The woman with the broken voice and tortured eyes read inconclusive words and rubbed her temples wearily. There were no accidents - only things incompletely seen, plans with some elements not yet revealed. She was not that different from him. She had only seen more pieces of the plan and begun before him to pay the price.
Always he swayed on the brink and always at the last moment, steadied himself. The very qualities for which she waited let him hold on too long, too long. They had all waited so long and paid so much.
This... Fram feared to trust what she had read, even though he HAD taken the first step and she had sent the means for the next. Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe the change would come in another's time. Maybe the price would grow yet higher and the results fall to another.
Wearily, she pushed the papers from her. She had done what she could. The pieces were all in place. She could smooth his path, put what he might need to hand... She could present him with a choice but beyond that she could not go.
Now it was up to him.
The two men loitering by the door were clean.
The tall man stopped in the shadows across the way and frowned at the entrance of the sleeping quarters.
On that rock of an asteroid passing for a port, most of the men worked in the mines. The ore was an incredibly fine black coal-like substance that, through some quirk of fate, refined into gem-like primary colors, depending on what heat was generated at its processing. All who worked around it took on a grayed look, even as their clothes blackened beyond any cleaning.
The gleaming pink faces of the two men at the door had caught his eye as soon as he came around the corner. The gleam and the fact that they leaned wrong. They seemed to be leaning from some imitation of sloth. Real leaners, on whatever chemical they preferred, gathered at the corner where they had two sides of the world secured. Nobody loitered and leaned by the doorway itself. For most of the regular inhabitants, one wall was far too precarious a support.
Two clean men leaning in the wrong place - Patrol was there. They had found him again. They would be waiting for him inside. Each time it happened, he told himself it would not startle him again.
Each time, his stomach betrayed the lie of those words.
Patrol. They had had only three days without shadow of pursuit. Three days. He had not slept until last night. Piree had, but then the boy was young. And trusting.
And Piree had found several sectors of work at the mine. The mine at the opposite side of the settlement from where Stenell had gotten work. Or what passed for work in their situation. The tall man studied the street in both directions and then his eyes swung back to that door and building.
For all he knew, Piree had long since walked into the trap. They could have had the boy for the last two hours. And alone, within minutes, Stenell could be - other places - and appear - differently... There would not be a pair of men to trace, one middle aged and one young. One tall and one short, one green-eyed and one brown. There would not be all that to betray him to anyone who looked. He - they - would not be so marked.
The spare clothes were lost. What few untraceable trade credits they had managed to accumulate were divided between his shoes and the boy's. Twice they had lost the contents of their room before learning to leave behind only what they absolutely could not carry... Where was the boy?
He fought the urge to move restlessly. Silence and invisibility were the only weapons remaining to him. Lord knew, everything else was long since gone. If he were smart, he'd be gone. He wouldn't be standing around thirty paces from the enemy because he didn't know where his self appointed guardian was.
The guardian Stenell spent most of his time trying to protect. The guardian who tied his hands.
One of the men came further out, forgetting to pretend to lurch. With a word to someone unseen, the man gestured to the other side of the street and then, whatever he heard turned him away from there and back to his own yard. The tall man shrank back against the corner of the door, while his mind imagined him walking straight into their hands. Pictured watching himself relax because the suspense was allayed.
For it just to be over - one short walk...
No more running, or questions, or doubts. No more choices. No more responsibility; they would assume that. No more room to make mistakes; he would be helpless.
When Maidan had left, he had thought himself finally invincible. Or maybe invulnerable. He had thought that the chink he had unwisely opened in his armor had been resealed. He had even believed it for a while. Then, a few years ago, when the rot had settled in, he had thought there was simply nothing left to lose. But that had been only another self-indulgence.
Trapped. Held immobile. Stopped. It didn't really matter what happened. It required no effort to recognize the luxury of being a victim, the sheer bliss of helplessness. There was nothing they could do to him, nothing worse than he had caused done to himself. But to be held and watch Piree walk into the trap, knowing that then they would move heaven and earth to tie the boy into something, have two prizes, use each of them to force the other to speak-
To be free - or at least untrapped - and know the boy to be held...
There would be no point in pressuring the boy before Stenell too had been caught. A truth drug would tell them the boy knew nothing of where the man would be. Only with both of them detained would the subtler pressure have any point or purpose.
