“That . . . sounds . . . workable,” Kris said slowly as she measured the plan and found it, well, workable. Putting that worry aside, Kris turned to her next question.
“This may be none of my business, and I may really not want to know how you did it, but, Elizabeth, how did you do this?”
“’Tweren’t no problem.” The captain beamed. “The CEO I work for had been trying for some time to get his grandmother to retire to someplace where her phone wouldn’t reach him. When Penny came to me with the problem of springing you from the perfect prison, I suggested to Leopold that the old girl might love a seaside villa on Madigan’s Rainbow if she could take seven or eight of her favorite bridge cronies with her. He liked the idea. Granny proved willing, and off we and Penny went to save the princess.
“That was the easy part. Now, getting you off planet looked to be the hard part until Nelly here suggested a sleight of hands. We’d off-loaded the aging bridge bidders, lock, stock, and a whole lot of barrels. Nelly suggested maybe we off-load one too many crates. What if the fine silver and china from the Archie IV got sent dirtside by accident?
“I got to go charging down screaming for my missing treasure, and you just happened to ride back up in its place,” Captain Luna finished with a wide grin.
Kris considered the idea and found a flaw. “What happens when they find a box load of fine china and silver with the Archie’s address on it?”
“They won’t,” Captain Luna beamed. “Said items were all made of dumb metal that is, as we speak, dissolving and leaking out of a box from which all identification and addresses are likewise going away. They may find an empty box in the corner of their warehouse, but it’s not going to tell them a thing.”
“That’s good. Really good,” Kris said in awe at the chicanery.
“Coming from you, I’ll take that as faint praise,” the captain said, chortling.
“Where do we go now?” Kris asked.
“I’m told you need to get to New Eden,” the yacht skipper said. “I wasn’t told why, and that is as far as I can take you. My CEO has a party he wants to throw. I figure the less I know about what comes next, the better off we’ll all be.”
With that, Luna stood. “My boss has this place rigged so that it can record every breath anyone in here takes, or can, just as completely, record nothing during the slaughter of several innocents. I’ve got the system turned off. Nelly can vouch for that.”
“It is off, and I have the only key, for the moment,” Nelly said.
“So, there’s a buttery that I had outfitted for the grand dame and her bridge cronies. It should feed you two for the next week or three.” Captain Luna paused, eyed Kris, then went on.
“Kris, I can’t help but say you look like hell. Whoever’s been riding you has done it hard and put you away wet, girl. There’s a workout room right off the master bedroom. If you want to hang with those hardworking Marines I usually hear you like, you better look after yourself, girl.”
“You say it so eloquently, Captain,” Kris said, standing herself.
“That’s why I make the big bucks. Now, lock the door once I’m gone. Anyone coming by will knock. Oh, and if we get boarded in system, you know where the air lock is. Don’t make me space you myself.”
On that note, they parted.
7
Kris was too strung out to sleep, so she and Penny set out to survey the suite. Kris’s circumnavigation of the Milky Way had been a major voyage of discovery. Traipsing through the huge rooms of the suite was like some sort of safari. Kris half expected to stumble upon a pack of lions chasing a herd of elephants.
The rich and enormous sitting room had the master suite off to the right and two just-as-massive bedrooms with expansive baths off to the left. The master suite bath included not only a shower for six but also a small swimming pool for twelve, as well as sauna and the usual equipment, much of it in gold. All this furnished a room that took up only slightly less space than the drop bay on the Wasp.
A door beside the sauna led to a workout room. Its computer began counseling them the moment they walked in. The electronic trainer had the same opinion of Kris’s present physical state as Luna and began listing all the things it could do for Kris.
Kris quickly crossed to the door that led back to the sitting room.
After the verbose exercise room, the space behind the two other bedrooms was a bit of a puzzle. It was a silent and strangely vacant room. There were tables and several utilitarian chairs. And shelves. Lots of shelves.
It was Nelly who figured it out, spotting the hardwired plug-ins and the electronically secure power outlets.
“This would make a perfect computer command center,” she observed. “What was done here would stay here until it was ushered out.”
“Should we do our planning in here?” Penny asked.
“I don’t think we need to,” both Nelly and Mimzy said at the same moment.
Nelly went on. “The entire suite is quite self-contained. Your captain friend was not kidding. What goes on in here stays in here. It’s just that this particular room is prepared to power and support a major server farm. It could take a data stream from the outside, mash a whole lot of numbers inside, and send them on their way in a most secure manner. You remember when you asked us to do a full analysis and forensic work-up on the St. Petersburg economy? And do it without getting caught?”
Kris allowed that she did.
“This place is set up to do that. Fully loaded, I bet this place could do it every day for a different planet’s worth of data, day in and day out. I’d love to command a place like this,” Nelly finished with longing in her voice.
“Who knows, maybe you will,” Kris said, with no commitment. She’d never considered Nelly as anything but her own computer. Yes, Nelly was great at playing all kinds of dirty tricks on other computer systems, look at what she’d done tonight. The thought of Nelly cracking the whip over a farmful of less flexible but no less powerful computers left Kris . . . strangely uncomfortable.
Penny broke the stretching silence with a challenge to Kris. “Let’s see what that workout room can do.”
Kris really didn’t want to, but it was either let the workout room show what it really could do, try the buttery, or go to bed.
Kris wasn’t hungry or sleepy, so PT won.
But Kris didn’t have to let it win without some complaining. “What is it with everybody? I don’t look that bad to myself in the mirror.”
Penny said nothing more but challenged Kris to a game of handball. The room quickly organized itself as a court even as it provided the two young women with suitable clothing, and, at Penny’s request, private facilities for each to change.
Penny left Kris flailing and out of breath in the first minute of the game.
“Okay, okay, you win,” Kris said, hunched over and struggling to catch her breath. “I’m out of shape. So, what are you going to do about it?”
The trainer computer said it had just the thing for Kris. While Penny worked out on a contraption that looked like the results of mating a ski machine with a bike with a rowing shell using all the jigs and presses that you normally only found in a spaceship-fabrication dock, Kris was offered a box.
It was a big box that opened up for her to sit in comfortably with only her head sticking out. When it closed, strange things started to happen. Initially, it was little more than a pleasant massage, not unlike the chair in the sitting room.