It was two standard days after the killing of Kaal Dol before they cut the Strip Engine for system manoeuvring. There was a full review. It took place in Vital Void’s secure suite, cartwheeling around the periphery of Kakan High Orbit Dock as Kalindy XII was being Replenished. Kakan had the first proper orbital berths the liner had encountered since Inskerelleryon and the supported, indeed, marginally superior facilities, Kakan being a somewhat more important world. Vital Void were traditionally strong in this region of the galaxy (so close to the principal ship yards at Videroth, where Kalindy XII had been built) and the company had the best offices here. Supra Light and Trans Galactic owned menial satellites by comparison. The Vital Void Booker took most of the business and gloried in state free fall chambers thirty meters in diameter.

The room they were in now was somewhat smaller but luxuriously appointed. Purple tapestries drifted lightly round the walls. There was a small altar with the traditional Shipping Line Icons. Draught protected candles burned to St. Einstein-Lorentz, St, Trama and St. Ching the Terrified but Quella had the feeling that the traditional elements were only there for form’s sake so that visitors were not offended rather than for the Booker’s own spiritual benefit. There was a perfunctory character to the workmanship. Rather more significant was the giant woven likeness of Che Manboosa, the well known scowl of the ex president of Toltaltek sitting uneasily beside a still larger Vital Void logo and an elegantly carved wooden map of Kakan.

The Booker was a young woman, lounging on a hydraulically slung couch opposite the curtain. She was wearing Vital Void formal uniform with the green and yellow sash of the new melanists. Not many years ago, new melanism had been confined to the still infamous ‘creeping enclaves’ on JaParys, the frontier worlds of Ocar and Zauli and the triple Alliance of Toltaltek, Dova and Fuleen. After the assassination of Che Manboosa, the brief interregnum and the subsequent popular revolt which restored a revitalised new melanist government to Toltaltek there was a Confederacy wide upsurge in all new melanist thinking. This achieved its first practical result with the ‘Katpolar Conversion’ and had subsequently swept the galaxy. New melanism was currently the most vigorous regular political movement (excluding the unknown and illegal strength of the Quiet People). There was a move to make Che Manboosa an official saint of the social revelation at the coming Conclave on Earth. It would probably succeed.

Quella was on her own. Le Grant was supervising the tourists on Kakan and Souveroon was overseeing the Replenishment. They had already discussed the circumstances of the duel, Vega’s escape from the demolition team of Nu and the subsequent thetan reaction. Like the omicrons before them, the thetans had taken the death of their fellow remarkably calmly. They accepted that it was an unfortunate accident, placed no blame on Vital Void and would trans ship from here to Vapastatia at the company’s expense. They would take the body but Annaba didn’t want the duelling machine.

“Keep the thing in your own stores,” the thetan said. “I can’t explain why but I think Dol would like that. It would please his morbid humour.” And so Quella had the instrument locked away.

For a catastrophe it had passed remarkably smoothly. The Booker reached into a wall pouch.

“Take a look at this.”

Quella deftly caught the news scroll which was tumbling towards her. it was the local English language version of Confederacy Contax ‘Big News’. At first her attention was drawn to the first page story ‘Montgomery suspected in High Gorge outrage!’. Apparently the Quiet People had bombed a well known rho hotel the previous day, killing sixty three. It was a typical piece of pointless violence with the misguided idea of reinforcing human culture as the only true ‘regular’ culture (with the old meaning of the world). ‘Montgomery’ was one of three almost mythical agents, real identity unknown, who together with ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Alexander’ formed the field agent’s ‘general triumvirate’ under ‘Gaia’ the code name of the Quiet People’s main spokesperson. Every time an action was claimed by the Quiet People these days it was sooner or later attributed to one or another of the ‘general triumvirate’. In actual fact if they even existed as real individuals it was highly unlikely that one of these super agents would be bothered with such a small scale affair as this bombing. Provincial planetary systems always overrated their own importance.

“Not that, further in.”

Quella fiddled with the unfamiliar local control set and took a moment or two to locate the central feature. Several full expansion pages were devoted to the story of Kalindy XII.

