Cupcake had the tour guide's hat.
She lay on the heat rock above the VIP path with the brim in her teeth. The hat was straw, with a green band that read STEELE XENO PARK in stitched letters. A third of the band was already gone.
Duncan Steele came over the service rail with a pair of grill tongs still in his hand. He'd been turning ribs for the keepers on the back lawn. Rest day was the one afternoon a month his zoo closed its gates. Somebody had decided to spend it walking forty donors past the most dangerous animal he owned.
The guests stood bunched on the gravel below the rock. Linen suits, sun hats, two off-world delegates with interpreters at their elbows. The tour guide stood at the front with one hand on his bare scalp.
"She's playing," the guide told them. He was nineteen and on his second week. "She does this. She's really very friendly."
Duncan looked at the cat's flank.
The cat had stopped purring. That was the part the tour guide should have worried about.
Cupcake was a six-legged ambush cat, eighty kilos of tawny muscle with a face like a sleepy housecat's. The keepers had named her as a cub. Nobody had renamed her since, partly out of loyalty and partly because she ate the keeper who suggested it. Ate his boots, anyway.
She set the hat down on the rock. Her middle pair of legs drew in under her belly.
"Everybody stand still," Duncan said.
He didn't raise his voice, but forty heads turned anyway.
"Who are you?" a man in white linen asked. He had a donor's badge on his lapel and the look of someone who had paid for this afternoon. "We were told the animals were secured."
"They were. I'm the owner. Stand still, please."
A woman at the back of the group had taken her shoes off. She held them by the straps in one hand, two grey heels with points like nails. She stood barefoot in the mulch at the edge of the path. Silver-streaked black hair cut sharp at the jaw. A tailored grey suit. She was the only person in the crowd looking at the cat instead of at him.
Beside her, a broad man in a dark jacket had his hand inside his coat.
"Sir," Duncan said to him. "Take your hand off that."
"My job is the ambassador."
"Then do it standing still. If you shoot her, you'll miss. Then she'll be angry and you'll be dead."
The bodyguard's hand stayed where it was. The woman with the shoes didn't look at him. She said, "Barnaby. Do what the man says."
The hand came out empty.
Cupcake slid off the rock like poured honey and was gone into the ferns.
"Right," the tour guide said, too loud. "Everyone walk calmly toward the exit. Calmly. This way."
The group started moving. Forty people on gravel made a sound like a slow rain, crunch and crunch and crunch.
Duncan listened to it.
He heard forty people walking. Then he heard one extra step inside their rhythm, soft and perfectly on the beat, coming from the ferns on the left, three meters off the path, keeping pace.
She was walking with them. An ambush cat on her home world hunted grazing herds that way. She matched their tread, so the herd only ever heard itself.
"Stop," Duncan said. "Everybody stop walking. Now."
They stopped. Eighty boots came down on the gravel and held still.
One more step landed in the ferns, a half beat late. Then nothing.
"What was that?" someone whispered.
"Her," Duncan said. "She copies your footsteps. As long as you walk, she's invisible. Nobody moves until I say."
A young delegate near the front had started to shake. Duncan could see the knees going from ten meters. Another minute and he would bolt. A running man was the one thing on this path she'd chase on instinct.
"You," Duncan said. "Green jacket. Look at me."
The young man looked, white around the mouth.
"I need you to do something hard. Put your hand on the shoulder of the woman next to you. Good. Now breathe out through your mouth. She doesn't care about you. You're too skinny."
Somebody laughed, high and nervous. The delegate's knees steadied. The woman whose shoulder he held patted his hand without looking at him.
Forty sets of nerves, Duncan thought, every one of them a different animal. He'd have taken the cat alone in the dark over this.
The man in white linen made a noise in his throat.
"This is absurd. I've been coming to this park for six years. I'm not going to stand in a bush because your animal got loose." He stepped off the gravel and strode toward the exit gate alone. "I'm going to have a word with your director."
