"Mercy Dash." Jaff looked up from the Chronicle and smiled across the crowded table at Chervaz. "Good headline."

"Thanks," Chervaz said, but blushed and Maiga, who sat beside him, felt him fidget. He didn't like being the centre of attention of the group spread across a couple of tables in Chullan's.

"Doctor's race to save mother and baby." Jaff read the sub heading. "I hope you've got me in there. Ah there I am. At least you spelled my name right. 'Maintenance worker Jaff, 34.' What's with the age anyway? You always put that in."

"It's a newspaper thing." Chervaz shrugged. "It's traditional."

"It's rather impertinent," Jasini said. "I doubt Sheni is pleased with you putting 68 by her name."

"She probably hasn't even had time to read it," Jaff said. "I passed her clinic earlier and it was chock full. Unlike a certain other clinic I could mention."

That led to laughter around the table. Wixa positively cackled.

"I like this bit." Wixa cleared her throat and read aloud from her copy. "Doctor Sheni has delivered several dozen babies during her many years of serving the human community on the station. She said 'my colleagues did absolutely the right thing asking for my advice. I was glad to help them, and I'm delighted that together we brought about a happy outcome for mother and child'." Wixa smirked. "Very gracious."

"She's too generous." Jasini said, sternly. "She should have made it clear that girl and her baby would have died if she hadn't taken charge."

"Doctors stick together though," Wixa said. "Even rival ones. Everybody knows what really happened. Just from the rest of this. Vaz, you don't try to make anyone look bad, I know that, but it's clear what the stakes were. 'The mother, Isha, 24, suffered severe haemorrhaging.' and 'the baby boy had to be resuscitated.' Yeah, nobody should be in any doubt what the stakes were."

"Isha certainly isn't," Jaff said. "See her quote? 'If it wasn't for Dr Sheni I'm sure me and my baby would both have died. I'll be grateful to her for the rest of my life'."

"This is going to knock Bara's nose so far out of joint she'll have trouble wearing sunglasses." Wixa chuckled. "The free clinic will be a wasteland. Lini tells me Major Jax's girls have already insisted on going back to Sheni's and that the Major barely argued with them. Even Isha has already been moved to Sheni's."

Maiga knew that, she'd seen the circus. Four men carried Isha there on a stretcher and Sheni walked behind with the baby in her arms. Although late at night by then, many people had wanted to take a look at the baby, and ask about exactly what happened. By the time they walked through the Plaza it had almost turned into a parade.

Chervaz's story was carefully factual, Maiga thought, picking up the Chronicle. However, lurid stories were circulating about the incident. Even people loyal to Bara couldn't fail to think again about using the free clinic.

"It's rather unfair really," Chervaz said. "Those two are good doctors, but they just didn't have the right experience to handle this."

"That's no help to Isha and her baby," Jasini said. "If either or both of them had died --"

"Well that really would have put the nail in the coffin for Bara," Wixa said. "It would have been a terrible thing, of course. But for our side, it would have been a tipping point."

Maiga felt Chervaz stiffen beside her and moved back to see him scowling at Wixa. He'd picked up his coffee cup, but slammed it back down on the saucer.

"Our side? This is not a game." His face flushed as he spoke, his tone harsh. "I reported the facts. That story is not a... a chess move, or a salvo in a war."

"I... I know." Wixa looked more rattled than Maiga had ever seen her. Everyone else fell silent. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. You know I respect you and your paper, Chervaz. I think it's important work you're doing."

"Please, don't patronise me. You think the paper is a weapon you can use against Bara. Well it's not. The Chronicle isn't on anybody's side."

He shoved his chair back and walked out of the coffee house, bumping a couple of tables as he went, then strode off across the Plaza. Maiga started to get up to follow him, but Jaff leaned over and put a hand on her arm. She looked at him and he shook his head.

"Don't. Best left alone when he's in that mood, take it from me."

