"'Things,'" echoed Ethan. "Quite. I think you and I should have a talk about 'things'." His mouth set mulishly.
Hers turned up on one side. "Heart to heart," she agreed cordially.
CHAPTER SIX
After sneaking the float pallet back to its docking bay, Commander Quinn brought him by a roundabout route to a hostel room not much larger than Ethan's own. This hostel was, Ethan was dimly aware, in yet another section of Transients' Lounge, although he was not quite sure where they had recrossed that unmarked border. Quinn had dropped behind several times, or parked him abruptly in some cul-de-sac while she scouted ahead, or once wandered off quite casual-seeming, her arm draped across the shoulders of some uniformed Stationer acquaintance as she gesticulated gaily with her free hand. Ethan prayed she knew what she was doing.
She at any rate seemed to feel he had been successfully smuggled to some kind of home base, for she relaxed visibly when the hostel room doors sealed shut behind them, kicking off her boots and stretching and diving for the room service console.
"Here. Real beer." She handed him a foaming tumbler, after pausing to squirt something into it from her Dendarii issue medkit. "Imported. '
The aroma made his mouth water, but he stood suspiciously, without raising it to his lips. "What did you put in it?"
"Vitamins. Look, see?" She snapped a squirt out of the air from the same vial, and washed it down with a long swallow from her own tumbler. "You're safe here for now. Drink, eat, wash, what-you-will."
He glanced longingly toward the bathroom. "Won't double use show up on the computer monitors? What if someone asks questions?"
She smirked. "It will show that Commander Quinn is entertaining a handsome Stationer acquaintance in her room, at length. Nobody'd dare ask anything. Relax."
The implications were anything but relaxing, but Ethan was by that time ready to risk his life for a shave; his stubbled chin was perilously close to pretending to paternal honors to which he had no right.
The bathroom, alas, had no second exit. He gave up and drank his beer while he washed. If Millisor and Rau had not found useful intelligence in him, he doubted Commander Quinn could either, no matter what she'd doctored his drink with.
He was horrified by the haggard face that stared back at him from the mirror. Sandpaper chin, red-rimmed eyes, skin blotched and puffy—no patron in his right mind would trust his infant to that ruffian. Fortunately, a few minutes work returned him to his normal reassuringly squeaky-clean neatness; merely tired, not degraded. There was even a sonic scrubber that cleaned his clothes while he showered.
He emerged to find Commander Quinn occupying the room's sole float chair, her jacket off, feet propped up and luxuriating in their decompression. She opened her eyes and gestured him toward the bed. He stretched himself out nervously, the pillow to his back; but there was no other choice of seating. He found a fresh beer and a tray of edibles, anonymous Stationer tidbits, ready to hand. He tried not to think about the food's possible sources.
"So," she began. "There seems to be an awful lot of interest focused on this shipment of biologicals Athos ordered. Suppose you start there."
Ethan swallowed a bite and gathered all his resolve. "No. We trade information. Suppose you start there." His burst of assertiveness ran down in the face of her bland raised eyebrows, and he added weakly, "If you don't mind."
She cocked her head and smiled. "Very well." She paused to wash down a bite of her own. "Your order was filled, apparently, by Bharaputra Laboratories' top genetics team. They spent a couple of months at it, under need-to-know security. This probably saved several lives, later. The order was sent off on a non-stop freight run to Kline Station, where it sat in a warehouse for two months waiting for the yearly census courier to take it to Athos. Nine big white freezer boxes—" she described them in precise detail, right down to the serial numbers. "Is that what you got?"
Ethan nodded grimly.
She went on. "Just about the time the shipment was leaving Kline Station for Athos, Millisor and his team arrived on Jackson's Whole. They went through Bharaputra's lab like—well, professionally speaking, it was a very successful commando raid." Her lips closed on some angrier private judgement. "Millisor and his team escaped right through House Bharaputra's private army, vaporizing the laboratory and all its contents behind them. The contents included most of the genetics team, quite a few innocent bystanders, and the technical records of the work done on your shipment. I gather they must have spent some time questioning the Bharaputra people before they crisped them, because they got it all. Pausing only to murder the wife and burn down the house of one of the geneticists, Millisor and company vanished from the planet, to turn up under new identities here just three weeks too late to catch your shipment.
"So then I arrived on Jackson's Whole, innocently asking questions about Athos. House Bharaputra Security about had a colonic spasm. Fortunately, I was finally able to persuade them I had no connection with Millisor. In fact, they think I'm working for them, now," she smiled slowly.
"The Bharaputrans?"
Her smile became a grimace. "Yes. They hired me to assassinate Millisor and his team. A lucky break for me, since now I'm not racing one of their own hit squads to the target. I seem to have made a start in spite of myself. They'll be so pleased." She sighed, and drank again. "Your turn, Doctor. What was in those boxes to be worth all those lives?"
"Nothing!" He shook his head in bewilderment. "Valuable, yes, but not worth killing for. The Population Council had ordered 450 live ovarian cultures, to produce egg cells, you know, for children—"
"I know how children are produced, yes," she murmured.
"They were to be certified free of genetic defects, and taken only from sources in the top 20 intelligence percentiles. That's all. A week's routine work for a good genetics team such as you describe. But what we got was trash!" He detailed the shipment received with increasingly irate fervor, until she cut him off.
"All right, Doctor! I believe you. But what left Jackson's Whole was not trash, but something very special. Somebody therefore took your shipment somewhere in transit and replaced it with garbage—"
"Very odd garbage, when you think about it," Ethan began slowly, but she was going on.
"What somebody, then, and when? Not you, not me—although I suppose you've only my word for that—and not, obviously, Millisor, although he would have liked to."
"Millisor seemed to think it was this Terrence Cee—person, or whatever he is."
She sighed. "Whatever-he-is had plenty of time for it. It could have been switched on Jackson's Whole, or on shipboard en route to Kline Station, or anytime before the census courier left for Athos—ye gods, do you have any idea how many ships dock at Kline Station in the course of two months? And how many connections they in turn make? No wonder Millisor has been going around looking like his stomach hurts. I'll get a copy of the Station docking log anyway, though…." she made a note.
Ethan used the pause to ask, "What is a wife?"
She choked on her beer. For all that she waved it about, Ethan noticed that its level was dropping very slowly. "I keep forgetting about you…. Ah, wife. A marriage partner—a man's female mate. The male partner is called a husband. Marriage takes many forms, but is most commonly a legal, economic, and genetic alliance to produce and raise children. Do you copy?"
"I think so," he said slowly. "It sounds a little like a designated alternate parent." He tasted the words. "Husband. On Athos, to husband is a verb meaning to conserve resources. Like stewardship." Did this imply the male maintained the female during gestation? So, this supposedly organic method had hidden costs that might make a real Rep Center seem cheap, Ethan thought with satisfaction.