Havaer smiled at him, which was hard but he was practised. ‘Understood,’ he said easily. ‘I’ll leave you with my details, in case you recall something and want to pass it on. Anything will help. This isn’t about you, it’s about saving lives. Anything . . .’ He trailed off. A woman had joined them. Havaer put a great deal of effort into maintaining his mild, friendly expression.
She was Partheni. He noted the badges on her regulation grey overcoat, the service-and-loss tattoo beneath her eye. But he’d have known her without those signs. Soldiers of the Parthenon all had a certain look to them, literally: beautiful and deadly like highly polished knives.
He nodded cordially to her and stood. ‘Thank you for your time, Captain.’
The Partheni was standing protectively by Telemmier, regarding Havaer with narrow-eyed belligerence. She didn’t return the nod.
On his way out Havaer was already composing his report in his head. Parthenon involvement, request further instructions.
Idris
Colonial tradition was for grieving to be brief; the living needed to move on. It came from when the dead had outnumbered the living, and there just wasn’t time for protracted mourning. And it wasn’t as though the end of the war had cured death. Spacers died; they died hard and they still died often. They were the lifeblood of the human sphere, from the crews of the huge, dilapidated freighters whose timely arrival with holds of food was the difference between plenty and starvation, all the way down to the packet runners who carried nothing but information and barely stayed out of suspension for longer than it took to download. They died when life support failed; they died crazy in the deep void. They died when decades of careful maintenance ceased to be enough to hold their ageing ships together. They died on both sides of pirate actions, of hereditary conditions, in impromptu brawls in sordid brothels or orbital bars. And their friends moved on, but you couldn’t move on without a ship to move you. Losing a ship was a disaster that you literally could only walk away from.
Kittering had been searching for opportunities for the crew all morning, without success. No vessel would take them on as a group. Rollo was fiercely adamant that he’d take nothing less than a share-holding second, and Idris privately thought that he wouldn’t want to be the captain who took Rollo on as a subordinate.
At some point, Idris knew, the crew would simply part under the stress of the situation, so that they would all drift outwards and probably never meet again. He certainly wasn’t going anywhere without Kris to fight for him. He felt a cold shiver at the thought that she might turn to safe work on-planet as an advocate. She’d been running a long time, after all.
Around that point the spook turned up, which didn’t improve anybody’s mood much. And Idris had over-reacted, of course. Too much stress and grief over too short a time. He’d let himself off his own personal leash, and that always left him feeling tired and sick. Probably the man really wasn’t here with ulterior motives but then Solace had arrived. He would worry, later, what conclusions the Mordant House man would draw about Partheni involvement; Hugh attention was never welcome. Yet right then he’d never been so glad to see anyone as he was to have Solace beside him, and the spook had cleared out almost immediately. Solace’s proprietary air should have got on his nerves but, with Kris absent, he clung to the thought that someone was looking out for him. That’s wretched, Idris; just wretched. But he felt rubbed raw, as though every new development was salt on open wounds.
‘I thought you’d left, gone back to . . .’ Rollo made a vague gesture, presumably intended to indicate the whole institution of the Parthenon.
‘I’ve been seeing what I can do,’ Solace told him. ‘As a member of your crew.’
‘And are you? Still?’
She met his bleary-eyed belligerence head on. ‘Do you still have a crew?’
Rollo dropped his gaze first. ‘I don’t know, my daughter.’
‘If you do, then I’m still on it. Until the next job, when we can negotiate all over again. And . . . I have something to say, but where are Kris and Olli?’
Rollo glanced at Kittering, whose screens informed them that they were inbound, with word.
Solace nodded. ‘Then let’s hear what they have for us.’
*
‘My ship’s headed for Tarekuma?’ Rollo echoed, after Kris had rattled out their news. ‘That figures, my children.’ He sighed, and said again, ‘Tarekuma. It’s a goddamn armpit.’
‘Explain?’ Solace asked and Rollo rolled his eyes at her.