Free gaian consortium 05 - the titan trap by Christine Pope Page A

strip joints, cafes, and commissaries.
    Although her eyes were shadowed with exhaustion, Cassidy walked briskly enough beside him, her chin up. Where they were headed, he had no idea, as neither of them had any cash or vouchers, and this didn’t look like the sort of place that exactly extended credit to unlucky travelers.
    “Do you know where you’re going?” he murmured to her, making sure he couldn’t be overheard by any of the sentient flotsam and jetsam, Gaian and otherwise, that crowded the byways of the domed settlement.
    A quick nod. “My friends at Triton Control gave me an address, said there was someone here who’d be interested in taking the ship off our hands.”
    So she was still on that kick. “Cassidy, if we get rid of the ship, we’re stranded here.”
    She didn’t look over at him, but he could see her jaw tighten. “We’re stranded either way, since there’s no way we can take that thing anywhere near Gaia itself, and it’s only a system craft and won’t get us anyplace else. So we might as well get some money out of it.”
    “And what’s to stop them from killing us and taking the ship anyway?”
    “Nothing.”
    That’s reassuring. He didn’t say anything, though, only strode along beside her, hoping he looked tougher than he felt. Probably not, in the ill-fitting borrowed clothes Cassidy had given him, his face rough with stubble.
    What she really needed here was some muscle, not an atmospheric scientist who couldn’t even handle a gun properly. Not that guns were allowed here…not openly, anyway. There were signs in the hangar where they’d disembarked, and posted on every ersatz street corner, and they’d had to walk through a full-body scanner when they exited the hangar complex. Made sense, he supposed; one pulse bolt through a dome, and everyone was in a world of trouble. Also, maybe it kept violence to a personal level, and not the whole-scale nightmare it might otherwise be in a place whose population was composed almost entirely of criminals.
    “Here,” she said, turning into a dubious-looking prefab building with an animated holo sign that proclaimed it to be the Pink Elephant. The trunk of the aforementioned elephant moved up and down jerkily, showing that its programming had begun to deteriorate. Something about it was vaguely nausea-inducing, so Derek shifted his attention from the sign to the interior of the bar that now surrounded him.
    It wasn’t much of an improvement. Shabby, worn plastic tables and chairs, the bar itself seeming to be made of extruded aluminum, every inch marred by the initials and other graffiti that had been carved into it. The place smelled of stale beer and sweat, and the indefinable humid aftertaste of a well-used locker room.
    Apparently undeterred by all that, Cassidy paused in the middle of the seedy room, eyes scanning the few occupants. None of them seemed to match the description of the person she was looking for, as she planted her hands on her hips and frowned.
    Then a scruffy-looking man who appeared to be in his late fifties emerged through the door behind the bar, a door that probably led to a storeroom or possibly a kitchen, although Derek couldn’t imagine actually eating any of the food served here. The man paused behind the bar, gave Cassidy one raking look from head to toe, then said, “You the one with the ship?”
    An expression of relief passed over her face, one Derek could tell she was trying to hide. She nodded and moved closer to the bar, taking a seat on one of the worn plastic barstools. He followed her, not wanting her to get too far away, although he didn’t know exactly what he could do to protect her if things really went south.
    “You interested?” she asked.
    “Yeah, I’m interested.” The man’s flat gray gaze traveled to Derek, paused briefly, then moved back to Cassidy. “I know some people who’d like to open her up and see what makes her tick.”
    “What’re you offering?” Her tone was