Maiga considered following anyway, but Jaff had the experience here, had known Chervaz for years. And they'd all just had a salutary lesson hadn't they, about how experience is what counts. So she nodded and sat down again. A few moments of glum silence followed, and then Jaff finished off his coffee quickly.

"Okay, I have to go to work."

Wixa nodded. "Maiga, we've got a meeting, see if we can get that load of spare parts to take to Klesanraa station."

"Right." Grateful for the distraction, Maiga left with Wixa. She'd go and see Chervaz later, she thought. Make sure he was okay.

As they walked away from the coffee house, Wixa pulled out her Snapper, hearing a chirp from it. She read it and looked up at Maiga.

"The Trebuchet just arrived."

~o~

Bara strode ahead of her landing party. Back again to Hollow Jimmy. She always called it by that nickname. Some officers insisted on using the proper name Olojimi. Even tried to get their tongues around the Klaff pronunciation. Why bother? Humans called it Hollow Jimmy.

She came here so often now. Of course, her trading and - hah - salvage activities had become more successful lately. The thought made her laugh aloud as she walked. Her name was becoming legend. Feared. As it should be.

She liked to see the looks on the faces of the humans as she passed. Awe, curiosity, admiration. When she got deeper into the station, away from the docks where so many drifties worked, she saw other expressions on the faces. Resentment and yes, fear. She regretted that, but it was a necessary stage. Things would change later.

And she just loved to walk through the hustle and bustle of the station. The noise, the voices, the cooking smells that drifted from bars and cafés. She loved her ship, but sometimes she hated the quiet of it. The noises she could hear in the quiet. That scratching sound.

"We'll go to Dav's first," she told the landing party. Then she'd send Alex and Sev, the damn freak, to conclude the deals for the goods they had to sell. Meanwhile she'd see to the distribution of the free goods. She enjoyed that much more than negotiating business deals.

Yes. Let Alex do that, get him the hell out of her face, get away from that look he kept giving her. He could go and do the work and then do whatever he did with his pet freak boy. If the freak didn't cut that hair soon she'd do it for him, she swore it. If he didn't button his jacket up right, she would...

"Captain."

A man stopped in front of her and it took her a second to recall him. One of her watch commanders. He handed her a copy of the Chronicle. Across the front page, in big letters, she read the words, Mercy Dash. What the hell was a 'mercy dash'. She began to read.

The words drowned her senses. She could have been there and seen it all. Her doctors panicking. The old woman sweeping in to save the day. The whole story might as well be a commercial for Sheni and her precious clinic. Would there be a single patient at the free clinic now? Aside from those she ordered there? Perhaps not even them.

Disaster.

"Captain?"

She turned to look at Alex and realised she had stopped in the middle of the walkway between the docks and the marketplace, blocking the way. Though people seemed happy to skirt around her party. She glanced down at the paper again and skimmed the article, making a careful note of every name mentioned. Then she stuffed the paper into the pocket of her coat.

"You two," she said to her bodyguards. "With me. The rest of you, wait for me in Dav's." Her throat felt so tight, her words almost a growl.

"Where are you going to be, ma'am?" Alex asked.

"The free clinic."

Her coat tails flew out behind her as she walked, with the boys striding along behind her. Fear showed on almost all of the faces she passed now. Mothers pulled their children closer. Mothers. Children. Made her sick. Some fucking drifty gets herself knocked up, comes to squeeze her brat out in my clinic, and when it all goes wrong, I'm the one taking the blame.

The doors into the clinic stood open, but the waiting room held only a couple of wasted looking patients.

"Get out," Bara snarled at them, damn sure what they were here for. Well hell, there'd be plenty of drugs going spare. They fled. A moment later Lon and Anishk emerged from their consulting rooms. More fear. She could almost smell it from these two.

Bara pulled the paper from her pocket and read aloud one of the parts that especially irked her.

"'My colleagues did absolutely the right thing to ask for my advice. I was glad to help them.'"

"We... We didn't ask," Lon said, voice quiet, but protesting. "Someone called her and she showed up."

