Read Edward M. Lerner for Free Online

discuss. That work had brought her to Jupiter system frequently in the past few years, for a connecting flight from Callisto to a remote UP outpost.
    The denuded, tortured twig sank slowly to the ground. Hard facts aside, she could not avoid the worry that the Snakes’ choice of destination related somehow to the top-secret matters taking place on Himalia.
    The mission’s grounded spaceships provided cabins for most members of the sub rosa diplomatic mission, but space for gatherings, official or otherwise, was at a premium. Art sought out Eva for a brisk walk through the settlement’s austere passageways. He had frustration to burn off: Chung had yet to follow through on his promise to contact Himalia.
    “What’s the commerce committee doing?” she asked.
    “Same as us.” He bounded down the hall, surprised that his Earth-born and—raised new friend was more graceful in Callisto’s feeble gravity than he. “Running in circles. Do our callers have anything novel for sale? They haven’t said. What we all want, no surprise, is the interstellar drive.”
    “The technical group wants that, too. Of course.”
    He kept bouncing too high, then taking roughly forever to settle to the floor. When he finally landed, he had to bound forward again to catch up.
    “Tech team’s exercise in futility is guessing how their drive works, whether we can help them to repair their ship.” She jogged in place while he again caught up.
    “Are there … many options?” His inefficient technique had him panting.
    “Lots of theories, not much basis.” She fell silent as a settler sauntered by from the opposite direction. “We know very little. Radar indicates it’s a large object—in human terms, the size of a habitat rather than a ship. As you know, the triangulation-derived tracking showed it was slowing down, somehow, long before it started its fusion drive.”
    He hooked her arm as he next caught up. “Let’s get coffee. We’ll think better.” And I won’t brain myself on the corridor ceiling.
    “Sure.” She headed for the most isolated booth in a café.
    “What troubles you the most?” he asked.
    “Two coffees,” she told the invisible-but-surely-present order-taker AI, while they were still a good two meters from the table.
    You don’t want to answer that. He wondered why.
    “I’ve been pondering your data-mining exhibition on our way here.” She paused as the tabletop opened to disgorge two steaming mugs. “Can Pashwah delve as well as a person?”
    “ Any trade agent can probably do better. They’ve been at it for decades.”
    “So Pashwah could know a lot about us. We must assume the starship crew does, too.”
    Translation: Something Eva preferred to stay secret might be detectable on the infosphere. What? He slopped coffee on the table, his stirring as ill-adapted to one-eighth gee as his jogging style. An empty sugar packet sat beside her mug, around which no sloshed coffee was in evidence. Why was Eva so well adapted to Callisto? She claimed to have done little interplanetary traveling.
    “What might Pashwah stumble upon that could be interesting, hmm?” A test: He would do some data mining of his own, one particular suspicion driving his queries. Art was glad that he had had the courier’s cyber-library do an infosphere search on Eva as they broke Earth orbit, and that the library’s AI had so expansively interpreted his vague and hastily formed request. It had retrieved a wealth of data about her university.
    When, over the past ten years, had substitutes taught Eva’s classes? He eliminated the shortest periods of absence, likely sick days or vacations. He switched to astronomical fact-finding. Although the correlation was imprecise, the farther away Jupiter happened to be, the longer she was gone. The absence durations were consistent with trips to Jupiter with more-or-less month-long stopovers.
    He had a quick dive into the public universidad’s financial reports. With a time lag of