Prudence ignored him. “We better not play that game on this next stop, Jor. I think I can handle it.”
Kyle didn’t ask, but Prudence explained anyway. “Sometimes it’s easier if they think Jorgun is the captain. As if the size of the man was more important than the size of the ship.”
In Kyle’s opinion, their next stop would require every trick up their collective sleeves. But Prudence obviously wasn’t going to expose Jorgun to a charge of fraud. On a place as regulation-obsessed as Monterey promised to be, innocent games could be dangerous.
“Did you hear anything about spiders?” Kyle asked Garcia. He’d listened in while Prudence had talked with her fellow captains, but all they seemed to care about was the safety of node travel and the prices of cargo. The concept of war and planetary devastation didn’t seem to connect with them. Maybe the rank-and-file spacers had a different view.
“I heard it laughed about. Nobody around here takes Altair Fleet very seriously. They figure Kassa was some kind of retaliatory raid by another colony. All this talk of spiders is dismissed as fancy-pants in gold braid justifying their pensions.”
A compelling enough excuse. Few planets cared to maintain a fleet, and this explanation would only reinforce their self-identified wisdom.
Prudence frowned. “If they want to stir up panic, why aren’t the local news services backing the official story? Especially here, where they have more control.”
“Because they don’t want panic here,” Kyle explained. “Panicked people want to change things. They don’t want change, because everything’s already going according to plan. They want misdirection away from this sector.”
She put it in her own words. “The web only trembles where the spider isn’t.”
The restaurant had rolled up its front walls, exposing the indoor tables to the open air. Solistar took full advantage of the brief twilight, while it was safe to be outside but not yet bitterly cold. Without a blanket of vegetation, the naked face of the planet froze in the dark and burned in the day.
On a vid screen hanging on the wall inside the restaurant, a comedic skit was mocking Altairian panic. One of the characters was plotting to make a fortune selling insecticide, while the other one kept trying to demonstrate his giant-sized bug-swatter.
The placidness of Solistar society, the absolute lack of concern, was unnerving. In the stillness, Kyle imagined the spider so close he could hear it breathing.
All of them felt it. Garcia took refuge in his glass, drinking a local concoction called
Only Jorgun was immune, complaining about his dinner like a cranky child one minute, laughing at the vid the next. As Prudence struggled to moderate the big man’s flittering emotions, Kyle began to see the comfort Jorgun gave to her. The simple giant required her, by virtue of his handicap, to focus on the here and now, the immediate and concrete. The cloying danger of imagined spiders could not compete with the pressing disaster of fried protein cakes stamped in the wrong shape.
Kyle dealt with his anxiety the only way he knew how, by fixing other people’s problems. He bullied the waiter into hand-cutting a new slab of protein to the five-pointed stars that Jorgun wanted.
“You’ll spoil him,” Prudence complained.
But she didn’t send the new cakes back.
SEVENTEEN
Anvil
Five days of Kyle and she was ready to scream in frustration.
She seriously considered taking him to bed, just to put an end to her fantasies. He was a man, no different from any other. He had a life back on Altair, family and friends, a place to live and a job to do. He wasn’t going to walk away from all that to live on her ship and fulfill her childish dreams of romance, marriage, and family.
But alone in her stateroom, with the lights out, she kept remembering him sitting on the edge of the bunk in a towel.
When the alarm started beeping, signaling that they would be dropping out of node-space in a few minutes, she breathed in relief. The unknown dangers of a possibly spider-infested planet would torture her less than this unmanageable desire.
The entrance was anticlimactic.
An automatic beacon logged her ship’s name and assigned them a berth in the spaceport. That was it. No bullying, warnings, gossip, or even advertisements.
“They don’t have any cartoon channels,” Jorgun complained.
Kyle leaned over Jorgun’s console and brought up a screen.
“Tourist information … one page. Wow. They don’t have anything.”
“Of course not.” Prudence was studying her sensor readouts. “There’s no sightseeing, because there’s nothing to see. The atmosphere is breathable, but opaque.”
“You mean cloudy?” Kyle stared at the reddish, featureless blob on the main screen.
“No, opaque. The atmosphere is not transparent to light. So the surface of the planet is always dark.”
“Earth-fire,” Kyle muttered under his breath.
Prudence shared the sentiment. Of all the places to live, this was the worst she’d ever seen.
“A great place to play hide-and-seek,” Jorgun said.
Kyle and Prudence stared at each other. A great place to hide an entire alien fleet, if you wanted to. A whole surface of a planet under a blanket.
“We’ll have to land with just GPS and radar. Traffic Control already gave us a vector that will take us straight to the spaceport.” She ran it through her own navcom. “A clean one, too. They didn’t stint on computers.”
As an experiment, she nudged her controls. The new course would cost her a little fuel and force her to orbit the planet once instead of landing directly. After only a few minutes, she was rewarded with a screeching siren.
So the neglect was illusionary. Someone down there was watching their every move.
The comm screen presented her with an option to view the relevant subsection of the local law code. Idly, she tapped it open. Instead of a welter of legalistic gibberish, there was a simple declaration.
“Look at this,” she said to Kyle.
He came over to her console, leaning comfortably close. “Holy crap … what the Earth does that even mean?”
“Local regulations are the super-cargo’s department.” She tapped the screen again, sending the image to Garcia’s console.
Garcia thought it was funny. “You want me to interpret this?”
“If doing your job isn’t too much trouble.”
“It’s pretty obvious,
She kept them on the straight and narrow after that. The ten-hour trip from node to base dragged on, a hundred times worse than the five days they had spent going through the node. Those days had been drifting in perfect safety, where nothing could touch them. This felt like a long, slow fall onto a bed of knives.
The spaceport was absolutely dismal. The atmosphere wasn’t any more dangerous than a heavy fog, so they
