Her reader chirped as she completed her examination, and she ejected the chip with a nod.
"Everything checks, Lieutenant Commander," she said, returning it to him. "Sorry if I seemed a bit suspicious."
"I approve of suspicious people-especially when they're being suspicious in my interests," Quintana replied, and extended his hand.
She clasped it, and the familiar sensation of heat enveloped her. The merchant was still speaking, welcoming her to Wyvern, but all Alicia truly "heard" was the soaring, exultant carol of the Fury's triumph.
The Quarn freighter Aharjhka loped towards Wyvern at a velocity many a battle-cruiser might have envied. For all its size and cargo capacity, Aharjhka was lean, rakish, and very, very fast, for the great Quarn trade cartels competed with one another with a fervor other races lavished only on their ships of war.
The bridge hatch opened, and the being a human would have called Aharjhka's captain looked up as a passenger stepped through it.
"Greetings, Inspector. Our instruments have detected the ship you described." The Quarn's well-modulated voice was deep and resonant, largely because of the density of the atmosphere, for Quarn ships maintained a gravity more than twice that of most human vessels. But the Standard English was almost completely accentless, as well, and Ferhat Ben Belkassem hid a smile. He couldn't help it, for the sheer incongruity of that perfect enunciation from a radially symmetrical cross between a hairy, two-meter-wide starfish and a crazed Impressionist's version of a spider never failed to amuse him.
He crossed to a display at the captain's gesture. Whoever had reconfigured it for human eyes hadn't gotten the color balance quite right, but there was no mistaking the ship in Wyvern orbit. Star Runner had made a remarkably swift passage, actually passing Aharjhka en route-not that he'd expected anything else.
"So I see, sir," he said through his helmet's external speaker, and the captain turned the delicate pink the Quarn used in place of a chuckle at the choice of honorific. Ben Belkassem grinned, and the captain's rosy hue deepened. Quarn had only a single sex-or, rather, every Quarn was a fully functional hermaphrodite-and humanity's gender-linked language conventions tickled their sense of the absurd. But at least it was a shared and tolerant amusement. Different as they were, both species understood biological humor, and humans gave back as good as they got. The prudish Rishatha were another matter. If the Quarn found humanity's sexual mores amusing, they found those of the Rishatha uproarious, and the matriarchs were not amused in return. Worse (from the Rishathan viewpoint), the highly flexible Quarn vocal apparatus could handle both human and Rishathan languages, and they found it particularly amusing to enter a multi-species transit facility, make sure Rishatha were present, and ask one another "Have you heard the one about the two matriarchs?" in perfect High Rish.
Ben Belkassem had been present when one of those jokes led to a lively brawl and an even livelier diplomatic incident-not that the Rishatha were likely to press the matter too far. On a personal level, nothing much short of a six-kilo hammer could hurt a Quarn, and even a fully mature matriarch fared poorly against two hundred kilos of muscle and gristle from a 2.4-G home world, whether the possessor of that muscle and gristle was officially warlike or not. On a diplomatic level, the Terran Empire and Quarn Hegemony were firm allies, a fact the Rishathan Sphere found more than merely unpalatable yet was unable to do much about. It wasn't for want of trying, but even the devious Rishathan diplomatic corps which had once set the Terran League at the Federation's throat had finally given up in disgust. What was a poor racial chauvinist to do? Bizarre as each species found the other's appearance, humankind and Quarnkind liked one another immensely. On the face of it, it was an unlikely pairing. The Rishatha were at least bipedal, yet they and humans barely tolerated one another, so a reasonable being might have expected even more tension between humanity and the utterly alien Quarn.
Yet it didn't work that way, and Ben Belkassem suspected it was precisely because they were so different. The Quarn's heavy-gravity worlds produced atmospheric pressures lethal to any human, which meant they weren't interested in the same sort of real estate; humans and Rishatha were. Quarn and human sexuality were so different there were virtually no points of congruity; Rishatha were bisexual-and the matriarchs blamed human notions of sexual equality for the "uppityness" of certain of their own males. There were all too many points of potential conflict between human and Rish, while humans and Quarn had no conflicting physical interests and were remarkably compatible in nonphysical dimensions.
Humans were more combative than the Quarn, who reserved their own ferocity for important things like business, but both were far less militant than the Rishathan matriarchs. They were comfortable with one another, and if the Quarn sometimes felt humans were a mite more warlike than was good for them, they recognized a natural community of interest against the Rishatha. Besides, humans could take a joke.
"We will enter orbit in another two hours," Aharjhka's captain announced. "Is there anything else Aharjhka can do for you in this matter?"
"No, sir. If you can just get me down aboard your shuttle without anyone noticing, you'll have done everything I could possibly want."
"That will be no problem, if you are certain it is all you need."
"I am, and I thank you on my own behalf and that of the Empire."
"Not necessary." The captain waved a tentacle tip in dismissal. "The Hegemony understands criminals like these thugarz, Inspector, and I remind you that Aharjhka has a well-equipped armory if my crew may be of use to you."
The Quarn's rosy tint shaded into a bleaker violet. The Spiders might regard war as a noisy, inefficient way to settle differences, but when violence was the only solution, they went about it with the same pragmatism they brought to serious matters like making money. "Merciless as a Quarn" was a high compliment among human merchants, but it held another, grimmer reality, and the Quarn liked pirates even less than humans did. They weren't simply murderous criminals, but murderous criminals who were bad for business.
"I appreciate the thought, Captain, but if I'm right, all the firepower I need is already here. All I have to do is mobilize it."
"Indeed?" The Quarn remained motionless on the toadstool-like pad of its command couch, but two vision clusters swiveled to consider him. "You are a strange human, Inspector, but I almost believe you mean that."
"I do."
"It would be impolite to call you insane, but please remember this is Wyvern."
"I will, I assure you."
"Luck to your trading, then, Inspector. I will have you notified thirty minutes before shuttle departure."
"Thank you, sir," Ben Belkassem replied, and made his way to the tiny, human-configured cabin hidden in Aharjhka's bowels, moving quickly but carefully against the ship's internal gravity field.
His shoulders straightened gratefully as he crossed the divider into his quarters' one-G field. It was a vast relief to feel his weight drop back where it ought to be, and an even vaster one to dump his helmet and scratch his nose at last. He sighed in relief, then knelt to drag a small trunk from under his bunk and began checking its varied and lethal contents with practiced ease while his mind replayed his conversation with the captain.
He certainly understood the Quarn's concern, but the captain didn't realize how lucky Ben Belkassem had been. Aharjhka's presence at Dewent and scheduled layover at Wyvern had been like filling an inside straight, and the inspector intended to ride the advantage for all it was worth. Very few people knew how closely the Hegemony Judicars and Imperial Ministry of Justice cooperated, and even fewer knew about the private arrangement under which enforcement agents of each imperium traveled freely (and clandestinely) on the other's ships. Which meant no one would be expecting any human-even an O Branch inspector-to debark from Aharjhka. Aharjhka wasn't listed as a multi-species transport, and only a convinced misanthrope or an intelligent and infinitely resourceful agent would book passage on a vessel whose environment would make him a virtual prisoner in his cabin for the entire voyage.