When This Goes Wrong ...

"Of all your fucking appalling ideas, farmboy, this one takes the prize for une assiette pleine de merde."

Lieutenant Charles Etay shrugged a little, having, Capitaine Elienne Desorlay thought sourly, clearly developed an immunity to even my best glare.

Fortune me forniquer.

"What's your better idea, Eli?" Etay asked. "Go back and knock on the front door? Say 'Excusez-moi, s'il vous plaît, je vous ai entendu gardent esclaves ici.' Like that?"

"Better than getting podders mixed into it." Eli shook the last cigarette out of the crumpled pack. "This one especially."

"Because ...?"

"Don't play dumber than you are, Charlie," Eli snapped. "You think he's all post-Sansha and reformed? Really?"

"Now you sound like Proleque."

"And baiser vous with a splintery stick too." She found her lighter and set fire to the cigarette with more vigour than was perhaps necessary. "You think about how our careers are going to look when this gets back home?"

Etay looked down. "I have," he admitted quietly.

"And?"

He paused, and then looked back at her, eyes a little narrowed against the smoke drifting into his face. "I can't just leave them there, Eli."

Merde.

She flicked ash at him for the small, vindictive pleasure of seeing him flinch. "When this goes wrong, farmboy ..."

The corner of his mouth twitched up. "You'll say I told you so?"

Eli snorted. "You'd better believe I will," she said. "If we both live long enough, you'd better believe I will."

Avec grandes cloches sur le dessus.

If I get the fucking chance.

Cross Jurisdictional Issues

"This had fucking well better not be another fucking F.I.O. mindfuck," Capitaine Elienne Desorlay said sourly, grinding her cigarette out beneath her heel.

Lieutenant Charles Etay glanced at her, the corner of his mouth twitching up. "One way to find out."

Eli grunted, and followed him up the steps to the entrance of the S.C.I.D. office. Office was a little grandiose, perhaps, for what was two rooms and three people crammed up the side of a Republic Justice administration building, but law enforcement agencies had their priorities, and so this was a Liaison Office, not a Liaison Converted Stationary Storage.  And it was there to deal with Cross Jurisdictional Issues, not Potential Political Clusterfucks.


Thirty seconds into the meeting and Eli was sure this wasn't another F.I.O. mindfuck. Sixty seconds in and she was starting to wonder if she might not have been better off if it had been.

Fed stations in the Republic, jurisdictional headache number one. Still, that was one reason why she and Etay were there, that and his pretty podder girlfriend and all her ISK, and why there were little converted stationary cupboards tucked away here and there throughout the Republic and the Federation and no doubt the State and Empire too although if Fortune loves me I'll never find out. 


Usually the stations took care of their own problems, with a little help when necessary from whatever their native law-enforcement might be. In this case, on the particular Gallente station in question stuck like a pimple on an asteroid in the ass-end of Metro low-sec, that would be S.C.I.D.

Except the Republic Justice Liaison Broomcloset out there had come to the conclusion, and the S.C.I.D. Liaison Stationary Cupboard here obviously agreed, that the S.C.I.D. officers there were compromised.

Bought off, that meant. And Republic Justice wouldn't normally give a flying fuck at a rolling peshorky if a Fedo station couldn't keep its officers on the straight and narrow, but the Republic was a tiny bit sensitive about some issues.

Like slaves.

Even if they are Caldari.


Eli kept her mouth shut until the meeting was done, let Etay do what little talking there was to do. Not much. S.C.I.D. and Republic Justice had done most of it beforehand, that was clear. She and Etay were there to be told what someone snug behind a desk had decided they were going to do.

Go in without backup, where we can't trust our own people, where we can't flash tin to get out of trouble without getting in worse, and find out what's the truth behind these rumours of Caldari on a Gallente station ...


With collars around their necks.


On the sidewalk outside, however, was a different matter. "Fortune fuck me sideways, you fils de putain de merde," she snarled. "This is on you, farmboy, you and your pretty podder who thinks she can change the Cluster to suit her fancies. Look at us! Stuck out here in the cul of the Republic and about to get ourselves killed cleaning up some political shitstorm, or killed for cleaning it up if Fortune fucking smiles on us."

Etay put his hands in his pockets and smiled at his shoes. "Don't hold back," he said mildly. "How do you really feel about it?"

Eli swatted his arm, hard enough to make him wince and make her swear with the sting of her palm. "Get us out of this. Get your podder to pull some strings and get them to send someone else."

"Mmm," Etay said, and Eli could tell from long experience that her partner meant no by that, meant that's a line I won't cross, meant I'm not going to be moved on this one. "If they're right, Eli, this is pretty ugly. Those people ..."

"Fuck 'em, they're Callies, I'm not looking to get shivved in an alley for a pack of people who'd like to shoot me as soon as see me."

"Eli," Etay said patiently. "I'm Caldari."

She snorted. "One of your ancestors got cunt-struck by a piece of Callie tail back in the hither-and-yon, doesn't make you fucking anything. Don't even try that shit. You don't even drink fucking tea!"

"Still," Etay said. "Still. They're people. And Repub Juice can't sent anyone themselves. You heard them, the station is almost entirely Fed hires. Minmatar agents would stick out like sore thumbs."

"Oh, and you won't?"

He gave her his best sunny choirboy smile. "You just said I wasn't Caldari."

"Farmboy," Eli said, and stopped.  You could be the purest Gallente off the Crystal Boulevard and you'd still catch every eye in every crowd.


Oh, fuck it. Dying in bed surrounded by fat, happy grandchildren was never more than a pipe dream, anyway. Not for someone like me, anyway. 


And certainly not for pretty boys who catch the eye of pretty podders.

She lit a cigarette.  "Fine. Fucking fine. Let's go. Save your ancestral cousins from their probably just deserts, or whatever. We live through this one, farmboy, though, you will talk to that girl of yours."  She exhaled a gust of smoke, and whatever Etay had been going to say was cut off in a fit of coughing. "Doubt she wants you dead, Charlie, whatever else I think about her. Doubt she wants you dead."

Yet, anyway.

Yet.

The Consultation

"Do you know why you're here?"

Capitaine Elienne Desorlay took out a cigarette and lit it, ignoring the wrinkled nose of the man across the desk. "We'll ask the questions, M'ser Proleque," she said on a gust of smoke.

Beside her, Lieutenant Charles Etay coughed politely.  "What my partner means to say," he said smoothly, "Is that we're eager to hear how we can assist the F.I.O. in this matter of ...?"

Tomas Proleque ran his hand over his bald head. "You can assume I'm more than immune to your provincial good-cop bad-cop routine," he said, and genial as his tone was Eli felt the hair lift on her arms. "And you should assume that the last thing, the very last thing, Capitaine Desorlay, that you want, is for me to answer your questions."

Eli couldn't bring herself to nod. She drew on her cigarette instead, started at Proleque through the smoke, and waited.

Been waiting all Fortune-fucked day, after all.

Called back to the Fed on five minutes notice for a consultation, that had been the first sign something was wrong. S.C.I.D. didn't spring for interbus tickets when a comm call would do.

The only reason to haul us over here is so we're in arm's reach when they decide they don't want us leaving again.


That hadn't been good, no.

Discovering that S.C.I.D. had yanked them back to hand them over to the F.I.O. with a bow on top, just about ...


Eli had been searching her memory for what she or Charlie might have done that had the F.I.O. sniffing after them for the hours they'd been cooling their heels in a blank grey waiting room.  The Eletta business, maybe, had been the best she could come up with.

Until  Proleque looked at her, looked at Etay, and smiled. "You know Ciarente Roth," he said.

Fortune fuck me and fuck him and especially fuck all podders everywhere, good and hard.

I knew that girl was trouble. 

Etay made a mild, non-committal noise, and Eli was impressed despite herself by his restraint.

Proleque's smile widened. "Captain Roth is not the subject of today's discussion, Lieutenant Etay. Nor are her children. Your children."  Unspoken, That could change hung in the air. "I simply need to know how her father is doing."

Her ... "Father?" Eli asked.  Well, clearly, she had one, Eli, good thinking there. 

Had one, has one ... a father the F.I.O. care about. 


"I'm afraid I can't help you," Etay said. Proleque opened his mouth to speak and Etay went on, his slightly raspy voice mild and even. "I've never met the man. I don't think I've heard Captain Roth mention him more than once or twice."

"And what did she say?" Proleque was equally mild and even. Nonetheless, the air in the room seemed to chill a little. Eli felt as if she was watching a particularly fierce mindclash match, the opponents testing each other's weakness. And the first mistake will be the last.


