She nodded soberly.
"Then there’s the fact that you’re the only female. It’s bound to make a difference. The last female we had was Thorson’s predecessor. She hated
serving on a ship full of men."
Cofort smiled slightly. "I know. She came to my brother, remember? She’s now happily berthed on a ship with mostly women. But I think I can fit in here, if I am permitted to go about it my own way. Can you trust me to do that?"
He swallowed off his coffee, wishing it would make his brain work faster. "I will, but... just use caution. Especially with the younger ones. Kamil will be all right—I think he was born sophisticated—but, well, Thorson is at the other end of the spectrum. He might take your friendly interest as. well, something else."
Her eyes widened, and her mouth curved in a delightful smile. Jellico looked at the reflection of the bulkhead lights sparking in the deep blue of her gaze, then picked up his fork and made himself busy with it.
"I don’t think you need to worry," she said, a quiver of laughter in her voice. "Part of our training in psych was in what you might call professional presentation. I have been very careful to project the aura of a fond older sister, and I think Dane will eventually accept me as such." She gave way suddenly to a low chuckle, soft and attractive. "Anything else and I think the poor soul would jump off the Queen and fly along in vacuum. He’s terrified of women!"
"He’s never known any," Jellico said. "Not socially, anyway. Orphan, went straight to Pool, and then to us. Did nothing in between times but work and study."
She nodded, unsurprised, and he realized belatedly that of course she must have read everyone’s medical files. A good ship’s doctor would, and Tau had made it clear he accepted her as a colleague.
As his fork absently pushed Mura’s excellent food around on his plate, he reflected how glad he was that his own file contained only the briefest details about his medical history, and nothing else.
"Good night," Rael Cofort said, rising to her feet. "Sleep well."
"You too, Doctor."
A moment later he was alone with his meal, and his thoughts.
5
" Passed the inner beacon," Rip Shannon’s voice came over the com from the other ship.
"Acknowledged," Tang Ya said. Then he keyed his console and looked up at Captain Jellico. "New instructions coming in."
"Pass them to my comp," the captain said, his hands steady as he piloted the Queen towards the immense construct now filling space dead ahead.
A moment later, they received word from the Starvenger that they too had received the docking and debarkation instructions.
Rael Cofort, from her vantage in the passenger’s seat, looked up at the screen showing the slowly approaching habitat. They were vectoring in along the cylinder’s long axis, straight toward the immense lock yawning at its center, surrounded by a wilderness of metallic complexity thickly forested with antennae and projectors and less identifiable objects. For a moment, dizziness seized her: the lack of scale made the metallic disk seem to suddenly swell to planetary size.
Rael shook her head to dispel the illusion, and instead saw the complexities of the habitat framed by the clean, plain, almost austere lines of the Queen's control deck. During her years of trading with her brother Teague, she had visited two habitats, one of them Exchange. Each time she’d experienced the same vertigo: somehow, the artificial nature of a habitat made its size more viscerally awesome than any planet. Too, the uncanny silence of their approach was far too suggestive of the most terrifying of all sounds to a spacer: jet failure, which during the usual planetary touchdown almost invariably meant death.
"Velocity point zero zero eight," said Tang Ya. They were now moving as slowly as a ground vehicle, thought Rael. No, almost at a walk. But the beacon warnings on the way in had been unequivocaclass="underline" here the speed limit was enforced by death, for despite its size, a habitat was fragile—a ship under full power that went astray could puncture through places that would cause the entire cylome to vent to space.
Now the disk of the cylindrical habitat’s end cap was a plain of complex metal shapes stretching out to either side, while ahead she could see the docking berths, bright blue-white lights strobing from the one they’d been assigned. Slowly the edges of the immense lock slid past as the habitat swallowed the Solar Queen, and the ship trembled as Captain Jellico triggered the maneuvering thrusters in quick bursts.
Rael looked around at the Queen's control deck. The contrast between the bristling technology outside the viewscreen and the functional ordinariness of the Queen was symbolic. On Exchange, fabulous technology was the norm—almost a fad. The Kanddoyds had to have the latest, the most complicated, the fastest, whether ships or food preparators. In contrast was Jellico and his crew, who worked with every evidence of contentment using ship technology that in some areas would be seen as outdated, and who lived plainly—as if on a planet—no matter what kind of gravity or environment they found themselves in. It seemed a part of their innate honesty, the straightforward approach to problems, to life, that had attracted her to them in the first place.
But she wondered how they would endure living in a place like Exchange.
"This is weird," said Ali, his voice rough. "Being inside like this."
"No degrees of freedom," agreed Van Ryke.
And that, thought Rael, was anathema to spacers, and Free Traders in particular.
A flicker at the edge of her vision caught her attention, and she suddenly realized that the immense space around them was alive with motion: small vehicles of every description and even figures in space suits swarmed around other ships in the huge bay and up into the vast corridors which radiated outward towards heavier-gee areas. They’d been assigned a berth in microgravity.
Tang Ya suddenly looked up. "General com incoming," he said.
Jellico gave a single nod. "Put it on."
Ya tabbed a key, and this time the voice that filled the bridge was a peculiar one, reedy—the kind of voice, Rael thought, a violin would have were it to speak.
"Welcome, Terrans of vessel Solar Queen, to the cylome graced with the cognomen The Garden of Harmonious Exchange. You will find here representatives of many worlds, far systems and near, conducting their important trade in perfect amity, hosted by three races, the Kanddoyd, the Shver, and the Terrans. Our laws, agreed in the Concord of Harmony between our peoples, can be found on Terran Standard Channel Twenty-seven. We wish, in the friendliest spirit, to draw your attention to those designed for everyone’s safety, foremost being those governing relations between the three species signatory to the Concord."
"Standard hoo-la," Stotz muttered over the intercom.
"If you are puzzled, dismayed, astounded, or confounded, we invite you to visit your representative of the Terran Stellar Patrol, Captain-Legate Ross, who resides on level five, domiciled in the Way of the Rain-dappled Lilies."
Ali gave a sudden laugh. "I think I’m going to like it here."
"Our representative, Exalted Locutor Taddatak, will indulge himself the inexpressible joy of a visit to your vessel to negotiate the nominal fees that, alas, we must ask of our visitors in order to maintain our splendid facility for your pleasures."
The voice cut out just as a flurry of booms and clanks announced that the berth had firmly grappled the ship; but so precise had the captain’s piloting been that they came to rest with almost no sense of deceleration.