CHAPTER TWO
Geri showed up exactly on time, wearing a jumpsuit-type outfit that was far more appropriate for shipboard use than the suit and overcoat he’d been wearing the day before. He was rolling a medium-sized carrybag, which really wasn’t much luggage for a month away from civilization. Either he was planning to avail himself of the Ruth’s limited laundry facilities or else the bag was filled with high-end self-cleaning clothing. From the look I’d had earlier into his wallet, I was betting on the latter.
Fortunately for me and whatever or elses he might have been holding in reserve, the work crews finished exactly forty-four minutes before his arrival, and I’d completed the final pre-flight checks thirty-two minutes after that. By the time he reached the airlock I was ready to welcome him in, show him where to stow his bag, and get him strapped down on the dayroom foldout. Selene had already gotten us a lift slot from the tower, and barely ten minutes after I sealed the entryway the landing pad repulsor boost nudged us off the ground and into range of the perimeter grav beams. They in turn lifted us up to where we could safely engage the thrusters, and we were off.
Geri was unstrapped and sorting his things onto one of the empty pantry shelves when I arrived in the dayroom. “Nice lift,” he commented. “Very smooth.”
“Thanks,” I said, passing up the fact that the trickiest part of any spaceship lift was handled by the port’s grav operators, not the pilot. “I assumed you’d want to start with the closest of the Bonvere systems, which is number four, so that’s where we’re heading.”
“Let’s start with number seven instead,” Geri said. “That one showed the most promise.”
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t seen anything in the original fly-by data to suggest any of the planets was better than any of the others, but Geri was the boss. “Any particular order you want for the rest of them?”
“Not really,” he said. “Let’s go with whichever’s most efficient.”
“Okay,” I said. “See you later.” I turned back toward the dayroom hatch—
“So what did you do before you were a crockett?” he called after me.
I turned back. He was still arranging his things on the shelf, his back to me. “I thought you already researched me.”
“I did,” he said, still not turning around. “I mostly wondered if you would lie to me.”
“There’s nothing to lie about,” I said, feeling a stirring of annoyance. First a setup to get me fired from my job, and now the world’s most casual interrogation? “Bounty hunter is a perfectly legitimate profession.”
“I’m not arguing,” he assured me. “I’m guessing it pays better than this job, though. Why did you quit?”
“It’s called the retrospective of age,” I told him.
“Really.” Deliberately, he turned to face me. “I thought it was because you nearly got yourself and your Kadolian killed five years ago.”
My stomach formed into a knot, and I felt a flicker of ghost pain at my left elbow where the artificial arm connected to flesh and bone. “Like I said: retrospective of age,” I repeated, managing to keep my voice calm. “See, when you die you don’t age anymore.”
“Very deep,” he said, not quite sarcastically. “Personally, I like to think that anything that doesn’t kill you outright makes you stronger.” He nodded toward my left arm. “Literally, in this case. You do know you can get models that are way stronger than human bone and muscle, right? Not to mention versions that can hold a knife or even a two-shot plasmic.”
“And I’m sure they’re wonderful Mother’s Day gifts.” I pointed at the shelf he was loading up. “Incidentally, I’d put some padding around anything breakable if I were you. Things can get a little energetic when we hit atmosphere.” Without waiting for any further comments, I turned and left the room.
Selene was seated at the plotting table when I arrived on the bridge, sifting through the nav database’s records on the Bonvere cluster. “You’re angry,” she said as I dropped into the pilot’s seat.
“Just annoyed,” I said, checking our vector. The newly tuned drive was running a little hot, but otherwise we were bang on course. “I’m starting to think our passenger is going to be a major pain in the butt.”
“He did pay to get our engines fixed,” she pointed out. “That should earn him a certain degree of patience on your part.”
“Maybe,” I said. “On the other hand, as my father used to say, It doesn’t take much to morph a gift horse into a white elephant.”
“We’ll be dealing with him for a month at the most,” she soothed, “a month during which our bills will all be paid. And now that our engines are up to code, we can start submitting bids again on new sampling runs.”
“I suppose,” I said. “Going to be a long month, though.”
“If you’d like, I could handle our day-to-day interactions,” she offered. “You’d only have to talk to him after we finished the sampling analysis.”
“Tempting,” I said. “But no, I’ll deal with him. Like you said, it’s only for a month.”
“As you wish.” She paused, and I looked over to see her eyes fluttering as her lashes sifted through the air. “Much better.”
