“We must be crazy. Trying to smuggle away a live alien from the UNSF,” Magnus said. He sat in a chair, eyes closed.
Telisa knew he preferred to close his eyes while running the ship interface.
“How could we turn him away after he helped us escape from that place?” Telisa demanded. “It’s obvious he wants to go with us. Would you rather he get captured and prodded by those UNSF monkeys?”
“Hey, careful there. I used to be UNSF, y’know.”
Sounds reverberated through the ship, signaling their takeoff. Telisa hoped that Shiny wasn’t getting into trouble where they had left him in the cargo bay. Hopefully if he could survive trapped in a mysterious Trilisk complex, he could make it in the bay. Telisa thought she should get back there soon.
“Be ready to get in a pod,” Magnus said. “I don’t know if they considered us important enough to have called any ships back before they heard Joe’s report. We might be in for another rough ride.”
“What’re you worried about? You can defeat their scanners, right?”
“We can probably get away from this planet. Probably. But now they’re going to be hunting for us everywhere. They don’t have the funds to search for every handful of smugglers that sneaks away with an artifact here and there. But this is huge. They’ll spend a lot of money to recover Shiny.”
“You think they’ll know where to look?”
“They won’t be able to ID this ship, at least not unless the scout ship is back in-system. It might have scanners advanced enough to get a good look. But those ships are expensive, there’s only a few of them, and one of them already spent its time here. They’d only send it back when Joe gives his report, so it probably isn’t here yet.”
“Where should we go?” Telisa asked.
She realized that she was still very new at this smuggler stuff, and now she was in way over her head.
“Let’s just stay in space for a while,” Magnus suggested. “I want to know what we’ve got in Shiny. I also need to scan the ship carefully, in case the UNSF managed to mark us somehow. Why don’t you talk to Shiny—see if he’s a willing passenger, for starters.”
Telisa loved that idea. She could forget about the UNSF for a while and study the alien and the artifacts.
“That sounds great! I need to scan the artifacts, and I’ll try to talk with Shiny some more while I’m at it.”
“I’ll concentrate on getting us out of here. Remember what I said: be ready to run for a shock pod.”
“What’ll Shiny do? We don’t have any pods for aliens.”
Magnus grimaced. “We’ll try our best. Maybe we won’t have to go for the pods.”
“Okay, maybe I could show him one.”
“I wouldn’t. If he went in there, he’d probably panic.”
“A Terran would, if they didn’t know what was going on. But I think he’s pretty smart. He knows we don’t mean him any harm.”
“Your call. Just make sure you get in a pod if I say so.”
“Okay.”
Telisa turned and headed for a cargo bay where she could catalog her hoard of artifacts. She used her link to ask the computer where the scanning equipment rested and got an odd notification.
“There’s something wrong with my link. It’s not working right,” Telisa said, turning back toward Magnus. “And the ship’s computer is complaining about it too. It says I’m hogging storage.”
That got Magnus’s attention.
“Hogging storage? Have you been recording a lot?”
“Hardly anything,” she said.
Magnus remained quiet for a moment. Then he cursed.
“Damn!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Something’s up with your link,” Magnus said, his eyes still closed. “It’s been compromised somehow.”
“What?”
“Give me a minute. I have to fire off some comp tasks and then I can talk more.”
Telisa waited. Now she felt more tense. Something wrong with her link? Was it the complex? Trilisk tampering? Or had Shiny somehow damaged it?
At last Magnus opened his eyes. He looked at Telisa for a moment in a way that scared her.
“What? What’s going on?”
“I’ve discovered a UNSF snoop program running on your link.”
“What! You mean they’ve tapped me? Those—”
“It must have run out of space in your local cache. We spent all that time in the complex, and you didn’t link to anything. Usually the spy program gathers information and uploads it at public links. But we’ve been isolated from public links for a long time now.”
“So everything we know, who we are, and what we’ve found…”
“Including Shiny, will be uploaded next time you connect to a public link,” Magnus finished for her. “We have to clear this out before we enter any port. It may even be sophisticated enough to detect public ports in range and upload all by itself.”
Telisa bit back a scream of rage. The UNSF… the ones who had taken her father from her, the ones who tried to control everyone’s lives, had been recording her life from a secret program placed into the link hardware at the base of her skull.
“Those bastards,” Telisa lamented. “They recorded everything. Probably down to every request for the local time. Wait a minute—that means they know about my employment with you, Thomas, and Jack! If they know it all, why’d they let us leave?”
Magnus shook his head. “No, you had a sleeper. It wasn’t active when we hired you; believe me, we checked.”
“You checked? You scanned my link? How could you?”
“We had to. It wouldn’t be safe not to. Look, we didn’t record anything of yours. We just checked to make sure you were clean. That’s all. I promise.”
Telisa took a deep breath. What Magnus said made sense. They would have to check things like that to keep from getting caught in a society in which people could be unknowing spies for their government.
“That isn’t the only unusual thing going on with the links,” Magnus said. “Since Shiny came on board, he’s been trying to emulate our link’s handshake codes to connect to the ship’s computer.”
“Really? He’s trying to break in?”
Magnus shrugged. “From his point of view, it’s probably not so much trying to break in as just trying to communicate. Obviously he’s detected the data we transfer on the link frequency, and he’s trying to speak the same language. But our ship’s computer is rejecting him.”
“You should give him an account. We need to learn to talk with him somehow.”
“Okay. But I want to restrict his access. He seems to be on our side, but he is an alien, after all. Until we understand him better, I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“And my problem?”
“We can work on that once we’re out of the system,” Magnus said. “Link up with me and we’ll poke around through Thomas’s programs and see if we can find something to clean up your link.”