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Quinn blinked slowly at her reaction. Gary seemed thrilled by it skittering up to her, leaping onto Kira’s hand and heading up her arm. Its little paws had just the right amount of warmth to almost feel real. If it wasn’t for the impossible coloring of it, she might have thought it a living animal.
“Uh, leopard. I took a brain scan of a gecko, tweaked the intelligence enough to understand basic human language, and added in an imprinting subroutine for loyalty. I uploaded that into a neural net that replicates a gecko’s body perfectly and grew a polymorphic crystalline gel compound around it to simulate muscles, skin, and bone before covering it in the smart diamond scales.”
“Well, he’s super sweet.” She rubbed his head. Gary stuck out his little tongue to ‘taste’ her skin, perhaps in order to judge her even if its sensors depended on its similarities to a real one.
Letting him walk over her hands, he climbed up her shoulders. When he hit bare skin around the collarbone of her loose black shirt, she giggled and told Gary, “That tickles, bud.”
Raising her hand to get him down, she held the creature gingerly, even though it would be extremely hard to break him. Moving him back down to the table, holding him in both hands, she smiled from ear to ear. Apparently, all it took to break her composure was an animal, and it didn’t matter the sort.
When she looked back up, she found Quinn observing all of this with a slightly disbelieving look on his face.
“He looks like he’s smiling,” she said, running a finger under his chin and lifting it up a little. The sweet little smug thing the sort of critter she used to fall for on alien planets, but would never take. They were wild and meant to be wild.
Kira still smiled like a fool. “This is brilliant, Quinn.”
Both knew his talents, and she should have been saying that about the engines or the new manifold, but no, she said it about a gecko made of spare parts.
“Uh, thanks. I just wanted...” Quinn shrugged and looked away, staring down at his dinner before returning to eating his meal without comment. Gary hopped out of her hands and crawled his way back up Quinn’s sleeve, vanishing into his jacket.
Finishing up her own meal with gusto, she never turned down food or waited until it got cold. So she dug back in, but she tried to keep the conversation going since he was doing so well. “May I ask how you found Toke to begin with? I would have figured you could have just commandeered a ship on your own-” that made the thought process kick in, “But you need enough supplies to live on. That’s a little harder, I see now.”
Quinn nodded his head in agreement. “Toke is an expedience. In theory, I could manage to get everything I need with enough time, but not easily. Getting money without making it obvious is hard. Buying large quantities of supplies is hard. Retrofitting a ship is hard. These things would take time to set up. With Paradigm putting all of their resources into locating me, speed is important. Toke already had the resources and network to get what I needed, and barter is the oldest form of trade.
“As for how I found him, I got access to an unsecured terminal with unfettered galactic-net access while at a shipyard. From there, I already had a script prepared to scan for what I needed. Someone with resources, connections, and connections to illicit resources. Toke came up really fast.”
“Toke runs the largest illicit business with ties to every major government in the galaxy to do their dirty work. They all know that he does business with everyone else. It’s common knowledge and yet the whole thing is called Rumor.” She snorted. “It’s no surprise you found him first, honestly.”
Toke hadn’t hidden himself very well, but when you were as powerful as he was, you really didn’t have to. He was the pirate king of smuggling. No one dared defy him, and he was so well protected it was almost impossible to kill him. The bar they visited had no actual clientele that day. Kira knew it even if everyone in it had not known that they were all working for the same man. It was a brilliant scheme, if not a dangerously wicked one.
“Yes, it wasn’t very hard, seeing as he was already a man with everything. It seemed offering the one thing his wealth could not yet buy him would make him keen to do whatever he could to assist me.” Quinn said.
“He’s stayed in power so long by knowing a good deal when he sees it.” Her tone then wasn’t loving towards Toke. She knew who he was, who she was to him, and the debt that she owed. The memory of that fact brought her to down the rest of her ‘wine.’
Glancing at the bottle, she knew she did not need another glass. Being a lightweight for real ethanol meant knowing limits. They chemically altered the fake substitute to allow you to be sober in an instant if you wanted to be. This... well, she could hardly account for who she’d be later.
Besides, if the conversation hadn’t turned to Toke, she wouldn’t be considering it. She wasn’t an actual lush.
Quinn finished the last bite of his meal as a drone came in to clean up the mess. “Thanks for the food. It was good.”
“Quinn?” Waiting for him to look back, she asked, “May I show you my favorite part of the ship? Before I leave.”
He paused, one brow lowered, and the other raised. “Sure?”
The relief she felt showed in a genuine smile as it spread across her face, making her much more likable than the sullen looks he’d gotten thus far.
“Come on,” she almost took his hand to pull him along. Her fingers graced the edges of his palm before she realized her mistake. He flinched while she attempted to pass it off as a case of walking too close as she passed him. Awkward, but she tucked her hands into the pockets of her pants, hoping to prevent herself from doing it again.
They went down the hall through the maze that was the Callistar. Heading down a slim working corridor, she explained, “It was closed in because of being nonessential when they did the first renovation. So the only access is through the tubes.”
“Hrmm, I think I know which room you’re talking about from the diagrams,” Quinn said. “I was debating going down there and seeing if I could do anything with it.”
Unused space was rare on a spaceship, considering the cost of making one was huge. Kira clearly did not feel bad about it admitting, “To be honest, I blocked it off. Although, I thought I had it removed from the maps as well, that is, unless you cross-referenced and found the space.”
“Hrmm? No, I just did a deep spectrum scan of the hull and superstructure. Like I said, this ship is going to be moving faster than what it was graded for. In order to stop the ship from shaking apart, it needed to be graded. If it failed, then it needed to be replaced. A new section that meets stress requirements put in and dry welded together.”
“Ah.”
The old maintenance tubes, basically large round pipes with ladders, were still there for quick access to interior systems. Opening the latch, she went first, leaving him to close it. Putting her hands on the rung above her, her ankle completely healed she took off, going up it at a moderate pace. Her hair swayed behind her as she climbed, and something else was definitely in his view since she led the way. One quick glance down told her he had no interest in the female form. He kept his eyes firmly on the ladder.
