Starsong

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The woman was somewhere in her mid-fifties, I estimated, wearing a lower-middle-class blue-green jacket suit and a professional scarf of a style I didn’t recognize. In one hand she held a boarding ticket; with the other she balanced the inexpensive and slightly scuffed carry-bag slung over her shoulder. Her hair was dark, her features unreadable, and her stride, as she toiled up the steep gangplank toward me, stiffly no-nonsense with an edge of disdain.

In short, she looked like any of the thousands of business types I’d seen in hundreds of spaceports across the Expansion. She certainly didn’t look like trouble.

But that’s always the way with life, isn’t it? It’s right when everything’s going along nice and smooth and you’re all relaxed and bored that you suddenly discover that you’re in fact eighty degrees off course with a dead stick, straked engines, and a comatose musicmaster.

And everything right then was indeed going along nice and smooth. The flight deck had been showing flat green when I’d left three minutes earlier, Rhonda had the engines running at peak efficiency—or at least what passed for peak efficiency with those rusty superannuates—and Jimmy, while his usual annoying self, was very much awake.

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