"Sir, stop walking."
The man kept walking. His shoes crunched on the gravel, one, two, three, a nice clean rhythm.
The ferns opened. Cupcake hit him from the side, low. He went down flat on his back in the mulch with all six of her feet planted on his chest. The crowd screamed as one.
Duncan was already moving, tongs up, but the cat didn't want the man. She lowered her face to his, sniffed his hair and took the panama hat off his head with her front teeth. Then she stepped off him and walked back into the ferns. She didn't hurry.
The donor lay on the ground staring at the sky. He didn't have a mark on him.
"She took my hat," he said.
"She likes hats," Duncan said. "Stay down. You're safer there."
For once in his life, the man listened.
Barnaby had his hand back inside his coat. The ambassador's guard had seen eighty kilos of cat land on a man. His training said to end it. Duncan walked across the gravel and stood squarely between the coat and the ferns.
"If you draw that," he said quietly, "you'll put a round through the fern bed and into my keepers' shed. There are six people eating lunch in there. She's already gone. Take your hand out."
Barnaby's jaw worked. The ambassador put two fingers on his sleeve, just touching.
The hand came out again. This time it stayed out.
Duncan crouched at the edge of the ferns where the cat had gone in.
The mulch was soft and dark from the morning's watering. It held prints well. Five pads in a curve, a big one in front. Then a sixth print, smaller and deeper, set off to the side. That was the middle leg she used to brake.
He followed them with his eyes. The tracks went straight into the ferns, heading for the back wall of the exhibit and the drainage culvert. That was where a scared animal would go. A keeper who'd only read the book would follow them there.
But the sixth print turned.
Three meters in, the braking print pointed back the way she'd come, laid across her own trail. She'd gone in, planted that middle foot and doubled back over her own tracks. She would come out behind the group, on the path, where the people would be when they finally relaxed and started walking again.
Duncan stood up.
"Listen," he said to the crowd. "In a minute I want you to walk out of here. But not together. Every one of you walks at your own pace, out of step with the person next to you. Shuffle, skip, I don't care. Just don't keep time."
"You want us to walk badly?" said one of the interpreters.
"I want you to walk like a crowd at a wedding. She can't hide in a noise that doesn't have a beat."
The woman with the shoes laughed. It was a big, low laugh that turned half the heads in the group. She didn't seem to mind.
"What if she follows us?" the guide asked. His voice cracked on it.
"She won't. She's already decided where she's going to be." Duncan pointed at the path behind them with the tongs. "Right there, in about five minutes. So you'll be gone."
"How do you know that?"
"She told me. Go. Take them out the main gate and close it behind you."
They went. The donors shuffled toward the exit like the worst parade on the planet, arms out, out of step, a few giggling now that they had something to do. The donor got up and went with them, holding the back of his head where his hat had been.
The ambassador went last. She looked back at him once from the gate.
He noticed that. Then he made himself stop noticing it.
The transport crate stood behind the keeper door at the side of the exhibit, steel and mesh, built for her. Duncan dragged it out onto the path where the double-back trail would end and propped the door open with the tongs.
He needed bait. His radio clipped to his belt crackled.
"Duncan." Nadia's voice. "Item one. Why is there a crowd of donors walking out of the VIP gate like they're all drunk?"
"Because I told them to. Bring the rib platter from the grill. Leave it at the keeper door. Don't come in."
A pause. "The whole platter?"
"She'll want to be bribed."
Two minutes later the keeper door opened a hand's width and a tray of smoked ribs slid through onto the gravel. The door shut. Duncan took the biggest rib, still hot, and laid it at the back of the crate.
Then he stood beside the open door with his back to the ferns and waited.
It was hard to stand that way. Sixteen years in Fleet special forces had taught him to put his back against a wall. Now he was offering it to a cat. He made his shoulders loose and looked at the empty path. He breathed smoke and sauce and the green smell of the watered ferns.
