A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [108]
TruGlas ringed the entire deck so you could look out at the stars, and very occasionally other traffic. Some parts of the glass had magnification insets. A whole section was polarized to block sunlight, and Terra was a huge floating ball, with an edge of Luna beyond.
Where we came out, a lounge bled into a restaurant that bled into a dancefloor, with a couple stages around the edges, and three bars. One of the bars was dark. The other two looked open and ready to get you drunk.
A cluster of passenger lifts opened onto a greeting area between the restaurant and the lounge. A uniformed crew member stood behind a podium there, smiling at passengers as they got off the lift, and pointing out places they could go. At each area, staff members waited to serve. Other than them, it was pretty quiet.
“Come,” Smik said, and toddled off. With the robe on, he couldn’t use his lower arms to walk, so he looked pretty wobbly.
I followed him over to the dark bar.
Smik lifted a plastic cover and showed me how the bar’s pewter-colored edge had deteriorated: it looked like something had chewed off pieces. No metal mites did that.
I got out my sample kit, took a scraping off an edge, and dropped it into the analyzer. Smik and I both watched until the sampler beeped and analysis came up on the readout. The metal identified as allosteel with a decorative fragmented coating. Also present: human saliva.
“No flippin’ way,” I said.
The sampler beeped again. It had identified four different genomes in the saliva. I stored the results. “Have you had the same passengers for a while? What about staff?”
“The current passengers embarked from Mars Station. Terra is just a stopping point before we head back. The only people we took on at Terra were you, your spawn, and a replacement chef. We lost one chef in an unfortunate flambé accident. All other personnel same since Mars.” He was talking pretty good for a bubble-mouth. I could understand almost all the words.
“Are there other damage sites you want me to check?”
“Yes. One we know of.” He let the cover fall back into place and contacted the engineering department to let somebody know the bar could be fixed now. We retreated to the crew-ways and took a lift down to the gym level.
The gym had lots of fancy padded equipment with steel parts that looked to me like torture machines. Some people were already in them, moving things around in the lo-grav. One of the things was a vertical pole, and a woman with long, loose hair was spinning around it, gripping rings. She was scenic.
Smik led me to a cordoned-off shower stall (gravity was slightly higher in the shower room so the water would fall down instead of floating). The stall was brushed steel, only where it wasn’t: something had nommed chunks out of it.
I ran tests on the compromised material and got similar results: allosteel, human traces on it, only this time there was a trace of a second, unidentifiable species in the mix. My sampler came up with five more genomes, none matching the earlier ones. It couldn’t tell me anything about the alien. Another new species. Then again, I still didn’t know what Smik’s species was.
“Are there any more sites?” I asked.
“Likely, but we haven’t found them.”
“You have passenger and crew genomes on file?”
“Purser has,” he said.
“I don’t know if this is a job for me. If the pests are passengers, you don’t want me exterminating them, do you?”
“Humans do not eat metal,” Smik said.
So obvious, so true. How did I miss it?
I didn’t miss it, really. I was just eeking about maybe shooting people. My Skikka used to dream about the day he could open fire on humans. He’d tell me about this any time I came close to peeking under his veil, which a thing like that can drive you crazy, you know? What could be so terrible?