Being on the same side helped only a little. He sat with the same feeling he had whenever he was in her office-that of being in the center of a spiderweb. Having wasted enough time on pointless chatter, B'kila waved Clang to a chair by the big holo tank that took up most of one wall. Everyone else started with names like pirates, thieves, spies, and went downhill from there. Loki's few friends called the Service a band of scavengers.
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"The day you start telling me how to wear my hair, you old harridan, is the day I get out of the Service."ī'kila laughed out loud, a bad sign things that amused her generally meant trouble for other people, She was a plump black woman with straight, graying hair, the head of what was euphemistically known as the Loki Salvage Service. In spite of his name, he had enough caucasoid genes to let him raise a fair crop. He had grown the whiskers on Cienfuegos, to make himself less conspicuous there, and was proud of them. "That's not much of a beard, either." The scout pilot put a defensive hand to his chin. That his habits were known did not surprise him he would have been surprised had it been otherwise.ī'kila looked him over, cocked a critical eyebrow. "Where did he find you? The London Pub or Nadia's?" The scout pilot was still fuming when the lieutenant brought him back to Salvage Service Central. Even the Cienfuegans remembered that much they'd mounted the discs above the altar, by the statues of their gods. Old floppies especially were more precious than gold. The load of books, cassettes, and floppies he'd snaked out of the cathedral on Cienfuegos deserved celebrating, too. he thought sourly: run a successful mission and not get the chance to celebrate. and Cluing was the only Service man in the dive. The youngster was in uniform, which meant he was on duty. "You aren't the only one," the computer told him.Īs soon as the shavetail lieutenant had stepped into the London Pub. "I wish I'd chosen a different bar," he said.
When he looked at the FTL display again, the four warships had slid a little closer. Unfortunately, they would overtake him long before he could deliver the news-long before he gut out of the Orion Nebula, for that matter. Loki and all the worlds in human space needed to know about the Zanat. Taking on four was sure suicide, and he could not afford it. The four glowing points in the detector display were Zanat warships. There was little enough else to see with the drive on, none of the normal-space instruments worked. Pace as he would, though, his eyes kept coming back to the hyperdrive detector. He paced up and down the cabin, a lean, trim man a bit below middle height whose wide, high-cheek-boned face was framed by a thin fringe of black beard. "I can see that for myself, thanks," he growled. "Well, hero, they're still gaining," it said with what he thought was misplaced amusement.
It was as cynically underhanded as he was. Chang did not trust his machine very far. a computer will develop a personality of its own-the current flows get set. But after enough time, memory dumps or no. In a way, that was an advantage: the navigation data programmed in were Terran Confederacy, the most far-reaching set even if it was six hundred years out of date. She went into or out of hyperdrive with a jolt that twisted a man's guts, her air recycler wheezed, and she had a 5% waver in her pseudogravity, so Chang's weight went through a seven-kilo cycle every twenty minutes. Erasmus Chang's scout Praise of Folly was too old.
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