"That he was travelling," Etay said. "That they were estranged. That she didn't know where he was and didn't care to find out."

Travelling.

F.I.O. 

Travelling.

Deep undercover, more like. 

Or ...

Dead.  

Proleque looked at something on the screen of his terminal, touched a key. Probably his shopping list, Eli thought. Trying to make us think he has some sort of incriminating transcript. She might be provincial but police-work had its universal patterns. "Has he been in contact with her?"

"She hasn't mentioned," Etay said blandly.

Proleque looked at the screen again. "That wasn't what I asked."

Don't lie for her, Charlie, Eli willed him. She's safe from men like this. You aren't.

Nor am I, for that fucking matter. 

Etay shot his cuffs and folded his hands on one knee. "I don't believe he's been in contact with her, no."

"Why?"

Etay smiled, very slightly. "Estranged."

Proleque matched the smile. "Do you know why?"

"It's not something we've discussed."

"Again, you answer a question I haven't asked," Proleque said. "Do you know why Captain Roth and her father are estranged?"

"I don't, no," Etay said, and Eli felt her heart sink as she heard the flat note of a lie in his voice.

"Would it surprise you to learn that it is due to her membership of Sansha's Nation?" Proleque asked genially.

"It would surprise me to learn that Captain Roth is a member of Sansha's Nation, yes." There was no inflection to Etay's voice.

"But not that her father objected to such an allegiance?"

Etay smiled, bland and sunny. "I imagine many fathers would."

"But you still say you have no knowledge of Captain Roth's contact with her father," Proleque said.

"I have no knowledge that Captain Roth has had any contact with her father," Etay corrected.  He smiled again. "Does M'ser Roth say they have?"

 "M'ser Roth - " Proleque said, and stopped. Eli saw the faintest flicker in his gaze, and knew, and felt Etay know beside her as well.

The match was over. And farmboy wins.

"You've misplaced him, haven't you?" Etay asked kindly.

Like he's slipped down behind the couch cushions, Eli thought, and then, on a fresh chill, they haven't 'misplaced' him.

They think the podder has.

And ... 

Not by accident.

Welcome To The Future

Section F -  F-for-Freedom, F-for-Future, it said right there in big letters over the section ring seal - was the part of the station which housed returnees from the Empire, the State and the Federation until they'd found jobs and clans and homes.

And it stank.
 

Too many people for the space, for the waste services, the air-cyclers, Capitaine Elienne Desorlay thought.

She'd seen the ads on the holo, back in the Federation, a tall Brutor woman whose deep brown skin picked up the colours of the Minmatar flag  on the wall behind her, her faintly-accented Gallantean vibrant with hope and promise. Come home, children of the Republic! Home to lives of freedom, the lives of your ancestors.


Eli snorted at the memory.  If your ancestors lived on tubes of casien protein, maybe, ten-to-a-room in the bowels of a space station with the perpetual hum and thud of the biomass processors on the other side of the wall.

Still, it doesn't smell as bad as it did last time.

Or maybe I'm getting used to it.

She lit a cigarette anyway, sour local Republic tobacco but better than nothing, as Lieutenant Charles Etay hitched the knees of his trousers and crouched by the body lying against the wall.

Eli was pretty sure it was a body, although without the medtechs' identification of the stained and crumpled rags wrapped around oozing meat as human, she would have had her doubts.

She exhaled a lungful of smoke. "Well?"

"No ID," Etay said, turning to look up at her. "Might not have had any before the beating."

"If he's registered with - he?" Etay nodded confirmation and Eli went on, "Registered with Resettlement, they'll have his DNA on file."

"If he was registered. And if they'd gotten around to testing." Etay looked back at the body. "Dental, maybe. If there's anything left of his teeth."

"If he ever saw a dentist," Eli said. "Fortune fuck me, it's not like his own mother would know his face."

"No," Etay said soberly. He rose to his feet with the easy grace of the young and strong, the fils de putain de merde, and adjusted his cuffs. "Morgue services'll have a better idea, but what do you think? Four of them? Five?"

Eli dropped her cigarette and crushed it with a toe. "At least. Fists and feet. But I don't see much blood on the walls, not that you could tell in this shithole."

"Somewhere else, then?"

"Could be. Or else ... more than five. A lot more. Packed in around him."

Etay put his hands in his pockets and looked at the walls assessingly. "Splashes on them, not the walls."

"Yeah." Eli shook another cigarette from the pack. "A lot more than five. Fifteen, twenty. More."

"Five is a gang," Etay said thoughtfully. "But twenty, Eli. Twenty is a mob."  He tilted back his head to look up at the walls rising on either side of them, vanishing somewhere twenty stories up into the clouds gusting from the over-worked envirosystems. Heads disappeared from sight as he did, windows banged shut. "Mobs don't come from nothing. Inter-tribal? Some sort of feud?"

"No reports of anything like that," Eli said. "Not that I've seen. Some shoving in the lines at supply, name-calling. Big jump from that to this."

Etay looked around the grimy alley with its grisly contents, and then slid Eli a sideways glance, one eyebrow raised. "Such a big jump, someone would have seen it, non?"


Four hours later Eli lit her last cigarette and thought sourly, 'Non' is just about fucking right.

Someone had seen something, she would have bet her pension on it, more than one someone, too, but those witnesses, whoever they were, weren't talking. Not just the usual 'no love lost for the long arm o f the law' either. She flicked ash down-wind.

The closest they'd gotten to an answer had been We take care of our own from a skinny Sebbie woman with the fish-belly pale skin of a life-long station dweller, the words spoken with the flat contempt of someone who'd long ago lost faith in the tender mercy of those in authority to take care of anyone but themselves.

"Something that never got reported, maybe," Eli said aloud, and Etay nodded. "Could be some tribal thing even, for all we know - "

She felt a tug at her sleeve and turned fast. Just a kid. A snot-nosed Vherry kid of indeterminate gender, pulling on her arm with fingers black with dirt.

"That's bad for you," the child said solemnly, pointing at her cigarette. "It'll make you die. We learned in school."

"That's you told," Etay murmured, the corner of his mouth twitching up.

Eli gave him her best glare, the one that had sons and husband backing towards the door when she used it at home, and Etay ducked his head and got very interested in his shoes.  Eli turned the glare on the kid, but the miniature Minmatar was made of sterner stuff.

"It is, though," the - boy? girl? - insisted. "Bad for you."

"I'm Gallente," Eli said. "It's different. But yes, it would be very bad for you. I'd have to arrest you."

Etay, the salaud, was laughing at her, almost soundlessly but I can fucking well tell. Eli put a hand on her hip, showing the child the ID pinned to her belt. "See? Republic Justice. So beat it before I put you in jail for loitering."

The kid moved back, just out of arm's length, and stopped there. "Are you here because of the Sansha?"

That sobered Etay. "No," he said, and Eli shook her head as well. "The Fleet and the capsuleers will make sure the Sansha never come here, okay?"

"No," the kid said patiently. "Not the ones out there. The one here."

Etay hitched up the knees of his trousers and crouched. "What one here, hmm?"

One skinny little arm lifted, and one filthy finger pointed, past Etay, back down the alley to the temporary barrier already beginning to sag on one side, marking the place the body had lain. 

Eli looked, then looked back at the kid. "How do you know he was Sansha?"

A shrug that said as clearly as DNA testing that the kid had some Gallente blood was her only answer.

"Did someone tell you he was?" Etay asked, and got a nod. "Who? Do you remember?"

Another shrug. "Everybody," the kid said. "Everybody was saying it."

Etay met Eli's gaze over the top of the child's no-doubt  lice-ridden head. "Everybody was saying it," he said quietly.

Words. Words and fear, at first. Until more and more people hear it, repeat it, and then it's words and fear and fists and feet.

And some poor bastard is little more than a smear on the sidewalk. 

Etay produced a bar of sweetened gelatine from a pocket, and offered it to the child. "Do you know who it was, who was saying it?" he asked. "Names?"

With a shake of his head, the kid snatched the bar and bolted.

Eli burned her cigarette down to the filter with a final drag. "You have to hold it out of their reach," she said. "For future reference."

Etay didn't smile. "We should make sure they check the body for any extras," he said, getting to his feet.

"You know they're not going to find any, farmboy, don't you?"

He looked at his feet, golden hair falling across his forehead and hiding his face from her. "I know. But we should make sure they check."

"And you know we're never going to get a name, or names, don't you? Who ever it was, they're local heroes now."

