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  Threshold, which normally housed about a quarter million souls out here between Mars and Jupiter, had swelled to capacity with the influx of Muslim pilgrims in for the hajj and the attendees of Croft's high-voltage diplomatic conference.

  Croft's office hadn't minced words: Keep things calm at all costs. The Muslims were likely to take any odd event as a sign, and any dead Relic might become a martyr.

  So Reice had to find a way to finesse this antique craft— and, if possible, whoever, if anyone, was in it—home safe and sound, according to regulations.

  By the book. The book allowed Reice to shoot in self-defense, however. He was considering going aboard the ship and shooting whoever, if anyone, was alive inside, just to simplify matters, when a squawk came over his com and he found himself listening to a voice from the distant past with what sounded like an American accent.

  If the pilot of the craft ahead had found Reice's hailing frequency, then he'd found the tug's and the backup cruiser's. Worse, he was sounding rational: a U.S. Space Command pilot, identifying his craft as X-99A. Somebody would look that up in the history books back home on Threshold.

  Reice cracked his knuckles in one flex of interlaced fingers. No use shooting the ship out of hand, not with a recorded contact to explain.

  Probably no use shooting the pilot, either.

  The pilot of the X-99A, a Captain South, was claiming power plant trouble.

  Before he responded to the Relic directly, Reice called in to Threshold Terminal's Port Authority. When he got to the traffic controller he wanted, he said, "Jack, we don't know what this guy's mental state is, or what shape his ship's really in. I'm going to ask him if he'll shut down his power plant—everything but emergency life support—and let us tow him in cold. That way, we minimize the risk of this antique going bang in our docking bay. But towing in somebody who doesn't want to be towed is no picnic. . . . Got a better idea?"

  The controller came back with a laconically delivered set of instructions, including a docking bay designator: "They really want to look at this ship, Lieutenant. I'll clear the way for you. Keep me advised. You're clear to dock anytime after 1800."

  "Gee thanks," said Reice. That gave him more than enough slack, timewise. He could sit out here and argue with the Relic for an hour or two, and still make his window if this Captain South would agree to the tow.

  Then it occurred to Reice that he didn't have to wait for South to agree to the tow, and a slow smile spread over his dark, sharp-featured face. He called the tug and said, "Begin making the derelict fast. I'll do the rest."

  And he called his backup: "Sergeant, let's have you on this baby's tail. It gives us any trouble, put a five-pounder up its ass. If we have to, we'll tow it in dead."

  A five-pound lead slug would immobilize the power plant, but not cook off a fusion plant, which this X-99A had, if Reice remembered his history of spaceflight correctly.

  Only then, feeling much cheered, did he call the Relic pilot and say, "Threshold Consolidated Security vessel Blue Tick to X-99A. Lieutenant Reice here. Captain South, if you'll shut down your power plant, we'll tow you in to Threshold with our tug, here. We can't mate with your air lock." That was a lie. "It'll only take a few hours, and you'll be safe in the Trust Territory VIP lounge."

  X-99A's com sputtered back: "I dunno anything about this Trust Territory. And I don't need to be towed. I need to talk to somebody from U.S. Space Command. If you can't manage that, how about you just escort me where somebody can ..."

  Oh boy, this was going to be a long day, after all. At least this South didn't sound too crazy. "X-99A? Look, South, Space Command's consolidated now. You've been away a long time. We're taking you to the Trust Territory of Threshold, population approximately two-hundred fifty thousand souls, including Sol Base Blue. We call it the Terminal. The local government's administered by USA/UNE—United States of America and United Nations of Earth, jointly. TIT is policed by UNE Peacekeeping, Consolidated Space Command, and Threshold ConSec—Threshold Consolidated Security. I'm your ConSec representative, Captain South, and the officer in charge of your case until we get you into the loving arms of the Stalk—Threshold—bureaucracy. That make you feel better, Captain? Just like old times, I bet."

  He hoped it did. The only way that Joseph South, Captain, U.S. Space Command, could talk to anybody in his direct chain of command was by going back in time, a service that nobody in the twenty-fifth century could provide.

