20 Salas 1117: Tlianke – Tlianke/Hinterworlds – (1104 B664AA9-C M Hi 220 Na M3 V M1 VI)
The place that Jami had picked turned out to be an industrial dance place somewhere on the high upside of the station. On the downside, there is probably a nice place, most likely with a glassteel floor looking down on the planet. People would be dancing above the world below the way humaniti used to envision the gods danced above Terra or Vland.
The Fusion Brahminboy wasn’t that place.
We ran into a jam of people, both local and off-world, as we got close. I almost just went back to our room, I still had trades to work on, but I had promised Jami that she could pick a place and I was determined not to avoid the crew any more than I had to. I had learned my lesson on how that worked out.
Besides… I needed to keep what friends and allies I had.
Jami and Shelly were waiting near the entrance and Jami waved frantically as Saahna and I entered. We forced our way over to them.
“Popular place!” I shouted. Even from the outside, the noise was overwhelming.
“Yeah! Fun!” she shouted back. “Let’s get inside! I’ve already tipped this guy enough to let us in!”
I glanced over. The bouncer, now regarding us levelly, was obviously human but wasn’t a branch of humaniti I had encountered before. He was barely a meter-and-a-half in height but was almost as wide. I was pretty sure he could have thrown me back to the entrance if he had wanted to.
I nodded politely to him as I followed Jami and Shelly inside. Once there, I paused a moment to take everything in.
Since we were facing away from Tlianke, there wasn’t anything to see. So, they didn’t bother with an outside view. Instead, the ‘floor’ wrapped up the walls and across the ceiling. The bar, surrounded by a close cluster of tables, wrapped around the ‘walls.’ People were dancing on both the floor and the ‘ceiling.’ Every now and then one, or several, would leap from one to the other. I didn’t even want to think of how they had their gravitics programmed.
As soon as we were well inside, Jami spun around. “OK! Great! We made it! Can… you watch out for anyone else? I’ve got some meeting and mingling to do!”
“What?”
“Look out for Varan or Do ‘rex. I’m getting in on the action!” She immediately headed towards the dance floors.
I glanced around to see both Saahna and Shelly looking at me. I waved towards the bar area.
“Let’s see if we can find a place.”
We were lucky. Just as we started looking for a table, several people stood up and left one. I immediately darted over and sat down and a waitbot almost as quickly came over and cleared it off for us. Saahna and Shelly joined me, and the waitbot paused long enough to take our orders. We all got a Counterspin, and I ordered a basket of Tama Leaves for the table. Fortunately, the table’s sonic dampers kept the outside noise to a level where we could hear each other.
“So…” I said as the waitbot left with our orders. “How is this stop going?”
Shelly sighed. “I tried taking Swoopy out to do some coverage, but there are just too many people here! Then I got yelled at for crowding the port and operating an unlicensed bot. I took him back the ship.”
“Probably best. Really, check before pulling it out, or even just imaging things on a high-law world like this. You’ll probably be OK, but you never know when some weird local law will trip you up.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I guess I learned that.” She paused. “And I’m trying to remember the things you said, that everything is different everywhere, but it still feels weird.” She paused. “Did you… do you know what happened to Mikey?”
I sighed. “Director Morn and her cargo got a shuttle to the surface about 6 hours after we docked. I think Mikey got down a few hours later. They got to the surface, and that’s the last info I have. Once the passengers and cargo are down, I don’t have any reason to keep track of them. We delivered them here. That’s all we were paid to do.”
“Well… OK. Thanks.” She wasn’t thrilled with that.
“Varan is here,” Saahna announced. “And Carma is still with him.”
She waved, and I joined in. After a few seconds, he saw us, and they made their way over. Fortunately, our table was big enough for everyone to sit comfortably.
“So how are we doing?” he asked as they sat down. Carma sat down next to him but, from the way she kept looking around, I could tell she wasn’t happy.
“As well as we can,” I said with a shrug. “All of our cargo is sold. But, since I had to pay shuttle fees, we didn’t come out as well as I had hoped. I’m trying to grab as much as I can for the next Jump, but we’ll probably go out a bit empty. They’re really too much about protecting their own ‘preferred partners’ here.”
“And what does that do to us?”
“We’re fine. We’re making less profit, not no profit.”
“OK. Fine.” He immediately looked away and started watching the dancers above us.
For a while, there was relative silence. There was a bit of small-talk as the waitbot came by, dropped off our orders and took Varan and Carma’s, but their arrival had quieted things. He wasn’t talking at all, and everything she said made it clear that she didn’t want to be here. I wasn’t sure what was going on or how to respond.
Saahna found the answer for me. “So,” she asked. “Any feedback on our next few Jumps?”
Varan didn’t say anything, but Carma was quick to chime in.
“Where the hells are we going? You’re heading for a pair of systems that you know wants nothing to do with us, and then to one with Droyne?” She shook her head. “Why not go somewhere that appreciates what you’ve done for them?”
“Like where?”
“Kupakii! Yeah, I know what Commander Winters said to you, but no one back home likes her anyway. Hells, if this ‘Hinterworlds Alliance’ thing is enough to scare the people here, then things must be going pretty good! Let’s go back! All of you will be heroes there!”
I shook my head. “We’ve been there. Recently. We’re Travellers. That’s… not what we do.”
“What! You spend a week on a ship, then another week on a cramped asteroid. Then another week on a ship then a few days on a packed station? Where next? A ship grapple? Don’t you want to be able to walk outside?”
“There didn’t seem to be a lot of people wandering around ‘outside’ on Kupakii.”
