of his field of endeavor.

But he was also childishly enthusiastic, especially when he was talking about his Marie. Blavatsky smiled, genuinely pleased by Chekoumian's good fortune—and his fiancee's. Her expression couldn't be pure laughter, though, because she remembered how recently she'd thought she was that happy also.

"Five years ago, I had nothing but the clothes I stand in," reminisced Chekoumian. He looked around at the ivoroid and silk, at successful passengers and the images of a supernal empire on the walls. "Ship's clothes they were, too, bought from the bosun's slop chest. And now, only five years—the Beakersdorff chain decides they must have my connections on Szgrane and K'Chitka. They pay me a million three—so much from nothing, in five years!"

Chekoumian had spoken of his warehouse. It sounded as though he was an import-export specialist—had been one, and would certainly be something, maybe the same thing, again soon. His kind of man didn't sit on his hands just because he'd found himself rich.

"I'm glad of your good fortune, Mr Chekoumian," Blavatsky said aloud. She knew she needed to get on, but she no longer felt the pressure of a moment before. Quiet longing eased over her as smoothly as the sea across tidal flats. Commander Kneale's anger was as remote a possibility as the threat of lightning; and in any case, it didn't rule Blavatsky's soul.

"The best of my fortune," Chekoumian said, "is my Marie. She can't realize how well I've done. I tell her, but a letter is a letter, you know . . . and I didn't realize until Beakersdorff made their offer three months ago! Many women wouldn't wait five years, you know."

And some men wouldn't wait four weeks, Blavatsky thought. The length of a round-trip voyage, Earth to Tblisi and back, with the wedding planned for the day the Empress docked on her return. . . .

"That's quite true, sir," Blavatsky murmured. "I hope you continue to be so happy."

The uniformed rating walked toward the real exit framed by the pillared facade of Rome's Temple of Concord. Chekoumian's Marie was a very lucky woman. Blavatsky hoped—and doubted—that she knew it

Chekoumian settled himself into a chair. He was too absorbed in his own affairs to notice that Blavatsky had gone without leave or ceremony. That wasn't the sort of thing that mattered to him, anyway.

He touched the edge fold of the earliest letter with his chip-encoded signet ring. The envelope peeled back neatly, like tensed skin drawing the flesh open along a cut. If the seal was broken in any other fashion, the envelope would have melted with enough violence to ignite the paper within.

Chekoumian extracted the letter and began to read:

My Dearest Abraham,
Today Mother and I went shopping for Nita's baby shower. You know Nita. Oh, don't put yourselves out, she says, but if we didn't you can be sure she'll be telling everybody what cheapskates our side of the family is until she's a gray old woman! Well, we . . .

* * *

The five passengers in the Starlight Bar, all of them male, watched the clear, curving wall as tugs on ground transporters crawled toward the Empress of Earth.

Wade wore his credit chip on a bracelet of untarnished metallic chain, an alloy from the heavy platinum triad. "I'll take this round, then," he said, and inserted the chip in the autobar's pay slot.

Other men began punching selections into the pads on their chair arms. "Many thanks, ah, Wade," Dewhurst said. "The next one's—"

The autobar chirped in irritation. "I'm sorry, sir," said the machine in an apologetic male voice," I believe there's a problem with this chip. If you'd try another one, please?"

Wade withdrew the chip with a look of amazement and outrage on his aristocratic features. "Oh, good lord," he said. "I haven't recharged this from my Terran account! Look, fellows, I'll just pop down, to the Purser's Office—"

"Pretty busy just now, don't you think, Dickie?" Belgeddes warned with a lifted eyebrow.

"Never mind," said Dewhurst. "I'll pay for the round."

"Much obliged, old fellow," Wade muttered. "Very embarrassing."

"Dickie's always doing that sort of thing," Belgeddes said indulgently.

"I dare say," agreed Dewhurst as he summoned a whiskey and water. The autobar chuckled happily over Dewhurst's credit chip.

