“Friendly service,” Legroeder remarked softly. Tracy-Ace gestured, and he pulled a plate toward himself. He took a swallow of the murk, and shuddered.
Tracy-Ace didn’t seem to notice his reaction. “You didn’t seem afraid of me,” she said suddenly, lifting her sandwich. “Why?”
Legroeder was still working his tongue to get rid of the taste. “Huh? Why should I have been afraid of you?”
“When you were brought to me. The guards who brought you were scared to death, you know.” Tracy-Ace took a bite.
He kept his lips puckered, but in a scowl. “I was wondering about that. Why were they afraid?”
“You really don’t know?”
He spread his hands. “I’m new here, remember?”
She chewed thoughtfully, arching one eyebrow, then took a sip of murk. “I wouldn’t have thought it would take much explanation. At your old outpost, weren’t you nervous when you were brought into the presence of a node holder?”
Legroeder felt a flash of memory: of fear, and hatred, and longing, and… He cut it off with an internal throat-slashing gesture. “There were things that made me scared, yes,” he said. “But we didn’t have… node holders.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No node holders in Barbados?”
“Well, none where I worked, anyway.” (Barbados? Am I supposed to be from Barbados?)
// We told you that. //
(You did? Is there such a place?)
// There is reason to think so. In any case, the goal was avoid connecting you with DeNoble, since you are presumably a wanted man there. //
Clearing his throat, he tried to shift the subject back before he said something provably false. “So then, because you have that name, Tracy-Ace/Alfa, they’re afraid of you?”
“Oh, yes.” Her lips tightened. “Indeed they are.”
“Because—”
“Because of certain… powers of authority… that I am occasionally called upon to exercise.” Her gaze seemed intense for a moment, and then the strain seemed to subside from her eyes. One corner of her mouth turned up. “Powers that… it does not appear I will have to exercise in connection with you.”
Legroeder felt his eyebrows come together. He sat stone still, thinking. Concluding nothing. He raised his cheese sandwich and took a large bite. Finally, when it was clear she wasn’t going to continue, he said, “That’s good. I guess. Isn’t it?”
Tracy-Ace’s implants glittered as she peered at him. Abruptly, she laughed out loud. “Yes, it’s good. Very good. Now, finish up. Based on our briefing, I think I can make you a useful citizen here. There’s a lot I have to show you.” She drained her mug. “That’s assuming you decide to stay, and we decide not to ship you back to Barbados. But there’s plenty of time to decide.”
He cleared his throat. “Ah. Well… I do want to stay…”
There was a sudden movement off to his left, and he saw the shop’s other occupant stirring. Tracy-Ace was glancing that way now, and for a moment, her expression seemed to become still, almost frozen. But her implants flickered energetically, and for just an instant, Legroeder had a chilling sense that something was passing between Tracy-Ace and that other man. Legroeder squinted, and saw that the man was bald, and dressed in light colored shirt and pants, and had an unsettlingly luminous quality about him. The man nodded in their direction, and Tracy-Ace nodded back. Just as Legroeder started to shift his gaze back to Tracy-Ace, the man abruptly vanished. Winked out.
Another hologram? Legroeder shot an inquiring glance at Tracy-Ace. “Who was that?”
Tracy-Ace shrugged; she seemed slightly uncomfortable with the question. “Just someone I know.” She slid out of her seat. “Good. So let’s go get you settled. Ordinarily I’d have someone else take you to your quarters, but I’m off duty.” She paused, pursing her lips. “You know, you seem like a very interesting man, Rigger Legroeder. I believe I want to oversee your case myself.”
He nodded cautiously, wondering if this was a good development or an ominous one.
“Come on. We’ll take the flicker-tube.”
He took a last bite and dusted his hands together. “What’s a flicker-tube?” he asked, braving one last swallow of murk.
“They don’t have flicker-tubes on Barbados, either?”
Legroeder thought a moment. They did not, he decided.
Tracy-Ace shook her head. “Rings,” she said, “I don’t know how your people manage. Let’s go.”
Legroeder bristled on behalf of his fictitious home, and followed her out of the joe shop.
Chapter 22
Outpost Ivan
It seemed, as they walked through the halls, that everyone they passed was moving quickly, as though on urgent business. Even so, Legroeder felt that something was missing, some element of ordinary random bustle. Or maybe it felt emptier than he expected. “I thought there’d be more people around,” he murmured, half unconsciously.
Tracy-Ace glanced at him sharply, and he wondered if he’d said something wrong. But she answered calmly enough, “There’s been a big shift of personnel lately. More and more people have been sent out into the field, to work in fleet preparations.”
Legroeder tried to hide a twinge. “Fleet preparations?” Preparations for what?
Tracy-Ace glanced sharply again. Was he being tested? He took a stab. “Are you talking about the pirate fleets?”
That brought a laugh.
“What’d I say?”
“Usually, it’s the people who don’t like us who call us pirates,” she said abruptly. “The preferred term around here is raider.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Usually defined as ‘raiding for that which should be ours.’ ” She laughed again, in a hollow echo of the first.
Legroeder tried to interpret the sound. Was she making a commentary on the raiding—or on his naiveté? “I guess I’ve picked up some of the Narseil’s language,” he said apologetically. “Most people on the outside, you know, do regard the Kyber fleets as pirate ships.”
Tracy-Ace cocked an eyebrow at him and lengthened her stride. “Well, that’s not the fleet I meant, anyway.”
“What, um, fleet did you mean?”
“You really don’t know?”
He shook his head.
“The colony fleet.”
Colony fleet…?
At that moment, they came around a corner into a brightly lit area that looked like a transit platform, except instead of cars, it was filled with clear vertical cylinders.
Legroeder blinked at the sight.
“You’ll see later,” she continued. “This is where we catch the transport between sectors.”
He was struggling to keep up with the cascade of new information. Transport between sectors… He remembered it had looked as though the sprawled-out structures in this outpost were anchored separately in the Flux. It had seemed an unlikely arrangement.
“The habitats float independently, but they’re joined by the flicker-tubes,” Tracy-Ace said, as though reading his mind. “It avoids certain instability problems of large structures, and gives us greater safety in the event of an attack.”
“Have you ever been attacked here?” Legroeder asked, remembering uneasily that part of his mission was to gain intelligence that might permit just such an attack.
Her eyebrows bristled. “No. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. And if it did, we could absorb some hard punches and still survive. Our leadership has always been very strong on taking the long view.”