Read Online [03] Elite: Docking is Difficult by Gideon Defoe - Free Book Online Page B

blessed with magno-boots – unlike their human companions – were bobbing around, gently bumping into each other, letting out odd snorts.
    ‘I’m sorry about the smell,’ said Misha. ‘Away from Gippsworld they start to go off a bit. Though, to be honest, they don’t smell that great to start off with.’
    ‘You know, in all the time I’ve been posted here, I never thought to ask – who actually
buys
these things?’ said Phoebe, gingerly tapping one that was drifting towards her head.
    ‘Mainly they’re sold as a bacon substitute to the more fundamentalist planets that would quite like to eat some bacon but whose religions forbid them to eat either actual pigs or printed synthetic products,’ he replied robotically.
    ‘Sounds lucrative,’ she said, flicking through the manifest.
    ‘Not really. They’re a poor product. I mean they
act
vaguely like pigs, and the flesh seems a little like pork, so long as you just look at it and don’t put it in your mouth, but that’s about as far as it goes.’
    ‘What do they taste like?’
    ‘Bark. Sponge. Burnt rubber. You have to do a lot of chewing. Usually, once a planet has tasted its first Gippsworld Virtual Pig the inhabitants either decide they can do without pork substitute after all, or they change their founding religious texts right there and then to allow the real stuff and to ban our version. We don’t get much in the way of repeat business.’
    Yikes
, thought Phoebe.
He’s REALLY sweating
.
Even worse than in the club
. She didn’t think she’d ever seen a human being sweat so much. And his hands were shaking. She averted her eyes, embarrassed for him.
    ‘Anything else I should know about?’ Phoebe asked, as she wandered around the hold, making a show of banging on things in a professional-looking way. She tugged her lapels in a pantomime of an old-fashioned detective. ‘I notice that you seem slightly ill at ease.’
    Again, she thought that maybe by making a joke of it, she’d get him to relax a little. It didn’t work out like that. Misha wobbled in his magno-boots and covered his face with his hands.
    ‘I’m sorry! I’m
so
sorry!’ He rocked back and forth. He let out a strangulated gasp. Appalled, Phoebe realised that he was crying. She had a sudden flashback to the school field trip when Bobby Osher had refused to come out of the Imperial Fortress on Proxima 6 until she agreed to hold his hand at break. The teacher had made her go along with it and she could still remember Bobby’s terrible, clammy palms, and the way he’d clumsily tried to lick her cheek afterwards. Worst of all she remembered the distraught look on his face after she had pushed him into the hyper-moat.
    ‘Hey, look, don’t worry. People exaggerate things when they’ve had a drink; it’s not the worst crime in the galaxy.’
    But Misha wasn’t listening; he was just babbling on.
    ‘I’ve never done anything like this before! I don’t know what came over me! I just agreed to drop it off. She said it was antiquities, you know – like a fancy vase or something – nothing bad, no
drugs
or anything like that. It won’t be a big deal, that’s what she said. Oh
god
.’
    Phoebe’s mind rewound a bit.
    ‘Drop what off, Misha?’ she asked, levelly.
    Misha crossed over to the astronavigation console, opened a small refrigeration unit, and pulled a squat, black box out from where it was hidden behind a pile of pork samples.
    ‘Oh god. Oh god. I’m going to
jail
.’
    He handed her the box. It vibrated gently in her hands as she flipped it over a few times. She gave it a quick scan with her sonic truncheon but already knew that was pointless. This was a fancy bit of hardware; she could tell that because of the label on the side. It boasted, in a series of perky bullet points, about the impregnable polycarbide shell, the lead lining designed to block any sort of readings, and, most impressively, about the unbreakable Quantum Lenslok. It didn’t take Phoebe’s