Every plan survives until the animal reads it.
She came on the double-back, exactly where the sixth print had said she would. He didn't hear her. He felt the gravel shift under his boots a fraction of a second before eighty kilos hit him between the shoulder blades.
He went down hard on his left side. Pain went white through his hip. Her weight rolled across him with the claws in. For one second they were nose to nose. Her breath smelled of straw hat and donor.
Then she smelled the rib.
She went over him to get it. Her back legs raked his shirt from collar to hem as she pushed off. She was into the crate in one long stretch, head down in the meat.
Duncan kicked the door shut from the ground. The latch fell.
He lay on the gravel for a moment and looked at the sky while his hip throbbed. His good shirt, the blue one he'd bought for the donor dinner, hung off him in four strips with rib sauce down the front.
Inside the crate Cupcake began to purr.
The keeper door opened. Dr. Nadia Chen stepped through, a tablet in one hand, a keeper's radio clipped to her collar. She looked at him on the ground, then at the crate, then back at him.
"Item two," she said. "That was your good shirt."
Velira was a soft green world with long evenings. Duncan had chosen it for exactly that ten years ago. The staff lawn smelled of grill smoke and cut grass by evening. Somebody had strung lights between the feeding sheds. The keepers had come back to the ribs with stories already growing in the telling. At the drinks table the night keeper was doing Cupcake, purr and all, with a straw hat in his teeth.
It was a good crew. Thirty-one people who would walk into a calving barn at three in the morning, then complain about the coffee. Duncan had built this place out of a bankrupt petting zoo and a lot of stubbornness. On nights like this he could feel it work.
Duncan sat on an upturned feed bin in a borrowed keeper's shirt, holding a cold bottle against his hip. Nadia stood over him and read from her tablet.
"Item three. The donor in linen wants a new panama and an apology."
"He can have the hat."
"Item four. The cat ate a hat. Again. Two, if you include the tour guide's."
"Put it in her file."
"Her file is thicker than yours." Nadia scrolled. "Item five. The Board."
He knew that tone. The Board licensed every zoo from here to the outer routes. Nadia said its name like a launch officer saying storm.
"We're still Class B," she said. "Rare animals and breeding programs. Dangerous species only on a special permit, which is how we keep her. I sent them the review file this morning. If you want Class A, you need three things on the record by year end. A dangerous species held safely..."
"We've got that."
"A crowd of donors just watched you prove it. Two. A logged field rescue, off-world, on the Board's forms. Three. A research partnership with a real scientific body. And the fee, forty thousand credits, which is banked. I banked it in spring. Nobody touches it."
"Then what's the problem?"
"Item six." She lowered the tablet. "The season's acquisitions money is spent. Committed. I put down deposits with three dealers, in good faith, for animals you told me you'd find. You haven't found them. If you don't bring something home this season, the Park eats the fees and nobody gets a raise. Including you."
"I don't pay myself."
"That's why I'm telling you." She looked past him and her face went smooth and polite. "Item seven is walking this way. I'll leave you to it."
She went off toward the grill. Duncan turned his head.
The ambassador was crossing the lawn with her shoes still in her hand.
She'd lost the jacket somewhere and wore the grey suit trousers with a white silk shirt, sleeves rolled. Her feet were bare in the grass. The lights over the sheds caught the silver in her hair and a small gold pin on her collar, a seal of some world he didn't know.
He looked at her feet a beat longer than a man should. When he looked up, she was watching him do it.
She didn't say anything about it. She sat down on the feed bin next to his, which wasn't built for two, so her shoulder pressed his.
"Linnea Arceno," she said. "I'm the ambassador Barnaby was so keen to protect."
"Duncan Steele."
"I know. I read your file on the shuttle down. It was very boring." She put her shoes on the grass between her feet. "It did not mention any of that."
"Any of what?"
