Furious

7

Kris was too strung out to sleep, so she and Penny set out to survey the suite. Kris’s circumnavigation of the Milky Way had been a major voyage of discovery. Traipsing through the huge rooms of the suite was like some sort of safari. Kris half expected to stumble upon a pack of lions chasing a herd of elephants.

The rich and enormous sitting room had the master suite off to the right and two just-as-massive bedrooms with expansive baths off to the left. The master suite bath included not only a shower for six but also a small swimming pool for twelve, as well as sauna and the usual equipment, much of it in gold. All this furnished a room that took up only slightly less space than the drop bay on the Wasp.

A door beside the sauna led to a workout room. Its computer began counseling them the moment they walked in. The electronic trainer had the same opinion of Kris’s present physical state as Luna and began listing all the things it could do for Kris.

Kris quickly crossed to the door that led back to the sitting room.

After the verbose exercise room, the space behind the two other bedrooms was a bit of a puzzle. It was a silent and strangely vacant room. There were tables and several utilitarian chairs. And shelves. Lots of shelves.

It was Nelly who figured it out, spotting the hardwired plug-ins and the electronically secure power outlets.

“This would make a perfect computer command center,” she observed. “What was done here would stay here until it was ushered out.”

“Should we do our planning in here?” Penny asked.

“I don’t think we need to,” both Nelly and Mimzy said at the same moment.

Nelly went on. “The entire suite is quite self-contained. Your captain friend was not kidding. What goes on in here stays in here. It’s just that this particular room is prepared to power and support a major server farm. It could take a data stream from the outside, mash a whole lot of numbers inside, and send them on their way in a most secure manner. You remember when you asked us to do a full analysis and forensic work-up on the St. Petersburg economy? And do it without getting caught?”

Kris allowed that she did.

“This place is set up to do that. Fully loaded, I bet this place could do it every day for a different planet’s worth of data, day in and day out. I’d love to command a place like this,” Nelly finished with longing in her voice.

“Who knows, maybe you will,” Kris said, with no commitment. She’d never considered Nelly as anything but her own computer. Yes, Nelly was great at playing all kinds of dirty tricks on other computer systems, look at what she’d done tonight. The thought of Nelly cracking the whip over a farmful of less flexible but no less powerful computers left Kris . . . strangely uncomfortable.

Penny broke the stretching silence with a challenge to Kris. “Let’s see what that workout room can do.”

Kris really didn’t want to, but it was either let the workout room show what it really could do, try the buttery, or go to bed.

Kris wasn’t hungry or sleepy, so PT won.

But Kris didn’t have to let it win without some complaining. “What is it with everybody? I don’t look that bad to myself in the mirror.”

Penny said nothing more but challenged Kris to a game of handball. The room quickly organized itself as a court even as it provided the two young women with suitable clothing, and, at Penny’s request, private facilities for each to change.

Penny left Kris flailing and out of breath in the first minute of the game.

“Okay, okay, you win,” Kris said, hunched over and struggling to catch her breath. “I’m out of shape. So, what are you going to do about it?”

The trainer computer said it had just the thing for Kris. While Penny worked out on a contraption that looked like the results of mating a ski machine with a bike with a rowing shell using all the jigs and presses that you normally only found in a spaceship-fabrication dock, Kris was offered a box.

It was a big box that opened up for her to sit in comfortably with only her head sticking out. When it closed, strange things started to happen. Initially, it was little more than a pleasant massage, not unlike the chair in the sitting room.

Then it got more physical.

Kris found she could be made to stand, as well as lie down, inside the box, as it went through the business of seeing that every muscle in her body got a workout.

On Chance, Kris had tossed a caber and strained some muscles she hadn’t expected to discover until she gave birth to her first child. This box put even those muscles through a workout.

Thirty minutes later, thoroughly wrung out, Kris stumbled into her lavish shower. Much to the shower’s disappointment, Kris demanded and got, “Just a simple shower. Nothing fancy. Water. Warm. Soap.”

Quickly done and toweled dry by herself—“Thank you very much”—Kris tumbled into a suddenly inviting bed.

“That was a good beginning,” the training computer assured her. “You should be up to three-hour-long workout by day after tomorrow.”

“Shut up. Lights out,” Kris ordered.

As wrung out as she was, Kris expected sleep to be waiting for her. It wasn’t.

What kept going over in her mind as she waited for sleep was the thought of Nelly and her command center of obedient and pliant supercomputers. And the trainer with its attitude toward human flesh. All these and God only knew what else that lurked in the future of the human race left Kris wondering if Grampa Al was really the problem she ought to be risking her neck to foil this month.

Given the choice between wasting her night chewing on that problem versus sleeping, Kris chose sleep.

But her last thoughts were of Jack and a prayer that she might meet him in her dreams.