In the Company of Others (6 page)

“Then we're done here.” Gail put the cup shard on top of the pile of studies she planned to read later this shipnight, after pulling free the topmost, withdrawing her attention from the others in the certain expectation they each had their own tasks to pursue and knew better than to waste her time.

Sure enough, Tobo and Reinsez left without another word, but Grant closed the door behind them, turning back to stand in front of her again. Gail glanced up, lifting one brow interrogatively. “What is it, Commander?”

“Have you heard from Thromberg about the remotes, Dr. Smith?”

Gail leaned back in her chair, a tactic she'd developed to avoid craning her head at a bad angle in order to look attentively at anyone whose own head endangered doorways.
Maybe
, Gail hoped,
he'd think she was relaxing.
Not for the first time, Gail pondered the rumors about cloning in the military—Grant's deeply chiseled features, long-limbed form, and stiff bearing resembled his troops so closely they might have been younger versions of the man before her now—then dismissed them. It was simply that the military had long ago adopted a policy of physically coordinating its units to produce the desired look for a specific political event, like a matched team of horses to draw a ceremonial coach. These days, Earth had little other need for her soldiers: police forces dealt with on-planet issues, and Sol System had its patrol to handle off-planet ones. Most citizens only knew there was still a planetary military during parades or state funerals.

A few, such as herself, bothered to notice Earth's military continued to zealously train its men and women for a new role: to protect humanity against what might be out there. First Defense.

A mandate they'd failed with the faceless Quill, dying or retreating to safety with everyone else. Now, for some unknown reason, Earth's military might, represented here and now by these twenty-five cookie-cutter soldiers, guarded her. Gail tried not to scowl.
A little overzealously, too, considering humanity remained quite alone in the intelligent life department.

“I haven't heard, Commander,” she told him. “If you still feel it's necessary to deploy your satellites outside the station, I can press the issue with Administrator Forester. But I don't hold out much chance of success. They're—prickly—about surveillance here.”

Vids, familiar from every street corner and hallway on Earth and her system companions, were conspicuous by their absence on Thromberg. They'd all noticed it and, when she'd asked, Forester had almost refused to help them further, spouting what amounted to a rant about the right to privacy. The Earthers, herself included, settled for feeling mystified and, in Grant's case, more vulnerable. The remotes he was so passionately set on using were his answer—independent bundles of cameras and other devices which could be set to watch the station from a distance, giving them advance warning of ship movements.

“Yes, completely essential,” the commander insisted. “You know I objected strenuously to docking the
Seeker
in the first place. You could have sent us on a shuttle, stayed in safety—and kept our only weapon free.”

“They wouldn't have let a shuttle dock under those circumstances,” Gail reminded him. “You know that. And as for keeping me safe . . . ?” she left the sentence hanging between them like a challenge, daring him to pick it up. She'd made it clear from the moment the military approached with its offer of protection that she'd accept it for her work, not her person. Less publicly, but just as adamantly, Gail had insisted Grant's unit be under her direct authority, not Reinsez's. They'd surprised her by complying.
Anything to get the troops a little practice
, she told herself, not for the first time.

Perhaps Grant felt the same way. “Understood, Dr. Smith,” he said, lips twitching as though about to smile. It was the closest to an outright expression she'd caught on his face. “But perhaps I can suggest a compromise. Let me send out one probe—” before she could utter her immediate objection, he raised a hand to ask her silence, continuing quickly “—if they object, we can say it was a maintenance 'bot out to check the ship that went astray. It would make one spiral orbit of the main station cylinder, sending us the image, then drift off into space.”

“And if they haul it in? I need their cooperation, Commander. I can't afford to alienate these people in any way.”

“If they haul it in, it will be an ordinary 'bot, like the ones their own facilities would use. The transmitter's a bit more powerful, that's all, but they'd need an expert in current Earth tech to know.” Grant paused as if for emphasis. “I think we're pretty safe in that regard, since Earth doesn't let her experts migrate outsystem.”