Da Silva looked up into the auroral sky. "The first time I traveled," he said, "I thought that—"he gestured toward the whispering light with a rum drink "—was what the stars would look like when we were . . ."

He paused and cleared his throat. "In sponge space, you know. But it was nothing like that."

"Even though the bulkhead shows exactly what an optically clear panel would show," Wade said, "in here we're still completely cut off from the insertion bubble. If you've only seen sponge space from the insulated interior of a vessel, you haven't a hint of what it's like to be out in the cold, twisted radiance with nothing but a suit to protect you."

Dewhurst snorted. "I suppose you've been a Cold Crewman, then, Wade?" he said.

"Oh, good lord no!" Wade chuckled. "But back long before you were born, I volunteered when Carlsbad decided to raise a sponge space commando during their unpleasantness with Jaffa Hill. Wasn't my quarrel in the least, but I thought it might be interesting."

He shook his head and looked deep into his drink. "It was that, all right," he said. "Bloody interesting."

"Dickie was the only member of the unit to survive," Belgeddes explained to the others. "They found that practice isn't the same as the real thing."

"Practice was bad enough, though," Wade murmured.

Reed stared at the crystalline mural over the autobar. The Empress of Earth's ports of call were sculpted as icons. They ranged from Earth—bands of rose quartz and topaz to suggest the aurora borealis—to three onion-domed towers representing Tblisi. The bead of red light now on Earth would follow the Empress's progress across the arc, while the blue indicator for the Brasil moved in the opposite direction until they merged briefly on the oil derricks of Hobilo.

"I don't like this talk about wars," Reed said morosely. "It's going to cause trouble, I feel it. I just hope that we make Ain al-Mahdi. After that, well, I wish all you other fellows the best, but it's not my problem once I've gotten where I'm going."

"We won't land on Nevasa or Grantholm if the war breaks out," Dewhurst said. "They'll pick nearby neutrals and offload passengers there."

He sounded calm enough, but what started as a sip drained most of the whiskey from his glass. "Anyway," he added forcefully, "I think it's all overblown. They'll back off, you'll see. Both sides."

"I said," Reed snapped, "that I didn't want to talk about it!"

"I wonder," Wade said, "if you gentlemen are familiar with the beach walkers of Ain al-Mahdi?"

The others looked at him. "The legend, you mean?" said Da Silva. "Beautiful women who, shall we say, make friends with men at night on the beach, but they drink them down to a hollow skin?"

"Ah, well," Wade said. "I thought it was a legend too. Still, it's a big universe, isn't it? We shouldn't be surprised when we learn that it's a little stranger than we'd expected."

"On Ain al-Mahdi?" Reed said. "Look, buddy, my company's based me on Ain going on fifteen years now. Beach walkers and flats, they're the sort of thing you hear about in sailors' bars—period."

"I should have thought that was where you'd expect to hear about them," Belgeddes commented. "From transients. If there were such a thing as a beach walker, it wouldn't prey on locals, surely?"

Wade pursed his lips in consideration. "Flats," he said. "They look like a pool of shadow, but when you step on them—"

He brought his hands together with a clop of sound.

"—like that?"

"That's the story, all right," Reed said over his gin. "But it's always the friend of a friend of a sailor who's seen it, not anybody you meet."

"Unless Mr. Wade has met one—as I rather think he may have done," said Dewhurst.

"Hmm," said Belgeddes. "You never mentioned that to me, Dickie."

"That's because I've never seen such a creature," Wade said stiffly. He pursed his lips. "Unlike the beach walker, which I met—well, I can't tell you how long ago it was." He glanced at Reed. "Certainly before your time, dear fellow. They've probably gone the way of the dodo by now."

"Of the unicorn, I would have said," Dewhurst murmured into his drink, but he spoke in a low enough voice that Wade could pretend not to hear.

"Well, tell us about it, Wade," said Da Silva. "Or—would you care for a refill?"

Wade clinked the ice in his glass. Scotch whiskey was only a hint of amber in the meltwater. "Thank you, friend," he said as he slid the glass toward Da Silva. "Embarrassing situation, as you can imagine."