“That’s how great the interest is in your ship and passengers. It’s a couple of days old but your pet gossip hounds haven’t wasted much time. I won’t keep you in suspense. This is today’s.”

The captain barely had time to contract and seal the scroll she was reading before she had to field the incoming one the Booker had thrown to her. The headline read.

“Cruise of death! Second passenger dies on ill fated Kalindy. Full Moviegram Inside!”

The story went on to sensationalise Vital Void’s troubles and to tell of the ‘luckless liner’ with lurid adjectives and journalistic hyperbole which made the earlier feature seem like a work of literature. The highlight was the full photonic record of the duel captured by their reporter. Even now, Quella knew, the story would be speeding to Confederacy Contax Vast Holme computers on Tyrone, from where in diluted form it would spread through ‘Big News’ throughout the galaxy.

“I hate to think what this is doing to our image,” the Booker said, “and you haven’t raised this with Mr. Big Eye yet?” She sounded incredulous. The fact was that Quella knew the deltan was fully informed. As a part of Vital Void’s Centrum it was the only one of the passengers to have a priority access to the ship’s computers almost equal to her own. It was true that in all other respects it had requested that it be treated like any other passenger, but not in this one. To have denied Mr. Big Eye of computer input would in any case be almost like depriving it of a sense, so accustomed were the deltan race to that mode of living. Mr. Big Eye could request an interview with her at any time and though she had expected it to do so after the death of Kaal Dol it had yet to ask her. The last time she had gone to talk to it after L’Rrantora’s demise it had been somewhat dismissive. Nevertheless she knew that she would have to see it soon for more reasons that just her own peace of mind. In truth she had been procrastinating. “Leave Mr. Big Eye to me,” she answered somewhat sharply. “Vital Void’s reputation is your concern but I can offer you no advice. I have a ship to run.

“Now to turn to other matters. I have here some papers from the regional branch at Fer-Verrilah presenting their case to be elevated to Booker status. I’d like to discuss this with you.”

It was not a propitious time to raise the matter but against a hostile Booker at least it put her on neutral ground. Afterwards she wished that she hadn’t used the argument in that way. By failing to win over a mildly antagonistic company representative a good case might now be lost. It was an unprofessional attitude.

Quella did ‘drop to mass’ on Kakan but she didn’t stay long; a brief visit to the ‘supernova village’ on the Frai Heights sufficed. The collection of luxury hotels and public clear mountain observatories perched precariously on a dramatic rock shelf had been built specially for the Gaftiz supernova, an event which Kakan had used to good advantage in raising its local tourist profile. As early as it was in the tour, Quella was already feeling jaded. It was, she thought, verging on a travesty of the truth to say that they had visited Kakan when they had only played in a small part of the Emquav region. She was starting to feel that the only decent way to experience a planet was to do as they had on Fer Verrilah; to be forced to endure a long over land trek and in the process soak up the gravity, air and soil in a kind of pilgrimage. Anything less was bound to be superficial and ultimately unsatisfying.

From Kakan the tour swept broadly away from Aquazyra and in the direction of Gaftiz. They were moving from the contemporary Confederacy borders into an old established part of its domains. True, it was something of a backwater these last few millennia but it contained worlds which had never been out of the Confederacy for as long as their recorded history ran. Some of the oldest known Confederacy systems were located in this region of space, three of which (though with no real proof) called themselves Origin Worlds. (The Confederacy went back much further than its records but most prehistorians now thought that it had probably moved from spinward and coreward of Jamix, so these claims were not taken too seriously).

Kakan to Boverdon; Boverdon to Pyritt; Pyritt to Araquse and Ciraquse the unique double planet culture; Ciraquse to Vrondit; Vrondit to Manaminikyne; Manaminikyne to Videroth (Vital Void’s own ship yard double sun system); Videroth to Staal; Staal to Exkave (one of the so called ‘Origin Worlds’ with a long archaeological history); Exkave to Torpintox; Torpintox to Dosa. As they moved onwards the regular and rho populations gradually diminished. Lambda and to a lesser extent sigma were the predominant interstellar races here.

