...
The trilling pulled her out of sleep. She had the blue ambient on tonight, it bathed the entirety of the cabin with its flat light. She took a swig of the purple syrup. She was sleeping hard, but the purple didn't allow for dreams. The warm fuzziness was pulled all over her body, but no dreams. She knew this as she slept and it nagged her. The trilling was the last of the annoyances. She gestured in a unique way that had the lights in the cabin go on and a flash of pure oxygen to help her wake.
She pulled off her covers, made from cerybian silk. It was the only luxury she really ever bought outside of ships and guns. Her body teetered as she made her way to the console. Without being fully awake, her hands lumbered all over the screen, but she got there. The trilling stopped and Gustiv popped on. His eyes rolled over her body. She was nude.
"Hey. Never saw you like that before."
"I'm sure we can both be professional. You called me out of sleep."
"I'll defer a joke to your memory about what I'll be dreaming of." He paused for a laugh he knew he would've gotten with anyone else in this galaxy. "Ok. Right. So, I have the data you requested for Cam. The best I could muster was some holographic stills from a few ports. A lot of security in other places is strictly local. It'll take time.""Where then?"
Gustiv was pushing packets as he spoke, "Last known was three days ago in Lopare. It was transferring transports. Had a lot of credits on it, letting everyone know. It is desperate." She mulled that over a bit. That was good intel. The more eyes on it, the more it thinks nothing will happen in the bright of day.
"Good. I'll transfer what I owe you. You get me something within a day or twelve cycles, and I'll transfer you four times the amount. Also, don't have Ber sending anything anymore, we're done: she and I."
"20,000. The bounty must be solid. Affirmative on Ber. Done for both of us then, I'll let her know." She caught his eyes roll over her breasts for a twentieth time, rolling her eyes in response. Grow up. He shut down.
With the packets in her possession she spooled up the AI, Richie. He hummed as he booted up, it increased until it was at a conversational level. "Howdy, miss."
"Richie, have new data to correlate Cam Eyres location. I need you to start chewing on this against where I left off six hours ago. I would ignore the last two hours beyond that, my mind was drifting. I'll be working in tandem.""Yes, mum." The AI pulsed to acknowledge that it was working, but offline. It sounded to her like a bass-filled swallow.
In the meantime, she scrutinized the pattern of Cam's movements. They were furtive, but meaningful. The bounty was for alive, so she had to think ahead of it. He was Artharian, so he was limited to very specific zones, necessarily amphibic. A wet place, warm. She highlighted those systems in a line of his trajectory. There were three options. The faster I close the gap between it's arrival and myself, the faster we close this. Amphibics can lay at the bottom of some deep chasmic lake and stay there for years. It was a racist comment, but it was a variable in this equation.
She paused. There were two other worlds. She thought of the macro view and the macro statistics. There were two other worlds that had regions that could sustain it too.
Richie came back into her console as a blurry finger, as if he were raising it politely. She couldn't get mad at him often. She acknowledged his question. "To the finer points of the bounty, I already understand that Cam Eyres is wanted alive to be called as a witness in the prosecution of the Ta'il Syndicate. However, your report has not specified to what information he holds."
"Relevance?""I could then correlate what information it has and to the disposition of travel movements it may take next."
"Exampled?"
"...if it were physical evidence, it may look to a Gridrian Bank for safekeeping. However, if all is non-physical, the more remote and quickest option will put it in regions that I have overlaid upon your work." He did it and put a yellow blur on the further options.
"Non-physical."
Richie acknowledged and disappeared again. *gulp*. She straightened up and looked at how the transit map looked now. Too many options. She got that itch though. It would do what it knew best, get to a deep pit of a warm, water source and hide. Hide and disappear and hibernate until it got tired of doing it for decades.
She queried her options against any subterranean water sources that held a consistent ambient temperature of 50Ui. There was only one. Only a day and a half. She culled up Richie from his work and told him of her findings. "You could possibly get there as it is arriving."
"That's the plan, Richie. Punch it to Tevaris, top line."
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