Maiga had the cockpit to herself, Wixa back in the sleeping quarters. The ship was on automatic, but the chairs here in the cockpit were more comfortable then the ones in the living quarters. Anyway, it felt good to watch the stars. With the lights off and the consoles mostly dark, she could almost imagine herself looking up at a night sky from a planet, from Earth.

Over the last six months, she'd tried to think about Earth, and the billions of her fellow humans who had died. Somehow, it wouldn't sink in to her mind. She could think about her dead friends, and Ilyan, and mourn them, but she didn't know how to mourn for a whole world. Perhaps she had never understood loyalty the way she should have.

Anger too. She didn't seem to get that right either. All her anger was directed at those who had betrayed her and the people she loved. High Command. Tesla. Her fists clenched at the thought of them. But the Big Four? She feared them as a threat, but she had none of the thirst for revenge she saw in the eyes of so many other humans.

Had she ever been loyal to anyone but her unit? They taught you at school that you owed you loyalty to High Command. So what happened when High Command betrayed you? Who could you be loyal to then? When you had no family, no tribe, no country, no religion? All you had was your unit and your friends.

All gone.

She still avoided a certain part of the marketplace on Hollow Jimmy. The part near to the alleyway where Rin's body had been dumped. She had been there once though. Some discreet probing of the station's security force's computers had given her the details. The murder case was still open. When she knew the location of the byway where the body had been found, she'd gone there and... Well, she'd stood around feeling awkward and foolish for a while, and realised that his face had started to fade from her memory.

So she preferred to stay away now. Not because it felt painful to go there, but because it didn't. And that made her ashamed of herself.

Behind her, the door slid open, spilling light into the cockpit. Maiga glanced back to see Wixa outlined in the doorway, holding a couple of steaming mugs. More coffee.

"I just had the strangest dream."

"Yeah?" Polite, but not encouraging. Nevertheless, Wixa sat down and handed Maiga a mug, which turned out to be tea and not coffee.

"It's sitting on top off all those crates of coffee beans. I can smell them through the air vents."

"No you can't. They're sealed in airtight crates."

"I swear, I can smell them. That's what made me have my dream."

"So, in the dream," Wixa said. "I'm swimming in a lake. It's a huge lake, I mean almost as far as the eye can see. But it wasn't water. You know what it was?"

"Amaze me."

"Coffee! A huge lake of coffee!"

"Imagine my surprise."

Wixa laughed. "Yeah, who'd have thought it? Me, dreaming about coffee. Anyway, I'm swimming in this lake and trying to get to the shore, but I start to get really tired and frightened that I'm going to drown."

"What a way to go," Maiga rolled her eyes.

"Hey, as much as I like my coffee I prefer not to inhale it. So I'm having trouble keeping my head out of the water - coffee - and it keeps getting in my mouth, and it's really good coffee, so I started drinking it."

"Oh, don't tell me, you escaped by drinking the entire lake of coffee?" Maiga looked down at her mug. "No wonder we're drinking tea."

"No!" Wixa protested. "That would be silly! And you know, I'm only one small woman. If I'd kept drinking all that coffee I'd soon be swimming in something much less pleasant, if you know what I mean."

Maiga sighed. She was going to get the whole dream. She couldn't escape, could she? Thirty-nine more hours on this ship before they got back to the station.

"Go on then, what happened next?"

"Well, because I was drinking the coffee I started getting really buzzed, and I started swimming, even though it was a really long way to the shore. I just kept drinking and swimming and swimming and drinking, until at last I climbed up onto dry land."

"Which was made of chocolate?"

Wixa laughed. "No. I wish. No, I stood there and looked out across this lake, all the miles and miles of coffee, almost as far as the eye could see. And you know what I did then?"

"I can't imagine."

"Jumped back in and started swimming to the other side, of course."

~o~

"How much longer?"

"Stand by."

Maiga sat back, sighing. They'd been stuck out here almost an hour waiting for traffic control to allocate them a berth and give them permission to dock. Wixa sat beside her in the cockpit and tapped away at the control panel, making good use of the time, setting up deals.

