DANGEROUS GAMES
by Marta Randall
Will he never come back from Barnegat,
With thunder in his eyes,
Treading as soft as a tiger cat,
To tell me terrible lies?
- Elinor Wylie
The Puritan Ballad
Part 1
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THE LOOSENING OF THE FOURTH-QUADRANT stabilizer leads plate was more of an annoyance than a crisis, but it could not be fixed in tau. The backup stabilizer, whining in protest, took most of the strain. Jes slapped temporary patches on the inner hull beneath the loose plate, magnetized the patches, confirmed that they held the plate to the hull and, cursing, instructed the navigational computer to home for the nearest grabstation. And so, two weeks out of Estremadura on a solitary flight to MarketPort to meet his ship, tauCaptain Jes Kennerin brought his limping sloop to Priory Main Grab and requested entry.

The Grabmaster himself, squinting with anticipation and delight, appeared on the comscreen and crowed happily while Jes outlined the nature of his problem. Tiny jewels danced beside the ‘master’s plump cheeks. He swatted them away from his eyes as he announced that his station had no facilities to handle repairs, that the repair docks for the station were closed, and that he would not open them for Jes’ use. And, when Jes said angry things about backwash spit-stops manned by incompetent ninnies and taking up perfectly good vacuum that was best used for something of some value, the Grabmaster glared in wry and superficial irritation.

We,” he said, “are a full Alpha-Class grabstation, with complete facilities. We are the mainstation for one of the largest sectors in the Federation, I’ll have you know. We happen to be nonoperational, my dear, but that doesn’t affect our size at all.” The ‘master smiled suggestively. “Is that simple enough for you to understand?”

Jes put his head in his hands. His fingers tangled in his black hair. “Look,” he said, “all I want is space to fix my sloop. Or is your freespace nonfunctional, too?”

“Of course not,” the ‘master said, and leaned forward to do something to the control board. “There you are, my dear, Priory Main Grab warming itself up, and all for your sweet benefit.” The Grabmaster grinned through his cloud of jewels and signed off.

Jes glanced at the control bank. The grab coils showed close and clear on the screen. The onboard computer locked into the grabstation net and guided the ship through tau and into the loops of the time-coil.

It was immense, larger than the shipping coils outside MarketPort; within the heavy bands the tausloop seemed no bigger than a gnat on a wine barrel. The glowing coils brightened in increments, in no great hurry to increase their pull until they affected his ship. Jes grimaced and tapped his readout screen, requesting whatever information the ship’s computer held about Priory Sector.

The general information log was concise but limited. It told him the tau and realspace coordinates for Priory Sector, mentioned the names of the major planets and gave their intrasector coordinates, provided a date of colonization and a date of Federation entry, and left it at that.

Jes tapped the screen and, after a long moment, requested a readout of properties and planets currently owned by Parallax Combine. The list was long and he scanned it quickly. Priory did not appear on the list. Jes cleared the screen, annoyed that he’d bothered with what was, after all, only family programming. He thought that, after two years, he’d managed to divorce himself from their concerns and problems, yet still found himself reflecting their worries, following their suggestions, awkwardly longing for their comfort and assistance even as he fought to keep his distance. He took this as a sign of his own weakness and it was therefore with a fair amount of free-floating hostility that he watched as the coils shimmered and the ship flipped through time. He guided the sloop out of the coils and into the stable lights of real-space.

“Good,” said the Grabmaster, reappearing on the screen. “Now what are we going to do with you?” The jewels glittered before his eyes and he batted at them.

Jes glanced from the Grabmaster’s beaming face to the forward screens. Priory Main Grab hung in space, an immense, gilded complexity of struts and bars and rings, attached to the coils of the grab by a delicate network of light.

“I don’t understand,” Jes said. “You do have an Alpha-class grabstation, but . . .”

