“I don’t know if you being stupid would make this easier or harder.” Standing slowly, she let him pull himself to his feet without guiding him the way she would some recalcitrant child.
“Well, that takes care of at least one of our little problems.” She backed into the corridor, then smiled when he followed with only the most requisite amount of wariness. “Now—let’s see how fast you can run.”
Medve’s docking bay stank of alien pheromones and burning polycarbons. The scream of working lasers somewhere out of sight made the boy jerk to a startled stop, and Rahel had to tug at the tail of his T-shirt to drag him along when she started down the access ramp. He trotted up even with her hip, seal-meals clutched possessively to his chest with both hands, and frowned at the broken splashes of light erupting from beyond Medve’s landing pylons. Rahel wondered if he just didn’t like the noise, or if he knew something she didn’t about what Nadder played with while hiding out behind her jumpship. Toad was no help—she bumped happily along behind them, growling, her leash clamped between her teeth. She wouldn’t have noticed a problem if it bit her on the behind.
The laser light extinguished before they’d made it half-way across the bay, throwing the dock into startling darkness and clearing the air for whispered curses and the scrape of metal against something more yielding. Rahel half-expected to find Nadder and her assistant dismantling animal crates in an attempt to do away with evidence of their crimes. But when the albino backed into view around the jumpship’s nose, his welding gloves were sticky with rotten-mustard blood instead of welding flux, and the long, jointed segment he dragged across the deck behind him looked distinctly organic in nature. Rahel stopped where she was and squeezed her hand just above the boy’s elbow to hold him from running.
Nadder, another length of tlict leg balanced over each shoulder, planted both feet when she rounded the jumpship in turn. Her opaque face-guard pointed at Rahel in what could only be a glare. “Why, you sneaky little eco-wench! Where the hell did you get him?”
The sliding slap of seal-meals hitting the deck was Rahel’s only warning. She dropped Toad’s leash and spun to grab the boy with both hands, closing her right fist on nothing but T-shirt when he twisted himself almost completely behind her. With one hand still locked on his elbow, though, that was leverage enough. Hauling back on the fistful of T-shirt, she leapt forward and swept her arms around him as his bare feet lost purchase on the decking. He shouted in anger, nearly crawling up her front in his effort to get away, but she managed to crook one arm around his neck just before he cracked her chin with the top of his head. He answered her with a stamp of his feet and the warm snap of teeth on her wrist.
“Don’t even think it!”
The boy rolled an angry lower lip at her, but, surprisingly, didn’t bite down.
“You so much as give me a love nip, you little throwback, and I’ll have the vet yank all your teeth while he’s got you in for neutering. You understand me?”
Before words were invented, there was tone of voice. Even 750,000 years of evolution couldn’t erase that common heritage. Rahel waited until he eased his jaw open and backed his head away, then slowly loosened her own grip around his throat.
“Good boy,” she said sweetly, in just the right tone to make Toad look up from the floor and wag her tail. Later, when he knew enough words to make explanations worthwhile, she’d worry about constructing a better reinforcement for good behavior. Right now, though, she settled for rubbing his shoulder and plastering on an artificial smile. “That’s a good boy.”
“That’s better progress than I ever made with him. I was just about ready to wire his jaw.” Nadder knocked the face guard up over her forehead, stalking forward to peer at the boy with professional interest. He backed closer against Rahel, but didn’t try to run. “So—did you actually send the mazhet out here to get him, or did their dohke cut a deal with you after the mazhet knew what they were buying?”
Rahel kept her hands on the boy as she guided him around behind her, just as happy to keep him touching her and out of Nadder’s reach. “How I got him doesn’t matter. We’ve got bigger problems, you and me.” She nodded toward the Larry parts Nadder’s albino was so diligently stuffing down the matter reclamater in the docking bay’s wall. “There’s gonna be a lot more of them, you know. One tlict more or less won’t help a lot in the great big scheme of things.”
Nadder picked up one end of a leg when the albino scurried back to her, shoving it into his arms without taking her eyes off Rahel. “You don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on here.”
“Then I’ll take a wild guess. You were doing some kind of business with Larry here when he started getting psycho. Maybe you killed him—maybe he killed himself. What matters is that you ended up with a dead tlict and no good explanation for how he got that way.” Rahel watched the albino force another length of leg down the wall with a tooth-grinding buzz. “Now you’re disposing of the body.”
Nadder pursed thin lips into a pensive frown, tugging on the cuffs of her welding gloves, picking at the seams. Somewhere behind Rahel, the boy started gathering up the dropped seal-meals in furtive grabs. “What is it you want from me?” Nadder asked her coldly.
Rahel stooped to sweep a few outlying meals in the boy’s direction. “I want the same thing you do—to get offstation before the tlict come to find us.”
“Well, then help us clean up the rest of this mess.” Nadder jerked her thumb at the rest of the tlict on the other side of the jumpship. “ ’Cause I put in for a departure code when Larry first tried to take Styen’s head off. Traffic Control said we’d be on queue at least six hours.” She spread her hands and took a few steps backwards toward the hidden work area. “Or are you in too much of a hurry to wait around while we chop-chop?”
Rahel shook her head, winding Toad’s leash up around one hand. “I don’t have to wait around. I can go back to my jumpship and be gone in fifteen minutes.” She smiled thinly when Nadder slammed to a stop and grimaced suspiciously. “I don’t have to take you with me, Nadder, but you’ve got what I want, and I’ve got what you need. I thought we might find some happy middle ground before we all ended up as Larry food.”
“Sonofabitch.” The word burst out of Nadder on a short, soft puff of laughter. “You’ve got a mazhet departure code!” She dropped her fists to her hips in belligerent awe.
Rahel wondered how impressed Nadder would be if she knew what Rahel had done to necessitate getting the number. “And you’ve got Terran-descendant genotypes that haven’t seen a common Earth ancestor in 750,000 years.” She reached around behind her to hook a finger in the boy’s T-shirt collar. Nadder lifted one eyebrow at first Rahel, then the boy. “I want your cargo,” Rahel told her flatly. “All of it. And I want to be on board with it when you pull out.”
“Bullshit.” Nadder slapped the face guard back down into place. “You can’t just take all my merchandise without paying me for it. That’s piracy!”
“I’m paying you with your life.”
“Which won’t be worth shit if I have to welsh on certain financial obligations.” Nadder tossed the albino the cutting torch off her belt and pushed him in the direction of where they’d left the rest of the body. He ducked under the jumpship’s nose and disappeared from sight. “At least give me two-thirds the going rate for anything you decide to keep.”