Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [171]
"Hey! Look at these display screens!" The youngest Thrixtopple, a weasel-faced brat in his early teens, lit up on sight of the three wall-size display screens in the central cabin. "Sis, where's my SPACED OUT hedron? I could play all the way home—"
"I don't have to keep track of where you drop all your junk," his older sister whined. "Mama, there's only one storage bin in my cabin. My Antarxian ruffs will get all wrinkled!"
"Who cares? They still won't make any difference to your ugly face!" Thrixtopple Junior stuck out his tongue at his sister. She hurled a globe of something pink and slushy at him; he ducked out of the way and Caleb caught the globe in a neat one-handed catch.
"Now, kiddies," Thrixtopple Senior mumbled, "mustn't upset your mother or the servants." He held out one skinny hand to receive the pink globe his daughter had thrown; glance and gesture included Caleb among those "servants." Nancia bristled. He might not be her official brawn, she might still have her reservations about the way Psych was trying to throw the two of them together for the convenience of CenCom, but Caleb was still a trained brawn and deserving of more respect than that!
"Governor Thrixtopple, I'm afraid I will have to ask all of you to enter your personal cabins and strap down for lift-off now," Caleb said tonelessly.
"Already? Why, these clumsy servants haven't begun to unpack for me yet! I'm not nearly ready to send them away!" Trixia Thrixtopple complained without a word of gratitude or farewell to the servants who had, presumably, waited on her through the twenty years of Governor Thrixtopple's service. It was clear where her daughter had learned that penetrating whine.
"My apologies, ma'am," Caleb said, still without any inflection that they could react to, "but I am bound by regulations. Section 4, subsection 4.5, paragraphs ii to iv. Courier Service ships are not permitted to dally for any reason; a prolonged stop here could upset urgently needed communications elsewhere."
He personally escorted the Thrixtopple family to their bunks and made sure each of them was secured against the high-grav stresses of lift-off. Nancia kept the cabin sensors open to double-check every move, but Caleb made no mistakes.
Once the passengers were strapped down and their luggage stowed, Caleb returned to the central cabin and waved one hand towards the door. "Would you close us off, please, XN?" He sighed with exaggerated relief. "If only we could keep them out of here for the entire flight. People like that are a disgrace to Vega. Why, they didn't even have the manners to greet you!"
"Neither did the passengers I took on the way out," Nancia told him. "I was beginning to feel invisible."
"Not to me," Caleb told her. His eyes scanned the entire cabin with a look of longing that surprised Nancia. "Never to me. . . . If I don't get a new assignment, this could be my last voyage on a brainship. And we had to be saddled with these, these . . ." He threw up his hands as though words failed him.
"It is a pity," Nancia agreed, "but there's no reason we can't be professional about doing our jobs, is there?" While she made conversation with Caleb, she was rapidly reviewing the volumes of Courier Service regulations with which her data banks had been loaded upon commissioning. There should have been something in the third megahedron. . . . Ah, there it was. Precisely what the situation called for. But she wouldn't mention it now. Caleb was eager to escape the surface of Vega 4.2 before the Thrixtopple family started complaining about their restraints, and she couldn't blame him.
In deference to Caleb's weakened condition, Nancia made this lift-off as slow and gentle as she could. After all, it wasn't his fault that Psych Central was practically forcing their personal codes into one datastream. And she didn't want to kill the man on the way home.
When they entered freefall again, Caleb unlatched himself