Текст книги "Harbinger"

Автор книги: David Mack

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Xiong sensed that the bridge crew were all eavesdropping intently on his conversation with Kirk. Tuning out distractions, he reminded himself that the key was never to lie, but simply to omit all but the most basic of facts. “I helped set up the outpost on Ravanar, Captain.”

“The report from Lieutenant Commander T’Prynn indicated that the prospecting camp was a cover for a listening post.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you’re an A&A officer.”

“I’ve always considered that designation to be sort of a misnomer, sir. I really deal in xenoanthropology and—”

“My point,” Kirk cut in, “is that an A&A officer isn’t normally dispatched to set up listening stations.”

“That’s true, sir.”

Kirk’s frustration began to seep through the polite veneer of his officer’s training. “I know it’s true, Lieutenant. What I want to know is why you, an A&A officer, were assigned to help set up the post at Ravanar, and why I’m taking you back there.”

“I was available,” Xiong said. “And I’m good with tools.”

The voice of Vanguard Control squawked from the overhead speaker. “Enterprise, you are passing through spacedock doors. Stand by to clear spacedock in twenty seconds.”

“Acknowledged, Vanguard,” Leslie said.

Jabbing one of his seat-arm controls with his thumb, Kirk said, “Bridge to engineering. Ready for full impulse, Scotty?”

“Aye, Captain,” said a man with a heavy Scottish brogue. “Standing by. Just give the word.”

“Good work,” Kirk said. “Bridge out.” He closed the channel and looked back at Xiong. “I don’t like secrets on my ship, Mr. Xiong. My orders are to get you to Ravanar and send a landing party with you to the surface, and that’s what I’ll do. But I’m not going to place my ship or my crew at risk without a good reason, and if you can’t or won’t give me one, their safety comes first. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly, Captain.”

“Enterprise, you have cleared spacedock. Releasing helm control back to you.” The gentle curve of Vanguard’s massive top section filled the main viewer past its edges.

“Enterprise confirms helm control,” Leslie said. “Setting course one-one-nine mark two-six.”

“Confirmed, Enterprise . The lane is clear and you are free to navigate. Safe travels. Vanguard out.”

“Helm,” Kirk said. “All ahead, full impulse. Maximum warp as soon as we clear the shipping lanes.”

“Aye, sir,” Leslie said, and then he submerged into his duties.

Kirk pulled himself away from running his ship long enough to glance at Xiong and say, “Dismissed.”

Walking up the stairs to the turbolift, Xiong was intercepted by Spock, who gave him the boilerplate instructions for getting a berthing assignment from the quartermaster and an ETA of seventy-seven hours to Ravanar. Stepping into the turbolift, he indulged in a moment of cynical optimism. Seventy-seven hours…. If I don’t get stuck rooming with another Tellarite, maybe I’ll actually get some sleep this time.

“This board of inquiry is now convened,” Desai said, the echo of three sharp double tones from her judge’s bell silencing the susurrus of whispers.

She presided from the head of a small table in the middle of a small and sparsely appointed wardroom. A handful of department heads were in attendance, including T’Prynn, who sat alone at the far end of the table. Reyes sat with his JAG defense counsel on Desai’s left.

“Lieutenant Moyer,” Desai continued, “are you ready to proceed with depositions?”

Holly Moyer, a youthful attorney whom Desai had recruited, represented the JAG Corps. “I am, Captain.”

Turning to the opposing counsel, Desai said, “Commander Liverakos, I see you’ve submitted no requests for deposition interviews. Are you ready to proceed?”

The short, slightly built man frowned. Despite his overall boyish mien, his salt-and-pepper goatee gave him a certain gravitas. “Captain, we move for a postponement of this inquiry, pending the conclusion of the Enterprise’s on-site investigation. Any testimony collected prior to that will be merely speculation and hearsay.”

“Commander, I’ve already instructed Lieutenant Moyer to restrict her questions to those establishing the status of the Starship Bombay prior to its final departure from this station. As for the Enterprise’s investigation…” Desai tossed an ephemeral, scathing glance at Reyes. “I was not apprised that such an investigation was under way.”

“The Enterprise left spacedock forty-two minutes ago,” Liverakos said, “en route to the last known location of the Starship Bombay.”

“So noted,” Desai said. “Regardless, I will be asking Lieutenant Moyer to begin her interviews as soon as possible, in order to complete our review of the Bombay’s recent service history. I suspect that we’ll have a lot of data to analyze once the Enterprise returns and Captain Kirk files his report.”

