“No, no cargo,” Kyle assured him, shaking his head.

“Good, good. Travel light, it’s the best way. Me, I’ve got cargo. Makes it a good deal more difficult to slip away unnoticed, I can tell you.”

Kyle finally took a sip of the scotch, which was better than John had given him any reason to expect. He liked the warm sensation it made going down. “This is the good stuff,” he said.

“Good as it gets. You live with the stink of this ship long enough, you’ll find that anything that would taste remotely pleasant is just wonderful, simply because it takes you away from the odor. Do your quarters smell this bad?”

“No,” Kyle replied, taking another drink. Once he had swallowed, he continued. “No, there’s a bit of the smell of Kreel’n around, but nothing like this.”

“I’m close to the engine room,” John explained. “Kreel’n are notoriously inept mechanically, and they’re some of the messiest creatures you could ever imagine. I’m surprised they can keep the ship aloft, even with the help of the other aliens they’ve got working for them.”

“Do you socialize with the crew?” Kyle asked him. “Other than Kreel’n, I mean.”

John looked shocked at the question. “You may get the idea that I don’t like the Kreel’n,” he said. “That’s not true. Or not precisely true, anyway. In point of fact, I don’t like much of anyone. The Kreel’n are okay with me in that they leave me alone and don’t pry into my affairs, but you’d never see me calling one a friend. No, the last thing you’ll ever see on this ship is me having a pleasant conversation with the crew. I’d sooner take a long walk out the airlock.”

“What about other passengers?” Kyle pressed. “Are there any you’ve gotten to know?”

John laughed again. “Besides you, you mean?” When Kyle nodded, he went on with a wide smile. “We’re it,Mr. Barrow. We are it.”

Chapter 12

The days passed quickly for Will and Zeta Squadron. Boon corralled his own obstreperous nature, with only the occasional pointed reminder from his comrades. Dennis took on an ever-stronger leadership role, including delegating authority when it served the team. Will, as it turned out, showed a knack for analyzing and solving the puzzles with which they were faced, though he left it to Dennis to implement the solutions once he arrived at them. The artist spanning the globe turned out to be a museum’s exhibition of a historical robot painter, mounted on a giant trackball—painted like the Earth—so it could work on multiple canvases simultaneously. Other clues led to Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, and the understory of the two-level Bay Bridge, no longer open to vehicular traffic but left standing as a historical landmark.

The clue they had found at the bridge had seemed, at first, as incomprehensible as all the others. “Gone Fishing,” it had said, and, “To bring them home means bringing yourselves home.” Dennis had turned, under the latticework of shadows cast by the upper level of the bridge, to look at all the water visible from this point—water that, they all knew, surrounded San Francisco on three sides—and said, “Fish? There’s nothing but fish around us!”

It was only while performing aikido moves in a heavy-grav environment inside the gym that Will had reached a breakthrough. When their workouts were done and they had showered, he gathered the others together and told them what he’d come to believe. “It’s the easiest one of all if you just take it at face value,” he told them excitedly. “Bringing the fish home. If you go fishing in a boat, you bring them home at a dock, right? Which narrows down our search to where there are working docks. But what if you don’t do the fishing yourself, and you still want to bring some home? You go to a fish market.”

“That almost seems too obvious,” Dennis countered.

“Right,” Will agreed. “That’s the beauty of it. These other clues have been so convoluted, who’d expect us to get an easy one at this point? We could spend all day trying to figure out some ridiculously complex meaning to this one, but I think this is really where it’s pointing us.”

“You could be right, Will,” Felicia said. “It’d be a way of throwing us off the track. Using our expectations against us.”

“I don’t know,” Boon said. “If you’re wrong we could waste a lot of time. We need to wrap this up today and get back to the Academy. First back, highest marks.”

“But if you don’t have any different interpretations, Boon,” Estresor Fil put in, “we might as well try Will’s, right?”

“I guess,” Boon admitted. Will figured Boon’s hesitation was just because the idea had been Will’s and not his own. Not that he had contributed much during this exercise, other than wearisome negativity and the occasional judicious application of criminal tendencies. Will found himself glad that his encounters with Boon over the past year had been minimal, and that there hadn’t been more extensive group projects like this one. Far from being captain material, Boon seemed like he’d be a detriment to any starship.

“Let’s get moving, then,” Dennis suggested. “The sooner we finish, the sooner we’re home.”

San Francisco’s Fish Market, on the site of the city’s old Fisherman’s Wharf, was a massive complex where dozens of boats, hovercraft, and skimmers brought thousands of pounds of fish every day for the citizens of San Francisco. Fresh seafood had always been a tradition in the city, and remained so to this day.

Will smelled the market before he could see it. The unique and powerful odor of so many fish—dead and not-concentrated in one place created an olfactory wall that was unmistakable. A stranger, beamed into San Francisco for the first time, would have been able to find her way to the Fish Market from anyplace within a kilometer of it. When they passed the invisible barrier, Will wrinkled his nose and smiled at his comrades. “We’re nearly there,” he said.

“Will?” Dennis ventured. “I’ve been to the Fish Market before. It’s huge. Do you have any idea how we’ll find the checkpoint when we get there?”

Will flashed him a smile. “I have no idea. I figured we’d cross that bridge when we got to it.”

“As long as there’s a plan,” Felicia put in. She walked next to Will almost all the time now, and had been sleeping next to him at night. She had never suggested anything further, though, and except for casual—and slightly more than casual—physical contact from time to time, they hadn’t really touched in any meaningful way. A few days ago, Will had been sure he’d been reading her signals correctly, but now he wasn’t as certain. He’d had a couple of girlfriends before, but they had been brief affairs, not at all serious, and having been raised in an all-male household, he sometimes thought of women as a race every bit as different from him as Andorians or Vulcans. Maybe if he’d had sisters, or at least a mother, he would have some idea of what to say and how to act around them. As it was, he had to make it all up. He definitely wanted something to happen—from the moment he’d started looking at Felicia in that light, instead of merely as an extraordinarily gifted cadet who happened to be female, he had wanted to be with her.

But where do you go from here, Will?

He didn’t know the answer to that, any more than he knew where in the vast Fish Market they should look for their checkpoint.

There were, as Dennis had pointed out, hundreds of stalls in the Fish Market. Some offered only one specific type of seafood—Will saw stalls for squid, for shrimp, prawns, lobsters, roe, salmon, and many others—while others offered more variety. It seemed that every craft, or every fisher who went out to sea, had his or her own stall. The wares were displayed on metal trays so cold to the touch that Will had once thought his skin would stick or break off if he dared to finger them, only to find out later that safety regulations required that they be cold enough to keep the fish fresh but not to injure curious humans. Some stalls even had large saltwater tanks where live fish, eels, and octopuses swam and waited to be taken away by some consumer or professional chef. Around each stall, humans and aliens of virtually every description loitered, examining the day’s catch—sniffing, touching, eyeing, comparing a swordfish at one with a tuna at the next.