One of her shoulders rose a fraction, the gestural equivalent ofI can’t begin to tell you how little I care.
“Elanie?” I squinted at her, suspicious. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” she replied flatly. “Why?”
She didn’t seem fine. Even for a being as universally annoyed by my antics as she was, she seemed…moody. “It’s just, you’re a bit pricklier than usual. What’s it been, three months since LunaCorp released the hormone upgrade for generation twenty-six bionics? Any chance you finally decided to install?”
Her entire body shuddered. “No.”
“Why not?” I waggled my brows. “Could be fun. I could take you up to deck thirty-six. We could visit the dance clubs, the pleasure pods, go to a live sex show?—”
Holding up her hand, Elanie said, “I hate that deck. And I already tried the trial version.”
“Really?”
“For 0.025 milliseconds.”
“Wow,” I said. “That long?”
Missing the sarcasm, she made a pinched, repulsed expression, like she’d sucked the slime off that elevator Blurvan’s seventh toe. “It was long enough, believe me. It was…messy.”
“That’s fair,” I conceded. “But you should do it anyway. You may find it won’t kill you to participate in something other than categorical disdain every once in a while.”
“Well, Sunny, as someone once said, life is far too short not to do what you love as often as you can.”
While I burst into laughter, Elanie left my pod, flipping her soft, glossy hair off her shoulders as she walked through the door.
Accessingthe files in my VC while I made my way to the staff room, my headache fading to a dull throb, I perused the dossiers of the special guests expected to board in the upcoming week. A conference of Delphinian magicians had arrived earlier in the morning. Delphinian magicians, while mostly harmless, were occasionally disastrous guests. A drunken magician’s finger snap three years ago had resulted in the still unfillable pool on deck sixteen. Every time the crew tried to fill it, the water vanished with an infuriatingfizz-popsound. Considering the pool on sixteen had been my favorite, I had a hard time hiding my annoyance with the outer-rim planet’s obsession with tricks.
A senator from Tranquis would arrive tomorrow. This was odd. We didn’t get many politicos on the ship—something about our reputation as an orgy-in-orbit tended tokeep them from booking. And this senator, Sonia Ramesh, planned to stay with her wife and ten-year-old son until they reached Portis for the Known Universal Senate meeting. Which would take more than a month. TheIgnisarwas not built for speed, and if this senator wanted to use the ship simply to get to Portis, there were much more efficient and economical methods of travel available to her. With much less of a risk of destroying her political career when she accidentally ate a piece of warple cake at Sunday brunch, and vids of her dancing naked in the atrium went viral on Vchirp.
I commed Elanie.
she responded.
This perked me up.
There was a moment of silence before Elanie replied,
Detecting the rare hesitation in her response, I said,
More hesitation. Now she had my attention.
When I walked into the staff room, I found the rest of the crew huddled at the far end of the big table. I was a breath away from announcing my presence when I realized someone was talking, telling a story. The new L&C, Iassumed. He held the crew in the palm of his hand, and even though I couldn’t hear what he was telling them over their laughter, they clearly hung on his every word.
I took a step their way, but then the laughter died down long enough for him to say, in the most delicious Venusian accent I thought I’d never hear again, “And that was the last time I ever went drinking with a Gorbie.”
The air in my lungs vanished like I’d been sucked out of an airlock. My heart kicked so violently against my ribs it caused me physical pain. I knew that voice. That laughter. Those hands.Stars save me,those hands.
Noticing me standing wide-eyed and frozen in the doorway, Chandler, theIgnisar’s cruise director, pivoted his hoverchair my way and waved me over. “Oh, good. You’re finally here,” Chan said. “Come meet Freddie. Freddie, this is Sunastara Nex, our hospitality specialist.”