The deepset chestnut eyes burned into what lay inside that door for a long moment before he made himself look away. No, whatever snakes curled inside his head, he could not risk being so used. He WOULD NOT risk being so used. If the boy had already been seized and he took that opportunity to splinter off on his own - nothing would be safer for the boy than to be forcibly separated from Stenell.
Even Patrol would be safer - but he eyed that opinion uneasily and was not comfortable with the thought.
Not as he once would have been. Not when he had no idea yet why they were even following him - them.
Far from considering that he might be followed, it had never occurred to him he could not simply leave.
Everyone was free to do as they chose. That had been one of the things he had known. That was why so few felt obliged to fight token battles. Why so many lives had passed in relative peace for his lifetime and his parents' and theirs' before them. Without opposition, fighting lost its savor. He and others around him had believed that.
Finding himself not free...
Finding vague and obscure obstacles in his way had so baffled him, he had nearly lost himself in study of that new puzzle until a captain of a fringe-freighter, apparently having heard from another of the bribe Stenell had resorted to offering, had come forward. Until the ways that had closed incomprehensibly around him, had as incomprehensibly reopened, if too late to spare any of his beliefs. He had sat in the small cabin on that freighter and stared at the two other unused bunks for eight and one half sleep and work cycles, trying vainly to bridge the gap between ahead and behind. Trying to understand the gap between what he had believed and what he was finding existed, when he did not even know why he had fled, before settling for anchoring the battered raft of his sanity so it at least could drift no farther.
He had been in a laboratory for too long and dealt only with artificial logic. Even his speech patterns were formal and archaic and set him further apart, marking him. He neither understood, nor could he predict, much less mimic, the actions of people around him. But he could not blame that on the lab. He had never understood people as a group. That at least he had known. Dealing with just one was hard enough and he hadn't even managed that.
Frowning into the half dark night, he argued with himself, dividing himself further. When he did not know why or from what he ran, much less where he ran TO, the question of who pursued him and why faded into obscurity. "Shit!" He forced himself out of the vagueness and into the there, wherever there was.
Dark streets all looked alike, whether they were under a pressure dome or open to whatever constituted local night. Planetside or deep space, fueling station or freighting stop, it was all the same.
This outpost settlement for fringe freighters was a plascrete horror on a rock of a planet with nothing but thinly breathable air to recommend it. This was no uglier than any other.
Any place used just to exchange freight or human tools or for ship repairs took on the feel of a refuse dump. Only the worst of everything came there, things worn out, empty or broken. People with no reason except it was midway from nowhere to somewhere else. Plascrete - cement with a plastic base - still looked and felt like cement. Cement streets, cement walls, dirty yellow lights, loud voices, every human vice.
Stenell rubbed his face wearily, his eyes aching from trying to penetrate the shadows, impatient with the awkward abilities he did not adequately understand. He did not know how to reach out and find Piree, something that should have been so simple. Or maybe self preservation would not allow him to try. After all, the bond between them was one of affection. After a dozen or more close calls and scores of holes like that one, mind numbingly weary, opening to such a defenseless emotion was not a likely move. Not one his instincts thought wise, while he stood outside of a nest of vipers.
But the choices were thinning.
He was too tired to feel tired. He was too tired to more than guess at what another would feel. He was too tired even to be numb. He moved in a frozen determination pierced by shards of what he had felt himself to be.
Boots pounded nearer and Stenell reminded himself that he had not yet managed to design a logic allowing him to ignore a fact in hopes that in mid-calculation, the rules would suddenly change.
If it just hadn't been for Piree...
For Piree, some part of him clasped a shard of the past and the before bled into the present. And what little he allowed to weaken his barriers identified the runner.
There was a plascrete alley two paces to his right and back. Reaching out one long arm, he wrapped it around the boy while his other hand covered his mouth and the long rangy body braced itself against the impact of the younger one's stopping.
So frantic, so light. All wire and sinew and heart.
"PATROL -"
Stenell felt, more than heard the word spoken despite his muffling hand. They must have sent someone to where the boy had been working. "I know," he said beside the boy's ear as he pulled his younger companion into the dark beside him in a whisper of stone bits and felt the panicked tension ease at being understood. "Have you noticed that being chased has not changed from what they show in the old vids?"
"No-" Piree's labored breathing tore through the night, "must be out of my field." The boy sagged suddenly and Stenell released him, seeing him double over, bracing himself against his splayed legs.
"You don't have a field. What you have is more like a swamp." Stenell slid down the wall to sit on the pavement, long legs straight out before him. Aware of his own even breathing, of the obedience of his mistrusted flesh and the cold clarity of his 'continuing', he surveyed his battered boots rather than watch his young friend's distress, and then looked around the narrow alleyway.
