She lowered her eyes in a gesture of concession. “Yes,” she said. Looking up again, she continued, “His involvement is unavoidable. Under the circumstances, I think we should consider it a necessary risk.”
Reyes couldn’t help it; he laughed. It was the mirthless chortle of a condemned man. “After all we’ve done to keep a lid on this mission,” he said, still chuckling with grim amusement, “we’re sending a reporter to Jinoteur.” He laughed harder and barely managed to add, “That’s just great.”
“Hysteria is not a productive response, sir.”
His hilarity tapered off gradually, and the dire nature of the situation pressed in on him once more. “We’re sending a drunk and a reporter to save the Sagittarius,” he said, and shook his head with disappointment. “Why not tell Nassir to set his ship’s autodestruct sequence and save your boys the trip?”
“Despite his outward appearance, Quinn is a resourceful field operative,” T’Prynn said. “As for the risk of allowing Pennington to have access to Jinoteur…managing his perceptions of what he sees on the planet’s surface is a task that can be dealt with after the Sagittarius has been rescued.”
Reyes sighed. “I hope you’re right about them.”
“Sir, I assure you, there is no cause for concern. Quinn may not be Starfleet, but he knows what he’s doing.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Pennington shouted. He hoped Quinn could hear him over the whine of plasma bolts flying overhead and the violent shuddering of the dilapidated hover-craft in which they’d fled Quinn’s latest deal-gone-wrong.
Quinn snapped, “I’m driving, newsboy. Shoot back or shut up!”
A dark cityscape blurred past them. Nejev III was a heavily populated planet, the homeworld of a peculiar animal-vegetable hybrid species known as the Brassicans. Pennington had meant to learn more about them than that superficial detail, but everyone had started shooting before he’d had the chance.
Wind stung his face as Quinn banked the open-topped hovercar through a diving turn. The vehicle’s overtaxed engine screamed almost as loudly as Pennington himself when Quinn wrenched the craft out of its descent. They sped under a series of covered walkways that bridged the gap between two massive skyscrapers. In the distance, over the whine of the engine and the roar of the frigid wind, Pennington heard sirens.
“More company,” he shouted over the din.
“I hear ’em, newsboy,” Quinn growled. The scruffy, white-haired scoundrel threw a nervous look over his shoulder at their pursuers and dodged another fusillade of plasma shots. “If you get the urge to do something useful, feel free to give it a try!”
They cut through a dense artery of traffic, leaving a flurry of randomly scattered vehicles in their pursuers’ path. The obstacle only slowed the chasing hovercars, but it gave Quinn and Pennington enough of a lead that Quinn was able to accelerate through two quick right turns, double back through the open core of a large building, and make another right turn that merged them back into airway traffic.
Blending in with the flow of the hovercars around them, Quinn slowed down and settled into the middle of a thick pack of vehicles. Ahead of them, city patrol fliers raced across their path, lights flashing and sirens wailing, then vanished into the nighttime canyons of the city.
After a couple of minutes of coasting along with ordinary traffic, there was no sign of pursuit, by either the police or Quinn’s aggrieved clients. Pennington sat up and stretched his legs, which had been tucked anxiously against the edge of his seat. “Nicely done, mate.”
“Nothin’ to it,” Quinn said. “Like my pappy always said, two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights do make a left.”
As they neared the coastline, Quinn veered north. It took a moment for Pennington to notice that they were heading away from the city’s spaceport. “Aren’t we going back to the ship?”
“What for?” Quinn said. “No point leaving without a cargo or a fare. Flying empty’s just a waste of fuel.”
Still paranoid that the men who had been shooting at them earlier might reappear, Pennington said, “After what happened, I figured you’d want to get off this rock as soon as possible.”
“Nah,” Quinn said. “Getting shot at? Occupational hazard. It happens. Besides, it’s not like they know where we parked. Might as well scare up a job before we breeze out.”
For once, the grungy middle-aged pilot made sense. “All right,” Pennington said. Nodding toward the seedy-looking sector of the city they had cruised into, he asked, “What kind of job are we going to get here?”
“Ain’t here to get a job,” Quinn said. “We’re here to get drunk. And if you can learn to stop runnin’ your mouth all the time, we might get lucky, too.” He slowed the hovercar and guided it to a shaky landing on a dark street crowded with the drunk, the indigent, and the shifty. In other words, amid a throng of people just like Quinn.
Quinn vaulted out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the vehicle toward a dive bar, which pulsed with annoyingly shrill synthetic music. Two enormous, vaguely reptilian bouncers loitered beside the entrance.
Pennington sat in the passenger seat, exhausted. All he had really wanted to do after evading the gunmen was to get back to Quinn’s ship, the Rocinante, and tumble into his hammock for some much-needed rest. “Go on without me,” he muttered.
“Come on, newsboy,” Quinn said. “I know you’re not into having fun, but you oughtta try it, just to see what all the fuss is about.”
Too tired to argue, Pennington pulled himself out of the hovercar and followed Quinn toward the bar. As they neared the door, one of the bouncers pointed at the hovercar. “You can’t park that here,” he said.
“We didn’t park it,” Quinn said, slipping the bouncer a few notes of the local currency. “We abandoned it.”
The bouncer pocketed the cash and opened the door. “I understand, sir. Have a good time.”
He and Quinn pushed through the crowd inside the dim, smoke-filled, and deafeningly loud bar. Pennington could barely shout loudly enough to be heard, never mind to convey how irritated he was. “Did you just give away our hovercar?”
“I gave away a hovercar,” Quinn yelled back. “And seeing as we stole it to make our getaway, the sooner we’re rid of it, the better.” He bellied up to the bar and caught the female bartender’s eye. He pointed at a bottle on the shelf, held up two fingers, then pointed at Tim, who squeezed in next to him.
“Well, that’s just great,” Tim said. “How the hell are we supposed to get back to the ship?”
Quinn accepted the drinks from the bartender, tendered some more local paper currency, then held up two fingers again and directed the bartender’s attention to a pair of attractive young alien women at the other end of the bar. As the bartender nodded and moved off to refill the women’s empty drink glasses, Quinn gave Pennington a brotherly slap on the back. “Relax, Tim. These things have a way of working themselves out—if you just stay calm and keep drinking.”
13
Captain Nassir huddled with Sorak and Razka around Niwara and her tricorder. Circled around them was the rest of the landing party except for McLellan and Tan Bao. Everyone was drenched and caked with mud from their desperate sprints through the jungle. The warm rain had slowed to a steady drizzle in the hour since they’d crash-landed, but there was still enough precipitation that Niwara had to wipe a sheen of droplets from the tricorder’s screen every few seconds while the captain and the landing party studied the area map.
“There’s no telling how far downriver Theriault might be by now,” Razka observed. “Our scan’s accurate only to ten kliks. After that, we’re making educated guesses.”