When he stood her control of the situation slid a little further; he was significantly taller than her, and bulkier, and appeared tense and almost poised for action. Don't back away Sura told herself. The man relaxed, placing a small gun on the desk. She hadn't even noticed he had been holding it.
"People bursting in can mean danger here," he pointed out. It sounded more like a warning than an admittance of a fright.
"Lock your door, then," Sura said lightly.
"Why?"
"Because trouble might walk through it." There was a flicker of curiosity on the man's face. Did he know she was bringing possible trouble? He was surely wondering why she was here, but perhaps he thought she was just trying to use a bit of surprise to put him off-balance for negotiating the transaction of a Juice delivery. It did not matter what he thought, since there was no cause for them to be playing around each other.
"Let's get to the point, Alex," she said. "I might be right about trouble. Here." She pulled the disc out of a pocket, and held it clenched in her fist. Alex Ardith was watching and waiting curiously, but letting her move this along at the pace she wanted.
Sura was watching Alex's face closely as she unfurled her fingers, revealing the small gold or brass coloured pendant. His expression twitched involuntarily at the sight.
"It turned up, more or less, on my doorstep," Sura explained tersely.
"I don't want to know why!" Alex exclaimed, suddenly frightened. She knew he was more familiar with the ebb and flow of life in space, and therefore his reaction was alarming, suggesting that what she had dismissed as paranoid worries may not have been so unfounded after all.
"Steady on!" Sura said, partially to herself; Alex's fright had reached her and made her react in kind.
"Whatever it's ended up with you for, I'm not having anything to do with it," he stated. Sura noticed his hands twitching, fiddling nervously and aimlessly.
"Too dangerous?" she asked, trying to sound calm, and failing slightly. Alex seemed oblivious of that. "That's why I haven't given it up, or thrown it away. Shall I leave it here?"
The twitching hands had, in their seemingly random movement, wandered over to the desk and grasped the pistol. They jerked upwards, pointing.
"Just get out, now."
Shoot me, and you're left with two burdens, Sura thought, but the reality of having the weapon pointed at her kicked her feet into action, and she started to back away.
"Alex!" she exclaimed, still edging towards the door.
"I've said go, and that's it." He waved the gun, shooing her out.
"What the hell am I supposed to do?" Sura said. Frustration, desperation. No other leads, and no other contacts she would go within a mile of with the pendant. "I don't know what to do with it!" she cried at last, pleading, abandoning the pose of control.
Alex grimaced and he gripped the gun harder, knuckles clenched around it. Finally, he broke. "Ask someone who knows!"
"I don't understand!"
"A pilot, independent combateer, someone like that. Now get out!" He started moving towards her, quickly, and she fled from him.
Outside, the street was still quiet. Sura leant against a wall, shaking slightly after her unsuccessful encounter with Alex Ardith. She was tempted, oh so tempted, to fling the pendant down the street and return to the surface as quickly as possible, but the fear gnawing at her mind had been increased tenfold by the meeting. She was scared of keeping it, and scared of letting it go. Whatever was to be done, it couldn't be done here. Almost unconsciously she tucked the disc into an inside pocket and ambled down the street in the hopeful direction of the spaceport or a taxi.
There was a taxi call point at the end of the road, and within minutes one of the small autovehicles had landed by her. The journey back to the port area was short, too short. The immediate situation of sitting down, simply moving from one place to another, and not having to decide anything now was relative bliss, and the docks looming up ahead were viewed with the enthusiasm of the approach to a black hole. She told the taxi to abandon its present destination and take a tour around the station instead.
Buildings slipped idly by. Sura half-watched them, submerged in her thoughts. One struck her all of a sudden - she had been intending to see if Alex could do anything about the unpleasant shuttle pilot. It seemed to her now an almost harmless incident, but it set her to cursing herself, the pilot, the world where people could get away with doing what the hell they wanted to whoever they wanted to.
The taxi was passing over sparsely lit streets now. Many of the buildings were battered, and carried the marks of temporary repairs. The significance of this passed her by for a minute, until she suddenly realised that there was no weather here, and it would take more than simple neglect to disfigure constructions to that extent. She turned away from the depressing sight as the taxi moved away from them
Below the ground was brighter, shining green under arrays of lamps where neatly marked fields grew crops for the station. Now Sura looked, seeing a fertility she had never witnessed on her native world, yet present here in an artificial construction floating in inhospitability of the vacuum. In truth the view was dull, neat lines of plants with humans and machinery scattered amongst them, and using space that in more prosperous stations would probably be occupied by recreational areas.
In a short time the taxi was back over the depressed accommodation quarters, and Sura ordered it back to the port. As it flew slowly over one street, near the docks, there was a sudden flash of light and a bang, and a glimpse of running figures, but the cause was hidden from view as the vehicle drifted over the buildings on the side. She shuddered.
The taxi set her down in the same place she had boarded one before meeting Alex Ardith. She ambled back towards the docks, hoping to find, and quickly, a transport to take her back to the surface. The pendant would be left in some corner on the station, hidden in a pile of litter; abandoning it would probably be less dangerous than hanging onto it.
Near the entrance to the docks a bar fronted the street, but unlike most of the other ones in the vicinity it didn't suffer from loud, unpleasant music pouring out of the door and windows. Sura changed her course and went in, desiring to relax before trying to find a journey home.
The bar's interior was filled with simple tables scattered randomly across the floor, and a plain counter at the back. People of all sorts of species were sitting, drinking or talking quietly, with none of the rowdiness that might be expected in such a place. Sura picked her way through the tables across the dirty floor to buy a drink, then found an empty table to sit at.
The nearest customers glanced without much interest at her when she sat down, the rest ignored her. She glumly slipped at her glass, paying as little attention to everyone else as they had to her. Her foray to the station had, she realised, been a pointless spur of the moment waste of time. She had no idea what she had hoped to accomplish, other than a vague idea that the situation would be easier to resolve in space. It would have been, she decided, had she any idea of where to go.