Sullen Stars: Free Merchant

In the end, Rachel didn't have much choice in what to repair. After the station paid her for her delivery, which luckily turned out to have not leaked out on the trip, she paid for the docking clamp repairs and that was it. She'd just have to put up with the defective sensor computer for now and hope that the power system didn't burn out before she got to Anvari. At least the ore delivery would pay enough to get her out of the hole and maybe pay a planet side technician to take a look at the laundry list of problems on the ship. Labor was cheaper when the tech didn't have to wear a space suit.

Her compad had a new crack in its screen, but her brief lapse of self control didn't destroy it. That meant that she had plenty of time to send a response to Alex, informing him that she was headed back to the planet anyway and should arrive in time. It was a bit hopeful thinking on her part, since the orbital positions weren't favorable for such a fast trip, but Theseus was technically capable.

There was just the fear of redlining the ship after such a dire list of things that could go wrong had been given to her, but if she missed this meeting then she'd be better off stranded in space.

The repairs were completed in plenty of time, and despite a three hour delay in getting the ore containers ready for docking, she left Vasili Station with time to spare. The navigation computer estimated a four day trip under normal cruise speed, but docking and unloading at Anvari Station would take hours so she pushed it a little. Running at the upper end of safe cruise speed would save half a day, which seemed like a good idea for when, not if, something went wrong when she got there.

Rachel rubbed at her damaged elbow as she watched the proximity radar count up the range from Haruta. The moment the text on her display hit ten thousand kilometers, she engaged the autopilot and sank into the pilot's seat as the engines began their transfer burn.

Nothing exploded. That was a good sign.

[hr]

Anvari was always so pretty this time of year.

Even from well beyond the monitored space of its principal orbital station clusters, the planet was a sight to behold. The half facing Autolye was like a white and blue marble, its land covered in pristine layers of ice and snow, broken up by the oceans that never had time to fully freeze. Mottled gray patches flowed over its surface from the sparse cloud cover that was left from the last snow falls. The dark side was sprinkled with an endless sea of white and orange lights from large cities, and from the space traffic orbiting, ascending or descending.

The first and only terrestrial planet in the system, Anvari had an unusual orbit for a habitable world, which was highly elliptical. The result was a short but intense summer for the whole planet as it accelerated past its parent star, lasting only about forty standard days, lengthy and mild springs and autumns, and an extended and equally intense winter when the planet reached the peak of its orbit and hung out in space for many months on end.

Winter, snow and ice were essentially what life was for the planet's five hundred million inhabitants. You dealt with it out if necessity, and everyone pined for the summers when all of the hibernating native life bloomed. That was when the planet always got its wealthy tourists from out of the system, who came in small flocks to see the vibrant flowers and birds. Rachel always thought the snow was just as pretty, but maybe her tolerance to cold influenced her opinion. Not to mention you couldn't ice skate during the summer.

She had a few hours to admire the view on the final approach before she had to perform her insertion burn. Normally, this was a routine and boring operation handled by the computers, but not this time.

It shouldn't have been an issue, but the autopilot software had never really been up to the task of matching the elliptical orbit. The nice, circular orbits of the belts and or outer planets were a piece of cake, but here, the system just spun its wheels and never arrived at a final burn solution. And for safety reasons there was no way to engage with a partial solution, no matter how close it looked.

So, she has to perform a manual correction burn. Even though she’d done it a few times before, her whole body tensed as she cross referenced the navigation computer's estimates before programming the burns. The engines fired a dozen times to slip the ship into the unusual orbit, but finally, the green path in the navigation display lit up, indicating that she was on a proper intercept with the stations.

The cluster of orbital platforms, docks and ship yards made Vasili Station look like a convenience store by comparison. Spanning from one end of the three display panels of the flight deck's walls to the other, the collection of towers, storage tanks, spanning bridges and colorful arrays of lights spilling from the habitable sections made it look like a technological version of the monstrous insect mounds that dotted the landscape of Anvari's lowlands. Every summer, the bugs would wake up and add a little more on top, until they reached tens of meters high. Rachel smirked a little at the thought. The ore she was delivering would probably be part of another tower or hab section, adding onto the orbital city like the bug hills.

There was no time to visit, however. Even if the Amber platform had a real, pressurized docking bay, as soon as she detached the cargo containers for the tugs to haul off, she had to leave.

She sent one more message to Alex, requesting a definite time to meet, and turned the ship back toward an insertion burn to the planet's surface.

[hr]

Reentry wasn't for the faint of heart, and Rachel was now thankful that she had none.

