Quiet Knives by Steve Miller, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

could be expected to outlive a mere human's span--hell, it
had already outlived two captains, and there wasn't any reason it
wouldn't outlast her.
    She ought to take up a
second--a couple of the cousins were hopeful, so she'd heard. The
time to train her replacement was while she was still in her prime,
so control could be eased over gradual, with her giving more of her
attention to TerraTrade, while the captain-to-be took over ship
duty, until one day the change was done, as painless as could be
for everyone. That's how Berl took Skeedaddle over from Mam, who had
gone back to the planet she'd been born to for her retired years,
and near as Midj had ever seen on her infrequent visits, missed
neither space nor ship.
    Berl, now. Midj shook her
head, her eyes watching the progress of the systems check across
the board. In a universe without violence--in a universe without
the Juntavas--Berl would've been standing captain yet, and his baby
sister maybe trading off some other ship. Maybe she'd been running
back-up on Skeedaddle , though that wasn't the likeliest scenario, her and her
brother having gotten along about as well as opinionated and
high-tempered sibs ever did.
    Still and all, he hadn't
deserved what had come to him; and she hadn't wanted the ship that
bad, having found a post that suited her on the Zar family ship.
Suited her for a number of reasons, truth told, only one of them
being the younger son, who came on as her partner once she'd
understood Berl was really dead, and Skeedaddle was hers.
    Full circle.
    The board beeped; systems checked out clean,
which was nothing more than she'd expected. She had a cold pad
spoke for at the public yard; some meetings set up across the next
couple days--couple of independents on-port she still needed to get
to regarding their views on TerraTrade's proposed "small trade"
policies. She'd write that report before she lifted, send it on to
Lezly, in case....
    In case.
    Well.
    She reached to the board, opened eyes and
ears, began to tap in the code for the office at the public
yard--and stopped, fingers frozen over the keypad.
    In the top left corner of the board, away
from everything else on the board, a yellow light glowed. Pinbeam
message waiting, that was.
    Most likely it was TerraTrade business,
though she couldn't immediately call to mind anything urgent enough
to require a 'beam. Still, it happened. That's why emergencies were
called emergencies.
    She tapped the button, the message screen
lit, sender ID scrolled--not a code she recognized, off-hand--and
then the message.
    Situation's changed. Don't come. K
    * * *
    THE ROOM WAS SOFTLY lit, his chair
comfortable. For the moment, there were no restraints, other than
those imposed by the presence of the woman across the table from
him.
    "Where is the High Judge, Mr. Zar?"
    Her voice was courteous, even gentle,
despite having asked this selfsame question at least six times in
the last few hours.
    "Evaluation tour, is what he told me," he
answered, letting some frustration show.
    "An evaluation tour," his interlocutor
repeated, a note of polite disbelief entering her cool voice. "What
sort of evaluation?"
    "Of the other judges," he said, and sighed
hard, showing her his empty hands turned palm up on his knee. "He
was going to visit them on the job, see how they were doing, talk
to them. It's a regular thing he does, every couple Standards."
That last at least was true.
    "I see." She nodded. He didn't know her
name--she hadn't told him one, and she wasn't somebody he knew. She
had a high, smooth forehead, a short brush of pale hair and eyes
hidden by dark glasses. One of Grom Trogar's own--his sister, for
all Kore knew or cared.
    What mattered was that she
could make his life very unhappy, not to say short, unless he could
convince her he was short on brains and info.
    "It seems very odd to me," she said now,
conversationally, "that the High Judge would embark on such a tour
without his pilot."
    They'd been over this ground,