three-monther, out past Precinct Twelve.”
“Fang’s a miner?”
“Yeah.” Djuro reseated himself, sipping cautiously at his own glass. “She doesn’t usually make mistakes. So what did Lo-Moth say about it?”
“They just said that FourSquare broke contract for no good reason, and then made difficulties about handing over the tapes,” Heikki said slowly. “Which does sound suspicious to me.”
Djuro nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, if you have to break contract, you don’t give your employer that kind of trouble, not if you want to keep your license.”
“I wonder. …” Heikki let the sentence trail off, and swung herself out of the tilted chair. She grabbed the remote from its place by the door to the workroom, and stepped inside, running her fingers across the touchface. The media wall lit, filled abruptly with names and numbers that vanished and were replaced by others at the touch of a key. She flipped hastily through the data base, not bothering to put the data through to a workscreen, but without result.
“Well?” Djuro asked, at her shoulder.
“I thought maybe if FourSquare’d been bought out, they’d’ve made arrangements to reconstitute themselves under a new name—after the old company lost its credit and licenses, that is. But the Board doesn’t list any new applications from them.” Heikki looked down at the remote, and made an adjustment, sending a new list of names flashing across the screen. “I guess now the question is whether they did go out of business.”
“Yeah, there it is,” Djuro said, after a moment. Heikki touched the key that would freeze the data, and they both stared at the glowing letters. “FourSquare, declared license-void 005/492, declared disbanded 105/492. That settles that.”
Heikki nodded, though privately she was not so sure. Still, she told herself, it does mean there’s no evidence of anything wrong beyond incompetence, and that’s something.
“If they offer the job,” Djuro went on, “will you take it?”
Heikki looked at him in some surprise. “Of course,” she answered, and was surprised in turn by her own certainty. Why do I want this job? she wondered, and put the question angrily aside. “Why the hell shouldn’t we?” Her voice was harsher than she’d intended, and Djuro shrugged.
“Just wanted to be sure. I’ll be off now.”
Heikki nodded. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”
There was no word from Lo-Moth for the next ten-day. Heikki occupied herself with the routine business of operating from an Exchange Point, and kept an eye on the news reports from Pleasaunce. Santerese did not appear in them, though she did dispatch a brief message saying that she had begun work. All in all, Heikki thought, I shouldn’t ask for more. Djuro reported that at least two other companies, including the Twins’ cooperative, had put in bids on the job, but no one was offering odds on the eventual winner. Heikki grumbled, but resigned herself to waiting.
When the message finally arrived, it was at the end of the business day, too late to send a formal response. The media wall lit and windowed, codes streaming across its obsidian face. Heikki answered the prompts, filling in the security codes, then waited while the screen went blank and the hardcopier linked to the wall whirred to life. Sighing, she went to read the sheets as they came off the machine: as she had expected, Lo-Moth had copied her standard contract into its corporate format, but, to her surprise, there were no significant changes. She frowned, read it again, dumped the original to the legal analysis program, and leaned against the edge of the desk, waiting for the results. After nearly a minute’s consideration, the program spat its response: no significant changes. Heikki’s frown deepened, and she settled herself in front of the workscreen.
She tied herself into the communications net, and keyed in the codes that would reach Malachy’s secretarial program. She dumped a copy of both contracts to him, and added a quick note, asking him to go over the language and make sure that Lo-Moth hadn’t changed anything important. Only when the codestring indicated that the message had been accepted did she touch Djuro’s code.
It was several minutes before the screen lit, and when it did, the camera was turned carefully to the white- painted wall. “Yes?”
“It’s Heikki, Sten.”
“Ah.” The camera did not move. “What’s up?”
“We got word from Lo-Moth,” Heikki said, and could not keep the pride from her voice. “We’ve got the contract, if we want it. I’ve got Malachy looking over the terms now.”
“Didn’t they do what you wanted?” Djuro asked.
