Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Nita snickered as Kit covered his eyes. “There’s one of your stalls about halfway down, isn’t there? We can grab something as we go by.”

Kit couldn’t see any reason to argue, especially when people were working so hard to get him to do something he wanted to do. “Come on,” he said, and he and Nita and Ronan started ambling down that way.

All around them the stream and bustle of thousands of humanoids coming and going went on, the wide concourse packed unusually full of people heading down to briefings or up toward the higher-power gate hexes reserved for large group transits or longer-distance jumps. “Funny,” Ronan said, “but normally you’d think seventeen thousand Earth people is a lot. With this lot all over Tevaral, though, we’ll be barely a spit in the ocean. Might feel kind of isolated…”

“We should try to get together while we’re there if we can,” Kit said.

Ronan shrugged. “Shouldn’t be a problem. It’s shift work, if I’m understanding the précis right: you get sort of eight or ten hours on and then eight hours off, and the rest of it’s sleep time. Pretty sure no one’ll care what we do with the off hours, as long as the people sharing your posting know where to find you if they need you in a hurry.”

Kit nodded as they continued on through the mostly-humanoid crowds, all along the way being paced by automatically-generated Speech-based Crossings information announcements targeted at the transient wizardly population.

“Tevaral Rafting Intervention transit group 1165RS, please note that you have a targeted information augment requiring your attention, please check your errantry-data modalities for more detail…”

“TRI transit group 1417TG, hex change advisory: your departure hex has been changed to 604, repeating, 604. Please make your way to the 600 hex group—”

“You know, we might have a group number too,” Nita said, and moved to pull her manual out again.

“5611GH,” Ronan said, without even breaking stride.

Kit shot him an amused look. There were occasions when Ronan’s organized side revealed itself more clearly than usual… usually when he was a bit unnerved, and going out of his way to conceal it.

“Okay,” Nita said. “Is that the place up there? Yeah, I think so…” She took the lead.

Kit and Ronan followed her through the crowds toward the kiosk she was targeting. “This is a general service announcement for entities involved in the Tevaral Rafting Intervention,” said the air in their immediate vicinity. “Please note that although for the duration of this intervention comestible selection options have been augmented at all food service outlets in the Main Concourse, you may experience occasional peak-period scarcity of supply for comestibles containing the following: manganese, technetium, zinc, arsenic, bromine, beryllium…”

Kit shook his head, amused, as the list went on.

“No?” Nita said, concerned, as they reached the kiosk and she paused by it. “You don’t want to eat at this one? I thought you liked these guys the last time.”

“What? Oh! No, this is fine,” Kit said. “Just scared for a moment there that I might not be getting enough arsenic in my diet…”

“Oh.” She grinned, and the three of them settled in at the kiosk. It was built along the normal Crossings lines for this kind of standalone structure: circular, with a glasslike table/ledge section that deformed or reformed itself upward, downward, inward or outward according to the stature of the species or beings using it. Above it all floated a slowly-rotating cylindrical signage structure covered with illuminated sliding 3-D images of food, and (alternating with the imagery) price lists in symbologies that changed from second to second in reflection of changing market values, availability, or the species or linguistic preferences of the viewer. Inside the counter was the being who ran the kiosk—a Rirhait, as so many Crossings service personnel were, this one with a bright metallic-blue carapace—and an assortment of food service machinery, mostly chromed and looking very sleek and industrial.

Kit knew the drill perfectly well by now. He dropped his manual onto the counter, the action immediately informing the Crossings data management and accounting systems that a wizard on active errantry was going to be ordering, and therefore (in line with best practice for gating facilities galaxy-wide) would be eating for free. Immediately the kiosk’s information management system pulled data from the manual regarding Kit’s species, likely food preferences, and sensitivities, correlated it with his past order history, and analyzed it all. A second later the counter presented him with a subsurface menu.

Beside him Nita had done the same and was studying the readout, flipping through its pages. Ronan merely laid a hand on the counter and got the same result, staring into the sudden parade of food and drink images that started flowing by. “Right,” he said under his breath, “let’s see…”

“What’re you looking for?” Kit said, tapping at a couple of possibilities as they went by.

“Anything that doesn’t say WARNING: CONTAINS FROGSPAWN.” Ronan shot Kit a wicked look. “For certain values of frog…”

Kit rolled his eyes. “Come on, that was an accident.”

“Somebody didn’t read the small print, you mean that kind of accident? So avoidable.”

“Hasn’t happened twice,” Kit said, flicking away a couple of the possibilities the menu had offered him and settling on one that closely resembled a meatloaf sandwich, as long as you understood that the meatloaf was going to be blue.

“Just as well,” Ronan said, “otherwise the Crossings’d have to assign you a mental health counselor every time you came through here to help you handle the shock of dealing with what you just ate…”

“Oh, the frogspawn again?” said a voice from down the concourse, laughing.

Nita looked up from the bowl of bright red and green noodles on which she’d just taken delivery and snorted a small laugh as Dairine came along from further up the concourse. She was dressed in jeans and boots and a parka, and Spot was spidering along behind her.

“You’ve told everyone about that, haven’t you,” Kit muttered as the Rirhait behind the counter put out a couple of small bowls of day-glo orange sauce for him to accompany the blue meatloaf.

Nita shrugged. “It’s a good story. Where’ve you been?” she said to Dairine.

“Here,” Dairine said as she bellied up to the kiosk, boosted Spot up onto the counter, and waited for the menu to come up on registering Spot’s presence. “Sker’ret wanted to talk to the Mobiles.”

Nita looked surprised. “They’re involved in this too?”

“Maybe as part of a contingency plan,” Dairine said, looking uneasy. “Species-fragment archival. Not gonna happen, though.”

“Wait,” Kit said, pausing in the middle of dunking his sandwich. “You mean—”

“The Mobiles are alpha-testing a lot of different matter-archival methods right now,” Nita said, and the odd way she was looking at her sister made Kit uncomfortable. “They’re looking for ways to back up the universe.”

The first time this had come up, Kit had thought Nita was joking. But he could tell from Dairine’s face that it was no joke. “Whole-species archival is nothing new,” she said. “Mamvish has done it before. But the techniques she’s used previously are kind of a blunt instrument compared with what the Mobiles have been developing, and she can’t implement them anything like as fast. Sker’ wanted to find out if the Mobiles could supply her with something state-of-the-art if the stay-at-home Tevaralti types had a last-minute change of heart.”

“And can they?”