Seventeen Dopplers out from Torpintox, Quella was on her own in her quarters. The memory of those infernal turquoise jungles under a baking blue sun where the green Cat Thing stalked the swarm of Snapper Things, the Snapper things stalked the Creeper Leaper and the Creeper Leaper stalked the green Cat Thing was still fresh in her mind. It was a fascinating and repulsive example of non transitive predation and very popular with the tourists. She flicked on the monitor and called up her private diary space. A few more notes on Zaralova Justa’s reaction to the Torpintox wilderness ceremony and she closed the files. It was time for a quick survey of the ship.

Channel Twenty Seven - Prince Falym. It was a wide panoramic view of the royal estate shot from the sky axis. The scene was chaotic. Every one of the prince’s followers seemed to be roving all over his park land and the microphones picked up a variety of calls as they hailed one another. Close to the border between the common land to stern and the private estate a large but crude looking fence had been erected and at first Quella didn’t know if it was intended to keep someone or something out or in. It must have been constructed during her last shift on the Reference Bridge. She cut to another camera at ground level and was rewarded by a close up of three Iron Sun’s warriors walking to the top of a small hillock by the stream. They were all armed with lethal looking needle guns of the type Vega had used to rescue her. The side arms were ornamented in holsters painted the luminous blue of the royal family.

“When’s he going to let them go?” one said.

“On the hour he says, but he’ll probably let them out earlier just to try and catch out those as aren’t ready and make for better sport. That’s why we’re going here. We’ll get ‘em when they go for the wood. Some of ‘em are bound to come this way.”

The men were taking up positions behind a stand of New Patagonian Cactus Bushes as she sought a close up of Falym’s mansion. Five cages were lined up in a row on the obsidian flagstones that paved the formal gardens. They were fine wire mesh cuboids about two metres in all dimensions and inside each one several dark forms somewhere between the size and shape of terriers and parquills heaved restlessly about. Two men stood behind the cages smoking. Even as she watched a senior officer came up and said something below the level of the microphone Quella had locked onto the scene. One by one the soldiers released catches and flung open the front of the cages. At first the captive animals refused to move but when the men began hitting the cages they lolloped out into the open. As the sensed freedom the beasts were suddenly galvanised and with remarkable peed shot away towards the bow, accompanied by exultant shouts from their erstwhile captors. “The hunt is on!” Quella heard one of them call in triumph as she shut down her screens.

She triggered a reserve communication line. Le Grant was off duty so it was the acting chief steward Carl Durranti who answered her questions, the scratch log scrolling the best guess text of his words.

“That’s right. Hera has personally approved it.” (That was Hera Goddard, the officer in charge of Environment Control).

“They administered the virus regulator three hours ago. It’s phased at twenty five percent of the breeding cycle and she’s certain they won’t strain the ecology in the meantime. We’ve had ‘em in quarantine since we picked them up at Manaminikyne on Falym’s request.”

“Yes, Mr. Le Grant knows but you’re right it was the prince’s idea”

“Manaminikyne Sabre Rabbits they’re called: small carnivores from the forests and plains of western Alusha. They can give you quite a bite if you’re not careful.”

“Yes, I can patch the monitor ray data through to you if you want.”

“I believe its corsindine.”

This last answer was said with some hesitation and no wonder. If it were true that the Iron Sun’s warriors were using corsindine to poison their needle guns they were playing a very dangerous game indeed. There was no known antidote to the drug and it was almost universally fatal when administered to human subjects. It would be a typical piece of Iron Sun’s bravado to organise a hunting party and arm the participants with weapons as deadly to one another as to their prey. In the confusion of beating, chasing and cornering the Sabre Rabbits a stray shot could quite easily kill the hunter instead of the hunted.

