Gateway To Xanadu by Sharon Green

grinned at my possessiveness. “Those cover I.D.’s I gave you won’t let you carry weapons on you down to Xanadu, Valdon, so Diana will put that one away with its mate in a place in her luggage where it won’t be found.
    If you’ve got anything that will raise eyebrows in a customs check, you’d better let her put it in with the rest.”
    “I didn’t bring any weapons with me,” Val said. It wasn’t hard to see he was. telling the truth-not to mention the fact that I’d checked his belongings during the trip. Val hadn’t come to the. Federation as a peace emissary, he’d come to work with a Special Agent; making the trip unarmed just about shouted how good he thought he was.
    “I don’t know about you, but I feel a good deal safer over that,” I said to Ringer, only glancing at Val. “If you’d seen him using a sword on Tildor, you would not be very anxious to have him handling any other weapons.”
    “She means I didn’t go around trying to skewer everyone in reach, unlike some people I could mention,”
    Val came back, dryly. “If we can’t carry weapons openly down to Xanadu, why wasn’t that one left with its twin? Why did you have to bring it along and give it to her now?”
    “They’re not fussy enough on this Station to give her a hard time over it,” Ringer answered with a shrug, clearly unwilling to go into details about the various usages a Special Agent put a knife to. “I knew she wouldn’t care to wait until she could get to her luggage, so I brought one along for her. She always claims she feels naked without a knife.”
    “You spoil her like that and then complain when she gives you a hard time?” Val asked, still enough amused to cause Ringer to stiffen very slightly. “If there’s something she really wants, make her behave herself before she gets it, otherwise don’t let her have it. She might not like it, but she’s bright enough to learn to go along with it if she has to. It should save you some headaches.”
    “That doesn’t apply to the knife, but you may be right,” Ringer said with something of a nod, letting the stiffness disappear as he turned his head to look at me. “Why don’t you try making her behave herself during this assignment, and then we can talk about it. Also let me know if you figure out a way of keeping her from something she really wants; I haven’t been able to come up with an answer to that one in nine years of trying.”
    The look in his eyes was no more than one percent wistful as he watched me stand up to fit my knife sheath into the slot in the right side of my ship’s suit, a place that put the hilt handily close to my palm.
    The slot was meant for a tool a lot more innocuous than a knife and was almost too narrow to take the sheath, but a moderate amount of forcing did the job and let the knife slide clear of its covering without the sheath coming with it. No one would bother me about carrying a knife on a Station that orbited a raw, young world like Faraway, and that was probably a very good thing. Val’s comment had annoyed me, and the only thing that had kept me from telling him what to do with himself had been the fact that I usually made it a point not to start fights when I felt annoyed and had a weapon in handy reach. That Ringer had acknowledged his idiocy even so far as to give him a sardonic approval of whatever he came up with added to my annoyance, something Ringer could see as he followed my example and stood.
    “I think we’d better get those clothes bought for you, Valdon,” he said, sharp-eyed gaze warning me to keep on being smart and letting it lie. “You ready, Diana?”
    “Not for the heart-stopping excitement of clothes shopping, I’m not,” I said, ignoring Val’s frown as I reached down to my monolon bag. “Now that you have room in your pocket, you can take these papers off my hands. You two have fun getting Val all decked out, and I’ll meet you in the docking area about fifteen minutes before the