The intervening days have been quiet. Fortunately, it's the good sort of quiet, the comfortable sort that you fall into with someone who you know nearly as well as you know yourself. Yesterday she'd taken a self-guided tour of the ship. I'd offered to show her around myself - though I usually preferred to spend time in the pilot's seat, the ship is actually fairly competent at flying on its own - but she'd turned me down with that mysterious look of hers. It wasn't until later that night I'd found out that what she'd actually been doing was trying to find all the hiding spots. Every ship has one, at least every ship with a freelance owner does. They're the spots you put things that the local authorities have, for whatever reason, deemed illegal and yet you have decided to carry anyway. Usually shielded against both regular detection and bumbling inspection teams. On occasion, they're used to secret actual people from place to place, which is where I suppose Katie's interest in them came from. Though, unless she suspected me of smuggling people - and that was most definitely against my 'harmless items only' policy - it didn't really explain why she was going through my ship in particular. For a while I was content to just let her explain when she was ready to, but it rapidly became apparent that the knowing smirk on her face meant she intended to say nothing until I brought it up. So I asked.
"I just wanted to see how many of them I could find. Gotta keep in shape, after all."
Curious myself as to the security of my hiding spots, I asked how many she found. All but one, it turned out, and that one was only accessible from the outside of the ship, so it wasn't exactly convenient. I made a mental note to design new spots.
I also mentally thanked my luck that I hadn't been in the midst of an operation which would have me making use of them. Katie likely wouldn't have interfered, but then again with her new job she might now be unable to overlook the small stuff. Thank goodness she hadn't found this journal; I've already confessed to mail-tampering. She'd put me away for life!
"You're being melodramatic."
She's watching me enter this right now, as it happens. She's known I kept a journal since yesterday, when she caught me trying to surreptitiously key in this entry. I received no end of teasing on this topic, notably the insistence that I start each entry with "Dear Diary". Understandably, I'm not terribly amused at this.
"Spoil sport. Fine, it's obvious you don't want a beautiful and available woman in your quarters anymore. I'll just be at the pilot's seat."
We're alone now, you and I. It's difficult to keep this journal with her around. We keep secrets from each other; I've never met anyone who didn't. There's things in this journal that I haven't told her. Things I'm not proud of, like getting Curly the twist back on Poln. Things like what actually happened in Ulix space. So anything I type in has to be mentally sanitized with witnesses in the area. Thankfully, there's no real access points to the journal. Central storage on the ship isn't accessible from the inside except via my panels here in my quarters and in the pilot's seat.
The pilot seat that Kate's sitting in, right now.
Hi, Kate.
## Hi yourself. ##How's the view from the pilot's seat?
## Fantastic. Though this journal's providing even more entertaining reading. Those sensors are awful exciting, but I think you've got them beat. ##You know, the entire time I've been writing this, I've been doing it under the assumption that some spy or prosecutor was going to be using it against me. I never figured you'd be the one to do so.
## Come now, I just plugged in to what you were writing right now. I wouldn't go through the whole thing unless you okay it. I've got my secrets too, you know. You wouldn't snoop in my diary, would you?##No comment.
## So can I read yours? ##I sighed. What the hell did I just write that for? I'm sighing, right now, at you, Katie. Sure, fine, read it if you want.
## Nah, that'd be rude. I'll do it some other time. It's getting kinda dry now that you know I'm looking over your shoulder again. ##I love that woman.
## Suck-up. ##--
Just like that, she's gone.
Not permanently, of course. Our brief conversation before her departure indicated she'd probably be on Exile a fair amount of time, so we stood a chance of running into each other. While it's nice to have the ship to myself again and be able to feel free in what I say and do, there is a part of me that misses her.
## Miss you too. ##I suspect she may have left me a little gift. Specifically, in the programming of the journal. She's always giving me farewells that way.
Her actual farewell was nothing so elaborate. I entered orbit around New Yotia and docked with the station. I was allowed to escort her to the airlock, but of course could go no farther. She gave me a hug and wished me well, saying she was sure we'd meet again.
And just like that, she's gone.
Afterward, I orbited the planet for a while, just looking at it. It'd been a while since I'd been here; I'd had a few contracts that brought me to this area, but those were few and far between. Few were willing to trust one of my species with anything to do with this place. Every time I came, I spent as much time looking down at the place as I could. Exile was a good place, and a part of my heart belongs there, but this planet will always be home.
Eventually the Yotia orbital defense ships buzzed me and gave me a warning which amounted to "stop looking so suspicious. In fact, get the hell out of here." They did this every time I stopped by, and every time I did as they asked. They already suspected me of trying to finish the work my people started, no reason to give them extra ammunition.
I set course along Lane 530, as that would take me toward Anjarti space. As it happened, I had an Anjarti I wanted to talk to: Salient Steve. As is the case with many of the names I've put down here, that's not his actual one. His name translated to about a paragraph's worth of description, and I can't remember it properly (which would be a grave insult) so, like I do in these cases, I gave him a nickname. He didn't mind because he didn't know; the translator did all the work.
Salient Steve earned his name by being the most visible of our research team, back in the day. Next to Dr. Fallon, he was the highest-ranking non-Ulix involved with the project. He was management, essentially, as the good doctor was too busy doing research with me and Jenny the Amazing Research Squid (sadly, aside from the 'Jenny' part, that was not a nickname; it's how her name actually translated) to deal with the Ulix and military higher-ups who wanted to see a return on their investment.
Of all the people I'd worked with in that project, he was the only one that I had a clue as to the whereabouts of. I suppose I could have hired a private detective, only that's also one of the jobs I tend to freelance at, and it would of course bug me to have to get someone else to do it. So Salient Steve was my best lead. Last I knew, he was on Anjart itself, which narrowed down the search to about twenty billion creatures which were visually indistinguishable from each other to the untrained eye. I'd spent a lot of time with Steve, granted, but not among his own kind. I never learned how to tell him apart. With luck I wouldn't have to. I'd just have to make a posting on the Anjart Mercantile Station job boards.