With assistance from Sethena ASTC, she plotted a route that put her in a parking orbit for two hours while the space ports cleared a landing pad. The whole time, she paced the fight deck and lounge. Her elbow ached if she tensed too hard, and yet she must have felt the dull throb twenty times before she, at long last, received the call from aerospace traffic control to prepare for insertion.

The wait might have been killing her, but now that she sat at the controls while the planet grew larger and larger in the displays, her muscles felt locked in place. She had to consciously flex her fingers to remind herself that she wasn't a statue. The electrical twinge in her arm faded away in insignificance.

“When is the last time this ship has landed? A year ago?” she muttered as the altimeter ticked down and her velocity ticked up. Two hundred kilometers up, seven kilometers per second. One ninety. One eighty. “Really should have had the deck crews check the heat tiles and landing gear. But they'd have probably put that on the report, right? There wasn't anything like that on the report…”

Her velocity peaked at eight kilometers per second as she dipped down to one hundred kilometers and hit the atmosphere. The display to her left showed the RCS thrusters firing in random patterns to keep the ship level and from rolling. The navigation computer and autopilot spewed calculations and course adjustments as they fought to keep the nose up and heat tiles facing the brunt of the descent. The ship slowed, and the hull temperature reading started to rise.

“Just let the computer do the flying,” she said, flexing her fingers again and taking her weight off of the sticks. A warning stopped flashing on the overhead display and the nose oriented back up to where it should be. “It knows what it's doing. Just as long as it doesn't crash, we won't crash. It's not tied to the sensor computer. We'll be fine.”

At thirty kilometers, the display was nothing but billowing red plasma. The radio was dead. ASTC couldn't help her if the computer crashed now!

Twenty five kilometers. Twenty four. Velocity was down to two kilometers per second, but the hull temperature was still climbing. The air was getting thicker, transferring more heat and forces against the airframe. All of the RCS thrusters were running at full throttle. Two minutes to the landing zone.

“Almost there. Come on, just a little further…”

Ninety seconds. The plasma began to dissipate. Snowy landscapes began to peek through the glow. She could see roads and clusters of buildings now. Lights and moving traffic-

An alarm blared and dozens of red indicators flashed on the flight displays. All but one of the left thrusters had shut down!

The ship immediately banked left and began to deviate from the landing path superimposed over the front display.

“Oh… shoot!”

“This is Sethena traffic control, tower nineteen. You're off course. Please correct your approach and confirm.”

“Having technical problems!” she shouted back as she disengaged the autopilot, which was clearly having its mind completely blown by whatever was going wrong.

She cut the throttle and banked hard right, to get back on course and to keep the ship's center of balance over what controls she had left. Theseus drifted back onto its predefined fight path like a drunken scale fish, listing to starboard in appropriate fashion to someone who had too many drinks.

The flight computer tried to replot her course, but she'd slowed down so much the ship was no longer operating under aerodynamic lift and relied on the control thrusters to keep it from plummeting. The numbers on the display shifted in an unending sequence of revisions.

An icon formed on the display ahead, circling from the edges of the screen and closing on a non-descript patch of clear ground amid the banks of snow. Platform thirty-three, and her destination. One hundred kilometers out.

Under manual control, she hefted the ponderous ship through an oscillating path centered on a straight line to the pad. Cars and other vehicles were visible now, plowing the snow or moving between the landing pads.

“Confirm? Theseus, are you there?”

“Confirm!” Rachel almost switched the radio off, but that would require her to let go of the controls first.

Even as the ship slowed to a hover over the pad, the tension in her muscles only increased. The ship refused to stay level. There was no safe way to disable the RCS nozzles to even out the forces. She switched off what she could, but the computer continued to blare warnings about her roll as she descended. She prayed the landing gear extended and locked down like she told it to.

[Reverse which side had failures, so it would have meant she'd have crashed if her other arm wasn't working.]

The impact was deafening and would have launched her out of the seat if she hadn't been restrained. The interior lights flickered and died for a few long moments. All of the displays went dark, only to be replaced by the cloven hoof symbol of Lockhoof Industries while the computers rebooted.

“Theseus? Captain? Can you hear me?”

Rachel pried her hands away from the controls. She articulated each finger and stretched her bad arm. “Yeah… yeah, I can hear you.”

“Is everyone all right? We're dispatching a medical team.”

She placed her face in her hands. There was temptation to tell them there was no need, but she didn't have the will.

She just needed to sit there for a minute.

