She was short, slight, neatly made, hovering about early middle age with the help of ananile drugs. She wore her tan hair trimmed close to her head so she could run a comb through it and forget it; the wind was teasing it, twisting it into a ragged halo about her face, angering her though she wouldn’t permit her annoyance to show except in the slight deepening of the shallow crows’-feet at the corners of her eyes, large eyes, gentian blue, cold eyes in a face adept at concealing what went on behind it.

After twenty minutes of brisk walking, she reached the edge of the field and stepped onto Telffer’s StarStreet.

StarStreet/Prin Daruze/Telffer had a fuel dump, a shipsupply store that from the look of it operated by appointment only, a short stretch of pavement and a very tall fence. Adelaar angled toward the Gate and stopped before a wooden kiosk painted black with a battered plastic window so scratched by windborne grit it had lost any transparency it had ever had. The Gate was shut, there were eyes and heat sensors soldered to the fencewire, melters perched on swivelposts atop the wire… She looked from them to the kiosk. “T’k t’k, sweet sweet.”

She located the outside palmer, a dullmetal oval freckled with old black paint, slapped her hand against it. A wall section shuddered, squealed, pleated itself until there was an opening wide enough for her to edge through. Tugging the case inside with her, she crossed to the heavyduty comset screwed onto the back wall and inspected it as the door squealed shut behind her, closing her in with an unpleasant smell, a mix of ancient sweat, dead moss and dryrot. Fungus grew in scaly patches on the greasy metal of the comset; there was an ugly olive-ocher film on the com’s thumbglass.

She touched the glass, her face rigid with distaste, rubbed her thumb repeatedly along her side as she watched a hold-pattern shiver over the plate. A minute passed. She glanced at the ringchron on her left hand, glanced again. Again. “If I was paying you, you’d be out on your ass yesterday.”