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

glanced to his right as he moved
beyond the edge of a bank of servers and spotted Lilita. She was
sitting on the floor, her legs sprawled any way, her abundant curls
spilling over her shoulder and covering most of her face, as she
looked down at her lap. She had this side of the servers open and
was working on a fragile-looking sheet of crystals with a finely
made tool. There was a box filled with more tools next to her
hip.
    She looked up, her dark eyes narrowed.
Then she smiled. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch something, down
here?”
    “I admit my comfort level is not what
I’d prefer. But you are not easy to find in the common areas.”
    She looked up and around at the
equipment surrounding her on three sides. “This stuff takes a lot
of maintenance. It’s so old, something falls apart every time
Catherine kicks in the Machs.” She hefted the board in her hands.
“Like these. They were fine three days ago, but now two of the
crystals are cracked right through their centers.” She curled her
feet under her hips and lifted up onto her knees, to slide the
board back into the proper slot. “I spend a lot of time down here
because if I didn’t, the ship would start flaking apart.”
    “You can fix it even though it’s so
old? You know this stuff?”
    “It’s old, but the principles are still
the same. Well, sort of the same. It’s just a lot bigger than I’m used to. But I can print any parts I need and there’s a
stock of crystals so big it could generate its own gravity well, so
nothing is ever going to be unfixable.”
    “Sort-of the same?”
    Lilita frowned, marring the perfection
of her flesh. “To look at things at first glance, I could see this
stuff is old. But then, when I started digging in, getting to know
the structure and the circuitry and how it was all laid out….” She
pressed her lips together, looking inward, possibly recalling her
exploration of the systems. “It’s far more complex than anything
I’ve ever seen.”
    “But the AIs are all shackled, right?
“
    She almost rolled her eyes. “Of course
they are. They’ll all itty baby things, only enough smarts to fix
themselves and call for help if they can’t. No, it’s the other
systems. The support and sub-routines. It’s like someone has been
adding capacity and storage any which way, a bit here and a bit
there…” She grinned. “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “It’s probably
just that the ship is so damn old it’s got redundant circuits and
routines all over the place.”
    “Most likely,” Brant said politely,
although the idea of systems being so old and so out of control
there were areas even a good engineer couldn’t map…that didn’t make
him any more comfortable. “But that’s probably why they hired an
engineer before they hired the muscle.”
    She gave him a small smile. “I’m still
trying to figure why you’re onboard. Cat could take you down and
three others like you before you blink. Come to that, I could
probably do the deed myself, long time before you got around to
reacting with that old body of yours.”
    Brant didn’t take offense. He’d found
that most people couldn’t help but comment one way or another on
his signs of aging. “On occasion, a second pair of hands is
helpful. Catherine believes some of those occasions might be coming
up. I’m just glad to have the job.”
    Lilita brushed off her hands and put
her tools away. “So you found me,” she prompted.
    “We’re going to be in the Soward system
in a few days. Catherine implied…well, she didn’t even do that
much. She failed to point out how we would be able to slide Kemp
past the gatekeepers on Soward’s terminal.”
    “Probably means we’re not,” Lilita said
and got to her feet.
    Brant nodded. “Does that mean they’re
actually going to land this ship on the surface?”
    Lilita grinned at him. “You’re a real
sod dog aren’t you? Why can’t we land on the surface?”
    “Ships just