If he wanted to, he could hire a car to fly him to an uninhabited islet. There he could toss gravel into the waves and watch the primary rise in perfect safety.
He could hire a woman to go with him. Again, perfectly safe, because escort services operating out of the New Port provided full medical histories of their employees. So far as Ran was concerned, that was as empty a proposition as trying to skip stones over live water.
He could cut out one of the Empress’s passengers, no problem at all for Ran Colville. And then spend the rest of however long she was booked for trying to dodge somebody who might very well make a scene no matter what she said beforehand about understanding the ground rules. It wasn’t that women lied, they just had no more control over some things than a man with a stiff prick did. An evening’s fun wasn’t worth a week or a lifetime of trouble. . . .
Ran sighed. He might as well get back. There was always work. That was the only important thing, anyway. He had the engineering officers’ course loaded in his hypnogogue. It felt strange to learn the theory behind the fusion drives he’d fueled and trimmed as a Cold Crewman in another existence.
An aircar in ground effect mode pulled up beside Ran and touched down. “Going somewhere?” asked the driver.
Female, mid-twenties at a guess, but the car’s yellow-green dash lighting didn’t tell much. Her face was heart-shaped and strikingly beautiful.
“Going nowhere,” Ran replied, squatting to put his head on a level with hers. “Headed back to my ship, to tell the truth.”
The car was a two-seater. The small luggage space behind the seats held a makeup case and something flat rolled into a tube. If there was a bruiser wailing to knock Ran over the head, he wasn’t hiding in the vehicle.
“I’d offer to show you Tarek’s Bay,” said the driver. The fans hissed at idle, occasionally driving a pebble to click against its neighbor. “But if you’ve walked this far, you’ve seen it all.”
She smiled. “And besides,” she said, “if I thought there was anything in the place you’d be interested in, I wouldn’t be talking to you. It’s the armpit of the universe.”
Ran laughed out loud. “You know,” he said, “that’s almost exactly the phrase that crossed my mind. But you’ve been more gently brought up than I was.”
The driver’s smile became wistful. “Don’t you believe it,” she said. “I’ve lived on Ain al-Mahdi all my life.
“But Ain isn’t all like—this!” she added sharply, gesturing back toward the Strip. Her fingers were long and shapely. “There’s parts of it that are beautiful, only it takes time to find them. The people who live here don’t care, and the transients don’t have the time.”
“I’ve got fourteen hours,” Ran said deliberately.
She touched a control. The passenger door swung open. “Hop in,” she said, “and I’ll show you the moon-fish spawning in a lagoon.”
Then she said, “And there’s an air mattress in the back.”
* * *
Tug motors hammered as they helped a tramp freighter down into the New Port. The blue glare was reflected from the office building opposite and through the glazed front of the Port Complex Towers.
Miss Oanh turned her face toward the empty lobby and watched her shadow lengthen across the tile floor. Disks behind the clear tube of the drop shaft paused, indicating that someone had gotten on at a higher level, then began to fall smoothly again. When she called up to his room, Franz had said he would be only a moment.
The starship dropped below the rooflines of the outer buildings in the complex. The cutting light vanished and the noise dulled to a rumble. Oanh looked out the front window again. If she stared at the drop shaft, Franz wouldn’t be the one to appear in it . . . .
The hotel was fully automated. The only living things besides Oanh in the lobby were the local life forms swimming in an aquarium. Fish on Ain al-Mahdi tended to metallic colors and vertical rather than horizontal compression, but Oanh’s only interest in the creatures was as possible food—