"Defending against the Sansha threat," Etay said quietly.

Eli shrugged. "Welcome to the future, farmboy," she said. "This isn't going to be the last time someone's suspicions get some poor fucker lynched. Anyway, it could be worse."

Etay raised an eyebrow at that.

Eli shoved him towards the exit, towards off-shift and home and a bottle of wine and some cigarettes from the Fed that don't taste of armpit. "He could have actually been a Sansha," she said. "Think about that, why don't you?"

"They've never set foot on a station," Etay said. "Cia said that."

"That she knows of," Eli said. "That she knows of, farmboy."

Etay let her herd him along. "The capsuleers are driving them back."

"Until they get bored," Eli said.  "Oh, I know, I know, your pretty girl podder will put her ship on the line to save the innocents, you've said, more than once in fact you've said. They're all like her, are they? You know they aren't, and one day you'll realise she isn't like that either, not really.  Podders, Charlie. Not people."

Etay looked down at her, and then back the way they'd come.

"Maybe they aren't," he said quietly. "Maybe not. But Eli - can you honestly say, today, that being people like the people back there who kicked a man to death because someone whispered 'Sansha', can you honestly say that people is always something worthwhile to be?"

Love and Crime

"Charlie, you're a fool." Capitaine Elienne Desorlay hunched her shoulders against the draft whistling out of the ventilation duct, gaze steady on the door at the end of the alley.  "This exchange program - that no-one's ever heard of before - just happened to pull your name out of the hat right when your capsuleer conceived more than a fancy to have you closer to home?"

Lieutenant Charles Etay, his thick coat more than a match for the breeze, more podder bribes, shrugged. "A job is a job all the same."

"A job that's a podder's grace and favour, for you to lose as soon as you lose her fancy?" Eli snorted, fumbling in her pocket for her cigarettes. "That's not a job, farm-boy. That's a polite way of offering to turn you into her putain.."

That got her no more reaction than a faint smile. "Such a way with words, you have," Etay said, leaning forward to cup his hands around her lighter as the draft made the flame flicker and dim.

"Oh, and how's it going to be, then, you tell me, when she tires of your pretty face?" Eli drew on the cigarette and when it lit, puffed smoke in Etay's face.  "When you tell her no when she wants to hear yes? When you think yours when she's thinking hers?"

Etay took a step back and turned to watch the door again. "There's a job there. There'll be one here, if I need it." He shrugged a little."Do you think this asshole's going to show?"

"He'll show," Eli said with flat certainty.

"He's got to know we'll be watching his girl," Etay said.  "The smart thing would be to -"

Eli flicked ash downwind. "You're forgetting something."

"I am?"

"One, he's a criminal. And crime makes you stupid," Eli said, holding up her thumb.

"Well, that explains a great deal," Etay said mildly.

"And two," Eli said, raising her forefinger to make the shape of a gun, "He's in love. And love, farmboy ..." She aimed at him. "Love makes you dumber than dumb."

Etay glanced sideways at her, long lashes half lowered over his limpid gaze, the breeze ruffling his hair into artless disarray, leaning against the wall as if he belongs on the cover of a holo, not that he knows it, which is almost more annoying, Fortune fuck him. "I recall you saying something along those lines once or twice before."

"A pretty girl crooks her finger, and a silly boy goes running. And then discovers he can't go wandering off again so easily."

Etay laughed soundlessly. "You think Cia plans to keep me chained up and captive?" he asked.  "To father the rest of her children?'

"Stranger things have fucking happened, farmboy, most of them in podder's hangars."

Etay took a step sideways as a passer-by obscured his view of the door. "She's not like that, Eli."

"Oh, not like that, not like that, says the man so head-over-heels in love with her he can't see her any more clearly than he can the shadow behind the sun." Eli burnt the cigarette down to filter on a single ferocious inhalation and dropped it.  "Fortune fuck me, and Robert just finished repainting the bathroom."

"Painting the ... " Etay stopped, eyes steady on the end of the alley. Not a stupid boy, no, Eli thought. Just a foolish one. "Eli ..."

"Someone has to keep an eye on you, farmboy. Someone with a clear head."  

The corner of Etay's mouth that Eli could see twitched upwards. "And you're volunteering?"

"Partners, remember?" She took a wide step around him as a face familiar from the squadroom holoboard showed at the end of the alley. "So you tell your pretty podder mama-to-be that this exchange program needs to have room for your senior partner. Flutter your eyelashes at her, or something."

"Eli ..."

She jerked her chin towards their target. "You going to argue with me or you going to make this arrest?"

Etay's head turned, his eyes narrowing, and he reached for the PRD on his belt. Cop trumps love-sick fool, Eli thought to herself.

For now, anyway.

For now.

Human

"No," Capitaine Elienne Desorlay said flatly. She opened the drawer of her desk and for an instant her hand hovered over her sidearm before she reached past it for the crumpled pack of cigarettes. "No fucking way."

"They'll dock you," Lieutenant Charles Etay reminded her mildly, "If you get another citation for smoking in the squadroom."

"My business," Elienne said, patting her pockets for a lighter. Shit. It's always in that one pocket ... She hoisted herself up to fit her fingers in the front pocket of pants that had been shrinking in the wash more and more lately. Got you, you putain de merde. "Not yours."

"Partners," Etay said. "What's yours is mine, remember? And I can't afford the fine. I'm going to be - "

"So you fucking said," Elienne snapped, flicked the lighter and saw their supervisor heading towards them. "Merde."

"Have an orange instead," Etay said, producing another of his increasingly-frequent fruit miracles from a jacket pocket.

"Gift from your fucking podder?" Elienne asked sourly.

Etay smiled at her, sunny and unperturbed. "From the podder I'm fucking, yes."

Elienne stuffed the unlit cigarette and lighter in her pocket. "And didn't anybody ever tell you not to wade without your waterproofs?"

"Mmm, well," Etay said, turning the orange slowly between his hands. "Everybody knows pod pilots can't be natural parents."

"So you just assumed..." Words failed her for a moment, and then returned in a string of obscenities that turned heads even in the squadroom.

Etay didn't try to interrupt, peeling the skin from the orange as Elienne gave him the full force of her opinion of his intelligence, parenthood, upbringing and general character. By the time she'd run down into fuming silence, he had a neat pile of peel on the edge of her desk and a heap of translucent crescents in the palm of one pale, long-fingered hand.  He offered one to her, the sweet, sharp scent stirring some dim image in Elienne's mind, a feeling like memory but one that connected to no place or time she'd ever known.  She took the fruit without conscious thought, a broken fingernail ripping the thin membrane and sending a trickle of juice running down her wrist.

"I assumed, oui," Etay said as Elienne stuffed the piece of orange in her mouth and licked the last trace of juice from her hand before it could disappear up her shirtsleeve. "I know. When you assume you make an 'ass' out of 'u' and - "

Elienne cut him off. "You made an ass out of you, farmboy, leave me the fuck out of it.  I wouldn't fuck a podder with my worst enemy's dick, let alone get her en cloque. And you think she was assuming she wouldn't end up avec un polichinel dans le tirrior?"

That got her another sunny smile. "Do you think it's a plan to sue me for child support?"

She snorted. "Be serious." Even with the worst will in the world it was hard to see how a capsuleer could be out for Charlie's money. He makes less than I do, for Fortune's sake, and I make two fifths of one tenth of fuck-all.

Charlie ate another crescent of orange. "I am serious," he said. "I'm serious about everything. You know that."

"Yeah, everything and nothing," Elienne said. "Charlie. This has gone far enough.  She's a podder."

"She is a podder, yes," he conceded. "And she's going to be the mother of my child."

"Mother?" Elienne closed her eyes, decided The Super can go fuck himself, and fumbled the now-crumpled cigarette out of her pocket. "Look, farmboy.  Whatever the fuck a podder turns into when it reproduces, it isn't a mother. A mother is a human thing, it's ... " She lit the cigarette and burned it a quarter down with one ferocious draw. "Take it from me. I've had three. Stretch-marks and hemorrhoids and tit-rot and all the rest of it. Waking up at one in the morning, and again at two thirty, and again at four, all of you hurting like poison from how tired you are, and still loving that little, screaming, stinking creature more than you ever knew there was love in you, even while you want to put a pillow over its face so you can get some sleep. Human, all of it, hard and ugly as it is. That's not something that belongs in a podder's world."  She ashed the cigarette into Etay's pile of orange peel and drew on it again. "You've been fooling yourself that this podder feels for you like you feel for her, and now tu l'as mise en cloque and you're talking about the  mother of your child but Charlie, she's a fucking starship, not a mother, and whatever comes out of her in nine month's time - "

"Six months," Etay corrected her mildly.

