A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [106]
Usually, when I take away-from-home-port jobs, my side-gran and her partners look after Fern for me, but this time the job came when Gran was on a business retreat. Fern and I live in a room in Gran’s enclave. We live in SubTerra, but we have a pipe up to sunlight, and get a spot on the floor most days. Fern’s got mirror blocks, and she sets them up sometimes to throw light all over our room.
I didn’t have babysitting backup this time, and metal mites didn’t sound Fern-endangering, so I loaded the kid on calmers and brought her with me. Goes to show you should never let clients diagnose, and also that I should never have been a mother, but I knew that before Fern was born.
The Skikka had taught me pretty good how to collapse everything into a manageable parcel. They’re always surprised at the shuttle port how much mass and how little room my luggage takes. My Skikka taught me how to hide things from scans, too. They didn’t stop me at customs.
My ticket didn’t authorize Fern, so I had to pay half for a second one. Maybe I’d get lucky on Evander and find pests plus loot.
Fern and me made it up to the orbital station without too much trouble (I put more calmers on her snack stix). I collected my luggage and went to the Evander’s dock.
“My stars,” said the doorman when he opened the servants’ entrance of Evander to my buzz. “You’re Delaney’s Pest Control?”
“Yeah. This is my dwarf assistant.”
I showed him my I.D., and he did scans to verify it, then scanned Fern into the system and took a copy of her I.D. bracelet. He frowned. “We didn’t budget supplies for two of you.”
“Hey, we can eat leftovers. You get those, right?”
“We recycle them.”
“She doesn’t eat much,” I said. “Is there day care on the ship?”
He allowed that there was.
“Come on, Stall-boy, I can’t just dump her in the station. She’s all the way up here, she might as well come.”
He muttered some more about highly irregular and caved, handing me the crew badge that would let me into areas passengers couldn’t go.
Our cabin was on the inside, against the core, along with all the other staff and servicepeople cabins. The passengers’ cabins were all against the outer walls of the ship; some had TruGlas portholes so the inhabitants could look out and see the actual starfield. The less expensive ones had screens they could program to show what was going on outside, or anything else they liked. (I’d read the brochure.) Even the service cabins had little screens flanked by curtains so we could pretend we weren’t locked up in small windowless compartments like machines.
I unfolded Fern’s care cage and set her in it with food and water dispensers and the omnigame. She dialed right past all the interactivities, piggybacked the ship’s net, and started snooping around. I guess she’s seen me do that too many times.
“You okay?” I said.
She frowned at the omnigame and waved a hand at me, like she couldn’t be bothered. She’s probably seen me do that too many times, too.
I had researched the ship’s layout before I left Terra. I geared up, including my suit, in case explorations took me to the outer hull or some of the non-atmosphere parts of the inner workings, though I kept the helmet retracted until needed. I headed down to report for duty.
A lot of things were happening in the engine room. The chief engineer was a human woman named Skeeter Johanson. She had hired me over a comm line; we hadn’t met, but she had checked my references. “Delaney. Did I just see you come out of one of the passenger lifts?” was the first thing she said to me, and, “What’s with the outerwear? Are you trying to alarm our guests?” was the second. She tapped the “Delaney Pest Control” logo on my chest, her face twisted into a huge frown.
“Uh,” I said, “Yes, I didn’t know there was a different lift for crew, and no, I’m not trying to scare anyone. Just want to do my job.”
“You need a suit to deal with metal mites? Never mind, we’re about to cast off. Get out of my engine