Thirty-seven

 

Zagrando sat in the cabin of his ship. The cabin was, as advertised, the most spectacular cabin he had ever seen. The bed alone could have accommodated four huge people. And the mattress, which he had only touched with his hand, was sinfully soft.

He had coded the entire ship to his DNA so that most of the rooms were off-limits to anyone but him. The ship did not inform other travelers how they got locked out of certain areas, only that they were. He imagined it was frustrating.

He hadn’t discussed the frustration with his first passenger, who was calling herself Elise. He had verified—again—that she worked for the Earth Alliance, but she made him nervous. He had a small screen open on his wall, and instructions to follow her. She sat in the lounge, a tablet on her lap, and tapped away at things he didn’t understand. He supposed he could zoom in on her work, but he chose not to. Instead, he let the system keep a record of what she was doing, in case he needed to know later.

She hadn’t moved since they got onboard the ship.

He had. He had programmed their flight path into the navigational system, then moved it all to the secondary cockpit, which was in a room just off the captain’s suite. He would fly from there, but he locked off the main cockpit just to be safe.

Then he had come here to find out who she really was. The cabin had its own dedicated network, one that didn’t interface with the rest of the ship. He had tracked it on his way to Jarvis’s Corner to see what nets it logged onto, and he found that it used systems he hadn’t seen in a long time. Most of them charged for the privilege. He still had money from H’Jith, so he used H’Jith’s account to log into one of the networks and used facial recognition to track Elise.

She had a long and varied history, mostly with the aliases he’d found. No one had placed obvious warnings on her nor had they flagged her.

When he logged off that system, he piggybacked on several others, looking again, and finding nothing.

Finally he logged off entirely and used one of his secure links to interface with the Earth Alliance system. He didn’t contact the system itself, just the downloads he carried with him. She was in there, along with her date of hire. Her real name took access to the network itself, and he decided not to look for it.

He had as much confirmation as he needed.

But he still felt awkward, forced to trust someone in a potentially dicey situation, and he knew nothing about her.

He had known more about Whiteley than he would ever know about her.

The ship pinged him. They neared their destination. Either he went for this or he didn’t. But he was the one who had requested her. He was the one who had set up this meet.

He would go through with it, even though he had his doubts. Once he got the information the Earth Alliance believed it needed, he would decide what to do next.

Without their help.