Chapter 2

Cynda Balarde was a petite woman with very blue hair that sparkled in the light of the shuttle port's glare. She had dark, expressive brows above even more expressive eyes and a small mouth that was currently set in a grin that seemed wider than possible.

As soon as Anya was clear of the access way, the two were hugging and squealing like school girls. Pete and Ross watched this for a second before turning and grinning at each other. This was far from the cool, aloof and sophisticated Keeler descendant that they'd come to know.

"Company at the street entrance," Pete whispered. There was a large gentleman leaning casually against the entryway. If Pete and Ross were supposed to be pretending to be bodyguards, this fellow seemed to be trying hard to give the opposite impression.

The two women turned without either of them looking at the two men and began walking towards the exit. This behavior was expected, and part of the prearranged cover they had settled on with Anya. As the pair passed through the door, Ross and Pete noticed the large man who'd been standing in the doorway was gone. When they passed through the doorway and out into the large plaza between the shuttle pad and the rest of the Keeler University campus, they saw the man walking a couple body lengths ahead of them. He knew where they were headed, obviously, and was leading the way, though the two women continued to act as if they didn't know the three of them were there.

Pete and Ross found themselves walking at a good clip behind the two women. The campus was bustling, but not crowded. Their ship suits, unsurprisingly, drew a few eyes. It probably wasn't common to see men walking the campus in ship suits, and certainly not two men together in matching suits. 'If only they knew, ' Ross thought, remembering the initial conversation back on the ship.

"Of course you should wear them," Dar laughed. "They're far better than anything you could buy, and they will offer far better protection while you are pretending to be bodyguards, though to be honest, the entire concept of needing to hire someone to protect your body is very, very strange to me."

"Don't you have important people in your society who might fear for their safety, or have enemies who would do them harm?" Pete asked.

"Of course, and perhaps more commonly than here, but..." Dar hesitated.

"What?" Ross tilted his head, a gesture the Sondag had already come to recognize as a sign of Ross' curiosity.

"My people ... Our culture, it is a warrior culture," Dar began again after some hesitation. "In our society, one settled one's disagreements personally. If you were too old or too slow to defend yourself, you needed to work at avoiding conflict, or choose... Uhhar, and before you ask, there's no word in your language that translates directly. The closest I can come is ... retirement, but seclusion is just as close a translation."

"So you get to be old and you put yourself out to pasture?" Pete asked. That took several more minutes of conversation to explain. Mostly, words were easy and the humans had learned quite a bit of the Sondag language, though nowhere as thoroughly as Dar had learned theirs.

"Out to pasture would suggest too soft a setting," Dar suggested, once the concepts had been hashed out. "Sondag elders do not simply go sit out in the sun and wait to die. But they live separated almost completely from the rest of Sondag society. The elders interact only with each other, and only in very different ways than the rest of Sondag society."

"Do they live in seclusion then, or are there communities for elders?" Ross asked.

"Some of both. The problem is not widespread," Dar hesitated again, this time it wasn't due to translation difficulties. "We are a warrior society," he continued. "Sondag expect to die in combat. Very often those who find they've outlived their ability to defend themselves choose not to live. To choose otherwise is rare."

Neither human had a response to that, and the silence drew them back to their original purpose.

"Tell me again that it will be perfectly safe for us to wear your marine's armor,"

"Of course it wil be safe," Dar laughed again. "Kat has run the analysis twice now, and the differences between Sondag and Human physiologies is well within the biomorphic armor's adaptability range. In fact the biggest difference between us is our size. Even the dietary differences are minor when you discount preferences in taste and texture."

"I wouldn't want to discount those if I was going to have to live off what the suit can produce for any length of time,"

"Well you're not, at least not yet. Its not likely to be an issue for any ground-side operations such as the one you're planning. On top of that, you're not even going to wear the helmet or gloves." Kat added.

"Well, that would be making ourselves just a bit too conspicuous, given the circumstances," Ross laughed.

"True enough. The suit itself will be relatively inconspicuous, and since we've adapted the Catamount insignia as our logo, it won't even seem out of place that way, if we're questioned about it," Pete admitted.

"They look very similar to what you humans wear as ship suits now," Dar reminded them. "You won't seem any more out of place than any other spacer walking around on the surface."

Ross' thoughts were jarred back to the present when the ladies turned into a building with a large green teacup hanging above the door. A sign on the window as they approached said 'Magda's'. Below that in smaller ornate lettering was 'Jade Tea Room'. He and Pete were again swept up in the wake of the two women as they passed through the front of the room until they arrived at a series of small alcoves in the back. Anya and Cynda slipped into the center of a 'U' shaped booth in one of the alcoves.

Once their hostess left with their drink orders, coffee or tea for everyone but Cynda who ordered 'a splash of Venetti White', which proved to be a wine of some kind, Pete and Ross were introduced to Anya's boyfriend, Orion 'Dev' Devonshire.

"I'm an artist now, I have to keep up appearances," she offered when Anya raised an eyebrow.

