“Well, I know Ship must be very busy with . . .”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Ship either speaks to you or doesn’t.”

She digested this for a moment, nodded, then: “Kerro, do you really talk to Ship?”

There was no mistaking the resentment in her voice.

“You know I wouldn’t lie to you, Hali. Why’re you so interested in talking to Ship?”

“It’s the idea of Ship answering you. Not the commands we get over the ‘coders, but . . .”

“A kind of unlimited encyclopedia?”

“That, yes, but more. Does Ship talk to you through the ‘coders?”

“Not very often.”

“What is it like when . . .”

“It’s like a very distinctive voice in your head, just a bit clearer than your conscience.”

“That’s it?” She sounded disappointed.

“What did you expect? Trumpets and bells?”

“I don’t even know what my conscience sounds like!”

“Keep listening.” He brushed a finger against her ring, kissed her quickly, brotherly, then stepped through the hatch into the screening area for Ferry’s office.

Chapter 9

The fearful are often holders of the most dangerous power. They become demoniac when they see the workings of all the life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses.

—Shipquotes

WINSLOW FERRY sat in his dimly lighted office unaware of the random chaos around him—the piles of tapes and software, the dirty clothes, the empty bottles and boxes, the papers with scribbled notes to himself. It had been a long, tense dayside for him, and the place smelled of stale, spilled wine and old perspiration. His entire attention focused on the sensor screen at the corner of his comdesk. He bent his sweaty face close to the screen which showed Panille walking down a passageway with that lithe and succulent med-tech, Hali Ekel.

A wisp of gray hair fell over his right eye and he brushed it aside with a deeply veined hand. His pale eyes glittered in the com light.

He watched Hali on the holo, watched the smoothness of her young body glide from passageway to hatch to passageway. But the musk that surrounded him there in his office was Rachel. At times Rachel Demarest seemed all bone and elbow to him, a hard woman hardly used. He developed an amused distance from her whine. She had dreams that included him because she wanted him, even if he was a sack of graying wrinkles and sour breath. She wanted power and Ferry liked to snuggle up to power. They were good for each other and they tricked themselves into a personal distance by trading information for liquor, wine for position or a warm night together. This game of barter between them walled off the kind of hurt they’d both been dealt at the hands of whimsical lovers.

Rachel was asleep now in his cubby, dreaming herself Senior Chair of a new Council that would wrest power from Oakes, make the Colony self-sufficient and self-governing.