“Rest for a moment,” Ru urged. A gentle touch to the back of his head urged it forward, then down to the table. Sweat-soaked hair spread out in an amber puddle as he shut his eyes. “I’m okay,” he whispered. “Seriously. Go ahead and order another round.”
Ten seconds later he was snoring.
Micah looked at Ru. “You have any idea where the trident thing is?”
“Actually, I think I may. One minute.” Her eyes unfocused as she consulted her files. “Check out G-5 on my map.”
He had his headset call up the appropriate image. And yes, there it was: three flyways converging into one as they neared the core. Damn it if the result didn’t look like a trident. “No easy way to get there,” he muttered. “We’ll have to walk.”
“Looks like it’s on a main route. Should be easy to find.” Ru caught the eye of a server and waved him over. “Unless you think we should just go to the Oracle directly, and see what’s up with her. Skip the middleman.”
“Um . . . let me think for a minute. . . . No.”
As the server approached she indicated Shane’s sleeping form. “Please see that our friend is safe.” She put a hundred-C cash chit on the table. The server’s eyes widened. “Maybe there’s some quiet nook you can take him to, where he can sleep it off undisturbed?”
“I’ll find something,” he promised, glancing both ways as he swept the chit into his pocket, clearly hoping no one would catch sight of his prize. He then began to clear the table of everything that wasn’t snoring.
“All right then.” Ru pushed her chair back, settled the strap of her supply bag more comfortably on her shoulder, and stood. She looked steady enough. Had she drunk less than Micah, or did she just hold her booze better? “Let’s go find this Ben Caruso.”
* * *
The pedestrian tunnel that led to the Trident was more polished than the spaces they’d been in previously, with smoothly finished walls, floor, and ceiling, such as one might find on a normal station. It was wide enough for small groups to pass each other comfortably, which happened often; it was obviously a busy thoroughfare. Couples passed Ru and Micah, hand in hand, and one amorous trio. A bevy of female Variants in painfully bright costumes giggled their way by. Two scruffy boys with the hunched posture of the downtrodden wheeled a closed cart past them. Ru remembered how Ivar had offered her slaves in return for her service, and she looked after the boys as they shuffled down the hallway, wondering what happier place they had been kidnapped from. Slavery was practiced on some colony worlds, so she was familiar with it, but though the first rule of outriding was to refrain from criticizing local customs, it was always hard for her to keep her silence in such a setting. At least with the colonies, she had the comfort of knowing that when the Guerans arrived they would demand the practice be ended, as a price of relocation. Common Law did not allow one human being to own another. But here that law had no power, and she had no power to change that.
“So,” Micah said, when a break in the traffic left them alone for a few minutes, “what do you see?”
“Excuse me?”
He waved at the tunnel surrounding them. “Technology reveals social patterns, right? This place is the product of technology. What does it tell you?”
The blank walls offered little to go on, but she was grateful to have something to focus on other than the darkness of her own reflections. She considered the space as she walked, and finally said, “It’s too big.”
“The tunnel?”
“The core. Only a harvester ship could tow something this massive to the ainniq, and the expense would be phenomenal. A single person couldn’t finance it.”
“A patronus?”
She shook her head. “Even if they had that kind of money, this much raw mass wouldn’t be given into private hands. There’s enough here to build a small station.”
“A Guildmaster would own it. Or perhaps a rich company.”
“Most likely.”
“The Terran megacorps build stations. They need mass to do that.”
She nodded. “So say that a harvester brings this hunk of raw mass back to the ainniq, and some corporate entity purchases it. They drag it to their station, beyond the control of the Guild and other megacorps. Then what? How does it get from there to here?”
“Stolen?”
She shook her head. “Too big. It couldn’t be accelerated fast enough to escape pursuit. And no megacorps would ever tolerate such a theft. They’d lay waste to half the outworlds trying to get it back. And nothing like that has happened in this node. No, some combination of barter and bribery must have convinced its rightful owner to part with it.”
He looked at her. “You think . . . the outlaws cut a deal with one of the megacorps? That they’re allied to a Terran corporation?”
“See? Now you’re thinking like an outrider. My guess would be one of the patroni.”
“And all this you get from the size of this rock?”
“And a knowledge of human nature.” She smiled.
“And what about this tunnel?” He gestured down its length. “I thought the goal in station design was to put things near each other, to minimize the dead space that environmental control had to regulate. These people seem to have gone out of their way to do the opposite.”
She laughed softly. “You’ve never been dirtside, have you?”
“You mean . . . on a planet?”
“Or a moon. Or an asteroid. Something produced by Nature rather than humankind.”
“Not in reality, no.”
“Well, construction on a station is additive. If you want to expand your usable space, you have to bring in mass to build walls with. Construction on the surface of a dirtworld is also additive. But inside that world, it’s subtractive. You get new space by removing the mass that currently occupies it. And since that mass has monetary value, selling it can help cover the cost of excavation. A perfect trade-off.” She looked around, eyes narrow as she studied the rock walls. “The cost would be cheapest if they followed the natural structure of the rock, linking together open spaces that already existed. The support structure would remain intact that way. Hence . . . long, twisting tunnels underground.”
“But shorter ones aboveground.”
She nodded. “Additive construction prioritizes environmental efficiency.”
“Damn, woman.” He shook his head. “I wish you’d been with me when I designed Dragonslayer. That was all underground.”
She smiled slightly. “I’m guessing magical construction has different rules.”