Julia Ecklar - Tide of Stars

As if Nils had heard them from a whole other balloon away, the phone in Rahel’s pocket chirped. She dug it out with an irritable sigh.

“Oh, please,” Nils groaned the moment she opened the contact. “Please tell me those aren’t what I think they are.”

Rahel scowled down at the mass of shouting people. The first waspish whiz of remote antigravs joined the babbling voices. “Well, they aren’t bellhops.”

“They’re reporters!” Paval, still folded nearly double over the gondola’s rail, had to jerk himself upright to avoid colliding with one of the fistsized minicams. It buzzed into position an arm’s length from him and activated its seeker light.

“Reporters?” Jynn had finally succeeded in hovering them just a little farther above the crowd than stones could easily be thrown. He obviously hadn’t counted on self-guided spybees.

“Either that or a Noah’s Ark fan club.” Paval swatted at two other whining remotes, to no avail. “How did they know we’d be here?”

Rahel barked a laugh, the phone resting against her shoulder. “Are you kidding? Reporters invented snitches. They can find out everywhere we go.” Although why they’d chosen here out of all the active Ark contracts was as much a mystery as anything the press did.

“Perhaps they’re here to help us.”

Rahel couldn’t help laughing at the sincerity of her apprentice’s suggestion. “You really are new to this, aren’t you?” She picked up the phone again without waiting for Paval to answer. “Nils, hit your lights. I want to get a good look at them.”

Almost immediately, a fat finger of light dashed through the darkness to splash against the roof of the hotel. Rahel felt their gondola tip gently as Paval leaned over one section of railing to activate their own powerful lamps. The crowd on the roof recoiled from the light as though they’d been doused with water, then poured back across the open landing area the moment they realized there was no danger. Their swarm of little remote bees echoed their movement.

Rachel cocked a look at Jynn. “Take us down a little closer.”

The pilot sighed unhappily, but out-gassed the balloon with a barely perceptible hiss.

There weren’t as many reporters on the pad as Rahel had first envisioned. A couple dozen, maybe, with that many again in hotel personnel trying to ring around them and keep them together—as if there were still guests in the resort who might be bothered by the shouting. The amoeboid gathering was the usual motley collection of suits, notepads, and budget-cloned faces. What did the netlinks do to get so many different representatives who all looked almost exactly alike? Rahel used to think they were all VR sims from the same length of flatscreen footage. She wasn’t sure it was worth trading her enlightenment on that point for proof as graphic as what shouted at her from below.

Crossing her arms, Rahel leaned her elbows on the rail and peered down at the jostling reporters. “You know,” she called, making a try at sounding amiable, “I could probably spit on you from here.”

An impassioned plea for attention surged through the gathering, as if her words had been the sweetest encouragement to each and every one of them. Rahel caught a few broken question fragments and a confusion of overlapping accusations, but nothing that sounded like she wanted to answer it. When a voice finally sorted itself from the general tumult, it was from a tall, brown-skinned man at the very edges of the knot.

“Proctor! I’m Cek Lencel, Instant News Service!” He tried to push past the chain of hotel security, squinting up at the balloon with one hand over his eyes. “Why is Noah’s Ark involving itself with a management problem on a planet owned by someone other than the Ark?”

Rahel opted not to dim the floods. “Why do you care?”

Lencel tipped his head in surprise. “The news netlinks care about everything.”

Yeah, right.

That comment somehow invited another eruption of shouted questions, and Rahel had to straighten up off her elbows to bellow loud enough to be heard over the noise. “Yes, Feles Sadena owns this planet. But Ark policy doesn’t limit us to trouble-shooting only in Ark habitats. If the private sector needs our engineering and research services to help manage any native environment, Noah’s Ark doesn’t think granting them that help is inappropriate.”

“Nicely said,” Nils purred approvingly across the open phone line. Just as well—it was the only piece of Noah’s Ark PR she knew by rote.

“Valhanryn Esz, Tomorrow Today. ” This time it was a woman, too bunched up against the mass of hotel folk to be picked out of the chaos. “Does that mean Noah’s Ark isn’t accepting any fiduciary compensation for your appearance here?”

“I guess it always comes down to that,” Paval remarked, quietly enough to reach Rahel’s ears but not the reporters’. He may have been an unasked for burden, but at least he caught on fast.

“That’s what I hate about you netlink guys,” Rahel answered the reporter. It took more control than she expected to keep from dropping things down onto their thick, news-gathering skulls. “No matter what I say, you’re going to make it mean whatever you want it to.”

Esz nodded blandly and buzzed her minicam closer. “So you are being paid.”

“Rahel…” Nils’s voice squeaked from the phone waiting down near her waist, “I think I should attack this subject.”

But she’d already told them, “Yes,” as flatly and noncombatively as she could. They all bent to their respective recording devices before she even started her second sentence. “Mr. Sadena is paying Noah’s Ark a consulting fee commensurate with what we’ve been paid elsewhere for similar environmental impact studies.”

“So it is not uncommon for Noah’s Ark to produce planetary reports to the specifications of private buyers?” She couldn’t even tell which bozo came up with that one.

Rahel smacked a hovering spybee away from her face. “Who told you that?”

“Well, you are accepting a great deal of money from Feles Sadena to produce a report for Feles Sadena, aren’t you?”

“The company I work for is accepting the money.” The act of sounding so gracious and patient made her teeth hurt.

“Oh, and that couldn’t possibly have any effect on how you choose to interpret the data you collect?”

She clenched her hands around the open phone. “It never has before.”

Nils groaned through the phone channel into her palm.

“Will you be working directly from Mr. Sadena’s samples and records?”

“Who will you be reporting to?”

Rahel gave up trying to sort out the voices from the crowd. “We’ll be conducting our own research— privately —and reporting back to both Mr. Sadena and the Ark as information becomes available.”

“Then will Mr. Sadena be deciding in which locations you’ll focus your search?”

She shrugged. “Why should he?”

“He has some pretty strong incentive to prove he isn’t destroying Uriel’s jellyfish, doesn’t he?”

“Look…” Rahel slapped at another roving minicam, missed, then nodded a terse thanks to Paval when he used the offline notebook to whack it out of the air. “Whatever Feles Sadena’s reasons for calling Noah’s Ark to Uriel, they don’t change the fact that our reason for being here is—”

“Monetary.” Someone different—a woman with the raw, unpolished look of a professional believer —pushed forward from the outermost edges of the crowd.

Rahel bounced the flat of one hand against the railing. “It’s not!” She already hated the young woman’s coolly crossed arms and well-cut green suit.