Although Kurj had made no stipulations about how I was to arrive, it was obvious he wanted a low-key approach. Why? What was he up to? We landed far from any terminal at the starport. The passengers all gathered in the cubicle some generous person had dubbed the ship’s lounge, a chamber with three chairs and a table bolted to what served as the deck in a gravity field. Glancing out a porthole, I saw a flybus approaching from the distant terminal, speeding on its cushion of air like a black and silver bullet. “Prepare to disembark,” the steward said over the com, his pleasant tone a marked contrast to the clipped computer voices on the military transports I usually took to Diesha. We queued up at the airlock and the steward appeared, a young man in a blue uniform. When he opened the batch, fresh air flooded the ship, a relief after our days of canned air during the flight. The flybus pulled alongside the ship. As it rose to the airlock, an officer came to stand in its open doorway, a woman in the dusky red uniform of the military police.
