Again her doubts nagged at her. Why all this trouble that risked attracting unwanted attention? Why hadn't Sameh's superiors found a simpler way of aborting the woman's mission? Surely they had some way to alert Sameh that her mission had been canceled. They might have given Alonza a pa.s.sword or some other coded message over a private channel. She would not have to be told what the operative's original a.s.signment was in order to pa.s.s such a message along.

They entered the infirmary. The beds in the ward were empty; the two paramedics on duty greeted Tom with quick nods of their heads. They walked through the ward and continued down a narrow hall with five doors on either side, then stopped in front of one room. The door slid open and the ceiling light brightened to a soft glow, revealing a small room with a wide bed and a wall screen with a holo image of a forest clearing.

"Kind of luxurious quarters," Sameh said, "for somebody like me."

"Normally we put Linkers and other dignitaries in the private rooms," Tom said.

"I guessed that." Sameh sounded unimpressed.

"We want you to be comfortable," Alonza added, "and if we should have to isolate you-"

"Can't think why you should have to do that." Sameh went to the bed, dropped her duffel on it, and sat down. "If you really thought it was catching, you'd have everybody else in here with me being checked."

"Not necessarily," Tom said. "I'll have to get some more equipment to run the tests, so just rest here until I get back." He shot Alonza a dubious look before the door slid shut behind him.

Sameh began to rummage in her duffel. Alonza leaned against the wall, resting her hand on her wand. "How long is this going to take?" the young woman asked.

"I don't know. That's up to the chief physician."

"I better be on my way with the rest of them.""We'll do our best to see that you are."

The comm on the table next to the bed chimed. "Alonza," Tom's voice said, "one of the Habber pilots is here. Calls himself Benzi, and he wants to talk to you."

"Bring him here, then." Alonza closed the comm's channel and turned to Sameh.

She had known that this might happen, that the Habber would have questions about his pa.s.senger. She hoped that he would be satisfied with whatever answers Tom was probably already giving him.

"Dr. Ruden-Nodell and Habitat-dweller Benzi," the door's voice announced.

"Let them in," Alonza said.

The door opened and Tom entered, followed by Benzi. "I think you know why I'm here," Benzi said. "I came here with thirty people to transport. I expected to leave the Wheel with thirty."

"The doctor said-" Alonza began.

"I know what he said, Major Lemaris. If you will provide me with a record of this woman's med-scan, I can determine what might be done for her aboard our vessel before she's put in suspension. In any case, it will probably be more than you can do for her here."

"I don't care for the implications of that remark," Tom muttered.

"The a.s.sociated Habitats have an agreement with the Council of Mukhtars to transport people from Earth to Venus," Benzi said. "We don't interfere with whomever you choose to be our pa.s.sengers, and we save you the trouble and expense of transporting them. In return, we expect you to allow us to get them to their destination quickly and efficiently. I'll admit that there were many among my people who wondered if we should perform this job at all, but we decided to do what we could for those people willing to sacrifice everything they had for the chance at a new life."

"You just wanted to do the right thing," Alonza said, "with no ulterior purpose in mind."

"Believe that or not, as you like. In any case, unless you abide by the agreement we have with your Mukhtars, there will be some of us who will argue that our agreement with you has lapsed, and that we no longer should perform this service for you."

Tom leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets. Alonza wondered if this Habber could interpret a med-scan record properly. It did not matter; he was Linked to his people's cybers, and they could interpret the data for him. He would soon find out that Tom was lying.

"I'm glad somebody's sticking up for me," Sameh Tryolla said as she got to her feet. She came toward them and gazed at Benzi. "I knew you would come. I want to get out of here."

Benzi said, "I'd like to see that scan now."

"Be easier for me to access it from my office," Tom responded, still stalling for time. Good old Tom, Alonza thought, grateful for that even if it wouldn't do them any good in the end. She folded her arms, trying to think of what to say next.

"I'll come with you, then," Benzi said as he turned toward the door.

Sameh was standing just behind Benzi as the door opened and Tom stepped into the hall. Alonza saw the woman's arm rise in an oddly familiar gesture. In an instant, realizing that there was no time to pull out her wand, she slashed at Sameh with her right arm, chopping her hard on the wrist with the edge of her hand.

Sameh's arm fell and slapped against her upper thigh. She stumbled back and stared at Alonza, her eyes wide, and suddenly her face contorted, becoming red andthen purple. A harsh gurgling sound came from her throat; her eyes seemed to bulge from her head, and then she fell forward and crumpled to the floor.