"Could have happened to any of us, Dickie," said Belgeddes.

"Tarek's Bay wasn't but a few fishing shacks and the warehouses, back then," Wade said. "Ain orbited its primary, and the storage bladders from the gas-mining dipper ships orbited Ain, like moons of the moon. That was before the place became primarily a trans-shipment point. I don't suppose any of the dipper ships still operate, eh?"

He cocked an eyebrow at Reed.

"There's still gas mining," the younger man said, "but now it's geosynchronous siphons and the storage is in primary orbit, not Ain's." He looked uneasily aware that by validating the background of Wade's story, he would seem to lend weight to the story itself—even in his own mind.

"Ah, that's a pity," Wade said. "On nights when the primary was illuminated, the gas bladders drifted across the face of her like soap bubbles, each of them reflecting a view of Ain itself down to the surface. I used to lie out on the beach at night, looking upward and imagining . . . well, I was young then. You know how young men are: romantics."

"Not a lot of romance about Tarek's Bay in the early days," Dewhurst interjected. "Not from the old-timers I've talked to."

"Also," said Reed, "the beach is gravel."

"No, not much romance at all," Wade agreed without dropping a stitch. "That's why I went out alone with nothing but an air mattress for company."

He took a sip from the refilled glass Da Silva brought him from the autobar. "And you can imagine how surprised I was when one night a young lady spoke to me."

"I'm not surprised," Dewhurst said into his drink, but he was listening too.

"Well, we talked," Wade continued. "You know how it is. I was young, and there was no doubt what I had in mind . . . but remember I'd been looking for romance. "And there was something odd about the girl. I mean, there couldn't be much doubt what she wanted either, or she wouldn't have come up to me that way . . . but she didn't seem like a professional. She was quite young and quite beautiful, and, it seemed to me, quite innocent."

"How young?" Da Silva asked with a hard underlayer to his voice.

Wade met the other man's eyes. "Old enough," he said. "Not twenty standard years, though. You'll remember that I wasn't much older than that myself."

Da Silva dipped his head in curt approval.

Reed grimaced, interested despite himself. "What was she wearing?" he asked. He faced slightly away from the storyteller to keep from seeming too eager.

"Cast offs," Wade said crisply. "The light was poor—"

"I thought you said the primary was full?" Dewhurst said in a verbal pounce.

Belgeddes raised an eyebrow. "I don't recall you saying that, Dickie," he said.

"No?" said Wade. "No, I don't believe I did—"

He smiled at Dewhurst. "But it's true nonetheless. I don't suppose you've been on Ain, my friend? Reed—"

Wade clicked his gaze sideways, like a turret lathe moving from one setting to the next.

"—how would you describe the way Ain's lighted under the primary?"

Reed shrugged and said apologetically to Dewhurst, "There's quite a lot of light, actually, but Wade's right—it's blotchy, multicolored pastels from the gas bands in the primary's atmosphere. It conceals as much as it hides, to tell the truth."

"Quite," Wade said primly. "So while it appeared to me that the girl was dressed in little better than wiping rags, I couldn't be sure. And fashions differ, you know."

Dewhurst snorted.

"I had a miniflood clipped to my sleeve," Wade said. "But it didn't seem the time to switch it on."

"You have been out in the evening with young ladies, haven't you, Dewhurst?" Belgeddes asked.

"Yes," said Dewhurst, admitting defeat. "Yes, I can see that."

"So we chatted—"

"Sitting on your air mattress, I suppose," Reed said.

"Sitting on my air mattress," Wade agreed with an appreciative nod. "She said she was local but from another island. A fisherman's daughter, I assumed. Not professional, I was sure of that now, but not disinterested either. I put a hand on her shoulder, and she slid open the front closure of my shirt."

Wade leaned back in his chair, savoring perhaps the memory and certainly the focused interest of the others in the lounge. Belgeddes smiled like a father watching his youngest perform in a church pageant.

