I agreed.
She nodded, and for a long moment she stared down at the access hole. Then, reluctantly, she keyed off the computer photo we'd been looking at and satdown on the deck. "Tell me about yourself, McKell," she said.
I shrugged, sitting down on the deck beside her. "There's not very much totell."
"Of course there is," she said quietly. "You had hopes and plans and dreamsonce. Maybe you still do. What would you be doing now if you weren'tsmuggling?"
"Who knows?" I said. She didn't care about my hopes and dreams, of course. Iknew that. She was just casting around looking for some mindless chatter, something to distract herself from the mental image of her father floatingdead in there. "Once, I thought I might have a career in EarthGuard. That endedwhen I told a superior officer exactly what I thought of him."
"In public, I take it?"
"It was public enough to earn me a court-martial," I conceded. "Then I thoughtI might have a career in customs. I must have been a little too good at it, because someone framed me for taking bribes. Then I tried working for ashippingfirm, only I lost my temper again and slugged one of the partners."
"Strange," she murmured. "I wouldn't have taken you for the terminallyself-destructive type."
"Don't worry," I assured her. "I'm only self-destructive where potentiallypromising careers are concerned. When it comes to personal survival, I'm notnearly so incompetent."
"Maybe the problem is you're afraid of success," she suggested. "I've seen itoften enough in other people."
"That's not a particularly original diagnosis," I said. "Others of myacquaintance have suggested that from time to time. Of course, for theimmediate future my options for success of any sort are likely to be seriously limited."
"Until about midway into the next century, I believe you said."
"About that."
She was silent a moment. "What if I offered to buy you out of your indentureto that smuggling boss?"
I frowned at her. There was no humor in her face that I could detect. "Excuse me?"
"What if I offered to buy out your indenture?" she repeated. "I asked you thatonce, if you recall. You rather snidely countered by asking if I had a halfmillion in spare change on me."
I felt my face warm. "I didn't know who you were then."
"But now you do," she said. "And you also know—or you ought to if you don't—
that I have considerably more than a half-million commarks to play with."
A not-entirely-pleasant tingle ran through me. "And you're suggesting that bailing me out of my own pigheaded mismanagement would be worth that much toyou?" I asked, hearing a hint of harshness in my voice.
"Why not?" she asked. "I can certainly afford it."
"I'm sure you can," I said. This was not safe territory to be walking on. "TheCameron Group probably spends half a million a year just on memo slips. Which, if I may say so, is a hell of a better investment than I would be for you."
"Who said anything about you being an investment?" she asked.
"Process of elimination," I said. "I don't qualify as a recognized charity, and I'm too old to adopt."
Somewhere along in here I'd expected her to take offense. But either she wastoo busy worrying about her father to notice my ungrateful attitude, or she had ahigher annoyance threshold than I'd thought. "Perhaps it's a reward forbringingthe Icarus safely home," she said. "Payment for services rendered."
"Better wait until it's sitting safely on the ground before you go off theedgewith offers of payment," I warned. "Unless, of course, you think I'm likely toweaken before we get to Earth and figure this is the best way to lock in myloyalty."
"Or else I just want to give you a new chance," she said, still inexplicablyunruffled. "You don't belong with smugglers and criminals. You're not thetype."
It was worse than I'd thought. Now she was sensing nobility and honor anddecency in me. I had to nip this in the bud, and fast, before there wastrouble I couldn't talk my way out of. "Not to be insulting or anything," I said, "butthe high-society life you grew up with is not exactly the sort of backgroundyouneed for judging people in my line of work. I could tell you about a man witha choirboy face and manner who could order one of his thugs to rip your heartout and watch him do it without batting an eye."
"You seem awfully vehement about this," she commented.
"I don't want you to get hurt dabbling in things you don't understand, that'sall," I muttered. "More than that, I don't want me to get hurt. Stick withcorporate mergers or archaeological digs or whatever it is you do for yourfather, Elaina Tera Cameron. You'll live longer that way."
I frowned, an odd connection suddenly slapping me in the face. "Elaina TeraCameron," I repeated. "E.T.C. As in et cetera?"
She smiled wanly. "Very good," she complimented me. "Yes, it was my father'slittle joke. I was the fourth of the three children they'd planned on. But thefirst three were boys, and Mom had always wanted a girl. And Mom generally gotwhat she set her mind on."
"Hence, the et cetera?"
"She didn't even notice for four years," Tera said. "Not until I startedlearning to write and was putting my initials everywhere."
"I'll bet she was really pleased with your father."
"Actually, she was mostly just annoyed that she'd missed the joke. Especiallysince Dad was famous for that sort of wordplay."
"Nothing like that with your brothers' initials?"
She shrugged. "If there was, it was something so obscure none of us everfiguredit out. Dad certainly never let on about any jokes hidden there."
"Sounds like him," I said. "He's always had a reputation for playing his cards all the way inside his vest."
"Only when it was necessary," Tera insisted. "And he never hid them from hisfamily and close friends." She looked past me at the access hole. "Which justmakes this all the stranger. Why would he go in there without telling me?
Especially after forbidding anyone else to do so?"
"Maybe he was afraid I would come into the 'tweenhull area after him again," Isuggested.
"But why didn't he tell me?" she persisted. "There was a day and a halfbetween that incident and our landing on Potosi. If he thought he needed to hide outfrom you, there was plenty of time for us to talk it over."
"Unless he thought I might drop in on him unexpectedly," I said. "Remember, there was nowhere else on the ship he could hide."
"Of course there was," she said. "The Number Two cabin on the top deck, theone Jones used before he died. After Ixil took the release pad off to put on hisown door, it would have been a perfect place for him to hide. We were planning tomove him in there while we were on Potosi."
"With access in and out through the inner hull?" I asked, feeling my face warmand hoping it didn't show. Once again, an angle I'd missed completely. Thoughto be fair, by the time I knew we even had a stowaway he was already gone.
"If he needed to move around, yes," she said. "We couldn't very well take thechance of letting one of the others see him, could we? We had some of the hullconnectors gimmicked so that he could get quickly in and out."
"Ah," I said, feeling even more like Nobel prize material. I'd been throughthat whole 'tweenhull area from starboard to port, and it had never even occurredto me to check for loose or missing inner-hull connectors. "But he never took upresidence there?"
She shook her head. "We were planning to move him in while you were outhuntingfor Shawn's medicine. But then Shawn escaped, and we all had to go out andlook for him. Then with the trouble we had with customs, I didn't get a chance tolook for Dad until we were long gone from there."