So, she dragged herself all around that filthy, rusted-out ramjet, seeing what she could see.
They were hiding something. Margo had figured out that much. They were carrying something—in the cargo bay, maybe elsewhere too—that they didn’t want found. There were a few too many halted conversations to ignore. A few too many badly suppressed glances in her direction.
Not that they were afraid of her finding it, necessarily. Even if they’d known who she was, she doubted it would mean anything to most of them. Most stepped right around her and carried on with their work when she crawled by, looking down to grin at her only when she called out cheerfully to keep from being stepped on.
But Kell and Captain Pilgrim had guessed something about her. The captain would straighten when he saw her, and ask her if there were any particular reason she needed to be there, wherever there happened to be. And Kell, whenever he came on her by accident, usually turned directly around and walked in the opposite direction.
“You don’t let it bother you,” Diallo had tried to tell her. “You must excuse a degenerate like Kell. Raised on a prison colony, the American kind. No hope of learning good manners, no experience with women. His mother was not a very successful prostitute.”
Margo smirked. “How can you be raised in a prison colony?”
Diallo shrugged. “Perhaps his mother was also a less than successful terrorist. I can’t claim to know.”
Margo studied his smile a moment. “But there are no prison colonies anymore.”
“No?”
“Not in UN space,” she said, sounding like a teacher even to herself. “The Security Council ruled a long time ago that abandoning prisoners on far-world correctional colonies constitutes inhumane punishment. The ruling was just upheld again the year I was born. It’s illegal.”
Diallo smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “That is comforting to know. Thank you.”
“It’s true.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“That’s the whole point of UN Sky. To make sure stuff like that doesn’t happen.”
Diallo was silent for a moment, and then said, with irritating slowness. “As you say. It does seem to me that people will always discover a place to put away the things they do not want, so that they don’t come back again. But I’ve never been very clever with names.”
Later, while she lay in her bunk trying to think of all the things criminals would not want UN Peacekeepers to find in their cargo bay (nukes, sonics, VX gas, high-power low-precision lasers?), Margo could not help thinking about Kell’s glass eye.
People without eye donors had biomechanical eyes. They had microchipped acrylic ones. At the very least, Margo had always thought, they had those plastic boxy pieces that you had to keep a cap on at night to block out images while you slept.
When you were Kell, on a faraway colony, and you knocked your eye out, what had to go wrong, what had to break down, before you fashioned your own out of whatever you could find, and carried on?
“Someone’s taken an interest in us,” was the first thing Diallo said when Rumer came on to the bridge.
“Peacekeepers, or the Kang family fun squad? Or both?”
“It’s difficult to say. She’s not marked. And she is keeping her distance.”
“Blueberries,” said Kell, “gotta be. You’ve heard that bitch talk. She knows somebody.”
Rumer ignored him. “Can you signal-cloak us?”
“I have done, of course,” said Diallo, “but I cannot do it long, and eventually she finds us. Very quietly persistent.”
“Keep on it ‘til you shake her. She don’t want us that bad, or she’d be on us already. We make our drop, even if we gotta pour it down there like manna.”
Diallo nodded, and bent over his joysticks.
“About that,” said Kell, rubbing his eye.
“About that,” said Rumer.
“What’re you thinking you’re gonna do with her? Our hitchhiker, I mean?”
Rumer shrugged. “I don’t know as I have a whole lot of options. We take her with us far as we can, drop her at the first opportunity, and hope she has the good sense not to talk to anybody.”
“You don’t mean you’re still gonna take her on the drop?” Kell looked entertainingly uncomfortable. “Jesus, Rumer, she’s not…she can’t even…plus, you heard her, she’s dyin’ to talk to the police. She thinks police are like…service dogs, or somethin’.”
“Don’t shit yourself, soldier. We drop her at Black Oven before anything else happens. It’s backworld enough no one’s going to care why we’re there, and she can go about her business, and we about ours.”
“Pretty outta our way, isn’t it, Black Oven?”
“Everything’s out of our way. What do you suggest?”
Kell shifted a little. “Hey, I’d just like to remind you, but we got about two tons a’ very perishable cargo down there, and there’s some very angry Koreans want it back. This was your idea, this thing. I wanted to do something small, something normal that’d make us a little fuckin’ money. You’re the one who wanted to go all Wyatt Earp Robin Hood…”
“What do suggest, Kell?”
“Well,” Kell hesitated. “Well, have you thought maybe we just…maybe we just get rid a’ her?”
“How the hell you want to do that?”
“I don’t know, man…”
“Yeah, you do, asshole.”
“Look, she woulda’ been dead anyway if we hadn’t picked her up, that’s all I’m tryin’ to say. Just, in the interest of the cargo. I’m not saying exactly we should, you know…”
“What are you saying, exactly, you fuckin’ moron?”
“I’m saying, you know, maybe, we put her in one of the shuttles, with some food, if you want, and we just…” Kell mimed the dustpan’s tiny shuttle drifting harmlessly away into space.
Rumer smirked, despite himself. “I thought you wanted to fuck her.”
Kell recoiled like he was standing too close to a serial kiddie-diddler. “She’s in a chair, man, don’t even joke. That’s some sick shit.”
Rumer rolled his eyes. “Turn the temp down in cargo and head for Black Oven,” he said to Diallo, “she’s clever enough to catch her own ride from there, I expect.”
Margo wasn’t going to let them continue to have their muttering, panicked, poorly-buried talks around her as though she didn’t understand what they meant. From now on, she would be where they were. If they wanted to continue having conversations about their secret black hole machine, or whatever, they’d have to do it while she was in the room.
That was Margo’s reasoning for finally joining them at dinner.
They had boiled the turtles, neatly diced, in four tins of reconstituted cream of tomato soup. Chin-Hae, the ship’s cook, who was alternately sipping beer out of his prosthetic leg and adding it to the pot, looked up grinning when she appeared. Margo hadn’t known that anyone still ate turtles. But then, until this voyage, she hadn’t known there were spaceships that couldn’t leave immediate space, or people who replaced their vital members with removable plastic and bottle-glass.
The mess turned out to be two long metal tables bolted to the floor. The men crowded around them on one-footed metal benches and passed stories and sloshing carafes of beer. Every one of them had scars they bragged about, and for the first time, Margo wondered whether this was because they really took any pride in them, or because they lacked the technology to remove and forget them.