“How do I know that thing isn’t recording?”
I talked around a bite of my battered fish with the hope that any frustration carried in my voice might be interpreted only as speech garbled by poor table manners. “You watched me turn it off,” I said, scooping my recorder from the tabletop inside Tom Walker’s and turning its video display toward my companion. “See? Off.”
“I hope you understand, Mister Pennington,” said the slightly built, balding man, “but I could lose everything by talking to you. Without permits to fly through this part of space, I’d never work as a trader again.”
“And you believe that whatever you have to tell me this evening could put all of that at risk?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that’s why you’re choosing not even to tell me your name?”
“You can call me Donnie, if you want. But that’s not my real name.”
“Well, ‘Donnie,’ at least you aren’t so paranoid as to walk in here with a bag over your head,” I said, which elicited a smile from my companion. “If you were truly paranoid, you would never have agreed to meet me in an establishment you know I frequent, thus one at which I would certainly have relationships with the owners or managers—relationships I most certainly could leverage to obtain image files from the security cameras surrounding us and cross-match those images against interstellar commerce permit application records to determine your identity in a matter of seconds.”
What color I had seen in the man’s cheeks had drained away along with his smile. “Uh . . . heh. But you’re not . . . heh, heh . . . serious,” he said. “Are you?”
“Of course I’m not serious,” I said, smiling and reaching over to clap him on the shoulder. “The confidential relationship between a reporter and his source is implicit, right?”
“Uh . . .”
“Inviolable? Sacrosanct?”
All he returned was a gap-mouthed stare with a look in his eyes that hovered between panic and bewilderment. I was starting to get the feeling that the gentleman before me might be lucky to verbally command the navigation computer on his ship, let alone manage a conversation above a basic reading level. It started to feel a little mean to toy with him like that, but not mean enough for me to want to stop.
“Donnie, a reporter would not turn a source over to the authorities. If I started doing that, I would run out of people who would want to talk to me. And then how would I get my work done?”
“Oh. That makes sense.”
“So, tell me why you’ve met me here,” I said, looking over the fish before me until I chose not to take another bite.
“Here’s my idea,” he said, scooting a little closer to me at the table. “I think Starfleet is not enforcing its rules against smuggling around here. I hear all the time about how shipments of one thing or another are getting through. So, I want to help you prove it.”
“I’m listening.”
“I figure that I can go around and just put the word out there that I’m open to moving a few things that need to be moved quietly. A few cases of Romulan ale headed one way, a few cases of Klingon disruptor rifles headed another way. I can take care of that part of it.”
“Hmm. Okay, but I’m not sure where I come in.”
“Well, I will keep records of all my activities in the sector, especially—here it comes—movements of Starfleet ships in the areas of my travels. Once I get caught, I can show all of the instances when Starfleet was present at the time of my transactions but chose not to enforce trade regulations, and then we’d have them down cold with proof positive of their being in on the situation. Or maybe then I’d get bribed by Starfleet to keep it to myself and just operate like I have been. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Oh, that would be something, all right,” I said. “So, what you’re proposing is a sting operation against Starfleet.”
“Yeah! That’s a good name for it. A sting.”
“Now, you realize that a sting involves proposing a criminal act and trying to get someone, in this case, someone from Starfleet, to agree to break a law and not necessarily to seemingly ignore one.”
“Oh.”
“And it doesn’t involve actually committing the crime, in this case, smuggling whatever it is you intend to smuggle.”
“Oh.”
“And whatever end you’re attempting to justify, that would not exonerate you from the means you took to achieve it.”
“Um . . .”
“Of course, ‘exonerate,’ “ I said under my breath. “You still can go to prison for smuggling anything you smuggled while waiting to get caught.”
“Oh!” Donnie bolted upright and practically launched himself from his seat. “I need to take a second look at this plan.”
“You might at that.”
“Just pretend that I never came by, Mister Pennington,” he said before pointing to my recorder on the table. “That thing didn’t record any of this, right?”
“Still off.” I smiled until he turned his back on me, when I could not keep myself from rolling my eyes. As Donnie left, I noticed the same brown-haired server I had seen earlier start to make her way to my table. “Nice story tip. Thanks a lot,” I said, prompting only a grin big enough to narrow her eyes.
“You can thank me in advance for the next few then, too,” she said, reaching into a front pocket of the short, black apron she wore to produce several data cards. “I guess word is getting around on how to find you.”
“I guess,” I echoed, taking the cards. “Remind me of your name, then.”
“I don’t remember you asking for it in the first place.”
“Right. Then allow me some grace for my lack of manners while I ask as I should have done earlier in the day.”
“In the day or in the week? I’ve seen you in here several times.”
“Now you’re simply embarrassing me.”
“My name’s Meryl,” she said, smiling again as she glanced down at the small basket of half-eaten fillets in front of me. “How was your fish?”
“Honestly? It was a little off. Did you fry it or get it from the synthesizer just like that?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Point taken. Next time, I’ll just bring you my own card. That way I can get some decent chippy sauce with it, too.”