"You lying down for a cat." Her fingers found the gold pin and turned it a quarter turn on her collar, then back. "That was the most interesting thing I've seen in six years of receptions."
"You need better receptions."
"I need better company at them. Do you know what I did last night? I listened to a trade minister describe his grandson's teeth for forty minutes." She tilted her head. "Today a man told forty rich people to walk like drunks, and they did it. Then he lay down and let a cat jump on him."
"I didn't let her. She has opinions."
"So do I." She looked at the borrowed shirt, then at the bottle against his hip. "Is it broken?"
"Bruised. She hit me like a door."
"She did. I watched." Her mouth curved. "You went down well. I've seen admirals fall with less grace."
The keepers at the grill had gone quiet, which meant they were listening. Duncan didn't care. He looked at her, at the bare feet and the rolled sleeves and the mouth that hadn't stopped being amused since the cat. He didn't feel like being careful.
"Here's what I'd like to do about your receptions," he said. "I'd like to get you out of here, feed you something better than ribs and find out what you laugh like when nobody's watching."
She considered that for about one breath.
"Dinner," Linnea said. "Yours."
"My place is a kitchen and a porch."
"Then I'll bring the shoes." She stood and held out a hand to pull him up. Her grip was harder than he expected. "Give me ten minutes to lose Barnaby."
She walked off across the grass toward her bodyguard. Duncan watched her go. This time he didn't stop himself.
Nadia came back with a flat courier envelope.
"Item eight," she said. "This came by fast post an hour ago. It was at the front gate. It's addressed to the house."
The envelope was heavy, stamped with a dock seal he knew. Inside was a card of black plastic with gold lettering, the kind of card he'd spent five years asking for and never getting. The closed exchange. Rare stock, licensed, traded behind a locked door to a guest list of fourteen.
Every year he'd applied. Every year he'd been turned down by a form letter.
He turned the card over in the lights. The guest line was printed in neat gold capitals.
GUEST OF RECORD: A. STEELE.
Linnea Arceno was wearing his shirt and drinking his coffee.
She sat on his kitchen counter with her bare heels against the cupboard door. The shirt was one of his old field shirts, faded khaki with the Park's cat logo on the pocket. On her it reached halfway down her thighs. She had rolled the sleeves to the elbow, the same as she had on the lawn last night.
Duncan stood at the stove with a pan of eggs and a bruise the size of a dinner plate on his left hip. He'd slept on the other side of the bed. He hadn't slept much on either.
"Your coffee is terrible," Linnea said.
"It's Fleet issue. I buy it on purpose."
"That explains it." She drank more anyway. "I've decided something about you."
"Go on."
"You're the only man I've met this year who didn't try to impress me." She studied him over the rim of the cup. "Which was very impressive. I'm annoyed about it."
He put eggs on two plates and slid one along the counter until it stopped against her hip. She ate perched up there as if she owned the kitchen. This morning she more or less did. Her grey suit hung over the back of his one good chair with the jacket folded on top. The gold pin lay on his table beside the salt, where she'd dropped it some time after midnight.
"When's your shuttle?" he asked.
"Nine. Barnaby will be outside at eight forty, looking at his watch and disapproving of you." Linnea set the cup down. "You're about to say something polite about seeing me again."
"I was about to say the eggs need salt."
She laughed, the big low laugh from yesterday that turned heads in a crowd. In his small kitchen it had nowhere to go and filled the place up.
"Don't call me," she said. "I'll find you."
"That sounds like a threat."
"It's a promise from a woman with a very good diplomatic staff." She slid off the counter onto his tile and crossed to the table for the pin. She turned it over in her fingers twice, considering, before she fixed it to the collar of his shirt, the one she still had on. "I owe you one, Duncan Steele."
"For dinner?"
"For the view." Her eyes went over him once, slowly, from the stove to his bare feet and back. "Diplomats keep their debts. You'll know when you need it."
