“Good enough. Tell him two hundred thousand stars—”

“One.”

“One. Half in advance, half when you’ve got the ’doc. I’ll be here at the Pequod until the money comes in.” I stood up. “It’s midnight. Pay my consultant’s fee at the hotel desk.” I walked out, thinking I’d timed that nicely.

I stopped at the desk to learn my room number. I told them there would be a payment entered against room charges.

My backpurse was hanging in the sleeping plates. I checked through it. Someone might have searched it…someone had. Sharrol, looking for what might identify me as a family man. She’d found and removed my two holos of her, one with Tanya and Louis but not Carlos, the other more recent, pregnant, with Jeena at her breast.

Twenty minutes between the plates would do me a world of good, I thought. Four hours would be even better.

No time.

I rode an elevator to the roof. There I paused, gazing idly up into the black oceanic night.

Sanity check: Was I being watched? In what fashion?

ARM cameras are little transparent disks you apply with a thumb to a flat surface. They don’t cost that much and are impossible to spot. My room would be a good place to scatter a few. So would the lobby doors and the line of transfer booths behind me on the Pequod’s roof. But Ander had had no chance to set them…had he?

I wished that I’d known Ander Smittarasheed better. I hadn’t learned much today. He had the instincts of a cop; he’d treated me as a felon ready to escape. He remembered me fairly well. Strong as hell. What else?

He had come here for me, he’d said. More likely he’d come for us. For Carlos, the valuable one; Feather, the dangerous one; Beowulf Shaeffer, the talkative one who knows too much; Carlos’s children, both United Nations citizens; Sharrol Janss…could lead him to the rest. But I could do that for him, too. He didn’t need Sharrol.

Ander must have reached Fafnir by tracking a sighting of Carlos’s ship. Where had he begun his investigations?

He’d started where he had landed, at the Shasht spaceports, of course. A party of six, three of us flat phobes, would not have come to a weird world like Fafnir to stay. He would search through the hotels and spaceports and hiding places on Shasht, try to learn if we’d left, before he faced eleven hours’ worth of jet lag in the islands.

If he’d gone to Outbound, he’d have found the Graynor family all registered for flight. Those names and a phone file would have brought him to Pacifica.