“Glad to hear I’m calming down,” I said. “You might be amazed how many people would find that really creepy.”
“I suppose they would,” she said, a hint of concern in her pupils. “You don’t, do you? Find it creepy?”
“Not a bit,” I assured her. “Actually, reading my mind that way saves a lot of time during conversations.”
“It’s not reading your mind.”
“I know.”
For a moment she was silent. “Does Geri know?” she asked at last.
“No idea,” I said. “He recognized you as a Kadolian, which most people wouldn’t. But even those who know about the Kadolian sense of smell usually don’t know how good it really is.”
“I was just wondering if he would find it creepy.”
“If he does, that’s his problem,” I said firmly. “He invited himself along on this little outing. Anything interesting in those records?”
“You mean the Bonvere planets?” Her pupils twitched a negative. “Not really. As I told you yesterday, they’ve just had a single fly-by. Geri said they were ripe for colonization, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Why? Was he lying?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that the cluster is so far away from anywhere. Unless there are some really valuable resources there, I’m not sure how economical it would be to develop them.”
“Unless the only ships traveling there had Talariacs,” I said as I finally got it. “Geri and his mysterious development group aren’t looking to work these planets. They’re looking to find something they can sell to the Patth for a quick turnaround.” I snorted in disgust. “It’s Lacklin all over again.”
“You mentioned Lacklin yesterday,” Selene said, sliding the Bonvere data off the screen and punching for a new search. “I never had time to look it up.”
“It won’t take you long,” I said. “Lacklin was a newly opened system, with lots of people getting excited about it. The Patth saw the hype and decided they wanted to be the big dogs on the block. So they started arm-twisting and underbidding and managed to take over all the trade and passenger routes.”
“And once everyone else had been pushed away, they ran it into the ground,” Selene said, peering at the screen as she scrolled down. “The other developers pulled out, the Patth didn’t have any replacements lined up, and no one else would move in without huge guarantees.”
“Leaving them with a half-built world which they then wrote off and mostly abandoned,” I said. “Pretty much only other Patth live there now, though I hear other people may be starting to drift back in. The point is that if Geri is shilling for the Patth, maybe they’re going to try starting from square one with the Bonvere systems. If they can buy them outright and then open bids for development, they may be able to avoid the confusion and resentment they bought themselves at Lacklin.”
“Maybe,” Selene said, sounding doubtful.
“You don’t think that’s what they’re doing?”
“I’m not sure it necessarily has to be the Patth,” she said. “Maybe Geri’s looking for an out-of-the-way place for some other reason.”
I frowned off into space. With my thoughts and resentments already pointed at the Patth, my conclusions had naturally ended up pointed that direction, too. Come to think of it, Geri had done all that pointing himself, first with the three Patth who were passing by the Ruth and then by bringing up Lacklin.
“Could be,” I said. “Maybe some megamil is bored with his private island and wants a private planet.”
“Or some criminal megamil is looking for a place to hide out,” Selene suggested, turning to look at me.
“Which would be none of our business,” I told her firmly. “We’re retired from hunting, remember?”
“We don’t have to be.”
The artificial nerves in my artificial arm gave an unpleasant little twinge, and in my mind’s eye I saw Selene fighting for her life in that hospital intensive care pod. “This is our job now,” I said. “Our only job.”
For a long moment we just looked at each other. Then, she lowered her eyes and turned back to the computer. “It’s been a long day,” she said. “If you’d like to go rest, I’ll watch things here.”
I wasn’t really tired, but at this point letting her have some solitude would probably be the better part of discretion. “Thanks,” I said, getting up and heading for the door. “I’ll be back in two hours.”
“No rush,” she called back over her shoulder.
She was right, of course. Targets were always on the run, and bounty hunters were always in a rush to catch up with them. Hunting might pay better, but it was a frantic business, wearing on both body and soul. Planets waiting to be surveyed, on the other hand, always just sat patiently.
And planets never took a shot at you.
Yes, I reminded myself firmly. This was a much better job.
***
Two days later, we arrived at Bonvere Seven.
“You really don’t have to be here,” I told Geri as he leaned over my shoulder in the bioprobe control room. He was close enough that I could feel his radiated heat on the back of my neck, with little puffs of air from his breathing ruffling my hair. Neither was at all pleasant. “The dayroom has repeater displays, and we can hook up the intercom so you can hear everything that goes on.”