"Whenever the fuck, she won't be a mother and it won't be your child. If it's even a child."

His expression was grave, and for a moment Elienne thought she'd finally got through to him.  Then he quirked one eyebrow. "You think it'll be a shuttle?"

No such fucking luck.

She shook her head, and stubbed out  her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. "Charlie.  This isn't a joke. It isn't a crush, anymore, yours or hers."

He offered her another piece of orange, and when she made no move to take it, set it carefully on the edge of her desk, ends upright like Tomas had used to make the smiles in his drawings. "I know that."

Elienne shook her head. A podder gets a pretty plaything, stops taking his calls when she gets bored, never thinks about the wreck she makes of a man's heart. That's a heartbreak.

A podder gets a pretty plaything and takes a fancy to breed another. What does she do when she gets bored with her toys and her poor pretty boy's fantasy that he's got something to do with her life and her child?

More than a heart's going to get broken, here.

She picked up the piece of orange and bit into it, sweet and tart at the same time, and sighed. "What am I going to do with you, farmboy?"

Etay studied the heap of peel and cigarette ash for a moment, apparently giving her question serious thought, and then reached out and swept it all into the trash bin by the desk and gave her his sweetest, sunniest smile. "Tell me more about your hemorrhoids?" he suggested.

Elienne tried to glare at him, but as always, she couldn't keep it up. No wonder that Fortune forsaken podder picked him for a diversion.

Sweet, pretty, silly farmboy. Thinking about a little voice calling him 'Papa', about first steps and milk teeth and all the rest of the holvertisements. 

Poor stupid fool.

Pretty Faces, Foolish Hearts

"So," Capitaine Elienne Desorlay said, tapping a cigarette free from the pack she held. "I talked to your podder friend."

Lieutenant Charles Etay regarded her mildly. "Which one?"

Which one. Fortune fuck me, it's come to that, when my partner has to ask 'which one' about the podders he knows. "The fruit one."

"Amieta."

"Yeah." The lighter caught on the third click and Elienne busied herself with getting the end of her cigarette burning, not least to have a reason not to look at Etay right at that moment.  First name terms ... Somewhere in the back of her mind was a vague conviction that there were things it was better not to call by name.

In case they hear you.

And come.

 "Why were you talking to Amieta?" Etay asked.

Elienne glanced up at him, trying to read his expression. No luck. Whatever Etay was thinking was hidden behind an expression of such studied neutrality it could have done double-duty as the Yulai Accords. "I haven't had much luck talking to you, have I?"

A slight thinning of the lips, that got her, a downward glance. That was all. "Eli ..."

She flicked ash from the end of her cigarette. "Relax, farmboy.  I should've told her you've a string of girlfriends and a suspicious rash and to keep her sister out of your way, but I guess I'm going soft in my old age.  I told her you deserved better than to be some capsuleer's pretty plaything for a week, and she didn't argue."

Etay sighed. "Eli ..."

"She seems to like you, for some reason.  Said you were solid, which shows she's not a fool." Elienne exhaled smoke. "Thinks you're smart, too, so her judgement's not that good."

Etay blinked as the smoke drifted into his face.  "And what else did you two discuss?"

"This'n'that," Elienne said, and shrugged.  "She said she wanted her sister to be happy, closer to a normal  human emotion I ever would have thought a capsuleer would have, and I don't think she'd look kindly on anyone made her sister unhappy, so you watch yourself, farmboy. You hear?"

"Watch myself?"

Elienne dropped her cigarette to the ground and trod on it. "Yeah.  She thinks you might be good for the girl.  Something about her having a bad time." She snorted. "Guess all that murdering was rough on her."

"I think maybe it wasn't quite like you're thinking it was," Etay said, his slightly hoarse voice even quieter than usual.

"I think maybe it wasn't quite like you're thinking it was, farmboy, but that's beside the point," Elienne said. "The point is, much as you've made yourself an annoyance to this woman, she did her best to sell me on the idea that this girl you've got moon-eyes for, and don't insult me by pretending you don't, that this girl isn't a walking plasma-leak of trouble for a boy like you."

Etay looked at her sideways with his usual faint smile of wry amusement. At me, at the absurdity of a cop and a podder playing at matchmaking like two old ladies in one of Krenshaw's stories, at the Cluster, maybe. Or all of them.  "And?"


Elienne shrugged. "She wants you to get to know her sister, you want to get to know her sister, you're pretty enough not to need any more help than that. Just ... watch yourself, Charlie.  These pilots, they might seem like normal people, but ..."

He studied her. "She's just a girl, Eli."

"A pretty girl," Elienne corrected, and saw the faint color rise in Etay's cheeks, and sighed.

Pretty faces.


Foolish hearts.

That's where all the trouble starts. 

Podders or not.

Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes

Debreth was a very pretty city, Capitaine Elienne Desorlay thought, despite the grey sky and cold wind that cut through her coat like a knife through sandwich spread. The buildings were pretty, in their matching yellow stone. The river was pretty, if a little frightening as it churned its way under the bridges. The trees were pretty, even without their leaves. And the people were pretty, too, not in the uniform way of the holoreels but with clear eyes that were used to seeing sky and an easy way of walking that said they were used to having enough space to finish a stride without stepping on the heels of the person in front of them.

Could be Farm-boy's home town, come to think of it.


Lieutenant Charles Etay's home town, maybe, but not Elienne's. The gaping open space above her head gave her the creeps, for one thing, and she had no idea how anyone could have a preference for living in a place that had no working temperature control.

Nice enough to visit, well, anywhere was nice enough to visit for a day or so, and Elienne hadn't said no when Charlie had suggested they put their names in the pool to see who'd get sent on the consult request from the local force.  And they'd gotten lucky, or else Charlie's star was on the rise again, even if his big war-crimes arrest had ended with the file marked 'deceased' and not with a trial.

Closed is closed, that was the rule.  And closing a case got you anything from an slap on the back to a promotion, depending on just how big and ugly and political the case had been and just how neatly you'd tied all the ends together.

Charlie had got a trip to Annelle XI, on expenses, which Elienne judged meant the case against Sarakai Voutelen fell somewhere in the middle of the range.

The case here hadn't even been a bad one, financial fraud, not even properly Crimes-Against-Persons except an accounts clerk had gotten a nasty bump on the head when he'd stumbled over the perp working late in the office. Enough to scramble his memory, sure, but not enough to break his skull.

No blood, no deaths, no kids.  That's what I call a good case.


And Charlie had been fast-tracked for a reason, before he got up the noses of the higher-ups.  Boy reads bank records like they're kids' primers. It hadn't taken them more than a few hours to wrap up the case and give it to the locals, all but with a bow on top.

Leaving the rest of the day for sight-seeing.


There were churches, apparently, old ones, that Charlie thought were worth looking at. Elienne had wished him joy of them and trudged off into what the locals had assured her was the right part of town for shopping.

Nothing that she'd have called a shop, not really, just poky little rooms no bigger that Elienne's own living room crowded with shelves and tables of things for sale.  Most seemed to sell only one sort of thing, too, which made for a lot of unnecessary tramping into the little hot rooms and back out into the chilly wind that funnelled through the narrow alleys and blasted up through the wooden walkways, as Elienne tried to find something to take home for Robert that was cheap enough for what was left of her travel allowance, nice enough not to be obviously cheap, and small enough not to get her stuck with an excess baggage charge on the Interbus home.


The last requirement was the hardest. Dirtsiders don't spend much time thinking about mass-lift costs, obviously.

Pausing in her search to buy a crisp sugared pastry baked in a cone, Elienne was eating it while looking in the window of a little shop that sold nothing but shoes when a familiar pretty face appeared reflected next to hers.

She swallowed a mouthful of sweet dough. "Find your church?"

Etay's reflection smiled. "More or less.  Find your souvenir?"

"Not yet," Elienne said. "Look at those shoes. You ever see anything like that? The soles are are some kind of stone, sparkling like that. You'd go slipping all over the place if you tried to run in them."

"I don't think they're for running," Etay said.

Elienne snorted. "Hardly anyone thinks their shoes are for running when they get dressed in the morning, Charlie.  And then you and me are standing in an alley somewhere looking down at some poor cow, and shaking our heads, and thinking that a little bit more speed and none of the three of us would have needed to be there."

The corner of Etay's mouth twitched up slightly. "There's a cheerful thought to have when looking at dancing shoes."