“With all due respect to this board, Captain,” Liverakos said, “the recent service history of the Bombay, including the logs of her senior officers, are all available by subpoena from the Vanguard operations center. There’s no need to conduct face-to-face interviews.”

“Your ‘respect’ is touching, Commander, but I remain the arbiter of whether individual testimony is necessary to a full and proper investigation of this case.”

Liverakos opened his satchel and removed a sheaf of paper. Holding it up, he said, “May we confer in private?”

Desai sighed, then got up and motioned to Moyer and Liverakos to follow her away from the table. The two attorneys joined her in the corner and leaned close to converse sotto voce. Liverakos handed her his stack of paper. “Under Code Five, Section Twelve, Article Four-thirteen of the SCJ, I move for a summary termination of these proceedings.”

Moyer stared at him, astonished. “Four-thirteen? Are you kidding? It’s the basis for the inquiry.”

“It also sets the criteria for determining whether such an inquiry can or should be convened,” he said, then listed the actionable causes specified by the Starfleet Code of Justice: “Negligence, incompetence, sabotage, and dereliction of duty. You don’t have evidence for any one of them.”

“Hence we inquire, Mr. Liverakos,” Desai said. “Which should explain why this is an inquiry and not a court-martial.”

“It’s neither, Captain.” His tone remained just civil enough to skirt a contempt charge without stepping over the line. “It’s a fishing expedition, and you’re using the looser standards of an inquiry to see if you can build a case for a court-martial. If you were conducting a criminal investigation, your witnesses could invoke their rights of silence, counsel, and freedom from self-incrimination. Instead, you’re end-running all those protections by holding an ‘inquiry’ and compelling these people to testify under oath, with little recourse to their rights under the SCJ or the Federation Charter.” Handing a copy of his motion to Moyer, he concluded, “In my opinion this inquiry is a civil-liberties violation, and I, for one, consider it a disgrace.”

I knew there was a reason I liked this guy, Desai mused as she perused his briefing. It was exactly what she had needed him to do. Her superiors had demanded she hold this inquiry, and it was her duty to carry it out in good faith. However, it was no mistake that she had assigned her best, most aggressive defense attorney to represent Reyes and the crew of Starbase 47. Moyer was a quick-minded, efficient prosecutor, and Desai had needed someone just as talented and driven to oppose her. Liverakos had proved her faith to be well justified.

“A compelling argument, Mr. Liverakos. Let’s go back.” The trio returned to the table. Desai set down the motion for termination and recomposed her demeanor to address the other officers. “This inquiry is in recess pending review of defense counsel’s motion. I’ll hear Lieutenant Moyer’s rebuttal in my office tomorrow at 1400 hours. Adjourned.” She punctuated her declaration with a quick tap of her bell.

The room emptied quickly. Desai gathered her papers into a slim hard-shell case. Moyer and Liverakos paused on their way out to trade quips under their breath. Reyes, Desai noticed, stepped aside with T’Prynn and shared a hushed conversation with her as they exited. Suspicion nagged at Desai’s thoughts: Why was the commodore so quick to confer with his intelligence officer? And why had T’Prynn taken such a keen interest in what was likely to be a mundane proceeding?

Desai dismissed both queries. The answer, she decided, was probably quite simple: T’Prynn had needed to make a time-sensitive report to Reyes and so had waited to speak with him as soon as he was free of the protocols of the inquiry. Occam’s razor, Desai reminded herself. The simplest answer is usually the best one. Then her inner voice of experience retorted, Not for a lawyer, it isn’t.

Walking alone back to her office, she couldn’t shake the intuitive hunch that T’Prynn’s presence in the wardroom had not been coincidental. There was no empirical evidence to suggest that she had any vested interest in the inquiry’s outcome, but something about the quiet intensity of the Vulcan woman’s attention to every detail had left a subtle but uneasy impression on Desai. She wasn’t there to see Reyes. She was there to observe the depositions, and not out of idle curiosity.

As a lawyer, Desai had learned to trust the law, protocol, procedure, and precedents. But before she was a lawyer she had been a detective with the JAG Corps’s Criminal Investigation Division, and before that she had started her Starfleet career as a security officer. In the wardroom, Liverakos had spoken dismissively of “mere speculation,” but hunches were all about speculation, and being a detective had taught Desai that hunches sometimes took a case farther than evidence.

She had a hunch that T’Prynn—quiet, pretty, “isn’t she a great pianist” T’Prynn—was connected to the loss of the Bombay.

