*
The lounge was deserted. He thought a moment, then decided to try the exoarch group offices. If this was going to be his last day off, he wanted to make the best of it. Charlie seemed nervous as he made his way down to the lower level. Bandicut had the feeling that the quarx was afraid that he would blow their cover with the exoarch people, but was determined to demonstrate his trust by resolutely holding his quarxian tongue. The thought flickered across his mind that it would be interesting to see how far the quarx’s trust could be pushed. He did his best to dismiss the thought.
The exoarch department was marked with a hand-inked sign taped to an olive-drab door. He rapped twice, and entered when he heard a muffled voice from within.
“Well, hi there!” said the voice, which turned out to be Julie’s. He had to peer around a filing cabinet to locate her, sitting behind a narrow desk, with a computer console to one side.
“Hi, yourself. All alone here, hard at work?”
She waggled a hand noncommittally. “Alone, yes. Hard at work, maybe. I’ve already gotten everything restored that mattered. It was no big deal—I had good backups. But—” She hesitated, and suddenly looked embarrassed.
“What?”
Julie shrugged, chuckling. “Oh, I’ve just been toying with a crazy notion of mine, about the datanet crash.” She glanced at her console monitor.
“Oh yeah? What is it?” he asked, his heart quickening as he walked around the cabinet to her side of the room. “Can I peek?”
She thought a moment. “Well—there’s nothing to look at, really. But sure, okay.” Julie flipped some pages of text and diagrams back and forth on the screen. “You’ll think I’m nuts, but what the hell, so will everyone else. I might as well try it out on you.”
“Okay,” he said, squinting across her desk at the screen. He couldn’t quite read it from where he stood. “Come on now, it couldn’t be any crazier than some things I’ve come up with.”
Her eyes sparkled. “I don’t know about that. You tell me.” She tapped the screen, then swiveled her chair to face him. He sat down in a chair directly across her desk from her. “Okay—now this is just an idea, and it’s not even in my area of expertise. I haven’t got one shred of real evidence to back it up, okay?”
“Okay.” Suddenly he felt very nervous.
/// Are you thinking what I’m thinking? ///
/Mm./
Julie nodded. “Okay—well, then—everyone keeps talking about how it could have been sabotage that made the datanet crash. But no one’s found proof, and no one’s been able to explain who would want to sabotage the net. It could be a competitor to MINEXFO, except that MINEXFO doesn’t have any competitors.”
“Well,” he pointed out, “there are some who would like to be competitors, back in-system. There’s the South America group, and the Mars group. MINEXFO’s monopoly doesn’t last forever.”
Julie waved off the objection. “Sure, but I mean, there’s no one else here right now trying to mine the turf. Okay, it’s possible that someone here is a plant from one of those groups, I suppose—”
“I’ve heard people say it could be the environment lobby, trying to screw up the system.” He tried to say it in a jocular tone, but it came out sounding forced.
Julie rolled her eyes. “If I, as an admitted wacko environmentalist, wanted to screw up the system, I sure wouldn’t do it by bringing down my only avenue for getting news and propaganda out, and support in. That makes no sense. And anyway, the disruption was so temporary, what would it have accomplished?”
“What if you were an incompetent, wacko environmentalist?”
Her eyes twinkled. “I think we left all of them at home.”
“Ah.” He cleared his throat. “So that leaves plain old system malfunction through shoddy design and poor workmanship. Right?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.” Despite his unease, he couldn’t keep from meeting her eyes. He suddenly, intensely, wanted to kiss her. “Or,” she said softly, her voice a throaty murmur, “it could have been interference from an outside agency. An agency that no one has even considered, despite the fact that we’re all here for the purpose of excavating the remains of an alien technology. Have you ever thought about that?”
He cleared his throat again, more energetically. Steady, boy. Think before you answer.
/// John—don’t! ///
/I’m not—/
“No answer?” she said, with a quizzical smile. “Is that because you’d never thought about what you think I’m thinking, or because you’re deciding that you’ve just dropped in on a fruitcake?”
He laughed nervously. “I admit, I hadn’t thought about it . . . in quite that way. I mean, I suppose it is . . . possible.” He swallowed. “But you said yourself, there’s no evidence, right?”
She rocked forward, resting her elbows on her desk, and gazed thoughtfully at a point just over his shoulder. He stared at her, at those intense eyes lost in thought, and wondered frantically what he was doing here. She turned back to her screen. “Not real evidence, no. But there is one thing I found in the report . . .” She glanced at him. His heart was racing. “It has to do with a deflection in the comm beam from Triton Orbital to the surface.”
“Uh—?” he croaked.
She brushed her hair back from her eyes. “The transmission beam was deflected slightly, just before the datanet came down. It was re-aimed about seven kilometers to the northeast of us, out beyond navpoint Wendy on the charts. We have no explanation for that.”
“Uh—part of the datanet failure?”
Julie shrugged. “Could be. But it seems kind of odd to me. Nobody’s been able to explain how that particular thing could have happened. It appears to have been done by a software command, but no one’s been able to trace the source of the command.”
/// Thank God for that. ///
Bandicut nodded impassively, trying to look curious.
“But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t yet be traced,” Julie continued. “Of course, it’s just a wild idea. But it seems to me that if you’re investigating alien remains, and weird things start happening, it at least makes sense to consider the possibility—” She interrupted herself in midsentence to cock her head at him. “Wait a minute. I’ve been wishing I had some way to trace the datanet records myself. But someone like you could do it. Someone who can link right in.”
He swallowed hard. “I can’t . . . do that, anymore. I mean, I’ve . . . lost my neuro capability.”
She looked puzzled. “But I saw the records of people connected to the net at the time it went down, and you were on the list.”
His heart skipped. He felt Charlie squirming in fear. “I, well, yes—I can connect to a very limited extent. But I mean limited, compared to what I used to be able to do. Say—” his voice caught, and he tried to make it a laugh “—you don’t suspect me, do you?”
She smiled disarmingly. “Of course not. I suspect aliens, I told you. I’m just looking for someone who can . . . look for evidence, where I can’t.”
He suddenly wished he hadn’t walked into this room; he wished he could take Julie home with him; he wished he could—
On a sudden impulse, he glanced quickly around the room, making sure there was no one else here. He hitched his chair close to her desk and leaned forward, biting his lip. “Listen, do you—do you want to—?” His voice caught, and her eyes blinked, and the corners of her mouth turned up as she leaned toward him. His heart hammered. “Do you want to go get some din—do you mind if I kiss you?”
/// John!
You aren’t really going to— ///
/Clear out, ether-brain!/ He felt Charlie twitch away, and his heart stopped as he waited for Julie to react.
Her eyes widened, but when she moved, it was to lean farther across the desk toward him. She closed her eyes, and he rose to meet her halfway, and their lips touched, brushing lightly. He smiled against her lips; she smiled back against his. As her breath sighed ou
t, he pressed just a little harder, and her lips met his more urgently. His heart was beating full tilt now, and he felt Charlie squirming and contracting into a ball as his blood grew hot with arousal.
“How’s your ankle?” she whispered, brushing her lips over his cheek and then his temple.
“My . . . umm . . . fine,” he whispered back, suppressing a little shiver. “It’s the rest of me that—”
“Shhh,” she said, drawing away a little and putting a finger to his lips. “Not here.” She peered into his eyes. “Do you want—?”
“Dinner?” he croaked.
She grinned and looked at the clock. “At noon? How about lunch?”
“Oh—”
“We could take it back to . . . my place. I have a private—”
“Let’s go,” he murmured huskily.