"You're a romantic, farm boy, that's your problem."  She turned to looked at him, and paused. "Had time for shopping after all, did you? That's a nice looking coat."

"It's a ..." Etay looked down, brushing at the rich fabric. "A loan."

"A loan. From one of the local boys?"

He shook his head wordlessly.

"So a complete stranger just walked up to you and lent you a coat, then? A nice one like that?" Elienne asked dryly.

"No," Etay said quietly. "Not a stranger."

Elienne sighed, but not aloud. Seeing two sons through adolescence had given her plenty of practice prying information from young men. Never let them sense your impatience. She looked back at the flimsy shoes with their silly high heels and impractical soles. "So who else do you know in Debreth?"

"I ran into someone," Etay said.

"And who would that be, then, Charlie?"

Etay's reflection looked away from hers.  "Amieta."

It took Elienne a moment to place the name.  "Your fruit woman?"

He smiled a little at that. "Yes."

Elienne made her voice neutral. "The one with the sister." The podder sister.


The pretty, podder sister.


"The very same," Etay said mildly.

"And she gave you that very nice coat," Elienne said flatly.

"Lent, not gave," Etay corrected.

"And why would she do that, Charlie?" Elienne asked.

He shrugged slightly.  "It's cold out?"

Elienne did sigh aloud at that.  Oh, Charlie.  "I don't suppose it was much of a surprise to you to run into this woman here, was it? Given how quick you were to volunteer us both for this little trip?"

"Not all that much of a surprise, no," Etay admitted. "Did you know syrup comes from trees?"

"No, but I always thought it tasted funny," Elienne said. "And don't change the subject, Charlie. We're partners, remember? If you're neck deep in the shit, so am I.  And - " She turned and tipped her head back to look up at him.  "My nose is closer to the ground than yours, farm boy.  So do you think that when you're next planning an interstellar trip to stalk a capsuleer you could let me know what you're dragging me into?"

Etay regarded her mildly. "Stalking seems a little strong."

"Stalking is what it'll say in the complaint, if she makes one.  It's not like you've got any official business with her, is it?"

"No," Etay admitted.

"Is she going to make a complaint?" Elienne asked.

He shook his head. "I don't think so. She gave me tea. And lent me her father's coat."

"Wait, the pilot lent you the coat?" Elienne said.

"And gave me tea."

Oh, Fortune fuck me with feathers. She's pretty and she's kind enough to give a man a warm drink on a cold day.

It wasn't that much, all in all, but then, it didn't take much when it came to young men and pretty girls, in Elienne's experience. Or pretty boys,for Tomas.  A polite smile was as good as a declaration of love, a basic acquaintance with the inside of a textbook was a sign of genius, the ability to walk across a room without tripping over the furniture was the hallmark of incomparable grace ...

And elementary hospitality is no doubt proof this podder is as kind and virtuous as all eight graces, as far as poor Charlie's concerned. 

Elienne shivered, and tugged her coat tighter.  That's where all the trouble in the world starts, she thought.

With pretty faces and foolish hearts.

"Charlie," Elienne said carefully. "She's a capsuleer and a confessed murderer and she's richer than sin-cake and twice as deadly. You do remember all that, don't you?"

"Sure," Etay said. "Sure, Eli. I remember all that."

Elienne studied him, squinting against the cold wind whipping up the alley. Her heart sank a little at what she saw.

Sure, he remembers, she thought.

Care, now.

That'd get me a different answer.

Not one that would do either of them any good, though.

Elienne dusted the sugar off her hands and shoved them in her pockets with a sigh. "Come on, farm boy.  I still need to find something to make Robert forgive me for running off with a pretty boy like you after twenty-seven years of marriage."

Etay laughed, just a puff of air. "There's a shop by the river that might have something," he said.

"Oh, yeah?" Elienne turned in that direction. "Your fruit woman tell you that? Or her pretty podder sister?"

Etay fell into step beside her, shortening his stride to match hers. "The sister," he said. "Ciarente."

Elienne hunched her shoulders against the wind. Ciarente.


First name terms with a capsuleer. 


Not a wise place to stand.


Not a safe one, either.


She glanced at Charlie and bit back the words.

Can't make his mistakes for him, any more than I could make them for Jules or Tomas.


He'll find out soon enough.


Find out that there were cold days no cup of tea could proof a man against.

No borrowed coat, either.


Even one as fine as that.


Elienne took one hand from her pocket and tucked it through the crook of Charlie's elbow as he walked beside her.  Can't make his mistakes for him, no. But with, now ... that's something else.


Partners are partners. And what's his is mine. Poisoned fruit, podders ...


And mistakes as well.

An Acquired Taste

It was yellow and it was almost round and it smelt a little bit like the laundry powder Eli's mother used to use, and a little bit like the juice Jules used to insist on for breakfast.

But better than either.

Capitaine Elienne Desorlay looked from the object that had just appeared on her desk to the man who'd put it there, and back. "What is it?"

Lieutenant  Charles Etay smiled at her, bland and innocent. "It's a rimpon."

"Baise moi." Eli sniffed again. Yes, definitely laundry.  Maybe with a little bit of that flavoring they put in the double-price coffee at that place on Rue Gervain. "And what's a rimpon when it's at home?"

"It's a fruit," Etay said calmly.

Eli snorted. "I can see it's a fucking fruit, farmboy. Where did you get it?"  Merde, there's some sort of fruit black-market and Charlie's the mastermind. It's the only explanation.


Etay pulled out the chair from his desk and turned it around, sinking into it to rest his arms on her desk and his chin on his arms, staring at the golden not-quite-globe with a faint smile. "Someone gave it to me."

"Someone gave you a rinpond," Eli said flatly.

"Rimpon," he corrected. "Yes."

"For what?" Eli eyed him suspiciously. "You selling that fine body of yours for produce, farmboy?"

The smile turned into a laugh, almost soundless. "She said I was too pretty for her."

Eli poked the rimpon with one finger. "I bet you don't hear that too often."

"No," Charlie admitted.  "Not too often."

"So she gave you this as a consolation prize? Who's she, anyway?"

"Amieta.  And I think it was more of a reward," Etay said thoughtfully. "Or something."

Eli narrowed her eyes. "Reward? For what?"

Etay shrugged. ""Dunno. I got her sister to confess to murder and arrested her CTO on an outstanding warrant, and she gave me that."

Now it makes sense. "Have you tested it? For poison?"

"Poison?" Etay said, sounding shocked. "She wouldn't poison it, Eli. It's fruit!"

"Fortune fuck me and save me from innocent boys," Eli picked up her handset. "Yeah, connect me through to the lab. I have a - "

Etay reached out one long arm and pushed the button to cut the connection. "There won't be anything left of it by the time they run their tests. Or at least, that's what they'll tell us. And it isn't poisoned." He smiled. "Amieta wouldn't do that, Eli. She'd just throw me out an airlock or something. And not waste the rimpon."

"Uh-huh."  Eli folded her arms. "Well, you eat it then."

He picked up the rimpon in one hand and studied it. "I will."

Eli shook her head. "I'll make sure and tell a lot of nice lies about you at your funeral. So, you made a couple of arrests? They must be happy with you upstairs."

"One arrest," Etay corrected. "And I don't think they're miserable, no."

"One?" Eli asked. "You said ... what, the sister was the CTO too?"

"The CTO is a CTO," Etay said. "Sarakai Voutelen, you can look her up. Warrant made out, oh, years ago.  Nasty little incident at a colony. Lot of deaths."

"And that's who you went looking for?"

Etay shook his head, smiling. "No. M'selle Voutelen was a bonus. Like the rimpon. No, I was looking for the sister. M'selle Ciarente Roth."

Eli scratched her nose. "And you found her."

Etay tossed the rimpon into the air and caught it. "Yeah."

Fortune fuck me, it's like getting Jules to tell me about his day at school. "And she confessed, this Ciarente Roth."

Etay nodded.

"But you didn't arrest her."

"No." Etay's gaze traveled from the rimpon to Eli, and then back. "She's a podder."

"Baise moi."


"Exactly."  Etay set the fruit down.

"And you met her? The podder?"

"I did."

There were a dozen questions that Eli knew she should be asking. Questions like What fucking murder, farmboy? and Is this connected to all those files from the University of Caille? But ordinary human curiosity won over all of them.  "What was she like, when you met her?"

The corner of Etay's mouth twitched up. "She had a whole bowl of apples on her kitchen counter."

"Well, sure," Eli said. "Podders are rich, aren't they? Like, crazy rich?"