Meryl silently took the basket from my table, and I reached into my bag on the seat next to me to pluck out a section of a newsprint edition I had replicated of that day’s FNS feeds. I unfolded the paper as noisily as I could, purposefully shaking out creases and holding it open wide enough for it to appear to create a black-and-white wedge in front of my face. At every opportunity, I liked reading the news as conspicuously as I could aboard Vanguard, if nothing else than to make a visual statement to whoever might be around that reporting and news are important to me—and should be important to everybody. And no, not simply because I had a job gathering it.
Just as my eyes had settled on an account of sesquicentennial celebrations for Earth’s first colony on Alpha Centauri, a sharp, skin-chilling snap sounded against my newspaper. I brought the paper down quickly from my face to discover a young woman in civilian clothing—professional attire, more precisely—smirking at me from across my table. Her right hand remained poised in front of where my paper had been, its fingers splayed out following the quick flick she evidently had given it to rouse my attention.
“Print is dead, Mister Pennington.”
“Sure it is, miss,” I said, allowing a smile. “Just as they’ve been saying for more than two centuries. Yet here it is in my hand, defying all predictions of its demise.”
“Just seems like a waste of resources to me,” she said.
“Not sure how you even figure that. I press a button and the printed copy appears. I read it. I press a button and it disappears again. It’s one more example of a completely efficient process of recycling, not too different from the way lots of other things are made around here.”
“It makes you look dated, anachronistic,” she said. “And we both know you’re not.”
“Let’s settle on it making me look . . . unconventional. And what we both do not know is who you are. You have me at a disadvantage.”
The young woman extended her dark brown–skinned hand and I took it, a bit fearful that my customary handshake might too roughly squeeze her slender fingers. The grip she returned changed my mind. “I’m Amity Price, and I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time now.”
“Then the least I can do is offer you a seat, if you’ll join me.” As she sat, I said, “And what did I do to earn the privilege of your attention?”
“I want to talk about being a journalist for the Federation News Service like you are.”
I laughed. “I can’t say that I would recommend being like I am to anyone, Ms. Price.”
“Amity.”
“Amity it is. And I’m not that big on being called a journalist. I’m a reporter. I’m much more comfortable in the thick of things learning what I can, getting interviews on the fly and writing it altogether as objectively as I can without using too many big words. I save those for when I want to be rakish and charming.”
“I’ll consider myself forewarned and forearmed.”
“So tell me about you then.”
“I’m from Earth, I studied at the William Allen White School, and I’ve been freelancing for a couple of years now.”
“A couple? I’m not wanting to be rude about things, but just how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six, if it matters.”
“Only to my growing sense of my spent youth. And you say you have wanted to meet me. While I appreciate the flattery, I can’t imagine that you made your way from Earth in a week to talk to someone who for a fleeting moment happened to become as big as his story.”
“Of course not.” I must have winced visibly because her response was quick. “Don’t be offended—”
“I’m not,” I interrupted to say.
“Um, could have fooled me. What I meant was that the timing of your story about the Shedai and the commodore was simply circumstantial as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been reading your coverage of the Taurus Reach since I first found out about Vanguard Station, and I finally got myself together to see it for myself. It took me several weeks to get here.”
“To talk to me?”
“Yes.”
“They have this wonderful new invention called subspace radio, and you can use it to communicate with people from across the quadrant.”
As I looked across at Amity, she crossed her arms in front of her and hung her mouth slightly open in one of the most impatient looks I had received in some time. Well, from someone who was not my editor at the time, at least. She narrowed her deep brown eyes into a glare that made my mouth go dry. “Are you about done playing with me, Mister Pennington?”
“I apologize.”
“I’m serious about coming quite a ways, and this whole self-effacing and petulant thing of yours wears pretty thin pretty quick.”
“Sincerely, I apologize,” I said, taking a sip of water as I paused to regard Amity with a new seriousness. “It’s been a while since I’ve talked to someone in the business who either wasn’t gunning for my story or chewing me out for something.”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “Subspace radio. Would you even have taken my call? Better yet, if you were me, would you have thought about simply making a call, even for a minute?”
I did not need to ponder that answer. “No chance.”
Her broad, white smile returned. “I knew we were kindred spirits, Mister Pennington.”
“All right then. Tim.”
Amity held my gaze a moment before digging into a handbag slung over her shoulder. “I did drop by unannounced, so I don’t want to take up more of your time tonight.”
“After a trip such as yours, I can understand your enthusiasm to track me down.”
She looked up from her bag. “Tim, I’m not fresh off the transport. I’ve been on Vanguard for nearly a month.”
“And you’re just finding me now?”
“I wasn’t ready to talk until now.” Amity pulled a light green data card from her bag and passed it to me. “Here are some clips—audio, video, and text—so you can get an idea of who I am and what I’ve been doing. I figure it’s only fair, since I’ve been reading you for a while.”
“So, once I read up on you, then we talk?”
“Something like that. I have a proposition for you.”
“See? I knew it. It’s the charm of the newsprint. Irresistible.”
Amity dropped her chin and looked up at me with an overly pained expression that I knew I deserved. “Tim, please. A little professional courtesy.”
“Certainly,” I said as I accepted the card. “And how shall I contact you?”
“You’re not hard to find. I’ll track you down tomorrow.”
“I’m looking forward to it already.”
“And Tim,” Amity said as she slid from the stool. “Be ready to work.”