“Oh, very simple,” the Grabmaster said. The jewels tangled in his carefully curled hair. “Priory Sector is the second largest sector in the Federation: hence this preposterous station. It’s not needed, of course - Priory is big enough so it doesn’t need outside trade and doesn’t want any, thank you. Three separate systems, you know, and tens of inhabitable planets, not counting the Labyrinth, and nobody much counts the Labyrinth anyway.” The ‘master made an airy gesture, brushing jewels from his hair. His curls sprang rigidly back into place. The jewels twinkled down to collar level, save for one small blue gem which nestled just above the ‘master’s left eyebrow. Jes stared at it.

“So almost no traffic through the grab,” the ‘master continued, “and I’m simply dying of boredom. Not, of course, that you’d care a flip about that; parties like yourself seldom do. Well, sweetling, just set your drives and head twenty even, four cross. You can sit there nice and tidy while you play with your . . . little ship.” The Grabmaster signed off.

Jes shrugged. He’d met stranger folk in the channels of space, and Priory’s Grabmaster would be good for some laughs and a couple of beers in the saloons on MarketPort. He entered coordinates, slapped the forward thrust slides, and the tattletales for the backup stabilizer went scarlet. The sloop shuddered, the bridge filled with the scream of tortured metal, and the entire leads plate ripped from the hull and sailed majestically, and irretrievably, through the still-shimmering coils of the grab. The plate flared once and disappeared from real-space.

Jes raced to the injured hull. The skin bulged under the missing plate and stress lines crept along the metal. He layered an emergency seal over the bulge, locked it in place, kicked the defective backup stabilizer, and retreated from the access hold, double-sealing the hatches behind him. The ship needed a repair dock immediately; she had been slightly crippled by the loose leads plate, but the stress on her hull was an active emergency. His anger refueled, Jes slapped at the commiter and bellowed until the Grabmaster’s bland face appeared on the screen again.

The Grabmaster regretted the accident, tendered condolences, and refused to open one of his repair docks, even when Jes threatened a report to the Federation. The man smiled and shrugged and pointed out that opening a dock would do no good whatsoever, as there were no tools in the dock, no replacement leads plates or stabilizers, and that no amount of furious shouting on Jes’ part would cause these items to appear. At last the ‘master said that Jes might use the docks of Gensco Station, provided that Gensco agreed. Jes collected the tattered remains of his patience and cajoled the Grabmaster into admitting that Gensco Station was the headquarters for Priory’s main transport agency; that the Station, in its continual circuit of Priory Sector, was conveniently close by; that they would be very likely to provide Jes with replacement parts, a repair dock, and a repairs jockey to do the work. For a price, of course. The ‘master finally produced Gensco’s current coordinates, and smiled, and tapped the face of his screen with a manicured finger, as though he were trying to put his finger through the fabric of space directly into Jes’ dark, impatient face.

“Mind you,” the ‘master said, “I’m not promising that Gensco will lift a finger for you. They’re an odd lot down there. Mind your sweet self, and for heaven’s sake be polite. They don’t take kindly to strangers in Priory, my dear. Not even wounded ones.” The Grabmaster, for the last time, broke the connection.

Jes nursed his sloop down the coordinates given him by the Grabmaster of Priory Main. His hands flickered between the pressure gauges and the correction keys, his eyes between the sensors and the directional screens, and his mind, between curses and computations, considered the strangeness of Priory’s Grabmaster. Of the ‘master’s oblique warning about Gensco, Jes thought not at all. Any station would help a ship in distress. It would be unthinkable not to.




GENSCO PERIPHERAL WOULD NOT BELIEVE that Jes was who he said he was. He held his ship steady amid the crowded skies, praying that no one would hit him. The accented voice on the commiter, alternately angry and exasperated, at last ran a scan on his ship and immediately signed off, leaving Jes shouting into a dead microphone. His eyes ached. He rubbed them with the balls of his thumbs and cursed Priory Sector and everyone in it.