“I want all our people well out of the area,” the captain ordered. “No one is to approach closer than rib cable ‘A’ or the stream between parallels five and six. Have a security team of twenty men with full body armour and needle guns to stun, out stationed to bow of parallel six. If that hunt moves out of Falym’s estate they’ve got to make sure the Sabre Rabbits are downed. We might have to mop up after Falym’s mob.

"And we might have to mop up Falym’s mob too”, she added in a lower voice. “I don’t want anyone taking chances against a snap happy trooper firing corsindine but equally we can’t have one wandering about the ship at will. If they go into forbidden territory use discretion and don’t start a fight you can’t win but make sure they’re taken out quickly and efficiently. Put your best veteran in charge. Do you understand?”

She cut the line with a sigh, wishing Le Grant had informed her of this escapade, but he’d probably thought it wasn’t important enough to worry her about. He wasn’t even on duty to oversee it himself. She’d have to have a word with him about that. She flicked on the cameras. The hunt was now in full hue and cry.

Men crashed through the woods from all directions with no common organisation and very little evidence of co-operation, but they made up for their lack of discipline with enthusiasm. It became clear that the prince had set this sport up as some sort of competition. Prizes were awarded for each kill when a twitching ball of agonised Sabre Rabbit was brought in triumph to the grand pavement before the mansion. The little beasts were ferocious though and surprisingly cunning. They could climb trees, burrow to a certain extent where the soil was softest and easily outrun any of the warriors. More importantly they seemed to sense the danger from the giant aliens who had captured them and in their primitive minds harboured some concept of revenge (or perhaps simply preservation through aggression), for whenever the odds favoured them they would attack rather than flee and the skirmishes that ensued were by no means one sided. Quella watched the three soldiers she had seen earlier, pursue two Sabre Rabbits into the hornbeam woods where a hitherto hidden companion of the fleeing animals dropped from a tree to ambush them. Falling on the neck of the trailing individual it had chewed off his left ear before he could scream for help, and when they shot it and it finally fell there was an atrocious amount of blood splashed all about. The unfortunate victim fainted. A corsindine dart had missed his face by less than a centimetre before piercing the clinging rabbit. The hunt continues but Quella was now aware of someone else watching her. Vis Ulman coughed politely to announce his presence.

“What do you think Vis?” Quella asked him as the barbaric excitement of the killing unfolded before them.

“I’ve seen worse,” the old steward announced, "but it’s not quite the same when they’re paying you to organise it, is it?”

“No it isn’t,” she muttered darkly and was surprised by the older man’s hand on her shoulder.

“Remember your crèche training and Vital Void apprenticeship. What was the most important attitude that we had to learn - the essential difference that must exist between us and the permanently mass bound? We have to tolerate alien morals - control our emotions and learn to suppress the luxury of spurious antipathy and parochial judgements.”

“You’ve certainly not been corrupted by listening to the Quiet People,” Quella joked. “But I always thought the doctrine of performance over evaluation, though fine when you’ve go to do your duty just glosses over a whole morass of moral questions which can’t be avoided forever. To say that you can is bad casuistry even if its good practice. We do need it though, you’re right, and I believe in it. But Falym’s a regular. Aren’t we entitled to judge him by our standards?”

“Entitled by whom?”

But Quella had gone deep enough and was in no real mood to continue with such philosophical questions.

“All right, all right. I know my job. We’re here to entertain the passengers. If there’s no trouble then let them enjoy themselves but I don’t have to watch," and she switched off the monitor.

“I’ll prepare your meal," Ulman said, and departed leaving her in silent contemplation. After a minute or so she returned to the console. There was a memory locked file she wanted to review. Shortly before cutting the Strip Engine to achieve orbit a Boverdon, Quella had visited Mr. Big Eye. She’d edited and then wiped the recorded outputs from Channels six, seven and eight immediately afterwards, holding the result in an identity secure store. Now she reviewed the meeting once again.