"It would have been worse if she hadn't," Anishk said. "We'd have lost both patients."

"Worse?" Bara said, voice still calm to her own surprise. "Your waiting room is empty. Meanwhile Sheni could double her prices and people would still go back to her rather than come here. Now explain to me, doctor, how the fuck it could possibly be worse!"

They both shrank back from the yell.

"You're supposed to be doctors aren't you? What the hell is the matter with you? Women have babies every damn day on this station. It's like a fucking nursery."

"The complications were severe," Anishk said and seemed to rally, holding her chin up now. Some of the old 'I'm a doctor, you may grovel before me' arrogance showed up.

Lon spoke, pleading. "Even Sheni said she hadn't dealt with such a difficult case in years. And, ma'am, I'm sorry, but neither of us have the experience of obstetrics, that's all. We're trauma specialists."

"Oh believe me, doctors, you'll be trauma specialists for sure if you don't fix this. You'll know everything there is to know about trauma."

Not enough fear now from Anishk. Some, but plenty of anger and even contempt too. This is bad. This is bad.

"Fix it how?" Anishk asked, not backing down. "After that newspaper story I can't see why anyone would come back to this clinic again."

Bara looked down at the paper in her hands, crumpled, torn, stained with the sweat from her hands now. My hands are sweating? That's what this has brought me to? The story. The damn newspaper story.

"You will think of something," Bara said. "You are meant to be the oh-so-brilliant young doctors." She turned away and marched from the room, her bodyguards following.

"Where now ma'am?" One of the bodyguards asked.

She gripped the Chronicle harder.

"The newspaper office."

~o~

As soon as the door closed behind Bara, Lon sank into one of the waiting room chairs and put his head in his hands. He could hear Anishk slamming around, but didn't want to look up at her.

He'd thought he would never again experience the fear he'd felt yesterday, at the moment Sheni first held the unmoving, silent, baby and Lon knew it must be dead. But she'd laid the boy on the bed, started CPR, and given him drugs. And the first weak cry brought Lon to tears he couldn't control.

So how could he be that scared again? He knew why. They almost lost two lives yesterday. Now his life and Anishk's were on the line. Bara was capable of anything. He saw it in her eyes. Normally he would diagnose mental illness with a checklist of symptoms, but sometimes it just yelled at you from their eyes and you knew. You'd have to decide what to classify it under at some point, but it all came down to the same thing. Barking at the moon, batshit fucking crazy.

"Lon. Look at me."

He looked up. Anishk stood in front of him with her jacket on and her doctor's bag in her hand.

"I'm going. Back to Sheni if she'll have me."

"Ani..." He shook his head. "Ani, you can't. Bara will kill you."

"She can try. But I won't go through anything like yesterday again. We should have called for Sheni ourselves. We let our fear of Bara interfere with our clinical judgement. We screwed up bad."

"I know."

"Come with me."

He wanted to, he really did. But he didn't have her courage. He knew he didn't dare.

"Someone has to keep this place going."

"For what? You think there'll be any patients?"

"There were a few this morning."

Anishk snorted. She put her case down, and then strode over to a desk with some printouts on it.

"These are the patients I've had this morning."

One by one, she held up the printouts before screwing them up and tossing them over her shoulder, with each one she said the same words over and over.

"Drug seeking. Drug seeking. Drug seeking. Oh, wait, this one was different. He also wanted to sell us a blood donation." She tossed that last balled up printout at Lon and he stood up as it bounced off his chest.

"Please, Ani."

"She threatened us! She stood there and threatened us with violence. Can't you see now what she is? She didn't set up this clinic for the sake of charity. It's part of her game, part of her war. This isn't a medical facility, it's a... a... military position. And I'm deserting."

She grabbed her case again and she turned to go.

"Ani, can't you see that she'll carry out that threat if you turn against her? Didn't you see that? That she's crazy."

"You know what I saw?" Anishk turned back to look at him for a moment. "I saw fear. Under the rage and the insanity, I saw terror of what she can't control. She doesn't know how to deal with what she can't control, so all she can do is kill it. And I'm not waiting around for her to kill us."