"Well," the storyteller continued, "I thought I knew where matters were proceeding. Now, of course, I think they were intended to proceed in a very different fashion. But her fingers touched the garnet locket that my mother had given me on her deathbed. I always carry it, you know. Mother said it would protect me from harm. Silly superstition, I suppose, but there you are."

"And I suppose you're wearing it now?" Da Silva asked, more precise than hostile in his tone. "The locket?"

"At this very moment?" Wade replied. He patted the breast of his tailored gray-and-black shirt "I believe it's in my cabin. I can go get it, of course."

"Shouldn't say he was in much risk at the moment, would you?" Belgeddes said. He chuckled. "Unless you fellows are a syndicate of starship gamblers preying on poor innocents like Dickie and me?"

"Huh! Catch me playing cards with you two!" Dewhurst muttered.

"Well, she touched the locket and she pulled back like she'd been burned. 'Why, that's nothing!' I said, pretty hasty as you can imagine. Not wanting anything to spoil the moment, so to speak. So I flipped the locket out, and I turned my light—I mentioned having a light, didn't I?"

"A miniflood," Belgeddes agreed approvingly.

"I switched on the light—aimed at the locket, mind, but there was scatter from it and through it, though the garnets. And when that red light flickered across the girl, as I thought she was, she simply melted."

"Melted to nothing?" Da Silva demanded.

"Not at all," said Wade. "Into a pool of what I suppose was protoplasm, but it seeped at once down into the soil."

He nodded toward Reed. "The coarse gravel, as Mr. Reed noted."

"I suppose the clothes melted with her?" Dewhurst said.

"No," Wade answered equably, "they were there when I came back the next morning. As was my mattress. I didn't stand on the order of my going, as you can imagine."

"Cast offs," Belgeddes said. "Saw them myself when I came back with him. Sort of trash you could pick from the town midden in Tarek Bay back then."

"What I believe," Wade said, "is that the beach walkers are—or were—"he nodded toward Reed again "—if Mr. Reed is correct in believing them extinct—"

Reed opened his mouth to protest at being misquoted, but he swallowed the words before speaking.

"At any rate, the beach walkers were a life form indigenous to Ain al-Mahdi that mimicked other species," Wade continued. "When men colonized the planet, they mimicked men—or women, at any rate, for the same purposes."

"Which we can guess, easily enough," Belgeddes interjected. "Dinner, not to put too fine a point on it."

"Food or reproduction," Wade said. "Survival of the individual or survival of the species. The basic drives of all forms of life. But its mimicry broke down under intense red light."

He looked at Reed and raised his eyebrow for confirmation. "You've heard that only a ruby laser can kill a beach walker, I suppose? Well, that's not true. It's the angstrom range, not simply destructive energy. And it's not fetal, only—disconcerting to the creature."

Dewhurst's mind riffled the guidebook through whose images he'd browsed in his cabin's bathroom. "There aren't any large animals on Ain," he said. "Except men. There never were."

"Not in the seas, old boy?" Belgeddes responded. "That's not what I recall. I seem to remember some of those arthrodires weighing tonnes, with jawplates spreading wide enough to swallow a catcher boat on a bad day."

"Well, yes, I suppose. . . ." Dewhurst mumbled. "But a—a sea creature doesn't just come up on land!"

Wade got to his feet and smiled at Dewhurst. "Fish don't, that's true," he said in gentle mockery. "At least they usually didn't on Earth."

Belgeddes stood up also. "Time we got back to the cabin, Dickie," he said. "We've still got some unpacking to do before we lift off."

He gave the other men a finger-to-brow salute. "Be seeing you later, I'm sure, chaps."

"One lies and the other swears to it," Dewhurst said when Wade and his companion had left the bar.

"Yes . . . ." agreed Da Silva judiciously. "But I think that story was worth the price of a few drinks, do you not?"

"The funny thing is . . ." Reed said.

The others waited for him to pick up where his voice had trailed off.

"Yes?" Dewhurst prodded.