“It’s practically our contract, copied onto their format,” Heikki answered. “That’s why I want Malachy to look at it. Do you know where Jock’s staying these days, or if he’s taken another job?”
“No, he’s still looking,” Djuro answered, and swung the camera back toward himself. Heikki blinked, dizzied by the sudden movement, and saw the little man fasten the last clasp of his jacket. “He’s staying on the hostel level here, but I don’t think he’ll be there now. He’s probably at Victoria’s.”
“We can track him down there,” Heikki answered. “Meet me—unless you have other plans.”
Djuro shook his head silently.
“It’ll take me about an hour to get there,” Heikki went on.
“I’ll be there,” Djuro answered, and cut the connection.
It would take somewhat less than an hour to reach Dock Seven, and Victoria’s, but there was a certain code of dress observed in the dock pods that could not be broken with impunity. To ignore it was to proclaim oneself an outsider, fair game; to follow it was to state quickly and clearly who and what one was. Heikki kicked off the station slippers she was wearing, rummaged in a wall bin until she found the tall arroyo-leather boots she usually wore planetside, and worked the clinging leather up over her knees. She left the two front slits of her skirt unbuttoned, freeing the sheath at the top of each boot, and transferred her knife from the thigh sheath to the boottop. Then she reached into a second bin for the jacket she kept for venturing into the docks. It had the standard ‘pointer collar, left side higher than the right, an electronics pad sewn into the stiffened material, but it was tailored more sharply, broad in the shoulders and nipped in at the waist, and the fabric was visibly expensive, an unpatterned blue-black tree-wool. She shrugged it on, feeling automatically for the electronics in collar and cuffs, then went back into the bedroom for her blaster. She slid a fresh cartridge into the charging chamber— half-power, a stun cartridge, all anyone ever carried on any space station— and slipped it into the top of the right boot. It was not that she expected to need it—in all her twenty-five years in salvage, she had never yet had to use it, or the thin-bladed knife she carried in the left boot, on any Exchange Point—but it was a part of the uniform, part of the romance of salvage. She grinned, too aware of the ironies in that view to do more than enjoy them, and started for the door.
She took the stairs to the connecting level and walked the length of the tube to the minitrain station. The other passengers, recognizing the clothes, gave her a wide berth until the Docks change-station, and then she was swallowed in a crowd of similarly dressed men and women. The corridors connecting the dock pods were brightly lit, high-ceilinged tunnels with padding on the floors and halfway up the slightly curving walls. People moved quickly along the center of the corridor, the harsh light flaming from exotic Precinct clothing and flamboyant spacer dress, but here and there eddies formed in the relative shadow of the padded walls. Once it was a group of neo- barbs, mostly women this time, clustered about the platform of the sonic drill that was their sole means of support; then it was a trio of spacers, standing close together, heads turned into their collars as they talked. Light flashed from biolume bracelets as they gestured.
A slidewalk ran down the center of the tunnel that led to Docks Five through Nine. It was crowded, knots of men and women in spacers’ bright clothes leaning against the groaning grab bars, while other people, carefully suppressing any immodest language, pushed past them to hurry down the moving strip. Heikki hesitated for a moment, then, with some reluctance, stepped up onto the walk. By the time the slidewalk had carried her the three hundred meters to the entrance to Dock Five, a number of adolescents—‘pointers, mostly, out for a spree in the frowned-upon dockside clubs—had stepped up onto the walk, and Heikki advanced her left leg a little, letting the skirt fall back to expose the knife tucked into the cuff of the boot. The nearest ‘pointer hesitated, and there was a little swirl of movement as the group rearranged themselves, giving her a wider berth. Heikki allowed herself a cold smile, and looked away. Most of the trouble in the docks was caused by touring ‘pointers; the real dockside crime tended to be silent, nonviolent, and deadly only when it had to be.
The slidewalk ran out between Docks Six and Seven. Heikki walked the last fifty meters to the entrance to
