They actually run up these cliffs, he mused. Why?
Here, on the bare overlook above the Preserve, he reviewed the latest messages regarding the HoloVision foil and the curious rebellion of the largest stand of kelp in the region.
“So, Marta, do you really believe that they’ve turned back?” he asked.
His communications officer, a little plump for her regulation blue jumpsuit, managed a quick chew at her lip before responding. Flattery had bedded her once and recalled that her touch was far more satisfying than her looks. She’d been a slender young thing then—four, maybe five years ago. She had started as a bodyguard on his nightside detail, but showed a facility with electronics that impressed his engineers. When she requested a transfer, he granted it. The move headed off rumors and the inevitable discomfort of extracting himself from a sticky personal situation.
“I … I don’t know,” she said. “The device that I placed personally on their foil is working perfectly, and its course is consistent with a return to this—”
“Bah!” Flattery blurted. “They’re not stupid. I insisted that you place the device on or inside her person and you took it upon yourself to place it elsewhere. A Current Control outpost has already confirmed the device to be aboard a crippled sub train dragging a few thousand kilos of dead fish.”
Flattery enjoyed the stunned look that flattened her face. She looked small and pale now.
“I was afraid,” she said. “I was afraid to touch her.”
Marta hung her head as though expecting a blade. The merciless suns here on the bluff widened the circles of sweat forming under her armpits. It was that heavy, sticky time on the coast just before the rain squalls hit. He didn’t have to sniff to smell the rain.
Flattery remembered that time with her on a hot afternoon like this, and their skins poured sweat. Tiny black hairs from his chest had stuck to her small white breasts and she laughed as she picked them off. She hadn’t been so afraid of him then, just a little bit in awe, which made things easier.
“Dammit!” he muttered to himself. Bitten by the fiction again.
He drew himself up to his full height, nearly two heads taller than Marta.