The conversation was light and social until the food and drink were there. There had been no menu. The waitress had asked who was eating, and when everyone had said yes, left. She returned only a few minutes later with bowls of some sort of fish chowder and freshly baked bread. Over the chowder, Anya finally got serious.

"Alright, we'll finish lunch and head for the storage facility. Access is biometric, and keyed to my voice and thumbprint, so we should have no trouble getting into my unit."

"Assuming no one has tampered with it," Dev observed.

"We should be fairly safe in that regard," Cynda offered. "The University works very hard to maintain its independence, and is not at all fond of government interference, even the trivial kind."

"Such as wanting into the storage unit of a minor member of the ruling family?" Pete asked.

"Especially a minor member of the ruling family," Cynda giggled. "When you're a long-lived institution like the University, you're adverse to pissing off a minor branch of the Keeler family, knowing that they could very well be less than minor a few generations later."

"And Keeler's have long memories, and tend to hold their grudges," Dev added more seriously.

"That they do ... we do, I should say," Anya sighed, shaking her head. "I hope I manage to avoid the worst of that family trait."

"So far you have," Cynda laughed. "But then you're in no position to do anything about your grudges anyway," They all laughed at that, and there was less talking and more eating after that.

They headed across the university campus after their meal. It was a pleasant place, similar in many ways to what Ross and Pete knew of university campuses everywhere, if perhaps somewhat spartan in its appearance. There seemed to be a shortage of foliage adorning the campus. Here and there a tree or tall shrub, but little else, and nothing flowering. Perhaps it wasn't the season.

The far side of the campus seemed a little more worn at the seams than the one where they'd arrived. The storage facility itself was a very open structure, mostly below ground, and with the biometric access used, there were no guards. The usual assortment of surveillance blisters could be seen here and there on the corners of buildings and other fixtures, but nothing more than they'd already seen everywhere they'd been. They took a wide escalator down to a mezzanine beneath ground level and from there, went to a bank of elevators. They'd seen only two or three other people since leaving the campus proper and none of those people seemed the least bit interested in them.

"Here we are," Anya said with a little edge in her voice after they'd gone down two more levels. She stopped in front of one of the long row of marked partitions that were a uniform three feet wide and floor-to-ceiling in this area.

Opening her storage unit was simplicity itself. She placed a hand on a well marked plate and pushed. The plate glowed briefly and was followed by a mellifluous female voice, obviously synthetic.

"Please state your name and access code."

"Anya Keeler," Anya answered in measured tones. "Bathwater Baby."

Several eyebrows were raised at the utterance of the phrase 'bathwater baby'.

"what?" Anya asked. "It's just something the security system can use for voice identification."

"Right," everyone seemed to say at once, bringing a little snicker in response from Anya.

The storage space itself was large enough that Anya could have walked into it, if she had wanted to, but the back of the unit seemed to be full of clothes hung on a series of rods that could be swung out from both sides of the unit itself. She ignored those things and instead tapped a front section, causing a deep bin to slide open.

"This for me," she said softly, hanging something around her neck and stuffing it inside the neckline of her outfit. "And this for us."

The 'us' object was a small oblong object that she handed to Pete. "Put that away somewhere safe."

"What is it?" he asked.

"Later, let's get out of here," she said, closing the drawer that she'd withdrawn the two items from. Standing, she started to back out of the storage unit, but stopped. "Oh, what the hell," she said with a shrug, stepped back in popping another bin open and swiveling it out. She grabbed a small cloth bag and handed it to Ross.

"What is it?" Ross asked.

"Later, I said. Let's go!"

The four of them left the storage building together but, after a long hug between the two women followed by some tears, they separated. Cynda and Dev headed one way and Anya, Ross and Pete headed back to the university's shuttle pad. The walkways were getting more packed with students the closer they got, to the point that Pete and Ross began to be concerned for Anya's safety.

"What is this?" Pete asked.

"Most likely students returning from an event somewhere, just dumped off at the shuttle pad," Anya speculated.

"There's not that much room on that university pad," Pete muttered. "I hope ours is still waiting for us."

"He will be," Anya reassured him. "We promised him too much on completion. They'd have to blast him off the pad to get him to move."

"If they knew these students would be coming back they'd have given him an out of the way section to land on," Ross added.

The knot of students was already thinning by the time they made it to the terminal. Their pilot was eating a foul-smelling, greasy sandwich, no worse for wear and happy to see them.

They had to sit on the pad for a mere five minutes waiting for the next launch window, but to judge by Anya's muttering, it must have seemed like forever to her. Still, five minutes after strapping themselves back into their seats, the pilot, having disposed of his sandwich for the time being, launched them casually off the shuttle pad.

Anya's muttering continued when they were back at the shuttle bay on Lucir. Her eyes darted everywhere and only Ross and Pete's firm grip on her as they made their way to where the Catamount's gig was docked kept her from an unseemly rush. The two men had to practically carry her through the docking umbilical, though once they were in the gig she managed to strap herself in without help.