freed and pocketed her lens. “He chose to change his codes after he’d asked me for help. That’s fine, except that he’s been screwing around with my—our— work. He said he’d pay for my help, and, by God, he is going to pay for my time and trouble, even if I have to beat it out of him myself.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Santerese began, and Heikki rounded on her.
“Do you have a better one?”
“Several,” Santerese said, drily, but Heikki had already pushed past her into the main room. “Heikki—”
Nkosi was staring at them, open-mouthed, but Heikki ignored him, swinging around to stare at Santerese. “This is the last time that little bastard interferes in my life. You can’t stop me, Marshallin. Don’t try.”
Santerese closed her mouth over whatever she had been going to say. After a moment, she said, “All right, if that’s the way you want it.”
“That’s the way I want it,” Heikki agreed, too angry to analyze the complex emotion in the other woman’s voice, and started for the storage wall. Nkosi’s voice floated after her.
“Perhaps it would be well if I came with you?”
“No.” Heikki tapped the nearest cell’s latch with more force than was necessary, got herself under control with an effort. “Thank you, Jock. But I want to deal with this myself.”
It didn’t take her long to pack a change of clothes, and throw that and her kit into a single carryall. The others were still standing in the main room, Nkosi frowning and worried, Santerese with her face tight with anger. The sight made Heikki pause, letting the carryall slide from her shoulder.
“Marshallin,” she said, slowly. “I have to do this.”
“Oh, I see that,” Santerese agreed, with angry emphasis. “This is stupid, Heikki.”
“I’m not going to be pushed around any more.” The flat finality of her own voice startled Heikki; Santerese seemed to hear it, too, and looked away.
“All right,” she said, shaking her head. “If you have to. But be careful, damn it.”
“I will,” Heikki said. They embraced, quickly, and
Heikki pulled away. “I’ll try to get a jitney at the stairhead—”
“I called one,” Santerese said. “It’ll be waiting.” She shook her head again, but said nothing more, and Heikki turned away.
The jitney was waiting at the stairhead as promised, and reached the Station Axis with time to spare. Heikki made her way through the crowd at the inner arches, not bothering to leave her carryall at the baggage window, and took her place on the platform, waiting for the signal that opened the capsules for boarding. The platform was crowded, and by the time she had worked her way up to the train, all of the capsules were occupied. She found one that had only one other passenger, and took the seat opposite him, barricading herself behind an otherwise unwanted newssheet. She sighed, wishing she had been able to find an unoccupied car, and guessed from the rustling of faxsheets that the stranger was thinking the same thing. At least, she thought, a brief smile tugging at her lips, we don’t have to worry about unwanted conversations.
The trip itself was uneventful. At the customs barrier, Heikki handed over her ID disk. “Purpose of your stay?” the securitron asked.
“Business,” Heikki answered, and wondered if there had been less than the usual boredom in his voice.
“You’re cleared for entry, Dam’ Heikki,” he said, and only the routine politeness colored his tone.
Heikki murmured her acknowledgement, sweeping her ID back into her belt, and passed through the now- open barrier into the volume of EP4’s Entrance Pod. Like everyone else on the Loop, she had always known that EP4 was the richest of the Exchange Points, not excepting EP/Terra, but she could not help recalling that fact as she stepped out into the plaza. Underfoot, the broad flat-grey squares of tile fragmented and changed color, deepening first to a dark, moonlit blue, and then to the rich black of interstellar space as the tiles reached the center of the plaza. Across that background were scattered tiny points of light, diamond-like tiles no bigger than a child’s thumbnail, swirling across the darkening tiles until they formed a two-dimensional sketch of the galaxy, spread out across the plaza floor. At the center, where the galactic core should have been, a star-fountain bloomed, shaping a hemispheric haze of blue-white light. Overhead, meters overhead, beyond the crystal latticework that crossed and recrossed the open space, carrying the distance-shrunk forms of passers-by, a plane of silver flecked with blue and black reflected in negative the pattern of the floor. Almost in spite of herself, Heikki found herself tracing the curve of one spiral, following it in toward the central fountain; she shook herself hard, and made herself walk straight away, across the bands of diamond, toward the trilobed arch that gave onto the Transit Concourse.