Gail sat forward, chin on the heel of one hand, and studied Grant's face more closely than she ever had before. He bore her scrutiny solemnly, his wide-set, brown eyes almost pleading. There was a pulse visible in one temple, beating strongly beneath the faint whiteness of a puckered, oddly circular scar. Otherwise, his smooth, olive-toned skin was unmarked, and unrevealing. “If they haul it in,” she said at last, “and have any complaints about it whatsoever, I'd have to claim no knowledge or approval of your actions. For whatever that might count with them—” Gail began to shake her head. “It's too risky, Commander. What are you expecting to find out there to make it worthwhile?”

Commander Grant reached out and lifted the cup shard from its place on her pile of studies. A thrill of alarm fingered Gail's spine as he turned the shard in his hands, but all he said was: “You're a scientist, Dr. Smith; I'm a soldier. Our jobs aren't all that different, you know. Like you, to do mine I need to observe what's around me. Right now, that's a station without external or internal vid feed for my people to tap; it's a population that, if not actively hostile, is as close as I'd ever want to come to it; and it's an environment we can't hope to explore in person. We're no use to you—to your project—if we can't see what's out there. Let me do this. For all our sakes.”

Gail tried not to look relieved as Grant put down the cup shard, then she slowly nodded, just once. “We didn't have this conversation, Commander,” she advised him coolly. “And I didn't ask you to work with Captain Tobo to have a maintenance 'bot do a routine check on the
Seeker
while we're in dock. Are we clear?”

Gods, an actual smile
, Gail told herself, though the expression strangely increased Grant's resemblance to a hunting cat rather than diminished it. A definite smile accompanied by a snappier-than-usual salute. “I didn't hear a thing, Dr. Smith,” he assured her. “And thank you.” He rushed out, obviously eager to be at his spying.

Gail picked up the cup shard and idly followed its lettering with her finger.

No need for Grant to know she was every bit as eager as he was to see what else might be docked to Thromberg Station.

It wasn't fair!
Pardell rammed his foot into its boot. Despite an anger sending spots before his eyes and shortening his breath, he took care nothing was folded or pinched in the process. Next, he tightened the straps that kept the overly-large mags attached to the soles; unlike the Earthers' new gear, his was cobbled together from a sequence of other space suits, and the mags to hold him safely to the station's outer plates were cut from ones originally three sizes too big. From Aaron Raner's suit.

Thinking about the dead was unlucky, especially here, where so many of the dead had been stored for identification.
The only place inside cold enough.
Pardell could see his breath when it passed through the thin cone of light from his wrist lamp.

Thromberg itself had bled that day, ripped along a fragile seam during the frantic exodus of too many people, in too few ships. There had been repairs and reclamation efforts in the years since, but none in this section of the aft docking ring, not yet anyway. Here remained only freezing air, darkness, and those ruined, twisted structures no one was desperate enough to salvage. Yet.

Pardell closed his eyes and let the emptiness seep into his bones, resting his head against the frigid, damp wall until the part of his scalp in contact grew numb and ached with cold. The isolation soothed him; a shame he couldn't savor it long. Others used this passageway, always hurrying, usually in pairs or groups. Pardell didn't need to remember Malley's warnings to know:
blend into the mass, stay inconspicuous.

He finished suiting up,
maybe slow by Earther standards
, he told himself,
but one of
them
would never get this suit to hold air.
One by one, Pardell snapped an assortment of small bags to their rings, having retrieved them from their hiding places. He tested each with a sharp tug. A loose fastener had cost him an irreplaceable set of readers once, the bag floating out of reach to join the other such orphans forming a tenuous band in the vicinity of Thromberg Station. Station Admin routinely sent out barges to sweep clear the approach lanes to the stern ring. No one bothered back here.

