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made a W!
    “A message!” Evans said.
    Javik glanced to his side at the co-pilot’s seat, focusing for a moment on Evans’s robust chest. It seemed automatic to look there, with the eyes homing in like smart missiles on their target. This time, however, Javik looked away quickly before she caught him.
    He heard Evans rustle, and sensed her looking at him.
    Javik’s face felt hot. He fumbled in his jumpsuit for the titanium pillbox. Leaning away to conceal the box, he selected a brown sex-sub pill and a clear water capsule. Hurriedly, he swallowed the pills and replaced the tin. Cool water molecules expanded in his stomach. He waited for the sexual sublimation to take hold.
    “What’d ya take there?” Evans asked.
    Javik did not answer or meet her gaze. Closing his eyes, he felt a warm, satisfied feeling soak into his bones. Inaudibly, he sighed.
    Evans snickered. It was not a loud snicker. But Javik heard it just the same.
    He wiped beads of perspiration from his brow.
    “Warm, Captain?” she asked, noting a scar on the bridge of Javik’s aquiline nose. His deeply set blue eyes darted around like those of a cornered animal.
    Feigning interest in a digital weather screen, Javik cursed himself for the continuing moments of weakness. Evans is a transsexual! he thought. If the guys ever heard I dabbled like that, I’d be the laughingstock of the . . .
    Evans rolled to a midships porthole to get a better view of the comet. Javik pictured her attractive features in his mind’s eye: soft, creamy skin, with smooth, rounded cheeks and a small nose that turned up slightly at the tip. Long black lashes and dark eyebrows overhung the eyes.
    “We are . . . not . . . your . . . garbage dump!” Evans read, squinting to read the skywriting. “That same message for more than eight months! What does it mean?” She turned to look at Blanquie.
    Blanquie winked at her.
    The gaze of Evans’s large olive green eyes darted away like a timid fawn under pursuit by a buck.
    “I think I know!” Wizzy said, in a tiny voice. “I think I know!”
    “Shutup, Wizzy,” Javik snapped.
    “Well!” Wizzy huffed.
    Javik watched the Great Comet speed off into deep space. A parallel with guerrilla warfare struck him: This comet was employing hit and run tactics. But Javik sensed the comet did not have to flee. It was playing games with the AmFeds.
    If that is Sid, Javik thought, bemused, he’s getting even with the bureaucrats now . . . making them run around . . . embarrassing the bastards.
    “Damn, that thing’s fast!” Blanquie said. “Just a pinprick of orange light now!”
    Rolling to Wizzy’s side, Javik spit out a terse command: “Come with me.”
    But Wizzy remained on the sill of the porthole. “Just a minute,” he said, glowing red. His voice became hollow and faltering: “I sense trouble ahead . . . Davis Droids . . . signal intermittent.”
    “Davis Droids,” Blanquie said. He flipped the selector on his CRT screen. “Here it is,” he said. “Directly in the target of Abercrombie’s garbage shots. Not much land mass there. Twenty million kilometers this side of Guna One, in the same Aluminum Starfield with the Guna planets.”
    “Wizzy,” Javik said. “I want you—”
    “Begin searching for garbage in the droids,” Wizzy said.
    “Is that meckie an official part of this crew?” Blanquie asked.
    Irked, Javik snatched Wizzy from the sill and moto-shoed aft.
    “See here!” Wizzy protested. “Put me down!”
    “Shush!” Javik said. He rolled into the bathroom and slammed the door. “Keep it down,” Javik husked, “Or by God, I’ll flush you into outer space!” He held Wizzy over the unlidded toilet.
    The gravitonics system whirred noisily here. A wall plaque beneath a Patterman gravitonics indicator read:
    CAUTION!
    Do not use bathroom
    if gravitonics
    inoperable
    Seeing the toilet, Wizzy understood Javik’s threat. He almost told Javik to go ahead, but reconsidered. It was cold out there. And a long