Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance (7 page)

Catherine couldn’t tap the Federation
job boards or freight auctions in any official capacity, so she
found paying passengers and cargo assignments by word of mouth
instead. There was rarely any need to go dirt-side because everyone
who knew anything about spacing ended up in one of these joints
sooner or later.

She hit pay-dirt the first stop on the
route. It was a tank bar and when they stepped inside out of the
harsh artificial daylight out on the concourse, the bar was silent
and dark. The tank didn’t have a game going on in it, so no one was
sitting around the wide bar that surrounded the tank. Even the
booths along the three edges of the room were mostly empty.

The barman looked up when they entered
and his brow lifted. He was standing at the long servery on the
back wall and Catherine drifted over to him.

The barman was heavyset and florid and
his jowls wobbled as he nodded at her. “I wondered when you’d stop
by. Good timing. There’s a man looking for passage to Soward. Said
he’d pay premium for non-Fed and under the radar.” His gaze
flickered toward Brant standing silently at her side.

“He’s with me,” Catherine said.

The barman nodded again and relaxed.
“He didn’t say, but I think there’s more than Feds he’s trying to
shake.”

Catherine considered it for a moment. A
near-normal run to anywhere would help everyone settle in to
shipboard life with a new member. “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.
Where can I find him?”

“He said he’ll be back tonight for the
game.”

“Sounds good.” She shook the barman’s
hand and left folding yen behind, then headed back out onto the
concourse and blinked at the brightness.

Brant was still with her, moving like a
shadow just behind and to one side of her. It was the perfect
body-man position. “You’ve done body work?” she asked him, dropping
back even with him.

“I’ve done a lot of everything since I
left Gry.”

“Which cadre was yours?” Catherine
asked. “The last I heard, there were only five cadres on Gry. The
best of the best of the enforcers.”

Brant glanced at her, before letting
his gaze return to roaming around the concourse. It was a very wide
strip that ran around the outer edge of the spoked-wheel station.
The commercial district took up half the circumference, split
almost evenly on both sides, giving space-farers quick access no
matter what landing bay was their dock assignment.

Once, a long time ago, the station used
spin to provide gravity. But now that energy was so cheap and
bountiful—at least, it was in the Federation core—artificial
gravity was used and landing bays were built along the perimeter
instead of being confined to the no-gravity center. Instead, the
center was used as the termination point for the sky hook down to
the surface of Darwin.

The commercial districts were the real
center of the terminal, though. They were busy at any time of the
artificial day/night schedule. Darwin terminal was similar to
hundreds of other terminals, stations, endpoints, platforms and
other variations of geosynchronous orbiting ports servicing their
worlds’ jump gates and the interstellar traffic that used them.
Catherine could have found her way around this one without benefit
of the station map that had been zap loaded into the
Venturer
as they had docked.

She glanced at Brant as the silence
lengthened. “Rather not talk about Gry?”

“Is it true you’re a direct descendant
of Glave of Summanus?” he asked.

“Old history, best forgotten,” she
said. “I get it.” As he dropped back once more she shook her head.
“I don’t want to advertise your role.”

He moved up level with her again.

“Besides, nothing is likely to happen
here.”

“I’ll come with you tonight, just the
same.” His tone implied it wasn’t open to question. Then he added,
“Unless you would prefer Lilita?”

“She’s far too young.”

“Ah. Then it must be me.”

Catherine laughed. “You realize I can
deal with anyone who comes at me with anything short of a nuclear
device?”

“You hired me as muscle.”

“You’ll earn your pay, later.”

“Indulge my whim,” he said, his voice
soft.

“Your whim, or your conscience?” They
were nearing the end of the commercial section. The doors of their
bay were two hundred meters into the administration section and on
the inner rim. Some of the bays came off the sides of the original
rim. Accessing them involved sloping catwalks and shifting gravity
fields as you walked “up” the wall to the doors. Catherine
preferred to pay extra for same-level docks.

Brant wasn’t answering her again.

“Are you not used to meeting new
people, or are you just shy?” she asked.

