Reiss pulled the jigg to a stop in the shade of the Central Administration building. “Do you want me to wait?” he asked.
Tatian shook his head. “No. Take your friend home, and then tell Derry what’s happened. Tell her to put some sort of plausible excuse on record, just in case someone decides to check up on us.”
“But you already paid the mosstaas,” the fem said, sounding startled, and then looked as though %e wished %e hadn’t spoken.
“I’m more concerned about IDCA,” Tatian said, still looking at Reiss. The younger man nodded, his expression for once somewhat chastened. “I want it taken care of, Reiss.”
“I will, baas,” the younger man said. At his gesture, the fem scrambled forward into the passenger seat, and he touched the throttle again. The jigg pulled decorously away from the curb, and Tatian stepped into the sudden cool of the Administration building.
Prane Am worked for the Port Authority itself, in the larger of the two repair facilities. Rather than use the maze of tunnels that connected the buildings, Tatian cut across the almost empty staging lot, blinking again at the heat and the gathering clouds. In a few weeks, this lot and the dozen loading bays it serviced would be filled to capacity, and draisines and shays would be backed up on the access roads, waiting their turn to unload. At the moment, though, only about half the bays were open; shays were drawn up to the platforms where off-worlders and indigenes directed the machines that moved the cargo. He surveyed them with a professional eye—Kerendach had been doing a steady out-of-season business for a while now, so their presence was to be expected, but what DTS was doing with a cargo that size this time of year was beyond him, and he made a mental note to check up on them once he got back to the office.
He was sweating freely by the time he reached Repair One, and he thought he heard a distant rumble of thunder: the afternoon storms were arriving as usual. He ducked through the narrow doorway, pushing hard against the stiff seal, and stopped just inside to get his bearings. For once, all the internal partitions had been folded back, opening up the full central volume. In that space, a shuttle hung, suspended from a metal cradle, dwarfing even the biggest cargo movers, its one extended wing almost touching the wall above his head. The exoskeletons that crawled across its surfaces and along the cradles looked almost human-sized by comparison. There were three of them in use, clustered around the shuttle’s steering jets. He stared up at them, shading his eyes against the cold glare of the working lights, and wondered which was Am. Before he could find an internal systems port, however, a speaker crackled on the wall behind him.
“Tatian? Is that you?”
“Hello, Am.” He waited, not quite sure of his welcome. She had sounded cheerful enough, but the speaker distorted emotion.
“Hang on a minute, I’m due break. I’ll be right down.”
Tatian allowed himself a small sigh of relief and waited while one of the exoskeletons withdrew itself along a support beam. It clicked into a port at the top of a main pillar, and a small figure emerged from its center. She climbed down the long ladder and came to join him, stopping only to enter a code in the shop computer.
“It’s good to see you again,” she said, and jerked her head toward the side door. “Let’s go out.”
Tatian followed her through the smaller door into the alley that ran between Repair One and the technician’s shed next door. It was shaded but still hot, the air heavy with the oncoming rain. The dirt-drifted paving was spotted with stains of spilled coffee and aram cuds, and the air smelled of ozone and fuel cells and the heady spice of the drift-grass.
“I haven’t seen you in ages,” she said. “How’re things?”
Tatian shrugged, but couldn’t repress a smile. He had half-forgotten, in the unpleasantness of their last quarrel, just how attractive she was. The close-fitting worksuit outlined the ample curves of hips and breasts; the tool belt just accentuated her tiny waist. She saw him looking and smiled back, appreciative and rueful all at once.
“Busy,” he said. “Things have been busy. And I hope I’m not taking you away from anything.”
“Nothing important,” Am answered, and looked back at the half-open door. “They had a couple jets jam when they were coming in, and the owner’s freaking. But, hey, it pays the rent.”
“Freelance job?” Tatian asked. Am, like most of the port technicians, rented time on the company equipment to do outside jobs, jobs that would otherwise be at the bottom of the company priority lists.
Am made a rocking gesture with one hand, and Tatian nodded. So-so, sort-of, the motion said, and that just meant that the job had been placed through the port’s gray market. Someone offered someone extra overtime, or a favor, or something—he himself had made that bargain often enough—and the job queue got rearranged.
“Speaking of which,” Am said, and smiled. “No offense, Tatian, but what brings you out here?”
Tatian laughed. “I need to buy parts. I’ve got a problem with the interface box, and it looks like it’ll be easier just to replace it.”
Am nodded again, her mobile face abruptly remote and serious. It was the look she always had when she was working, or thinking about work, and it had never failed to evoke an odd mix of lust and jealousy. It figured she had taken up with a mem, he thought bitterly. They would at least share that obsession.
“I can get you a box,” Am said, after a moment. “But—you have Inomatas, right?”
“Yes.”
“That I can’t do, at least not if I’m remembering your prejudices right. I can get you something secondhand, I heard there’s a Mark Three Inomata available right now, or I can get you a new, up-to-the-minute clone. Take your pick.”
“That’s not much of a choice,” Tatian said.
Am shrugged. “I know you hate clones. At least there’re no HIVs on Hara.”
“There are plenty in the port,” Tatian answered. That was another reason the pharmaceuticals spent so much time and effort on Hara: Hara was the only human-settled world that had no native HIV strain, and the off-world strains seemed to find no toe-hold in the indigenous population. Unfortunately, whatever it was that protected the indigenes—and no one had isolated it yet—had absolutely no effect on the resident off-worlders.
“For a druggist, you’re pretty phobic about used parts,” Am said.
“That’s not the issue,” Tatian said, and bit off what could easily escalate into a too-familiar quarrel. Am had a technician’s contempt for the softer sciences. “You said there was a Mark Three, a real Inomata. How would it work with the system I’ve got? And how much are they asking for it?”
“I can get it for about two-fifty, three hundred cd,” Am answered. “But that doesn’t include installation.”
“I’ve got someone who’ll take care of that.”
Am nodded. “There shouldn’t be any problem tying it into your present system—you were running the Three-Eight, right?”
“Right.” Trust her to remember that, if nothing else, Tatian thought.
“You may find it a little slower, but you’ll get used to that.”
“How much slower?” Tatian asked.
“The difference is in nanoseconds, but sometimes it feels perceptibly different, mainly when large blocks of data are involved.” Am shrugged again. “I think a lot of it’s psychological.”
Tatian sighed. He didn’t like secondhand bioware, less from any rational fears—risk of infection or rejection—than a childhood terror of bodysnatchers, the killers who had roamed the cities of Dodona, murdering for the expensive implants people wore beneath their skin. The worst of the gangs had been broken before he was born, but they had remained part of Dodonan folklore. But the alternative was a clone, and even with Am’s help and advice, there was simply too much risk of getting a defective part. “I’d rather get the real Inomata,” he said, and Am nodded.