“That’s quite enough,” said the commiter in light, slurred Priory accents. The screen shivered and cleared to show a fat, sharp-eyed woman who looked at Jes with disapproval. All the lines of her face angled toward her excess of chins. Her hair, thick and richly auburn, curved over her brow and around her cheeks; Jes, forgetting his curses, wondered if all those shades of red and gold were natural. His own thick black hair felt limp and dirty, and he resisted the urge to brush it back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not used to being treated as a pirate.” She didn’t return his smile. “I’ve a crippled ship. I need a repair dock and a good jockey, and I’ll pay for repair fees, rentals, parts, and anything else. I beamed you my identification codes - “

“Codes can be forged, Menet . . .” She paused, glancing down. “Kennerin. We have our own security to worry about. And we’re a very busy station, we can’t take in every cripple that comes along demanding dock time.”

“I believe you can’t refuse,” Jes retorted. “According to Federation regulations it’s a major offense to refuse aid to a ship in space.” The woman opened her mouth, but Jes overrode her. “I don’t think you have a choice, Quia. Refuse me and I’ll beam a priority complaint to Priory Main. And even your tame monkey up there wouldn’t dare ignore it.”

The woman looked even more sour. “You, Menet Kennerin, are a good example of why we don’t care for strangers here.”

“Quia, if you don’t give me dock time, and pretty damned quick, you’re going to have more strangers in your system than you’ve ever seen before. I’ll have every investigator and agent in the Federation on your ass.”

The woman pressed her lips together and disappeared. Jes checked the pressure sensors; the patch was holding, but barely.

The woman reappeared. “We’ve dispatched a pilot drone to take you to a repair dock. You’ll be issued a restricted visitor’s pass, which you must carry at all times, and we expect you to leave as soon as the repairs are completed. You’ll be billed for that, and for your room and board, and we want payment in fremarks before you’ll be allowed to leave.”

“Your charity should be the basis for a thousand songs,” Jes said. The woman’s face pruned with disapproval and she signed off.

The pilot drone hooked onto the sloops’s guidance system and the flight bank went dead. Jes sat back, his fingers resting on the pressure controls, and watched the vision screens.

Gensco Station was an enormous silver orange whose exterior was a maze of metal valleys and square metal mountains, overlaid with the bars and graphs of the flight directors. The space around it bristled with commerce. Small, powerful freight donkeys hauled pod upon pod of goods carriers; a fat, strangely shaped spacebus passed overhead; innumerable small ships darted between the larger vessels and the thick sprinkle of auxiliary satellites. Jes watched space and tattletales, and fretted. The drone led the sloop in a direction counter to the rotation of the Station, then veered north before beginning its descent. An aperture irised open in the skin of the Station and the drone dropped toward it. Jes concentrated on balancing the pressure in the sloop’s access hold against the changing pressure of the various airlocks. The drone guided the sloop to a resting place in a large, dimly lit bay and slid back through the locks. Jes cracked the sloop’s entry hatch and looked out.

To his left lay the skeleton of a small freighter, its curving struts dull with oxidation. On the right a skip-sloop lay gutted; a large, angry gash ran up the ship’s forward hull and burn marks darkened the lateral fins. Before him stretched other dead ships, all Delta-class or smaller, all decayed or in the process of being cannibalized for parts. The air smelled of old oil and ancient burns, and tasted stale. Jes climbed the hull of his sloop and peered at the damage; the plate had taken most of the leads wires with it, and those remaining were scarred beyond redemption. He touched the wires briefly, as though in apology, locked the sloop, and went in search of the jockey.

A light glimmered at the far end of the bay; he heard someone singing in an alien language. He paused, listening to the smooth, slippery melody. The voice slid from major to minor keys, exploring variations in a rich, controlled contralto. When Jes stepped around the last dead ship into the light, the singing stopped.

“Hello,” he called. No one answered. Jes put out a hand to touch the hull of the ship behind him, reluctant to move forward. “Hello,” he shouted. His voice echoed from the distant sides of the bay.

“Why, welcome to my parlor, said the spider to the fly.” The voice was soft, amused, unaccented, and close by. “Let me guess. We have here an incompetent ore-jockey who bothered someone, and has been sent to me? No, you don’t have the look of one of our outstanding humpers. A private pilot for a disliked minor manager, come with dented chrome? I think not - you look far too fierce to be a tame captain. Whatever you are, my curious fly, you are certainly unpopular. And for that mystic deduction you will not be charged at all.” The voice slid into song again. Jes glanced overhead to see a dark shape seated casually on a swing dangling below a suspended hull. The harsh lights behind the swing dazzled his eyes.