Believing it was easy. Proving it would be hard.

The best that Desai could hope for was that playing her hunch would do more good than harm. In her experience, the law was a blunt and clumsy instrument with which to seek the truth.

Unfortunately, it was the only one she had.

It would have to do, for now.

Being dragged by my hair across white-hot coals.

Stepping off the turbolift, T’Prynn reflected on her decades-old training in the disciplines of logic and repeated to herself that pain was only a matter of perception. It could be mastered, it could be channeled, and, even when it could not be eradicated, it could at least be rendered impotent.

A blade piercing my lung.

She knew that her pain was psychosomatic, nothing more than a figment of her imagination. The old Vulcan masters had taught her that there can be no pain if one’s mind does not acknowledge it. If one denied it expression, they said, if one could attune oneself to the body’s true signals, even the most horrific forms of physical suffering could be quelled from within.

Fingernails gouging a path across my cheek.

Pride and instinct made her hide her agony. She didn’t speak of it. Comrades and acquaintances never saw anything amiss, no momentary flickers of discomfort in her eyes, no fleeting twinges or tics to betray her inner torments. Masking distress, whether emotional or physical, was one of the first lessons Vulcan children were taught on their long journey toward mastering the Kolinahr—a goal few achieved.

The flashing slice of a lirpa across my abdomen.

One step followed another, bringing her at last to the entrance of docking bay ninety-two. The door was locked. She entered her security bypass code, and its two halves parted with a thin pneumatic hiss.

Parked in the middle of the small but austere hangar was Cervantes Quinn’s battered old Mancharan starhopper, the Rocinante. Quinn was hunched under an open panel in the craft’s nose section. Assorted loose parts and tools were scattered like flotsam at his feet. Both his hands were plunged deep inside the ship’s inner workings and tinkering loudly with something. T’Prynn’s sensitive hearing discerned his every muttered expletive with perfect clarity.

The sharp clacks of her boots on the gunmetal-gray deck echoed loudly in the confined, bare-walled space. Ceasing his labors, Quinn pulled his head out of his ship and looked at T’Prynn, who stalked toward him. “Don’t you knock, lady?”

“You said you had information.”

“I said I needed to talk to you,” Quinn said. He stepped out from beneath his ship and wiped off his hands with a towel looped around his belt. “You got an information leak.”

Skull-cracking pressure ballooning behind my eyes.

“Explain,” she said, in a tone harsher than what she had intended. When the pain flared, her patience faded and anger proved its power to her, over and over again.

“A reporter,” Quinn said. “Name of Pennington. Cornered me in Tom Walker’s place, asking about the Bombay.”

The splintering break of a knuckle bent backward.

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, I left him pickin’ up his teeth off the floor.”

Emerald hues of panic as his hands grip my throat.

“How much did he seem to know?”

“Hard to say.” Quinn walked toward his ship’s gangway, kicking a path through his tools, which clanged across the deck. “He didn’t ask anything specific.”

“I see.” That news concerned T’Prynn. A reporter who had no questions, only vague inquiries, usually was waiting for someone to let slip something that confirmed leads already in hand. If Pennington knew as much as she suspected he did, his intrusion into the matter could undo years of careful preparation and jeopardize thousands of lives. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention,” she said. “Avoid contact with him in the future.”

“Sure,” Quinn said, clomping haphazardly up the ramp. “Will do. You got it.” He looked disoriented and unstable.

“Do you require medical assistance, Mr. Quinn?”

“Nah,” he half-growled. “Just a bucket and some shut-eye.”

Not wanting to visualize the rest of Quinn’s evening, T’Prynn let herself out and walked back to the turbolift. She turned the throttle grip. “Level twenty-seven, section six.”

The coppery tang of my own blood pooling in my mouth.

Fifty-three years had not dimmed the memories. They haunted her, amplified each year by the injustice of being deprived of the purgative release of Pon farr. Part of her psyche remained trapped in the final moments of that long-ago death struggle, the moment of her emancipation, the beginning of her bondage to a personal demon more vivid than the pale schemes of the living who surrounded her daily.

Sten’s voice, demanding my surrender to his passions.

Her face was a portrait of stoic calm for the handful of engineering technicians who rode with her to level twenty-nine, and for the communications officer who remained on the turbolift after T’Prynn stepped out. Crewmates and strangers passed by her in the corridors, taking no notice of her unhurried pace or her Zen-like countenance. She arrived at her quarters, let the door close behind her, and walked to the center of the room. There, she remained still and allowed her agony to gnaw at her from within. Then she plumbed the crypt of her memory and trained her mind on the one moment that would silence the darker fires of her nature, even if only briefly.