Just a minute…

[hr]

Rachel knew she wasn't going to like what she found long before she worked up the nerve to exit the ship. The lights went back out and stayed out, followed by the computers. All that was left on were emergency lights, small and placed erratically in the ceiling and floors that shed harsh shadows from every tiny corner they intersected. A distant alarm buzzed, which she guessed was in her bunk room. The floor wasn't level. Lots of little things that just made her suspect that when she got off of the ship, she was going to be unhappy.

For the first time in her life, she pulled an emergency release lever. The airlock was nominally powered, so a loss of power meant she had to remove an access panel, twist two locks and with both arms and legs, all under dim lighting that made the faded directions infuriatingly hard to read, pull the mechanical release that disengaged the airlock's mechanisms. The inner portion of the airlock was much better covered by the emergency lighting strips, so repeating the process for the access hatch went a bit more smoothly.

A deep hiss filled the room as the pneumatics bled off pressure to let the ramp down, followed by a gust of arctic air and morning light flowing into the corridor. A siren wailed in the distance, growing louder as she stared down the ramp. The distinct odor of burnt grease wafted past.

Whatever. The damage is done. Better face the proverbial music.

Things could have been worse. Not much, but they could have been worse.

To the aft of the ship, the left landing strut had collapsed under the impact, jamming the locking rings upward and twisting at least two pistons as large as she was loose. Thick, dark lubricant oozed from the rings, painting the lower half of the strut and forming a black, icy slurry in the snow at the base of the ship. To the fore of the ship, a maintenance panel beneath the ship was entirely [i]missing[/i]. Exposed plumbing and wiring had been burned through by the reentry, which now leaked a clear fluid that left little holes in the snow where it dripped.

“Well, I guess that explains the thruster failure.” She scuffed a hoof along the snow, as if she could move enough out of the way to see if the landing pad had been damaged. Probably not. They made them crash resistant for a reason. At least she wouldn't have to pay for that.

The medical team and ground crew arrived moments later, and before she could really ward them off, paramedics were checking her over. After assuring them that she was fine, and that no, she really didn't need an expensive ambulance ride to the hospital, the ground crew started picking over the landing pad.

A scrawny buck with oversized antlers and an equally oversized jacket whistled and shook his head as he spotted the missing panel. “I don't know if I should call you the luckiest woman on the planet, or if that's like calling a pet that's lost two legs getting hit by ground cars lucky. Looks like reentry burned through your propellant lines. I've never seen that happen before, but I've seen the photos after other thruster failure incidents.”

A stockier ram covered in thick wool looked back from where he was inspecting the ruined landing leg. “No joke. When's the last time you had maintenance done on the RCS system? Who did it?”

Rachel shrugged. There was an intense, almost overwhelming desire to throw the Vasili Station crew under the train, but she honestly had no idea if they even touched it. She'd have to find the logs, and they were in the now dead computers. “No idea. It's been ages and this is my first time the ship has been on the planet in over a year. Could have lost it halfway to the outer belts.”

The deer kicked some snow onto the dripping propellant. “Yeah, well, you ought to sue whoever did look over your ship last time. They should have caught it if there was a loose panel. You could have died, for real.”

Thanks for reminding me! Rachel traced the tracks from their emergency response vehicle through the snow back toward the buildings in the distance and decided she didn't want to walk that far. “Can you give me a ride back to the terminal building? I've got to be across the city in a few hours, so I kind of need to get started on whatever ream of paperwork is involved in...” She waved her hand over the cargo freighter canted backward and to its side. “This.”

“Must have been a real hurry to come in that hot,” the ram whispered to his buddy, probably assuming she couldn't hear him. He ambled back toward the boxy red truck collecting a fine mist of white powder. “All right, hop in and we'll get you back. Wait, was it just you aboard?”

“Here we go...” Rachel whispered, not caring if he could hear.

[hr]

The paperwork was surprisingly light for a change. Aside from the fun of explaining her age to the administrator, there was little to do other than sign a form authorizing Sethena Interplanetary Spaceport to perform an investigation, and to permit them to bill her for one hundred fifty credits per day that the ship sat on the landing pad. While the doe was kind enough to point out that she could rent a long term hangar for just two-thousand five-hundred credits per month, Rachel declined. Not because she had any realistic hope of flying Theseus out of SIS in the next few days, but when she only had a few hundred credits in her account, that was all she could do.

Based on her last communications with Alex, she had just about three hours before she had to be at his office. According to her compad, his office was about twelve kilometers away, and under present traffic conditions would take about half an hour to reach by public transportation.