"Guess so."  

"So," Eli said, and shrugged.  "I'd have a whole bowl of apples on my kitchen counter, if I was crazy rich.  I'd have a kitchen counter big enough for a bowl, too. So what was she like besides rich?"

"Not what I expected," Etay said thoughtfully.

"What did you expect, then?'

He gave her a rueful smile. "You know. Like the holos. Master of the cluster? Or mistress, I suppose.  Guns and dangerous stares and so on. But she was ... "

"What?"

Etay shrugged. "Soft. Gentle, you know?"

Uh oh. Eli hadn't raised three sons without knowing the signs. "Pretty?"

Etay shrugged again, but his fair complexion betrayed him, the faint color clear in his cheeks. "I suppose you could say that. I didn't really notice."

"Sure you didn't," Eli said dryly. "Very pretty?"

"I guess." Etay looked intently at the rimpon, rolling it back and forth with one finger.

"Mmmhmm." Eli folded her arms. "Farmboy. This woman, this capsuleer. She might look sweet, like that rimpon. But she's poison."

"Rimpon isn't sweet," Etay corrected her. "An acquired taste, I was told. Some people eat them with sugar." He picked up the fruit and studied it. "And Ciarente Roth is just a girl, Eli."

"Charlie," Eli said flatly. "She's a podder."

"She's still just a girl," Etay told the rimpon.

Just a girl, yeah, right. Fortune fuck me, there's no way this ends well.


She looked at him, SCID's literal and figurative golden-haired boy, slouched in his chair with the easy grace of a man who'd never made a clumsy movement in his life, and her heart ached the way it had when she'd found Tomas crying in the cupboard beneath the stairs and had no good answer for his tearful question But Maman, why doesn't Jacques like me the way I like him?


Pretty as he was, her farmboy had nothing to catch a podder's jaded glance, used to the best eye candy the cluster could offer, and better for him that it's so, bad as that'll hurt.  The air was thin where capsuleers lived, up in the rarefied heights, too thin for mere mortals to breathe long and live. 


Oh, Charlie.  


Why did she have to be pretty?


The silence stretched out, thinner and thinner, until finally Eli shook her head, and sighed.


"What?" Etay asked.


Eli nodded at the rimpon. "Are you going to eat all of that?"  she asked.


Etay gave her a small, slow smile. "You want some?"


"We're partners, aren't we?" Eli said. "What's yours is mine."


Etay nodded. "That's the rules," he said.

"That's the rules," Eli agreed.

What's yours is mine, all right, she thought as Etay turned back to his desk and rummaged in a drawer for a knife. 

What's yours is mine.

Poisoned fruit, podders and all.

Apples and Oranges

Capitaine Elienne Desorlay looked at the screen of her terminal in bemusement. What by the face of Fortune is the University of Caille sending us copies of their cloning contracts for? "Farmboy, those files from Eletta you asked for are - " She turned in her seat and forgot what she was about to say. She gave her partner an incredulous look.  "Is that ... an apple?" she asked.

Lieutenant Charles Etay gave her his sweetest choirboy smile.  "Yep."

Elienne leaned forward to get a closer look, the tiny silver knife in Etay's hand catching the light as he scraped the rich red skin from the fair-to-Fortune, real-life, actual apple that he held. "Where did you get it?"

"My mother has an orchard."  The skin came off in one long, curling strip, and Etay set it carefully on the desk.

"An orchard? Like, with lots of apples?"  Elienne poked at the long curlicue of ridiculous red with one finger, then surreptitiously licked that finger in case some taste of real, grown-on-a-tree apple had managed to stick to it. Nope.  


"Yeah, with lots of apples," Etay said, his quiet, slightly hoarse voice matter-of-fact, as if everybody had a childhood with lots of apples in it. "But mostly for sale. We only got to eat them for special occasions." He nodded towards the apple-skin lying on the desk. "You can dry that, you know. It keeps its scent."

"Uh-huh." Elienne watched him slice the apple in half, then quarters, then eighths. "And your mother sends you apples from her orchard, here?"

"One. Every year," he said. "For my birthday."

"It's your birthday?"

"It is," he said, with the tiny twitch of the corner of his mouth that Elienne had learned to recognize as his real smile, "my birthday."

She could smell the tart tang of the apple now as Etay cut out the seeds from the side of each slice. Her mouth watered. Normally, if she'd been eating, she'd have offered him half. Normally, if he had something that looked good, she'd ask Are you going to eat all of that?  It was the rules, everybody knew that.

But the rules applied where it was turn and turn about. Anyone could get a peshorky from the stall outside SCIDHQ, anyone could walk the extra block to the cafe that made shrip-and-chocolate coffees.

That apple, that was something else.

Elienne swallowed hard, and tore her eyes away from the actual, not re-fabricated cellulose proteins, ripened-under-a-sky, apple.   "Happy birthday," she said, a little bit thickly with her saliva glands working overtime at the tantalizing scent in her near proximity, and turned away.

"Thank you," Etay said.

Elienne concentrated on the files on her screen. Clone activations, Eletta system, 24/5 last year, for ... why?

"Eli?" Etay said.

"Mmm?" She turned back to see him holding out one white crescent toward her, white but already browning at the edges like she'd read real apples do once they're cut.

Her hand wanted to reach out and snatch it and stuff it in her mouth before he could change his mind.  The impulse was so strong that for a second Elienne thought she'd actually do it, grab the piece of fruit from Etay's fingers and hunch over it. Maybe growling.

Somewhere within her, she found the reserves of decency and discipline to say "No, Charlie. It's your birthday apple."

Etay gave her another of his choirboy smiles, as sweet and as bland as a painted cherub. "Don't you have a birthday?"  When she didn't answer he held the little white sliver out further. "Go on, Eli. You'll like it, I promise."

An offer made once is manners. An offer made twice is genuine. That was the rules, too.

Elienne took the fragile morsel from him. She made herself wait, looking at it, smelling it, feeling the slight give in the crispiness of it, the sticky juice on her fingers, wanting to be able to remember this moment in years to come.

Maybe tell my grandkids, if Jules ever gets around to giving me any.


Once upon a time, Granmamare had a real apple, one that was grown on a tree, and everything!


It tasted sweet, yes, and not sweet, at the same time.  A flavor she could recognize as apple from the packets with that word on the label, but as much like that sickly-sweet taste as the giant ball of flaming gas outside the station was like the pale yellow globes set into the ceiling of the station.

Elienne closed her eyes and held the piece of fruit in her mouth until it was nothing more than mush, and then, reluctantly, swallowed.

Etay was watching her. "Good?" he asked.

She nodded wordlessly. Good.

Etay ate a piece of the apple himself, thoughtfully, showing, Elienne thought, proper respect for it even if he had grown up surrounded by trees full of them. "It's a shame you can't grow them in pots," he said. "Oranges, now, orange trees don't mind a pot."

"No?"

He shook his head. "No. Never get very big, of course, so there's not much fruit. I get two a year, if I'm lucky."

Elienne  gaped at him. "You have an orange tree?"

Etay gave her another beatific smile. "More of an orange shrub, really."

Apples, oranges ... man probably grows shrip in his window box, too. "There's a lot more than meets the eye to you, Charlie," Elienne said.

Etay's gaze flicked to her, easy good humor gone, eyes very level and face very still. After a pause, a pause that went three seconds too long, he smiled. "Could say the same for all of us, I guess."  He picked up another sliver of fruit and offered it to her.  "Our job's'd be boring if not, hey?"

Elienne reached out and took the slice of apple. "Nothing wrong with boring, farmboy."

"Mmm," Etay said. He picked up the long curl of apple skin from his desk and slowly wound it around one finger. Against his white skin, the deep red looked like a wound. Elienne watched as he twisted and untwisted it, the edges fraying slightly with the movement.

"What?" she asked at last, her tone unreasonably sharp.

He let the apple skin slide loose from his fingers and coil itself on the desk again, and looked up to meet her eyes.  "Nothing wrong with boring, Eli."

"That's right."

"Except boring doesn't have apples, now, does it?"

There was no reason for the hair on the back of Elienne's neck to raise at that, no reason at all.

But it did.

The Rules

Capitaine Elienne Desorlay rummaged around in the paper bag.  I’m sure there was one more … aha!  Triumphantly, she pulled out the last peshorky, still slightly warm, if a little soggy as the spicy meat began to seep through the crisp pastry. 

About to bite into it, she paused as her conscience stirred.  You don't eat in front of your partner. That's the rules. “Want half?” she asked.

