Blue Bloods

Grace looked across the bay. To get to the consulate or the airport, she needed to cross half of Hong Kong. To do that required taking a taxi, in which case she would still be stuck in traffic when Phil realized her intentions and moved to intercept her. The other possibility, one she knew Phil wouldn’t think of, was the bay. Most Westerners thought of the water taxis as a tourist gimmick, but deep inside Grace wasn’t really a Westerner.

Then again, she was going home to New York City, so maybe she was.

She looked around the bay, found one that looked good, and waved her hand to get his attention. It didn’t work. Maybe he thought she’d waved at someone else. Maybe… He looked away. She sighed. She was tall for her family, mostly because she’d moved to the US before her final growth spurt. The high protein diet in the states had plenty of problems, but it made people tall. Tall for their families, at least. Grace was at least four inches taller than her mother, nearly as tall as her father.

She still only stood four feet nine inches tall in stockinged feet.

She sighed again, lifted two fingers to her mouth, and ignoring the warnings her sense of decorum gave her, whistled.

Half the street turned to look for the source of the high, piercing, perfect note. The water taxi driver looked straight at her. When she made eye contact and waved, he waved back.

At least something had gone right today.

***

Nothing had gone right today. First her best bust in a year turned out to be an undercover narcotics guy. Then the narcotics guy tried to keep his cover by resisting arrest after insulting her. That would have been bad enough, but the narcotics guy turned out to be a nephew of Somebody. Then she got in a fight with her own bathroom and lost. Finally, when she got to the party, trying to relax, Jesse found her.

Jesse was a way better friend than Drew deserved, really; kind, caring, considerate. Without question, an absolute gem. But right now, Drew wanted something with alcohol to drink, someone with a bad attitude to hit, and somebody with low standards to hook up with. Preferably somebody without a lawyer. The fight, not the hook up. Then again, she might need that for the hook up too, given how beat she looked.

She took another glance in the ladies’ room mirror. Her eyes had luggage for a family of four. Her hair, never the best in the world, hung ragged and looked like she’d permed it too many times. Her nose had been set right away, which was the only thing that went right about the whole fight. Drew was pretty sure this time would correct most of the damage from the time she broke it sparring in the Academy. She smiled. Her teeth were all good. Despite a history of brawling, she’d not lost any.

Drew leaned on the bathroom sink and looked at herself in the mirror again. A heartfelt sigh forced its way out of her not quite flat chest. B cups were nothing to sneeze at. If she could fill them, she might even have a passable body. She looked down at the shirt she’d borrowed from Jesse. It left her stomach bare, but that wasn’t really a problem. She was in good shape; sparring every other day in the police gym ensured that. She wasn’t fat. She wasn’t actually ugly. She wasn’t a lot of things.

She wasn’t beautiful, even made up. She wasn’t a knockout, even dressed up. She wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, especially when something got her blood up.

Drew stopped herself. She promised Jesse she’d try to look on the bright side.

“I’ve got good teeth. I’ve got… passable birthing hips? I’ve got hair that won’t snap or pull out.”

She knew that. Enough people tried it. She looked one more time at the makeup kit, then back at her face. A little more foundation made her baggage a little less noticeable. She looked down at the loaner jeans from Jesse’s emergency stash. There was a little too much room in the butt, and a little too much Drew in the thighs, but they fit ok. They also didn’t show the myriad cuts and scratches from the bathroom fight, or the bruises from the undercover narc fight.

“Hey, Drew? You coming out, or do we need to send in a search party?” Jesse’s voice through the door shook Drew out of her introspection, if not out of her funk.

“Yeah, I’m coming. Just putting the stuff away.” She dropped Jesse’s stuff and her own back into the backpack Jesse had tossed to her. Once everything was in and the zipper closed, she wandered out into the hallway. To one side of the door, Jesse leaned against the wall, texting someone on her phone.

“Did you even try to put your hair up?” Jesse’s frown was the epitome of pixie cute.

“Yeah. The Hair laughs at your puny ponytail ties.” Her hair might be ragged and look awful, but it was durable and mighty. Yeah, that brought the guys running.