“If I’m talking, I can’t listen.”

“You like listening that much?”

“That’s the best way to learn.”

“Is that why you spent all last night
sitting at the mess table?”

“Instead of consulting the computer for
ship data?”

“Computers are faster,” Catherine
pointed out. “Especially for hard data.”

“And it is all that. Hard, I mean.
Learning from watching and listening is far more organic and you
retain it better.”

“Not if you’ve learned how to remember
properly.”

“For someone as old as you, wouldn’t
memory management be the more vital skill? The more you remember,
the more places you have to find to keep it all.”

“That’s why I like computers. Saves me
from having to remember.”

Brant wrinkled his nose. “While sitting
at the table last night I observed that Lilita, despite her age,
has an advanced understanding of engineering principles. That sort
of training generally leaves a person disposed toward thinking in
terms of closed systems and circuits. Despite that bias, Lilita
thinks in terms of flow. Tides, pressure, release. Channels.”

“That probably means she studied
engineering even though she isn’t naturally disposed toward it.”
Catherine shrugged. “It’s a good starter profession. It can take
you all over the galaxy and that’s exactly what she’s doing.”

“I also learned from my time in the
mess hall last night that you are a strategist. You think in
overall patterns. It’s not a learned skill. You were born with it.
But despite that, you force yourself toward therapy fields.”

Catherine let out a breath, careful not
to let him see the silent sigh.

“Are you, perhaps, trying to live up to
your ancestor’s great heritage?”

“Did you learn anything about
Bedivere?” she asked. “Because I’ve known him for a hundred years
and I’m still trying to figure him out.”

Brant smiled. “Bedivere…X, shall we
call him? He really has no last name? Not even an assumed one?”

Catherine shrugged. “He’s from
Griswold. What can I say?”

“Is that a fringe world?”

“It’s a village on a lump of rock on
the far rim of known space, a light year beyond the Last Gate.
Griswoldens are a little strange.”

Brant looked genuinely interested
instead of politely curious. “It’s in the Silent Sector?”

“About as far inside the sector as
anyone cares to get. I think something like sixty percent of the
mineral makeup of the planet is beryllium. The Griswoldens mine it
and load up the one freighter they possess. When the freighter is
full, it heads for the Last Gate and jumps to the nearest
Federation metal exchange. The proceeds from that let them buy what
they can’t produce themselves and the whole village lives from
payload to payload.”

“It sounds like a desperate life.”

“They live in the silent sector and
there’s about three thousand of them, barely enough to keep the
gene pool viable.” Catherine shrugged. “I’m more surprised Bedivere
doesn’t behave far more strangely than he sometimes does.”

“I imagine his social skills went
through some adjustments after he left.”

“The adjustment is on-going,” Catherine
said dryly.

Brant smiled. “I think the most curious
thing I learned last night was that you and he are not intimate.
You like him despite his faults and he regards you most
highly.”

Catherine laughed. “We have a good
working relationship. Sex would mess it up.”

“Then you don’t get lonely?”

“Are you offering a contract,
Brant?”

He smiled, not offended by her reprisal
for the nosy question. “I don’t know you well enough to know if you
would cut my throat in my sleep, were you to accept a contract. I’m
familiar with the events on Egemon, you see.”

Catherine ignored the parry. “I’m an
old-fashioned woman, Brant. Endless partners don’t suit my
temperament and shipboard life doesn’t help. Although Bedivere
manages to stay busy.”

“Then it would not bother you if I
mention that he and Lilita have already established some sort of
arrangement?”

“I knew,” Catherine assured him.
“Lilita is a pillow talker.”

Brant’s smile this time was a delighted
one, making his face light up and making him seem much younger.

“But I’m fairly sure the arrangement is
already ended,” Catherine added. “I like to stay on top of such
things. Even the most casual of sex can ruin working relationships.
But Bedivere seems to have extricated himself without
complications, as usual.”

They reached the docking bay doors and
Catherine pressed her hand against the scanner and leaned against
the door to open it. “So you learned a lot with one night of
observation,” she concluded. “Is that your hobby, measuring
people?”