He leaned on the counter beside her knee. Up close she smelled of his soap and her own perfume, something dry and expensive that had survived the night.
"Barnaby could wait an hour," he said.
"Barnaby could wait a week. The trade minister can't." She put one bare foot against his good hip and pushed him back a step, smiling. "Don't tempt me. I was raised by people who signed treaties before breakfast."
"How's that going?"
"Badly. I've already broken one tradition this morning." She looked at the bruise showing above his waistband, purple going green at the edges. "That's spectacular. Does it hurt?"
"Only when ambassadors kick it."
"I kicked the other side." Her mouth curved. "I'm a diplomat."
He was going to kiss her for that. He had his hand on the counter by her hip and was leaning in when the door chimed.
They both looked at the door. It was seven fifty. Nobody came to his house at seven fifty, because the keepers knew better and the animals couldn't reach the button.
The chime went again, twice more in a cheerful little rhythm.
"Is that your wife?" Linnea asked.
"I don't have a wife."
"Then I'm curious." She picked up her coffee again and leaned on the doorframe to wait.
Duncan went and opened the door.
His niece stood on the porch with a packed bag at her feet and a black card held up beside her face like a winning hand.
Alisa Steele was twenty-three now and taller than her mother. Her dark curls were already coming out of their clip. The freckles across her nose seemed to multiply every time he saw her. She wore a jacket of bright blue with a fur collar that had cost more than one of his keepers made in a month. It was a jacket for places where she planned to be noticed.
"Good morning," Alisa said. "Before you say anything, I have coffee money, a translator license in four trade languages and guest access to half the bars on Port Aster. Also this." She waggled the card. "Can I come in? It's cold, and my bag weighs more than I do."
"How do you have that?"
"I asked nicely." She looked past him into the kitchen. Her eyebrows climbed toward her curls.
Linnea had come to the kitchen doorway in his shirt with the gold pin on its collar, holding her coffee. The two women looked at each other for a long second. Neither of them blinked first.
"Good morning," Linnea said.
"Good morning," Alisa said. "I love your hair."
"Thank you. I love your jacket. It's very loud."
"It's supposed to be." Alisa beamed at her. "I'm Alisa. He's my uncle. I'll stand right here on the porch and admire the trees for a while."
"No need." Linnea set her cup on the counter. "I was just leaving."
She went into his bedroom and came out three minutes later in the grey suit with her shoes in her hand and the pin moved to her own collar. In the doorway she stopped beside Alisa and looked Duncan over once more, as if memorizing him for later use.
"Tell your cat I said goodbye," she said.
She went down the porch steps barefoot. Out on the gravel road Barnaby stood beside a black ground car, looking at his watch exactly as promised. He opened the door. She got in without looking back. The car rolled off between the paddock fences toward the main gate.
Alisa watched it all the way to the turn.
"Okay," she said. "She's amazing. Where did you find her?"
"Under a cat."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
"She's an ambassador," Duncan said.
"You found an ambassador under a cat. That's the best sentence I've heard all year." Alisa hauled her bag over the threshold. "Is there coffee, or did she drink all of it?"
He took the card off her on the porch, under the eaves where the light was good. The gold capitals read the same as they had last night. GUEST OF RECORD: A. STEELE. Under that, in smaller print he hadn't looked at closely enough: PLUS ONE.
"The exchange is closed," he said. "Fourteen guests. I've applied every year for five years."
"I know. Nadia told me all about it at Grandma's birthday, while you were in the kitchen feeding the dog cake." Alisa sat on the porch rail with her coffee and swung her long legs. "You're my plus one."
"I'm nobody's plus one."
"You are on this card."
Below the porch the Park was waking up. A keeper pushed a feed cart along the lower path with one wheel squealing. Something in the bird house was screaming, which meant the morning fruit was late again. Duncan turned the card over and back.