“Hold still, and gimme that.” Jesse spun her around and grabbed the backpack back. A few moments later, she felt Jesse playing with her hair. She stifled a sigh. It was useless, but try telling Jesse that. A moment later, she squeaked. She hated the sounds she made when she was in pain.

“What?” Jesse seemed honestly confused.

Drew didn’t want to upset her, but she wasn’t at her best as it was, and she didn’t deal with pain well. “That hurts!”

Sympathy was, apparently, in short supply. “Oh, you big baby. Hold still just a second.” One more yank of her hair, and Jesse backed away. “OK, that looks suitably exotic. Turn around.”

Drew turned around. Jesse was not to be resisted when on a mission. By her tone, she was on one now, and it had to do with Drew’s ‘party look’. Drew held still while Jesse did something with her makeup kit. Two endless minutes later, she backed away. Jesse's mouth smiled, but her eyes didn’t. Her voice agreed with her mouth, but Jesse always had good voice control. Drew supposed she got it from that stint doing phone support. “You look great, Drew!”

“Yeah. Lemme look.” She walked over to one of the decorative mirrors in the hall. Jesse had done a bang-up job. Drew had deliberately asymmetric eye shadow, some kind of oriental bun with sticks in, and a little design high up on one cheek. It even made her look like she had cheekbones, sorta.

“Thanks, Jesse.”

“Y’know, Drew, if you smiled the way you used to back in our freshman year, you’d look pretty good.”

Drew pulled her lips back in a mockery of a smile. Her voice came out appropriately strained. “How’s this?”

“Oh, can it. Let’s get up to the roof.”

“You got it.”

***

“Coming up on flip over.” Walker strained to keep his voice coherent. He had taken more g’s than this before, but not for this long. This many didn’t pose an inherent danger, and didn’t exactly hurt, but they caused incredible discomfort. He worried a little about the two injured crew members, but only a little. If he didn’t get them out of the way of the meteor, they’d die anyway.

Johnson didn’t respond. Walker killed the engines, rolled the shuttle through the flip with attitude thrusters, and then fired up the engines again. That done, he prodded his only conscious crew member again. “You still with me, Johnson?”

After a few moments, Johnson’s voice sounded over the intercom. “Yeah. Sorry, I waved, but I guess you didn’t see it.”

Walker counted to five before answering. “I’m watching too many things to look back, Johnson. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m just rattled, I guess. Sorry.” He did sound contrite, at least.

Walker tried to be reassuring. “Don’t worry about it. We’ve got another half hour until we’re within unaided visual range of the space station. Another hour until we make zero relative rendezvous. Do you think you can get up and get us a visual? I know you haven’t had as much high g time as I have.”

Johnson’s voice was strained, but he showed willing. “Yeah. I’ll give it a shot, at least. I don’t know if I can walk it or not, but I can crawl my way there if I have to. How soon until we’re out of the path of the meteor?”

Walker heard the tension in Johnson’s voice when he asked the question. “Assuming the projected path is correct, we’re out of it already.”

Johnson heard the qualifier. Paranoid, after all. “But?”

Walker decided to see if paranoia could be useful. “You know the problem I’m having?”

Johnson’s voice was speculative, but not really uncertain. “Yeah, I think so. The astronomers who plotted the course of the thing also said it had no debris cloud.”

Walker pushed. “What does that say to you?”

“Couple things might be true. Simplest is incompetence. The astro boys messed up somehow, and there was a debris cloud that they just plain missed.”

“All of them?”

“Y’know, Walker, I’m not sure I like you playing Devil’s advocate like that. Still, you’re right. This thing is the biggest single astronomical event that humans have experienced since manned spaceflight became a reality. So many astronomers looked at it with so many devices, you think one of them would have seen the debris cloud.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Well, either the thing broke up very recently, maybe due to proximity to the sun, or…”

Walker heard the doubt in Johnson’s voice. He understood the reason but wanted to hear it from someone else. “Or?”

“Or that thing shot us.”