Tom was still standing in the open entrance. He pushed past Benzi as the door slid shut, then knelt next to Sameh. His fingers found her neck, then clasped her by one wrist. "She's dead," the physician said. "And I don't need a scan to tell me that."

Benzi's light brown skin had turned yellow. He closed his eyes for a moment, clearly struggling to compose himself, then turned to Alonza. "What happened to her?" he asked.

"Think this happened to her," Tom replied as he lifted Sameh's right arm by the edge of her sleeve, revealing a tiny device no larger than an implant or a gem. "Better not touch it. I'm guessing it's deactivated now, but no sense taking a chance."

"What is it?" Benzi asked.

"Probably a disrupter of some kind," Tom said. "Activate the thing, slap it onto somebody, and it disrupts the body's blood vessels or neurons. Gives somebody a stroke or shuts down their brain, and-"

"You have such things?" Benzi asked.

"Well, there's one of them right there," Tom said. "Always knew they were a distinct possibility. We've got implants for medical purposes. It wouldn't take much to make them for other uses."

"I never heard of such a thing before," Alonza said softly, although she had heard plenty of rumors and had long harbored the same suspicions as Tom.

"It seems that you may have saved my life," Benzi said to Alonza. "I'm very grateful."

Alonza thought of Colonel Sansom's orders. Get the operative into custody as quietly as possible, he had told her. If he had wanted to keep this matter quiet before, he certainly would not want word about the woman's attempt on Benzi's life to leak out now.

Presumably the operative had been sent here for the purpose of killing the Habber, and afterward those who ran the shadowy and mysterious secret service of the Guardians had come to their senses and decided to call off the mission. She wondered what the diplomatic consequences would have been if Sameh had succeeded, and exactly what whoever had given the woman her orders had hoped to accomplish.

There was no question of what Alonza's own fate would have been had Benzi died.

Colonel Sansom and those above him would have had to punish somebody. The loss of her rank and a court-martial would have been the least of her punishment; any work detail she was a.s.signed to after that would be a lot worse than anything her mother had probably suffered.

She realized then what Sameh's movements had reminded her of when the woman had moved toward Benzi. Amparo had sometimes moved in the same way, creeping up on her marks when there weren't other people around, ready for a quick and disabling blow to the back of the head with her pouch of pebbles and small stones.

"You'll have to store the body," she said to Tom, "until Colonel Sansom gets back.

And I'll have to make a report." She turned to Benzi. "I'll need a statement from you,"

she said. "Once it's recorded, you can board your ship and be on your way."

"In other words," Benzi said, "you'd prefer to keep this quiet."

"Obviously." Alonza sighed. "You must know that we have our few extremists, people who would prefer that we have nothing to do with your people, but be a.s.sured that such folk will be watched even more closely from now on and that you'll be safe. I don't know what you intend to tell your own people." She thought of his Link. "Maybethey already know."

"My Link was closed-is closed." Benzi's face was solemn. "But they will be informed. This shouldn't affect our agreements with your Council, since you saved my life. In protecting me, you honored our agreement."

"My duty," she said. "It wasn't out of any particular concern for you."

"I know, and that speaks well of you and your Guardian training." For a moment, she thought that he was being sarcastic again, and then he bowed his head to her.

"We'll go to Tom's office, and you can give me your report there." Tom would keep quiet, and Benzi would soon be gone; she strongly doubted that this Habber would ever return to Earth or to the Wheel again.

Tom told his infirmary staff that Sameh Tryolla had unexpectedly died of a stroke, a cause of death verified by a scan of the corpse. Alonza doubted that any of them believed that was the whole story, but they seemed willing to accept it. Benzi's pa.s.sengers would simply a.s.sume that their former companion was being kept in the infirmary for more tests. She wondered if any of them would try to find out about her in years to come, if they would even be able to call up any records about her fate.

Sameh Tryolla might disappear as thoroughly as though she had never existed, which in a sense, she hadn't.

Where had they found her? But Alonza could guess the answer to that. The woman who had become Sameh Tryolla would have come from the ranks of those on Basic; she would have been someone who could vanish from her earlier life without anyone's missing her and slip easily into another life. She had probably been a child much like Alonza herself.

