'Well, you ought to—you sat next to me in disaster drill class for two years. I admit it's been a while.' She ran a hand through her dark cropped curls. 'Picture longer hair. C'mon, the re-gen didn't change my face that much! I'm Elli.'
His mouth made an 'o' of astonishment. 'By the gods! Elli Quinn? What have you done to yourself?'
She touched one molded cheekbone. 'Complete facial regeneration. Do you like it?'
'It's fantastic!'
'Betan work, you know—the best.'
'Yeah, but—' Dom's face puckered. 'Why? It's not like you were so hard to look at, before you ran off to join the mercenaries.' He gave her a grin that was like a sly poke in the ribs, although his hands were clasped behind his back like a boy's at a bakery window. 'Or did you strike it rich?'
She touched her face again, less cheerfully. 'No, I haven't taken up hijacking. It was sort of a necessity— caught a plasma beam to the head in a boarding battle out Tau Verde way, a few years back. I looked a little funny with no face at all, so Admiral Naismith, who does not do things by halves, bought me a new one.'
'Oh,' said Dom, quelled.
Ethan, who found his enthusiasm over the woman's facial aesthetics a trifle baffling, had no trouble sympathizing with this; any plasma burn was horrendous—this one must have come close to killing her. He eyed the face with a new medical interest.
'Didn't you start out with Admiral Oser's group?' asked Dom. 'That's still his uniform, isn't it?'
'Ah. Allow me to introduce myself. Commander Elli Quinn, Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, at your service.' She bowed with a flourish. 'The Dendarii sort of annexed Oser, and his uniforms, and me—and it's been a step up in the world, let me tell you. But I, sir, have home leave for the first time in ten years, and intend to enjoy it. Popping up beside old classmates and giving them heart failure—flashing my credit rating in front of all the people who predicted I'd come to a bad end—speaking of coming to a bad end, you seem to have turned your passenger here loose without a map.'
Dom eyed the mercenary officer suspiciously. 'That wasn't intended as a pun, was it? I've been on this run four years, and I am so damned tired of coming back to a lot of half-witted bend-over jokes—'
The mercenary woman's laughter burst against the overhead girders, her head thrown back. 'The secret of your abandonment revealed, Athosian, ' she said to Ethan. 'Should I take him in hand, then, being by virtue of my sex innocent of the suspicion of, er, unnatural lusts?'
'For all of me, you can,' allowed Dom, shrugging. 'I have a wife to get home to.' He walked pointedly around Ethan.
'Good-oh. I'll look you up later, all right?' said the woman.
The crewman nodded to her, rather regretfully, and trod off up the exit ramp. Ethan, left alone with the woman, suppressed an urge to run after him begging protection. Recalling vaguely that economic servitude was one of the marks of the damned, he had a sudden horrible suspicion that she might be after his money—and he was carrying Athos's entire purse for the year. He became intensely conscious of her sidearm.
Amusement livened her strange face. 'Don't look so worried. I'm not going to eat you,' she snickered suddenly,'—conversion therapy not being my line.'
'Glck,' blurted Ethan, and cleared his throat. 'I am a faithful man,' he quavered. 'To, to Janos. Would you like to see a picture of Janos?'
'I'll take your word for it,' she replied easily. The amusement softened to something like sympathy. 'I really have you spooked, don't I? What, am I by chance the first woman you've met?'
Ethan nodded. Twelve exits, and he had to pick this one….
She sighed. 'I believe you.' She paused thoughtfully. 'You could use a faithful native guide, though. Kline Station has a reputation for travelers' aid to uphold—it's good for business. And I'm a friendly cannibal.'
Ethan shook his head with a paralyzed smile.
She shrugged. 'Well, maybe when you get over your culture shock I'll run across you again. Are you going to have a long layover?' She pulled an object from her pocket, a tiny holovid projector. 'You get one of these automatically when you get off a proper passenger ship—I don't need mine.' A colorful schematic sprang into the air. 'We're here. You want to be here, in the branch called Transients' Lounge—nice facilities, you can get a room —actually, you can get most anything, but I fancy you'd prefer the staid end of things. This section. Up this ramp and take the second cross-corridor. Know how to operate this thing? Good luck—' She pressed the map module into his hand, flashed a last smile, and vanished into another exit.
