“Proctor Tovin.” Keim said it half as greeting, half as identification as Rahel walked into easy speaking distance.
Rahel passed her by without slowing down. “Some reporter you are. What were you doing talking to him?” She waved at where Paval fidgeted with one leg already in the waiting skate. “He doesn’t know shit.”
“I’d assumed as much.” Keim fell into step behind her, unperturbed. “Mostly, I was waiting for you.”
“I don’t know shit, either.” Rahel tossed her pack at Paval. “Talk to me tomorrow.”
“I don’t know that I’ll be able to get permission again tomorrow.”
Rahel paused, one hand still on the dock piling, and turned slowly to cock a suspicious look at Keim. “Permission?” Behind her, Paval groaned.
“I know you won’t believe it, but this wasn’t even my idea.” Coming a few leisurely steps closer, Keim presented a folded slip of paper. “The memo I got this morning said I should give you this if you made trouble.”
Rahel plucked the note away from her without shifting her scowl from Keim’s pert little smile. The faintest tickle of pleasant sweetness danced counterpoint to the smell of ocean when she spread the note open against her palm. The scent dissipated before she could identify what it was supposed to remind her of.
Feles Sadena’s already-familiar script decorated the paper with hairlike grace.
Proctor Tovin—
Forgive my presumption in arranging this interview with Ms. Keim. I have paid generously for your presence on my planet, however, and so I feel I have some liberty in interpreting the particulars of your duties here.
I would very much like to see at least one of the netlink services produce a truthful report of our efforts on behalf of the stellar jellyfish. With that in mind, Ms. Keim of GreeNet has been granted permission to accompany you on today’s expedition. You do not, of course, have to answer everything she chooses to ask you, but I needn’t remind you of the benefits of positive publicity.
Thank you for your cooperation in this.
Cooperation. He obviously didn’t know her very well.
“She showed me that, too.”
Rahel hadn’t even heard Paval move up behind her, and so shot him a sharper look than she’d really intended.
His attention, however, was focused on Keim. “Do we really have to bring her with us?” he asked quietly.
Rahel shrugged. “Did Sadena say anything about this during dinner last night?”
“He never even came to dinner last night.” She couldn’t tell if Paval’s disgust was aimed at Sadena or the reporter.
“Well, then…” Rahel made no effort to keep her own voice down, “we could always push her off the pier.”
“And she’d write all about it in her netlink upload tonight.” Keim returned Rahel’s glower with an angelic grin. A Greenie, Rahel reminded herself, and a smartass.
“Remember that skinny little redhead who came in with us?” Rahel rolled Sadena’s note into a ball between both palms. “Well, we brought him along to talk to people just like you. Why don’t you go bother him?”
“Because I’d rather talk to the people who are doing the real work,” Keim told her, stepping down into the skate beside them. The boat listed drunkenly under her added ballast, and Paval scooted hurriedly to the other side to try to even them out. “Not to the people with the pre-prepared answers who were sent to stonewall the people like me.”
As much as Nils would have accused her of not understanding politics, Rahel had to admit that she knew enough to know that pissing off both the Ark’s employer and a major netlink news correspondent in one fell swoop wasn’t a very good idea. She just wished she could shake the feeling that Nils would have found some incredibly smooth way to convince Keim she’d rather count sea gulls from the docks. She jerked loose the closest tie-off, and turned away from the reporter with a growl.
“You got extra UV block?”
Paval looked up from strapping on his flippers with sharper, shorter motions than really necessary. “Me?”
“You?” Rahel parroted, not in the mood for anyone else’s ill temper but her own. “The man without a molecule of melanin in his dermis.”
He pursed his lips and bent back to his equipment. “I’m already covered up.” This despite the fact that his cheekbones and nose already looked pinkish above the bright yellow-and-black Ark skinsuit. Or maybe that was just a trick of the strong greenhouse sun.
“Not for you—” The skate’s antigravs cut in with a kick, and their rise to a meter above the water made Rahel catch at Paval’s shoulder when she leaned over him to jerk his pack out from under his seat, “—for her.” She found a tube of UV screen jammed under a clutter of sampling vials and a flimsy on skinsuit prep. “If she sunburns while she’s out here, she’ll probably blame that on Noah’s Ark, too.”
Rahel turned to find Keim sitting awkwardly on the floor of the skate. It soothed her irritation a little to see the faint startlement in the reporter’s eyes as the skate crept silently up to speed. She held the UV block in front of Keim’s face, then sighed when the reporter didn’t immediately reach for it.
“You’ve got less than thirty minutes before me and my partner dive overboard and start getting down to that ‘real’ work you mentioned.” Rahel caught at Keim’s wrist and unceremoniously clapped her hand around the UV tube. “So if I was you, Ms. Keim, I’d start talking.”
Sunlight, bright as fire on glass, exploded across the water around them as the skate slipped northward out from under the shoreline shadow. Rahel squinted despite her sun visor, and heard Keim groan against the sudden intensity before Paval relinquished his own eye protection—for the sake of the Ark’s reputation, no doubt. She wished now that she’d thought to bring along extra visors, and couldn’t help burning with renewed annoyance at the reporter. Then they passed out of the shallows and the skate leapt into speed, leaving hotel, reporters, and frustrating hindsight doubts all behind.
Rahel hadn’t expected the hush of the skate’s low-friction sprint. She gripped the edges of her seat even though they streaked toward the Odarkan straits in a smooth, unnatural rush—no bobbing with the windy chop, no needle stings of water against her face or the exposed backs of her hands. The only wake behind them was a dotted trail of foam divots where wave crests were brave enough to brush at the stern of the boat as it raced by.
Rock clambered up from the water on either side, rising high and fast to build the ragged straits that marked the entrance to the Odarkan Sea. At the stately drift of a hot-air balloon, the throat of stone leading into the Odarkan had seemed long, and wild, and elegant. Now, it tore past too quickly to register as anything but a sketchy frame for the view of dawn-bleached mist and distant woodland. Then the fleeting sense of confinement whisked away, and the only thing Rahel could see besides the hectares of sun-splashed water was the smudge of border trees with their false rootwork of blurry swamp reflections.
“You’ve got to be making this up.” Rahel tore her gaze away from the slough’s bleak grandeur, and sighed. Keim had actually been quiet for nearly two minutes now, paging back and forth through screen after screen of scribbled notes. Rahel had rather hoped the reporter’s silence meant she couldn’t think of any more annoying questions. So much for that.