“Well, what do you think of her?” Faith asked.
“Do you mean the ship?” For a moment Tiffany had thought Faith meant Miko.
Faith and Miko nodded together, waiting for her answer.
“I’m amazed,” Tiffany admitted, dazzled by the Archangers Aladdin’s Cave interior. As plush as the saloon looked, it was still a working part of the spacecraft. It abutted the main air lock, and an auto-galley and wine cellarette stood at the far end, waiting to serve. But the adjacent stateroom was pure living quarters, decked with a shaggy green carpet of dwarf bluegrass. Smelling like spring.
“Right,” Faith agreed. “But beneath the glitter, she’s just an insystem yacht, with a simple fusion-reaction drive. She’ll get you to Floreal—in style—but she hasn’t got the legs to go outsystem.” Which was why she had been abandoned, along with her priceless Picassos.
Miko looked confused, then stricken. Falling silent, she stared down at her toes, her excitement punctured. Tiffany watched her go from being a bouncy young woman, happy to show off her ship, to looking like a criminal facing capital sentence.
A lot was happening beneath the surface, and Tiffany could not entirely trust the ship’s sensors to separate truth from fiction. Heartbeat, GSR, and voice modulation could be faked, given the proper programming. She had to gamble on her own judgment. “And what do you want in return?”
“Your ticket outsystem.” Faith said it lightly, but she might well have asked for keys to the galaxy. It was what everyone wanted. That much was very believable.
Tiffany turned to Miko. “And what about you?”
The small woman shrugged. “I go with the ship.” Her hangdog look said that she was hardly likely to be lying.
“She’s the pilot,” Faith explained. “I inherited this ship from a friend. A good friend. But when you are done—when she’s taken you to Floreal—I want Miko to have the ship. She deserves it.” Faith was one of those people who found friends in all the right places. Friends that were about to send her outsystem.
“And that’s all right with you?” Tiffany wanted to hear Miko say it. Floreal was a sealed-off habitat in the lesser half of the double system, 3645B. A cosmic dead end, orbiting a nameless red dwarf in a system set to be demolished. Going there would take time, time that would be far better spent trying to get outsystem. Whatever Miko’s chances were of surviving, going to Floreal made them a lot slimmer. Ship or no ship. In a similar situation, Anton and a dozen like him had shrugged, turned, and not looked back.
Miko glanced from Tiffany to Faith, then back at her bare toes, her anguished look too awfully real to be an act. “Of course. I can take you to Floreal.” She looked up at Tiffany, forcing on a smile. “Sure, good-looking. Whatever you say. If you are hollow-headed enough to want to go, then I’m the girl to get you there.” Miko meant it.
Tiffany liked her already, even trusted her some, though they were meeting under trying circumstances. Miko had a no nonsense “do the right thing” attitude—even if it cost her. Also a touch of gallows humor, always a plus on a kamikaze mission. But did Tiffany dare make life and death decisions based on like, or trust? Well, it wasn’t as if she were being deluged with counter offers. Miko was the only one not to take one look and walk. Tiffany had yet to set foot in this screwed-over system, and already she had to stake everything on hope and intuition.
She turned back to Faith. “You’re in luck. All I’ve got to offer is my return berth on the Nightingale, leaving as soon as she can load.” To keep a starship insystem a second longer than necessary would incite mayhem.
Looters and Wreckers
Next time was for real. No longer a holo, Tiffany dressed for trouble, pulling sturdy ship’s coveralls on over her clothes, stuffing gas filters up her nose. Halfway through the midwatch, Nightingale docked on the starport side of the hub. Pandemonium erupted. The rescue ship could take only a tiny fraction of the people screaming to get aboard.
The mob at the embarkation gate fell back before tangle-foot bullets and volleys of gas grenades, trampling one another in retreat. But as soon as the gas thinned, the crowd rebounded, rushing the gate with renewed fury. Insane to get aboard an outbound ship. A tight wedge of riot cops and roboguards beat a path through the howling mass with electro-shock truncheons, taking Tiffany with them.
She had a ship’s bag on her shoulder, holding three changes of outfit, plus personal effects, and a non-lethal plastic stinger—as much for moral support as self-defense. If she ended up having to fight, Tiffany didn’t much like her chances.
Jutes and Choctaws had taken over the starport. All outsystem lounges, staff areas, and stopover suites were in their hands. They ran baggage claim and the security kiosks. But their main concern was shaking down anyone lucky enough to be headed outsystem. Pay or stay. They killed, maimed, and assaulted in the course of doing business. Or to mark turf, or to maintain their image. Or for the malicious satisfaction of thwarting the more fortunate.
Luckily, Tiffany was headed insystem, something so unheard of it took everyone by surprise. Insystem lounges were no-man’s-land. Incoming slide-walks were barely worth blocking. Faith was the one who had to run the gauntlet of Jutes, Choctaws, freelance footpads, and families begging tickets. Tiffany wished her luck.
Her robo-cop escort hustled Tiffany past crying babies and disbelieving parents, desperate to get where she was coming from. The starport lacked Belt City’s chaotic charm. Floor-to-ceiling energy fences snaked through packed lobbies, past people sleeping sitting up. Garbage had not been collected for months. Stuffy, unrecycled air reeked of urine and excrement. Attempting to use a public toilet had become an act of suicidal bravado.
She exited through a Choctaw checkpoint, a gap in an energy fence festooned with shock wire and anti-bomb mesh. Overarmed boys in leather pants and war paint looked through her bag, laughing at her little non-lethal stinger. One of them pocketed it. Their leader scratched his head with the business end of an assault pistol, trying to figure out what to make of her. “You have business in the Belt?”
“Just passing through.”
He grinned boyishly, “Ain’t we all. Where to?”
“Floreal.” That got a good laugh.
Tiffany stared into his mirror shades. “It’s true.”
The young gunman looked back at her, amazed, puzzled, then saddened, seeing something lovely going to waste. Lowering his recoilless pistol, he turned to the riot cops. “Crazy lady can pass. You can’t.”
None of the riot cops wanted to pass. They had all been promised outsystem berths. The robo-guards were programmed not to leave the starport.
Turning back to her, the Choctaw’s voice softened. “If you change your mind and come back this way—it will cost you.” He said it half as a warning, half as an invite. If she wanted to straighten out and submit, he was the boy to see.
Tiffany nodded. “I know.”
They painted her face to show she was Choctaw property, then passed her through. Pulling the filter plugs from her nose, she was on her own, one more anonymous inmate in a system careening toward disaster.
Faith had programmed the lock and scooter to take Tiffany’s thumb and voice print, and the v-suit was an adult woman’s adjustable. Exiting the lock on the insystem side, Tiffany attached her suit to the scooter seat. Belt City’s high-g section arched across the void overhead, backed by neon fingers of gas. The angry white eye of Orion 4673 dominated the crowded starscape, hurtling toward the doomed system. Firing up the thrusters, she coasted through the orbital graveyard, hoping she had picked the right ship, and the right pilot.