Reed shook himself and punched in a refill for his gin. "I've lived on Ain for fifteen years," he said. "But you know, he had me believing that for a moment?"

* * *

Ran Colville had programmed the three walls of his office alcove to show a Terran country scene. A road of yellow gravel, crushed chalk from the Cretaceous Sea of North America, wound over a hill. The side ditches were bright with Black-eyed Susans and the rich blue of chicory flowers.

Ran didn't talk about his background so that he wouldn't have to lie. He didn't mind easing others into their own false assumptions, however.

He'd attached his transceiver to the alcove terminal while he took a hypnotic crash course on Szgranian language and customs. Shards of light coalesced behind his eyes, then fanned outward into an external reality which was disconcertingly flatter than the roil of images still churning within his mind.

The terminal chirped again.

"Go ahead," Ran muttered. The effort of speaking brought vertigo. He was supposed to be off duty . . . .

"Sir," said a voice. In Ran's present state, it took him a moment to recognize it as Babanguida's. "There's something funny going on. I passed six guys in Corridor Twelve with a float full of equipment—electronics. Not our people or the company's either. They unlocked the hatch into officers' country—"

"Unlocked it?" Ran said. He shook his head to clear it and found right away that had been a bad idea.

Because of the disorientation it caused, many people refused to use a hypnogogue. Virtually all the knowledge that fitted Ran for his present position came out of one, though. His father had brought home a teaching unit and a university data base of software . . . from Hobilo, loot gathered when Chick Colville served there as a mercenary.

The elder Colville had never touched the hypnogogue, except to demonstrate it to his son. But on the long nights of Bifrost's winter, the unit had hammered Ran Colville through a template of civilized knowledge.

"That's right," Babanguida replied. "I know I'm off duty, but I asked them what they were doing and they told me to stuff it. I, ah, couldn't follow them through the hatch."

Balls. Babanguida had chips to every door in the Empress of Earth or Ran was badly mistaken. The rating had quite reasonably figured this was a good problem to pass off.

It was nice to know that Babanguida hadn't simply ignored the oddity, though. Lots of people would have done just that.

"Right," Ran said aloud, wishing that he felt all right "How'd they come aboard, do you know?"

"By the main gangway," Babanguida said. "Cooper was on duty. He says he checked their passes and they were fine, so what's the big deal. Cooper!"

"And didn't inform Ms. Holly?" Ran said. He was too fuzzy to have remembered whose shift this was, but Cooper was on Wanda's watch.

"That's a negative," Babanguida agreed. "You know Cooper. He figures any day he doesn't put his pants on back to front, it's a win."

"Roger, I'll handle it from here," Ran said. "Over. Bridge, give me a time plan of hatches opening from Corridor Twelve into officers' country and doors in officers' country. Starting ten minutes back."

He closed and rubbed his eyes for a moment That helped a little, but he continued to have flashbacks of still-faced Szgranians dancing while their arms swayed together like the limbs of mating spiders. Ran sighed and got to work again.

The Empress of Earth had visual monitors only in the Third Class spaces. There were times that a full-ship system would have been useful—this was one of them—but neither passengers nor the vessel's officers would have stood for it. For that matter, records of who went to which cabin with whom were an incitement to blackmail by entrepreneurial crewmen, which wasn't the sort of thing Trident Starlines needed either.

Ran's terminal now displayed an alternative. Corridor Twelve was one of those running the full length of the vessel. Going forward from the Embarkation Hall, it passed through First Class and then, through separate locked hatches, gave access to the crew and officer accommodations.

A pair of engineering officers had entered or left their cabins recently, but that was several minutes before the most recent use of the Corridor Twelve hatch. The only cabin opened after that point was Commander Kneale's, two doors down from Ran's own.

"Bridge," Ran asked. "Where's the commander?"

"Commander Kneale left the ship three hours and seventeen minutes ago," the AI replied. "He has not as yet returned. I have no information on his present whereabouts."

"Right," said Ran. It sure didn't feel right. "Request Second Officer Holly to meet me in the commander's suite soonest. I'm headed that way now."