"I've got buyers for forty seven of the crates. The last thirteen we'll easily offload to the mobile vendors."

Well at least she had been making good use of the time.

"We'll need some help unloading and distributing the crates."

"Easy. There's lots of boys standing around idle looking for some casual work. Won't cost us more than a few credits."

"You've thought this through," Maiga said, impressed by Wixa's attention to detail.

"Of course. That's what you have to do, because it's unexpected expenses that eat into profit margins."

"Maybe you should do this more often. I mean get a ship and go into business properly. You seem to have a knack for it."

Wixa nodded her face quite serious. "I've been a trader for years, really. It's just that what I used to trade in was information. Hollow Jimmy is information central, and I have a knack for picking it up."

She doesn't just mean gossip in bars, Maiga thought, thinking of the way she'd just been working that console, like a musical instrument. She was probably an ex-intelligence operative, a technical specialist. Maiga was a good tech herself, had become an even better one, by necessity while on the run. She could spot a colleague.

"Right now information about supplies is some of the most valuable information there is," Wixa went on. "I could just sell that information I suppose." She shrugged as she spoke, sounding as if that bored her. Then she smiled, a sly look. "And why buy a ship, when this is a perfectly good one?"

"Wixa..." Damn, she felt tempted, she really did. A few more trips like this one and her capital could grow to a really nice sum. Right now, once she bought her supplies she'd have very little cash left. And if the "Committee" fleet was as far away as the rumours said, she'd need to refuel more times than she'd planned.

And was the trip even necessary? She'd said it herself; the Committee had to come to Hollow Jimmy in the end. Why go looking for them? Why not just wait here for them to arrive? Of course her other reasons for leaving hadn't changed, more people arriving all the time, her fear of being recognised.

Some people blamed Ilyan for what happened. If they knew who Maiga was, her association with him... Even worse, some people almost worshipped him, called him The Prophet. The latter could make her life just as tricky as the former. She wasn't ashamed of her involvement with Ilyan and she certainly didn't hold him responsible for the way things played out. But she didn't want to be reminded about it every day. She just wanted to be left alone.

Of course, if she did become a trader, she'd be off the station a lot, moving around, so the chances of someone on the station recognising her grew smaller. She didn't necessarily have to leave permanently. She just had to leave often.

"Courier Friss, permission to dock, berth four one zero."

Maiga smiled at the voice of the traffic controller. She turned back to look at Wixa, who still watched her, speculatively, waiting for an answer.

"I'll think about it."

~o~

She had plenty of time to think about it as they supervised the deliveries of the crates to the various businesses. It took several hours to get them all distributed, with four strong young men hired from the groups that hung out in the market place, waiting for casual work.

The last delivery was to Dav's bar, where Wixa paid off the four men and bought them all a round of drinks. She looked as if she'd like to join them, and looking around at the mixed clientele of humans and aliens, so close to the docks, Maiga understood. This place had to be gossip central. But it was also noise central and not Maiga's scene at all. Chullan's coffee house suited her better.

Seeing Maiga's reluctance Wixa said goodnight to their temporary workers and they left the bar.

"Come on, we'll have a cup of coffee somewhere quiet."

Somewhere quiet turned out to be Wixa's own quarters. They were twice the size of Maiga's own, and more obviously a permanent home, full of decoration and ornaments, with colourful throws on the furniture, rugs on the floor, and pictures on the wall. The living room looked comfortable and, to Maiga's mind, a mess that could do with being tidied up with a flamethrower.

"Take a seat." Wixa waved Maiga to a chair. "Oh hang on," she said when Maiga paused, looking down surprised, at a curled up cat on the chair. Its sleek black fur caught the light as it breathed.

"You have a cat? Who took care of it while you were away?"

Wixa just grinned and lifted the cat up. It hung limp in her hands and a wire trailed from its side. She pulled the wire out and ran her hand over a spot between the cat's front legs. At once, it started to squirm in her hands and she put it down on the chair. It jumped onto the floor and began to nose around Maiga's feet.

"You have a robot cat." Maiga winced. "I can't believe I just said that."

