The City Who Fought (2 page)

"This way, please."

She nodded. Simeon froze the visual and studied her; tall, athletic. Dressed plainly in a coverall, but she had
presence.
Nice figure, too, if you liked subtle curves and rolling muscle.
A fox.

* * *

Channa entered. He closed in on the viewer to what he thought of as normal conversational distance.

That was an advantage sometimes, since softshells couldn't get to their psychologically comfortable distance with you. She had delicate, clear-cut features and earnest dark eyes, and the curly black hair was swept back from her face in a disciplined no-nonsense fashion.
Avid-show heroine. Perfect!
he thought.
I'll get things off on the right foot.
He switched on a screen with his own "face"—the way he'd imagined it, ruggedly handsome with a tan, a Heidelberg dueling scar, level gray eyes, close-cropped blond hair and a
Centauri Jets
fan cap—and spoke aloud:

"Hubba-hubba!"

The dark eyes widened slightly, "Excuse me?"

He laughed, "That's ancient Earth slang for 'sexy lady.' "

"I see."

The words were so clipped Simeon could almost hear them ping on the deck as they fell through a short silence.

Ah, geesh,
he thought,
this is going really well.
"Um, I meant it as a compliment."
Why didn't they send
me a male brawn?
he asked himself, conveniently forgetting his request form. Male bonding he knew about.

"Yes, of course," she said coolly. "It's just not a type of compliment that I'm particularly fond of receiving."

She's got a nice voice,
Simeon thought uneasily.
Pity she seems to be a bitch.
"What sort of compliments
do
you accept?" he asked in a tone of forced jocularity which wasn't easy to manage through a digital speaker.

"I accept those that deal with my quick learning ability, and my efficiency, or that acknowledge I'm doing a good job," she said, moving further into the room and taking a seat before his column. Until she had finished speaking, she did not look directly at him.

"The sort of compliment you'd give a servo-mechanism, if you gave servo-mechanisms compliments," he said.

"Exactly." She smiled sweetly and folded her hands.

"You've an interesting attitude, Ms. Hap," he said, laying a little stress on the ancient honorific.
If she
wants to get formal, I'll
show
her formal.
"Most of the women I've worked with didn't object to an occasional compliment on their appearance."

She raised her brows slightly and cocked her head. "Perhaps if they objected you simply dismissed it as being part of an 'attitude.' "

I could cry, if I could cry,
Simeon thought. He'd gotten lonely these last weeks without Tell Radon.

He'd begun to anticipate the
fun
he'd been going to have with a new brawn. Someone to talk to. . . . How could they have matched him with this . . . ice princess? They knew he was easy going, sure, but he'd given them a very good idea of what he was looking for in a brawn. Exact specifications, which Channa Hap hadn't met, fully. Was someone in Central taking advantage of his good nature, somehow hoping he could straighten her out, or maybe loosen her up?

"I find
your
attitude rather interesting," she murmured, narrowing her eyes. "Have you checked your hormone levels recently?"

"That's a rather personal remark. . . ." Maybe they just want me to blast her out an airlock when nobody's looking.

" 'Sexy lady' isn't?" She smiled and raised a sardonic brow.

"That was a compliment, intended to put you at ease. Have you checked your own hormone levels lately?"

There was silence.

After a moment she sat forward and looked at him levelly. "Look, even though it hardly seems worth the trouble of officially submitting my orders to you, on a practical level we may as well just admit that, for the time being, we're stuck with each other. You need a brawn and I'm here. I'm well trained, experienced and hard working. We don't have to love each other to work together."

"True, but it gets a little cold trying to maintain your distance with someone you see every day. It would be a
lot
easier if we could be friends. Look, why don't we just erase what just happened and start over?

Whaddaya say?"

She pursed her lips, then smiled. "I'm game. But let's start slow, and we'll avoid the personal remarks for the time being, okay?" She cocked her head at him and raised an eyebrow. "You start."

