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anyway.”
    Shasti
looked at him without speaking for some seconds.   He could almost feel the distance grow.   “What have you gotten yourself into?”
    “Meet
me at the ship in an hour and I’ll fill you in.”
    For a
terrible second, he thought she might say no.  
    “Should
I bring anyone?” she asked.
    Fenaday
thought for a second.   He had high
turnover among officers and crew for one reason or another.   He didn’t trust most of them.   “Do you know where the Exec went?”
    “To
jail,” she replied.   “There was a
manslaughter charge waiting for him here.   Evidently Romola isn’t his real name.”
    “How
distressing,” he replied.   “Just come
yourself then.”
    She
nodded, giving him her most enigmatic look.   The screen faded.
    Fenaday
leaned back with a sigh.   Shasti was
in.   His odds of survival had just
doubled.   Unfortunately, twice zero was
still zero.
    *****
    An
hour after his call, Shasti Rainhell’s two-meter-plus shadow fell on the gantry
leading to the silent Sidhe .   The frigate lay in a takeoff cradle, secured
by the Marsport Authority.   Shasti gave
them a wide berth, having already passed a security checkpoint and as always,
wary of police.   A few dock workers
labored on the cradle or the ship.   One,
she noted, appeared to be watching her sidelong.   Men often did.   It was not unusual for one to be
surreptitious about it.   Her size and
obvious strength kept catcalls stilled, but she sensed other intentions and
trusted her instincts.  
    Shasti
paused on the catwalk leading to the ship.   Leaning back against the slim metal rail she looked up, pretending to
study the ship.   Not that she needed
to.   The vessel had been her home since
her escape from Dua-Denlenn cutthroats.
    Sidhe sat with her four hundred and
eighty meter, blood-red hull engulfed in the launch cradle’s embrace.   Wings, set far back on the hull, held two
black Wildcat fighters.   Far over her head, hung the turrets for the
chain guns.   Sidhe’s big punch, the mass acceleration driver, ran the length of
the horizontal interior axis of the ship.   Her crew of two-hundred fifty was largely
dispersed through Mars by now.  
    The
spot she’d stopped at allowed her to study her watcher from the corner of her
eye.   He was using some hand tools to
work on the scaffolding, bolting and unbolting the same piece of decking.   Confed
police , she thought, and that means
big trouble .   Maybe coming was a
mistake.   What the hell has Fenaday done now?   And why do I keep staying to save his ass?   
    When
she had seen enough of the man’s face to remember it, Shasti started back up
the gantry.   A personnel lift took her up
to the main gangway.   She used her ship’s
officer pass to enter the secured airlocks and boarded the turbovator.   The door to the spade-shaped bridge opened.
    *****
    Fenaday
looked up from his command chair as Shasti walked onto the bridge and cocked an
eyebrow at him.   He didn’t rise or reach
out a hand.   Shasti hated to be
touched.   For a while, he’d thought her
uninterested in men, until she proved otherwise one spectacular night.   
    “I’ve
checked the ship out,” he said.   “I’ve
got every anti-bugging and white noise device we have working,” he said, “I
think it’s secure.   No guarantees.”
    “In
this or anything else in life,” she replied.   “I assume you didn’t bring me here for a sparring rematch.”   She dropped into a bridge chair at her
security station with an easy grace.
    “No,
no rematch,” he replied.   It took him ten
minutes to lay out the details of the meetings with Duna.
    “Enshar?   Why would you even consider this voyage?” she
asked, looking at him as if he’d gone mad.
    “I
had another visitor later, a man, calling himself Mandela.   He’s with Confed Intelligence.   He knows about the day we met.   Someone talked.”  
    Shasti
did not yell, scream or curse the unfairness of the