Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories

glare on me. "Besides, I don't have to lift a finger to drop Smith down the sewer. The TransShipMint Corporation will be handing out all the revenge I could ever want."

I swallowed hard, trying not to let it show. I still had the money card she'd given me; but after paying off all the cargo and penalty clauses from this trip, I'd be lucky to clear the seventy thousand neumarks she'd originally promised me. Unless I could track down that hundred thirty thousand she'd ghosted out of my account—

"And if I were you I wouldn't count on digging up your bankroll in time,"

Chen said, reading my face despite my best efforts. "I'm the only one who can retrieve it... and according to His Highness here, I'm going to be stuck on Parex for a few weeks."

She looked at Peter. "Unless, of course, you want to call off your little demonstration. If not, he's going to prison."

Peter looked at me. "Captain?"

I shook my head. It was, we all knew, her one last chance to manipulate me, and I wasn't in any mood to be manipulated. "I appreciate the offer, Ms. Chen," I said. "But I think you need King Peter's object lesson. I'll take my chances with TransShipMint."

The cheek muscle twitched again. "Fine," she said. "I'll do my few weeks on Parex; you can do your ten years in prison. We'll see which of us gets the last laugh."

She waved a hand impatiently. "If you're finished with your threats, I'd like to get going. I have a life back in the Expansion, Smith here has charges of embezzlement to face; and you of course have some serious cowering to do." "We are indeed finished," Peter confirmed with a nod. "Farewell, Miss Chen."

The ten-hour trip back to Parex was very quiet. Chen stayed in the passenger cabin with the hatchway sealed the whole time, while Jimmy, Rhonda, and I spent most of our time at our respective stations. Only Bilko took any advantage at all of the dayroom. He reported it as being pretty lonely in there.

The intended recipients of the cargo we'd left behind on the Freedom's Peace were not at all happy with the Sergei Rock's empty cargo hold. I think Chen was hoping they would press charges, but application of the assets on her cash card—along with a little smooth talking on Bilko's part—got them sufficiently calmed down. It did, however, leave us with only sixty thousand neumarks, a far cry from the two hundred thousand TransShipMint was going to want in the next couple of weeks.

We were on Parex for about twenty hours, catching up on sleep, getting our next cargo aboard, and wading through the heavier-than-usual stack of paperwork.

During that time, Chen tried twice to sneak off the planet. Both times, the transports were forced to return after an hour's worth of trying failed to get them a flapblack wrap.

By the time we buttoned up the rumors about her were just beginning to be heard, and as we headed for deep space I found myself wondering if she would be able to find passage on a transport even after her internal exile was over.

To my lack of surprise, I discovered I didn't really much care. "Hi," Rhonda's voice came from the dayroom door. "Got a minute?"

I looked up in mild surprise, deciding to pass on the obvious retort that when TransShipMint got done with me I would have all the time in the world. "Sure,"

I said instead, waving her toward one of the other chairs at the table. "You come here often?"

"Hardly ever," she said, sidling over to the indicated chair and sitting down.

Her left hand, I noticed, had stayed out of sight behind her the whole way, as if she was hiding something behind her back. "But I wanted to talk, and this seemed a good time to do it."

"Sure," I nodded. "What about?"

She nodded down at the reader on the table in front of me. "Working out how to pay off the TransShipMint Corporation?"

"Trying to work it out," I said, sighing. "Really just going through the motions. There's just no way I can raise that kind of money that fast."

"There was one," she reminded me. "I hear Chen offered to unbury your other account if you'd get Peter to let her off the hook with the flapblacks." She cocked her head slightly. "I wanted you to know I was very impressed that you turned her down. So was Jimmy, by the way."

I snorted. "Thanks, but impressing the two of you was pretty far down on my reasons list. We needed to scare her, and scare her good, or we'd have had her and the whole Chen-Mellis family hanging over our heads for the rest of what would have probably been depressingly brief lives. This way... well, at least we all have a chance of living through it." "Assuming self-preservation outweighs her sense of vengeance," Rhonda pointed out soberly. "And assuming she doesn't figure out what's actually happening."

"I don't think there's any chance of her doing that," I said. "She doesn't even know about the InReds, let alone how they interact with younger flapblacks."

Rhonda shivered. "I guess it just feels too much like a magician's trick," she said. "Peter creates the illusion that a whole galaxy worth of the flapblacks are deliberately and actively snubbing her; when really all it is is a single Ancient InRed who's been persuaded to hang around her whenever she leaves the planet. It just seems so fragile, somehow."

"Only because you know how the trick's being performed," I pointed out. "And because you know that it would only work on a world like Parex where there's a

single spaceport and no more than one ship leaving at any given time." I shrugged. "Frankly, if there's any magic in this it's that Peter was able to persuade one of the InReds to cooperate this way in the first place."

"Yes," Rhonda murmured. "It's rather sad, really, having to spend its last few weeks of life sitting on Chen instead of getting to listen to the Freedom's Peace's music."

I smiled. "Oh, I don't know. You didn't see what they did to Chen during her last day in prison. Where were you, by the way?"

"I was working out a deal with Suzenne," Rhonda said, frowning. "What did they do to her?"

"Nothing much," I said, frowning at her in turn. This was the first I'd heard of any deal. "They just played one of the InRed's favorite melodies over and over again on her cell's speaker system. Knowing how my mind does things, I figure that tune will be spinning around her mind for at least the next month. What deal?"

"Oh, that's nasty," Rhonda said. "Brilliantly nasty. Gives the Ancient something to listen to, and probably helps him identify her, too. Your idea?"

"Peter's," I said. "What deal?"

"Oh, it wasn't anything much," she said casually. "You remember how much Suzenne liked my beadwork? Well, I sold her my entire stock. Beads, hoops, pattern lists, fasteners, needles, thread, looms, finished items—the works."

"Congratulations," I said, feeling obscurely disappointed. After all of that buildup, I had expected more of a payoff. "She'll be a big hit at their next formal concert."

"I think so," Rhonda agreed. "She was already talking about getting one of the fabricators retasked to making a fresh supply of beads."

"Sounds great," I said, frowning. Rhonda, I suddenly noticed, still had a twinkle in her eye and seemed to be fighting hard to keep from grinning. "So OK, let's have it."

"Have what?" she asked, clearly determined to drag it out a little more.

"The big punch line," I said. "What did she do, offer you a 50 percent commission or something?"

"No, of course not," she said. "How in the worlds would I collect on something like that, anyway? No, I insisted on cash."

Her hand finally came around from behind her back, and I saw now that she was holding a small wooden box like the kind Bilko kept his poker chips in. "And that's exactly how she paid," she concluded. "With cash." I frowned down at the box. It was one of Bilko's poker containers, all right.