4

“How do I know that thing isn’t recording?”

I talked around a bite of my battered fish with the hope that any frustration carried in my voice might be interpreted only as speech garbled by poor table manners. “You watched me turn it off,” I said, scooping my recorder from the tabletop inside Tom Walker’s and turning its video display toward my companion. “See? Off.”

“I hope you understand, Mister Pennington,” said the slightly built, balding man, “but I could lose everything by talking to you. Without permits to fly through this part of space, I’d never work as a trader again.”

“And you believe that whatever you have to tell me this evening could put all of that at risk?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that’s why you’re choosing not even to tell me your name?”

“You can call me Donnie, if you want. But that’s not my real name.”

“Well, ‘Donnie,’ at least you aren’t so paranoid as to walk in here with a bag over your head,” I said, which elicited a smile from my companion. “If you were truly paranoid, you would never have agreed to meet me in an establishment you know I frequent, thus one at which I would certainly have relationships with the owners or managers—relationships I most certainly could leverage to obtain image files from the security cameras surrounding us and cross-match those images against interstellar commerce permit application records to determine your identity in a matter of seconds.”

What color I had seen in the man’s cheeks had drained away along with his smile. “Uh . . . heh. But you’re not . . . heh, heh . . . serious,” he said. “Are you?”

“Of courseI’m not serious,” I said, smiling and reaching over to clap him on the shoulder. “The confidential relationship between a reporter and his source is implicit, right?”

“Uh . . .”

“Inviolable? Sacrosanct?”

All he returned was a gap-mouthed stare with a look in his eyes that hovered between panic and bewilderment. I was starting to get the feeling that the gentleman before me might be lucky to verbally command the navigation computer on his ship, let alone manage a conversation above a basic reading level. It started to feel a little mean to toy with him like that, but not mean enough for me to want to stop.

“Donnie, a reporter would not turn a source over to the authorities. If I started doing that, I would run out of people who would want to talk to me. And then how would I get my work done?”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“So, tell me why you’ve met me here,” I said, looking over the fish before me until I chose not to take another bite.

“Here’s my idea,” he said, scooting a little closer to me at the table. “I think Starfleet is not enforcing its rules against smuggling around here. I hear all the time about how shipments of one thing or another are getting through. So, I want to help you prove it.”

“I’m listening.”

“I figure that I can go around and just put the word out there that I’m open to moving a few things that need to be moved quietly. A few cases of Romulan ale headed one way, a few cases of Klingon disruptor rifles headed another way. I can take care of that part of it.”

“Hmm. Okay, but I’m not sure where I come in.”

“Well, I will keep records of all my activities in the sector, especially—here it comes—movements of Starfleet ships in the areas of my travels. Once I get caught, I can show all of the instances when Starfleet was present at the time of my transactions but chose notto enforce trade regulations, and then we’d have them down cold with proof positive of their being in on the situation. Or maybe then I’d get bribed by Starfleet to keep it to myself and just operate like I have been. Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Oh, that would be something, all right,” I said. “So, what you’re proposing is a sting operation against Starfleet.”

“Yeah! That’s a good name for it. A sting.”

“Now, you realize that a sting involves proposing a criminal act and trying to get someone, in this case, someone from Starfleet, to agree to break a law and not necessarily to seemingly ignore one.”

“Oh.”

“And it doesn’t involve actually committing the crime, in this case, smuggling whatever it is you intend to smuggle.”

“Oh.”

“And whatever end you’re attempting to justify, that would not exonerate you from the means you took to achieve it.”

“Um . . .”

“Of course, ‘exonerate,’ “ I said under my breath. “You still can go to prison for smuggling anything you smuggled while waiting to get caught.”

“Oh!” Donnie bolted upright and practically launched himself from his seat. “I need to take a second look at this plan.”

“You might at that.”

“Just pretend that I never came by, Mister Pennington,” he said before pointing to my recorder on the table. “That thing didn’t record any of this, right?”

“Still off.” I smiled until he turned his back on me, when I could not keep myself from rolling my eyes. As Donnie left, I noticed the same brown-haired server I had seen earlier start to make her way to my table. “Nice story tip. Thanks a lot,” I said, prompting only a grin big enough to narrow her eyes.

“You can thank me in advance for the next few then, too,” she said, reaching into a front pocket of the short, black apron she wore to produce several data cards. “I guess word is getting around on how to find you.”

“I guess,” I echoed, taking the cards. “Remind me of your name, then.”

“I don’t remember you asking for it in the first place.”

“Right. Then allow me some grace for my lack of manners while I ask as I should have done earlier in the day.”

“In the day or in the week? I’ve seen you in here several times.”

“Now you’re simply embarrassing me.”

“My name’s Meryl,” she said, smiling again as she glanced down at the small basket of half-eaten fillets in front of me. “How was your fish?”

“Honestly? It was a little off. Did you fry it or get it from the synthesizer just like that?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Point taken. Next time, I’ll just bring you my own card. That way I can get some decent chippy sauce with it, too.”

Meryl silently took the basket from my table, and I reached into my bag on the seat next to me to pluck out a section of a newsprint edition I had replicated of that day’s FNS feeds. I unfolded the paper as noisily as I could, purposefully shaking out creases and holding it open wide enough for it to appear to create a black-and-white wedge in front of my face. At every opportunity, I liked reading the news as conspicuously as I could aboard Vanguard, if nothing else than to make a visual statement to whoever might be around that reporting and news are important to me—and should be important to everybody. And no, not simply because I had a job gathering it.

Just as my eyes had settled on an account of sesquicentennial celebrations for Earth’s first colony on Alpha Centauri, a sharp, skin-chilling snap sounded against my newspaper. I brought the paper down quickly from my face to discover a young woman in civilian clothing—professional attire, more precisely—smirking at me from across my table. Her right hand remained poised in front of where my paper had been, its fingers splayed out following the quick flick she evidently had given it to rouse my attention.

“Print is dead, Mister Pennington.”

“Sure it is, miss,” I said, allowing a smile. “Just as they’ve been saying for more than two centuries. Yet here it is in my hand, defying all predictions of its demise.”

“Just seems like a waste of resources to me,” she said.

“Not sure how you even figure that. I press a button and the printed copy appears. I read it. I press a button and it disappears again. It’s one more example of a completely efficient process of recycling, not too different from the way lots of other things are made around here.”