Channel seven caught her emerging from the rapid transit terminal at the point where the ground began to rise to the black bulk of the stern fuser shielding. The hull integrity envelope widened underneath into a maze of power machinery controlling Einstein Lorentz manoeuvring, but ahead of her stretched that red twig tight labyrinth Mr. Big Eye loved. Before even setting out the captain had checked that her passenger was close to one of its GalCon generators. It was only three minutes walk from here through a twisting uphill path and channel seven auto focused, tracked and zoomed according to a standard random interest program to follow her progress. This area of Kalindy was the closest it ever got to real hill country. Ahead was the end of the world. The mat black bastion wall protecting the living environment from the dangerous radiations of the nuclear fusion caves and acting as a projection screen for the laser images, glazed in dull specular reflection from the artificial sun at her back. It was warm and secret in the wood. Thousands of criss-cross shadows dusted the beaten path. Rounding the last corner channel six picked up the view. In a small clearing a tall central black pole was a GalCon generator specially designed for deltan use. Mr. Big Eye itself was sprawled over the far trees, a large yellow and red drapery half way between feeding and moving. It recognised the captain immediately of course and began to move towards the generator. This was a slow process. Locomotion for the sentient fungus took the form of a resolute but tedious advance of a multitude of pseudo roots which probed, bit and pulled the organism forward along a wide front, only disengaging at the rear much later. Quella had sat down and waited ten minutes for Mr. Big Eye to reach the generator, but in editing the recording she was able to cut that out.

With such a low profile and firm anchorage the deltans were the only species that were able to feed on the mineral rich ‘fat lichens’ native to the upland ‘tunnel passes’ that dominated the extensive plateau of the northern continent of their homeworld. An unusual meteorology drove titanic winds in a deep belt around the planet at just the right altitude to be in permanent conflict with the volcanic forces continually rebuilding the plateau as it was torn down. These ‘jet strip blows’ made it impossible for any swifter animal to exploit the lichens, most especially the richest specimens which invariably grew in overhang shadows and vertical magma chimneys. That was the key to the reason why the deltans were such an interesting race. An extremely sensitive sense of touch and smell was needed to find the best lichens and to avoid the dangerous ‘crumble crags’. Their ability to detect subtle chemical changes in the ground was astounding and with crude light sensitive facets which tipped inactive fruiting stalks they had a rudimentary compound vision system. Most of all, the deltans had the ability to change rapidly and at will the colour of their surface skin through a bewildering and extensive series of patterns and hues. Initially this was an accidental by-product of their digestive system in the transport of chromatic organics that complexed the lichen metal proteins. Later it evolved into a method of communication. With such a sophisticated and wide spread pseudo nervous system the necessary preconditions were present for the development of intelligence in the primitive species. And in fact there were two important evolutionary pressures which had forced the deltans in that direction.

Firstly, because the deltans were so slow moving they were very vulnerable to the tectonic violence of the tunnel passes. Many were killed by the sluggish larval flows and by baking in super heated steam vents that a more rapidly moving animal might easily have avoided. Travelling in widely spread colony groups they learned to warn one another of such dangers in the ever fluctuating environment through observation of their skin patterns (involuntary and voluntary). It was also possible with the application of intelligence (and far more so than with any conditioned behaviour, however sophisticated) to predict geological changes and this too encouraged the development of mind.

No doubt the deltans already had a low level intelligence when a second pressure / opportunity produced a quantum leap in their evolution...

The Terran Expedition Series I, Mission XXIV was the first to contact Freya (the name they gave to the deltans home world). It was a mere five standard years after the regulars had Emerged and as yet they had encountered only two intelligent races of aliens from whom they were (but slowly) becoming aware of Confederacy structure and history. This was at the start of their most dynamic expansion phase, during which they were to penetrate more than half of the known civilised galaxy.

The anthroform race which the captain of the Freya mission discovered on the south western plains of the northern continent was clearly intelligent although technologically primitive. They were the descendants of hunter / gatherer tribes who had recently begun to make use of an agricultural system based around a multitude of independent villages which clustered close to streams and rivers, all running from the great northern plateau into the sea With that arrogant self confidence which was the hallmark of all regulars at the time, the human xenologists instantly christened them the ‘gammans’ because they were the third intelligent alien race to be encountered by humanity. Later, this system of nomenclature was to be reserved for Emerged species and as such the brutal but vigorous new names became standard in the Confederacy dominant language when English ultimately attained that status. (GalCon by contrast had a much more sophisticated classification of the races and a consequent better grammar for assigning new names. It mattered not. As a regular poet said - ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.’)