  There was a long, long pause before Captain South answered. "Yeah, okay, I get your point, Blue Tick. But I still don't need a tow. Why can't—"

  "Look, Relic, we don't want a malfunctioning fusion power plant in our docking bay, or maybe you don't realize we're not going to give you a parking slot in nice empty space where, if you blow yourself to bits, you won't hurt anyone."

  The tug was almost alongside the X-99A. The backup was already in position, sighting up the X-99A's butt. In a couple of minutes, the situation was going to degenerate markedly—as soon as the captain of the Relic craft heard the grapples hit his hull, if not before.

  And South wasn't responding.

  "South? X-99A, this is Blue Tick. Do you copy?"

  No reply.

  Maybe the Relic pilot had some sort of weapon aboard after all. Reice's palms began to sweat. For the first time since he'd sighted the antique craft, Reice's own safety, and that of his ship, became a focus of his concern. He uncrossed his legs and stretched on his flight deck. His fingers trailed over a panel above his head, touching emergency recording and broadcasting procedures to life.

  Then again he called his traffic controller: "X-99A doesn't want to be towed. We're trying it anyway. You've got constant feed." He got off the circuit.

  The Tick itself was now on priority alert. She would defend herself against any weapon that matched weapon parameters in her banks, including an attempt by the X-99A to ram her.

  More than that, Reice couldn't do. So he got back on the horn to Joe South, trying to convince the crazy Relic that it would be better to be towed in willingly than unwillingly.

  "... willingly means, Captain, that we don't put a slug up your ass. Unwillingly means that you're coming in with five pounds of lead in your tail or your power plant kills you while we're trying to incapacitate your ship—with our apologies, of course."

  "Screw you," said the Relic pilot.

  But, at the last possible moment, the Blue Tick's sensors told him that South had shut his systems, including the power plant, down, all but emergency life support.

  Sucker didn't want to die, that was something. And he was smart enough, though that didn't prove he was sane. With the fusion plant shut down, the chances of any mishap resulting from a KKD impacting the rear of the X-99A were nil.

  As a matter of fact, the need for a KKD was nil.

  Reice called the backup cruiser and told him to follow along, ready to shoot if X-99A powered up.

  Then he called the tug and confirmed his previous orders, keeping in contact during the whole grappling operation.

  Then he called South again, but nobody answered.

  Maybe emergency life support didn't include ship-to-ship communications. Or maybe the captain was just sulking.

  Or maybe the Relic was another psycho, like the last one, running around inside that ancient ship trying to turn it into a fusion bomb or planning to ram the cruiser or find some other way to make Reice disobey orders and lose captain, ship, or the much-desired low profile this mission was supposed to be keeping.

  Reice kept trying to contact the X-99A and her captain long after the tug started hauling her into port. All he got from the Relic ship was maddening silence.

  Maddening.

  The X-99A was cold as a grave to all sensors, except for emergency life-support readings and a heat signature from one human body that could be dead and still giving off readings, if South had killed himself in some crazy gesture.

  Again, Reice tried to raise the captain of the X-99A.

  Ag
ain, he got no answer.

  So he called the data in, personally, to Mickey Croft's office and waited for a response, even though he was sending a constant data feed up through channels.

  He hated to do that. He really did. But it was Croft's office staff who'd insisted on picking up the Relic ship in the first place. If Reice had had his way, they'd have let it go on by Threshold. Its primitive astronics would never have picked up something it wasn't looking for.

  Then the X-99A wouldn't have been anybody's problem until it crashed and burned in the electromagnetic shield around the Earth, or suffered some handy mishap in the months it would have taken to get that far, or Captain South tried his high-handed tactics on Consolidated Space Command and got himself and his ancient ship blown to component atoms.

  But you couldn't tell Croft's office anything. And you couldn't go on the record with suggestions contrary to Threshold policy. Ever.

  Trust Territory of Threshold made the rules out here. Captain Joseph South was going to find that out soon enough.