Ran stood up, wobbled in a flurry of false six-armed memories, and went out the door. He paused to put on his hat.

He thought of taking the pistol in the locked drawer beneath his terminal; but if that was the way the situation had to be solved, Ran Colville wasn't in any condition to solve it.

The corridor was empty as usual. Trident Starlines didn't stint their crews. Officers' cabins on the Empress of Earth were of First Class quality, and the corridor walk were programmed with a holographic reproduction of sea grasses moving beneath a Tblisi lagoon.

Ran would just as soon have had gray paint. He wasn't afraid of water, exactly, but he caught his breath every time he stepped out of his cabin.

He walked past Lieutenant Holly's door and stopped at Kneale's. Setting his ear to the panel didn't tell him anything, not that he'd have expected it to. Worth trying, though; and it took up a moment before he had to act.

Ran set his ID chip against the lock plate. An officer could open any door on the ship, even the one to the captain's suite. Of course, Ran could knock instead, but he figured he'd learn more this way.

The man who was leaning against the inside of the door staggered backward when the panel withdrew into the coaming. Ran stepped around him, moving fast so that he was past the entry and bathroom before the man he'd passed grabbed him from behind and another rammed a sub-machine gun into his chest. Together they slammed him up against the wall.

"Who the hell is he?" another man demanded.

All six of the strangers wore civilian clothes, but that was as far as "civilian" went. Both the men holding Ran had gun muzzles against his body. For all his strength, he couldn't have broken free if he'd tried, and he was pretty sure either of them could have handled him alone.

Bare-handed, at any rate. With a Cold Crewman's adjustment tool or even a shovel—maybe not.

Three of the others had shifted Commander Kneale's terminal into the center of the floor. They were wiring a panel into the bulkhead behind it. That was fast work, even with a modular system, but the technicians were obviously pros—as were the two holding Ran, in their own fashion.

The sixth man, the one asking the question, was in his late 40s, with iron-gray hair and a face to match. He hadn't drawn a gun when Ran burst in, but he certainly looked as though he'd seen his share of sight pictures over the years.

"I'm Third Officer Colville," Ran said. One of the men held Ran's face hard against the wall so that he couldn't look around at the work going on. "And who are you, gentlemen?"

"Let him go," the man in charge said abruptly.

The guns and gripping hands fell away. Ran turned slowly. He was going to have a stiff neck in a day or two. The panel the technicians had been working on was hidden behind a holographic screen. With the hologram projector working and the terminal slid back to where it belonged, the additional panel would be completely hidden.

"Mr. Colville," said the man in charge, "we're here on company business." He offered Ran an ID chip embossed with a gold trident. "Check this with your reader, please."

Ran obeyed because that was simpler than refusing. His commo link trilled in his ear, "John Brown, Central Office. Bearer is authorized to enter all Trident Starlines locations. Direct any questions to Department Five, Central Office."

Ran handed the chip back without comment.

"Colville," said the man whose name was as likely Brown as he was likely a Trident employee—not very, "you probably think you were doing your job. We are doing ours. Get out of here now and forget all about it Otherwise, you won't have a job with this company or any other that lifts off of Earth."

Ran didn't doubt that the cold-voiced statement was a promise rather than a threat, nor that it was a real one. But why was the government of Federated Earth installing a—

"Freeze!" ordered Wanda Holly from the open doorway where she stood with her right hand in the pocket of her coat as though she was pointing a pistol. "Drop those guns now!"

"It's all right!" Ran shouted. He didn't step toward the Second Officer because the gunmen might use the cover of his body to swing their weapons up and—

"Lee, Damson!" snapped the man in charge. "Don't move." When he was certain that his subordinates had heard him, he added like the rustle of a bullwhip, "Since you left the damned door open."

"Wanda, it's all right," Ran said in a calmer tone as he stepped quickly toward the corridor before "Brown" decided to hold them. "These gentlemen are from Central Office. They've got a perfect right to be here."

