She had intended to help her old crewmate Deke Tatarcoff make a good sale, and hadn’t thought beyond how spectacularly well the silk would drape and flutter through the air. She had forgotten the effect the dance had on watchers, and happening to glance up at the tall, blond cargo apprentice, she had surprised a look of what she considered to be perfectly normal, healthy male appreciation on his face—an expression which was almost immediately followed by dismay and then embarrassment.
"Cats, some human trade items, interior design reasonably accessible—it all points to humanoids, doesn’t it?" she said, keeping her voice cool and professional.
Dane seemed glad for the unexceptionable subject. "There are some handwritten additions to some of the container labels. The script is nothing I’ve ever seen."
Rael nodded as they moved back through the silent corridors of cargo. Her mind was not on alien script, but on Dane Thorson, who was one of the Solar Queen's most surprising anomalies. Memory also produced an intense visual image: Dane working like a madman to throw burning barrels of ammonium nitrate into the sea despite not only the painful burns he was enduring but the possibility of being blown into atoms at any moment. And the others—never Dane—had told her of equally heroic action on Trewsworld and other places. Afterward, instead of talking about his experience or expecting praise, Dane seemed to want to pretend these things had never happened.
Rael was a physician, and though her main area of study had been epidemiology, she had also done thorough studies of human and xeno psychology. Dane was a knot of intriguing contradictions, and the prospect of unraveling him was one that appealed to the professional in her.
But life experience had taught her patience.
In the hatchway leading back toward the entry lock, she said, "We’ll probably never be able to categorize all the varieties of human biology out in space."
Dane said, "In training they told us that evolution took millions of years on Terra. On other worlds, especially where humans don’t fit, it can take just a few generations."
"We are remarkably adaptable," Rael said. "Though in some cases there is a tremendous loss of life in the meantime." She thought of some of the terrible human tragedies behind the dry, academic prose of her study tapes. "It was inevitable that humans would try to help the adaptation process, in some cases, with bioengineering."
Dane blinked over at her. "I thought that was illegal."
"It is—in the Federation," she said. "But the farther you get away from Federation jurisdiction, the more chances people are willing to take. Unfortunately, not for the good of colonies, either."
She stopped there, but saw the impact of her words in Dane’s sober eyes. Another tough lesson had been reading about some of the horrors perpetrated by unscrupulous bio-engineers in their experiments to try to produce superhumans, or other variations. Most of those quickly failed; the ones that haunted Rael and her empathic fellow students were the stories about bioengineering meant to help humans adapt the more quickly to this or that planet, with unexpected and tragic results.
Shaking off the thoughts, she found the others gathered in the lock. Stotz had just arrived.
Rip said, "Captain wants you here to help the fuel transfer, Dane. Rael, you’re released to get back to the Queen and see about the transfer of the cats. Tau’s got transfer equipment packed and waiting for you at the other end of the line."
"Excellent," she said. This was the kind of duty she liked most—saving lives.
3
The engine crew, with Dane among them, watched anxiously as Johan Stotz lifted the platinum-alloy pipette carefully away from the inspection gland on the engine feed. A single drop of fuel glistened at its tip, not tear-shaped as it would have been planetside, but globular in the microgravity of the alien ship.
Carefully, the chief engineer inserted the pipette into the fuel analyzer, a bulky cylinder with a simple readout on it above a small console.
It was interesting, Dane reflected, that although the personal appointments of the alien ship were very different from the human norm, the engines were almost identical in design. That had been one of the lessons at Pool training: that cultures changed, but physics didn’t.
Stotz extracted the pipette and locked the breech of the tester. He tapped rapidly at the tester’s console, which hummed and clicked.
Symbols flashed rapidly across the readout.
Then there was a muffled whoomp and the tester tilted slightly.
"That’s it!" Stotz exclaimed. He peered at the readout. "Two third and one fourth array superheavy," he said. "Ganeshium, Kalium, and Lokium. Not our mix, but a number-ten catalysis screen and an oh-six-hundred feed should do it."
The crew expressed their relief and satisfaction in a variety of ways, from Jasper Weeks’s quiet smile to Ali Kamil’s jokes.
Ali hit the intership com with an extravagant gesture. "We’ve got fuel, Captain."
Stotz looked up. "Ask him how much he wants transferred over. We’ll need a minimum of thirty percent in order to decelerate and dock."
Ali nodded and relayed the question.
After a brief pause, Captain Jellico’s voice came back: "Take half. How long?"
"No more than four hours," Stotz replied.
"Make it three," replied Jellico and the com clicked off.
"You heard him," said the engineer.
The crew sprang into action. Kamil disappeared outside to attach the fuel hose already snaking over from the Queen, brought by Rip Shannon, and for what seemed far longer than the time allotted, Dane did what he was told, functioning as an extra pair of hands for Stotz and Kamil, who talked back in forth in their own cryptic shorthand. Dane’s inner clock kept yammering at him about the length of time it was taking to make the conversion—he had no idea if the Kanddoyds would warn them first before blasting them out of space.
He didn’t let himself look at the time until Stotz said finally, "We’re done."
All four of them looked: two hours, forty-five minutes.
"Nice work, my children." Ali managed a graceful bow despite the bulky suit.
Stotz snorted. "Get back over to the Queen. Captain wants us. Rip,
you’re to stay here with Wilcox. You too, Jasper. I want you down here monitoring."
Jasper Weeks nodded silently, and began drifting around the engine room, looking closely at the alien scripts.
Dane followed the others back to the lock, and one by one they blasted along the cable to the Queen.
As the lock of the Solar Queen pressurized around them, Dane felt excitement flood though him, and he rotated his neck, trying to ease the kinks out. Immediate danger seemed averted, though they were not in the clear yet.
"Decontamination cycle commencing," came Kosti’s voice, and Dane squeezed his eyes shut as the UV lights flared on. He felt the needle-sharp spray of biostop even through his suit, and he raised his arms and turned slowly around, letting the deadly solution hammer against every square millimeter of his suit. The actinic light died, and as Dane opened his eyes his almost giddy sense of relief provoked a snicker at the sight of his crewmates in an identical posture, for all of space like a troupe of Parnixian Devil Dancers.
"Stand by for acceleration," came the captain’s voice. Jump seats swung down from the walls of the lock, and they sat down and strapped in. The engines roared, and weight returned, building swiftly towards what felt like about 1.25 gees.
"We cut it close!" Kamil exclaimed.