Morse's forehead wrinkled a little at that, but he let it go without comment. "Well, then, if you have nothing else for me, I'll be off." He stood up. "I trust you'll be spending the night in your own stateroom?"
My first impulse was to tell him it was none of his business. He could hardly dislike me more than he already did.
But I was counting on him to protect Penny if and when the shooting started. I couldn't afford for his disgust with me to bleed over onto her. "Absolutely," I assured him.
"I would hope so," he said. "Good evening, Mr. Compton." He gave me a stiffly polite nod of the head and moved off.
I watched as he made his way back to the door, quiet alarm bells going off in the back of my head. I had long experience in reading faces, and I was pretty sure that some significant threshold had just been crossed in Morse's mind. Problem was, I had no idea what that threshold was.
But I was very sure I wasn't going to like it.
I thought about dropping in on Penny before retiring to my own stateroom, just to make sure she'd gotten there safely. But I decided against it. She might invite me in, and then I would have to say no, and then there'd be more confrontation of the sort I'd just gone through with Morse.
So I headed instead back to my own stateroom. I was finished with confrontation for the night.
Unfortunately, confrontation wasn't finished with me.
I'd been in the stateroom no more than ten minutes when there was a tap on the door. Wondering whether it was Penny or Morse or one of the Modhran walkers, I opened it.
It was none of the above. It was Bayta.
"We need to talk," she said without preamble as she strode into the room.
"Come in," I murmured, closing the door behind her. "What exactly do we need to talk about?"
She turned to face me, a determined look on her face. "Ms. Auslander," she said.
My stomach rumbled with a stirring of anger. "That was quick," I growled. "What did Morse do, come straight to your stateroom?"
Her forehead creased. "I haven't seen Mr. Morse since dinner," she said. "Is there something he's supposed to tell me?"
"No, not really," I said, cursing my carelessness. The first rule of subterfuge was to never, ever, offer information that hasn't been asked for. Especially information you didn't want anyone knowing. "What specifically about Ms. Auslander did you want to talk about?"
"I want to talk about the way you've been behaving toward her," Bayta said, still frowning.
"I'm just trying to be civil," I said. "Just because you don't like her—"
"You're trying to be civil?" she interrupted.
"Civil, friendly—whatever," I tried again. If Morse hadn't blabbed, could she somehow have heard about the kiss from one of the Fibibibi who'd been in the lounge? "We need to earn her trust if we're going to get to Stafford and the Lynx."
"Frank, what are you talking about?" Bayta repeated. Her puzzlement, I noted uneasily, had edged into irritation. "I'm talking about the way you've been ignoring her practically since we got on the torchliner."
I swallowed. Uh-oh. "Oh," I said.
"Is that what you call being friendly?" Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Or is there something I don't know about?'
"Nothing that's any of your business," I said. Even to my own ears it sounded lame.
Apparently, it sounded exactly the same to her. "Really," she said, her tone dipping below the frost line. "Shall I go ask Mr. Morse what he thinks of that?"
Silently, I cursed myself, Morse, Bayta, and the universe at large. But there was no way out. Letting Morse frame the details of Pyotr Gerashchenko's murder had turned Penny against us for days. I didn't dare let him frame the details of this one, too. "Okay, fine," I bit out "I kissed her, okay? Is that a crime?"
I'd expected Bayta to stare at me in disbelief, or explode in anger, or at the very least launch into a lecture on proper decorum. Instead, she twitched backward, her breath catching in her throat, her expression that of someone who's just been slapped hard across the face.
Slapped across the face by a friend.
It was so unexpected that it took me a couple of seconds to find my brain and then my voice. But by then, it was too late. Bayta was already on the move, brushing past me and making for the door. "Bayta!" I called, spinning around.
Again, I was too late. Bayta was out of the stateroom, the door sliding shut behind her.
My first impulse was to run after her, to try to explain that it wasn't as bad as it sounded. But she hadn't looked like someone who was ready to listen to explanations.
Besides, maybe from her point of view it was as bad as it sounded.
I spent the rest of the evening alone in my stateroom. Between Penny, Morse, and Bayta, suddenly the Modhri was starting to look like the least of my problems. I hoped that by the time we made planetfall tomorrow morning everyone would have calmed down.
But I wasn't really expecting it.
FOURTEEN :
We touched down at the main Ghonsilya spaceport outside Portline a little after six in the morning, torchliner time, which had been gradually adjusted during the past few days to match that of the local spaceport. We'd already gone through one set of customs formalities at the transfer station outside the Tube, but the local groundsiders wanted a crack at us, too, and we spent two hours running through their particular collection of bureaucratic hoops. Finally, we were released to make our individual ways to the other end of the terminal where we could catch one of the various planes, trains, or suborbital transports that would take us to our final destinations across the planet.
Morse's count had been correct: there were indeed four Halkas who joined us aboard the Magaraa City transport. I wondered briefly if the Modhri realized how they would stand out of a crowd of the thinner, more delicately featured Tra'ho'seej, then put the question out of my mind. That was the Modhri's problem, not mine.
Morse wasn't speaking to me much, basically limiting his conversation to necessary information exchanges. All of those were short and formal. Bayta wasn't speaking to me at all. Penny, in contrast, was almost chatty, though most of her conversation was of the casual cocktail-party variety. Usually I had little patience with that sort of thing, but I recognized it here as a cover-up for her nervousness about what might await us.
She also was showing a new penchant for hanging on to my arm as we walked. It would probably have made Bayta even quieter if she hadn't been at absolute zero already.
Off we all went for a fun-filled excursion together.
The suborbital transport took three hours to get across the Ghonsilya landscape, which when added to the local time zone change put us on the ground again just after local sunset. At my suggestion we parked our luggage in the depot storage lockers, with the idea that we'd pick it up later after we'd figured out what our long-term plans were going to be. We took the subway to the neighborhood of the art museum that had been burgled, and a few minutes later disembarked into the gathering dusk.
By our own internal biological clocks, of course, it was only lunchtime. Travel could be very wearing on the stomach.
"What's your plan?" Morse asked quietly as he. Penny, Bayta, and I walked along a street lined with small shops and quaint-looking houses, our four silent walkers running a wide screen formation around us a few meters away.
"I thought we'd try something outrageously clever and give the nearby hotels a call," I said, pulling out my comm and keying for a local directory.
Morse snorted under his breath. "And here I thought you'd be looking for a trail of bread crumbs."
Penny half turned toward him, her eyes glowering. But whatever crushing retort she'd been preparing to offer on my behalf, she never got to it. As I lifted the comm the biggest of the four Halkas, whom I'd privately dubbed Gargantua, moved in from his place in the screen formation and plucked it from my grip. "No," he growled.