nodded to the prone One-track, unconscious on the floor. 'You should be more choosy. Friends like that can get you killed.'
Ethan was hastily dropped. His knees buckled as he folded over his aching belly. The mercenary woman pulled him back to his feet. 'C'mon, pilgrim. Let me take you back where you belong.'
'I should have said, 'Why, are you missing yours?',' Ethan decided. 'That's what I should have said to him. Or maybe—'
Commander Quinn's lips curved. Ethan wondered irritably why everyone around here seemed to find Athosians so amusing, except for the ones who acted like he was offering them a dose of leprosy. A sudden new fear put him so off-balance he very nearly clutched the mercenary's arm. 'Oh, God the Father. Are those constables?'
A pair of men were nearing them in the corridor. Their uniforms were pine green slashed with sky blue, and an intimidating array of equipment hung from their utility belts. Ethan felt a sudden stab of guilt. 'Maybe I should turn myself in—get it over with. I did assault that man—'
Commander Quinn's mouth quivered with amusement. 'Not unless you're incubating some rare new plant virus under your fingernails. Those guys are Biocontrol—the ecology cops. Underfoot all over Kline Station,' she paused to exchange polite nods with the men, who passed on, and added under her breath, 'bunch of compulsive hand-washers.' She continued after a meditative moment, 'Don't cross them, though. They have unlimited powers of search and seizure—you could find yourself being forcibly deloused, with no appeal.'
Ethan thought about that. 'I suppose station ecology is much less resilient than planetary.'
'Balanced on a wire, between fire and ice,' she agreed. 'Some places have religion. Here we have safety drills. By the way, if you ever see a patch of frost forming anywhere but a docking bay, report it at once.'
They re-entered Transients' Lounge. Her eyes were too penetrating, edgy with seriousness, for her quirking mouth, and they made Ethan hideously uneasy. 'Hope that little incident doesn't put you off Stationers, ' she said. 'What say I take you to dinner, to make up for my fellow citizens' bad manners?'
Was this some sort of proposition, a ploy to get him alone and helpless? He edged farther from her, as she paced softly beside him like a predatory cat.
'I—I'm not ungrateful,' he stammered, his voice rising in pitch, 'but, uh, I have a stomach ache,' quite true, 'thank you anyway,' there was a lift tube to the next level, the one his hostel was on, 'good-bye!'
He bolted for the tube, leaped in. Reaching upward did nothing to speed his ascent. His last shreds of dignity kept him from flapping his arms. He offered her a strained smile through the crystal sides of the tube as her level fell away in dreamy slowness, distorted, foreshortened, blinked out.
He nipped out of the tube at his exit and darted behind a sort of free-form sculpture with plants nearby in the hallway. He peered through the leaves. She did not chase him. He unwound eventually, slumping on a bench for a long, numb time. Safe at last.
He heaved a sigh and got to his feet, and dragged off up the mall. His little cubicle seemed newly attractive. Something very bland to eat from the room service console, a shower, and bed. No more exploratory adventures. Tomorrow he would get right to business. Gather his data, choose the supplier, and ship out on the first available transport…
A man dressed in some planetary fashion of dull neutrality, plain grey tunic and trousers, approached Ethan on the esplanade, smiling. 'Dr. Urquhart?' He grasped Ethan's arm.
Ethan smiled back in uncertain courtesy. Then stiffened, his mouth opening to cry indignant protest as the hypospray prickled his arm. A heartbeat, and his mouth slackened, the cry unspent. The man guided him gently toward a bubble car in the tubeway.
Ethan's feet felt vague, like balloons. He hoped the man wouldn't let go, lest he bob helplessly up to the ceiling and hang upside down with things falling out of his pockets on the passersby. The mirrored canopy of the bubble car closed over his unfocused gaze like a nictitating membrane.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ethan came to awareness in a hostel room much larger and more luxurious than his own. His reason flowed with slow clarity, like honey. The rest of him floated in a sweet, languid euphoria. Distantly, under his heart, or down in his throat, something whined and cried and scratched frantically like an animal locked in a cellar, but there was no chance of its getting out. His viscous logic noted indifferently that he was bound tightly to a hard plastic chair, and certain muscles in his back and arms and legs burned painfully. So what.
Far more intriguing was the man emerging from the bathroom, rubbing his damp reddened face vigorously with a towel. Grey eyes like granite chips, hard-bodied, average height, much like the fellow who'd picked Ethan off the mall and who even now sat on a nearby float chair, watching his prisoner closely.
Ethan's kidnapper was of so ordinary an appearance Ethan could hardly keep him before his mind even when he was looking directly at him. But Ethan had the oddest insight, like x-ray vision, that his bones contained not marrow but ice stone-hard as that outside the Station. Ethan wondered how he manufactured red blood cells with this peculiar medical condition. Maybe his veins ran liquid nitrogen. They were both utterly charming, and Ethan wanted to kiss them.
'Is he under, Captain?' asked the man with the towel.
'Yes, Colonel Millisor,' replied the other. 'A full dose.'
The man with the towel grunted and flung it on the bed, next to the contents of Ethan's pockets, and all his clothes, arrayed there. Ethan noticed his own nakedness for the first time. There were a few Kline Station tokens, a comb, an empty raisin wrapper, his map module, his credit chit for his Betan funds for purchasing the new cultures—the creature under his heart howled, unheard, at that sight. His captor poked among the spoils. 'This stuff scan clean?'
'Ha. Almost,' said the cold captain. 'Take a look at this.' He picked up Ethan's map module, cracked open its back, and fixed an electron viewer over its microscopic circuit board. 'We shook him down in the loading zone. See that little black dot? It was caused by a bead of acid in a polarized lipid membrane. When my scanner beam crossed it, it depolarized and dissolved, and burned out—whatever had been there. Tracer for sure, probably an audio recorder as well. Very neat, tucked right in the standard map circuitry, which incidentally masked the bug's electronic noise with its own. He's an agent, all right.'
'Were you able to trace the link back to its home base?'
The captain shook his head. 'No, unfortunately. To find it was to destroy it. But we blinded them. They don't know where he is now.'
'And who is 'they'? Terrence Cee?'
'We can hope.'
The leader, the one Ethan's kidnapper had named Colonel Millisor, grunted again, and approached Ethan to stare into his eyes. 'What's your name?'
'Ethan,' said Ethan sunnily. 'What's yours?'
Millisor ignored this open invitation to sociability. 'Your full name. And your rank.'
This struck an old chord, and Ethan barked smartly, 'Master Sergeant Ethan CJB-8 Urquhart, Blue Regiment Medical Corps, U-221-767, sir!' He blinked at his interrogator, who had drawn back in startlement. 'Retired,' he added after a moment.
'Aren't you a doctor?'
'Oh, yes,' said Ethan proudly. 'Where does it hurt?'
'I hate fast-penta,' growled Millisor to his colleague.
The captain smiled coldly. 'Yes, but at least you can be sure they're not holding anything back.'
Millisor sighed, lips compressed, and turned to Ethan again. 'Are you here to meet Terrence Cee?'
Ethan stared back, confused. See Terrence? The only Terrence he knew was one of the Rep Center techs. 'They didn't send him,' he explained.
'Who didn't send him?' Millisor asked sharply, all attention.
'The Council.'
'Hell,' the captain worried. 'Could he have found himself some new backing, so soon after Jackson's