“This is fine,” he assured me, as if it was his comfort I was worried about. “I’m a hands-on sort of person. When do the probes go?”
I clenched my teeth. Paid for the engines. Only a month. “We typically come in over the equator,” I told him. “Some crocketts like to come in with the rotation; Selene and I usually come in against it. We drop to an altitude of between fifty and sixty kilometers, which puts us into the stratosphere, then launch both bioprobes simultaneously. They’ll go out at forty-five-degree angles from the ship’s vector, one angling north, the other angling south.”
“Just two?” Geri asked. “I understood the usual pattern involved six to ten probes.”
“We’ll be happy to do follow-ups if these first two passes show any promise,” I said. A random gust of stratospheric wind buffeted the Ruth, and I heard the slight hiss of maneuvering jets as Selene damped down the vibrations. “Typically, though, they come up pretty dry.”
The extra puff of air from his snort ruffled my hair. “I wouldn’t think you’d get much data from a couple of three-hour passes.”
“You might be surprised,” I said. “A fair selection of seeds, spores, and other vegetable matter gets thrown up into the atmosphere, where it can travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. The probes will get some of that, and of course they’ll scoop up more localized samples at the lower altitudes. By the time they head up again, we’ll have a fair idea of what’s down there that might be of interest to a developer.”
“Or to a pharmacologist?”
I felt my throat tighten. That one was way too close to the mark. “There are sometimes spores or seeds that contain chemicals adaptable to medical purposes,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
“Just medical purposes?”
The Ruth rocked through another couple of seconds of buffeting. “Selene?” I called. “Everything okay up there?”
“We’re fine,” she assured me. “And we’re now at altitude. Drop whenever you’re ready.”
“Thanks,” I said, lifting the protective covers and arming the launchers. “Hang onto something,” I warned Geri. “They’ve got a bit of a kick.” Without waiting to see if he obeyed, I turned the locking keys and pushed the buttons.
Once, when we’d had to launch into an extreme wind-shear pattern, the jolt of the bioprobe launch had sent us into a spin that came damn close to dropping us into a stall. Compared to that, this was more like a friendly tap on the shoulder. The bioprobes shot off to both sides, angling away from the Ruth as they simultaneously dropped lower into the atmosphere, eventually disappearing from sight through layers of cloud. “And we’re off,” I said. “Timer set; reacquisition in three hours.”
I turned to look over my shoulder at Geri. “Which means nothing to look at for three hours,” I said. “If you want a snack, this would be a great time to go get one.”
“Maybe later,” Geri said. His eyes, I could see, were shifting between the tracking display and the two screens linked to the probes’ video cameras. “Actually, it looks to me like there’ll be plenty to look at.”
“Not for much longer,” I said. “The transmitters have a limited range, especially when they get into thicker air and humidity. They’ll keep recording, but we won’t know what they saw until we get them back up.”
“How do you control them when that happens?”
“I don’t,” I said. “But then, I’m not controlling them now, either. They’re running on pre-programmed courses.”
“I see,” he said. “Well, if there’s nothing for you to do, I suppose you could go have a snack.”
Fleetingly, I wondered if he’d had to learn how to be irritating or whether it was an inborn talent. “Sadly, I need to stay here in case something happens that I can do something about.”
“Ah.” He paused. “Why Ruth?”
I frowned. “What?”
“Your ship,” he said. “Why’s it named Ruth? Was she an old girlfriend?”
I took a deep breath. Pretending he wanted to watch two bioprobes collect airborne flora samples was bad enough. Digging into my life’s trivia was starting to seriously push against the edges. “It’s named after Ruth from the Bible,” I said. “The story says she got a job gleaning the corners of Boaz’s fields. That’s what we do.”
“Because the big survey groups get all the important jobs and you’re left with the scraps?”
“Something like that.”
“Ah,” he said. “Still, there’s something to be said for working the corners. They’re quiet. Remote. Peaceful.”
“They’re certainly uncrowded,” I said pointedly. If he wasn’t going to take the hint, I was just going to have to drop a brick on him. “Speaking of uncrowded…?”
“Oh. Sorry,” he said, as if he’d just noticed how close he was standing to me. “Sorry,” he repeated as he finally took a step back out of the hatchway. “I think maybe I’ll go have that snack you mentioned. Maybe grab a quick nap after that. Call me when the probes are on their way back up.”