After Benzi's ship had left the Wheel, Alonza sent a short report to Colonel Sansom, promising him a full report when he returned. Things had not gone as he might have hoped, but the operative's mission had been aborted and the whole business kept quiet.

What still nagged at her was exactly why Sameh had been sent here to kill the Habber, what the purpose of her mission was. Would any Habber have served equally well as her target, or had she been after Benzi in particular? Maybe those using Sameh had wanted to make an example of the man who had abandoned his world for that of the Habbers. But would they have jeopardized Earth's treaties with the a.s.sociated Habitats simply to punish Benzi? Would they have risked losing their uneasy but enduring peace with the Habbers as well as the loss of the resources and expertise their more advanced technology could provide to the home world?

Sameh Tryolla could not have left the camp outside Tashkent carrying a disrupter in her duffel without the connivance of at least one of the camp's Guardians. Someone might have slipped the weapon to her at the port in Tashkent, before she boarded the shuttle, but getting it to her earlier so that she could conceal it before leaving for the Wheel would be safer. No security officers at the Tashkent port or aboard the shuttle would have bothered to search any of the travelers, who had already been cleared by Keir Renin and his people in the camp and had been under Guardian supervision ever since.

More unanswered questions-and it was probably best, Alonza thought, to leave them forever unanswered.

Colonel Sansom returned to the Wheel thirty hours after Sameh's death. Alonza met him at the hub, accompanied him to the infirmary, and sat with him while he perused the full report on a pocket screen in the office of Tom Ruden-Nodell.

"You did well, Major Lemaris," the colonel said."I'm sure any of your officers would have done as well," she replied.

"I'm not at all sure of that." His voice was hard.

"One thing puzzles me, though," Alonza said. "Seems to me that the whole point in using a weapon like a disrupter is to make sure no one knows you've used it. I mean, I can see Sameh Tryolla using it if she and her victim were alone. Slap the thing on the Habber, make sure he's dead, ditch the thing in a recycling slot and n.o.body's the wiser. But to make the attempt in front of witnesses-"

"Obviously she was so intent on her mission," the colonel interrupted, "that she didn't consider that, and simply used the means she was given. In any case, what would you have done had she succeeded? Put her under restraint and under guard, go through all the usual procedures-informing me, getting your report together, waiting for diplomats to arrive to try to rea.s.sure the other Habbers-"

"Waiting for my own court-martial," Alonza added.

"Needless to say. And the operative would have been officially charged, sent back to Earth for a hearing, and probably have disappeared after that. Maybe that's what she was promised if she were caught-a hearing, a sentence, and then a new life and ident.i.ty."

"Somebody really wanted that Habber out of the way, then," Alonza said.

"No, Alonza. Think." Jonas Sansom leaned forward in his chair and rested his arms on Tom's desk. "Someone wanted me out of the way."

She stared across the desk at him. "But-"

"I should have been here to take charge of the situation. I would have been if not for those damaged tracking telescopes, and that was pure chance."

"So they had to abort Sameh's mission," Alonza said, "but they didn't have a way to tell her-"

The colonel shook his head violently. "No. Saying that the mission had to be aborted was probably part of the plan. It was the way to be certain that I would be there when she struck at the Habber, that I would have to take responsibility for failing to protect him."

"But why would anybody want to get you?" she asked.

"Perhaps you don't want to know why, Alonza. I know Earth needs the Habbers and their technology more than we're willing to admit, and I haven't made any secret of my opinions. There are others who disagree, who would willingly see Earth become even more impoverished if they could be rid of our agreements with the Habbers.

Let's leave it at that."

He folded his hands. There was more gray in his blond hair, and the lines on either side of his mouth were deep grooves. "We're all p.a.w.ns in the hands of the Guardian Commanders," he continued, "and there are those who think that Earth may grow too dependent on the a.s.sociated Habitats and that the Council of Mukhtars has already made too many concessions to them. An incident involving the death of a Habber we were bound by treaty to protect would have been useful to certain political factions."

"Well." She looked away from him for a moment.

"We can continue to be p.a.w.ns," Colonel Sansom said, "or we can be the players who move the pieces. Those are the only choices we have, and I know which one I'd rather be. I'm due for a promotion soon, and I'm going to put in for a post that will move me closer to the center of the game. I'll want my best officers with me."

"Of course, sir."

