Page 41 of Tattle Tail
“You’ll have to hold her. The force field expands to cover you and anything in your arms, like a child.”
“Nettle is not a child, but I understand the sentiment.” She loved her Nettle fiercely but had doubts as to being able to hold her for hours. Nettle was not that kind of wuap. She would have to go into the carrier.
Joseph reattached the panels. “If you were interested in cleaning up, now would be the time.”
She looked down at her bare feet. “Are you suggesting that I wear trousers?”
“Well, I appreciate the look, but once I hit the distress signal, we should dress for company.”
A fair point, though she suspected thatdressing for companywas more than pants and shoes and involved a series of increasingly small weapons hidden on her person.
“Is there time for a shower?” Scrubbing off the stale smell of illness seemed like vanity in a crisis, but she’d think better if her skin wasn’t itchy.
“We’ve got an hour of breathable oxygen left. You do that and I’ll finish up here. I want to check the vital systems for shenanigans,” he said.
Peaceable drank another glass of the terrible orange drink—it was not juice, no matter what Joseph said—and swallowed another tablet for decongestion. She felt much improved from the last few days, but already her energy waned.
Showering helped clarify her thoughts. Seeing no reason to converse, the cleansing cycle ran twice. Hot steam eased her aching muscles, and soap scrubbed away the murkiness in her mind.
One explanation for this clarity, she read in an anthropology textbook, was a holdover from prehistoric development. Moments spent at a “watering hole,” so to speak, were moments of vulnerability. The person most alert and aware of danger got to survive. Another explanation—this one from a book of guided meditations that Valerian insisted she needed—was that showers relaxed the body and mind, allowing for new and novel connections. Either way, she wondered if humans experienced the same phenomenon.
Clean and dressed, she had a list of questions and a decent idea of what to do.
She found Joseph and Nettle at the ship’s helm. A map was on screen. “I calculated where we can reach with the ship or with the escape pod. It’s large enough for two, but it’d be tight.”
“Agreed.” Escape pods were built for survival, not comfort.
“But first,” he said, swiveling the chair around to face her, “who wants to kill you?”
Joseph
Peaceable blinked. “If the saboteur wanted either of us dead, we’d be dead. I think the better question is: who wants us stranded and desperate in deep space?”
True enough. Any number of engine failures could have denoted the ship or a nasty override to the ship’s computer could have vented all their breathable air. The delayed destruction of the atmo system was something else.
“Bandits and pirates are known to use delayed timers to cripple ships and leave them drifting when they’re out of range of fast rescue,” Joseph said. “That’s one of the risks of dodgy stations.”
Joseph completely expected Peaceable to launch into a mini-lecture about avoiding such places. Honestly, sometimes a person didn’t have a choice. Credits—or lack thereof—made that decision.
Instead, she pressed her lips together, thinking. “You were not docked at such a station. You were at CayneTech. Do you have the work order from the maintenance crew? Was there anything unusual?”
“Normally maintenance is done the night before, but they did it that morning,” he said, passing her a tablet with the document open. “But the crews get behind, so that’s not unusual. I usually do a visual inspection before departure but—”
“Do not say that you were distracted because of me,” she said.
He had been, but that was not the issue. “There was a storm coming. We had to leave or be grounded for the next few days.”
She scrolled down the tablet’s screen. “I do not recognize the crew ID.”
“You can’t know everyone,” he said, which made her ears twitch as if annoyed that she did not have the entire roster of employees memorized. “Do they want the cargo?”
The piano was famous, sort of, if you cared about fading pop stars from more than a decade ago. Would an obsessed fan go to such lengths to steal an otherwise unremarkable piano?
Peaceable’s tail flicked, thumping against the chair. “Unlikely. You forget the obvious. One of us is related to a very wealthy male.”
“Ransom?” Even asking the rhetorical question felt ridiculous. The thought would have never occurred to him. “Winter and I barely tolerate each other. He won’t pay a ransom.”
“He will for his mate,” she said in a tone that implied he was silly for thinking otherwise.
