The Space Opera MEGAPACK ®. Jay Lake

would want Susan to keep her company.

      Susan wasn’t ever going to do that, again.

      * * * *

      The scream echoed through the stairwell. A woman’s scream, sharp, high-pitched, startled. Cut off in the middle.

      For a moment, Richard Ilykova bowed his head. The last thing he wanted to do was deal with another crisis. He stood in the lobby of the hotel, which was cleaner than some he’d seen on makeshift starbases. The owner, Grissan Hunsaker, looked up from the work he was doing behind the desk, his features contorted with fear.

      No help from that quarter.

      Richard sighed, then bounded up the stairs, feeling his exhaustion in every step.

      The scream didn’t sound again, but he heard footsteps other than his own. Doors squealed open, slammed shut, and voices started.

      He found a group of people clustered on one of the landings—the B Team, he privately called them. The people who had paid lower fares, filling out the ship’s rooms, people who wouldn’t even have gotten on the ship had the owners managed to sell all the tickets.

      In the middle of them, a woman—Lysa Lamphere—lay prostrate on the floor.

      He remembered her only because she was so pretty. Easily the prettiest woman on the ship this trip. But she didn’t have the brains or the personality to match her beauty, which disappointed him.

      Not that anyone who booked passage on the Presidio would look at him. They were all too important for that. Except Ms. Carmichael. She had smiled at him, which surprised him.

      She had noticed him watching her, which had surprised him even more.

      The group stepped back as he approached. Even though they weren’t on a ship any longer, they seemed to think he was in charge.

      Maybe he was.

      “What happened?” he asked.

      “Dunno,” someone said.

      One of the men—Bunting? Richard almost didn’t recognize in him the new set of clothes he wore—added, “I was in my room when I heard the screaming. Sounded pretty awful, so I came directly here.”

      Richard had no reason to doubt it. Bunting had the unfortunate ability to arrive first in any crisis. Unfortunate only because he didn’t have the compatible ability to know the right thing to do once he had arrived.

      Richard was of the private opinion that Bunting had made the fire on the ship worse by trying to fan it out rather than hit the controls for the room’s environmental system. But Richard was number four man on the crew, the lowest of the low, and he didn’t dare criticize anyone.

      He crouched beside Lysa. She was sprawled on her back, her arms up as if they had been near her face when she had fallen. Her hands were clenched into tight fists, and her legs were twisted sideways.

      He touched her face. The skin was soft, silky, the way that skin should be, the way that enhanced skin often wasn’t. Her beauty was natural, then, and even more pronounced when that mousy personality wasn’t front and center.

      She had no fever, and she didn’t look injured.

      Richard glanced up, saw Hunsaker lurking near the stairs, said, “Do you have a doctor?”

      “More or less,” Hunsaker said.

      “What is it?” Richard snapped. “More? Less?”

      “More if she’s sober,” Hunsaker said.

      Richard cursed. “I assume you have basic medical equipment.”

      “Yes,” Hunsaker said.

      “Then get it,” Richard snapped.

      Hunsaker fled.

      The group remained, staring down. These were the people who irritated him. The ones who had wanted the lighting in their room changed and didn’t know how to do it themselves, the ones who woke him from a sound sleep to ask how to work the automatic cafeteria, the ones who thought he was at their beck and call even though, technically, he wasn’t.

      Right now, they were content to let him see if the woman was all right.

      Hunsaker came back with a handheld medical scanner and a tray of medical pens, each with some kind of magical function. Magical because Richard didn’t know much about medicine, at least this kind. He had some knowledge, but on the other end—how to turn the body against itself, not how to make it function again.

      Hunsaker crouched near him and ran the scanner over her, clearly not trusting Richard with the device, which suited him just fine.

      “I think she simply fainted,” Hunsaker said with surprise.

      “And hit her head?” Richard asked.

      “Oh, she’ll be bruised, but there doesn’t appear to be much else wrong with her,” Hunsaker said.

      Then his gaze met Richard’s, and Richard could tell what the other man was thinking. They both worked service in not-the-best conditions. They both knew that people rarely fainted without a reason.

      “You think, perhaps, she’s finally having a reaction to the trauma on the ship?” There was a hopeful note in Hunsaker’s voice, a note that said, Please, don’t make this my problem.

      “I doubt it,” Bunting said before Richard got a chance to reply. “I mean, she screamed first.”

      Richard closed his eyes for just a second. A brief indulgence, a moment to himself before it all started up again. He’d hoped for an interlude, a bit of quiet, a chance to rest, but it clearly wasn’t going to happen.

      He stood, eyes open now, and looked at the door.

      It didn’t look latched.

      “Is this her room?” he asked, already suspecting the answer.

      “Oh, no,” Hunsaker said. “Miss Lamphere is rooming upstairs with—”

      “Me,” said one of the women behind Richard. He turned slightly. A slender woman with buck teeth stared back at him. He remembered her, because she had propositioned him one late night back on the ship. She’d been drunk, and in her drunkenness she assumed that the ship’s promotion line, which said that the crew was there to serve her every need, apparently understood “every need” to mean every need.

      Her dark eyes met his and a spot of color appeared on her cheeks. She remembered the encounter too.

      “Miss Potsworth,” he said, not using her first name—Janet—because he didn’t want her to get the wrong impression, even now. “I take it Lysa was not in her room?”

      “She’d just left a few minutes ago,” Janet said. “We’d just been told there was going to be dinner and she was famished.”

      Famished. That was a word he hadn’t heard in a very long time.

      “So what was she doing here?” he asked, more to himself than to anyone else. The room was all by itself on this level, and it was a bit out of the way of the stairs.

      “Oh, probably letting Miss Kantswinkle know about the meal,” Janet Potsworth said. “Lysa was the only person—I think—”

      And she looked around for confirmation. A few others nodded, as if she already know what Janet was going to say.

      “—who still liked Miss Kantswinkle. Although I would say that ‘liked’ is probably too strong a word. She felt that Miss Kantswinkle deserved our respect, given all her work with the children—”

      “Right,” Richard said, having heard Agatha Kantswinkle’s long diatribe about her years of service with orphaned children a dozen too many times. “Miss Kantswinkle is in this room?”

      “Yes.” This from Hunsaker who was doing his best to revive Lysa.

      “Then