careful. After all, since she was officially assigned to A and E with special assignment to the Institute, she had gotten precisely what she expected, a ship without Singularity Drive. Those were top-of-the-line, expensive, and not the sort of thing that the Institute could afford to hire. So, like Moira, she would be spending a lot of time in transit. Unlike Moira, she did not intend to find herself bouncing brawns so often that her buy-out had doubled because of the fines.
Spending a lot of time in transit meant a lot of time with only her brawn for company. She wanted someone who was bright, first of all. At least as bright as Tomas and Charlie. She wanted someone who would be willing to add her little crusade to the standard agenda and give it equal weight with what they had officially been assigned. She rather thought she would like to have a male, although she hadn't rejected any of the brawns just because they were female.
Most of all, she wanted someone who would like her; someone who would be a real partner in every sense. Someone who would willingly spend time with her when he could be doing other things; a friend, like Kenny and Anna, Moira and Lars.
And someone with some personality. Two of the last batch, both females, had exhibited all the personality of a cube of tofu.
That might do for another ship, another brain that didn't want to be bothered with softpersons outside of duty, but she wanted someone she could talk to! After all, she had been a softperson once.
'Who's first?' she asked CenCom, lowering her lift so that he, or she, could come aboard without having to climb the stairs.
'That'll be Donning Chang y Narhan,' CenCom replied after a moment. 'Really high marks in the Academy.'
She scanned the databurst as Donning crossed the tarmac to the launch pad; he'd gotten high marks all right, though not stellar. Much like her; in the top tenth of the class, but not the top one percent. Very handsome, if the holo was to be believed; wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, sculptured face with holo-star looks, sculptured body, too. But Tia was wary of good looks by now. Two of the first lot had been gorgeous; one had been one of the blocks of tofu, with nothing between the ears but what the Academy had put there, and the other had only wanted to talk about himself.
Movement outside alerted her to Donnings arrival; to her annoyance, he operated the lift manually instead of letting her handle it.
To her further annoyance, he treated her like some kind of superior AI; he was obviously annoyed with having to go through an interview in the first place and wanted to be elsewhere.
'Donning Chang y Narhan, reporting,' he said in a bored tone of voice. 'As ordered.' He proceeded to rattle off everything that had been in the short file, as if she couldn't access it herself. He did not sit down. He paid no attention to Ted.
'Have you any questions?' he asked, making it sound as if questions would only mean that she had not been paying attention.
'Only a few,' she replied. 'What is your favorite composer? Do you play chess?'
He answered her questions curtly, as if they were so completely irrelevant that he couldn't believe she was asking them.
She obliged him by suggesting that he could leave after only a handful of questions; he took it with bad grace and left in a hurry, an aroma of scorched ego in his wake.
'Garrison Lebrel,' CenCom said, as Donning vacated the lift.
Well, Garrison was possible. Good academic marks, not as high as Donning's but not bad. Interest in archeology... she perked up when she saw what he was interested in. Nonhumans, especially presumed extinct space-going races, including the EsKays!
Garrison let her bring him in and proved to be talkative, if not precisely congenial. He was very intense.
'We'll be spending a lot of time in transit,' he said. 'I wasn't able to keep up with the current literature in archeology while I was in the Academy, and I planned to be doing a lot of reading.'
Not exactly sociable. 'Do you play chess?' she asked hopefully. He shook his head. 'But I do play sennet. That's an ancient Egyptian game. I have a very interesting software version I could install; I doubt it would take you long to learn it, though it takes a lifetime to master.'
The last was said a bit smugly. And there had been no offer from him to learn her game. Still, she did have access to far more computing power than he did; it wouldn't take her more than an hour to learn the game, if that.
'I see that your special interest is in extinct space going races,' she ventured. 'I have a very strong background in the Salomon-Kildaire Entities.'