"You'll probably get a commendation for your recent action. You ought to take advantage of that and put in for duty in Baghdad at headquarters. That's what I'mgoing to do, and right now you're in a position to get whatever post you want." He stood up. "I'll talk to the chief physician now, and then I'll be in the officers' mess for dinner with the rest of my staff. Will you join me there in a couple of hours?"

"Yes, sir."

"You did well, Alonza-Major Lemaris."

"Thank you, sir.

A torchship slowly floated away from the dark metal latticework of a dock. Alonza watched the ship on the bay viewscreen and for a moment wished that she were one of its pa.s.sengers. Some months ago, even a few days ago, she would have leaped at any opportunity to rise, to remain on Jonas Sansom's staff, to be stationed near one of the centers of power.

Now she was thinking of Sameh Tryolla again. Maybe she had been found in a port like San Antonio's before being shipped off to a children's dormitory and whatever training was deemed suitable for her. Alonza imagined herself in Sameh's place, soothed, manipulated, moved across the board, and then discarded.

Always know when to run, Amparo had told her.

There was another choice besides being a p.a.w.n or a player, and that was abandoning the game. Colonel Sansom would be dismayed when she put in her request for duty on Luna, and then he would conclude that he had misjudged her, that she did not have the ambition or the stomach for the greater game. But there would be other p.a.w.ns he could use.

She left the bay and hurried toward the lift, already late for the dinner with the colonel. Tom would be surprised when she told him that she was going to ask to be stationed on Luna. They might even travel there together, adrift for a time aboard the shuttlecraft taking them to Luna, antic.i.p.ating the destination that lay ahead of them.

They would follow the sky together.

Auriga's Streetcar

by Jean Rabe

Jean Rabe is the author of eleven fantasy novels and more than two dozen Jean Rabe is the author of eleven fantasy novels and more than two dozen Jean Rabe is the author of eleven fantasy novels and more than two dozen Jean Rabe is the author of eleven fantasy novels and more than two dozen short stories. Among the former are two DragonLance trilogies, and among short stories. Among the former are two DragonLance trilogies, and among short stories. Among the former are two DragonLance trilogies, and among short stories. Among the former are two DragonLance trilogies, and among the latter are tales published in the DAW anthologies the latter are tales published in the DAW anthologies the latter are tales published in the DAW anthologies the latter are tales published in the DAW anthologies Warrior Fantastic, Warrior Fantastic, Warrior Fantastic, Warrior Fantastic, Creature Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, Creature Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, Creature Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, Creature Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, and and and and Guardians of Tomorrow. Guardians of Tomorrow. Guardians of Tomorrow. Guardians of Tomorrow. She is the She is the She is the She is the editor of two DAW collections editor of two DAW collections editor of two DAW collections editor of two DAW collections , Sol's Children , Sol's Children , Sol's Children , Sol's Children and and and and Historical Hauntings, Historical Hauntings, Historical Hauntings, Historical Hauntings, and and and and a CD anthology a CD anthology a CD anthology a CD anthology: Carnival. : Carnival. : Carnival. : Carnival. When she's not writing or editing (which isn't When she's not writing or editing (which isn't When she's not writing or editing (which isn't When she's not writing or editing (which isn't very often), she plays war games and role-playing games, visits museums, very often), she plays war games and role-playing games, visits museums, very often), she plays war games and role-playing games, visits museums, very often), she plays war games and role-playing games, visits museums, pretends to garden, tugs on old socks with her two dogs, and attempts to put pretends to garden, tugs on old socks with her two dogs, and attempts to put pretends to garden, tugs on old socks with her two dogs, and attempts to put pretends to garden, tugs on old socks with her two dogs, and attempts to put a dent in her towering "to-be-read" stack of books a dent in her towering "to-be-read" stack of books a dent in her towering "to-be-read" stack of books a dent in her towering "to-be-read" stack of books . . . .

IT LOOKED wholly unremarkable-this fog-gray box suspended against the glittering darkness of s.p.a.ce.

It possessed none of the technological elegance of its kin, none of the graceful b.u.t.terfly-wing panels or sculpted solar-scoops. No gently curving sections contrasted with the sharp angles of its thick hull. No lights-not that Hoshi had expected any, as the station had been abandoned more than eight months past. No rotating grav-bands or revolving antenna arrays.No beauty to it.

Indeed, there was nothing that made this aging s.p.a.ce station even the slightest bit interesting to look at. Yet, Hoshi p.r.o.nounced it...

"Wonderful."