“You were doing it for twenty minutes. Don’t you travel well, a bubbler like you?”
“I don’t go off-world as often as you might think, and my travel quarters are usually a bit more well-appointed.” Tyson spread his arms to encompass all four square meters of their berth’s floorspace, including the narrow bunk beds, the single hot plate and coffeepot with the gall to call themselves a “kitchenette,” and the sink built into the tank of the compartment’s toilet, that last detail being the cause of Tyson’s current dehydration headache.
“What, this ore-hauler doesn’t have a luxury C-level suite you could’ve conned your smuggler friend into handing over? Maybe rent out an entire deck so the plebs don’t trouble us?”
“That would rather defeat the purpose of traveling incognito, don’t you suppose? And no, there’s no lavish suite.”
Elsa returned her attention to the reader in her palm. Tyson was telling a fib, of course. He happened to know for certain that the Praxis-flagged bulk cargo ship they’d arranged passage on had a very nice C-level suite, because he’d stayed in it some fifteen years earlier when it had still been the Belmont in Ageless’s merchant fleet. Now rechristened the Taipei, it was the same class and layout as the Preakness that was still under quarantine in Lazarus orbit, only a few years older.
The shared history of the two ships had not been a coincidence, but part of Daryl Cooper’s devious little plot to get them out of the system undetected. Or at least undetected long enough to no longer make a difference.
The Taipei had been scheduled to depart for a return trip to Proxima, just a short four-light-year hop away from the Sol system. Daryl had arranged forged travel documents for Tyson and Elsa aboard the ship that would put them tantalizingly close to Ceres and the man they suspected was connected to the attacks on their persons. But the forgeries were intentionally sloppy, containing a few flags that would reveal their fake nature to a skilled investigator once someone got around to looking at them more closely.
In the meantime, the Taipei maneuvered herself into a mutual orbit with the Preakness, their approaches coming so close that their radar signatures merged and Lazarus Space Traffic Control had to issue an official citation against the Praxis Corp. crew for violating minimum safe clearance and generally sloppy ship handling.
What LSTC didn’t know was in that six-second window, the two nearly identical ships had executed a very illegal transponder code handoff, made very slight preprogrammed changes to their drive signatures, then burned hard enough to swap courses under the guise of last-ditch collision-evasion maneuvers.
Thirty minutes later, the “Taipei” broke orbit and bubbled out for her appointment in Proxima, while the “Preakness” lazily circled the planet for another sixteen hours until the forged travel documents were discovered by a sharp eye in Customs and Immigration and the news broke in the underground that Tyson Abington had “fled” onboard the Praxis ship. Fifteen minutes after that, a small pleasure yacht, little bigger than a skip drone, filed an emergency flight plan for Proxima and bubbled out several hundred klicks short of the safety line, incurring still more fines for LSTC’s coffers.
At which point, “Preakness” registered a new flight plan for the Teegarden system where it would ostensibly deliver relief supplies to the colony while they recovered from the plague. In reality, the Taipei only bubbled out a few light-weeks away from Lazarus, then plotted its true course for Grendel.
Daryl’s ruse had unfolded even better than Tyson could’ve hoped. Not only had they gotten away undetected, but they’d managed to flush out a new lead in the registry of the yacht that chased after what they’d thought was Tyson’s evacuation route. It was registered to a pair of fake accounts and run through at least one shell corp, but tracking down its true provenance was only a matter of time.
Not that the minor miracle had come cheaply. Again, Daryl Cooper hadn’t asked for money. Instead, he’d negotiated for the eventual share of NeoSun’s percentage of the Grendel project’s profits while he had Tyson over a metaphorical barrel.
Tyson couldn’t help but feel a swell of admiration for the smuggler’s mind. He’d underestimated the man, in no small part because of Praxis’s position in the transtellar pecking order. Now, he wondered just how much of that was a calculated ploy, and just how deep Cooper’s fingers reached into how many pots. They’d pushed him down the ladder because he wasn’t established money. He was uncouth and unrefined, a junker scrambling for castoffs. Not really “one of them.” But instead of bristling at the insult, Daryl had taken to the role and thrived in the unique ecosystem he found himself in.
“You’re not very good at waiting, are you?” Elsa said out of the blue.
“Hmm?”
“You were mumbling to yourself.”
“Was I?”
“Yes. You pace, you fidget, now you’re talking to yourself. Do you not know how to wait?”
Tyson considered this. “I suppose not. People are usually waiting on me, not the other way around. Most of my days are full from the moment I set a foot on the floor to the moment I collapse back into bed. I’m not used to this much down time.”
“We wait in the lab all the time. Wait for cultures to grow. Wait for sequencing to finish. Wait for the centrifuge to stop. Wait for batch results. Always waiting on something.”
“What do you do?”
Elsa waved her reader. “Catch up on the pro journals. Scan data sets on other experimental runs, anything to keep connected and busy.”
“Is that what you’re reading now?”
“Now I’m reading about a young heiress who seduces a summer intern to get back at her parents. They’re currently being gymnastic in her daddy’s yacht, but corsairs just showed up. He’s naked and fighting them off swinging a sword at the moment.”
“Further reinforcing my decision not to have children.”
“Oh come on, it’s a romance novel.”
“Exactly. It’s fiction. Believe me, it’s tame compared to the reality. There’s hardly
