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Bili said. “Not much on the scopes, either.”
    Sarah did find one thing on the scopes however, a small ship of unknown configuration. It was coming in fast from the asteroid belts, approaching Garm from behind Gopus. She shrugged mentally; probably just another smuggler like herself, coming in to make a rendezvous with a freighter headed down to Garm. She pressed her fingers against her temples, feeling the sickness of despair gnawing at her guts. Every time she looked at Bili’s arm now, she wanted to retch.

    * * *

    Back in the galley, Bili poked his withered-looking new arm through the tough plastic again. It looked like a bunch of rotting sausages strung along a white plastic pipe, which was about what it was. He looked at the swirling brown liquids, circulating through the tiny pump and filter with a soft gurgling sound. He bet it stank in there. He bet it stank real bad.
    Turning back to his project, he found the glue tube and began to glue the dark little pebble-shaped asteroids into place.

Six

    Bili was right next to Sarah, strapped into his crash-seat and eating a bluish hork-apple. “We’re going to meet the freighter now, Bili. Time to close your visor and pressurize your suit.”
    “Right, Mom.”
    Bili took two more quick bites of his apple and tossed the rest into a zip-bag to keep it fresh and anchored until later. Snapping his helmet visor down, he struggled with the wrist controls for a moment, finally getting the air flowing. It was hard for him to use the wrist controls on the suit since his right arm was rammed into the suit’s tight sleeve, still in the heal-bag and still useless. Unfortunately, the controls were located on his left wrist. The only way he could work them was to push them against the edge of his belt buckle, half the time nudging the wrong button. He looked sidelong at his mother, making sure that she had not noticed that he had done things out of sequence. He was supposed to get the air pump working first, people had suffocated that way in the past, but he liked to think he was saving a little oxygen by closing the visor first. Space on a shoestring budget could be a scary place; you never knew when you might need that last little gasp of air.
    Fortunately, his mother was far too preoccupied with making her rendezvous on time and without incident to notice what he was doing. “See it? The Yeti is right there above Garm’s crescent.”
    Bili squinted and thought he could make out a tiny speck, gray-white, hanging above the curved sickle-like shape of Garm below. “Yup.”
    “Hang on now, we’re coming in hot, and we’ll have to brake hard for just a few seconds when we get in too close for anyone to tell down on the dirt that it wasn’t just an attitude jet from the Yeti .”
    To the great, and preplanned, fortune of Sarah and all the smugglers in the system, the orbital traffic radar net was regularly sabotaged and operated improperly. This created large holes in the planet’s coverage and left many regions only partially covered. Cashing huge checks weekly, the communications staff at the spaceport routinely reported major malfunctions as calibration and adjustment , blaming equipment damage too serious to ignore on Grunstein’s harsh weather.
    All this kept operations like Sarah’s running night and day, and kept a long receiving line of greased officials fat and happy.
    “What’s that Mom?” asked Bili, seeing a new contact on the sensors, closing in fast on a converging angle.
    “I—” said Sarah, focusing a sensor array and setting it to track the contact. “It’s that ship that’s been following us.”
    Bili sat back, his eyes wide. He didn’t like this at all. Things were supposed to go exactly as planned when you were in space. They had to otherwise you could end up dead, just as his father had. Or armless , his mind countered.
    “What ship?”
    “It must be another smuggler, from farther out. Maybe he’s running in some illegal fissionables from