Or, she could save twenty credits by walking, and give herself some time to collect herself for the upcoming meeting. What was it really about? As far as she could tell, probably not much. Anthony and Andrea were just trying to weasel their way out of the lawsuit by pulling technicalities. There was probably nothing more to it. Just a way to make her waste her time in the hopes she'd drop it.

Fat chance.

The light snowing stopped not long after she left the spaceport, but the thin, hazy winter cloud cover blanketed the sky for as far as she could see. There was always activity in a city this size, but this early in the morning most people weren't out and about in the morning rush yet. The cool and overcast lighting gave the city a calm veneer that she wished she could share in.

Towering street lamps, formed of spiraling metal frames that rose three times her height dimmed and faded in response to the growing light from the sun's rise. It would have been nice if this meeting had been a few hours later, after the sunlight and heated sidewalks had melted all of the snow that accumulated over the previous night. Her hooves sank into the slushy mess with each step, dampening her sandals and the cuffs on her pant legs.  Perhaps opting to walk had been a poor choice after all. It wouldn't matter what she looked like when she arrived, but she'd be lying to herself if she said she didn't care.

Otherwise, she was cold, but unlike an organic woman it wasn't an impediment. There was a distinct stiffness to her gait now, something she'd come to expect from cold weather, and something she was long used to.

But was it worse now?

She stopped to flex her knees and ankles. Maybe. It was so hard to tell. For all that she was a machine, she wasn't a computer. She couldn't tell the precise forces needed to move her limbs, nor did she recall in minute detail what it felt like to walk in the snow five years ago.

It was just her mind. She knew she would need maintenance one day. Unlike a normal person, her muscles couldn't self repair. They would wear out and get weaker over time. She'd need them to be replaced one day, but that couldn't be today. She didn't have the money to...

Rachel paused and tried her bad elbow again. She needed to rivet her attention somewhere else. The shops to her right might have been a reasonable distraction if anyone were there at six in the morning. The electronics emporium was brightly lit, but empty. Posters as tall as her filled two of the windows, featuring an irrationally exuberant reindeer holding a glowing Tri-Pi-Tek compad that radiated images of half a dozen movies and games she recognized. The scuffed and cracked device in her back pocket jumped back to the front of her mind.

Never mind.

She huffed and pressed on down the empty street ahead. Towering skyscrapers from the Petroupos Subdivision rose above the buildings ahead, far enough into the distance that they grayed from the haze hanging above her. She could see her destination now, a squat tower with a red roof, now missing whatever name had once hung on its side in neon lights. She'd made better time than she thought.

Ahead was the Kalamatsi river, and its likewise named suspension bridge. She must have walked its paths a thousand times during her stay here. One of the tourist attractions of the city if there ever was one, the engineers had gone through the trouble of building observatories above the traffic along over a kilometer of walkways. It was loud during rush hours and cramped during the middle of the day or after business hours, but people were willing to wait in line for ages to eat at the gyro shop at its peak. Her father loved it too, and as one of the wealthiest businessmen in the city, he was always able to secure a seat without so much fuss. If she were honest, the food wasn't exceptional, and the atmosphere was less thrilling than one might think overlooking the ships in the river from three hundred meters up would be, but it didn't matter. She was always happy to join him here.

Rachel stopped again at the lift at the center of the bridge that could take her there. Tempting as it was, she declined. The memories were of her and her father together. Not... this.

Cars raced by behind her, separated by a centimeter of plexiglass marred from impacts by pebbles or other minute debris. She stepped around the lift and out to the railing overlooking the river below. There was no ship traffic yet, despite no ice on the water's surface, but that was fine. She didn't need to watch the boats float by right now.

She just needed to collect her thoughts.

She had plenty of time to get to the Sakalos Lawfirm.

[hr]

Even with the increase in traffic, vehicular or pedestrian, Rachel had no trouble crossing into the subdivision in time. It helped that the city's Pedestrian Elevation and Expediency Program for Safety, or PEEPS, had evidently been completed in the year since she'd been gone. The elevated crosswalks and tunnels crossing the major roads that had languished in a state of partial completion since her first day on Anvari were now finished and choked with pedestrians working their way through crowds to get to work and ignoring the animated ads playing on the walls. A digital coyote strode along the wall next to her and flashed a thumbs up. “We're looking out for PEEPS like you!” a text bubble flashed, before it changed to advertising some local restaurant she hadn't heard of and lost her attention.

