Craig Tau faced her. "The captain has never been gabby, but I don’t remember when I’ve seen him this taciturn. Both of you have walked around this little ship doing your duties, unfailingly polite, and if you’ve addressed two words to one another since the day you were chased, I haven’t heard either of them. Did you two have an argument?"
"No," Cofort said, pulling herself down into a chair. "We kissed."
Tau whistled.
She laughed softly. "It was a mistake, of course, but I have to admit it was the nicest mistake I’ve ever made."
Tau expelled his breath in a sigh. "Care to explain?"
She gave a tiny shrug—not enough to bounce her up from her seat—then said, "Perhaps I’d better, if you think it will help. I know Miceal won’t talk; it’s just not in his nature. I suspect the two of us ought to have talked it out by now— we might even have, had we had the time. But we came back to find the Tooe problem waiting, and then when all that got settled, Kosti’s fight, then Ali’s..." She shrugged again. "The fact is, we’re both in love. No, nothing’s been said, but I know how I feel, and I can feel how he feels. But neither of us is made for the kind of lighthearted fling that Ali, for instance, finds so easy. Love, and leave, and no regrets—no good-byes."
"Then. if you do both feel the same way."
"Why don’t we do something about it?" Cofort’s brilliant eyes lifted toward the lab ceiling, as if she could look through the decking of steel to the captain’s cabin. Then her gaze returned to Tau’s face. "Because I can feel the conflict in him. For some reason he can’t take the risk. And, loving him as I do, if I can’t make him happy, I’ll try to make him comfortable. If he needs to be loved from a distance, then that’s what I’ll do. I don’t know—maybe there have been too many hard good-byes in his life, and he doesn’t want to chance another. I know as well as he does how unstable the Trade life is; I grew up in it. Lost both parents to it."
The light tap of magboots on the deckplates outside the lab made Rael stop. Both doctors faced the hatchway, where Ali appeared, grinning. "Let the cats free?" The expression on his handsome face altered to one of appraisal—and interest. "Did I walk in at the wrong time?"
"Not at all," Rael Cofort said, her poise at least the equal of his. "You’re just in time to help me recalibrate the chromatographic analyzers."
Tau turned away to hide his grin, and left the lab.
Without any clear plan in mind he demagged his boots and one-handed himself up the ladder. Some idea of finding the captain to assess his appearance flitted through his thoughts, to disappear when Tang Ya shouted down from the control deck, "Got it!"
Tau glanced up the ladder access, saw the upper portion of Ya’s broad chest as the comtech grinned down at him.
"Be right there," came Jellico’s voice.
A few moments later, they were all crowded into the control area, where Ya could put his data on the big screen. Steen Wilcox sat with his console lit, the screen glowing with the data that had come with the official transfer of claim of the Starvenger.
Ya paged down through the unfamiliar script. Then, as he tabbed quickly, the screen split and data ranked itself in the new screen. Touching his finger to the console, he watched as a highlight bar appeared at a date. Tau noticed it was just a couple of months earlier, by Standard Terran Time.
"Here’s the last entry," Ya said. "Note the date."
"Eighteen Standard months after the Starvenger was reported abandoned," Wilcox said.
Ya nodded. "Also note the fact that both doctors"—he pointed in Tau’s direction—"said that the cats, when we found them, had probably been abandoned from four to ten weeks."
Tau felt the tightening in his gut that indicated danger.
"What’s in those last entries?" Jellico asked. "Any indication of what happened?"
"Nothing," Ya said. "Mostly notes on the progress of the hydro, plus notes on her experiments with growing grapes. Our writer was the cook
and hydro tech of the Ariadne. She was apparently a grandmother—there are references to messages waiting at various stops from her grandchildren—and had been cook on that ship for decades. Nothing whatever about the Starvenger, or the names of the supposed owners. Other names show up, but nothing that matches the data from the Starvenger."
"So this old date—" Wilcox tapped his screen. "Is it possible that Ariadne's crew found the Starvenger and just set up housekeeping on board without bothering to go through channels?"
"If so, then Corlis—that’s the cook here—faked up a damn good set of records, going back twenty-seven years. Most of it about plants, and the rest concerning food supplies, meals, eating habits and tastes of the crew, and experiments with growing and cooking."
"A faked set of records, and the other computers cleaned out," Jellico said. "And the cats, any mention of them?"
"Only once," Ya said. "But it matches what Tau said: one of them had had a litter about a year ago, and they found homes for the kittens on one of their stops."
Everyone looked over at Tau, who nodded. "Alpha was definitely a mother. I’d say within the last year."
Jellico rapped a tattoo with his fingers on the control console as he stared up at the data. "Then that leaves us with one alternative: that ship never was the Starvenger, but the name and registry were added."
"Can we take a shuttle and go check?" came Ali’s voice from behind, in the hatchway.
Jellico looked up with a grim smile. Next to Ali Rip Shannon stood, his dark eyes narrowed with challenge.
"No," the captain said. "If there’s dirty work been done, and the doers are on this habitat, then they’re watching just for that. Steen." He turned suddenly to Wilcox.
"Finding it," the navigator said. He’d already started a search, and within moments the big screen flickered, and Ya’s data was replaced by
the vids of their discovery and capture of the derelict. Steen spooled forward, then enlarged the picture so they could scrutinize the hull where the name and number were painted. There it was, clear and sharp: STARVENGER. He tabbed the vid forward slowly, but there was no visible trace of any other painting—nothing but that blackened scoring down one side.
"It’s got to be under there," Ya said, reaching up to touch the screen. "Though there’s no way to recover it."
"Not here," Jellico said. "At Trade there are special stress analyzers and the like to check for that kind of thing. But even if we found it, these people could just say we did it ourselves. We need proof."
"The cats?" Ali asked.
The captain shook his head.
"Could say they were ours," Wilcox spoke up. "Worse, if someone really wanted to make trouble, they could say the cats technically own the ship—"
"But they aren’t sentient," Rip protested.
Ali grinned. "Though they seem smarter than some of the idiots we’ve met of late on Harmonious Exchange."
Some of the others chuckled, but the captain did not crack a smile.
"The point is taken, though: if someone wanted to make trouble for us, we could get mired in a legal battle that would ruin us long before anything was decided. No, what we need is some kind of proof—"
"And I think I know where we can get it," said a new voice.
Everyone turned to see Dane Thorson loom in the hatchway behind the other two apprentices, a wide grin on his bony face. "First, though, where’s Van?"
"Got a com from someone at the Trade Center," Wilcox said. "Left just after you did."
"Well, I can tell it all over again," the apprentice cargo master said. He