"Oxy-CO2 exchange for the Station," Commander Quinn explained in an undertone. "The algae is bioengineered for maximum oxygen generation and CO2 absorption. But of course, it grows. So to save having the chambers down half the time while we, ah, bale hay, the newts—specially bred—crop it for us. But then, naturally, you end up with a lot of newts…."

She broke off as a blue-suited technician shut down a monitor at a control station and turned to frown at them. She waved at him cheerily. "Hi, Dale, remember me? Elli Quinn. Dom told me where to look you up."

His frown flipped to a grin. "Yes, he told me he'd seen you…" He advanced as if he might hug her, but settled on bashful handshake instead.

They exchanged small talk while Ethan, unintroduced, tried not to shift about nervously, or open his mouth or act like a downsider. The first two were easy enough, but what was it that marked a downsider in Stationer eyes? He stood by the float pallet and tried desperately to act like nobody at all.

Quinn ended what seemed to Ethan an unnecessarily lengthy digression about the Dendarii Mercenaries with the remark, "And do you know, those poor troops have never tasted fried newt legs!"

The tech's eyes glinted with a humor baffling to Ethan. "What! Can there be a soul in the universe so deprived? No cream of newt soup, either, I suppose?"

"No newt Creole," confided Commander Quinn with mock horror. "No newts 'n chips."

"No newt provencal?" chorused the tech. "No newt stew? No newt mousse in aspic? No slither goulash, no newt chowder?"

"Bucket 'o newts is unknown to them," confirmed Quinn. "Newt caviar is a delicacy unheard of."

"No newt nuggets?"

"Newt nuggets?" echoed the commander, looking suddenly really nonplussed.

"Latest thing," explained the tech. "They're really boned leg meat, chopped, reformed, and fried."

"Oh," said the mercenary woman. "I'm relieved. For a moment there I was picturing some form of, er, newt organettes."

They both burst into laughter. Ethan swallowed and looked around surreptitiously for some kind, any kind, of basin. A couple of the slick black creatures swam to the barrier and goggled at him.

"Anyway," Quinn went on to the tech, "I thought if you were about due for the culling this shift you might spare me a few, to freeze and take back with me. Assuming you're not short, of course."

"We are never," he groaned, "short of newts. Help yourself. Take a hundred kilos. Take two. Three."

"A hundred would be plenty. All I can afford to ship. Make it a treat for officers only, eh?"

He chuckled, and led her up a ladder to an access port. Ethan skittishly followed her come-along gesture, bringing up the float pallet.

The tech picked his way delicately across a mesh catwalk. Beneath them the waters hissed and rushed in little eddies; a fresh draft from below cooled Ethan's skin and cleared his aching head. He kept one hand on the safety railing. Some of the whirlpools below suggested powerful suction pumpers at work somewhere in the silver-green. Another water chamber was visible beyond this one, and beyond that another, retreating out of sight.

The catwalk widened to a platform. The hiss became a roar as the tech pulled back a cover above an underwater cage. The cage roiled with black and scarlet shapes, slipping and splashing over each other.

"Oh, lord yes," yelled the tech. "Full house. Sure you don't want to feed your whole army?"

"Would if I could," called Quinn back. "Tell you what, though. I'll trot the excess down to Disposal for you, once I pick out my choice. Does Transients' Lounge need any?"

"No orders this shift. Help yourself."

He opened a housing over a control box, did something; the newt trap rose slowly, draining water, compressing the wriggling black and scarlet mass. Another motion at the controls, a buzz, a blue light. Ethan could feel the nimbus of a powerful stun beam even where he stood. The mass stopped writhing and lay still and shining.

The tech heaved a large green plastic carton from a stack of identical ones and positioned it on a digital scale under a trap door in the bottom of the cage. He aligned a chute and opened the trap. Dozens of limp newts slithered down into the carton. As the digital readout approached 100 kilograms he slowed the flow, and tossed a last black body in by hand. He then removed the carton with a hand-tractor, replaced it with another, and repeated the process. A third carton did not quite make it to full capacity. The tech entered the exact biomass removed from the system into his computer log.

"Want me to help you pack your canister?" he offered.

Ethan blanched, but the mercenary woman said lightly, "Naw, go on back down to your monitors. I'm going to sort through these by hand a bit, I think—no point in shipping any but the best."

The tech grinned, and started back across the catwalk. "Find 'em some nice juicy ones," he called. Quinn gave him a friendly wave as he vanished back through the access port.

"Now," she turned back to Ethan, her face gone intent, "let's make these numbers match. Help me get that dirt-sucker up on this scale."

It wasn't easy; Okita had stiffened, wedged in the canister. The mercenary woman stripped him of clothes and a variety of lethal weapons and made them into a compact bundle.

Ethan shook off the paralysis of his confusion to attempt a task he at last felt sure of, and weighed the corpse. Whatever this madness was he had fallen into, it threatened Athos. His original impulse to escape the mercenary woman was becoming, in his gradually clearing head, an equally strenuous desire not to let her out of his sight until he could discover, somehow, everything she knew about it.

"Eight-one-point-four-five kilograms," he reported in his best clipped scientific tone, the one he used for visiting VIPs back at Sevarin. "Now what?"

"Now get him into one of these cartons and fill it to, ah, 100. 62 kilos with newts," she instructed with a glance at the first carton's readout. When this was done—the last fraction of a kilo was accomplished by her pulling a vibra-knife from her jacket and adding slightly less than half a newt—she switched data discs and sealed the carton.

"Now 81. 45 kilos of newts into that shipping canister," she instructed. It came out even, leaving them with three cartons and a canister as before.

"Will you please tell me what we're doing?" Ethan begged.

"Turning a rather difficult problem into a much simpler one. Now instead of an extremely incriminating drum full of dead downsider, all we have to get rid of is 80 or so kilos of stunned newts."

"But we haven't got rid of the body," Ethan pointed out. He stared down into the bright waters. "Are you going to dump the newts back in?" he asked hopefully. "Can they swim all right, stunned?"

"No, no, no!" said Quinn, looking quite shocked. "That would unbalance the system! It's very finely tuned. The whole point of this exercise is to keep the computer records straight. As for the body—you'll see."

"All set?" called the tech as they floated out of the access port, canister, cartons and all stacked on the pallet.

"No, darn it," said Quinn. "I realized when I was about halfway through that I'd grabbed the wrong size shipping canister. I'll have to come back later. Look, give me the receipt and I'll still run this load down to Disposal for you. I want to look up Teki there anyway."

"Oh, sure, all right," said the tech, brightening. "Thanks." He punched up the records, put them on a data disk, and handed it over. Commander Quinn retreated with all seemly haste.

"Good." She slumped as the airseal doors slid shut behind them, the first hint of weariness Ethan had seen in her. "I'll get to oversee the final act myself." She added to Ethan's bewildered look, "We could have just left them to go down to Disposal on the regular schedule, but I kept having this horrible vision of a last-minute order arriving from Transients' Lounge and Dale opening a carton to fill it…."