“You’ll be the first,” I promised.
He left. I took a few deep breaths in lieu of uncorking the expletive I’d been holding back for the past half hour and turned toward the intercom. “You hear all of that?” I asked quietly.
“Most of it,” Selene’s voice came back. “I’m rather impressed you didn’t kick him out sooner.”
“It was close, I’ll give you that,” I said. “Anything unusual going on out there?”
“Nothing I can see,” she said. “Why, were you expecting something?”
“Not really,” I said. “But I’ve been thinking about our conversation a couple of days ago, the one where we wondered if Geri was looking for an out-of-the-place as a future hideout for someone. It’s occurred to me that we might have had that backwards. He could just as easily be looking for someone who’d already had that idea and gone to ground on one of the Bonvere planets.”
“And he thinks we and our two probes can search eight whole worlds for him?”
“Sounds ridiculous, I know,” I agreed. “On the other hand, if there are specific tags he’s looking for, and if those tags are light enough to get to the upper atmosphere, it might be barely possible.”
“I assume you’re talking about tags that shouldn’t exist on an unexplored planet?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Like chrysanthemum seeds, say, if his target is a flower enthusiast. Or maybe ash residue if he likes big cookouts.”
“Interesting,” she said thoughtfully. “Something we’ll want to keep an eye out for when we get the probes back.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Well, stay on them. I’m going to make sure he’s settled in comfortably, preferably out of our hair, then go run another tuning check on the engines.”
“All right,” she said. “May I suggest you also pipe in a live feed from the probes to the dayroom so he doesn’t have to come stand over your shoulder while we bring them up?”
“Way ahead of you.”
***
I was back in the probe control room half an hour before the scheduled retrieval, running final tests, double-checking the bioprobes’ positions and status feeds, and generally awaiting the critical minutes looming ahead.
Geri, to my silent annoyance, was back hovering at my shoulder ten minutes after I arrived.
Still, as my father used to say, When there’s a bad penny you can’t get rid of, at least you’re never completely broke.
Retrieval was always the trickiest part of the job. The bioprobes couldn’t make it high enough on their own to just be plucked out of the air, and they couldn’t maintain their maximum altitude more than a few minutes. That meant the ship had to dip farther into the atmosphere, get its tight-core grav beams locked on the probes before they began to sink, then reel them to safety without the buffeting winds knocking either the probes or the ship off-target. Since the typical trailblazer ship only had two beams, if more than two bioprobes had been sent the crocketts had to perform the operation multiple times in rapid succession.
Fortunately, for once everything went off without a hitch. Both probes surfaced within double-grab range, held steady vectors while the ship pinged their transponders, and the grav beams locked on with our first try. It was almost as if the Ruth was putting on its best behavior for its visitor.
“And that,” I announced as the status board confirmed both bioprobes were secured in their bays, “is that. Selene will get us up into a stable orbit, and we’ll go see what we’ve got.”
“Congratulations on an excellent job,” Geri said, stepping back. “I’m ready when you are. The clean room’s aft, right?”
“Clean room’s aft; dayroom, where you’re going to be, is forward,” I said, standing up and turning my best official stare on him. “The clean room’s only big enough for two people.”
“No problem,” he said. “Selene can wait in the dayroom while you and I run the analysis.”
“Not if you want the clean survey you asked for,” I said. “She and I are licensed crocketts. You’re not.”
For a long moment we locked eyes. Then, he gave a small shrug. “The joys of bureaucracy. I presume I can at least watch the procedure?”
“Of course,” I said. “Everything has to be recorded anyway. I just have to set up a feed to the dayroom.”
“Good,” he said, heading forward. “I’m anxious to see what you find.”
The Ruth’s clean room was hardly a Class One facility, and in some ways it barely qualified as clean. But it was good enough for trailblazer standards, at least for a first approximation. By the time Selene got us into a parking orbit and came to join me I had the probes open and their various containers neatly laid out on the examination table.
Now came the crucial part. The part that occasionally made this whole job worth the time and effort. The part that occasionally made us enough money to keep going.
The part Geri absolutely couldn’t be allowed to see.
“Ready?” I asked as Selene settled herself on the opposite side of the table.
“Ready,” she said, her pupils showing a heightened level of concern. She understood the risk here as much as I did.
