Free Faring Soul - Science Fiction Romance by Tracy Cooper-Posey

to help the settlement or the city thrive…that’s how you’re
measured.”
    “Usefulness. That could be a deceptive
gauge.”
    “Oh, there’s plenty of con artists,
crooks and thieves out there. If you’re dumb enough to get suckered
in by one, everyone else figures that’s your look-out.”
    “That isn’t a good recipe for
trust.”
    Catherine smiled. “No, trust doesn’t
come easy out there. But once you have someone’s trust, you value
it and you do your best not to destroy it.”
    The bed pinged.
    “You’re clear,” Catherine announced,
“and free to go.”
    Brant sat up and bent his arm
experimentally and prodded at the location of the injection.
    “You shouldn’t be able to feel
anything,” Catherine said.
    “I don’t,” he confirmed. “That’s why I
was prodding. There are some nasty virals on Gry and the
immunization process was much more invasive.”
    “On Earth, in antiquity, they use to
slice the flesh open, insert a pellet of the inoculation material,
then sew the patient back up and wrap a bandage around the wound.
You might die of infection to the wound, or the disease the pellet
was supposed to protect you against.”
    “Barbaric.”
    “It helped humans survive. Shouldn’t
you be spiritually uplifted by that?”
    Brant slid off the table. “I never said
I was perfect.” He paused at the door. “We’re a week out from
Soward. No one has said anything about how we are to slide Kemp
down to the surface undetected. All traffic has to go through
Soward’s Forward Station to get dirtside.”
    “Is there a question in there
somewhere?” she asked.
    “It’s the lack of questions I’m
questioning. You’re planning to take the whole ship down to the
surface, aren’t you?”
    “Jump ships can’t land,” she said
automatically.
    “Except for this very old one,” Brant
said, patting the doorframe and looking up and around. “I do wonder
what else the ship is capable of, that might have been very
carefully hidden behind facades like the false hull.” He gave her a
smile. “See you at the dinner table.”

Chapter Nine
    Brant had never stepped inside the
engine workrooms before, although Catherine had opened one of the
doors and let him peek inside when she had been showing him the
ship, his first day aboard. Ball-bound freshie he might be, but he
knew enough to stay out of the engineering areas and let Lilita do
her work.
    So he moved through the crowded room
carefully. There were too many consoles and readouts. If he brushed
against one and reset something accidentally, there was a good
chance he wouldn’t know what he had touched and he certainly
wouldn’t know what to correct.
    The hum of electronics and the deep
background throb of the massive engines behind the shield wall made
him uncomfortable. Anywhere that was not Gry still made him uneasy.
Gry did not have computers, except for the minimum necessary for
communications off-world and for interstellar transports to find
them, but the cadre had no need to use them. He had gone thirty
years without touching a screen and now they were all around him
everywhere he went.
    Shipboard life was even more reliant
upon electronic processing. Even drawing water from a faucet
involved computers, to monitor the purity, to adjust the
temperature to something drinkable and to draw the water through
plumbing that was subject to gravitational surges and sometimes no
gravity at all.
    After five years away from Gry, he had
become inured to daily life driven by digital enhancements, but he
was still adjusting to the level of computer assistance
onboard.
    That was another reason he had stayed
away from the engineering areas. Computers and AIs had no heart to
speak of, but their guts and entrails lived in engineering.
    He sidled past the banks of servers and
tried to pretend the structures were simply mounds of mechanical
equipment and kept looking. He could hear something beneath the
engines and the electronic humming, just ahead.
    He