The crack of Sten’s neck snapping sideways in my grasp.

For a few moments the primitive part of her katra savored that moment. Her conscious mind screamed out with self-loathing—not for having taken Sten’s life, but because, even now, decades later, that one instant of manifest rage, sanctified by the Koon-ut-kal-if-fee, still gave her a tiny measure of joy. It was his own fault, she consoled herself. He should have let me go when I asked to be released.

She had never loved Sten. On Vulcan, teaching children to love was considered grossly improper, but every child was taught how to wield the lirpa and the ahn-woon, and some were instructed in the dancelike martial art of V’Shan.

There were many such dichotomies of her upbringing that T’Prynn had never been able to reconcile to her own satisfaction: She had been indoctrinated with pacifism but taught to kill. Her elders had extolled the right of each individual to make their own choices, but they also had expected her to mate with a man who was all but a stranger to her. From the earliest days of her childhood she had sensed that the emotions raging deep inside her were enormously powerful and vital to understanding the true nature of her existence as a Vulcan, yet her people’s entire society seemed predicated on the philosophy of suppressing its most profound inner beauties because it feared the ugliness that resided beside them.

All her doubts notwithstanding, T’Prynn had learned and obeyed, absorbing the tutelage of the Adepts and the stern reprimands of her parents, until she, too, learned to live her life in a state of self-inflicted emotional atrophy.

Then she had seen the lust in Sten’s eyes, felt his need to possess her, to smother her, to control her. It was a crude and sickening sensation, and she had obeyed the impulse of her heart. She told Sten to choose another mate and let her go.

Enslaved by his own ardor, he had refused to abandon his claim on T’Prynn. His final demand, before she snapped his fourth vertebra, had been “Submit.”

It was a demand now repeated endlessly, in her waking thoughts and in her dreams, by his vengeful katra, which he had projected into her undefended mind—and which now lingered in her subconscious, torturing her without mercy, flooding her thoughts with its memories of wounds she inflicted so that they could mingle with the hurts Sten had bestowed upon her.

Submit!

After more than five decades of unrelenting mental strife, T’Prynn’s answer remained unchanged.

Never.

14

Kirk sat at the desk in his quarters and reviewed Spock’s report of long-range sensor data from the Ravanar system. So far, the information was not promising. There were indications of recent high-energy discharges, which were consistent with the current hypothesis that the Bombay had been destroyed. Reinforcing that speculation was the complete absence of signal traffic to or from the system, which implied that there was no one left alive, either in lifeboats or on the planet.

There’s always a chance, he reminded himself. They might be alive but without communications. Until we know otherwise, this remains a rescue mission.

His door signal buzzed. For a moment he considered making whoever was outside wait while he tossed his damp towel back into his shower nook and swapped his loose civilian shirt for a proper uniform jersey. Then he reconsidered and said, “Come.”

The door slid open, and Lieutenant Robert D’Amato stepped inside. “Pardon the interruption, Captain. Is this a bad time?”

“Not at all, Mr. D’Amato. What’s on your mind?”

D’Amato took a few moments to choose his words. “I saw that Mr. Spock’s roster for the landing party on Ravanar includes Ensign Pawlikowski from earth sciences.” After a brief hesitation, he added, “I also noticed that my name wasn’t on the list, sir.”

Kirk nodded. “And you feel this was an oversight?”

“I am the ship’s senior geologist, sir. It should be me.”

“You’re still on bereavement leave,” Kirk said. “For now, Pawlikowski is top of the list for your department.”

“Captain, I understand that landing-party assignments are made at Mr. Spock’s discretion, but—”

“I selected the landing party, Mr. D’Amato.”

Heavy silence followed Kirk’s declaration. The thrumming of the Enterprise’s engines, straining to maintain maximum warp for an extended run, pulsed through the deck under their feet.

D’Amato seemed to be struggling to restrain a floodtide of temper and grief. “I hereby request permission to return to active duty, and to serve on the landing party at Ravanar.”

“Request denied.” Kirk walked past D’Amato and tossed his used shower towel into the corner.

“May I ask why, sir?”

“You know why,” Kirk said, opening his drawer and removing a clean uniform shirt. “A landing party’s no place to work out a personal agenda.” He backed off from his reflexive authoritarian mode. “Besides, I think you need to give yourself more time to deal with this. It’s been less than three days.”

Shaking his head in protest, D’Amato said, “I can be objective, Captain.”