All his work had been aimed in the wrong direction. Towards the improved and ideal and away from the real. Still, for his friend, he clung to that shard. "If I'd known coming out of the laboratory would be so - random - I would have tackled different problems." And not have chanced misplaced loyalty endangering anyone, especially Piree. For someone who was supposed to be brilliant, he saw only evidence of incredible stupidity.
Piree had his breathing almost under control. "I had no idea you were so valuable."
Neither had he. Nor could he understand for what. And that question lay too near the heart of the problem that he could not yet risk perceiving. Not and hope to ever uncurl from a fetal position.
Stenell wished he could summon true amusement. Piree was young, not even twenty-five. At forty-one, he felt like the boy's grandfather. All he could see were the shapes of death with which Stenell's reality had surrounded them.
If it had been only himself in that situation... There was nothing more left of value to them. But dispassionately as he regarded his own fate, he would not see Piree pay for Stenell's misjudgment. He could not take back what he had mistakenly done, but he HAD thought he could drop out of sight.
'Burrow into the underbrush', Maidan would have said.
Phrases of hers, forced from his mind years ago, intruded upon his mind more frequently each day.
Shards he did not need to seek out. He examined that fact with a certain grimness, aware that he carried within him the seeds of his own destruction.
But Piree neared the end of his strength. He was young, but he did not have Stenell's edge. He was not esper. He did not have the choice of breaking what served as a code of ethics - that forbidding the use of esper for one's own benefit.
Esper - the other abilities of the mind. Abilities humans had wanted to take responsibility for even less than they had wanted to recognize. Abilities that, resisted and ignored, had insisted on deepening and strengthening, until the people who had not wanted to recognize esper's existence were forced to seek out those holding the abilities in self protection. Until they were forced to find espers in order to catalog and control and channel these twilight zone abilities into forms that others could use.
That too, Stenell set aside. Dirty cement, dirty walls, rotten air. He looked around him and could not avoid the truth. This escape thing was NOT working. Neither for him nor for the boy who had followed him. Not with Stenell simultaneously concerned for and encumbered by the boy. There was nothing worse they could do to him if they found him and alone, he had a better chance. Alone, Piree had at least SOME chance. Piree was not the one they looked for. And with the boy with him and not them, shrugging inside sweat-stiffened coveralls, he found himself believing what he had tried to convince himself of earlier.
Of course, to do what he wanted, meant he would violate the very heart of the laws regarding the use of esper. Using this for his own ends paled beside using it to invade another human's mind and will. It also saved him the task of persuasion, already exhausted on the boy, and encompassed all the rules he would, even a few years ago, have defended to the death.
Reaching out inside his mind, Stenell extended fingers of awareness out around them, wisps of himself drifting over the dirty cement streets, searching, watching. Even in that little sorry excuse for a town, numberless sparks of humanity flickered, danced, flared - and died, fogged by a lurid miasma of greed and dirt and lust.
Shred's of Stenell's self brushed past sparks without number before he touched what he needed.
A fight sputtered into chaotic life in another alley. A handful of sparks flickered, reflecting all the spectrum of color as they traversed the gamut of emotions, from greed, hate, lust, survival, even joy that they were NOT the victim to whom they were willing to do unspeakable things in celebration of that fact.
The spark of the victim went hot and bright, with the legendary clarity of death's presence. A clarity that lasted for so brief a moment...
Piree and the victim were of similar height, build and age. Beginner's luck, he told himself.
Shaking his head, he reminded himself of the point of this trespass. The dying man belonged to a freighter with a large crew, labor destined for a mining colony. Open to the touch of the wisp of him spying on that other alley, were all the numbers he needed; pay voucher number, identification number, his name, home planet, ship, date into port and scheduled lift off.
That passing nova flickered - so much fear accompanied dying alone in the dark. With everything else, Stenell could see no reason to stop then. A tiny touch and the dying man slipped less fearfully into the next life. And holding the details he had required, the mist that was Stenell paused at the passing of even so little valued a life and then the wisps all shrank and were drawn inward into the long, still body over which Piree was concernedly hovering.
"Be still," Stenell managed to say through the cloud of fatigue he fought his way through. Stupid. So stupid. Overextending himself with Patrol only across the street. "Give me a minute -"
Maybe it had not been all that stupid. The last place they would look was under their own noses.
