BOUNDARY(119)

The grin never faded. "Sure. Of course. That's what the whole complicated business is about in the first place. So what? Whether you and Joe work anything out is between the two of you, period. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But that's all I wanted to know. That the only person inside of you is you. If you understand what I mean. Not somebody else, pulling the strings."



Her jaws tightened. "Nobody else ever pulls my strings."



"Oh, good. Well, that being the case—if you'll pardon me for taking the liberty—I guess it's okay for me to give you a push."



He reached out, planted his hands on her shoulders, turned her around, and gave her a little shove. Even as gentle as the motion was, with his much greater mass she found herself moving rather quickly down the hallway. Microgravity still seemed weird to her, sometimes.



"So go talk to him," his voice followed. "Now."





Madeline didn't quite follow his orders. First, because Joe was still on the Nike, so it took her several hours to get there. Second, because she made a brief stop at her own cabin.



When she left the cabin, she felt a bit like an idiot. There was something just plain ridiculous about a secret agent superspy carrying a hope chest. Of a sort.





Chapter 38




Joe Buckley sat in his cabin, looking out at the stars, and at Phobos as the giant space rock moved in and out of view with Nike's rotation. The new Gourmet Illustrated Quarterly glowed from his cabin display. Blinking in irritation, Joe pulled his attention from the eternal circling panorama and focused on the magazine. It dawned on him that he wasn't even sure where he'd left off. "Again. Damn."



He just didn't seem to find the recipes as interesting as he used to. Granted, he had a lot less opportunity to test things out on board Nike, even as well-equipped as the ship was. Still, he'd never found himself bored with reading new approaches or new ways to use the old ones.



With a sigh, he started flipping through his collection of movies and series. Madeline would've liked—



As soon as that thought intruded again, he gave a sound somewhere between a growl and a snort and stood up. A bit too fast, unfortunately. He bounced nearly three feet into the air, a mistake he hadn't made for months.



He considered going down to see how things were coming in engineering analysis. Room R-17 had contained what appeared to be a sort of vehicle, maybe a runabout or shuttle for Bemmius. Joe, Gupta, Jackie, and A.J. had been working on analyzing the thing from an engineering standpoint, using A.J.'s sensors and the engineering expertise of the others.



He was off-shift for another six hours, but it wasn't like he was getting anything accomplished here. He'd like to see what Mayhew and Skibow were up to, but he was temporarily persona non grata with the linguists ever since he'd gotten distracted for a moment while salvaging some noteplaques and banged one into the wall. The sixty-five-million-year-old artifact had practically exploded into powder and fragments. A.J. was trying to reconstruct what was on that plaque from the images the suit sensors had picked up incidentally. But it was taking a while as there hadn't been an in-depth scan of that one, and in some cases he was having to piece together components from partial images in various scenes at differing ranges, resolutions, and wavelengths. This was especially annoying to the two linguists as there was fairly good reason to believe that the noteplaque in question had included a map for part of Mars.



On the positive side, A.J. had pointed out, he and the rest of the physical sciences and engineering crew now had pieces of noteplaque to analyze without having to decide if they could afford to damage one. "You did that for us, Joe. Good work."



The door chimed.



Muttering something which was probably rude enough that it was a good thing no one else was there to hear it, Joe went to the door and opened it.



Madeline stood there, looking up at him with huge blue eyes. For a moment he just stared at her. Then he turned away. "Look, I'm not ready to talk right now. Please go."



After a moment, the door shut. He sighed and turned back to the case near the door, where he kept his spacesuit—and nearly ran over Madeline, who was standing just inside the door. "Madeline, what the hell—?"



The blonde security agent still hadn't said a word, but from behind her back she produced an enormous bouquet of flowers— roses, irises, daisies—and a box of chocolates.



The ironic inversion of the approach did not immediately strike Joe, as he was focused more on the utter impossibility of fresh flowers on board a ship nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.



"Where in the universe did those come from?" He reached out and took the bouquet.