“It’s all yours,” Lieutenant Charles Etay said with a faint smile, his accent making it sound as if he was trying to keep the words in his mouth even as he spoke, reluctant to give even that much of himself away.

“You sure?”  she asked suspiciously.  Turning down a peshorky, even a rapidly-cooling one, was grounds for a diagnosis of insanity in Elienne’s book.

“Sure,” Etay said mildly, not turning from his scrutiny of the street through the windshield of their Unmarked Surveillance Vehicle.

Elienne studied his profile with growing unease. “You’re not … you’re not a vegetarian, are you?” It would explain why he’s so damn skinny, at least.  Although skinny was perhaps the wrong word, she had to admit.  Still, my Robert would make two of him. A man should have some meat on his bones.

The corner of Etay’s mouth that Elienne could see twitched up slightly. “No,” he said, “I’m not a vegetarian.”

“On a diet?” More understandable, if still reprehensible.

“Not that either,” Etay assured her.

“Then …?”  Shit. He’s dying of something. That’s why they’ve stuck him with me, last year’s fair-haired boy of the Supreme Court Investigative Division parked in Crimes-Against-Persons with a partner two years out from retirement. Shit, that’s the last thing I need, just when I’m about to get Jules out of the house and off to college and have an easy few years run through to the pension. A dying partner. Shit!  “Are you …. ?”

Etay turned to look at her with his usual unreadable expression.  Elienne had tried over the past few days to work out if Etay regarded the world through eyes narrowed in scrutiny or by a perpetual amusement. Even money each way. “I’m not sick either,” he said. “I’m just not hungry. This case…”

“Ah.”  She bit into the peshorky with a clear conscience and a sense of relief, and added another item to her mental list titled Charles Etay: The Partner’s Manual.

It now read Plays handball; probably irons his underwear; doesn’t seem to know how pretty he is; possibly too 'sensitive' for the job.

The handball she’d learnt about from the office grapevine, the underwear was, she felt, a logical conclusion given the man had turned up for a stake-out in a suit rather than the comfortable sweats most plain-clothes investigators would choose, he made the jacket and open-collared shirt look as formal as a uniform.

And it was clear to Elienne that Etay was at least partially oblivious to his own good fortune in the looks department from the fact that he’d gotten through the first few days of their partnership without acting like a con.  In her long experience, men – and women, for that matter - who knew they’d fallen out of the pretty tree and hit every branch on the way down tended to carry themselves with an awareness of their superiority to the fat-assed, pug-nosed, gap-toothed rest of the world. Not Charlie. Not yet, anyway.

“Yeah, it’s a shit of a case,” Elienne said. Leshinna Grattotte, aged six.  “Kids … that’s the worst.”

“You seen a lot of them?” Etay asked, his husky voice even softer than it usually was.

“A few.” She licked the last of the juice from her fingers. “One’s too many. They stick with you.  Especially if you see the bodies.”

“This one’s missing, not dead.”

“Don’t go setting your heart on that, Charlie,” Elienne advised. “I did that, the first time. Then we found him, poor little boy. You go setting your heart on finding them alive, they won’t ever leave you alone.”

Etay looked out the window, the glass showing Elienne his eyes only in a shadowed reflection. For a moment she thought he was too young and green to know the rules of the USV, give and get, and he wasn’t going to speak.

Then he took a shallow breath. “The one that stuck with me was a live one,” he said. Unwritten rules. Truth for truth. “Bodies, well, you see them. The worst thing that’s ever going to happen to them is already over. One night patrol my partner and me got a call, woman screaming in an alley. We got there, she was on the ground, he was on top of her. My partner was putting him in the patrol and I was trying to tell her it was going to be all right, she was safe now." Etay paused and traced one finger over the window beside him.  "She couldn't work out whether to hang on to me for comfort or cower away. I could tell it was all tangled up in her head, that nothing was safe for her anymore.  I wonder about her, you know. How she's doing. If it got untangled for her, or not."

“Probably not,” Elienne said.

"Probably not," Etay agreed.

Elienne crumpled up the bag and tossed it over into the back seat, and let silence return to the USV. Etay was good with silence, that was something else for the manual and a point in his favour. Elienne let it stretch and stretch to see when he'd break it, but in the end she was the one to speak first. 

"So who did you shit on to get stuck with me?" she asked.

 Points for honesty, she thought, when Etay didn't try and pretend he was thrilled to be stuck in CAP with a partner who'd been stuck at the same rank for twenty years.  "The FIO," he said simply. 

"Shit." Elienne slumped in her seat. "So you're a dumb son-of-a-bitch, then."

He laughed, nothing more than a puff of air. "Guess I am. Or a stubborn one, anyway."

"Yeah?"

Etay shrugged slightly. "Cold case. Cloning station sabotage. Ran places nobody expected, FIO agent in the place at the time. We got warned off and I didn't listen."

"Yeah, well, I got two years to pension, so they warn you again, you be fucking smarter, all right?"

"Yes, ma'am." It might have been sarcastic. It might have been sincere. Elienne couldn't tell.

"Where are you from, anyway?" she asked. "Don't recognise the accent."

Etay kept his gaze on the street. "Caldari Prime, a dozen generations ago, if that's what you're asking."

"I'm old, but I'm not blind. I could see that. Where'd you grow up?"

"One world over," Etay said.  

"Ah, so that explains it. Luminaire boy, huh? Big city manners and big city style?"

He turned to face her for the first time. "I grew up on a farm."

"Oh well that - "

She bit the words off as Etay gave her the first unmistakeable smile she'd had from him. "That explains a lot? Yeah, it does."

Elienne snorted. "Yeah, farmboy, I guess it does."

  

He turned back to the window. "So where did you - he's moving. There he is. He's moving."

"I see him."  Average-height-average-build-brown-hair. "Hold on, hold on, he's heading for his car - "

Etay thumbed his comm. "SCIDCEN, this is USV 4-3, our target is moving. Request activation of monitor."

Elienne watched as Mr Average lifted the driver's side door of his 'car and slid in. "They have him?" she asked. "Charlie? They sending the feed?"

"No." Etay pressed the buttons to start the USV. "Feed's down."

"Again? Ah, baise moi, the fucking budget! Get across, cut him off - "

"No," Etay said again as the USV engine warmed up with a faint, ear-tickling whine and he sent it out into the stream of traffic.

"No? Then what?"

Etay pulled out into the traffic as Mr. Average reached his vehicle. "We're going to follow this son-of-a-bitch."

"Oh, no." Elienne shook her head. "A sniffer's one thing. If we fucking lose him - "

"If he's got her somewhere else what are the chances of him telling us once he's in custody?" Etay let a couple of cars pull in between them and their target. "We're going to follow him and see where he goes and if we're lucky he'll lead us to the girl."

Shit. "The girl's - "

"Probably dead, I know. I'd like her family to have something to bury, though, wouldn't you?"

"Fuck!" Two years off pension.  

But you backed your partner, that was the rules. 

Elienne leaned back in her seat as Etay punched a priority code into the Traffic Control System and sent the USV weaving through the traffic and thumbed her comm-link. "SCIDCEN, be advised, USV 4-3 in pursuit of suspect in green late-model Rosseche landcar licence Q-R-45-I-9-K-K-316, headed west on Rue D'Avourge, request traffic control monitoring, do not approach, repeat, do not approach the vehicle."  She clicked the comm off and braced herself against the dash as Etay took a corner hard and fast. "If this comes back on us you better know I'll be spending my impoverished old age with you, farmboy. Me and my husband and probably several of my damn kids with their useless degrees in art history and similar shit. I hope you realise th - watch it!"

Etay disengaged the feed from the TCS and sent the USV onto the wrong side of the road, the engine's whine rising to a shrill buzz as the old vehicle shivered in protest.  They shot past on-coming traffic as 'cars to the left and right swerved crazily, the TCS trying to track and compensate for their now 'rogue' vehicle. As Etay wrenched the USV back over the divider Elienne pressed a hand over her heart and tried to decide whether to look at the road ahead, the vehicle they were following, or Etay's calm profile.

She picked option B and saw their target turn into a smaller, less busy thoroughfare. "Charlie..."

"See him." Etay followed, slowing to leave a greater distance between the two 'cars.

They were a block or so back when the vehicle ahead came to a stop. As Mr Average got out and headed into the nearest building, Etay brought their own 'car to a halt. Elienne slid out of the door as the engine stopped, checking her mag-pistol automatically with one hand as she thumbed the comm again with the other. "USV 4-3 on foot in pursuit, request traffic monitoring of the area, maintain distance."