But to survive, for either of them to have a chance to survive, he had to revive himself as quickly as possible. And once he started breaking rules, it was surprising how easy it was to continue and how many new things he thought to try that should also have been outlawed. He reached for the small, lurid, living core of that cursed rock and drew on that life. He was in no position to be fastidious and the fog around him did clear. Energy flooded through him, forcing back the worst of the physical exhaustion for the moment, but only the physical.
But then physical reviving was all he had reached for. The emotional and mental exhaustion had accumulated over so long and in ways not clearly seen or understood at the time, he would not have known what to seek as a remedy. If there were ever time to sit and rest and think... Making some kind of peace with himself, if that were even possible, could have been part of why he had fled the life that was the only one he had ever known. The life that, for so long, had seemed the only one he could have asked for. If there were ever time...
Piree... The face hovering over him, knowing things it did not want to know, seeing what it had tried not to see, was the face of a fawn, sharp angled, perceptive, vivid. And possibly damned, because in his blindness, Stenell had lied to himself.
Maidan would have loved him, found in him an uncomplicated joy... Letting the boy form a bond could NOT be allowed to bring him harm. There had to be something to believe in. Some small good that would be able to survive. With his fawn green eyes and stubborn square jaw, Piree deserved the option of perishing in a battle of his own choosing.
Those shimmering green eyes watched him now and did not question what he had to have understood too well. He'd seen Stenell go short of sleep and food and still go on running. Seen him run without tiring. Seen him - influence - those around them. Not once had he questioned Stenell's actions or means or motives.
"Stop hovering over me," Stenell settled his shoulders more comfortably against the wall. "We seem to have escaped attention. Settle down and catch your breath, while you have the chance."
That lump of rock had a meager life, but an old one. What he had drawn from that fire had a surprising strength and patience to it. He found himself unweakened by setting out what he believed had been called 'wards' around the mouth of the alley to assure that they were not interrupted. They would not have been sufficient to hold off an extended, prolonged search, but if by luck, they had escaped the main hunt for the moment, the wards would steer away any less determined intrusion.
For years, the antique literature he had absorbed had been only a pleasant fantasy, a study of archaic attempts to make sense out of chaos in a time when intuition and reason had shared a common vocabulary. And now, after two months' pursuit left him no visible options, when he could not reach out and find a friend but could help a stranger die in an alley, that information welled up in him and was so easily executed as to resemble something he had done before, in another time.
He had no other choice and it would get no easier. Closing his eyes, Stenell reached toward the younger man and poured his mental exhaustion into him until he felt the boy slide into sleep.
Instantly, he went to his knees in front of Piree. This part he had no clear memory of reading about, but instinct of some kind presented itself. Pushing back the man he knew, he pushed back the last two months, the lab, their friendship, the keen clever mind into a tight circle around his center and in that central confined self, Stenell planted anger, anger at what he, Stenell had done, the trick he had pulled, anger enough to spur him to use one of several numbers that would get him a patrol audience who would be quickly able to confirm his true identity. Then, he planted the information he had found in that other alley. He planted that man, work, numbers, fury over a stolen payvoucher with the number stubbornly retained because space rot it, Pir-, Pir-, Pelser wasn't going to let that port garbage get away with this.
Pelser knew all he had to go was go to the port authorities and tell them what happened and give them the voucher number and his pay would be replaced and the thieves followed. He always remembered his voucher numbers because he had been robbed before. Most of them had. And without the voucher number, he'd been told he was out of luck. So now he remembered and he had been telling his friends they should remember and they never did and were all the time getting ripped off.
Pelser who was Piree stretched a little, easing imaginary bruises from the scuffle and the overall air around him seemed to shift, coalesce and thicken until the man who was Piree hid inside a shell of Pelser, a mental and physical shell. HE knew the boy, so he could see both, but anyone else would see only Pelser.
That should hold for a few days. Long enough to get him off planet and away from there. The wards should hold for another few hours. Enough for the boy who was still Piree to get some sleep, rest more quietly inside that planted shell.
Pushing himself to his feet, Stenell regarded the boy and then turned away, sliding out through his wards and then resetting them behind him. Across the street and down, the doorway was empty. Around him for one of the few times he could remember in the last week, the streets lay deserted. Quietly he moved along the shadowy fringes, down that street, around a corner, and down another.