"Colville," said Brown. He paused for a moment, got an unheard prompt and continued, "Ms. Holly. Don't talk about this, don't even remember it Right?"

"Right," Ran said. He keyed the door shut behind him. For a moment he was afraid that the government gunmen were going to follow him out, but the door stayed dosed. He guided Wanda quickly back to his own cabin.

"What was that all in aid of?" she asked, speaking more calmly than Ran could have done, but the guns hadn't been pointed at her.

"The government—the Federation—is installing an autopilot in the commander's cabin," Ran said. "I'll check that he knows about it, but I don't think it would be a great idea to say anything more about what happened."

"I'll check," Wanda said. "Since it happened on my watch."

"Look, Babanguida called me because Cooper didn't see anything to report, even when Babanguida brought it up," Ran muttered defensively. "And just as a suggestion, that sort of fellow doesn't bluff worth a damn with a hand in the pocket."

"I'll remember that the next time I bluff somebody," Wanda said. She lifted the flat pistol from her jacket pocket, put it on safe, and dropped it back where it came from. "And I'll take care of Cooper. He's got a great career back in Maintenance where he came from."

Ran swallowed. "Look," he said, "I'm shook. I was on a hypnogogue learning Szgranian when the call came, and getting slammed up against a bulkhead didn't help a lot I screwed up and I'm sorry."

Wanda started to giggle. "You're shook?" she said. "Can't imagine why. Me, I'm going to go change my pants, because I'm afraid I had a little accident when I saw those sub-machine guns."

She sobered. "You saw a problem and you fixed it, Ran," she said. "It's a pleasure to serve with you."

The way Second Officer Holly said that, Ran thought as his door spread shut behind her, he'd have kissed her if she weren't a fellow crewman.

* * *

The bridge of the Empress of Earth was in the center of the vessel, to make the current path for the controls as nearly as possible the same for each bow and stern pairing. The internal walls were real-time holograms fed by sensors on the Empress's skin. The members of the Ship Side command group could watch a panorama of Port Northern, marred only by seams between the holographic panels.

The officers were all familiar with the illusion, but even Captain Samuel Kanawa paused on occasion when he caught the scene out of the corner of his eye and the wonder of it struck him anew.

The Empress of Earth was moments from undocking. Kanawa looked around deliberately now, a tall, spare figure with the mahogany complexion of his Maori ancestors. His blue Ship Side uniform was tailored so perfectly that it might have been cast as a part of his body.

On even the finest ship, in the best-appointed port in the known universe, there was a possibility of disaster on lift-off and landing. Kanawa never forgot that. Before every undocking, he let his eyes feast on the world that he might be leaving in a metaphysical instead of the planned physical sense.

The sensors ignored the Empress herself, so the eight tugs lashed to the starliner's bitts stood like great stones in a neolithic astronomical temple. The tugs were squat and as ugly as toads. Backwash from their own motors had blackened and rippled their skins, and multiple lift-offs and landings every day inevitably torqued their frames.

Appearance mattered only to passengers watching from the terminal as the tugs crawled into position. That wasn't important enough for the port authorities to attempt the impossible job of maintaining cosmetic beauty in the brutal conditions under which the little ships worked. Function was another matter. To the extent that any human contrivance was trustworthy, Port Northern's tugs could be trusted not to fail at the moment their thrust was most needed.

The Empress's autopilot had checked the tugs' location, then calculated the precise vector for their motor outputs based on the thrust each had developed during its most recent use. When the tugs lighted up for undocking, Bridge—the artificial intelligence, not the physical location—would make such corrections as it found necessary.

Seligly, the new First Officer, had checked all Bridge's calculations. She'd captained an Earth-Martinique shuttle, and before that served as First Officer of the moderate-sized starliner Queen of Naples. Though Bridge had never failed and Seligly's background was beyond cavil, Captain Kanawa rechecked the figures. All were in order.

"Three minutes, sir," murmured the Third Officer from his console. The seventeen officers and ratings on the Empress's bridge were all seated, with the exception of Kanawa himself. It was the captain's choice to remain standing while his ship entered or left a gravity well, despite company regulations to the contrary.

