Once in our small stateroom aboard the Princess Caroline—double bed that folded down from the wall, workdesk likewise, closet recessed around lavatory, commode and shower stalls—she untensed and sighed.
I met her eyes and said, “Yeah, you have to be less nervous when we arrive, and for future trips. Especially arrivals.”
“I know,” she said. “I wasn’t really afraid of being detained, but of blowing the mission.”
She unfolded the bed and sat down with another exhaled sigh.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Everyone takes a bit to get used to it. Remember this is the easy part. The worst that happens is a Caledonian jail, and we get bailed out. They’re nice enough people, and civilized. More likely, there’s some kind of meeting, we look clueless, bumbling and apologetic, and off we go, to acquire more hardware later.
“When and if we get to other systems, it’s a case of bribes working, or invoking threats to higher ups. But we’re the offense here. We don’t apologize and we don’t shrink back, unless it’s a deliberate act.”
“Got it,” she nodded. Then she smiled. “I think I’ll be fine after the first round.”
We were in that cabin for most of seven days out and six days in to Caledonia. She couldn’t find any vid she liked. There were some I might watch, but I couldn’t concentrate. We didn’t want to do too much interaction with other passengers, so meals were about the only time we left. It was cleaned daily, neat, smelled faintly of flowers and with a touch of ozone for clarity. The staff really did try, but it wasn’t enough.
I’m a loner, didn’t have any privacy, and I couldn’t think of a diplomatic way of saying, “Can you leave for a half div while I stroke off?” A shipboard shower stall is neither romantic nor comfortable. Her flipping channels got on my nerves. Me fuming in silence got on hers. She had an annoying habit of taking forever in the shower, when I needed to get clean, get off and get to sleep.
Which is all part of traveling with someone, especially other troops, and something you learn to cope with. I just hadn’t had to in a long time.
I did find it soothing to have a warm back against mine at night. Human companionship was something I always lacked.
The meals managed to be adequate without being either too institutional or flashy. I was impressed. Ships are usually one or the other. The housekeepers were agreeable to our request to come at dinner time, when we had everything secured. I didn’t want them wandering in otherwise.
I also had to put in long divs researching. Randall was in the Caledonia system. Great. Who was the target? We had nothing concrete.
I made a list starting with the Queen and other Royals and working down.
I ruled out the Royals. The only group that would target them was the decades old, increasingly pathetic Common People’s Action Group. They didn’t have the money, and they’d never hire an “elitist” to do their killing. That, and my team had slaughtered them in a previous engagement. There were others who didn’t like the monarchy, but they all realized it was politically and promotionally bad to target them, because the Caledonians overwhelmingly loved their Royals. That was the basis of their colony, now nation, after their parent Earth culture got rid of its royalty in one of the UN treaties.
I supposed it was possible that someone with enough money hired him to settle some petty score against an underling, but there were too many tens of thousands of possibilities to consider that.
In between were a few hundred notable business and political people who might be significant enough. I gridded them and managed to eliminate a few who were either too old, too meaningless or too noncontentious to matter.
That took most of a week. I’d have to spend the next week doing the heavy thinking on the rest. Also, there were some in from outsystem. I had to cut the ones who were definitely short notice, or strictly transient, or had made plans after the DNA intel date. Again, targets of opportunity were possible, but I had to stick to predictable strategic targets.
Right before we hit jump point, I did screen a message to Chel.
“Hey, kid. I’m about to leave system, but I am going to say goodbye. I’ll have updates relayed to you, and I’ll get back as soon as I can. Miss you. A lot. Be good. Love you.”
I just had a lingering fear that this would be the last she saw of me. So I had to send something.
Silver and I reached a détente the second week. She watched vid in the passenger lounge and turned down occasional passes. In the stateroom, I gave her a half div to send coded posts to a repeater back insystem that updated her social pages and noted she was doing a remote training course in the Hinterlands and would be out of contact for a while. She kept the screen turned away and used earbuds while she cruised and hopped whatever nodes she wasted time on. I spent that time staring at the ceiling above the bed trying to parse the chart I’d printed and had lying on my chest. Or, I went into the shower and pretended to be alone. Then she took her ridiculously long showers (okay, but she started it) and I did my nightly random node hop for mental relaxation.