His thin, rangy body cooperated, slipping into its odd humming 'continuing' where what he needed to do seemed to slide effortlessly, unthinkingly past. That humming 'continuing' that had relieved him of the physical exhaustion he had not been able to spare Piree because he had not known how to extend whatever it was to include another.
Esper of some sort, of course. Renegade, untrained. The esper ability he had regarded so long ago as the ultimate warping of a reality already crumbling around his ears. The final, fatal indicator of his own dissolution. What he had turned away from, knowing only that he could not remain himself and encompass such a span of improbability. And that, seeing an oasis of logic in the school to which he had fled, he had pushed completely from his mind in his attempt to force his life into logical lines or force what did not fit those lines out of his life. To regain control, some sense of fitting into his own life.
He had been so young then. Fourteen when he had turned away. Seventeen when he had seen with what he would fill that void.
The man moving through the darkness understood now the internal and external chaos surrounding such times in even ideal circumstances. He understood, but pierced by shards of old pain, he remembered that time and flinched away.
As he had fled then, ignoring the past and what struggled to be the present in order to explore the field that beckoned to him, fields promising logic and order, the ultimate precision, the ultimate power of both safety and control. Ignored as Maidan had said he ignored whatever did not aid him in his project of the moment - with what she had called his merciless logic.
Esper would have compelled him into a completely different life if he had allowed himself to accept it. And now esper was the only weapon helping him to prolong this life, for what it was worth. For the second time, in this escape as in that long ago turning away, he had stepped outside himself. Outside of what he had known about himself. Outside of what he had believed his limits to be. Part of him stood back and watched, curious to see just what he would discover. And another part watched that detached curiosity and wondered at IT.
In the mouldering dark, Stenell loped through the shadows, surrounded by himself and himself again. Watched himself move through the darkness, trapped in layers of awareness.
A night at least empty of another to worry about. And empty still of a destination. Except for the landing field.
In the end, there were always the landing fields. And lines where body laborers waited to be signed on, the way he and Piree had slithered to more than a dozen equally grimy ports, working their way determinedly down the ladder of survival. A few more rungs down and they'd have had only the rats to fight or fear. Rats that seemed to be another constant, much like fear and flight.
Weaving his way through the strange, tortured, coppery smelling bushes that passed for undergrowth, he could finally see the field.
Part of him watched himself restrain a shudder at this smallest field yet. Even from a distance, from the farthest corner away from the town, he already knew from his scavenged memories that only a handful of labor freighters landed there. Less than a handful.
Approaching the barrier singing against his nerves, he cast around him until he found a faint hillock and stretching out on the brassy excuse for grass, he peered across the field. Whatever fatigue his muscles threw off, his mind had absorbed. He could feel himself settling into the tinny dust but there was no time to let go and relax. Pulling himself up to sit crosslegged, he got to the serious business of surveying the field.
At the far edges, he saw the profile of the four labor ships. Piree, with any luck, would soon be on one of them. To try and gain one of the other three, would mean making his way around the field. That wasn't a problem. And he would have to find a place where he could watch and listen and pick passerbys' brains for information, destination, crafts.
A sigh escaped through the cracks in the ice around him.
It wasn't that he hadn't done all that before. He was just having trouble convincing himself to repeat a step that had achieved nothing, that only exchanged the bloodless prison of the laboratory for one more crude.
Nothing existed of itself, swinging untouched in a vacuum. There were links. There was a larger logic. Even apparent anomalies still obeyed rules and laws. Stenell had spent his life believing that.
Failure to understand lay in incorrectly perceiving the question, in lacking sufficient information to recognise significant elements. One underlying truth had to prevail, no matter how strange the circumstance. But that insistence was from before. From when Stenell had thought that he understood.
Before the world and universe he'd believed in had slowly grayed and then vanished....
When that certainty ripped, all his certainties had been lost in a moment. With no footing from which his rational mind could operate, he had been forced to rely on instincts never before freed, let alone depended upon, while he tried vainly to find some fact in the fracture upon which to found some small certainty. After half a lifetime of crystalline facts and figures, mathematical reassurances, he had been left to run through murky clouds of cryptic figures, aware of knowing nothing...
Scrubbing his face roughly with newly calloused hands, the flash of his amethyst ring caught him. He let his mind go blank, bare, empty. Let a deep purple shot with gold threads wash through him. He let himself have five minutes washed in color and silence. Then, with a single deep breath, he opened his eyes and looked at the choices again.
And he looked at the choices he had turned away from before, because logic said that if one action, repeated several times, produced the same problem each time, then another action was called for. Because no matter how doubtful the results, at least there was doubt. There was room for change.