The closed exchange was the best licensed animal trade on the Frontier, the long sweep of settled worlds out past the old core where he'd made his living for ten years. Rare stock with clean papers. Fourteen buyers and a locked door. If anything that could carry the Park to Class A was changing hands this season, it would change hands in that room.
"How did you get this?"
"I have friends."
"Which friends?"
"The friendly ones." Alisa grinned at him over her cup. "I'll tell you on the ship."
"There isn't going to be a ship."
"There's always a ship. You've got that big white one with the horse painted on the side."
"The Pegasus is a working vessel. It's a flying animal hospital with an engine strapped to it. It isn't a party boat."
"Good. I hate parties." She said it with a perfectly straight face, which was quite a trick for a woman in that jacket.
He looked at her. She looked back. The grin stayed, though under it she was watching his face very carefully. She had done that since she was six years old, sitting at his sister's table while he told stories about Fleet, watching to see if he'd laugh at her questions.
"Why do you want this?" he asked.
"Because I'm good at people and you're terrible at them." She set her cup on the rail. "Because every time you come home from a trip, you tell the story at dinner and everybody laughs. I want to be in the story. I'm tired of being the one you tell it to."
That landed somewhere he didn't expect.
"Your mother would kill me," he said.
"My mother said, and I quote, 'If he brings you back with all your fingers, I'll make him dinner for a year.'" Alisa held up both hands and wiggled ten fingers at him. "She's already planning the menu. There's a roast."
"You're not a field hand. You can't shoot. You fly a shuttle like you're trying to wake it up."
"I can talk to anyone. I speak four trade languages and enough Thalassian, the blue-skinned ocean people's language, to order dinner and apologize for it. I can get invited into rooms you'd have to break into." She tilted her head at the card in his hand. "I got that. You couldn't."
There it was. He'd walked straight into it, with his eyes open.
Duncan sat down on the porch step below her. His hip complained about the angle. He ignored it.
"One trip," he said. "Trial basis. If it goes wrong, you go home on the first commercial liner, with no argument."
Alisa made a small sound that might have been a scream with the volume turned off.
"There are rules," he said.
"Of course there are rules. You're you." She pulled a pen out of her jacket and held it over the back of her hand. "Go."
"Rule one. In the field, you do what I say, when I say it, and we discuss it afterward. Rule two. Sealed means sealed, whether it's a habitat, a bay or a crate. Rule three. Nobody goes off without telling me where. Rule four. You declare everything you bring aboard, especially anything that breathes. Rule five." He looked up at her. "Nobody hears where we're going. Not your friends, not a bartender, not anyone."
Alisa wrote the five numbers down the back of her hand with a word beside each one. Then she sat and looked at number five for a while.
"Rule five is stupid and I can prove it," she said.
"Prove it later. The rules stand."
"How do you get anywhere if nobody knows where you're going? Half of finding things is asking people about them. You can't ask about a place you won't name." She capped the pen. "I'm writing a proposal."
"Write it on the ship."
Her whole face changed. The grin went away. For a second she looked about twelve, then about thirty, then exactly like his sister on her wedding day.
"So I'm coming."
"You're coming. On trial."
"I want a title."
"No."
"Assistant expedition director."
"Absolutely not."
"Junior expedition director."
"You're the plus one," Duncan said. "That's your title. It's printed on the card."
She thought about arguing. He watched her decide it was a fight she'd win later, on better ground. She picked up her bag.
"Where's the ship?"
"Come on. I'll walk you down."
The hangar stood past the hoof-stock barns at the bottom of the Park, a long shed of grey panels with its doors rolled open to the morning. The Pegasus filled it nose to tail. She was a fat white vessel built for cargo and bad weather, with a winged horse painted on her flank by a keeper who'd had more enthusiasm than talent. Her loading ramp was down, breathing disinfectant into the morning.