"Hello, you must be Channa Hap. Welcome to the SSS-900-C."

"Thank you. I hope I'm not interrupting."

"Nah, I always have time for a pret . . . colleague." He detected a slight narrowing of her eyes. "My, you sure are efficient looking."

"Well, and so are you, you're so
steely
and all."

"Funny, I was just about to say the same thing about you."

She stood up. "This isn't going to work."

"My fault. I shouldn't have said that. Look, you must be tired from all the travel you've been doing. Why don't you settle in, look around, relax a little—things might look different."

"This has nothing to do with my being tired or your hormones. . . ."

"What is this fixation you have with my hormones?"

"Shut-up-and-listen-to-me." Channa was giving him a look that he could almost feel. She paused and held up her hands, sitting down again. "Just listen," she said earnestly. "I think that it would be best if we put our cards on the table. I haven't studied your files in full yet," she admitted with a tired smile. "I just couldn't make myself do it. But I do know quite a bit about you." She leaned back and crossed her long legs. "I know that you have a fair amount of influence and a lot of contacts at Central Admin. And I know that you called on just about all of them in the matter of your brawn replacement." She gave him a severe look. "You made yourself famous on just about every level."

He was a little lost here. He
had
kicked up quite a fuss when they forcibly retired Tell Radon, but what did it have to do with her?

"In case you're wondering why I'm bringing this up," she continued.

Geeeze, Simeon thought, that's eerie! She can't possibly read my mind. Can she?

"It may interest you to know that I have my own contacts at Admin. And they've told me that you came up with a list of qualifications that were extremely hard to fill. In fact, I was the only candidate who did fit them, with the glaring exception of the age qualification. I hear that I'm four years too young for this post."

"Well, you see . . ."

"Excuse me, I'm not finished. I was also told that you went over my service records looking for black marks, and that when you couldn't find them, you went looking for shadows that you could pretend were black marks. . . ."

"Hey! I don't know who you were talking to."

"Bear with me a few moments longer," Channa said, holding up one finger. "Then you can have your say.

I'm not going anywhere." She looked at his image on the screen for a moment with narrowed eyes, and when he remained silent she nodded. "I've been told that all you need do to ruin the day of almost any Admin executive is to mention my name. The feeling you appear to have left behind you as the smoke cleared on this was that where there's smoke, there's fire. And that if you, well-known and respected brain that you are, would object so strenuously to my assignment to the SSS-900, despite the fact that I fit all but one of your many qualifications, then there must indeed be something seriously wrong with me."

"Oh." He honestly hadn't thought about that. He'd been so intent on saving Tell from forced retirement that no other considerations had seemed important. Channa Hap as a person had never entered into his thoughts.

Channa continued speaking, "I told myself that it probably wasn't personal."

God, it's weird the way she can pick up on my thoughts like that!

"I told myself to keep an open mind. If you had only greeted me as a fellow professional, then I think I could have let the whole mess be forgotten. But the first words out of your speakers show that either you can't discern the difference between a compliment and a lip-smacking, smarmy, personal remark, or your campaign to get rid of me continues."

"Now wait a minute!" Simeon said. She opened her mouth to speak and he overrode her. "It's my turn.

Okay, you said I'd get a turn and I'm taking it." She raised her brows and gave him an open-handed gesture, giving him the floor. "I don't know who your informant is, but they've got it all wrong. I'm going to assume that you know the system well enough to realize that whoever came up for consideration was going to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb. A space station the size of a small city requires versatility.

I'm going to assume that you're mature enough to know that twenty-six is very young for this posting. Tell was thirty-eight when we came here, and that's the general age I was looking for. I don't think, given the importance of the SSS-900, that I'm being unreasonable. But, I suppose that to someone uninformed, the in-depth investigation could look like a campaign to discredit you. That was honestly not my intention, nor is it my intention now. If my greeting was a little too familiar, I apologize, but I had no way of knowing what dark suspicions you were harboring. I'm really very open, Ms. Hap."

