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Our scientists were brilliant, talented, and rather petulant when things didn’t go their way. It’s called an Argument of Scientists for a reason, after all.
The Fate Unknown, the Destination Anywhere, and the Abandon All Hope were our three shuttle ships and proof positive that our small crafts division had an even more fucked up sense of humor than Mother Universe.
“Nice work down there. I am beginning to think perhaps—perhaps, mind you—that Captain Chui was not bereft of all sense when she hired you, after all.” Whoa. Compliment from the XO, that was a big deal.
Filter-implants were a legal requirement for most space travel and no one joined the Carpathia without one—and they were bloody useful, too, filtering out the crap in most of the atmospheres we entered, so we almost never needed heavy equipment to do the job. But damn, the cleansing fluid for them tasted like ammonia laced with sulfuric acid, with a hint of sardine to add insult to injury.
And I could hear the tromp of booted feet down the corridor that meant this area would soon be more full of people than I liked. That’s space for you, I thought, as I swung myself into the grav-tube. It was so huge, space, and yet when you were me, it was still too crowded.
Kiriit Ayabara sat at her station, watching me with amusement.
Uhura!
Yet most of my brain was focused forward on slingspace, hearing it chime around me in the sweet voices of silver bells. I saw it and I heard it, and I tasted it like cooling mint in my mouth, driving out the last vestiges of the filter cleanser.
He laughed again and winked at me, and goddamn the bastard, he didn’t look corny when he did it.
Before long I knew two things about the Anmerilli for an absolute certainty: 1) they were going to take longer to decode than usual for me because 2) they’d learned to control the non-verbal language of their tails. The bastards.
Explain it to Your Audience Like They’re Five 101 wasn’t a class most scientists or engineers ever took.
And we’d brought the Psittacans, because there was nothing like attracting metric buttloads of attention to yourself in a crowded space station.
Why do people keep touching me? Stop it! You’d think after so many millennia humanity would’ve learned that touching isn’t automatically nice.
And happily it had a twenty-seven hour day, which wouldn’t be too big a shift from the standard twenty-six that all space-faring ships and space stations were set to.
Why 26?
And I had nanobots to support my breasts rather than using bras.
That sounds useful.
“Xan, what do you know about physics?” “Um…” I ticked off on my fingers. “One, an object in motion will stay in motion— unless, of course, you’re in slingspace. Two, what goes up must come down—unless there’s no gravity. And three, fuck up at the wrong time and physics will end you. That’s all I got.”
P122
Which seemed to boil down to little more than “physics doesn’t work like that.” Or, as I liked to phrase it: Physics is a party-pooper.
I like predators. They’re less fussy than diplomats.”
“There had better be a good explanation for this,” I said, “because if this is just a game of Spanish Inquisition, I’m going to have to open fire.”
“Cof-fee,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could. A hand reached in through the doorway, passing a therma-pot to Diver. “Give this to her or she’ll be moaning about brains before long.”