~o~

Chervaz stood up as Bara and her men rounded the top of the staircase. She looked terrible, her pale face gaunt, eyes sunken. Her moving hands caught his attention. Scraps of torn paper clutched in them, until she opened her hands and let the paper fall to the floor. A glance told him it was the remains of today's Chronicle.

"Mr Chervaz." Her voice was a hiss, through her teeth, fighting for control, for calm.

I'm going to die. The certainty came to him, as he looked at the two bodyguards behind her. They didn't look terrible, except in the sense that they induced terror. No, they looked healthy and strong and as if they were looking forward to doing a thorough job today.

"What can I do for you, Captain?" He kept his voice level, calm. It felt like facing a vicious animal. As soon as he showed fear, she'd go for his throat.

"I wanted to talk about the story in your paper, about what happened at the free clinic yesterday. I want to know why you would write such a biased story."

"I don't believe it's biased. I reported the facts. All of the quotes were accurate. If there are any factual errors, I'll be happy to print a correction. If there are additional facts that I'm not currently aware of, I'll report on those too."

"Do you think I'm a fool, Mr Chervaz?"

Fool wasn't a word he'd thought of in relation to her. Several others that he wouldn't say to her face, but not 'fool'.

"No, ma'am, I do not."

"Then why do you ask me to believe you are a neutral party in all this?"

All this? Is she standing here admitting to me that she is engineering conflict on the station? Does it matter, since I'll never get the chance to tell anyone?

"Captain, since you opened the free clinic, every edition of the Chronicle has included the opening times, the services available and a note that everyone is entitled to free treatment there." This seemed an odd way to beg for his life.

She sighed and some of the intensity dulled out of her eyes. She shook her head. "I'm sorry, Mr Chervaz. It's just that I feel so strongly that humans are getting a poor deal on this station. Your paper doesn't seem to reflect that."

"With respect, this poor deal you allege is your opinion."

"Not only mine, many people agree with me."

"I'd be happy to speak to anyone who has evidence of it."

"Perhaps they don't feel they can come to you. That you wouldn't give them a sympathetic hearing."

"I'd give them an objective hearing," Chervaz said.

"Ah, objectivity." She leaned against the back of a chair, hands tight on it.

Chervaz realised his own hands were gripping his desk, as if hanging on to a rock in a swirling river. If he let go of the desk, he wouldn't be able to keep himself from backing away towards the wall, like a coward. If he did die today, he could at least die on his feet.

"You're so proud of your objectivity," she said. "You think it's a virtue. Have you considered that it could be a vice? You're human, Mr Chervaz. You print your paper for the humans who live here. Don't you think it's time you and your paper were a little more pro-human?"

"Pro-human? Or pro-Bara?"

Oh nice move, poke the lioness with a stick. Serve him bloody well right, Jaff would say. He rushed on, trying to erase what he'd just said. But he doubted she'd forget.

"I'm pro-truth, Captain. I have a duty to the truth. If I let my reports be biased towards anyone then I am nothing but a mouthpiece."

She shook her head. "I didn't realise that you were quite so vain. The champion of truth? You print a news sheet that sells for pennies and has more commercials than news stories." She glanced back at the scraps of paper on the floor. "Pathetic. Meaningless. Tomorrow, people will be using your paper in the toilet."

Chervaz didn't answer this time. No point. Once you got to the insults, the conversation had lost any meaning. And she was only posturing anyway. If the Chronicle was so meaningless then she wouldn't be here. As for people wiping their backsides with it. Well so long as they read it today, Chervaz didn't care what they did with it tomorrow.

Perhaps she decided that she liked that as a good exit line. She turned away and strode to the top of the stairs. He sighed with relief thinking he had escaped death today after all, but then froze, when she stopped, and spoke to her bodyguards. Before she moved on down the stairs, Chervaz heard her quiet order to them.

"Make certain you break his hands."