The singing became laughter. “Discovered, by all that’s cross and holy. State your business, please. I am, as you can see, a very busy person.”

Jes shaded his eyes with his hand. “My name is Jes Kennerin. My tausloop pulled a leads plate in tau and lost it entirely after I came through grab. Your managers sent me here for repairs.”

“Not my managers, my outlandish friend. Nor am I theirs. I’m surprised they offered to help you at all.”

“They didn’t offer anything. I had to threaten them with a Federation complaint.”

“Did you?” The voice was delighted. “My admiration for you increases by the second.” The voice began humming.

“I’m in a hurry,” Jes said. “I’ll be late as it is, and if you could - “

“Rush to your repairs, forsaking all others? Ah, but I’ve work and much work, to fill the days and ways of hands.” As if in proof, Jes heard the sound of metal on metal and some flakes of rust drifted into the light. He wondered if everyone in Priory Sector was crazy. “Still, I should endeavor to leave you with at least one good impression of Gensco Station, may its wane wax and its decrease increase.”

The swing arched away from the light. A dark figure leaped to grab a dangling line and within a moment the jockey stood before Jes, grinning.

She was slightly smaller than himself, with long, silvery gray hair pulled into a messy knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyes, oval and sardonic, were of a blue cooler and deeper than his, and her face was delicately furred from the neck of her suit to her hairline. Jes glanced at her hands and she obligingly raised them for his inspection. Small, curved claws slid from the silver fur and slid into hiding again.

“You’re a . . .” Jes began, and stopped in confusion.

“Santa Theresan,” she said. “Or Tabby, if you prefer speaking in the present tense offensive.” She gestured and her claws flashed. “Why don’t you show me your ship, captain mine, and we can discuss philosophy and biology and anthropology and, perhaps, apology. You may stop staring now.”

Jes flushed, then marched toward the ship, hearing her footsteps behind him. The humming resumed, sweetly competent. Jes put his hands in his pockets and clenched his fists.

She swung up the side of his sloop and probed the wound, still humming, before asking him to open the ship so she could inspect the damage on the inside. She peeked into the cabins, ran her fingers lightly over the control board, and gave a nod of approval when Jes unsealed the last lock. Removing a probe from the pocket of her blue suit, she stepped into the access hold and tested the emergency seal, twisted the magnetic clamps, and lowered them. Jes stared at her trim backside.

“No tail,” she said without turning around. “And no pointy ears, and we don’t go into heat and we don’t bear in litters. Any other scurrilous myths you want quashed, Menet Curiosity?”

Jes flushed again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never met a Santa Theresan before, and I’ve only heard a little.”

“And all of it false. I live,” she remarked, “constantly surrounded by lies and liars. Beware of them, Menet. They will only lead you into sin.” She slapped the bulkhead and turned to him. “It will take some time, and I’ll have to order the part from main, but I should be able to get you spacebound again.”

“How long?” Jes said.

She shrugged. “Depends. On supplies in main, and the mood of their keepers. It’s rarely easy to get supplies, and for me it’s never easy. It might take weeks.”

“Weeks!”

“At least,” she said and jumped out of his ship. “Don’t bother to lock it, Menet. I’ll need to get inside to repair it, and you may not want to be hauled away from your diversions and delights.”

“I don’t see that I’ll have much to do . . .”

“Ah, but I’ve yet to introduce you to the wonders of Gensco Station, Peripheral Sector, Repairs Bay Colony. You’ve much and much to learn, my fly. And you’ll need a cabin. Come along, Menet Outworlder. We’ll secure you a parlor of your own, to which you can invite any number of succulent little insects.”

“I thought I’d sleep in my ship,” Jes said.