Check done, Pardell switched off his light, listening to his own breathing, feeling the soft press of the frigid darkness on his lips and eyelids. He tapped his helmet gently against his right leg, a child's habit, counting out the seconds ...
five ... fifteen . . . one hundred and one
. . . still no lights, no other sounds. He was alone. The habit answered to caution as well as courtesy: caution, in case he was this even-cycle day's target for menaces ranging from the authorities sending down an engineer to a crazy after a 'tastic fix; courtesy, because manually cycling the 'lock was hard enough for one, so most of the older 'siders needed someone with stronger arms to help them through. If you saw or heard them struggling to catch up, you waited.

Anger rushed back, making Pardell's hands fumble at the helmet fastener, anger at the Earthers whose elderly didn't suit up in the dark, but, even more, anger at one Earther in particular: the woman who had walked into Sammie's and stolen his peace.

Pardell cued on the helmet's reddish interior illumination with his chin in order to see the gauges lined up below his jaw; all that remained of the suit's fancy remote display pads were sealed-over stitch marks on each wrist. Only low-maintenance gear had endured decades of use—that, or what new devices clever, desperate hands could cobble together. He made himself continue the checks, fighting the emotional overload.
Malley'd talked some sense
, he had to admit it now, if he couldn't to Malley's face—not right away, at least. No one would give him up; he had the choice of tailing it and keeping out of sight until the Earther ship left, or of attempting that long, impossible walk to the docks.

Smith hadn't realized what she'd asked of him, or if she had, she played some game he was safer clear of—Malley had the truth of that as well. How'd she think a 'sider could make it to the stern docking ring—the living, breathing heaven to the hell he crouched in now? Was she Earther-blind to the difference when she'd been escorted down to Sammie's? Surely she'd noticed how the press of people in the corridors increased with every level. Hadn't she seen for herself the change to a population whose reflex was to crouch to one side to allow others through, and whose eyes never met in more than a courteous slide past, granting one another the only room they could?

Not the Earther
, Pardell thought bitterly. Not with her troops and her Station puppet to clear the way down.

And without that kind of escort, no way up.
No way for him to cross the checkpoints without being counted and discovered. No hidden shortcuts or byways that hadn't been found and welded shut by now. Station Admin tolerated his kind only as long as they stayed invisible.

He didn't have the air to waste debating the extent of Smith's craziness with himself, Pardell judged, tipping his head to view the display within his helmet. Turning his wrist light back on, he followed its thin wispy beam, playing it over iced black walls until it reflected from faded lettering. Air lock S17. Pardell gave the inner door a gentle pull to test for vacuum. When it shifted grudgingly in his hands, he swung it wide with a practiced heave. There had been an entire series of 'locks in this section, a set for each docked ship: passenger hookups, emerg 'locks, service gates, the huge cargo passages. Since the destruction, they were all supposedly inoperable, either damaged so they couldn't open—as children, Pardell and his friends used to scare one another with made-up stories about ghosts, trapped inside—or sealed when the ring was abandoned, to protect station integrity.

Air lock S17 showed traces of its seal: shiny, congealed lumps the cutting torch had failed to melt free clung to the doorframe here and there, looking like some blighted growth on the metal. It was, naturally enough, a capital crime to be caught breaking a station engineer's seal. Naturally enough, no one bothered to check down here as long as the ring stayed airtight and powered down. S17 had been an emerg 'lock; as such, it was barely large enough to hold three in suits. Cramped quarters, but with a bonus: emerg 'locks had dual systems designed to keep them functional in power failures.

Or in a failure to provide power
, Pardell grumbled to himself, stepping over the sill and reaching back for the inner door. From this side, the door's scars and blisters were ample evidence entry had been forced from outside the station, not in.
Before his time.
The mechanism hadn't been harmed, and he braced both feet against the sill to use his body's mass to haul the door shut. The oversized mags didn't help. It took three tries this time, and Pardell felt himself heating up, a maddening bead of moisture winding its slow path down the side of his face. The suit's faltering conditioning system had the contrary habit of allowing his toes to approach frostbite when he needed warmth, then, without warning, kicking in to hoard every iota of his body heat so sweat floated around in his helmet, beads stinging when they collided with his eyes.