Banner decided to take the long way home, by walking. Something about the salvage yard operator's last words bothered him. It also bothered him why he couldn't pinpoint why they disturbed him. There wasn't anything inherently wrong about suggesting that Cimarron accompany him to the robotics repair shop. The only major problem would be convincing her to accompany him in the first place. But then, if this Terrel Riverside was anything like the Nowhere City Inn clerk...
He fisted his hands in his jacket pocket as he trudged past the transportation station. No. He shouldn't care how other men looked at her. She was just an annoying guest staying at his house. He was just being gracious for offering her a place to stay. It would have pleased his great-uncle that he was making nice with his goddaughter.
The ground rung dully with the pounding of his footsteps. He looked resolutely ahead, welcoming the relative cold that seeped through his clothes. He didn't like her at all, he told himself. He was just being uncharacteristically nice. With that thought, he started swearing under his breath, as he called himself as being all sorts of idiot.
Past the transportation station, the North Corridor loomed. With no other choice, Banner stepped onto the moving walkway toward the North Dome. He looked passed the sim-glass to the moon's landscape. From the north, the crater in which the city hugged against, appeared even larger and desolate. Strange rivets zigzagged the terrain on this side, which he imagined would look like the tracts of dimples on the rind of a cantaloupe, if observed from space.
Something dark at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He moved his head slightly and looked more closely behind him at a figure dressed in a navy blue jumpsuit with a transportation logo pinned on his shoulder. The man had a cap over his head with flaps which covered his ears and a visor which cast a shadow over the features of his face. The transportation worker, however, was not looking at him at all, but at a hand-held planner.
Banner turned to look ahead again. He was just being paranoid.
He made his way back to the South Dome without further incident—due to the fact that he willfully ignored anyone else passing him by. When he entered the house, the entrance and kitchen appeared empty. Apparently, Cimarron had cleaned up the breakfast dishes after he had left earlier. Glancing at the clock, he pondered cooking lunch. After the cup of coffee earlier in the morning, he was feeling famished. But the thought of just grabbing a protein bar tasting of wood pulp made him mentally and physically rebel. For a year, he had been subjected to sensory deprivation of all sorts. Which made him hunger for and to appreciate the things which before he had taken for granted.
Opening one of the drawers in the kitchen, he found that the gardening robots had plucked several ripened tomatoes and some grapes in addition to the figs that he had seen the last time he had visited the hydroponics garden. After pulling out some other items that he had purchased earlier at the grocery store, he took out a pot and filled it with water before bringing it to a boil. He slid out a cutting board on the kitchen counter and began slicing out thin strips of synth veal.
When the imported pasta was put into a pot and the meat was ready for the skillet, his guest finally wandered out from the depths of the house. She had finally changed into a pair of denim pants and a cream colored sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, emphasizing her high cheekbones. Banner saw her arrive at the corner of his eye as he prepared the food, but pretended to not notice her as she came closer to the counter to see what he was doing.
“With all the repair robots running around this place, I expected that there would be a meal preparer as well,” she said. She reached out to poke at a tomato.
“Don’t touch that. You’ll bruise it.”
“Playing the gourmet chef, aren’t you?”
Banner laid the meat onto the skillet, pleased that the oil sizzled rather loudly. “There is a meal preparer. But I decided not to use it.”
“Isn’t this too much work?”
He grunted. “I have all the time in the world.” He tested the pasta with a wooden spoon and then began chopping the tomatoes and some parsley to be cooked in a sauce pan. “I gather you did all your correspondence?”
“The necessary ones,” she replied enigmatically. She seemed focused on the knife in his hands. “Can I help with anything?”
“How about setting the table? The dishes are in that cupboard on your left.”
As she rummaged for some plates, she asked, “So how was your trip to the salvage yards? Did they have the materials?”
“Yeah. They’ll be delivered later today.” He paused briefly as he checked the synth-veal on the skillet. “I have a favor to ask of you.”
“What sort of favor?” Faint suspicion laced her voice.
“I need to have some of those robots repaired, of course, after that methane explosion down in the lower level. The operator at the salvage yard recommended someone to me, but warned me that I wouldn’t get anywhere unless I brought you with me.”
“What do I have to do about anything? I know little about robotics, except maybe the programming. But your robots need much more serious repair than simply rewriting some software.”
He stirred the tomato sauce, tasted it, and decided that it needed a bit of pepper. “Yes, but apparently the robot repairman has a weakness for women. You might be able to make him more complacent.”
She turned to him after she placed the plates on the dining table and regarded him thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I have the tendency to have the opposite effect on some people.”
“Doesn’t matter. At least his attention will be on you, not me.”
“What’s wrong his attention on you?”
“Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe it has to do with the rumors floating around this place. Nowhere City isn’t that large, you know. It doesn’t take much for it to get around that an ex-criminal has settled down in this backwater town.” He smiled self-deprecatingly to himself. “I’m sure the authorities have this place discretely surrounded.”
“If they did, they would have noticed me yesterday trying to get in here.”
He shrugged. “Right. But they probably don’t care. After all, doesn’t someone like me deserve to be robbed anyway?”
Cimarron grabbed some silverware. “You don’t have much faith in the system to do what’s right.”
“Nope.” As he drained the pasta, he wondered how he let her sidestep his request and get onto the topic of himself—something that he particularly didn’t want to discuss.
* * *
After overseeing the delivery of the titanium alloy sheets from the salvage yard and going over the latest progress on the repairs happening on the lower level of his great-uncle’s vacation house, Banner had taken a brief dinner before announcing that he was turning in for the night. Cimarron had merely replied that she would be staying up for a couple more hours reading in the study which was located at the end of a hallway, past the kitchen. He hadn’t cared. For some reason, he was feeling strangely lethargic. Perhaps it was due to the early hour that he had gotten up. Hopefully, he would be so tired that he would sleep without dreams.
But when he opened the door to his bedroom, a sudden attack of wrongness assailed him. The lights had not turned on yet, so he couldn’t understand what made him frown even though he saw nothing.
“Computer, lights, level 2.”
The lights came on in a soft, muted intensity. His room was divided into a brief living area with couches, chairs, a desk. Then a narrow archway led to the area where his bed was. On first glance, everything appeared in their proper places.
A dull throb pulsed behind his head, making him blink. The headaches were nothing new—he had had them periodically since the age of eighteen. Doctors had found nothing wrong with him and had simply told him it was probably the product of psychosomatic stress. But he doubted it had anything to do with stress. Because ever time one of those headaches would come on, he would make some sort of connection with what would happen or what had happened. Some would have called it old-fashioned intuition. But he was too often right for it to be some kind of random gut reaction. He preferred to call it insight.
His own bedroom used to be a guest room. He had not felt right taking over his great-uncle’s master bedroom even though the entire place now belonged to him. Everything there seemed too personal. The guest room, however, was completely impersonal. He had not yet stayed long enough to accumulate anything that would have marked the room as his. As it was, there was little in the room that could have been moved at all. But something drew him toward the desk.
The desk was a curve of black panel on an arching support made of the same material. There was nothing on the desk to be moved, but Banner activated the controls and accessed the logs. The time it was last accessed coincided with the time that he had arrived on Triton. But something still nagged at the back of his mind. He scrolled through some other logs which showed when the times when he had entered his room. The logs showed no discrepancy. But if anyone was determined to get in undetected, he supposed it would be possible to doctor the logs.
He blew out a breath and rolled his shoulders. Or he could be acting paranoid again. He tilted his head back, trying to ease the muscles in his neck, when he saw it. An irregular, oily stain on the ceiling, the size of a thumbnail.