The sidewalks' heating systems had also finally kicked in and turned the thin snow cover into puddles and streams of water running down drains, but it was too late for her clothes. Here she was, outside the lobby of the combination lawyer, university computer lab, corporate fast food headquarters and truck rental company offices, and she looked terrible. Her feet were soaked and she had dozens and dozens of little pinpricks of dampness all over her over shirt from snow flurries.

“Whatever,” she mumbled.

Sakalos Law Firm was on the seventh floor, occupying just a small receptionist area and three individual offices, all decorated in abstract paintings of blotchy colors. Lucy, a red cow with black spots, curly hair and an electronic cigarette that hung loose in her mouth, sent her back to Alex's office with a disinterested grunt and nod toward the back rooms.

Her first clue that this was more than some token waste of her time was the variety of voices she heard, and the fact that it was all coming from the conference room instead of Alex's personal office. A quick peek as she passed confirmed that Alex was sitting at the table with two paper cups.

The deer whipped around, sending his garish tie with more of the abstract color blotches covering it spinning around in a small circle. His hair was ruffled like he'd run his hands through it a few dozen times. “Oh, Rachel. Thank goodness, I was about to message you again. Come in, please.”

Despite her fears of who she would find inside with him, she complied. She wished she hadn't. At the far end of the table were three people she didn't particularly care to ever see again. A black coated bull in an equally black business suit, a white cow in a sky blue jacket and skirt, and their lawyer, a hyena woman who was much less jovial looking than the stereotypes would suggest.

“Oh, good,” Andrea said first as she set her silver cased compad on the table.

Anthony crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “I'm glad you're here, Rachel. I was worried we'd have to send you the case dismissal in a very impersonal Rumormonger message. You're pretty hard to contact any other way.”

“That so? When is the last time you tried?” she asked as she took a seat next to Alex.

Her “brother” shrugged. “I don't know, maybe a year or so ago. Probably around the last time we all had a face-to-face chat, come to think of it.”

“So what's this about, anyway? All I heard was that if I didn't show up by today the judge was going to toss the case.”

Tony held up a hand to his lawyer. “Alice, if you would?”

The hyena passed over a stack of papers, which Alex intercepted. “What this is about, is that you don't have a case to stand on, and we're here to offer you a chance to settle before we present it to the judge.”

“You can't be serious,” Alex said. He thumbed through the pages and shook his head. “No, no. No, I don't think so.”

Rachel tried to take the pages for a look of her own. “What?”

“They want you to drop the suit and pay their legal fees.” He flipped to another page without releasing the documents and said, “Which is an outrageous sixteen-thousand credits.”

Tony shrugged again. “No offense to Mr. Sakalos, but our corporate lawyers charge top credit for their services.”

Alex slid the papers over for Rachel to look over. “I'm sorry, but we're not going to settle on those terms.”

“And what terms would you settle on?” Alice asked.

“The terms we sent to you before. They haven't changed. If you insist on dragging this out, I'll caution you that we have cases of our own to present to the judge that demonstrate precedent for VI synthetics' personhood, not to mention similar cases of aggrieved siblings trying to retroactively change a will. They all ended poorly for those trying to change it.”

Rachel tuned out the back and forth for a moment as she flipped through the documents. A bill for the Hoffman & Son Lawfirm was at the top, followed by the extensive will of Phillip Freeman that she'd read multiple times, followed by an invoice for a Tsoukalos Personal Companion Virtual Intelligence Synthetic, Generation 7, Revision 93. An image of her, with a simple smile and equally simple white shirt and jeans, filled the cover page of the invoice, which was multiple pages thick...

Alice snorted. “And I'll caution you that there was a ruling two weeks ago that VIs are not considered people on Anvari. It was a city level decision in Kerres, ironically another will dispute to decide who would get the robot, but it's a powerful precedent. The judge will rule in our favor. You can appeal it, and the case will go up to the planetary court, and they will rule the same. Then we won't have to have questions like this in the future. It's your choice, Ms. Freeman and Mr. Sakalos, but you both know the political climate. VIs are a dangerous step toward unchecked automation, and no judge is going to rule in favor of proliferating it.”

A lot of things went through Rachel's mind that she had to filter out before they got to her mouth. She opted to slide the papers back to Alex and look her “siblings” in the eyes. “I just want to know one thing.”
 

“What's that?” Tony asked.

“Why?”

“There's a lot of possible answers, could you be more specific?”

“Why are you doing this? All of it? Our father wrote his will and he was very specific. Freeman Express is worth nineteen billion credits, and you want to cut me out of the million credits he was going to leave me?”