Etay was out of the vehicle after her but he overtook her easily before they reached the door of the rundown apartment block. Elienne wheezed as he tried to open it. Fucking teenagers and their damn athletic hobbies. The handle didn't move and Etay took a step back and kicked it hard by the lock.  Pressed fibreboard showered them both with dust as the lock tore free.

The door opened directly onto stairs. Etay headed up, Elienne panting behind him, and then stopped, hand raised. She stopped as well and in the silence could hear footfalls above them.

Etay caught her gaze, and jerked his chin upwards. She nodded. Go ahead. 

By the time she reached the third floor he was out of sight. She toiled upwards grimly, cursing silently, checking each floor for the sight of his blonde head above the residents coming and going.

He was there on the tenth floor, standing outside a door, his own gun in his hand.

Elienne paused long enough to tell a couple of curious bystanders to Go inside, right now!  and joined Etay at the door.

He put his finger to his lips and bent his head listening.

The voices inside were audible to Elienne was well. One deeper, adult, the other the piping treble of a child.

Talking.

Alive.

Elienne allowed herself one second of a relief so intense she could taste it like sweet honey on her tongue. Alive.

Then she let it go. Not home yet. Not yet.

Kid to the left, him to the right ...

She caught Etay's eye and nodded, lifting her gun. He took a step back, braced himself, and kicked.

The door banged open and Elienne followed it so fast the rebound caught her hard on the shoulder. Etay was right behind her, both of them shouting SCID, on the floor, on the floor!

For a minute Mr Average didn't move. Elienne could hear a child crying off to her left and felt her finger tighten on the trigger for the first time in more than forty years. 

Etay pushed past her, holstering his gun, and grabbed Mr Average by one arm, spinning him around and slamming him face down on the floor. Elienne tracked him down with the muzzle of her pistol, vision narrowed to his face in a sea of black.

"The kid," Etay said. "Elienne. Capitaine Desorlay. The kid."

Her sight came back and the buzzing in her ears faded. "Yeah."

Etay fished a Perpetrator Restraining Device from his pocket and hooked it around Mr Average's wrists as Elienne holstered her pistol and turned to look around the room. It was small and filthy, stinking of shit and garbage and stale sweat but it held the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

Leshinna Grattotte, aged six.

She made a quick call on her comm as she moved cautiously towards the child. Backup needed - medics - immediate, tenth floor.

"Hey there, cherie," she said, crouching down beside the bed where the little girl lay. "We're from SCID and we're here to take you back to your mama and papa, okay?"

The little girl nodded, tears leaking from her eyes.     

"I'm going to pick you up, okay, cherie?" When Leshinna nodded again, Elienne gathered her up and settled her on one hip, rising carefully to her feet. She felt warm liquid soaking through her shirt and wished she could believe that it was because Leshinna had wet herself.  The child was shivering. "Charlie, give me your jacket."

He slipped it off and draped it around the little girl's shoulders.  "Take her downstairs," he said to Elienne. "Send the backup up to bring this guy down."

"Yeah," Elienne said. "Wouldn't want him to have a slip and fall on the stairs."

As Elienne turned to the door, Etay yanked Mr Average to his feet. "You," he said, "are obliged to answer any questions put to you by authorised agents of the SCID. Anything you say without the presence of legal representation will be recorded and may be used in evidence at your trial - are you listening to me?"

Elienne glanced back.

Mr Average was staring at Leshinna. "Don't forget me, okay, cherie?" he said. "I'll see you again soon."

Later, when she was turning it into a story in her head, taming it so it was something she could share with Robert over a cognac after dinner, Elienne would tell herself that she'd been frightened by what she'd seen in Etay's eyes, or that there'd been something terrible in his expression. But the truth was, the truth that would stay in that little stinking windowless room that Elienne would never allow herself to visit again even in memory, the truth was she had no warning.

Nothing in Etay's face changed. He was looking at Elienne with his perpetual, maybe-amused, unreadable expression, and then there was a blur of movement and blood and Mr Average was on the ground, groaning.

Elienne looked down at him, and then at Etay, who was regarding the man whimpering on the floor mildly and steadily, unbuttoning the cuff of his left sleeve and staring to roll it up with careful, precise folds.

Later, Elienne would tell herself that it was a moment of decision. That she made a choice, for good or ill, that it was a turning point in her sense of herself and her definition of the job. 

That would be part of the story.  It wasn't part of the truth that would stay in that room.

Elienne turned and walked out the door with the girl without making any choice at all. It wasn't until she was three storeys down that her mind began to work again, and as soon as it did she knew she'd made a mistake.

Broken the unwritten rules. Left her partner out on his own, in a room with an arrestee. Anything could happen.

Someone could get hurt.

Someone was going to.

Her partner was going to step over a line there was no coming back from and she was walking away from him, step by step.

And, fuck, there's every chance it'll come out and I can bend over, put my head between my knees and kiss my pension goodbye.

Elienne hated herself a little for the thought. Hated herself a little more for keeping on climbing down those ten flights of stairs.

The medics met her halfway down.  When they tried to take Leshinna from her the little girl cried and clung, and so they let Elienne go on carrying her all the way down and out the front door and into the waiting medical transport.

SCID officers passed them on the way, heading up. Elienne gathered herself enough to tell them she'd left Etay with arrest in progress, leaving as much wriggle room as she could, leaving out the PRD and the fact that Mr Average had been down and bleeding when she'd left.

  

Leshinna didn't let go of her until they'd reached the hospital where the girl's parents were waiting. Elienne relinquished her, waved off colleagues who wanted to know What happened, how did you know?

Where's Etay?

She found herself a seat in the waiting room and settled into it, taking stock of her aching knees and sore feet to avoid thinking about anything else. Fuck the SCID health plan, anyway.  Need anything more expensive than a filling, like those fancy implants for an old woman's joints they're always advertising on the holo, and you're on your fucking own.  

When a trolley was rushed past her with a flurry of medtechs around it Elienne refused to look up.

A pair of shoes, good leather with thin, impractical soles, intruded into her field of vision, paused, and then came over beside her as the owner of the shoes settled into the chair next to her.

"Kid?" Etay asked.

"Okay," Elienne said. "Docs said she was drugged. Could be she won't remember much."

"That'd be nice."

"Yeah."  She looked sidewise at him, determined not to ask.  

Etay looked back at her with the same imperturbable expression he'd worn for three days. "So," he said mildly. "There’s something I have to tell you. And you’re not going to like it.”

Shit. Oh, shit. There had to be a way to keep it quiet. Save them both, well, save herself, Etay being beyond saving in anything more than the most strictly careerist sense of the word. Shit. Shit. "What?"

"Hmm?"

"What is it that you have to tell me?"

"Oh, right."  He gave her the second smile she'd got from him, sunny and warm.  "I'm sorry, Elienne. I know it's not something you want to hear from your partner, but ..."

"But?"

“I am a vegetarian.”

She stared at him, mouth ajar.

"And on a diet. Have to make weight for the departmental handball championships, you know." 

Elienne realised her mouth was open, closed it, opened it again to say: "You ...?"

"But I don't mind if you eat meat," Etay said. "It's a personal decision. So don't feel you shouldn't - "

Elienne took a deep breath. "And the suspect?"

"Oh, him." Etay shrugged slightly. "They're putting a stabilizer in his arm. Gluing up some cuts."

"But he's not ... dead?"

Etay shook his head. "Nope. So what do you think?"

"What do I think? About ...?"

"About me being a vegetarian. Do you want to put in for a new partner? I won't be offended."

"You..."

Elienne found herself laughing, tears running down her cheeks, tried to stop as a medtech glared at her and felt her breath hitch treacherously close to a sob.

"I know it seems funny," Etay said. "Choosing not to eat meat. But when you look at the scientific evidence - "

Elienne gasped for breathe, slapped Etay's arm, and shook her head. "You fils de putain de merde!"

"Now, come on," Etay said. "it's just a personal preference - "

"Oh, shut up," Elienne said. "You nearly give me a heart attack on your third day on the job, and you want to talk about vegetables?"

"Well, see, there's another reason to stop eating meat.  The effect on your arteries is - "

Elienne slapped his arm again and Etay subsided, smiling slightly.

"I," she said firmly, "am not going to give up peshorkies. And you, farmboy, are going to buy me a drink. A big one. Big enough to fucking swim in, in fact. That's what the rules say. "

"They do?"

"You better fucking believe it, partner," Elienne said. "You better fucking believe they do."