“Can you? I’m not so sure.”

Pausing to take a calming breath, D’Amato closed his right hand into a fist, which Kirk took as a sign that the man was barely holding himself together. “This isn’t about revenge,” D’Amato said. “And it’s not about some denial fantasy that she’s still alive if only I can find her.” His jaw trembled as he forced out the words, “I know that she’s gone.”

“What’s it about, then? Proving you’re not in pain?”

“No, sir. It’s about making this mean something.” The shadow of grief darkened D’Amato’s face. “I can accept that she died in the line of duty, but not that she died for nothing.” Tears of sorrow and anger welled in the corners of his eyes. “Something on that planet was important enough that Oriana and her shipmates were killed for it. I want to know what it was.”

Kirk put down his jersey on top of the dresser, then walked slowly back toward D’Amato. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make sense of tragedy, D’Amato.” He placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “But it doesn’t always work. I can’t promise you that we’ll find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, the truth is that accidents happen—acts of nature, of random chance, of God, if that’s what you want to call it. You want an answer so badly that you might fool yourself into seeing one that’s not there.”

“No, Captain, I won’t.” D’Amato straightened his posture, as if he were defying the weight of grief burdening his heart. “I’m a scientist. I have my training, standard protocols, simple rules for reporting only what I can detect, observe, and quantify. You can trust me to do my job, sir…to bring you facts, not wish lists. You have my word on that.”

The captain considered D’Amato’s request. He is better qualified than Pawlikowski, Kirk thought. And the briefing from Xiong suggested we would want an expert in subterranean geology. Looking back at D’Amato, however, he remained worried about the deep emotional wound the man had just suffered. Letting this man be part of the investigation into whatever events had claimed the life of his wife wasn’t against Starfleet regulations, but it felt like a risky decision. What if I were in his place? Could I put my faith in science? In procedures and protocols and cold, hard facts? Kirk admitted to himself that he probably couldn’t…. But I’m not a scientist.

“I’ll ask Mr. Spock to tell Pawlikowski you’ll be taking her place,” Kirk said. “Join us in transporter room one tomorrow at seventeen-thirty hours.”

With a look of bittersweet gratitude, D’Amato nodded and said, “Thank you, Captain.”

“Dismissed.” Several minutes after D’Amato had gone, Kirk was still wondering whether he had just made a grievous error in judgment. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow on Ravanar, he decided, then changed into his uniform shirt and left for the bridge.

With a bucket of ice-cold water and a spin of the hammock, Zett Nilric rousted Cervantes Quinn from a drunken stupor aboard the Rocinante. The subsequent, heated exchange of exceedingly vulgar salutations led to Quinn’s quick beating by Morikmol, followed by a blurry drag through the corridors of the station. When the haze of Quinn’s minor battering began to abate, he blinked and realized that once again he was propped up inside Ganz’s dark sanctum on the Omari-Ekon, facing the big green Orion himself.

“I have a job for you,” Ganz said, reclined on his mountain of rainbow-hued giant pillows.

Acid churned, hot and sour, from Quinn’s stomach into the back of his throat. He couldn’t tell if the bile was the product of anxiety or of his hangover. With his hoarse croak of a voice, he said, “What kind of job?”

“A delivery,” Ganz said. “To the camp on Kessik IV.”

“The new dilithium mine?”

Ganz nodded, then surveyed his manicured fingernails.

Quinn continued, “What’s the cargo?”

“Hardware.”

“Hardware?” Quinn had a bad feeling about this. “Are we talking dynospanners, or the kind that’ll have Starfleet going up my tailpipe with a tricorder?”

“The kind that repays the debt you owe me,” Ganz said.

It’s contraband, huh? Whatever. “Where’s the pickup?”

Zett cut in, “We’re loading your ship now.”

“Whoa,” Quinn said. “I’m going out hot?”

Ganz leaned forward. “You have a problem with that?”

Quinn understood his situation clearly now: It was a setup. If I refuse it, he blasts me; if I take the job, I end up in jail. He sighed. It ain’t subtle, but I guess that’s the point. “No,” he said. “No problem.”

“Good,” Ganz said. “The payment will be raw dilithium crystals, six kilos. Make sure they’re pure.”

“Right,” Quinn said, even though he didn’t expect to get past his preflight check with a hold full of illegal cargo. “How do I contact the buyer?”

“Zett’ll fill in the blanks before you leave. Which would be right about—”

“Now,” Quinn said, “got it. See ya in a few days.” If you visit me in the brig, you green bastard.