He gathered his meager belongings and found his way to the transients' area eventually, after only a few wrong turns. He passed many more women en route, infesting the corridors, the bubble-car tubes, the slidewalks and lift tubes and arcades, but thankfully none accosted him. They seemed to be everywhere. One had a helpless infant in her arms. He stifled a heroic impulse to snatch the child out of danger. He could hardly complete his mission with a baby in tow and besides, he couldn't possibly rescue them all. It also occurred to him, belatedly, as he dodged a squad of giggling children racing across his path to swoop like sparrows up a lift tube, that there was a 50% chance the infant was female anyway. It assuaged his conscience a little.
Ethan chose a room on the basis of price, after an alarming teleconference between the transient hostel's concierge, the Kline Station public computer system, a Transients' Ombudsman, and no less than four live human officials on ascending rungs of the station's governing hierarchy about the exchange rate to be assigned to Ethan's Athosian pounds. They were actually quite kind in computing the most favorable translation of his funds, via two currencies of which Ethan had never heard, into the maximum possible number of Betan dollars. Betan dollars were one of the harder and more universally acceptable currencies available. Still he ended with what seemed far fewer dollars than he had had pounds before, and he passed hastily over the preferred Imperial Suite in favor of an Economy Cabin.
Economy proved more cabinet than cabin. When he was asleep, Ethan assured himself, he wouldn't mind. Now, however, he was wide awake. He touched the pressure pad to inflate the bed and lay on it anyway, mentally reviewing his instructions and trying to ignore an odd myopic illusion that the walls were pressing inward.
When the Population Council had finally sat down to calculate it, returning the shipment to Jackson's Whole with Ethan to demand their money back cost more than the dubious refund, so Jackson's Whole was scrubbed. Ethan was at last, after much debate, given broad discretionary powers to choose another supplier on the basis of the freshest information available at Kline Station.
There were subsidiary instructions. Keep it under budget. Get the best. Go as far afield as needed. Don't waste money on unnecessary travel. Avoid personal contact with galactics; tell them nothing of Athos. Cultivate galactics to recruit immigrants; tell them all about the wonders of Athos. Don't make waves. Don't let them push you around. Keep an eye peeled for additional business opportunities. Personal use of Council funds will be considered peculation, and prosecuted as such.
Fortunately, the Chairman had spoken to Ethan privately after the committee briefing.
'Those your notes?' he nodded to the clutch of papers and discs Ethan was juggling. 'Give them to me.'
And he dropped them into his oubliette.
'Get the stuff and get back,' he told Ethan. 'All else is gas.'
Ethan's heart lifted at the memory. He smiled slowly, sat up, tossed his map module in the air and caught it in a smooth swipe, pocketed it, and went for a walk.
In Transients' Lounge Ethan found the bright face of the tapestry at last by the simple expedient of taking a bubble car through the tubes to the most luxurious passenger dock, turning around, and walking back the other way. Framed in crystal and chrome were sweeping panoramas of the galactic night, of other branches of the Station shot with candy-colored lights, of the glittering wheels of the earliest sections turning forever for the sake of their obsolete centrifugal gravities. Not abandoned—nothing was ever wholly abandoned in this society—but some put to less urgent uses, others half-dismantled for salvage that Kline Station might grow, like a snake eating its tail.
Within the soaring transparent walls of Transients' Lounge rioted a green fecundity of vines, trees in tubs, air ferns, orchids, muted tinkling chimes, bizarre fountains running backward, upside down, spiraling around the dizzy catwalks, lively intricate trickery with the artificial gravity. Ethan paused to stare in fascination for fifteen minutes at one fountain, sheeting water suspended in air, running endlessly in the form of a moebius strip. A breath away, across the transparent barrier, a cold that could turn all to stone in an instant lurked in deathly silence. The artistic contrast was overwhelming, and Ethan was not the only downsider transient who stood transfixed in open