"They're quite popular on the station." Wixa bent down to tickle the cat behind the ears, making it purr. Maiga sat down, shaking her head. She had seen cats around in the accommodation blocks, but it hadn't occurred to her that some of them might not be real.

"His name's Glyph," Wixa picked Glyph up and scratched him - it, Maiga thought, it - under the chin. "Beautiful isn't he?"

"A perfect replica." And what the hell is the point of it?

"Right. Coffee." Wixa put the cat down to roam the floor and started to bustle around the kitchen area.

Maiga wandered over and sat at one of the tall stools at a long bench. Glyph followed her and jumped onto the second stool. Maiga ignored an urge to pet it. What would be the point? A moment later Wixa placed two cups on the bench.

"You know," Wixa said. "There's so much more than coffee that people are willing to pay for. Tea, chocolate, whisky, fancy soap, all the little luxuries of life. Other things too, Dr Sheni's clinic needs medical supplies."

Maiga frowned at her and Wixa back-pedalled. "Medical supplies we'd sell at cost of course. Um, then there's one thing we can always sell. Chickens."

"Chickens? What? Frozen ones?"

"No," Wixa laughed. "Frozen chickens don't lay eggs."

Good point. A fresh egg could be an unspeakable luxury. How many chickens were out there among the human survivors? On the other hand, live animals on the ship sounded like a recipe for disaster.

"I can track goods down and negotiate prices. I have the contacts on the station to sell the goods here. You have a ship and can handle security. You said you'd think about it. Have you decided yet?"

Maiga had. She would stay. For now.

"I don't make any promises, Wixa. I was... Well I wasn't sure I was going to stay, thought I might move on. But for now, I'm staying."

Wixa grinned and held out her hand for a shake. "Of course you are! We'll make a lifer of you yet."

After they shook hands, Wixa raised her coffee cup and smiled. "Partners."

Maiga echoed the gesture and the words.

"Partners."

Glyph began to purr.

~o~

Maiga left Wixa's quarters after an hour or so, while they set up their next trading job. After seeing her out, Wixa made sure the door was locked, and then she walked into her tiny office, through a door from the living room. Unlike the rest of her quarters, this room was neat, quite bare.

A large sloping desk-like computer terminal took up most of one side of the room. Screens of data illuminated various parts of the flat panel. This was the heart of Wixa's world. Of course, she picked up a lot of word of mouth gossip, she had a talent for that, her superiors had always said. But probing computers was where she got the truly important information.

Like the information about Tesla that she'd sold to Jadeth.

Maiga's face had been part of that information. One of Ilyan's followers, believed to be his lover. And supposedly killed with the rest of them. So the day Wixa had seen her walking through a corridor on the station, large as life, had been like seeing a ghost.

Nothing in the information she'd found had even hinted that Maiga was still alive. Trying to find something to explain it had driven Wixa almost crazy. And she never had found out. The information had probably been buried deep in some High Command database back on Earth, destroyed now.

Well maybe one day Wixa would be able to ask her.

She touched a panel on screen. "Are you there?"

"Where else?" A man's voice came from speakers in the wall above the computer panel.

"She's staying."

"That's good news." The voice sounded satisfied, echoing Wixa's own tone.

"You're sure about her?" Some doubt came into the voice then.

"She's the one?"

"I'm sure."

"I had great hopes of the newspaper man."

Wixa shook her head, although the man speaking couldn't see her. Well probably he couldn't. He'd better not be able to. She'd warned him before.

"He's a good man, and I think he'll be important, but he doesn't have what it takes. He doesn't, well, he doesn't have the balls."

"And she does?"

"Yes. I think so."

The man chuckled. "Things have changed since I was topside."

Wixa rolled her eyes. "We have this thing up here called metaphor."

"Anything else to report?"

"Oh, I picked up some gossip." She sat down now in the comfortable chair in front of the panel. Glyph jumped up into her lap and curled up. She stroked him and he purred. Purrs too easily, she thought, and decided to tweak his programming when she had a moment. Cats should be more standoffish.

"Right, first of course the most important thing, Bara and the Trebuchet."