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several months, each of her long absences corresponded to a payment from an innocuously named UP procurement agency. The lengthier the absence, the bigger the payment. Disbursements of correlating sizes later flowed from the university into an unidentified bank account. Her personal account?
    “Are you planning to drink that, or swim in it?”
    A broad ring of coffee now surrounded Art’s mug; he’d apparently continued absently stirring while he surfed. He glanced at the wall clock: less than a minute of mining an excerpt of the public record, and already he had fairly suggestive evidence that she’d worked on the same secret project as he. Judging from Eva’s acclimation with Callisto’s gravity, her participation was more recent than his.
    Moving his mug, he dropped some paper napkins onto the mess. “I lean more towards sculpting in it. Something mythological. A nymph, I think, with three children.”
    There was a flash of surfer-glassiness, and then her eyes went round. She had taken his point. Zeus, whom the Romans called Jupiter, had sired three children by a nymph named Himalia.

CHAPTER 5
    With a clunk , one more mystery floating thing was eaten by a fan in the bridge’s ventilation system. The bridge, and for that matter the rest of the Odyssey , was a sty. Helmut Schiller, the captain/engineer/crew, was repelled and appalled by the squalor, but powerless to do much about it. The ship’s owner, and its only current passenger, was the slob-in-chief.
    Schiller was tall, almost two meters, and lanky, with close-cropped brown hair and a grizzled but trim beard. With his original name, he’d climbed from lowly engine tender to master of his own ship—and then lost everything. It was a story he brooded on, but did his best not to share. Schiller assumed that Corinne Elman, the slob/owner, merely pretended to know nothing of his past. Irritant that she was, he had only respect for her talents.
    Splat crinkle . A sheet of paper plastered itself to the air return above Schiller’s head. A languid flex of his feet launched him towards the ceiling, where he removed the paper before its blockage of the vent could make the foul atmosphere even worse. In microgravity you could suffocate in your own exhalations if the ventilation system failed.
    Corinne, Corinne … if only her hygiene were as diligent as her investigative reporting. That she personally owned an interplanetary vessel made clear just how successful she was. Her freelance status was a lifestyle choice—any media giant in the solar system would gladly hire her. It was a measure of his desperation that Helmut stayed with the Odyssey , his secret safe for only as long as other matters diverted her attention.
    “Hey, skipper.” As though summoned by his musings, Corinne entered the bridge. She was of athletic build and not-quite average height, her round face framed by brunette curls and, usually, an aura of energetic chaos. Off-camera, she favored baggy jumpsuits and color-coordinated headbands. “What’s up?”
    “We’re in free fall, so that’s your choice.”
    “Heh.” She swung herself into the acceleration seat of the non-existent co-pilot. “What’s your take on the bank failures on Ceres?”
    He feigned nonchalance. “Banks don’t matter to someone without assets.” Once upon a time, a Cerian bank had backed him. They’d never see that money again, but the unfolding Belt banking collapse surely had bigger and more recent causes. Was she pulling his chain again by hinting at knowledge of his past, or making conversation, or sharing her plans? “So are we off to Ceres?” The Jovian matter to which they had boosted seemed to have evaporated. At least he thought it had … more and more often he’d heard her mutter about unsatisfactory replies to her long-distance inquiries of the Galilean infosphere.
    “Let’s keep going,” Corinne said. “I’m getting more curious about what I’m not learning about Jupiter than what I might hear