Surprisingly, he found the fresher room unoccupied. The rest of the crew, fifteen in all, was either at work or bunked down. This was a rare opportunity to scrape off some of the grime the overtaxed atmosphere system aboard the Destiny I kept spewing out. He peeled coveralls from his greasy body, then groaned as hot spray needled his flesh. No one ever got really clean aboard Destiny I. For months, they had all been walking around in the thickening miasma of their own smells. Eating stale packets of heavily manufactured chow, since scarce water also meant a crimped supply of fresh vegetables from hydroponics.
The needle spray cut off as his hot water allotment was used up. Kea suffered zed guilt as he punched the button and the shower resumed. Crap on those company pinchcredits. A delicious fog filled the room. He spread the soap on thick and lathered up.
The expedition to the Alva Sector had been a bust from the get-go. Kea had signed on against his own good sense. Being chief engineer of a bucket of bolts had never been his idea of a life's work. He'd had big dreams, once. Dreams that seemed to be worth achieving. Then he had thrown it all away over that inbred, high-society woman. If it had happened to somebody else, the situation would be laughable. But the memory of the other, harsh laughter on Mars would be with him for years. He was so young and dumb he didn't ask why the first deep-space com-pany he had hit up leaped on him as if he were solid gold. Sure, he had aced their aptitude test. And gone through the exams in a third the allotted time. Kea had half expected to be rejected, despite his high test scores. After all, he had no experience. He had also assumed the competition would be fierce for something so exotic as career in deep space. Especially now that private companies—sniffing fat profits and guaranteed monopolies— were venturing out on the few bridges to the stars that had been built with government money.
He started getting an idea how wrong he was in his first job as a wiper aboard a cargo hauler making the jump out to Epsilon Indi. His fellow crew members were as stupid as his chief engineer. And his brain cells numbered fewer than the fingers on his mangled left hand. What the crew members lacked in intelligence, they made up for in greed and sloth. Any time the ship ported, it was all the captain could do to rouse them from the drinking and narco dens to make the next flight.
His next job—a long jump out of Arcturus—proved the first ship was no exception to the rule. If anything, the feebles making up that crew and officer staff were less competent. That journey had ended in near disaster when the captain ignored the clearly charted meteor belt and wound up hulling his ship. Four crew members had died before Kea had jockeyed a patch into position and sealed the hole. His knowledge of Yukawa drive had been tested when it was discovered the engine was damaged. And no one aboard had the skills to repair it. There had been a lot of praying for the next seventy-two E-hours as Kea jury-rigged the stardrive into some kind of working order. The jump home went without incident.
It was then he had been recruited by his present company— Galiot Inc., a division of the megagiant SpaceWays. "Galiot's a brand spankin‘ new division, son," the recruiter had boasted. "You'll be seein' places and doin‘ things folks are just startin' to dream about. Our mission's to come up with new ways and ideas for SpaceWays to make money. They're puttin‘ big credits behind us. If you join, son, you'll be joinin' quality. Nothin‘ but the best for Galiot Inc. Cuttin' edge all the way." Kea had hired on at a two-grade jump in position. And it wasn't long before he'd worked his way up to chief engineer.
Yeah, he thought, as the needle spray soothed tension-knotted muscles, the road might not have been long, but it sure was torturous. It wasn't the risk that made it so. Hell, risk was spice. Here he was getting his chance to act out his boyhood dreams.
Starships bound for adventure in the beyond. But the company did its best to spoil all sense of wonder. They hired and bought cheap, making intellectual companionship minimal and turning the most routine labor into knuckle-busting frustration for lack of quality machines and tools. The company had a knack for turning any assignment into boredom—interspersed with fear of a pointless death as shoddy equipment failed at a touch.
What the bejesus are you doing here, Richards? Stuck on a one-E-year-minimum expedition. Surrounded by the sorriest, most cantankerous, ill-mannered employees of Galiot Inc. You could have stayed at Base Ten. Waited for another contract. Okay, you were bored out of your skull. So, what's new about that when you work for Galiot Inc? You could have guessed Hell, you knew, Richards. Knew at the time you had best tell them to put that contract where the sun doesn't shine.
He heard the fresher door open. Through the clouds of steam he saw a lush, female form slip out of tight-fitting coveralls. The warning bells hammered. Dr. Ruth Yuen smiled through the mist, then slowly lay down, on the fresher's small changing bench. "Mmmm," she said. "I like my men nice and clean."
The last time she had left his bunic, Richards had sworn to himself that was it. The end. The woman was more dangerous than anything aboard the ship or outside in cold, cold space. A guaranteed knife in the back. So, tell her no, Richards. Tell her no. Send her back to her full-time lover and boss, Dr. Castro Fazlur.
Go ahead, Richards.
But his feet were moving forward, taking him out of the shower. Ruth's smile grew broader. She looked up at him, eyes half-closed. Her hand reached up. Caressed Kea's stomach. Slid downward. Her left leg lifted off the deck, knee bending, and she put her foot on the bench. She let her leg fall open, then reached down and touched herself, stroking.
"What're you waiting for, Richards? Do you need a written invitation?" As he knelt over her, her legs came up, locking around his waist.
Sure, Richards. Tell her no.
Just like you told the company no.
He had heard the rumors about Operation Alva even before he had been approached by Captain Selfridge to join the crew. Word was that a routine scan of the remote Alva Sector had come up with a strong but intermittent disturbance in the normal background radiation. The pulse came from an area no known body existed. It was not a black hole. Or any of the theoretical formations posed by twenty-second-century physicists to explain the newly unexplainable. Also, as far as anyone could tell, the blips or buzzes showing up against the radiation background charts came from a "natural" source.
Kea was oddly stirred by rumors of the unexplained phenomenon. The small-boy/adventurer in him wanted badly to see for himself. To be the first to know a thing before anyone else. To rediscover his sense of wonder. Then his hard-won cynicism reasserted itself. Unless there was proven money in it, the company would ignore the whole thing. The required government report would eventually be drawn up, filed, and forgotten in a bureaucratic black hole. So, he'd returned to the room the company provided ‘tween-contract workers and buried himself in his steadily growing collection of historical works. Then he had gotten the news of Dr. Fazlur's arrival. The scientist was reportedly an expert on alternate-universe theory. Kea had nearly dismissed tins news outright. He had met too many of the company's pet experts. They always proved to be nothing more than PhDs for hire, with no qualms about bending fact to meet an employer's expectations. He had figured Fazlur was there merely to draw up the report, to maintain the company's license requirements with die government. This guess had been reinforced when he heard about Fazlur's gorgeous "assistant"—Dr. Ruth Yuen—and how he liked to nuzzle and paw at her in public. The man was obviously more playboy than scientist. Then he'd heard about the many metric tons of equipment being unloaded from the ship that had borne Fazlur and Yuen to Base Ten.