Free Jewel by Veronica Tower Page A

troubled
her. “All right you two, let’s get going. We’ve got supplies to locate.”
    “I’m not going with you,” Falco protested. “You’re not a
real ship’s officer—you’re the purser.”
    Jewel decided to ignore her. “Come on, Jester, let’s get to
work.”
    Falco wasn’t ready to give up. “She’s not a real ship’s
officer,” she shouted after Erik.
    “That’s right,” the exec called back as he led his two
people up the corridor. “All she knows about, Falco, is how to pay your
salary—or not pay it, if the fancy strikes her.”
    “She can’t do that!”
    “I’d say the joke will be on you,” Jester told her, “if you
keep pushing and find out she can.”
    “I can’t believe how cold it is!” Falco said. In two hours
she hadn’t stopped complaining. “It’s freezing in here!”
    If Jewel were in a fair mood, she’d have admitted the woman
was right, but she wasn’t feeling fair right now. Brynhild Station was more
than cold, it was near freezing—the temperature gauges apparently kept at 4
degrees Celsius in the power down mode they’d found the station in. That sort
of frigid atmosphere did not heat up again very quickly—and it didn’t help that
their explorations continued to move them into new parts of the station.
    But a purser who couldn’t scrounge up three coats on a
deserted space station really wasn’t worth the title. Jewel had found them
blankets to drape over themselves inside of eight minutes and upgraded those to
actual winter weather gear within eight minutes after that. She’d been a little
bit surprised to find so many cold weather garments on a temperature-controlled
space station. An ominous sign, but the gear was useful to them just the same.
    “Jewel?” The sound of Erik’s voice, even over her com unit,
made Jewel’s heart beat faster. “We’ve found the Control Deck. It’s deserted
like everywhere else.”
    Jewel willed her hormones to cool off—not that the mere
wishing for it actually accomplished anything. She still didn’t like the way
Erik had started things with her without first clueing her into his history on
the ship, and she really didn’t like the way her body kept responding to him.
She wet her lips and asked a probably futile question. “What about the computer
terminals?”
    Erik’s deep voice continued to resonate inside her.
“Password protected, of course, just like the others.”
    “Damn,” Jewel whispered. She knew she had the capability to
break into those systems if she was willing to activate her bioware again, but
she couldn’t do that without compromising her security. Her parents had
installed her first bioware chip when she was an infant, and planned all her
expansions and upgrades as she grew older. She knew they’d used it to spy on
her—monitor was the term they would have preferred—throughout her childhood.
And they could continue to legally do so until she reached her thirtieth
birthday and legal emancipation into adulthood. Not that she really expected
them to stop spying then. Laws really didn’t apply to people like her parents.
    “That’s too bad, Er—Mr. Gunnarson. Any sign of what happened
to the people?”
    “Just call him Erik, for Stars’ sake,” Falco muttered. “It’s
not like everyone doesn’t know he’s balling you. Hurry up and get it over with
so someone like me can get her turn.”
    Jewel spun about to stare at Falco in astonishment, unable
to believe the sort of things that came out of this crew’s mouths. Was no one
on the Fringe even remotely professional?
    “No sign,” Erik responded over the com-link, “but as I said
before, I can’t get access to the computer. How about you?”
    “We’re taking a quick inventory of the kitchen storage
compartments. The news is pretty good. They have a lot of food stored here—all
vacuum sealed—at a glance it looks like enough to last for years.”
    “Decades,” Jester interrupted with his own little
contribution.