[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult

[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult by Gideon Defoe Page A

Book: [03] Elite: Docking is Difficult by Gideon Defoe Read Free Book Online
Authors: Gideon Defoe
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stuck on the platform and there are no other shuttles coming ever again? Do you think you can mess up your life because of one stupid mistake? Sorry, that’s a daft question. You’re a successful importer-exporter of niche luxury items.’
    ‘Well, yes, but that’s not to say I’ve not had my share of disappointments,’ said Misha, wishing he had dialled it back a little. ‘What was it?’
    ‘What was what?’
    ‘Your mistake?’
    Phoebe bit her lip. ‘It was my dissertation. For my final year Policing Exams. Up to that point, I’d pretty much aced everything. Top marks at theory, attendance, badge polishing. A star student across the board. And then I decided to write a thesis about the history of Galcop. You know the old Coriolis stations? I went through a bunch of operations logs, and it turns out the police back in those days were total imbeciles. I mean, unfathomably stupid. If there was an alert, the standard practice – which had been drawn up by this Commissioner Osborne guy, the real bigwig – anyway, the standard practice was just to fly out of the station regardless of any intel. Half the time the perp would simply
park
there, waiting, and pick the cops’ Vipers off one by one. Crazy casualty levels! The sort of thing mad generals in the bad old days would have approved of. So I wrote a scathing account of what a giant idiot Commissioner Osborne must have been.’
    She downed another drink.
    ‘Clever Clag. Didn’t bother to think about the fact the current police chief’s surname is also Osborne. The famous historical idiot turned out to be her grandfather. So, long story short, I’ve been stuck here for the last two years.’
    ‘Ah,’ Misha tried to think of something better and more comforting to say than ‘ah’, failed and so just said ‘Ah’ again.
    ‘Hold this. I’ll be back in a second,’ said Phoebe.
    She slumped down in the toilet cubicle, turned the dial of the drug dispenser to ‘Neurotic’, and necked a couple of mood pills. Then she slapped herself hard in the side of the head. What, she wondered, was
wrong
with her? She had finally talked to the guy from the vending machine with the pleasant, open face, who turned out to be both successful and
multilingual
, because he’d definitely said ‘yag’ instead of ‘hello’ that last time they’d spoken, and now she was messing it up by being miserable and by making weird shuttle metaphors and by sharing too much about her dysmorphia issues
.
And, to cap it all, there was obviously a bug in her neural link, because that was the third time the leg had gone on the fritz and she’d booted somebody. The trigger seemed to be whenever she found herself in an awkward social situation. Which, she realised gloomily, meant it was going to happen a lot.
    She blinked on her police crime scene recorder, guiltily sped past the NOT FOR PERSONAL USE warning boxes, and a ream of data about the evening scrolled past her face. This kind of thing was ethically dubious, but she was so poor at judging facial cues she could justify it to herself as simply levelling the playing field. She was pleased to see that Misha’s eye dilation and sweat levels suggested either a fatal pituitary disease of some sort or a 70 % chance that he was interested in her.
Jesus Christ
, she thought, as more biometric data scrolled past,
he has a LOT of recessive genes
. Glen’s almost flawless DNA flashed into her mind for a moment before she had a chance to stamp the image down. A nice-looking double helix wasn’t everything. She undid the top button of her shirt and wished she’d changed it earlier. Hopefully the noodle-stain looked like a deliberate bit of design. Perhaps she could pass it off as
avant-garde
. It’s not like some of these Gippsworld artists weren’t wearing enough crazy crap.
    Heading back across the throbbing Jazz Lounge, Phoebe was so busy worrying about the stain that she didn’t notice a rowdy new group at the bar until a terrible,

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