When I was back to myself, he asked, “Did I do that right, Boss?”
“No, you son of a broken-down vacuum cleaner, you did it perfect. Now I owe you one. Do you have any idea how hard it is to pull a joke on one of you bots? This will take weeks! Now, for real, is there something you need my help with?”
“No, Boss. Good luck with your studies.”
“Thanks.” I decided I wasn’t going to figure much out, without those other courses Bone was talking about, so I might as well turn in, and try again tomorrow. I couldn’t help but think I was missing something, but there wasn’t any grass room to go by on this ship, even if Snitz had been there. Rhonda must have thought she wasn’t completely out of the doghouse yet, because I got woke up by coffee smell again. When I got through with my morning routine and got out there, she had made me the omelet we had joked about the day before. I felt a trap closing around me, but I had yet to find out just what it was she wanted. I said, “Good morning.”
“Morning, Boss.”
“You mind telling me what it is that you need me to do for you?”
“What do you mean, Boss?”
“You made me breakfast two days running. I think you want something.”
“Dangit, Boss. Doesn’t anything get by you? Okay, here’s the deal. My best friend, back on Earth, the only one who kept coming by when I was so sick and lost all my hair? I’d like permission to run her past acceptable contact, so I can tell her about what I’ve been doing out here.”
“Does your Mom know this girl?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s do this. I’ll have your Mom go out to John’s, and have Max give her Steve’s cold reading course. Then she can talk to your friend. If, and only if, she passes that, you can talk to her about acceptable contact.”
“Okay, Boss. Why so many steps?”
“There are a lot of people still on Earth who could get in trouble if somebody said something they shouldn’t. I have a responsibility to those people to do all I can to keep them safe.”
“I see. So, everybody we tell is one more person who could say the wrong thing to the wrong person?”
“Yep. It’s cool that you want to share all you’ve done and seen with your friend. I understand that. I just have to make sure it doesn’t make problems for the rest of us.”
“Everything has so many layers, when you’re in charge. You were joking about giving me a ship, right?”
“Nope. When you’re ready, you’re getting a ship. Karma is a pain in the heinie, little girl.”
“You’re saying I give you trouble, so I have to see what it’s like from your side?”
“Something like that. I better find Julie and get started. I need to get some training in today.”
“She’s in medbay.”
“Trouble with Lyla?”
“No, but one of us stays there, just in case.”
“Shouldn’t she be getting more stable, by now?”
“She is, but her internal organs took a lot of damage. There are still some tricky places, before we can relax.”
“I’ll get the dishes, and you can go change the watch.”
“Thanks, Boss.”
“No problem, Middie.”
“Middie? You’re calling me a Midshipman? You’re serious about giving me a ship someday, aren’t you?”
“Yep.” She took off, mumbling to herself. By the time I had the dishes cleaned up, Julie had appeared. She said, “You’ve upset young Rhonda, Boss. She’s talking to herself about going back to Earth, and getting off this crazy ship.”
“Good for her, if she can. She needs to go ashore, before she gets hooked on all this. I don’t think I could quit if I wanted to.”
“You organics have strange ways of getting one another to do things.”
“I would have thought you had some experience with that, taking care of Frank.”
“I suppose I do, but I thought that was just him. I didn’t realize you were all crazy.”
“You bots have the advantage of working from logic. We have emotion in all our considerations. It makes things more difficult.”
“It seems to work for you, but I can’t say I understand it.”
“That’s the problem. Neither do we.” She lit me up, and this time I came out with a better understanding of what I was trying to learn. I began to wonder if the Squirrel courses I had taken had been sabotaged, just like the Commonwealth ones were. I went up to the cockpit, where there was a computer console I could work with. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I looked at the titles of the real Commonwealth courses, compared to the ones the Admirals had left for the newbies to find, and checked them against the titles of the Squirrel courses we had. Sure enough, there were courses that looked to be disguised the same way. Titles that sounded like they would be useful, if you needed that particular information, but not anything anyone would take on a whim. I must have smiled, or something, because Ace asked, “Find something, Boss?”
“I think so. Looks to me like Squirrel Admirals are just as tricky as human ones. I found what looks like hidden files on fleet maneuvers in the Squirrel courses we captured.”
“We’ve got several bots not doing much right now, Boss. They could link together and see if you found what you think you did.”
“That wouldn’t be too much trouble?”
“No trouble at all, Boss.” He went into a trance for a second, while he set it up. When he came out, he