“We have the domes! We have open areas in the cities! And we can go outside anytime we want! Here? There’s no ‘outside’ here! There was no ‘outside’ at Gimisapun! Why are we here?”
I sighed. “We should have been on-planet here, but the locals are getting a bit paranoid and territorial. Annoying, but… it happens. And we’ll be at the downport next Jump. Hopefully. Again, this is what we do!”
“Maybe it’s what you do but… I can’t do this!”
I glanced at Varan, who was looking anywhere except us at the table. Saahna was doing the same and Shelly had that horrified but fascinated look that one usually associates with air-raft crashes.
“Then, maybe…” I glanced around, then back at her. “Maybe Travelling isn’t for you.”
She responded to me but was looking at Varan. “Then… maybe we need to go home!”
I pretended to not notice the subtext. “We are home. The Grayswandir is our home. What are you asking?”
“I want to go back to Kupakii!”
I smiled as politely as I could. “I’ve already given our route. I’m buying spec cargoes for it. We won’t be jumping to Kupakii for some time. If you want to stay with us then I can’t give you any timeframe for going back there; our current schedule is taking us rimward. If you do desire to leave then… we will miss you, but I can’t force you to stay.”
Saahna quickly looked away and waved for the waitbot, Shelly had a horrified expression on her face, and Varan tensed and looked from me to Carma and back.
“We aren’t going back that way; we don’t need to get involved in all of that. We’re taking care of ourselves.” I paused. “I’m certain that there are any number of ships here heading back towards Kupakii if you really want to go home.”
She froze. She was obviously angry but couldn’t think of anything to say. I hadn’t been sure how Varan would react to that, but his response was to pull out his comp again.
He tapped something on it and flicked in her direction. “Here. That should get you back to Kupakii. High Passage. I’m… sorry it ended this way.”
“What!”
“As Derek said; we’re Travellers. This is what we do. We… travel.”
“You said you didn’t want that anymore!”
“Things… changed.”
She stood up. “So that’s it? You’re just… kicking me off your ship!”
He stood up as well. “No! Really! I… love you! But… this is what I am! This is who I am! I just… want to share that with you!”
She glared at him for several seconds, jaw tight, and then started walking towards the exit. Varan quickly followed.
I watched until they had left, then looked back around the table. Both Saahna and Shelly were staring at me. Shelly hadn’t changed expression. I idly wondered if she had ever seen, or been part of, an ugly breakup before.
“That could have gone better,” said Saahna, voice flat.
I shrugged. “Wasn’t much else I could say.”
She waved a dismissal. “Oh, I wasn’t blaming you; Varan obviously misread that one.”
“He’s better than that.”
“Yeah, he is. I don’t know how he wound up falling for her this bad. But…” She shrugged.
“Yeah. I don’t know. I hope this works out.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not worried about Carma. She’ll get home. But Varan?” I sighed. “I would hate to lose Varan.”
“I’d just as soon not spend all my time in the gimbal either.”
“He’ll be back.”
“Are you sure?”
I hesitated before responding. “No. Not really.” I sighed again. “What a mess.”
“Tell me about it.”
We spent the next while talking about random topics, like the cheating scandal from the latest sector sunsphere tournament (one of the players on the Cromar Valatins had reaction-enhancing implants that were standard on her homeworld but that the Tempri Dropkicks claimed they had no knowledge of) or the cliffhanger from the season finale of Captain Spaceways. Shelly was using her imager to capture the dancers jumping from what was now, to us, one wall to the other, occasionally turning it to face herself and talking to it. I assumed she was recording something for her followers.
Finally, the conversation turned back to current topics. “So… what did Doctor Korvusar say when you told her we weren’t carrying passengers anymore?”
“She asked for more wine.”
“Sounds like her.”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “She’ll be on-board for lift. And we’ll keep her with us. She’s too invaluable of a resource to abandon.”
“Resource?”
“You were the one worried last night about what was going to happen. She’s an Agent; I’d rather have her on my side.”
“You… don’t think that will attract more problems to us?”
I laughed at that. “I think we’ve already attracted enough problems on our own. Look, if the Imperium holds together, then it won’t matter; her life support costs are barely a rounding error in the ship’s budget. If it doesn’t? Well, we need to keep as many friends and allies as we can. She may no longer have any ‘official’ support if that happens, but I’m sure she has access to any number of contacts in the area. Either way, she’s an asset.”
“I hope you’re right.”
The conversation turned to random topics again. Eventually, we decided to leave. Jami was dancing with two humans and a Virikushi and returned my wave as we left.
—-
Back at our room, I checked the net. We had a few more accepts, and a few more denials, from my trade offers. I put some new offers out then checked the rest of my messages.
I had one from Jami. I had come to expect her to be on her own for most of her downtime, so I was a bit surprised. I pulled it up.
“Hey!” she said on the recording. She was in some noisy bar, but it wasn’t the Fusion Brahminboy. “Listen, I got us a good contact. Some good credits now and a chance for some really good creds later. I’ll send you a place for tomorrow; I’ll be busy until then. See ya!” The recording ended.
I looked up from my comp and sighed. What now? I glanced over at the bunk. Saahna was already lying there, but I could tell that she wasn’t asleep.
I decided not to bring it up. I shut my comp and went to the fresher. When I was done, I climbed into the bunk beside her.
She immediately slid over and put an arm over my chest, pulling herself closer. “Everything OK?”
I pulled her closer in the darkness. “Yeah. Nothing to worry about. We’re good.”