  CHAPTER 3

  Some Days ...

  No matter how you try, or how good you are at your job, some days are just magnets for events. Whatever action's around, it'll surface on one of those days. You'll get a block of time where everything's nice and controllable, smooth and low-key. Then you got a day like today, when everything that Mickey Croft and staff could do on full power wasn't enough to keep things on an even keel.

  So it followed that today would be the day that some ConSec lieutenant decided to tow in a Relic from humanity's past, whether that Relic wanted to be towed in or not.

  Michael Croft was Secretary General of the Trust Territory of Threshold, therefore human rights were high on his list of prioritized concerns. All he needed was for some Threshold Civil Liberties lawyer—of which they had a surfeit right now, because of the conference—to decide that the Relic's rights were being violated, or decide to make himself a star by choosing to define the gray area in which the rights of Relics currently existed.

  Croft turned from his littered desk to the window behind him, looking out over Blue Mid, and Central Stalk's administrative district, and "down" on Blue South. If Croft unwound his lanky person from his chair and went to stand by the window, with his forehead pressed to it, he could justn glimpse a triangle of star-dusted space from his office. Everywhere else, the Central Stalk and its proliferation of modules occluded his view of the stars.

  It was easy to forget, on days like this, that he wasn't working in Manhattan. But he wasn't. Michael Croft was a forty-five-year-old widower frustrated by an unstoppable proliferation of red tape in his attempts to be a "good bureaucrat" (not, to his way of thinking, a contradiction in terms). He'd been born on Threshold, schooled at Exeter, Oxford, and Harvard, and migrated back to his home when the UNE shifted its headquarters out here, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

  Croft had the long bones and apparent fragility of the space-bred—a fine, horse face; lank, thinning hair as pale as the rest of him. His ancestors had been "Air Barons," who'd mined the moon and asteroids and gotten rich supplying the expanding need for liquid oxygen. Latter-day blue bloods such as Mickey Croft seldom were idle: his fortune was only four generations old and the responsibilities that went with opening the stars were his real inheritance.

  The only true luxury, in his own terms, that Mickey Croft possessed was a psychometric sampler-modeler, which allowed him to create a simulacrum of a person and interact with it, interrogate it, pose problems to it, and practice his own diplomatic performance on it.

  But he couldn't use the modeler on the Relic, even if he'd had the leisure to try: you had to have data to model a personality. There was almost no data on the Relic. And there was no time to be concerned with the Relic, one Captain South, and the possible problems he represented until they became real problems.

  Not today. Not with Threshold full of confreres from the diplomatic community and touchy Muslims who'd rather be on Earth for their religious ceremony, but couldn't get any closer than Threshold by UNE decree—a decree that Croft had helped create.

  Staring blindly at his window, but not out of it, Croft pulled on his long nose and touched a button on the curve of his chair's arm. "Get me Remson."

  His assistant's voice came immediately from the grillwork on his desk. "Remson's out with the Muslim VIP group, sir." The young voice was vainly trying to hide its wonder that his Fearless Leader had forgotten something.

  "Get him for me anyway, Dodd. And see if you can postpone my meeting with the head mullah and his daughter . . . until, say, tomorrow morning." On a different day, things would go better.

  "Ah, sir, they're coming up from security now. I just had confirmation."

  "Well, that's that. Still, have Remson check in with me. Patch him through whenever. I want to talk to him about this Relic mess. And you be ready to squire the mullah—" Croft spun his chair and looked at his calendar screen. "—Beni Forat, and his daughter, Dini, on a quick tour of the offices if Remson calls while they're here."

  Dodd said, "My pleasure, sir. Nobody—not Lieutenant Reice or anybody else—has called with anything else about the Relic, sir. ..."

  "Let's hope nobody does." Croft toggled off the intercom and began clearing his desk for the Forat meeting.

  When Dodd buzzed him, he expected to be told that the Forats were outside or Remson was on the line.

  Instead, young Dodd said, "It's Riva Lowe from Customs, sir. She says she has to talk to you privately, it's urgent."

