Odd Girl Out

trip quickly took on the feel of an actual vacation, with our primary occupations being food, sleep, and dit rec dramas and comedies.

Rebekah turned out to be even more culturally deficient in the latter area than Bayta. As soon as we realized that, and to my mild surprise, Bayta immediately appointed herself the girl's guide and mentor. She worked up a program to bring Rebekah up to speed on Human cinematic tradition, then set about implementing it.

Rebekah took to the program like a duck to quack, greeting each new dit rec with wide-eyed excitement. She took to Bayta the same way, and for hours the two of them would sit side by side in the dayroom, chuckling at the punch lines and making quiet comments to each other as they watched.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised by the obvious bonding that was going on. For Rebekah, Bayta was someone to fill the empty hole in her life that had been left by Lorelei's death. For Bayta, I suspected, Rebekah was the little sister she'd never had at all.

It reached such a level, in fact, that I started feeling like a side dish neither of them had ordered. Often during one of their marathon sessions, I would slip out of the dayroom to check on the autopilot or drive systems or even to take a nap, and return with the sense that neither of them had even noticed my absence.

The whole thing gave me a strange and decidedly unpleasant feeling. Being ignored was nothing new to me, and over the past few years I'd been ignored by acknowledged experts in the field. But this was different. Bayta was a colleague, and ever since we'd embarked on this quiet war together I'd been the biggest thing in her life.

Except for the Spiders and Chahwyn, maybe. But they Mostly sat on the sidelines. I was the one Bayta had lived with and fought beside and risked her life for. Not the Spiders. Certainly not Rebekah.

Five days after leaving New Tigris we reached the transfer station. The vacation was over, and the danger was about to begin again.

I was almost glad.

The Customs official on duty was the same one who'd sent us through on our way sunward. Considering the relative trickle of customers who came through here, I wasn't surprised that he remembered us.

'Ah—Mr. Donaldson,' he greeted me. 'This is a surprise. I had the impression you'd be staying on New Tigris a bit longer.'

'That was the plan,' I agreed, handing over my ID. 'But things fell into place more quickly than I'd expected.'

'Ah,' the official said, his eyes shifting to Bayta. 'Good to see you again, too, ma'am.' He looked at Rebekah. 'And you are …?'

'This is Rebekah Beach,' Bayta told him. 'She'll be traveling to the Tube with us today.'

'Good day, Ms. Beach,' the official said, smiling genially at her.

Rebekah didn't smile back. She'd been pale and jumpy ever since we arrived at the transfer station, actually before I'd even finished the docking procedure. If she was trying to look like someone on the run, she couldn't have done a better job of it. 'We'll need a shuttle ride to the Tube,' I said, trying to draw the official's attention toward me instead of her.

'I'll call the pilot,' he said, his eyes still on Rebekah. 'Is this the young lady the gentlemen down the hall have been waiting for?'

An unpleasant tingle ran up the back of my neck. 'Which gentlemen are those?' I asked.

'I believe they're from the United Nations,' the official said. 'They mentioned they were here to escort a young lady back to Earth.'

'I see,' I said, glancing around. There was no one else in sight, but that could change quickly enough. 'And you're supposed to let them know when she arrives, I presume?'

'As a matter of fact, I am,' he said, his tone drifting from friendly to guarded. 'Why, is there a problem?'

'The polite term is jurisdictional poaching,' I said, pulling out my Hardin Security card and handing it to him. 'I'm the one who's supposed to escort Ms. Beach back to Earth, not some bureaucratic glory-hogs.'

'I don't understand,' the official said, frowning uncertainly at the Hardin card. 'They implied this was a very serious governmental matter.'

'They always imply that,' I growled, putting on my best professional-versus-amateurs face. 'The fact of the matter is that I was the one sent to locate this girl and bring her back to Earth. Sent by Mr. Hardin personally, I might add. If the UN wants to interview her, they can ask politely. After we've finished talking to her.'

'I don't know,' the official said hesitantly, gazing at Rebekah as he fingered the ID. 'Their instructions were very specific.'

'Did they have a warrant?' Bayta asked.

The official pursed his lips. 'Not that I saw.'

'Or any official paper at all?' I added.

'Again, not that I saw,' he conceded. 'But they do have UN IDs.'

'Which means what?' I persisted, wishing I could just pull my gun and get us the hell out of here. If the UN flunkies were Modhran walkers, they'd probably sensed Rebekah's renegade coral before I'd even finished docking the torchyacht. God only knew why they weren't here already, flashing IDs and trying to confiscate everything in sight.

I frowned. Why weren't they here, come to think about it? 'But you're right—maybe we should try to be civilized about all this,' I said.

I could feel Bayta's eyes on me at this sudden change in tactics. But the Customs man himself showed nothing but relief. Caught between the UN and a multitrillionaire industrial giant wasn't a comfortable place for a low-level career bureaucrat to be. 'I'd appreciate that,' he said, reaching for his desk comm.

I caught his wrist before he could pick up the handset. 'It might be better if I just go talk to them,' I suggested. 'Keep you and the transfer-station management out of it, you know.'

'If you think that would be best,' the official said, looking even more relieved as he withdrew his hand. 'They're down the corridor to your left. Room Four.'

I looked down the corridor. Room Four was about midway along, in plain view of where we stood in front of the counter. 'Wait here,' I told Bayta and Rebekah, and headed toward it.

The door still hadn't opened by the time I reached it. Settling my shoulders, reminding myself that on this side of Customs the two of them were likely to be as well armed as I was, I pressed the buzzer.

There was no response. I tried again, then a third time. Nothing.

I looked back at Bayta. I could see her lips moving as she continued to talk to the Customs official, probably working out the details of our cargo transfer to the Tube. The official himself, I noted, was too far back to actually see the door where I was standing. Keeping an eye in that direction, I dug out my lockpick and got to work. A few seconds later, the door snicked open, and I slipped through into the room.

They hadn't been dead long, I decided as I knelt over the bodies lying in the middle of the small room. No more than a couple of hours, probably less. The cause of death was pretty obvious: both men had had their necks broken. On the floor beside one of them lay a handgun with the distinctive aroma of recent firing about it.

The target of that fire was also obvious: a dead Pirk lying a meter behind one of the Humans, probably shot in the act of breaking the man's neck. His chest had the small bloodstains of a pair of snoozer rounds, but there were no other signs of injury I could detect.

Ironically, I noted, he was as lacking in normal Pirk odor in death as he had been in life.

I made a single careful circuit of the room, looking for anything that might give me a clue as to what had happened here. But there were no signs of struggle, no documents lying around in the open that someone might have been looking at. Both victims' IDs were tucked safely away in their jackets, with no indication they were being shown to anyone during their final moments. From all appearances, the Pirk had just buzzed the door, walked in when it was answered, and set about killing the two occupants.

Meanwhile, the gentleman at the Customs desk would be expecting me to return with glad tidings of jurisdictional agreement. I finished my circuit and headed back toward the door, giving the gun on the floor a final look. It was a Heckler-Koch 5mm, I noted, just like the one Lorelei had stolen from my Manhattan apartment.

I paused, my hand hovering over the doorknob. Then, slowly, I retraced my steps to the group of dead bodies and took a closer look at the gun.