At any rate, the xenologists on Freya soon discovered something unusual about the gammans. They had a religion based on gods who had a real physical manifestation (something that they had hitherto associated with even more primitive cultures). The field workers were led into the presence of the gamman gods (one for each village) in ‘under huts’ excavated at the centre of each community. Here the priests who knew the secret language could communicate with the ‘eternal one’ and carry his messages back to the villagers (and on to other ‘eternal ones’). The xenologists were astonished at how specific these messages were - the times for crop planting and harvesting, where to build new huts, instructions to make weapons against threatened raids from a hostile village, who was to mate with who, the size and leadership of hunting parties etc...They were even more astonished when they uncovered the nature of the gamman gods. They were carpet fungi.

At first the field workers assumed that the priests simply made up the instructions themselves and were the real leaders of each community, using the fungi only as a pretext for their decisions, but when they realised how extensive the system was and later began to appreciate how unnaturally stable were the boundaries between villages (despite the occasional fight) it became apparent that the priests were no more than agents for the fungi and they christened this latest and most unusual race the ‘deltans’.

It took more than a year for the regulars to learn from the gamman priests how to communicate with the deltans and only then did the full story come to light. As a result of their success in the ‘tunnel passes’ of the northern plateau, population pressure had forced the primitive deltans down from the mountains. In the lowlands their painfully slow movement and bright colours made them easy prey to a variety of speedy hunters. True, the metal complexes in their bodies were poison to many, but by no means all, and their population was severely culled. No one knows how long it took until that first deltan encountered a gamman but it was to be the start of a symbiosis which brought lasting benefit to both (though perhaps at the long term expense of the gammans). Somehow a new language was created. The gammans must have been ripe for the discovery, discerning colour changes in the fungi were not random and picking up the meaning which was perhaps to start with a superstition but later as confirmation followed confirmation became an established ‘cause and effect’ pattern language. In return for protection from predators and a new mobility (as gammans moved their gods around at deltan direction) the deltans supplied a sophisticated accelerated intelligence. In time, though it must not have been without many failures and deaths among the fungi, they came to resolve tribal disputes and later achieved a dominance which the gammans never really appreciated as their own developing intelligence stagnated.

All this Quella knew as she watched the recording of her conversation with Mr. Big Eye. She also knew how the deltans had quickly adapted to the new opportunities brought by the human expedition. Where regulars had gone in the galaxy, deltans and their gamman servants had slowly followed; an induced Emergence that was unusual in Confederacy history but not entirely unprecedented. The deltans were famous for their Machiavellian minds (after all it was only their quick political minds which had kept them alive on the lowlands of Freya). Though they seemed to lack the drive which had brought the regulars to dominance so quickly they had nevertheless achieved a remarkably influential position in the Confederacy for such a recently feudal race. Marked as positively ascendant by the sociologists their day had yet to come.

Studying the opening flickers of the generator, the captain was struck by the in born advantage which the deltans must have with GalCon. They were one of the few Confederacy races to whom it would seem conceptually straightforward, being a visual language like their own. Was GalCon in fact a natural language at all? There had been many debates on the subject with learned treaties theorising on the spectrum of the sun which must have been a normative influence on the commonest frequency range, the possible life forms who could have spoken it and the estimated date of the split off of GalCon B from the root language. The consensus (though by no means the universal opinion) was that GalCon had never been a natural language but must originally have been developed for use as an interspecies communications tool. These days the manufacture of GalCon and GalCon B generators was a highly skilled business limited to a dozen worlds in the Confederacy. The tourists had visited a ‘Crafting Centre’ at Staal not long before.