Mercenaries - he regretfully crossed out that group of shabby craft. The fortune in gems on his hands was too distinctive. And too tempting.
He regarded his hands emotionlessly, seeing the rings he had collected by instinct over the years and once acquired, never removed. In the lab, he had seen the stones as portable assets. Out of the lab, once he had begun blindly using abilities he had so long refused to acknowledge, he had realized something more than instinct had led him to acquire these things. The qualities for which the stones' colors and elements were a focal point, had helped him maintain a balance, as he realized they had balanced his earlier refusals.
Some were gems beyond price. All were irreplaceable. A diamond, a square-cut amethyst, a blue sapphire, a firehearted sapphire, a blood-red ruby, a square emerald, a blue topaz, a huge, blue fired hawkseye and a water-clear aquamarine. On the labor ships, as one in a tangle of bodies, he had gotten away with passing them off as gaudy junk. But around smaller groups of mercenaries, that illusion would fail. Stones so valuable and easily concealed would buy him a one way trip out an airlock without a pressure suit. One more thing that could neither be sold nor hidden....
Like his accumulated trade credits - the use of which would also reveal his identity and the fact that the reward offered was higher than most could turn down, especially with the chance of collecting from both sides.
He had thought himself prepared. Pursuit had never entered his mind. Only flight. Outside of the lab, he had proved himself to be both inept and short sighted. Like running away without providing more than one medium of exchange, without converting his trade credits into something less traceable. He shook his head sharply and forced himself back to the matter at hand.
There WERE the corporate, semi-private ships. Ships outside of the main nets, with far more freedom of movement and choice. Usually the tool of one man or a group of men, part of the toys of upper management of the large combines.
Of that smaller, elite group the nearest three were the mid-class type, used to transport groups of executives or high level support teams. Two of them, classes likely to have esper pilots plus a handful of passengers - more people to deal with and far different than being one lost among many, as they - he - had been on a labor ship. Too many to bribe or be sure of manipulating efficiently.
That left three of the smaller class. Esper pilots, probably one or two crew, all isolated. Dedicated loners. At worst, unlikely to join ranks against an intruder.
An esper ship. A fragment of genuine humor emerged from the ice encasing him. Burying his face in his knees, he laughed silently, laughed until tears ran down his face and looking up at the field, he started laughing all over again. Such an incredibly unlikely plan, nobody would ever consider it. Of course, the idea of even HIS dealing with an esper pilot - just getting off planet would be a minor miracle - so, he'd just have to aim for one miracle at a time, rather than plan for a succession of them. He wiped his streaming eyes on his upper sleeve.
Three espers - he considered that base and quadrant. That was an established, if poor corner of the galaxy, with few of the ingredients that attracted the usual skills of an esper ship. Stenell cast a sharper eye at those ships and bet that the main reason for their presence was an accumulation of hours and a mandatory layover at the nearest base. Thanks to Piree, those details came quickly to the surface of his mind, as did an awareness that novices would have paid more care to be near a better port when their hours red-lined. That left pilots of two to ten years standing. And he thought he could narrow that down to two to six years. And, thanks to Piree, he knew now that after six or seven years, pilots began to need the more sophisticated facilities of a substantial port, and again, out of necessity, began to plan ahead where they would be when they red-lined. By then, they had learned more tricks than anyone could quickly unravel to accomplish their goals.
Two to six year pilots then. Closing his eyes, he rested his head against his knees and reached out to the nearest of the small ships, no longer questioning why he was able to do so, but simply 'intending' whatever seemed necessary at the moment. Just as quickly, he snapped free, cringing in distaste. A fouled bitter emptiness filled that bridge. If there were an odor to when a pilot was going bad, he thought it would smell like that.
Shaking his head to clear away the taint, he turned back to scan the second ship. That one, that one was sound. More or less stable and with no visible weakness that Stenell could manipulate to some advantage.
The last ship was the newest of the three. An engineer and a cargomaster were on board. From them, from the surface of their minds, he saw that the pilot was due soon and then, belatedly, saw that this pilot was a woman. Eccentric as all esper pilots were considered to be, five years bonded, outside of what little comradeship piloting left the males, with their innate tendency to bond.
Among female pilots, not even the illusion of comradeship existed. Independent movements from such a one would go unnoticed as long as anyone would.
A woman and an esper pilot. If he sought a personally elegant exit, his enemies could do no better.