kept her mouth shut, but Jack saw the expression on her face, and once they were safely out on the tarmac he started to laugh. “What we like about our ’port is its informal efficiency,” he said breezily. “As long as you have dough, all things are possible.”
Eddie cocked a silver eyebrow at Jack. “I thought you were without funds, friend Flash.”
Jack grinned. “I couldn’t let Adrian take my emergency walking-around money, now could I, Eddie? Besides which, I have a certain image to keep up. I’d hate for people to start thinking I was flush instead of Flash, right?”
Thanks to the monsoon, the air smelled fresh and clean as they made their way to the rockets, which were the only things so far that looked exactly as Rachel had thought they would—sleek, streamlined white torpedoes with needle noses pointed straight up at the featureless gray sky. To reach them they had to detour around several puddles that were like miniature ponds, complete with live fish if the ripples were anything to go by. At least, Rachel hoped they were fish—Jack silently took her elbow with one hand and Katie’s with his other and steered them away from the instant bodies of water.
“Where’s the ticket counter?” Katie asked.
“Who needs a ticket counter? Most of these ships are charters, owned by their pilots. You pay in cash when you board,” Jack said.
“Which is convenient,” Eddie said, motioning with his head toward the terminal, “for a quick getaway.”
Jack glanced back, then tightened his grip on the Earth girls’ elbows and started walking faster and faster until Rachel’s feet barely touched the ground. Not looking back to see who or what was after them was almost as hard as the physical effort of running. She panted, but Katie seemed untroubled and Anya and Eddie kept pace easily. That’s what I get, coming from a family of professors and rabbis, she thought ruefully. At least the nearest rocket was no more than a few yards away—but suddenly Jack swerved off to the left, heading for another spacecraft much further away. Eddie asked the question Rachel didn’t have breath for.
“I owe that guy money,” Jack snapped.
“You ever think,” Eddie gasped, “that it might make sense to pay at least some of your debts, some of the time?”
A searing beam of heat struck Rachel’s arm. It was like a miniature of the lightning bolt that had welcomed her to Aphrodite Port, and she yelped in pain but found reserves of strength she didn’t know she had, speeding ahead of everybody to the metal staircase of the rocket Jack seemed to be steering them toward. The air was suddenly full of sizzling and a sharp ozone tang.
♂
Rachel came to with a gasp and tried to push that fat pig Sonya off her chest. But her little sister Shoshie was holding her hands down. Or anyway, something was crushing her chest and something was pinning her arms to the bed. Even her eyeballs felt like they were being squeezed. She tried to scream but it came out sounding sort of flattened. G-forces, her mind belatedly informed her. The rocket is taking off, so I weigh several times what I should thanks to all that force pressing down on me. It was elementary, anyone who read sci-fi knew about g-forces, but it didn’t stop her from panicking. “Katie?” she called hoarsely. “Jack? Anya?”
“Ain’t this beast!” Katie called back happily. “We’re going up into space, just like you wrote about in your stories, Rachel!”
“Yeah. Beast,” Rachel muttered. The pressure on her chest gradually decreased, and soon she was able to sit up. She was in a berth in a cramped room with white metal walls and foam padding distributed at corners and edges. Katie was in the berth above her, Anya in the berth opposite, with Jack underneath her. Rachel looked for a porthole, then felt foolish. This wasn’t some little ferryboat like the one she and her parents had taken in Danzig. No, this was a real honest-to-God spaceship. Outside the hull was hard radiation and hard vacuum. Nothing to mess with.
Not surprisingly, Jack was in his element. He stood up, stretched and grinned at the girls. “Welcome aboard! You might as well make yourselves comfortable, it’s a three-week run out to Ganymede. Anya’s an old hand at this, but you two landlubbers should know that you’re going to be weightless shortly. That won’t last long, though—the grav will come back as the spaceship starts to accelerate outwards.”
“You should probably stay put until we’re on our way,” Anya said with a sympathetic glance at Katie and Rachel. “A lot of people get spacesick. Plus, moving around in zero-gee takes practice, and you don’t want to get bruised.”
“Wonderful,” muttered Rachel. She already felt queasy, but the burning itch on her left arm distracted her. A crude bandage covered her arm.
Anya came over to sit beside her. “I have a paste in my emergency bag that will ease the pain and prevent infection,” she said in Marpolski, producing a tiny bottle from a pouch concealed in her waistband. “Let me have a look.” She gently peeled back the strip of gauze covering Rachel’s forearm.
Rachel muffled a cry. She wouldn’t show pain or fear in front of the princess. An angry red patch of skin the size of her palm was surrounded by a long narrow oval of charred flesh, oozing blood. Rachel’s head spun.
“That’s a nasty flash burn you’ve got there, Rachel,” Jack said quietly.
Startled, she nearly hit her head on the bottom of Katie’s berth. His tone reminded her of the pediatrician her parents used to take her to before the war, a kindly balding man with bifocals named Max Kantorowicz. It was so unlike Jack’s usual jauntiness that Rachel peered up at him in confusion.
“Mind if I help Anya fix you up?” he asked, and she could only nod, turning away while they clucked and murmured over her wound, swabbed it with something sharp-smelling that instantly dulled the pain, and then applied a professional-looking bandage. “There you go,” said Jack, ruffling her hair as unselfconsciously as if she was a girl of five and not fifteen. “You’re a real veteran now, with the scars to prove it.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said in a small voice.
“Don’t mention it,” Jack said. “Now, the next thing we need to do is figure out where to find some decent clothes for you and Katie. You can’t go running around dressed in costumes like that.”
“Costumes?” Look who’s talking, when Anya was wearing that ridiculous toga! The Martian princess had changed into more sensible traveling wear, slacks and a nondescript blouse, though of course she looked like a million zlotys in it.
Jack ran, or rather swam, out the door of the compartment, motioning them to stay put as he sailed off. Rachel tried to follow him and floated away from her berth, moving as if surfacing through shallow water. She swallowed a brief surge of panic, reminded herself that she was not a bad swimmer, at least in water, and stretched her arms out to push off the ceiling. Bouncing off at an angle she found she had gained momentum, and ducked to avoid hitting her head on Katie’s berth. This motion in turn sent her caroming off the wall, and she flailed around helplessly until Anya caught her from behind in a bear hug and eased her gently back onto her bunk.
“Jack can be difficult, but he does know what he’s doing in space,” she said. Rachel said nothing, sitting with her hands on her thighs and staring at her knees. Bony knees, clearly visible through the threadbare skirt she had worn to bed two hundred years ago.
Anya looked at Rachel intently, then took hold of her chin so that she was forced to look into the princess’s eyes. “It’s nothing, Rachel,” the princess said. “Everybody makes mistakes like that when they’re new out in space. You’ve hardly ever been in space before, am I right?”
“I don’t know anything about space, but it reminds me of my first time on horseback,” Katie chimed in from her berth, from which she’d had the good sense not to move. “Daddy put me on the gentlest pony we had, and I darn near broke my neck.”
“And what about you, Anya?” Rachel whispered in Polish. Or was it Marpolski? “When was the last time you made a mistake, ever?” The jade eyes stared into