Shoving Krobis ahead of him, Boone crowded her back into the cabin and shouldered shut the door.
She stared. "What—?"
Krobis spoke rapidly, caustically: "Boone's jealous of your new assignment, my dear. He doesn't want to let you go to Titan."
Eileen caught her breath. Her eyes flicked to Boone. "Fred—"
"You can believe that if you want to, Eileen." Boone quit trying to keep the anger, the tension, out of his own voice. "The main thing is, you're not going."
He could see the storm flare in her eyes. "Fred, you can't stop me!"
"Can't I?" Boone tossed the coat from his arm, baring the nerve-gun. "I've watched Krobis run through this big-boss act before, Eileen. He specializes in putting people under obligation. In your case, he knows how much your work means to you, so he'd like to maneuver things around to where you'll feel indebted to him for letting you prove your professional competency at the top level. Only this gun,"—he gestured with it—"says he's not going to get away with it."
The curves of Eileen's face changed to planes and hollows. A thin white anger-line drew about her mouth. "Fred, this is utterly absurd!"
And from Krobis: "Miss Rey happens to be one of the Cartel's best extraterrestrial biologists—"
Boone slashed in on him: "—And also, at the moment, she's a woman you want." He laughed—savagely, explosively. "A nice co-incidence, isn't it? You'd gamble her life on it—send her into a chunk of void where monsters materialize out of nowhere and two ships in three never come back. If she lives and cracks the nut, figures out how those nightmares get aboard our ships and why, mekronal production and your rating—with Eileen and IC both—go sky-high. If she dies, you chalk up another score for yourself as an ironclad Cartel man so set on his job that he doesn't know what sentiment means. Either way, Martin Krobis wins."