Grateful that he was walking out of Ganz’s place this time instead of being dumped out like garbage, Quinn descended the curving stairs two steps at a time and strode across the smoky gaming floor. He shouldered past dense knots of people who crowded around the center stage to ogle the striptease show. As soon as he left the compartment, he sniffed and groaned to realize that the cloying perfume of debauchery clung to his rumpled clothes like a chigger on a bare leg.

He grew angrier by the minute. If he was gonna kill me, he could have at least been quick about it. That wasn’t how Ganz did business, though. The Orion merchant-prince had a knack for letting others do his dirty work for him.

If Quinn got arrested, he could try to implicate Ganz, but that would lead inevitably to Quinn’s “suicide” in the brig. He imagined how some intimidated medic would write up the cause of death: Subject snapped own neck in fit of depression. Instead, Quinn would play by the rules, keep his mouth shut, and spend the rest of his natural life in solitary confinement.

Conversely, if Quinn made it to Kessik IV only to be gunned down while delivering a shipment of small arms, Ganz would be light-years away, safely removed from any stain of impropriety. No matter how Quinn looked at the situation, the rules of the game were rigged in Ganz’s favor.

In the turbolift, his string of muttered curses bloomed into a shout of frustration. An irrational impulse drove him to kick the wall. Something went pop beneath his left kneecap. Hopping on one foot, he fell sideways as the door opened. He landed facedown in front of two young women, who recoiled with disgust, then stepped over him into the turbolift and shared a laugh at his expense as the doors began to close.

Lying on the ground and clutching his knee, Quinn decided—between expletives—that this was shaping up to be one of the worst weeks of his life.

The crawl to the bar seemed mercifully shorter this time.

He was nursing his second double of tequila when he faced facts. I can’t turn down the job. I can’t do the job. I can’t run. Circumstances had dealt him a losing hand. Recalling his father’s lessons about playing cards for money, he knew what he had to do. If all the rules work for Ganz, it’s time to cheat.

Swallowing his pride, he made the call.

An hour later, Quinn sat waiting in the meeting place, surrounded by every depressing shade of gray he could have imagined, and a few more to boot. The brig, he brooded. Not my first choice, but I have to admit it’s private.

He had entered through the front door. When the back door opened, he knew it must be T’Prynn. She walked in and was all business. “What is your ‘emergency’?”

It confounded him that a woman with a voice so warm could have a heart so cold. “Ganz is setting me up to take a fall.”

She arched one eyebrow. “Details.”

“His boys are loading my boat with enough guns to buy me twenty years in here.”

“So your difficulty is with Vanguard customs?”

“For starters. Knowing Ganz, even if I make the drop, the buyer’s got my number.”

T’Prynn looked away briefly, thinking. Quinn spent the moment admiring her gentle, innocent-looking profile. She reminds me of Molly, he realized. He hadn’t seen his third wife since she had tracked him down—on his honeymoon with his fourth wife, Amy—to remind him that their divorce wasn’t actually final yet. He shook his head and grinned at the memory of those roof-raising arguments. It was always something with Molly.

Turning back in his direction, T’Prynn said, “What is your destination?”

“The dilithium mine on Kessik IV.”

She nodded slightly. “Make the delivery.”

He blinked. “Maybe I haven’t made the situation clear.”

“I understand your predicament perfectly. Make the delivery and bring Mr. Ganz his payment.” She took a few steps toward the rear door, then paused and looked back. “Our meetings must become far less frequent, Mr. Quinn. Furthermore, in the future they will be set at my discretion. Do you understand?”

“Don’t call you, you’ll call me.”

“Precisely. Good night, Mr. Quinn. Safe travels.”

She left quickly, without sparing him another word or glance. Just like Denise, he reminisced, recalling his first wife with nostalgic fondness. Yeah, she ditched me with style.

Swaddled in dark clothes of an exotic alien pedigree, and tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of the enlisted men’s club, Tim Pennington sipped slowly at an orange soda.

As usual, he went unnoticed while he listened.

Surreptitiously adjusting the settings on his recording device, he aimed it slowly from one table to another, eavesdropping, seeking out tidbits of conversation. Most of what he overheard were run-of-the-mill grumblings—double shifts taken, priority work orders with conflicting needs, broken equipment, and the like. Every now and then, however, he caught something interesting.

“No telling what’s even in half those cases,” one stevedore groused to a table full of his comrades. “ ‘Category-one matériel, handle with care.’ That’s about all we ever get.”