Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [42]
“Good as it gets. You live with the stink of this ship long enough, you’ll find that anything that would taste remotely pleasant is just wonderful, simply because it takes you away from the odor. Do your quarters smell this bad?”
“No,” Kyle replied, taking another drink. Once he had swallowed, he continued. “No, there’s a bit of the smell of Kreel’n around, but nothing like this.”
“I’m close to the engine room,” John explained. “Kreel’n are notoriously inept mechanically, and they’re some of the messiest creatures you could ever imagine. I’m surprised they can keep the ship aloft, even with the help of the other aliens they’ve got working for them.”
“Do you socialize with the crew?” Kyle asked him. “Other than Kreel’n, I mean.”
John looked shocked at the question. “You may get the idea that I don’t like the Kreel’n,” he said. “That’s not true. Or not precisely true, anyway. In point of fact, I don’t like much of anyone. The Kreel’n are okay with me in that they leave me alone and don’t pry into my affairs, but you’d never see me calling one a friend. No, the last thing you’ll ever see on this ship is me having a pleasant conversation with the crew. I’d sooner take a long walk out the airlock.”
“What about other passengers?” Kyle pressed. “Are there any you’ve gotten to know?”
John laughed again. “Besides you, you mean?” When Kyle nodded, he went on with a wide smile. “We’re it, Mr. Barrow. We are it.”
Chapter 12
The days passed quickly for Will and Zeta Squadron. Boon corralled his own obstreperous nature, with only the occasional pointed reminder from his comrades. Dennis took on an ever-stronger leadership role, including delegating authority when it served the team. Will, as it turned out, showed a knack for analyzing and solving the puzzles with which they were faced, though he left it to Dennis to implement the solutions once he arrived at them. The artist spanning the globe turned out to be a museum’s exhibition of a historical robot painter, mounted on a giant trackball-painted like the Earth-so it could work on multiple canvases simultaneously. Other clues led to Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, and the understory of the two-level Bay Bridge, no longer open to vehicular traffic but left standing as a historical landmark.
The clue they had found at the bridge had seemed, at first, as incomprehensible as all the others. “Gone Fishing,” it had said, and, “To bring them home means bringing yourselves home.” Dennis had turned, under the latticework of shadows cast by the upper level of the bridge, to look at all the water visible from this point-water that, they all knew, surrounded San Francisco on three sides-and said, “Fish? There’s nothing but fish around us!”
It was only while performing aikido moves in a heavy-grav environment inside the gym that Will had reached a breakthrough. When their workouts were done and they had showered, he gathered the others together and told them what he’d come to believe. “It’s the easiest one of all if you just take it at face value,” he told them excitedly. “Bringing the fish home. If you go fishing in a boat, you bring them home at a dock, right? Which narrows down our search to where there are working docks. But what if you don’t do the fishing yourself, and you still want to bring some home? You go to a fish market.”
“That almost seems too obvious,” Dennis countered.
“Right,” Will agreed. “That’s the beauty of it. These other clues have been so convoluted, who’d expect us to get an easy one at this point? We could spend all day trying to figure out some ridiculously complex meaning to this one, but I think this is really where it’s pointing us.”
“You could be right, Will,” Felicia said. “It’d be a way of throwing us off the track. Using our expectations against us.”
“I don’t know,” Boon said. “If you’re wrong we could waste a lot of time. We need to wrap this up today and get back to the Academy. First back, highest marks.”
“But if you don’t have any different interpretations, Boon,” Estresor Fil put in, “we might