Of course. Rahel carefully tickled the snail off her palm and back onto the virtual mud. It bounced onto one side when it met the ground, cringing back into its shell until only the tips of its slow antennae floated ahead to feel for danger.
Rahel righted it gently with the side of her thumb. Even knowing it was virtual didn’t save her from feeling guilty for having startled the little snail. Rahel couldn’t force herself to be cavalier about any creature’s welfare, even when she knew the creature was only make believe. This particular virtual specimen, at least, presumably represented some live individual, hidden amongst Nadder’s extensive cargo. Keeping that in mind, Rahel tapped the snail’s spiral shell to see if that would give her additional information on the species.
A submenu exploded upward from the partulid’s location. A bright yellow rectangle, outlined in red, hung in front of her face long enough to blink access restricted four times, then diminished into a point again and vanished. Rahel twisted her mouth into a frustrated scowl, but resisted actually swearing out loud.
“What the hell was that for?”
She glanced up for Nadder’s simulacrum before remembering she was in this VR scape alone. “Just browsing. I was curious about things like the snail’s original climate, altitude, mineral requirements—”
“DNA spins?”
Rahel called up a sample of Alytes obstetricians in an effort to hide her surprise. “Whatever you might have had on tap,” she said with feigned nonchalance.
Light shattered across the sim-scape, dashing apart the pieces of unreality and leaving Rahel blinking at the sudden solidity of the cargo bay around her. Nadder pitched Rahel’s optic set at the VR station, then didn’t bother bending to catch it when it slid off the panel and onto the floor. She left that to the silent, white-haired man behind her.
“Chat over.” Nadder tugged the headset from the albino’s hands and threw it back onto the station. This time it stayed. “Vacate the ship like a good girl, proctor, and we’ll call this barter even.”
Rahel stood slowly, Toad kicking unhappily until she turned her to a more stable position in her arms. “I didn’t even get to see what I was looking for.”
“You’ve seen enough.”
Not nearly.
“Don’t you guys have better things to do?” Nadder asked as she gestured oh-so-politely toward the door they’d come in by. “I’d think you’d have enough problems with the animals you’ve already got.” The albino circled around to Rahel’s other elbow, just in case she entertained some silly plan to resist.
She didn’t. “Well, we re funny that way.” Rahel fell into step between them without bothering to put Toad on the floor. “People selling genotypes that we own all the legal rights to has a tendency to tick us off.”
“Moral superiority has a tendency to tick me off.” Nadder levered open the cargo door and ushered Rahel through. “You guys think your kind of purist conservation shit is the only right way to keep four-legs. Even if I was selling your genomes—’’ She slammed the door behind them, “—which I’m not—what makes it so wrong to give people a taste of what they can’t get anywhere else?”
“Don’t try to tell me you’re not selling Terran genotypes.” Rahel opted to stay with the strictly legal end of their discussion—the black-marketeer’s profession made the larger ethical question seem hardly worth pursuing. “You think I don’t know authentic gross structures when I see them?”
Nadder shrugged. “I’m glad you think so. But it’s not like you actually looked at any animals today.”
Rahel stopped just inside the final hatchway, bumping her elbow back against the albino when he would have shoved her forward to keep her moving. “What are you talking about? I saw the partulid and—”
“You saw a partulid simulacrum,” Nadder corrected her. The marketeer’s smile was as slick and artificial as her hair when she took Rahel’s arm and accompanied her the last few steps onto the dock. “That’s what I sell, after all—VR tours of an extinct zoo. If you came here thinking otherwise, proctor, I’m afraid you were misinformed.”
Noah’s Ark had spent nine months and a small jumpship’s worth of money tracing leads and rumors beyond the edge of human space to the Newborns s Interface. What had started as a search for the origins of a single boodeg Terran cargo had grown into one of the Ark’s primary projects. It was the strength of that history and her own long hours of clue-sniffing and travel that let Rahel scowl down into Nadder’s face and say with such grim certainty, “Bullshit.”
The marketeer’s smile stretched even more irritatingly serene. “I guess you’ll have to prove that.” She slapped the control that closed Medve’s airlock door.
“Wait a minute!” Dancing forward, Rahel caught the edge of the door with her palm to halt it in its track. “Aren’t you at least going to tell me how you found out where I was from?”
Nadder tipped her head as though considering, then smiled in what looked like honest amusement when Toad echoed the gesture with one brindled ear cocked higher than the other. Behind her shoulder, the albino actually laughed.
“Staffordshire bull terrier,” Nadder said suddenly. She wiggled her fingers at Toad, then turned her eyes more directly on Rahel while the puppy fidgeted delightedly at the attention. “Holds the domestic record for going from endangered to extinct in less than ten years back in the early twenty-first—one of many victims of the pre-Reform urban paranoia. I’ve never heard of anybody offering that kind of blueprint for open sale.” She hooked a thumb back toward the albino. “Took Styen nearly fifteen minutes just to match a visual to our records. That left only one place that little dog could’ve come from.”
Rahel nodded, already blushing with self-anger at her own shortsightedness. “Noah’s Ark.”
Smiling, Nadder tapped the end of her downtumed nose and poked at the door controls again. Rahel stepped grudgingly back to let the airlock hatch slide closed. Nine months and uncounted millions of credits, just so Rahel could put them right back where they’d started less than two hours after setting foot on the station.
She kicked at the now impassable airlock door. “Dammit.”
“I can’t believe I blew it!”
“Does that mean it’s too late for me to suggest you leave the dog behind next time you go onstation?”
Rahel aimed a withering glare at the comlink over her shoulder, and Paval’s image on-screen returned her scowl with eyebrows raised in his traditional expression of innocent query. She still hadn’t decided how much of her apprentice’s little-boy sincerity was for real, and how much he affected just for the sake of annoying her.
“Your next lesson when I get home will be all about giving advice before it’s needed, not after.’’ She pitched Toad’s ball over the puppy’s head, sending both ball and dog bouncing madly down the jumpship’s center aisle.
“Well, then here’s some advice for your next course of action: See what you can find out about Nadder around the rest of the station. Who knows what we’ll find useful next time—”
“There’s not going to be a next time.” Rahel sighed in frustration as Toad cavorted back to shove the warm, spit-slimed ball into her palm. “By the end of tonight, Nadder’s going to have memorized the face, name, and description of every proctor in Noah’s Ark.” She threw the ball again, wiping her hand on the leg of her pants. “Face it, Junior—we’re screwed.”