Galaxy's End: Book One by LeRoy Clary (popular ebook readers txt) 📗

angry. His revelation of making a person do something against their beliefs, background, or wishes, wore on my mind. It was always in the background of my thinking. It went against all I had believed.

Bill still sat across from me. We’d ordered more red and brown ice cream more as an excuse to remain close to each other than because we wanted to eat it. Bert remained quiet, understanding this was not the time to discuss Chance.

“Problems?” Bill asked as he paused while the bowls were delivered.

I said, “Too many to talk about.”

“Tell me the worst and we’ll go from there.”

It was a perfect answer. Just like Bill to go right to the heart of what bothered me. When I told him, he’d try to explain how I should handle it if he couldn’t fix it himself. That was not what I wanted. Or needed. All I wanted was an ear to listen.

Chance had spoken to me in the way he would have if I were his young daughter, not as if I had the power of life or death over him. While I didn’t have that power specifically, I certainly had input. Right now, my input was to shove his butt outside the ship and let him suck in a few breaths of vacuum.

Okay, I calmed myself. I wouldn’t ask for that unless his overbearing manner placed the ship in danger. Even then, I didn’t think I could do it. But all that didn’t mean I was any less angry or upset.

Changing the subject, I said, “You like it here. This ship, I mean. It’s old and too small for humans to be comfortable.”

He shrugged. That was evasive and made my anger tic upwards another point. I said, “If offered a position here, would you take it?”

Bill placed the spoon on the edge of his bowl as if realizing the seriousness of my question. He said, “What about you?”

“That was not the question!”

He clenched his jaw and growled, “I was not asking if you would accept a job without me, I was asking if you were also offered a position. We’re a team. Where you go, I go.”

What a friend. I loved the guy.

I tasted my ice cream and then said, “Why don’t you go back to work? I have some thinking to do.”

He stood and walked away. Again, he knew exactly what I needed.

I sat and reviewed every word of the conversation I’d had with Chance and examined it for hidden or underlying meanings. Bert could replay it, but that might confuse me. There were hints and traces of unknowns in his talk. Not humor, but almost funny. Like when a child tells his parents something that is almost correct—but not. Like when they say they can read but only know a few letters.

Parts of the conversation were slipping away but I trusted my memory to single out the important parts. The obvious things like forcing people were not what I wanted to remember. Nor that he was from the planet I’d spent a few years on. And he’d murdered one of the crew. Those were huge. Impossible to forget.

No, it was something else.

He had described how his family, all his children, and even his wife, were held, hostage. To do so, the mysterious employer made him kill a sentient being. That item bothered me, true or not. The explanation implied others knew of his empathic abilities and had made use of them. That was the problem I had. Who were those people and how did they know?

There had been the statement and then he quickly moved on in the conversation. If that were true, and he cared for them, he would be worried that since he hadn’t completed his assignment. His family would be punished or killed.

There should have been tears. Threats. Anger.

However, there were none of those.

The steward approached and asked if I wanted more ice cream. Looking down, I found it had melted, but that was not what I wanted. I said to her, more of an order than a request, “Take me to where the crew cabins are. Now.”

She flinched, then turned, and almost fled out a side door with me at her heels. It didn’t take long. She came around a corner and said, “All of us are in this passage, except for the captain, of course.”

“Which one belongs to Chance?”

She pointed.

The door was unlocked. I entered alone and found the cabin smelled of a man who didn’t bathe as often as he should. Or perhaps it was the pile of dirty uniforms in a sloppy pile in one corner. But I was not there to judge.

The cabin was like others. Small, cramped, and built for a race slightly smaller than humans. The walls of his cabin were bare. No magnetic picture frames of his family. The dresser top displayed three bottles of colognes. No photos.

“Bert, can you tell me where his personal computer or tablet is?”

“His wrist com is on him but deactivated when we arrested him. There is another tablet inside the cabin, to your right.”

I moved right and found a shirt tossed over it. “Bert, open his wrist com and search for photos of his family.”

“On it,” Bert replied.

The tablet was locked. Bert did his magic, and I was able to access it. There were no photos of anything. The tablet had barely been used. However, there was a link to his financials. We wouldn’t be able to look at them until we left the wormhole and entered three-dimensional space.

Bert pinged to announce himself. “No photos, no personal messages.”

I searched his tablet for messages and found only shipboard communications, duty assignments, and such. It was as if he didn’t have a personal life.

She located a locked and encrypted file. “Bert, can you help me