“Where was it?”

“In a shoulder holster under my left arm.”

“So he couldn’t see it?”

“Correct.”

“Go on.”

“I reached for my gun, pulled it out, and shot him in the face.”

“And?”

“And he fell over dead.”

The captain nodded grimly. She looked around the compartment. “Questions?”

Silence.

“All right, given the fact that Sasha Casad’s testimony is consistent with the physical evidence, and is partially confirmed by a security camera located in the vicinity of the attack, I find that Lester Hollings’s death was a justifiable homicide, committed in self-defense. Inquest closed.”

The captain nodded to Wilson, and he touched a button. She smiled and looked around the bridge. “Okay, everybody, the recorders are off.”

Sasha and I turned to go but stopped when the captain said, “Not so fast, chrome-dome. We still have a problem, and you’re going to help.”

“She means the phantom,” Killer said helpfully as he examined a set of absolutely filthy fingernails. “We’ve got to find him.”

I looked at the captain. “Why?”

She scowled. “Because the phantom was programmed to assist the engineering officers, that’s why. Barring a major drive failure, or something equally catastrophic, the phantom has enough shit to see us through.”

I nodded slowly. “Oh.”

Sasha was more inquiring. “Why search for him? Get on the horn and order him to come.”

The captain rubbed her chins. They jiggled. “It ain’t that simple, honey buns…the phantom doesn’t like humans.”

Kreshenko spoke for the first time. “We believe that Lester abused the Engineering Support Android in a manner that caused it to run away.”

Sasha frowned. “Abused…how?”

The rest of the crew looked at each other. They were visibly uncomfortable. It was Wilson who answered. He had a deep, rumbling voice. “Lester tried to modify the ESA’s body so that it could function as a sex surrogate. That’s the theory, anyway, but none of us have gotten close enough to confirm it.”

There were sexroids of course, lots of them, but they had programing appropriate to the job. The ESA didn’t, and Lester’s attempts to graft that function over the others had driven it insane. Which raised some interesting questions: Assuming we were able to capture the phantom, would it be able to perform the job it had been designed to do? And why had the whole thing been left so long?

I think everyone had similar thoughts, but no one wanted to say anything. To do so would be to question the way the captain did or didn’t do her job and risk one’s livelihood. A real no-no when there are twenty people waiting to fill your slot.

The search began in the bow. All of the Trader’s crew plus most of the ship’s ambulatory robots had been recruited for the task. The plan was simple: Start in the bow, sweep towards the stern, and drive the phantom before us. Once it was concerned, it would be a relatively simple matter to repair the damage that Lester had done and put the android right. Or so we hoped.

I looked around. Kreshenko had armed himself with a section of cargo netting. The captain had a sandwich in one hand and a stun gun in the other. Killer had fashioned a lasso from a length of utility line and twirled it over his head. Wilson untangled his homemade bolo and Sasha looked bored. “All right,” the captain said through her food, “go get him. And remember, if you hurt the little bastard, we’re screwed.”

Not the most inspiring speech I’d ever heard, but direct and to the point. We spread out and headed down-ship. Hand-held radios helped coordinate our movements. Each corridor, passageway, compartment, and cubicle was searched. We found all sorts of things including rats, a parrot’s mummified body, a cargo module with “urgent” marked all over it and a five-year-old delivery date, the still my predecessor had maintained, plus an entire storage room packed with supplies that Kreshenko didn’t have listed on his inventories and the captain ordered him to ignore. But no android.

Various members of the search party did catch glimpses of the phantom, however, always a step ahead of us, fleeing towards the stern. But large as she was, the Red Trader was only so big, and the outcome was inevitable. We found him huddled in a locker full of pneumatic cargo jacks, trying to blend in with the equipment around him. The things that Lester had done to his body were disgusting enough, but the artificial intelligence that stood in for his brain had been scrambled, and required three shifts of electronic therapy. The result was somewhat twitchy but functional enough to meet our needs-barring what the captain called “major catastrophes,” which I was too stupid to imagine.

And so it was that I went back to petting the aniforms, finished my shift, and hit the rack. The dream grabbed my mind and pulled it down.

“Holy mother full of grace, help me make it through this place…” The pilot’s personal mantra was little more than a whisper now, as if the strikers might hear it, and punish us with a missile. And I couldn’t really blame her, since they were damned close and had some first-class detection equipment. And why not? They had stolen it from the same place Mishimuto did. I patted her shoulder. It was slick with sweat. “You’re doing good, Loot. Just a few more klicks and it’ll be over.”

She nodded stiffly and kept her eyes straight ahead as she slid the ship around the side of a slowly tumbling asteroid. The trick was to keep it between us and the research station for as long as possible. After all, you can’t shoot what you can’t see, and even the best detectors can’t see through solid rock.

That was the theory, anyway, although the strikers might have surrounded themselves with a whole network of remote sensor stations that were busy screaming their heads off.

I imagined missiles leaving their racks, zigzagging away from the installations that fired them, and accelerating in our direction. The Loot might have time to detect them, might have time to say the words uttered by so many pilots before her, but would die a millisecond later along with me and the entire team.

The Loot rescued me from my own imagination. “We’re twenty from the drop.”

I hit my harness release. “Gotcha. I’ll be with the team. Thanks for the lift.”

It was macho stuff, the kind we practice in the corps, and she wasn’t playing. “Your team will have sixty seconds to deploy.”

I nodded, snuck one last look at her nipples, and floated free. I pulled myself down the corridor, cycled the hatch, and propelled myself into the cargo bay. The gunny yelled “Ten-hut” and the troops did their best to obey. But it’s hard to look military inside a Class III battle suit, especially with all sorts of extra gear strapped to your body, and no gravity to hold things in place.

I said, “As you were,” and accepted the gunny’s help in donning my battle suit. It was similar to the trooper model, except for the lighter weaponry, heavier armor, and a sophisticated command and control package. It fit like a glove, smelled like the dump I had taken in it the month before, and was servo-assisted. The gunny thumped her helmet against mine. She had wide-set eyes, a pug nose, and a dusting of freckles across the top of her cheeks. “How ya doin’ sir? Everything okay?”

I tried to ignore the smell. “Just fine, gunny. Couldn’t be better.”

She grinned knowingly. “Life sucks, don’t it, sir? Well, that’s why god gave us the corps. To shorten the suffering.”

I laughed, knowing it was expected of me, and knowing she was scared too. And there were thirty-six men and women on our team, their helmets turned in my direction, all of whom shared the same feelings. I thought about some of the stupid gung-ho crap other officers had laid on me and tried to avoid it. “We’re on final approach. You know the objective, the layout, and what you’re supposed to do. Questions?”