Jack Rourke sat on the bottom of the ramp with a cup of tea and a diagnostic pad on his knee. He was fifty-one, grey at the temples and built like a barrel with a beard. He'd flown Duncan out of worse places than this. He did not look up.
"She's not happy," Jack said. "I want that on the record before we go anywhere."
"Who isn't?"
"The ship. There's a note in the port drive I don't like." He looked up at last and saw Alisa. His face went through several things and landed on resignation. "Oh, no."
"Hello, Jack," Alisa said warmly. "I'm the plus one."
"I know who you are. You stole my cap at your cousin's wedding and wore it for two days."
"You never asked for it back."
"I was afraid to." Jack looked at Duncan. "She's coming?"
"On trial."
"That's what you said about the cat." Jack drank his tea and stood up, knees cracking. "Fine. Cabin four has a working shower. Don't touch anything that hums, beeps or growls. That's my one rule. His are worse."
"I've got his written down," Alisa said, and showed him her hand.
Jack read the back of it, then read it again. "Rule five is a good rule."
"Rule five is stupid."
"It's kept me alive for twenty years." He went up the ramp with his pad. "Leaving at eleven. If you're not aboard, I'm not waiting."
Alisa looked at Duncan with delight. "He likes me."
"That was him liking you?"
"That was him liking me a lot." She went up the ramp after Jack, already asking him about the shower.
Duncan stood at the bottom and watched the bright blue jacket disappear into the ship. She was aboard now. Whatever she broke from here on, she broke on his account.
He found he didn't mind as much as he should have. He went to see Nadia.
Dr. Nadia Chen's office sat over the quarantine block, so she could see every animal that came in or went out. It smelled of disinfectant and the ginger tea she drank by the liter. Her desk was spotless. Her walls were not. They were papered in permits, framed and pinned, eleven years of them.
She didn't look up when he came in.
"You saw her," Nadia said.
"I saw her."
"Good. Then you know she has the only pass."
"You knew about this."
"I told her about the exchange at your mother's party. I didn't tell her to get a pass. She did that by herself, in three weeks, which is five years less than you've spent failing to." Nadia folded her hands on the desk and looked at him. "Take her, Duncan."
"She's a kid."
"She's twenty-three. At twenty-three you were jumping out of drop ships."
"That was different."
"Yes. You had a gun. She has the pass." Nadia tapped her tablet without looking at it. "Item two. The dealers' deposits are paid and the money is gone. If you come home from that exchange with nothing in a crate, I'm explaining it to the Board in person, and I'll bring you along so they can see what I work with."
"I'll find something."
"You'll find something with papers. Item three. Bring back your niece with all her fingers. I've met your sister." Nadia opened a drawer, took out a clean mug and set it by her teapot. Then she held out her hand. "Card."
He gave it to her. She slid it under a reader on the corner of her desk. The card's chip had stayed sealed until the guest of record opened it, so the details were new to him. Now text came up on her screen in black and gold, with the exchange seal turning slowly in one corner.
"Fourteen guests," Nadia read. "Venue, Port Aster, outer ring."
Port Aster was the trade station everyone on the Frontier docked at sooner or later. Duncan had docked there for years. Three years ago he'd stopped.
"The trip takes two and a half days," Nadia said. "The exchange opens its bidding in three, and it runs three days: licensed lots first, salvage lots on the last day. If you want a day to look at the lots before you bid, you leave this morning. I called Jack at six." She scrolled. "Your niece is guest of record. You're her plus one. Very good. You'll have to wear something nicer than a keeper's shirt."
"Port Aster's a big station. The exchange always hires a trade guild to run it."
"Not this year. This year it names a host."
Duncan had picked up the clean mug without thinking and filled it from her teapot. He drank. The ginger burned the roof of his mouth.
"Which guild?" he said. "Who is it?"
Nadia looked at the screen, then at him, then at the mug in his hand.
"You'll want to put that down," she said.
He put the mug down.
"The host is Seraphine Fox."