Things were less breathtakingly beautiful here; there was a roar of voices, and the constant snarling counterpoint of the jitneys that slid up to the well-marked kiosks to discharge one set of passengers and pick up another. A half-dozen Retroceder protesters stood under their green banner beside an information kiosk, but securitrons were already converging to move them along. Most of the travellers’ societies had branches here, ranging from elaborate clubs to a single information cubicle. Glancing to her left, Heikki could see the simple gold- on-black logo of the Explorers’ Club flaunting below a mirror-windowed bay, but she turned instead in the opposite direction, taking her place in the line of people waiting to use the standard station directories. It had been an instinctive decision, not at all rational, but it made a certain sense, she thought, tapping her fingers impatiently against the strap of her carryall. Why draw attention to herself by going to the Club, when her inquiry would be all-but-invisible among the hundreds of thousands of requests the system must process every day?
At last the light turned green above the nearest cubicle, and a stocky man in a neat ‘pointer suit stepped out, politely holding the door for the next user. Heikki took it from him, and stepped inside, carefully sealing the door behind her. The fittings were spartan, but adequate, and included a socket for transferring data directly to her lens. She spent a moment studying the charges, then fed a single hundred-credit voucher into the cash slot. The machine hummed to itself as though surprised, and then unlocked the keyboard. Heikki smiled sourly, watching the credit number tick away in the upper left hand corner of the display, and began punching in her requests. Galler’s address and contact codes remained unchanged, as did his listed place-of-employ. She used the machine to plot the easiest route to his residence, downloaded it to her lens, and then glanced again at the credit number still displayed above the readout. Sixty-five credits remained. She smiled to herself, and typed more codes, transferring the set of general station maps into the lens’ memory. The low-memory warning was flashing in its depths by the time the transfer was complete, but the information was there, and accessible. She closed down the machine, accepted the twenty-credit voucher the credit meter spat at her, and stepped from the cubicle.
The nearest free-transit station was one level down, on the secondary Lower Concourse. She found it without difficulty, and settled herself to wait for the proper omnitram, watching the crowd from under her lashes. It was a different group, all right, poorer than the pedestrians who wandered the Grand Concourse or the businesspeople who waited for jitneys and corporate shuttles on the Transit Court, and there were even a few spacers, conspicuous in their low-collared coats and jackets, waiting for the tram that ran to the distant docking pods. There were no neo-barbarians or protesters here: the securitrons, wandering in pairs along the well- marked rows of tramstops, made sure that the less desirable transients remained in the docks where they belonged.
A tram, marked on every available surface with the five-digit route code, slid up to the stop. Heikki pushed herself up off the bench, and took her place in the forming line. She felt out of place among the range of
corporate workers, mostly machine clerks and data handlers, found herself almost unconsciously adopting their stance, head down, eyes on nothing in particular.
The tram was almost full by the time Heikki was allowed aboard, and she had to climb to the upper deck to find a seat, squeezed in next to a thin, tired looking man whose broken-nailed hands betrayed him as a keyboarder, and a green-eyed girl who looked to be barely twenty and had not yet learned to suppress an urchin’s grin. The tram lurched into motion, throwing her against the keyboarder, who pressed his lips together and said nothing. Heikki suppressed a sigh, and tucked her heavy carryall under her feet. The girl darted a glance in her direction, but looked away as soon as their eyes met.
The tram wound its way slowly along the Low Concourse, then turned onto one of the spiral ramps that led to the nearest connector, picking up speed as it went along. The corridor walls blurred into an indistinct smear of color, and Heikki looked down at her carefully folded hands.
The tram slowed at last as it approached the spiral leading down to Pod Twenty-Eight, and Heikki allowed herself a sigh of relief. It slowed further in the turns of the spiral, and by the time it reached the Pod’s transit bay
