Rahel wished she were on the ground, face-to-face with this self-appointed moralist, or at least in range to grab and shake her pressed lapels. “What’s your name?”
The reporter cocked her chin up with easy pride. “Eme Keim.”
“From GreeNet,” Rahel finished for her, and Keim’s only answer was a twist of her mouth that didn’t resolve into any particular expression. Rahel allowed herself a derisive snort. “Well, guess what, Eme Keim? Science takes money. Do you think Noah’s Ark can just clone credit, the way we do the animals?”
“Rahel…” Nils’s warning trickled up like smoke through the still-open communications line.
“If we had endowments from every planet in the goddammed sector, we still couldn’t pay for the time—”
“Rahel!”
“—The food, the resources, the land—”
“Rahel!”
The bark of his voice leaping the distance between balloons caught her attention, and Rahel jerked an angry glare across the dark at Nils. He scowled back, just as fiercely, as though trying to mentally convey some message through the sheer force of his stare. Rahel clapped shut the phone in her hand in petulant dismissal.
If the gesture meant anything at all to Nils, he ignored it. Slipping his own phone into a pocket, he leaned over the edge of his gondola to address the reporters. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.” The group as a whole inclined heads to peer at him, and Nils smiled coolly. “I’m Proctor Nils Ob-erjen, Proctor Tovin’s associate and counsel. I would be more than happy to explain the public particulars of Noah’s Ark’s contract with Mr. Sadena to you, but not from up here. I have traveled twenty-seven light-years, spent two days in a jumpship with my colleagues, and have neither bathed nor eaten since arriving on Uriel. If you’d like to have your curiosity satisfied, kindly let us set down and tend to our creature needs first. Perhaps we can talk in the morning.”
“No.”
Nils twitched upright as though he’d been poked in the ass. Rahel would have given anything to have a clearer view of his face just then. Maybe this would teach him to trot out his juristic bullshit for the media.
“You’re not the only one to spend a lot of time and money getting here,” Valhanryn Esz told him prissily. “We’ve been standing in the cold for four hours, waiting for you to get back from your sightseeing. Now, you’re either going to answer a couple of questions, or you’re not putting down.” Her colleagues hooted and whistled their support, and she glanced around her with obvious pleasure. “That’s the deal,” she said at last to Nils. “And I’m afraid it’s not negotiable.”
Rahel snorted, and the reporters all glanced up at her as though they’d forgotten her presence. “I’ve done barter with the mazhet,” she told them, scowling. “Everything’s negotiable.” She nodded brusquely back at Jynn. “Set us down.”
The pilot’s eyes flashed white in the darkness. “Ma’am?”
“I said set us down.” Rahel grinned maliciously over the railing at the unsettled crowd below. “The only thing netlink parasites care about more than their headline grabbing is themselves. They’ll move.”
Jynn reached uncertainly for the descent controls above his shoulder. “And what if they don’t?”
“They’ll move.”
The first blast of outrushing gas gained a haphazard rumble of surly protest from below, then a more directed cry of alarm when the first reporter realized the balloon was descending rather than going away. People and spybees scattered from beneath the gondola like pigeons. Rahel heard Nils moaning something about “reckless endangerment” and “litigious barbarians,” but she had learned long ago not to take his displays of anxiety too seriously. By the time their gondola bumped to rest on the smooth pavement, only Keim still stood close enough to clap hands on the rail and nod thoughtfully.
“Force.” The GreeNet envoy very pointedly held her ground while Rahel swung one leg over the railing and started to climb down. “Very environmental. Very subtle.”
“You’ve probably heard…” Rahel turned to accept the pack of field equipment Paval passed down to her. “Subtlety isn’t my strong suit.” Her apprentice followed her in silence, avoiding eye contact with the reporters in a way that could have meant either great annoyance or embarrassment. Rahel couldn’t tell which, but suspected both were as likely.
“If I were you,” Keim suggested, “I’d work on the subtlety thing. You could have killed somebody here.”
Rahel smiled and shouldered her pack with a shrug. “You’re not part of the native environment. Why should I care?”
The Newborn robot who staffed the main lobby crouched behind the desk like a blue and silver crab. Rahel guessed it as an old construction mech, judging from the collection of arms and spare arm sockets bristling from its stumpy body. Probably a foreman or it never would have developed enough awareness to petition the courts for sentient status. Someone had done a bang-up job refitting its chassis to match the Startide’s glass and aquamarine decor, even down to replacing the lenses in its optics with varying shades of blue and turquoise crystal. The hotel designers had even granted the Newborn a certain sense of freedom by hiding its necessary monofilament track in the sweeping kelp-frond pattern of the white-and-green tile floor.
There was obviously something for everyone at the Startide Hotel—whether you were human or not.
“Well,” Rahel stopped just inside the landing pad doorway and dropped her luggage with a sigh. “I guess no one can fault Sadena for accommodating non-human personnel.”
Paval glanced up from setting down his own small roll of luggage, turning a look over one shoulder to note the Newborn at its slightly-too-short registration desk. “I wonder how well he treats his human personnel.” Then, seeming suddenly to realize how impolite that sounded, he pushed their field pack together with their gear and volunteered curtly, “I’ll go get the keys,” before Rahel could say anything to reprimand him.
Not that she’d intended to. She watched him cross the spacious lobby at a brisk trot, and wondered if Saiah had forced an apprentice on her because he thought it would be just like having another puppy. If only apprentices had such short childhoods and were so easily trained.
“Thank you so much for waiting to make sure the media didn’t rend me limb from limb.” Nils came up on her from behind, his footsteps characteristically unhurried even though he carried nothing but a pocket notebook and a single overnight valise. “Really—thank you.”
Rahel glanced back to find him completely unscathed, his valise balanced neatly atop Rahel’s equipment pack. “A lawyer as slick as you, Nils? I thought that was why the Ark sent you.”
“And with your skills at client relations, Rahel, it’s a wonder they even considered me.”
Not in the mood for Nils’s verbal sparring, Rahel leaned back against a nearby pillar and watched the fish in one of the self-sustaining tank colonies. They looked as confused and unhappy with their artificial surroundings as she.
“Anyone up for dinner in the Galaxy Ballroom?”
She looked up as Paval approached, and Nils lifted red-gold eyebrows with interest. “Are you paying?” the lawyer asked.
Smiling, Paval handed Rahel her flat plastic key with one hand, offering a similar card to Nils with his other. “I don’t think anyone working for the Ark makes enough money to afford it.” He fished in a front pocket of his field vest and withdrew a crumpled square of paper between two fingers. “Huan gave me this when I picked up the keys.”
“Huan?” Rahel twitched the paper away from her apprentice, just out from under Nils’s reaching hand. Nils returned his hand to the top of his suitcase with quiet aplomb, too well-bred to bicker.