The jockey pruned her face into a devastating, silvery imitation of the red-haired woman’s scowl. “Regulations,” she intoned in Priory accents. “No sleeping aboard nonfunctional vessels. You will stay, Menet, in transient quarters, and no arguments.”

“But - “

“On pain,” the jockey said with positive relish, “of dismemberment.” She grinned and Jes, bemused out of anger, collected his gear and followed her swaying hair and lithe walk out of the bay and into the corridors of Gensco Station.




HER NAME, SHE TOLD HIM, WAS TATHA, AND she’d been on Gensco Station for six standard months, working as a repairs jockey. That she didn’t care for Gensco was obvious; that she, in turn, was disliked became apparent as they negotiated the corridors and cramped public spaces of Repairs Bay Colony. She ignored the “meows” and occasional murmurs of “Here, kitty,” and arriving at Transient Registry, she arranged a cabin for him, slicing through a maze of regulations and bureaucratic confusion. When they left the air was thick with Tatha’s sarcasm. She allowed herself one triumphant glance at Jes before schooling her face to calm irony. She pointed out mess halls, restaurants, bars, and shops, and told him that transient quarters were divided into a section for visiting Gensco employees and a section for non-Gensco transients, mostly Labbers in on business. His cabin was in the Labber section.

“Gennys are taught hatred with their first breaths,” she explained. “For Labbers, for outworlders, for aliens, for any strangers. For themselves. You’d perhaps not be in danger staying in the Genny section, but it’s best to avoid the problem entirely. If possible. And, of course, you’re blessed in not having fur.”

She swayed on the slidebelt and a gobbet of something fishy just missed her shoulder. It didn’t break the flow of her conversation. Once they reached the small cabin she had secured for him, though, Jes noticed that her claws were half extended.

“Does that happen all the time?” he said.

“Yes.” She ran her fingers over the comscreen. “This will give you general information, but it won’t tell you the important things. Such as that eating in the company mess halls is guaranteed death, and kevefah, the local brew, will give you a twenty-day hangover and cure your warts. Or possibly you don’t drink?” Jes shook his head. “Good. I don’t trust the totally innocent.”

The chute bleeped and coughed out a small packet. Tatha scooped it up before Jes could reach it. She unseamed it with one claw.

“Your symbols of existence, blue eyes,” she said, flicking through the contents of the packet. “A restricted greenpass, you won’t like that. Or possibly you won’t be around long enough to learn not to like it. A room credit plate. Every day billing? Oh, they do indeed dislike you. This has the reek of an insulted Maigret about it. Did you have contact with a small, fat woman of incontinent tongue and quick temper? Reeking of the blood of children and small mammals? Red hair and eyes to match?”

Jes, grinning, sat on the bed. “Or someone very like,” he agreed.

“Our sweet Maigret, in charge of making life interesting for the likes of you and me. It’s a means of checking up on you, mysterious and dangerous unfurred alien. Maigret is very interested in strangers, right about now. She asked me to check out your accident.”

“My accident?” Jes said, startled. “Why?”

“Accidents can be faked, plates can be lifted. I’m giving you a clean bill.”

“Does she really think I’d damage my own ship? Who does she think I am?” Tatha simply looked at him. “Listen, I’m a tauCaptain trying to join my ship in Market-Port, and all I want is my ship fixed. Sweet Mother! Is everyone on this station crazy?”

“Not everyone,” Tatha said. She sat on the table and swung her legs idly. “I, for one, am entirely sane. And Maigret has her reasons . . . you’ve come at a bad time, tauCaptain. But you’ll manage.” She went on to suggest which mess halls to avoid, which to patronize with caution (“Don’t eat anything yellow, please”), and told him to speak in public as little as possible (“You have an accent, you know”). She further suggested that he pack away his own clothing and buy some company issue. It would serve to keep him inconspicuous and harder to follow.

“Should I worry about being followed?” he said.

She shrugged. “What’s your opinion? Never mind, you haven’t been here long enough to have one. I’ve business, tauCaptain, among which is the ordering of your leads plate. Take a care.” She swung off the table and out the door.

“Tatha - “ he said. The door closed behind her.