  Now there was a sullen tone in the youngster's voice that conjured up an image of the fat-faced boy whose father had been a friend of Croft's father, complete with set jaw and petulant mouth drawn tight.

  "Put her on my vid," Croft said, and braced for whatever the woman had to say that needed a secure line.

  The vid cleared to an image of Riva Lowe, whose feral magnetism never translated well to video, and who was so intensely troubled that her face wasn't pretty at all right now, just haughty and deep-eyed and fierce: "Mickey, I've got something so sensitive I'm not even going to chance describing it this way. You've got to come down here."

  "No I don't. Customs is your barrel, you roll it around. I've got more on my plate today than ten people could handle, and two Muslims from Medina on their way up here right now—heavy hitters." He saw her frown but didn't pause for breath. "But I'm glad you called. Remson's got a tour group on his hands, and I need somebody to take charge of Reice's Relic."

  "Whose what?"

  "Reice—Lieutenant Reice of ConSec is towing in a Relic. Meet them at the docking bay. Avoid attorneys. Keep it civilized. Bury the whole thing in paperwork until the conference is over and the pilgrims leave, and I'll take you to dinner with your whole staff, anywhere you say."

  "Give me your modeler for a couple days, and it's a deal," said Riva Lowe, who might have been his type ten years ago, before he'd fallen in love and gotten married and lost his wife in a quick and intense tutorial on what emotions can do to a man. Riva, quick on the uptake, was no longer looking for aid. But not yet finished with him: her face had changed; now it was canny and somehow bold. She brushed back a wisp of brown hair that had fallen over her forehead. "And give me carte blanche with the unexplicated problem I called about, as well."

  "It's a deal," Croft said airily. "Just let me know as we go along if I'm in danger, personally or professionally, because of anything you're doing with my authority."

  "I told you we can't talk about it on the comlink," she said, and again the sharpness was there. "I'm assuming this make-no-waves mode of yours will continue to take priority for, say, the next forty-eight hours or so."

  "Indeed it will. Give me a hint."

  "Come see me, big fella." She nearly smiled.

  "I'll try, but there's no chance of it before twenty-one hundred hours, so I'll call first."

  "By then," Riva Lowe told him solemnly, "we'll be committed."

  "Terrific. I must say, this mystery is
truly lightening up my afternoon."

  "You know where I am, sir. And you have a meeting, so I won't keep you. . . . I'm rather going to enjoy exercising my new power." Now she did smile, but it wasn't a fetching smile. It was a grim one. "Bye."

  She rang off only seconds before Dodd told him his appointment had arrived.

  The mullah was in full, archaic dress, but his daughter, Dini, was in a modern version of it that made Croft's pulse pound: Dini Forat was a breathtakingly beautiful, gravity-raised teenager with amazing muscle tone clearly obvious through a translucent robe, under which she wore a form-hugging purple one-piece that Croft would see in his dreams for years.

  How could a fifteen-year-old have the body of a twenty-five-year-old temptress? And the hungry lips of destruction?

  Her father had a beard and a turban and Croft was hard-pressed to penetrate his accent or keep his mind on what the father had to say. Dini's hip-long black curls kept tangling in his thoughts.

  Squiring this pair on a tour of the facility was going to be a mixed blessing, but one that Croft suddenly decided he couldn't very well avoid.

  The thing about this sort of day, when too much was happening, was that good things overcrowded your schedule, as well as bad things. Progress could be made with these two, if Croft could convince the father that keeping the faithful on Threshold was to everyone's benefit. And if he could do that, Croft could get on to the dicier subjects he needed to bring up with Medina's head mullah: the human rights problems that the UNE saw in Medina's slavelike underclass, and the question of defining "human" in relation to that underclass.

  Human/subhuman/alien rights abuse issues were at the center of Croft's conference, and the center of his concerns. The sect that ruled on Medina considered all nonbelievers as soulless infidels, and thus subhuman. The indigenous species on Medina, and its bioengineered bodyguard class, complicated the problem.