Free Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess by Ray Strong Page A

shortly.”
    Meriel waited for a few minutes and then went back to watch the women playing racquetball. She looked at the screens with interior views of the ankle and watched it flex and extend. The graphs spiked with stress each time she planted her foot or cut in a new direction.
    The young woman’s faint scar caught Meriel’s attention again, and she recalled Phillip’s scar-free wrists. She rubbed her shoulder above her left breast. Maybe his people can heal me , she thought.
    John came up beside her. “Well, what do you think?”
    “Well, it’s not stim. Can…” Her voice trailed off, and she blushed, not wanting to expose her disfigurement to another round of “poor girl” or “oh my God.”
    “Does the scarring treatment work on…old scars?” she asked.
    “As far as I know, yes,” he said. “Why?”
    “Oh, nothing. So what’s this ‘final understanding’?”
    “It’s a trade for marketing,” John said. “Each treatment is custom to the patient and still very expensive until we can get equipment and replicators near the point of treatment.”
    “Their treatments are free?”
    John nodded. “And no one else could help them.”
    Meriel thought she had misjudged him more than once today and looked at John with newfound respect. She pointed to the women playing racquetball. “Which was your product? The joints or the instrumentation?”
    “Yes,” John said with a smile and led her back to the entrance of the clinic.
    “Uh, which?”
    “Both. When we first introduced joint regen, the doctors could not distinguish the performance between the original and the regenerated joint without better instrumentation, so we had to invent that, too. All of our competitors had joint replacements, but no one could heal the bones, nerves, and muscles at the same time. We can. The standard postop goal is mobility. We’re changing the goal to performance functionality.”
    “Why so much secrecy?”
    John looked around them and smiled. “Not here,” he said and led her outside the clinic and flagged a personal shuttle heading back to the docks in blue-zone.
    ***
    Blue-zone included the docks and had its own shops and bars that were functional, sterile, and resilient because spacers from different ships tended to mix it up. Stationers thought spacers brought vermin with them and were hard on their fragile decor, so they mostly forced spacers back to the facilities near the docks. Station police harassed the blue-zone bar owners with sanitation orders that kept most of them alternating between repair and fumigation.
    Meriel and John joined the Tiger crew at the TarnGirl in the middle of a raucous party and pulled chairs over to the table. Cookie flirted with a buxom blonde at the next table, which annoyed a large bald man sitting beside her. Their shoulder patches identified them as crew on another ship in their league, the JSS Rowley . Both crews had already reached stage 5—loud and bawdy—of Meriel’s ten stages of a spacer’s party with Alf Martin, Socket’s alternate, acting surly and heavily invested in a severe hangover. Socket was there as well, enhancing her legend with two muscular escorts.
    John scrolled through the list of premium scotches. “What do you think, Alf, a single malt or blended?”
    Alf Martin blinked with his mouth open, and Meriel looked away and bit her lip. She let her breath out slowly when John ordered a scotch-flavored alcohol replica.
    “So why the secrecy?” Meriel asked John.
    “Our competitors hunger for information about our products and customers. I can travel under the noses of our competition when I work crew.”
    “Competitive products?”
    “Not really,” John said, “but they control the product buzz and the media. Our tactic is for loyal customers to post testimonials on the net and spread the word before BioLuna and others can suck the air out of our message.”
    “Who’s the ‘we’ in your story?”
    “LGen Inc. You heard of them?”
    “No,”