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trees, but once the Courier got to Nightstalkers’ Support, old Nada, in his briefing, had modified that to include what you couldn’t see way up there circling the planet. The unblinking eyes in the sky.
    She swallowed and nodded. “Follow me.”
    They entered the building and she walked past the elevators, which the Courier found odd, and opened a fire door. They began to troop up the stairs, which was when the Courier became rather intrigued with her ass. He tried to make small talk, but she was in crisis mode and everyone knows that people worried about their careers seldom flirted. Instead they tended to talk and explain.
    “I don’t know why I got stuck with it. I just did the lab work. The professor did all the real work on the project. And the professor was insistent that no one have access to her data.”
    The Courier could give a shit, and her taking one step at a time was hurting his knees. He wanted to bound up at least two, if not three at a time. She kept explaining as if the Courier hadn’t read the Invoicer, or been briefed by Moms and Nada and Doc.
    He and the others had been grilled with Nada “what-ifs”:
What if you can’t locate the Point of Contact? What if the Package is breached? What if gravity as you know it ceases to exist
...
    Or, as everyone in Support called it, the Yada-Yada from Nada. But never when he was around.
    “The problem is, well, the professor, she must have gone on sabbatical, at least that’s what the dean said. Sort of. And I got stuck with it. So we brought it over in the safe it came in and up the elevator and into the most secure lab.”
    If you got an elevator, why are we taking the stairs?
the Courier thought.
    “I followed the rules in the book the professor had.”
    The Courier felt heartened that he wasn’t the only one who had to follow Protocols.
    “It’s locked up here, because the bio people have the most secure areas.” Simmons literally shivered. “It scares me, some of the stuff they work with.”
    “Why are we climbing the stairs?”
    “I use the stairs for the exercise,” she explained. That explained her tight body, but also a sense of narcissism to include him in her workout routine while he was on a job.
    “Everything should be all right and up to date,” she continued as they made it to a door with a big
6
stenciled on it.
    The Courier wanted to tell her Nada’s theory during his lecture about
should be
, which Nada had said often translated to
what the fuck?
    “I don’t really see the big deal,” Simmons prattled on as she led him down the hall to a door with all sorts of warning signs and big biohazards symbols. “It’s pretty small.”
    He decided to show the college girl up, with a tidbit of knowledge he’d had hurled at him during the Support briefing by Doc. He tapped the closest yellow sign. “The engineer who developed the biohazard sign said: ‘We wanted something that was memorable but meaningless, so we could educate people as to what it means.’”
    He remembered that because it was one of the dumbest things—among many dumb things—he’d been told, not even realizing his remembering actually validated the engineer’s point.
    She stopped talking for a moment and stared at him as if he had two heads. “The professor has never taken a day off since I’ve known her. She’s always like ice; nothing bothers her, but this,” the girl nodded at the steel door, “this bothered her. Why would the professor take a sabbatical now?”
    “Right,” the Courier said, not really listening to her, eyes on her breasts. Figuratively, wishing for literally.
    Shaking her head, Simmons entered a punch code and the door slid open.
    They walked over to another door that required a second punch code, as well as a retina scan this time, so he knew they were getting close to the Package.
    There was a safe inside the next room.
    An old iron safe, like Butch and Sundance used to rob.
    She pulled out a rumpled piece of paper and began