Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer

Author:Suzanne Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2020-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

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The cargo for Wyville-Thompson was a standard resupply. He was glad he’d taken the time to load it himself earlier so he wouldn’t have to potentially answer questions from the cargo crew about why he had a tarp-covered junker pod in the back of one of his bays, but he found himself wishing he could have at least swapped a few minutes’ small talk with someone. Anyone.

Or almost anyone. Loxodon, thankfully, was gone.

Mister Feefs yowled from his new carrier. “Not you!” Fergus called back.

As soon as he’d locked down the bay doors, he let Mister Feefs out. The cat came out stretching, then jumped up on the console beside Fergus. “Okay, fine, yes, you,” he said, and gave him a few pats on his scrawny head.

He backed out of Depot and started the long trip to Wyville-Thompson. When the dark started to close in, and Fergus stared at the front window as if at any moment it would seep through and wrap itself around him, the cat was suddenly right there, bumping his hand. “You too, eh?” he asked. He leaned back in his chair and the cat settled on his lap.

He needed distraction almost as much as he needed real sleep. Not expecting much, he flipped on the auxiliary vid screen, but everything was static; Stani had told him that the rescue bot they’d used to explore Alopias had a short range, but if things went as he hoped, he’d catch up to it soon enough. He turned the screen off again and was back to nothing to do.

In his hauler’s forward lights, the tiny, diffuse gas bubbles in the water seemed to dance ahead of him, like the ocean was full of ghosts of the restless dead.

Before the dark thoughts could crowd in again, he grabbed his handpad off the helm and propped it up on one knee. While making the trip from Titan to Enceladus, he’d set it to download as much information about Zacker’s museum heist as it could find, and now he had not only the time to spare for it but need of the distraction, too. Hexanchus was still less than halfway to Wyville-Thompson.

“So, Mister Feefs,” he said, and one ear on the sleeping cat twitched in annoyance. “If you were Master Thiefs, and you stole a bunch of paintings and had the patience to sit on them for nearly two decades, how would one go missing?”

The cat had no answer.

“I mean, it has to have been missing from the beginning, because no one had been in the storage unit for a long time, and the robbers would have wanted to stay away from it to avoid drawing any attention. And if they sold it to cover expenses, at least some rumor of it would have surfaced by now, if not on SolNet directly, then on the NetUnderground. So, why keep one somewhere different from the rest?”

He was so tired, he could barely keep his eyes open, but talking to the cat seemed to help.

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