Fortunately, I’d had plenty of time during the three hours the probes were away from the ship to come up with a plan. Trailblazer regs said the entire exam table had to be visible on the recording, but they didn’t say anything about the whole room or, more importantly, the crocketts themselves. A small adjustment to the camera’s angle earlier while Geri was having his nap, and we had the blind spot we needed.
As my father used to say, The hand doesn’t have to be quicker than the eye if the hand is out of sight. Giving Selene a reassuring wink, I picked up the first sample container and we got to work.
The first fifteen went by as smoothly as any regulator could have wanted. I pulled a bit of each sample from its container and gave it to Selene. She ran a quick scan to categorize it, then handed me a small rectangular glass ampule. I carefully tweezed out a few of the feathers, seeds, dead insects, or whatever from the container and placed them inside the ampule. While I did that, she printed a time/place/category stamp to attach to the side. I sealed the ampule neck and affixed the stamp, she logged the whole thing into the computer, the ampule was stacked on top of the others in the shockproof collection basket, and it was on to the next container.
Fifteen went by as normal. On the sixteenth, we finally hit pay dirt.
I saw it in Selene’s eyes as I eased out one of the seeds inside and handed it to her for scanning. She moved the sample out of camera range; but instead of taking it straight to the scanner she first raised it to her nose. A quick flaring of her nostrils, a brief flutter of the seed with her eyelashes, and she looked at me with her pupils showing cautious excitement. Only then did she run it by the scanner.
And this time, instead of handing me a single ampule, she handed me two of the little glass boxes pressed together.
I was ready. Holding them together, making sure they were angled so that the camera wouldn’t show the double thickness, I started transferring the seeds, alternating between the two ampules. By the time she was ready with the stamp I had loaded ten seeds in each. I fastened the tag to one of them, then lifted them out of camera range just long enough to palm the second, unmarked ampule before putting the marked one in the collection bin. As I picked up the next container in line, I slipped the spare ampule into the collar of my exam smock and dropped it down my shirt.
There were fifty more containers, and I ran through them hoping lightning would strike twice. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
But that was okay. Most of our crockett runs didn’t glean us even one.
We purged the rest of the containers of the residual flora and fauna, started the sterilization process on them, the bioprobes, and the clean room itself, and were finally finished.
To my complete lack of surprise, we found Geri waiting for us in the corridor. “Well?” he asked.
“Lots of life churning around down there,” I told him. “Preliminary indications are that everything is amino-based, so even if humans can’t eat anything there are probably sentients out there who can. No evidence of any civilization—no combustion byproducts, refined metal or ceramic microbits; that sort of thing. As you said when you first offered us this job, it looks promising.”
“Sounds good,” Geri said. “What about microorganisms?”
“Those were sealed in their own containers before the probes reattached,” Selene told him. “You’ll have to take those to a Trailblazer Class One clean room once we’re back in civilization to get them analyzed. The macro samples we tested were thoroughly sterilized before we brought them aboard, of course.”
“I wondered why you weren’t wearing full isolation suits,” he said, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Anything else?”
“At this stage, there usually isn’t,” I said. Which, I noted with a certain degree of virtuous satisfaction, was a completely truthful statement. “Our report’s available on the computer whenever you want to take a look. You also need to decide whether you want us to do a second sample run across a different part of the planet or move on to the next system.”
“In that case, I’d better start reading,” Geri said. “I’ll let you know when I’ve made a decision.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “We’ll be on the bridge.”
It took a moment for us to strip off our gloves and smocks and dump them in the laundry hopper. While Selene headed to the bridge I stopped by the dayroom, partly to snag a couple of drink boxes for us, mainly to make sure Geri was settled in at the computer terminal there. I continued on to the bridge, sealed the hatch behind me, and settled into the pilot’s seat. “So,” I said as I dug the ampule out from my shirt. “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
“Vegetable, of course,” Selene said, her pupils giving me a frown. “They’re seeds.”
“I know,” I said. Not one of my better attempts at a joke. “I suppose I should have said legit or illegit?”
“Probably a bit of both,” she said. “They smell very much like an opioid comparative.”
“Definitely a bit of both,” I agreed soberly, staring at the ampule and the tiny, innocent-looking seeds sealed inside. The pharmaceutical companies were always on the lookout for new pain-relief drugs, and one of them would probably pay well for a leg up on this potential new player in the analgesic game.
So would any number of the evil people out there who pushed their own versions of such drugs on the more miserable, lonely, hopeless people of the Spiral. Especially since drugs that weren’t yet identified and codified were by definition not illegal and had no official restrictions on their sale and use.
