‘Complaining son of a bitch,’ Olli put in promptly.
‘Bad sore loser,’ Kittering’s translator declared.
‘Drank too much,’ Kris added.
‘Couldn’t keep money,’ Idris rounded up.
Rollo nodded, satisfied conventions were being followed. ‘My son, he was, my brother. Loyal to his ship and safe hands. Died in orbit – who should have died in space where he belonged. One of ours, he was.’
And they chorused, ‘One of ours,’ with Solace a beat behind, caught out.
‘Asset Medvig 99622,’ the captain went on. ‘Instanced 116 After and provided to us under a medium-duration leash contract out of Peace Hive Three.’
‘Bad sense of humour,’ Kris said.
‘Finicky stand-offish type,’ Idris followed.
‘Never put my stuff back where it belonged,’ growled Olli.
‘Very expensive to maintain,’ Kit contributed.
‘My children, they were, and comrades,’ Rollo said. ‘Good company and safe hands. Died amongst us, who should have gone back to their own, but they were ours.’
‘They were ours,’ the chorus came back to Rollo, and Kris saw tears making their tortuous way down the creases on his face.
Safe hands. For Colonial spacers, whose lives were strung from one mechanical failure to the next, for whom there would never be enough replacement parts and every little thing might be made to serve as something else just to get them into port, it was the greatest valediction.
‘Now,’ Rollo said quietly, hands on the table. ‘In this time of grief, I have a favour to ask of you, my daughter.’ And he looked Kris in the eye.
‘Oh, I know,’ she agreed. ‘I’m on it, Captain. I will find out who the hell those waste-makers were.’
Rollo’s smile was bleak. What, after all, could they do with the information? A handful of spacers who didn’t even have a ship . . . But if all they could do was spread word to their peers, they’d do that.
Kris stood to go, shaking her sleeve slightly to make sure her duelling knife was hanging right. For a moment she thought to ask Solace to accompany her. You couldn’t get better backup than a Partheni soldier. The woman looked distracted, though, and Kris wondered if she was planning to leave them soon. Instead she glanced at Olli.
‘Oh yes,’ the remote specialist said. ‘Wouldn’t miss it.’
‘Bring the Scorpion,’ Kris told her. ‘Stay back, don’t loom, but bring it.’ And if they actually met any of the symbiont’s confederates, Olli would ensure they properly rued the day.
Kris had done this sort of thing before. It was a development of the work she’d carried out as a student lawyer back on Scintilla, when the thought of a spacer’s life would have set her laughing hysterically. Students did the beat work on senior advocates’ cases, investigating witnesses, digging up dirt . . . which meant getting their hands dirty. She hit the Lung-Crow’s kybernet with her credentials until she found a way in, then set automated seekers into the station’s records. Next, she and Olli went around the docks, talking to spacers and the orbital’s ground crew. Where people recognized her ship name, she took their sympathy and used it ruthlessly. The rest of the time she played whatever role seemed most apt: creditor, debtor, abandoned lover, old friend. Always her queries circled the identity of the Tothiat, perhaps a Tothiat who palled around with a vermiform Castigar with a beweaponed headmount.
The station records gave her some detail on Tothiats as a class, none of it good. They were from the Hegemony; the actual Tothir, the insect-thing, was technically a subject race of the Essiel. You didn’t see them much outside a fishtank off-world, because they were very dependent on their planet’s chemistry. However, the Essiel had many ingenious subordinates, and someone had felt it worth putting a great deal of effort into giving the nasty little critters the freedom of the universe. The solution had been to graft Tothir to other creatures – modified to produce the toxic chemicals the things needed. The results, so she read, had gone some way beyond the Hegemonic scientists’ intentions. What came off the surgeon’s table was neither host nor implant, but a conglomerate personality – seamlessly mixing both. Unsurprisingly, there were few volunteers for the process. On the other hand, Kris discovered grimly, the resulting hybrid had considerable conscious control over the host body’s metabolism. The merged creature could push itself far past its usual limits, and repair damage very swiftly. They could even survive hard vacuum for an uncomfortably long period of time.