‘A crapton of complaints but no demands so far. Though they’ve forfeited our docking deposit,’ Kris told him.
‘I want eyes all around: Olli, my children. A certain Boyarin bastard most definitely did not walk here from Magda. I don’t want his ship on top of us before we know it. Barney, how’re our feathers?’
‘Fucking bedraggled,’ came the engineer’s sour voice. ‘We can fly though.’
‘Where to?’ Idris wanted to know.
‘Kit?’
The Hanni hadn’t decamped to his chambers yet and his screens were still flickering with Roshu-local adverts. A moment later he was displaying navigation data, ship specs, their new job’s contractual details. The financial incentive was circled. Commercial transactions formed the chief common ground for human and Hannilambra dealings. Personal enrichment for them was a matter of life and death.
‘Heading to Huei-Cavor,’ Rollo noted. ‘Pick a path, Idris. Why does Huei-Cavor ring bells with me, anyway?’
‘Hegemony takeover in progress,’ Kris told him promptly. ‘It’s going to be a bit turbulent.’
‘Frying pans and fires, and never a break from them.’ The captain shook his head. ‘And while I’m talking trouble, which of my unruly children suborned the city gravitic system to lug us about on that travelling trunk?’
Medvig’s frame had been standing in the corner like a three-legged avant-garde sculpture. Now, in acknowledgement, they wriggled one of their remotes, currently plugged back into their chest.
Rollo scowled at the Hiver, but then his expression softened. ‘I am very grateful, but you can’t go about hacking kybernet systems. It’s outside your remit. They’ll unlicense you.’ Medvig operated under a leash contract of their own, necessary in order to trade with humanity. The Colonies, having created the Hivers during the war, remained leery of the distributed intelligence now it had declared independence.
Medvig’s three surviving remotes managed, between them, a very creditable spread-handed shrug. ‘Always a pleasure saving your pounds of flesh,’ came the artificial voice from their chest.
The smile that graced Rollo’s face was not one of his jovial beams but something smaller and more genuine. ‘Just be careful, see right?’ And then he looked up and his expression hardened. Following his gaze, Idris saw that their newest crewmate had entered the compartment.
She still wore most of her armour, though the wings were folded and the gun nowhere to be seen. She was short, compact-framed, her skin weirdly pale. And she was beautiful. Or perhaps she was just a well-finished product of the Partheni vats. Their warriors weren’t identical, but followed an identical aesthetic. She was looking at him. And he knew her.
Idris felt a sudden sinking in his belly, knowing that the universe wasn’t done messing with him, still ladling out his own personal ration of trouble.
‘You,’ Rollo addressed her, moustache bristling as he made a big show of being unafraid, ‘pulled out your goddamn Mr Punch inside Roshu Primator. That is death penalty stuff. I should poop you out the airlock right now.’
For a moment the Partheni’s face was blank, then she translated ‘Mr Punch’ as spacer slang for an accelerator, so named because of the inconvenient holes it made in ship and habitat walls alike. ‘I am of course extremely sorry,’ she said. ‘Also, you’re welcome.’ Both statements delivered in exactly the same neutral tone of voice, as though giving Rollo the option of which he wanted to hear.
In the end, he decided on neither. ‘Kris, explain this nonsense to your Uncle Rollo because he can’t make head or tail of it.’
‘She came and told me you and Idris had got scrobbled.’ The lawyer was cleaning her knife, not quite meeting Rollo’s gaze. ‘She offered herself as security, wanted to sign on. I took an executive decision. And we did need her.’
‘She’s a Partheni!’ Rollo gesticulated wildly at the woman, then tried to face up to her again. ‘My newfound surrogate daughter, you do realize we are a crummy little salvage operation here? We are not going to be fighting any star battles while I’m captain.’
‘Sometimes you get tired of fighting,’ the woman said. Remembering her, Idris didn’t believe it for a moment.
He should say something, he knew. He should unmask her as the Mysterious Woman From His Past, here for some underhand purpose that could only relate to him. Except something flipped inside him when he looked at her, and in the end he took the coward’s way out and said nothing at all.