He opened his sack and looked at the clothes niche, decided that he wouldn’t be on Gensco long enough to unpack and, sliding his Certificate among the folds of his clean suits, he closed the sack again. He secured a line on the commiter to the communications center. After a great deal of shouting and nonsense he sent a message direct-line to Sandro in MarketPort. Then, taking Tatha’s suggestion, he ordered a standard blue company-issue suit and used the clensor while waiting for it. To his surprise, it held a water shower, not a sonic unit. The packet popped through the chute as he came out of the clensor, drying himself. It was poorly made and scratched his skin at the seams. He took it off, put on his light-weather underclothes, and put the company suit on again, stowing the greenpass and credit plate in his hip pocket. Sitting at the commiter, he secured a line to the main library computer and requested information on Santa Theresa.

There wasn’t much of it, and what there was seemed vague and far too general, as though it had been programmed directly from a second-level text.

Santa Theresa was one of the earliest colony planets, settled so far back that dates were still reckoned by the old calendar. Before the discovery of tau and the invention of coils and taudrive, colonists had been sent in large, big-bellied ships to eight systems: Santa Theresa, the last planet colonized and the farthest from Terra, was a large, dense, cold world, rich in rare and costly minerals and miserly of its heat. Not fit for normal human habitation, the colony-masters declared, and in those days of slowdrives and limited xenotechnology they created Theresans to serve the climate of their planet. Fur, to protect from the cold. An extra layer of subcutaneous fat, for the same reason, layered over a musculature slightly more powerful than that of unchanged Terrans. More sensitive eyesight, to cope with the long, dark winters. A metabolic system slightly altered to extract the maximum protein from foodstuffs. And claws replacing fingernails, retractable to facilitate the use of the hands. Claws to capture and kill, for the colony-masters, taking into account the roughness of a new world, the distances between Santa Theresa and the mother world, the long cold winters and the short growing season, had decreed that Theresans be, when necessary, predators.

Yet the changes were small. Theresans had hips and joints and sockets and limbs, curves and angles, that were distinctly human. Had features and expressions that were human. Had brains, minds, souls, as human as those of the race from which they sprang.

Two centuries after Santa Theresa’s colonization, Terra and her three closest colony worlds disagreed about levies and tax rights, and the disagreement quickly escalated into the Last Great War, which left two worlds in cinders and Terra herself badly scarred. War, always the parent of innovation, this time produced the discovery of tau and the invention of the grabcoils and taudrives. The universe opened, not to Terra, still sullenly rebuilding herself, but to Reba, Ha Olam, and Jirusan, three untouched colonies. Santa Theresa, the youngest and most distant, was misplaced during the war years and lay forgotten for twelve centuries.

Twelve hundred years of tau changed humanity and changed its nature. Santa Theresa had been born at a time when the complexity and cost of space travel dictated a stable colony population: tau created a mobile workforce, independent of the need for special adaptation to any one planetary condition. Gene engineering, since the days of Santa Theresa’s foundation, had become little more than a cosmetic art. Most importantly, Santa Theresa had been settled before humanity met any sapient aliens, and re-emerged into a universe where alien races were known and regarded as, at best, the results of an inferior creation. The smooth-skinned humans of the Federation were bewildered by the furred Theresans but forced to recognize their humanity, for Theresans and humans could, together, produce fertile offspring, thereby meeting the most basic definition of shared species.

The computer could provide Jes with little else. Santa Theresa was a one-country planet, had a quasi-feudal system of government, spoke a language as different from Standard as Standard was different from any original Terran tongue. Santa Theresa had a short growing season and long, fiercely cold winters. Mined and exported ores, had a stable population, and was the only colonized or colonizable planet in its Sector. According to the Theresans, there had been no regression of culture in the twelve centuries between its loss and rediscovery; they remembered, adapted, and flourished. Jes envisioned a frigid, lonely world and could not picture Tatha’s quick tongue and lithe songs set in such a cold, dim place. He closed the computer link and allowed himself two hours of sleep before going in search of food.
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