“You will need to get on the next flight.”
“We really need to hurry,” I said.
He shrugged again. “What kind of emergency?”
Silver gushed tears.
“M-my father,” she said. “Please?”
I was impressed. She really looked as if someone had died, rather than that someone was about to die if she didn’t get her way.
Grudgingly, as if he had other, pressing matters, he leaned over to his comm, tapped in a few characters, filled in a couple of blanks, and said, “There is a ten percent surcharge for flights booked within the window.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I turned to Silver. “Hang in there, Meg. We’ll get there.”
He took our info and my card, which would once again be disposed of. Shortly we’d have to funnel all those loose funds somewhere we could use them.
It was wrenching. He could be debarking right now, for the surface, or for another craft elsewhere. He could be well on his way, and we had to assume he was. His funds were not unlimited. He had contracts to keep. He couldn’t afford to detour all the way up here, even without a ticket, then drop back down. Disposing of luggage . . . he might have had something else in the bags that would have aroused security, and decided to dump it. Or it could have been a DNA spoof.
I assumed he was on there.
In the meantime, we had hours until our new berth. We took the tickets and left. I didn’t thank the guy.
“Search again,” I told Silver. “On foot. I go up, you go down. We meet back here. Check for lurkers in shops. Check any available maintenance passages.”
“Will do.”
I’ll spare you the details. We found nothing. We did arouse suspicion ourselves for poking around things, and the third time the same officer questioned my flight and asked to look at my itinerary, I called it off. We grabbed a toasted sandwich and went to sit and fume.
I didn’t see any reason to risk another miss, so we boarded early.
CHAPTER 15
The trip was yet another combination of boredom, frustration, strained eyes from searching data and cabin fever. News updated through the Point regularly, but there was still a lag of minutes to hours to reach the ship, and then back. Whoever develops an FTL transmitter is going to be rich, though probably more from frustrated teens and stock-watching business drones than from spies.
On the plus side, arrival was easy. Customs required a small fee, a cursory glance at our documents, and a declaration of purpose. That was processed via comm aboard ship. We traveled directly to the orbitals, transferred to a lander, and swung down on a skywhip before landing in a long, screaming hypersonic approach. The commercial port was unremarkable, just gates, slides, tunnels under the ramps, with the usual stores selling overpriced souvenirs and travelers’ necessities. We found our luggage and sought lodging.
Novaja Rossia was modern without being a rat maze. It wasn’t as open as the Freehold, a bit more so than Caledonia, and as much better than Earth is as lobster steamed in wine is overraw cockroach.
If only I had time to sightsee, I’d be having the time of my life. Novaja Rossia, despite its name, is largely Western, with Germans, Brits, Americans, quite a few Aussies and Canadians and a large South American heritage. The Russian planetary development company sold stocks to a Swiss consortium who’d sold the hell out of the idea. All the commercially based colonies turned out rich and cosmopolitan very quickly. All the idealistic ones sank into the mire for lack of interest and lack of purity. There’s a lesson there somewhere, I’m sure.
Grainne is beautiful, but we have high coastal hills and young, craggy mountains as the prime natural assets in our most populous areas. NovRos has staggering fractures unseen elsewhere. It’s a very active planet, with lots of tectonic activity. Noglomsky Hrebet, the Legbreaker Range, was a mix of volcanic rifts and vertical shards. Oozing magma with steep basalt in between is very pretty, at least from a distance. What looks like dug terrain is actually ragged lava, and uncrossable by surface means. Gravity is .93 standard, metals a little lower and the planet marginally smaller than Earth. UV is moderate.
While the nation is modern, that terrain restricts expansion. The lush bowl of the capital is surrounded by two long arms of the mountains, with a broad river running to the ocean.
There were lots of small towns, one hundred K and under, scattered across the continent, around landing pads. Those patterned out to smaller towns and ranches before reaching an “older” range like the Dragontooths on Grainne, or Earth’s Rockies. The coastal plane was mostly arid semidesert.
So, unless he sought someone in their home, which he might, any target would be here in the capitol.