“I’m convinced that someone is trying to destroy Vital Void’s credibility by ruining the maiden voyage of the Kalindy. Vega is the obvious agent of course,” Mr. Big Eye was saying, “but we have to find a motive and means. It might be a jealous potential passenger unable to get on the first voyage, but more likely its a rival corporation. Do you know that Falym owns fifteen percent of the stock of Trans Galactic? He could be employing Vega to do his dirty work.”

“Might it not be a coincidence?” Quella asked. “We don’t know what happened with L’Rrantora but Dol was surely just an unlucky accident.”

“It’s all set up like that. Very plausible but so unlikely. Believe me, the odds against Vega having killed Dol by some sort of fluke are incredibly (or at least suspiciously) remote. I have a hunch he was behind the omicron’s death too, but I can’t prove it. He certainly saw a lot of L’Rrantora before that unfortunate individual’s demise. For the moment there is nothing you can do but continue as you are. I’m warning you, though - watch Vega very carefully.”

And Quella had but so far without interesting result.

“I shall be looking for a motive from Zaralova Justa. Her post as one of the Twenty Seven is coming to an end. There are some exotic jungles in Nu politics which I intend to explore. There’s something essential I’m still missing I know...”

“Mr. Vega is here,” Vis Ulman said, breaking into her thoughts. With a start the captain broke the replay and blanked the screen just as a familiar bearded face poked round the corner.

“May I join you for lunch?” he asked.

“Can you manage to serve another?” Quella asked her steward and Ulman shrugged in confirmation. “Be my guest,” she answered.

Before they started their meal, Theodore spoke humbly. “I know its an intrusion on your private quarters and time, and I’ve got no right to be here but I hope you’ll forgive me. You see these last few weeks I just wanted to see you again. This seemed the best way. You’re not harbouring a grudge against me are you? If so, please accept my apologies. I regret any distress I’ve caused you.”

It was difficult for Quella not to soften towards him. There was no doubt that Vega had a certain charm and an indefinable magnetism which attracted her once again. It was easy to drop into a casual conversation as they ate and he soon had her laughing with little jokes about the ship, the stewards and the bizarre systems they’d visited. Although Quella wanted to maintain her guard, her mind was not so tough today as Mr. Big Eye would have liked. By the time they finished she felt completely relaxed and happier than she had in weeks. Vega was serious.

“I’ve been lonely since Fer Verrilah. I hope I can see you again soon.”

Quella made an instinctive decision.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

A hidden calculating corner of her mind was intrigued and at the same time horrified as she confronted him with Mr. Big Eye’s accusations and her own suspicions. Now, more than ever she had to know how he’d react. And this was how he did react.

After listening gravely for a few moments he smiled grimly. “A pretty catalogue of deception and crime eh? But no hard evidence. I suppose that explains the closer than usual attentions of your stewards recently. And what do you think is the truth?”

“I want your reaction first. That’s why I asked you.”

“Do you expect me to break down and confess?” He laughed. “I’ll tell you what though. Here’s another one to add to your list of suspects. What if Mr. Big Eye is trying to sabotage his own ship?”

“Why should he do that?” Quella cut in sharply.

“Well... How about as a piece of self protection? You know he was the leading proponent of the motion to construct Kalindy XII when the Vital Void Centrum debated the issue.”

“That’s no secret! So what?”

“That was before the Quiet People became so prominent - before tourism declined. The Centrum knows Kalindy XII is a failure and Mr. Big Eye knows it too, but what a wonderful excuse for the inevitable commercial collapse if the first voyage is littered with death. He could hardly be blamed for that could he? Makes you think doesn’t it?”

“That’s the most ridiculous proposal I’ve ever heard. It’s far too labyrinthine to be true.”

“Typically deltan in fact,” Vega said. “And I could still be his agent couldn’t I?” He gave her a broad wink to match his broad smile. Believe me if you dare, he seemed to say.

And Quella answered in the only way she could. She laughed aloud and the incident was passed, but later she added several troubled pages to her private diary under the entry space for Theodore Vega and not a few lines under that for Mr. Big Eye. And she resolved to keep a close personal watch on Mr. Vega. She would definitely be seeing him again soon.