“I thought it was my job,” Brant said
gravely. “Security doesn’t stop at the airlock.”

That gave Catherine something to think
about other than the endlessly fascinating problem of making a
living.

Kemp Rodagh stepped aboard the next day
and stowed his gear in the best of the passenger rooms. Bedivere
ran all the usual background checks and Catherine matched Kemp’s
DNA to the fedcore banks.

Once the jump was initiated, it would
take two weeks to reach the Soward gates. It was considered to be a
small jump, one that the really big Federation cruisers could do in
a few days. But Kemp was paying for a non-Federation vessel and an
extra degree of discretion.

“Soward isn’t only home to the best
wine in the universe,” Brant pointed out as they headed back to the
dock after meeting Kemp for the first time.

“The Jourden Cartel is still in
business?” Catherine asked.

“Not in a way that draws Federation
attention, but they objected to the preaching we did, so we had our
run-ins with them.”

“They’re anti-humanist?”

“They’re pro-profit and they’ve been
around for a couple of centuries. Kemp says he’s going back to
comfort a dying relative. It might even be true, but if he was
cartel, he wouldn’t be looking for discreet passage. He would take
the cheapest Federation shuttle he could find, or his cartel
buddies would put up for a luxury berth on one of the really fast
ones.”

“The cartel used to have the Soward
system locked down pretty tight. As they’re still in business, that
probably hasn’t changed. If he’s trying to get home without the
Cartel knowing, I’d do it the way he is.” Catherine glanced at
Brant. “This could be interesting.”

Kemp’s background checked out as clear.
Bedivere specifically searched for possible cartel connections, but
came up empty. “There’s no signs of tampering on anything,” he
said, flipping through screens of information. “I think he’s
exactly what he says he is, a family man heading back to see a
dying relative, who doesn’t want to have to deal with the Cartel to
do so.”

“That’s right, they group into families
on Soward,” Catherine murmured.

“That’s how the Cartel came into
being,” Brant said. “Individuals identifying with groups, giving
rise to an outsider/us complex.”

“Kemp left Soward and was reoriented, I
suppose,” Bedivere replied.

“It’s amazing he was allowed to leave
in the first place,” Catherine said. “If the Cartel is so powerful,
they wouldn’t like one of their own leaving.”

“Perhaps he didn’t ask,” Brant said.
“Maybe he left the same way he’s returning.”

“That would explain a lot,” Catherine
said.

And so Kemp was invited aboard. Brant
reported he had been tucked into his stateroom and Bedivere sent
Kemp an invitation to the last meal of the day on behalf of the
captain. They got busy with departure protocols and jump
preparation.

Darwin’s gates were only three standard
hours from the terminal at best sublight speed, including
acceleration time. It meant the jump preparations had to be hurried
but they had done this so often, even with Lilita mixed into the
process, that there was little risk they would have to go through
any expensive deceleration process at the gates because they
weren’t ready.

The new factor in this jump was Brant.
He asked for permission to watch the jump from the bridge and
Catherine couldn’t think of a reason to say no. He stood at the far
back of the deck, by the door and well out of the way of anyone’s
work area, including Lilita’s dashboards and monitors along the
back wall.

He didn’t speak. He was a model
visitor, but even so, Catherine was very aware of him standing at
the back and watching everything, because he didn’t simply watch.
He absorbed things, like he had taken in the personality traits of
all of them the first night aboard.

Bedivere seemed unaffected by Brant’s
presence, but he was concentrating almost exclusively on the jump
preparation and barely said anything, which was usual.

Catherine had learned to rely more and
more on the AI to control most of the factors of the jump. They
just had to ensure that the raw data being fed to it was pure and
correct and as current as possible. Since acquiring the new
Itinerary with its license to access current gate data, a lot of
the stress of jumping had disappeared. If they were to return to
the fringes, updates would cease and the sophisticated guesswork
and recalculations would start up once more. In part, that was the
reason why there was only one AI and a powerful one at that. They
needed it to adjust for outdated gate data.