She smiled amiably and nodded. "Mmhm. This entire charming explanation of yours is predicated on the assumption that my informant is someone's secretary." She shook her head sadly. "No."

Gulp, maybe I did go a little far. . . . "Um . . ."

"You can rest easy," she assured him. "I'm very good at what I do. As you well know, I have an almost perfect record. . . ."

Actually, you do have a perfect record, Simeon thought miserably.

" . . . so, whether we actually get along or not, the station won't suffer. And I promise you that I'm not going to just up and disappear on you once you've gotten used to me. Because I have it
on good
authority that, after what you've done to my career and reputation, I'd have to bribe and sleep my way into a secondary assignment on the meanest asteroid-mining outpost at the farthest reaches of the explored galaxy." She rose and said, "I'd like to look at my quarters now."

"Yeah . . . just," Simeon slid the door to the brawn's quarters open, "just settle in. We'll work this out, Ms. Hap—you'll see. I'm not as bad as you seem to think I am. I'll check out your allegations and see if I can make things right. Okay?"

She looked from the open door to Simeon and back again. She sighed as she walked to the door. "No, I think it would be better if you just left things alone for a while."

"Ms. Hap," Simeon called. She turned. "When a new brawn comes aboard, station protocol recommends a little informal gathering of the department heads. I've arranged one for this evening at 20:00. That is, if that's all right with you?"

She nodded and smiled. "I think that's a great idea." The door to her room slid shut behind her.

"I can't keep her level! I can't keep her level!"

Amos ben Sierra Nueva leaned forward, gripping the edge of the console as if he could force strength down the commlink and the beam to the stricken transport.

"Do not panic, Shintev," he said, firm but calm. "You are too close to your destination for panic."

Panic seemed to be the order of the day. The bridge of the
Exodus—
a minor substation control center for three hundred years—was in pandemonium as the refugee technicians struggled to activate and improvise. There was a hissing puncture right through the pressure hull where they had slammed a steel tube for the coaxial feeds to Guiyon's shell. None of the big cargo-bay doors were operable so they had had to lash the surface-to-ship transporters to the exterior of the ancient ship and climb in through service-hatch doors. The air was thin and cold, dim with the emergency lighting, full of the smell of fear and sweat and scorched insulation.

"Excellent sir. I think that the enemy has detected us," a voice said fromone corner.

"You
think
?"

"I am not sure!" the technician wailed, on the brink of tears. "They are moving . . . yes! They have detected us!"

Amos' head whipped around. Then the link from the last shuttle began to transmit only a long high-pitched scream. He looked back again to see a face rammed into the pickup, plastered there by centrifugal force. Flesh and pooling blood rippled across the screen before it blanked out.

"They are gone," Amos said into the sudden hush. "Decouple the remaining shuttles. Prepare for boost."

Another chorus of screams protested that they were not ready.

"The engines are on-line," Guiyon's calm deep voice said. "That will suffice for now."

Amos turned and punched an override. "Prepare for acceleration! Acceleration in ten seconds from mark. Mark!"

A speck of light blossomed across one of the exterior fields.

"They got Shintev," somebody whispered. An extra-orbital fighter, bouncing across the surface of the troposphere like a skipped stone had gotten close enough to launch a seeker missile at the out-of-control shuttle.

"Attend to your duty!" Amos snapped. Later there will be time for prayers, and for tears.

Force pushed at the ancient ship. Humming and snapping sounds vibrated through the hull. Exterior feeds showed gantries and constructs bending and breaking under a strain they had never been intended to endure. The ground-to-orbit shuttles were breaking away as well, and a few figures in spacesuits.

Damnation,
Amos thought, looking away.
They were warned!
So many lives rested on his shoulders.

The great cloud-girdled shape of Bethel began to shrink in the rear viewscreen. The visible face of the planet was obscured by dust and flame from the fighting. Acceleration flattened him into his chair as he read figures from the flickering screens.