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But…”
    “That’s why I told you. I knew you would be interested.” Strem looked again at the setting sun, the sharp edge of the ocean cutting it in half, a quarter, an eighth, before swallowing it all together. “Perfect,” he whispered, nodding to himself as artificial light warmed up overhead.
    “Have you suddenly become sentimental about sunsets or what?” Eric asked.
    Strem shook himself, as he would from a nap, and stepped away from the window, grabbing the top of Eric’s arm and half pulling him down the corridor toward the elevators. The passionate couple had left and for a moment they were alone. Strem’s mood, or whatever it had been, had passed. “Do you still want to rent a mini-sub and see if we can ram some sharks?”
    That was why they had originally decided to meet in Baja. “Sure. But you didn’t answer my question.”
    Strem laughed. “The only thing I feel sentimental about right now is the five-percent commission I’m trying to squeeze out of my uncle for delivering the cargo.”
    Eric figured he could question him further at another time. “You’ll be lucky if you get one percent.”
    “I’ll take it,” Strem agreed, hurrying him along at his usual frantic pace. “Hey, I just thought of someone you can ask on this trip. Dentenia Soulete – she’d be perfect. She’s not that bright, but she knows how to answer the phone and say yes. Here’s what you’ll do…”
    Strem proceeded to bless him with a dozen lines that were guaranteed to stimulate Dentenia’s lust for danger, space travel, and witty young men. Eric only half listened. He hardly knew Dentenia – though she had a superb body and he wouldn’t have minded knowing her intimately – and couldn’t imagine calling her. He was thinking of novas, exploding stars that saturated space with incalculable torrents of energy. The Andromeda Sector was not in the direction of Tau Ceti and Strem’s commission. It was a shame in a way that they wouldn’t have time to swing over for a quick peek. Of course that was for the best. God only knew what emissions from a nearby nova could do to their equipment.
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    The dawn was sudden and dazzling as they ploughed out of the Earth’s shadow into the glare of the sun five hundred miles above the cloudless Sahara. Eric immediately snapped down his visor, but not before he began to see stars that weren’t there.
    They were in a ferry halfway between Space Station One and Excalibur , floating away from the massive pinwheel that oversaw all travel within the solar system to the freighter that housed Strem and his girlfriend. The ferry was homed onto a directional beacon aboard Excalibur and would arrive at the freighter’s bay doors without human assistance. Nevertheless, Sammy Balan was keeping a close eye on their approach, which was reassuring to Eric.
    Sammy was as cautious as he was intelligent. Because he was so quiet, kids at school often mistook him as cold, and it was true that his mind seemed to more closely parallel the working of a machine than a person.
    Sammy’s attention to detail, however, did not apply to his personal appearance. When he dressed in the morning, it was as though he put on the first thing his hand touched and didn’t always check to see if it was a viable piece of clothing. Pale and underweight, his short stature was not helped by a chronic slouch. His one physical virtue was his long wavy brown hair, which managed to maintain a lustrous sheen despite infrequent washings. Yet he had mentioned cutting it all off. Sammy didn’t care what he looked like.
    “What do you think the chances are that we will get away with this?” Eric asked. They were sitting before rows of colored buttons and a single dark blue screen traced with shifting speed and distance graphs. A wide window curling back from the tip of the hull provided them with the breathtaking view of the Middle East. Because the ferry was used only for short