“You’re going to take them to Mr. Varsi?” Selene asked into my thoughts.
“You know he’ll ask,” I said with a sigh. Selene didn’t like our occasional employer Luko Varsi, and absolutely hated working with him.
I could hardly blame her for her attitude. I wasn’t all that thrilled about the man and his organization, either. But Geri had been right. Gleaning the corners of the trailblazer industry was just profitable enough to keep us alive as we took a downward drift toward financial ruin. At this point, our side deal with Varsi was all that was keeping us afloat.
“What if we don’t go back to Xathru?” Selene asked. “It’s not like there’s anything to hold us there. If we don’t go back, how would he even find us?”
“Oh, please,” I said scornfully. “You think an organization with someone like Varsi at the top wouldn’t have access to every banking, travel, business, and shipping data network in the Spiral? We so much as poke our heads out of the rabbit hole and Varsi will know it.”
“What if we changed our identities?” Selene persisted. “We’ve seen targets do that. Couldn’t we do the same?”
“Sure,” I said. “But then how would we put bread and bitters on the table? Without our crockett licenses we’ve got nothing.”
She didn’t answer, but just watched in silence as I pushed up my left sleeve. The little storage space I’d created among the electronics and wiring behind the wrist access panel was too small for anything but my collection of knockout pills. But the larger space, the one that opened up just forward of the elbow, was longer, with enough room to hold a sampling ampule. I popped it open, snugged the ampule into the hole, and resealed the panel.
“You once said that without our bounty hunter licenses we were also nothing,” Selene reminded me. “We found this job. We can find something else.”
“You still need an identity and a history,” I said. “Without our names, we don’t have a history. With our names, we have people like Varsi.”
“There must be something else.”
“You find it, and I’ll take it,” I promised. “But until then, we do what we have to.”
There was a ping from the intercom. “Roarke?” Geri’s voice came.
I keyed the intercom from my end. “Yes?”
“I think we’re done here,” he said. “Time to head back.”
I frowned at Selene. “You mean on to the next Bonvere system?”
“No, I mean back, as in back to civilization,” Geri said. “How far away is Ringbar?”
I frowned a little harder. Ringbar? What the hell was on Ringbar? “Hold on, I’ll check,” I said, gesturing to Selene.
“That’s where my partner said he would meet us,” Geri went on. “I talked to him just before we left Xathru. He said he’d head to Ringbar and we should contact him there when we arrived.”
“What about the Bonvere systems?” I asked. On the nav screen Ringbar’s coordinates popped up, along with the course and time from our current position. “You did pay us for a whole month.”
“The situation has changed,” Geri said. “Don’t worry, I’m not asking for a refund.”
I frowned at Selene, saw the same frown in her pupils. If Geri and his partner had talked before we left Xathru, and he’d known then that the situation—whatever it was—had changed, why had we come here in the first place? Why hadn’t we headed straight to Ringbar? “You’re the boss,” I said. “Looks like it’s about a twenty-six-hour trip from here.”
“What if you run the drive to plus-ten percent?”
“That’ll get us there ten percent faster,” I said cautiously. “But it’ll burn thirty percent more fuel.”
“Will another ten thousand commarks cover the extra fuel?”
“And then some,” I said cautiously. “But running a drive hot isn’t recommended.”
“You just had an upgrade,” he pointed out. “That should be good for at least a thousand hours of reckless driving. So do it.”
I glared at the intercom. Still, he was right. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t abused the Ruth’s engines before. “You’re the boss,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
“I want,” Geri said. “In fact, go ahead and run it to plus-twenty if the tanks have enough fuel to cover it. I’m going to go take a shower; I’ll give you another bank check when I’m finished. Well, don’t just sit there—get us moving.”
“Right away,” I said. I keyed off the intercom. “Your wish is my command,” I added under my breath. “Selene?”
“Course set at plus-twenty,” she said, the altered course and fuel profile appearing on my display. “We could actually do plus-thirty if we wanted to.”
“Well, we don’t,” I said, standing up. “Plus-twenty is as far as I want to push it. Do me a favor and pull up the shower’s water-flow reading, will you? Beep me if it stops.”
“All right,” she said, her pupils showing another frown. “Any particular reason?”
“I’m going to go search his stuff,” I told her. “I’d like to not be there when he comes back.”