She glanced at him: a split second of the incredulous look on his face told her that he was no more a party to this than she was. She looked back at Abdhiamal before Chaim's eyes could catch and hold her own. “You had no right to do this to—to us! I won't work with him—” Her hand shot out.
“I'm afraid you'll have to, if you want this ship.” She heard the vaguely condescending tone that Abdhiamal could never quite keep out of his voice when he spoke to her. “Sekka-Olefin's relatives agreed that the ship should go to both of you, since you had an equal share in bringing his murderer to justice.”
“Equal—?” She choked back the rest, looking from face to face again, feeling a cage close her in. “Whose idea was that? I suppose you think this is all terribly clever, Abdhiamal, setting me up like this—”
“Wait, wait,” Chaim put his hands up, palm-out, in the placating gesture that set her memory on edge. He finished his ascent into the room, dressed in a drab gray-white jumpsuit like her own, with no mediaman's camera slung at his shoulder. “Abdhiamal, what is this? You mean we share in this—?” His hands spread, taking in the ship around them, but his eyes stopped at her face. “Why the hell didn't you say something?”
Abdhiamal smiled, smugly omniscient. “If I had, would you both be here now?”
“Yes.”
“No.” Her refusal went directly to Dartagnan.
“That's why I didn't tell you.” Abdhiamal shrugged slightly, tugged the hem of his loose jacket back under his belt. “Listen—the two of you tried to do something worthwhile, the right thing. And you weren't rewarded for it, you were punished. I'm only trying to do my job, which is to see that things are settled fairly. This is the best I could do. It's up to you from here on.”
“Thanks, Abdhiamal,” Chaim said, as though he meant it. “Even if we can't keep this ship, I'll always appreciate this,” looking back at her again.
Abdhiamal nodded. “I appreciate the appreciation.”
“I hope you'll do us one more favor, then, Abdhiamal.” Mythili pressed her hands together fitfully, avoiding both their gazes. “Get out of here, and leave us alone—”
Abdhiamal bowed his acquiescence, and glancing up she couldn't detect any change in his expression. He moved toward the exit well.
Chaim threw an apologetic glance after him. “Thanks again, Abdhiamal.”
“Let me know what you decide.” Abdhiamal disappeared into the well.
Mythili turned back to the control panel, listening to the echoes recede through the ship, filled with sudden claustrophobia. To be alone in this place with one man—this one man—was to feel the hull close around her in a way that it had not when she shared it with the two of them. She punched in a sequence on the panel, clumsy with haste, opening the segment of wall that became a port above the viewscreen.
She looked out on the docking field abruptly: on the ungainly insectoid forms of volatiles tankers clutching the flaccid sacs in which they transported unrefined and semi-refined gases to the Demarchy's distilleries. Immense ballooning storage tanks ringed the eternally eclipsed field, obscuring the light-hazed horizons of Mecca planetoid. Beyond the field's fog of artificial light she knew that a starry black infinity of space lay on all sides, and that she was not a prisoner.…
Dartagnan came toward her from the hub of the cabin; she sensed his movement more than heard it, and turned to meet him. “Don't come any closer. Please.” She brushed her night-black hair back from her face irritably. He stopped himself, wavering as he regained his balance; his open disappointment reached across the space between them.
“Mythili, I didn't know about this …”
“I know you didn't.” She cut him off. In his eyes lost images were rising; something between disgust and terror would not let her see them. “You don't need to fawn on me, Chaim. I'm not working for a corporation anymore. And neither are you, from the looks of it.”
“No.” His head stayed down; he stared at his own long-fingered brown hand clenched over a seat-back before the panel. “Sorry,” he said, still apologizing, compulsively, for something beyond words. “But maybe we've bottomed out, Mythili. Maybe we've changed our luck.” He lifted his head slowly. “This ship—look at it! It's all ours; it's giving us a chance to start over again, to prove we've got the guts to live by our own rules, this time. This is a dream come true—” His wide mouth stretched wider in a hopeful grin.
“Your dream, not mine!” She rebelled against the part of him that had included her without asking; against the part of herself that might have been glad. “I never wanted to be a prospector, I don't know a damn thing about it. I don't want to spend the rest of my life as a junker, living on the edge of starvation. And I don't want to spend it sharing this ship with you, Dartagnan!”
His whole body tautened visibly. “I see.” He sagged, as though the unseen tensions had let him go again abruptly, leaving him more formless than before. But the yielding softness had gone out of his eyes, and he looked at her without hope or apology. “So it's not your dream. Have you got anything to put in its place? No—or you wouldn't be here. You don't know a damn thing about prospecting; but I do. Only I can't pilot a ship this size well enough to get it into the places a prospector has to go. You can. Maybe we don't want each other,” he said with spiteful satisfaction, “but we sure as hell need each other. I want this ship; I want this chance at a real life. And even if you don't want it, you want a chance at some kind of life, and this's your last one. I can stand it if you can.” His free hand clutched the arm that anchored him to the chair.
Mythili bit the inside of her mouth until she felt sharp pain, until the first response died in her throat. “All right. I agree with everything you say. I'll work with you, because I have to. We'll share whatever we find fifty-fifty. But that's all—” words escaping again in spite of her.
“That's all I expected.” Chaim moved his mouth, imitating a smile sourly. “And I think there's one more thing we can agree on: Abdhiamal really screwed both of us.”
In the artificial brightening of a new day, Mythili left her tiny rented room and took an air taxi out across the kilometer-wide vacuole that held Mecca City. The towers of the city clustered on every side, their colored surfaces shimmering with faint movement as she looked outward and ahead. The sight did not touch her with wonder as it once had; today she scarcely saw them at all.
She had agreed to share a ship and a gamble with Chaim Dartagnan, and now she was about to back it up, taking all that was left of her life savings to buy the equipment and supplies they needed to make their trip. It was insane … but what other choice was there? She felt the tension that had shocked her awake after a night of depression-drugged sleep winding still tighter in her chest. She swallowed and sighed; but the tightness came back, and the taxi closed inexorably with her destination.
She made her way down the central core of the Abraxis commercial building, settling like a feather into gravity's soft well of suction. The skin of the building walls was golden, and she felt herself suffocating, sinking through honey. Workers and customers moved past her, propelling themselves like swimmers from the corridor's wall. She let them pass, letting her own slow sink-rate remain undisturbed.
The ship-outfitter's business, with its massive displays, occupied the two bottom-most levels of the building. Grimly she pushed aside the flaps of the upper-level entrance, found herself in a catacomb of stabilized boxes and closed mesh containers. She moved cautiously through the narrow aisles, where a handful of desultory strangers inspected navigation equipment she identified at a glance and prospector's gear she could not recognize at all. They stared as she passed, herself an unclassifiable oddity in this male domain.