Ethan of Athos

"Do you wish a final view of the deceased?" Helda inquired of them.

They shook their heads, a middle-aged man among them remarking, "Ye gods, the funeral was enough." He was shushed by a middle-aged woman beside him.

"Do you wish to stay for the interment?" asked Helda, formally and unpressingly.

"Absolutely not," said the middle-aged man. At a look of embarrassed disapproval from his female companion, he added firmly, "I saw Grandpa through five replacement operations. I did my bit when he was alive. Watching him get ground up to feed the flowers won't add a thing to my karma, love."

The family filed out, and the ecotech returned to her original aggressively businesslike demeanor. She stripped the corpse—it was an exceedingly ancient man—and took the clothes to the corridor, where presumably someone had lingered to collect them. Returning, she checked a data file, do

Helda unsealed a large hatch and swung it down, and shifted the body on its catch basin onto it. She clamped the catch basin to the i

While Helda was occupied in the other end of the room, Ethan risked a whisper. "What's happening in there?"

"Breaking the body down to its components and returning the biomass to the Station ecosystem," Qui

His carrot had turned to lead in his stomach. "You're going to let them put Okita—"

"Maybe I'll turn vegetarian for the next month," she whispered. "Sh."

Helda glanced irritably at them. "What are you hanging about for?" She focused on Ethan. "Have you no work to do?"

Qui

"Oh," said the ecotech. She sniffed, hitched up one sharp, bony shoulder, and turned away to tap a new code into the degrader's control panel. Stamping back with a hand tractor, she lifted the top carton and locked it into position on the hatch. It flipped up; there was a slithery rumble from within the machine. The hatch flopped down again, and the first carton was replaced by the second. Then the third. Ethan held his breath.

The third carton emptied with a startling thump.

"What the hell… ?" muttered the ecotech, and reached for the seals. Commander Qui

"Look, is that a cockroach?" cried Ethan loudly in what he prayed might pass for a Stationer accent.

Helda whirled. "Where?"

Ethan pointed to a corner of the room away from the degrader. Both the ecotech and the commander went to inspect. Helda got down on her hands and knees and ran a finger worriedly along a seam between floor and wall. "Are you sure?" she said.

"Just a movement," he murmured, "in the corner of my eye…"

She frowned fiercely at him. "More like a damned hangover in the corner of your eye. Slovenly muscle-brain."

Ethan shrugged helplessly.

"Better call Infestation Control anyway," she muttered. She hit the start button on the degrader on her way to the comconsole, and jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. "Out."

They complied immediately. Floating down the corridor Commander Qui

"No, it was just the first thing that popped into my head. She seemed like the sort of person who is bothered by bugs."

"Ah." Her eyes crinkled in amused approval.

He paused. "Do you have a roach problem here?"

"Not if we can help it. Among other things, they've been known to eat the insulation off electrical wiring. You think about fire on a space station a bit, and you'll see why you got her attention."

She checked her chronometer. "Ye gods, we've got to get this float pallet and canister back to Docking Bay 32. Newts, newts, who will buy my newts … ? Ah ha, the very thing."

She made a sharp right turn into a cross corridor, nearly dumping Ethan, and speeded up. After a moment she brought the pallet to a halt before a door marked "Cold Storage Access 297-C."

Inside they found a counter, and a plump, bored-looking young woman on duty eating little fried morsels of something from a bag.

"I'd like to rent a vacuum storage locker," Qui

"This is for Stationers, ma'am," the counter girl began, after a hungry, wistful look at the mercenary woman's face. "If you go up to Transients' Lounge, you can get—"

Qui

The counter girl glanced at the ID. "Ah. Oh." She shuffled off, and returned a few minutes later with a big plastic-lined case.

The mercenary woman signed and thumbprinted, and turned to Ethan. "Let's lay them in nicely, eh? Impress the cook, when he thaws 'em out."

They packed the newts in neat rows. The counter girl, looking on, wrinkled her nose, then shrugged and returned to her comconsole where the holovid was displaying something that looked suspiciously more like play than work.

They were just in time, Ethan gauged; some of their amphibian victims were begi

"They won't suffer long, will they?" Ethan asked, looking back over his shoulder.

Commander Qui

"'Things,'" echoed Ethan. "Quite. I think you and I should have a talk about 'things'." His mouth set mulishly.

Hers turned up on one side. "Heart to heart," she agreed cordially.

CHAPTER SIX

After sneaking the float pallet back to its docking bay, Commander Qui

She at any rate seemed to feel he had been successfully smuggled to some kind of home base, for she relaxed visibly when the hostel room doors sealed shut behind them, kicking off her boots and stretching and diving for the room service console.

"Here. Real beer." She handed him a foaming tumbler, after pausing to squirt something into it from her Dendarii issue medkit. "Imported. '