Tony shrugged yet again. She wished she had a rope to tie him to that chair so he couldn't do it again. “We let you keep Theseus. Besides, I have a fiduciary duty to the company to maximize its value, and a duty to the shareholders to maximize profit. A million credits goes a long way toward the employees at the bottom of the pyramid too, you know.”

“Oh, cut the crap! That's not what this is about and you know it! The company's not going to see a bit of it!”

Alex tapped her hand. “Settle down, yelling isn't going to help.”

Her “sister” leaned onto the table. “No, you're right. That isn't what this is about. You said our father earlier, but he wasn't your father. He was Tony's and my father. Not yours.”

“How can you say that? He wrote in his will that one million credits would go to his daughter, Rachel Freeman. That's me. He spent nine years telling people I was his father. Telling me. Just because I wasn't born and raised by-”

“Doesn't mean you weren't his daughter?” Andrea huffed. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it does. What do you know of how we feel? You replaced us!”

Now it was Alice's turn to interject. “Ms. Freeman, Andrea, please. Getting into a shouting contest isn't going to solve anything or advance your-”

“I'll say what I want if it makes me feel better! I think I've got a right to be mad at what-what she did to our family.”

Rachel stood and thrust a finger toward them. “If you gave a crap about him, maybe even a tiny little one like the birds leave on the sidewalk, then he wouldn't have felt like he needed a real daughter.”

Everyone else took in a sharp breath. Andrea stood and cut her eyes across the table. “You think we didn't care about him?”
 

“No, I know you didn't. Daddy knew about all of the politicking going on with the board. The two of you were working for years behind his back to try to get him removed as CEO and have Tony installed in his place. Why? For money? Is that all you cared about?” Rachel snatched up the invoice and shook it. “Because that's sure what it looks like.”

Tony raised a hand. “If I may? Dad wasn't really able to run-”

“No, you may not,” Rachel spat. “It wasn't just the company. The two of you haven't spoken to him outside of board meetings in years. Even before I got here, he said that you openly talked about how much you'd get out of him when he died. You're lucky he left you-”

Andrea shouted, “And that gives him the right to buy some sexbot from Rawiyah? And what do you know? We were both board members and very busy people. You think you're better than us just because you could sit around his house all day with no job and bring him his dinner when he asked for it?”

“Sexbot?” Rachel roared.

“Read the damned invoice,” her “sister” spat back. “Oh, yes, it's on there. He spent a lot of money to make sure you were as natural as possible. Did you know Tsoukalos charged fifteen thousand credits for a vagina? Because they did. It's all there in black and white. Oh, and by all means, please read your instruction manual, which is clear to point out that you'll perform any 'domestic duties' your owner requests.”

“Daddy never touched me like that and never-”

Alex jumped up and threw his arms higher. “Ladies, ladies! Please, sit down. If you're going to just throw insults at each other I'm going to call this meeting to a close right now and get security if I have to. Now, did you have anything else to say or are you going to leave us with your offer to settle?”

Andrea smiled. “No, I think that we're done here. And don't worry about the settlement. We're retracting that offer.”

Alice said, “Ms. Freeman, I don't-”

“It's fine. Don't worry, you'll get paid.” She met eyes with Rachel and circled around the table toward the exit. “We'll be seeing you in court. And maybe we'll be repossessing your ship while we're at it. You should have taken the easy way out.”

Rachel gave an exaggerated shrug back. “Do whatever you want to. You're going to anyway.”

Alice and Andy made their exit more quietly, leaving no further threats or ultimatums.

Alex sank into his chair and ran his hand through his hair again. “That could have gone better.”

“You don't say.”

He brushed an empty coffee cup aside and said, “Don't worry about the ship. There are laws against rescinding large property like that if it's all you have. I'll find a case about it somewhere, I'm sure the judge will side with us on that one.”

Rachel chuckled under her breath. What did any of it matter now? “The ship's not worth repossessing anyway. They don't want it.”

“Maybe not. Uh, in any case, we should probably adjourn for now. I imagine they'll make good on their threat and I need to get ready for a court appearance.” He flicked his eyes down to the crumpled invoice in her hand. “And, uh, your account is getting very low, so we probably shouldn't drag this out.”

“I guess not.” She made for the exit. “Guess I'll see you soon in court.”

Maybe she should have asked about suing Vasili station for possibly almost burning her up during reentry, but she knew she didn't have the money for it. And she knew she'd lose that lawsuit too and just ruin her reputation as being litigious.

Not that her reputation could get much worse at this rate anyway.