"Very good, Mr. Rigney," Kanawa said. "Stay alert, ladies and gentlemen. Remember Captain Stoltzer."

The Empress of Earth's own magnetic motors had been a low-frequency rumble for several minutes. Now they were joined in pairs by those of the tugs—the quick shock of lighting, a rising pulse as Bridge ran them up to test their response to its control, and then back to idle as another pair came on line. Bright blue light glimmered through the holographic panels, mimicking what was reflected from the frozen soil.

All eight tugs were ready. The Empress quivered like a horse at the starting post. Kanawa glanced down at his terminal. Actual outputs were all within one percent of those calculated. He noted with approval that Seligly was checking also.

"Are you familiar with Captain Stoltzer, Ms. Seligly?" Kanawa asked.

His First Officer looked up at him from her console. "No sir, I'm not," she admitted.

"Then you should have asked," Kanawa chided. "Never be afraid to ask for clarification. It might mean all our lives some day."

"Two minutes, sir," the Third Officer said, speaking into his console so as not to seem to be interrupting his captain.

"Thank you, Mr. Rigney," Kanawa said. The rhythm of the motors was building. There was an occasional jolt and flash as an output antenna cleared its throat of debris.

"It happened seventy years ago, Ms. Seligly," Kanawa resumed. "The captain under whom I trained, Captain Kawanishi, was on the bridge of the Ensign with Stoltzer when it happened. She told the story at every docking or undocking, and I've tried to keep it current in my time."

"I've heard of the Ensign, sir," Seligly said apologetically.

"Yes, of course," Kanawa agreed. "A record holder in her day, though The City of New York had just bettered her time on the Earth-Harkona run. That was the prime route of the day."

Seligly nodded. The deck had a queasy feel, and the tugs could be seen to bob as their thrust edged toward perfect dynamic balance with the Empress's mass.

"One minute, sir."

Kanawa cleared his throat. "Yes, thank you, Mr. Rigney," he said. He glanced at the levels on his display, then the lambent fury of the tug motors in holographic image.

"The Ensign was in Earth orbit, maneuvering to attach her tugs," the captain continued, "when Captain Stoltzer disengaged the autopilot and engaged the backup system. The Ensign began to drop out of orbit on her own. The First Officer just gaped. Captain Kawanishi—Third Officer she was then, of course—tried to take manual control, but Stoltzer grabbed her."

Kanawa chuckled. "That was back in the days when some people didn't think women were tough enough to be Ship Side officers. Kawanishi had her captain's ear in her mouth before they hit the deck together, but that wouldn't have helped a lot if the Second Officer hadn't switched the main autopilot back in and brought the Ensign to orbit again."

"Had he gone out of mind?" Seligly said in amazement.

"Exactly!" Kanawa said, beaming. "He was mad as a hatter. He'd programmed the backup system to drop the Ensign squarely onto New York City with no more braking thrust than it took to drop them out of orbit."

"That would have killed a hundred thousand people!" Seligly said.

"That would have killed tens of millions of people," Kanawa corrected. "The Ensign massed some forty kilotonnes—only a fraction of our size, but still enough to turn the whole metropolitan area into a crater if it hit at orbital velocity. It turned out—"

Kanawa paused to smile brightly at the horror on the First Officer's face.

"—that Captain Stoltzer was so disturbed at The City of New York bettering his Ensign's time by six hours that he'd determined to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Not the ship but the city itself."

Seligly shook her head.

"Lift-off," said Rigney. Bridge raised the tugs' motors to full thrust over a ten-second span, while the Empress's own motors built up power at a cautiously greater rate. The huge vessel vibrated but did not seem to move.

"So watch me, ladies and gentlemen!" Captain Kanawa shouted over the bone-deep throb of the magnetic motors. "Because anyone on the bridge, myself included, may be every bit as crazy as Captain Stoltzer!"

With a roar like rising thunder, the Empress of Earth mounted toward the stars.

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