Brightsuit MacBear by L. Neil Smith Page A

coins and sighed. “Believe me, son, I know exactly what I’m saying.”
     

Chapter VI: Hot Pursuit
    Not quite two hours had passed since Dalmeon Geanar had departed the small apartment he shared with his grandson in the wake of a large, mysterious crate.
    To Berdan, left on his own for the first time in his life, it seemed like an eternity.
    He’d spent some uncounted amount of time trying to decide whether his suspicions about his grandfather—that the old man had stolen the fabulous Brightsuit—were justified, more time figuring out what to do about it, and almost an hour in the congenial bedlam of Spoonbender’s Museum and Friendly Finance Company.
    Now, having succeeded where Diogenes had failed, and having obtained some useful advice from the honest man he’d found, Berdan was on his own again. Making his way toward the Broach depot on the lowest level of the ship, he wished he felt up to wearing the broad, heavy gun belt which, instead, he still carried in the briefcase where his father had left it for him over a decade ago. The trouble was—and it seemed to Berdan this typified everything he was going through at the moment—he knew nothing about operating the Borchert & Graham plasma pistol it had been built for (he couldn’t even tell if the thing was loaded, let alone shoot it), and didn’t have any time to learn.
    In the same sense, trying as he was to catch up with his grandfather, trying to discover the truth about the old man’s activities and about the experimental smartsuit he appeared to have stolen, Berdan didn’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish those things either and, again, didn’t have time to learn.
    Nevertheless, if he didn’t do something, it would soon be too late—if it wasn’t already. For once in his otherwise cautious life, it appeared to him the proper course consisted of leaping before he looked. He might fall on his face or into a hole, but nothing was going to get accomplished any other way.
    Berdan’s hesitant footsteps—and a complicated series of trips through the Tom Edison Maru ’s transport system—brought him at last to the lowest level in the ship. As usual—although Berdan had no way of recognizing it—he was preoccupied and therefore unconscious of the wonderful sights surrounding him.
    The size of a small city, over seven and a half miles from rim to rim, the full diameter of the starship, this level accommodated far more than just a few hundred Thorens Broach terminals, those wondrous devices capable of transmitting passengers and cargo across space-time in an instant. Overhead, a huge transparent bubble permitted an amazing view—from the sandy bottom of Tom Edison Maru ’s second level indoor ocean. Drawn to the warm light coming from below—or perhaps to the many fish attracted by the light (or the opulent plant growth it engendered)—a giant squid rolled over and across the curved outer surface of the bubble, reaching out an occasional long and lazy tentacle to snag a swimming snack and stuff it into his parrot-beaked mouth.
    Berdan walked by beneath this incredible spectacle and never even knew it existed.
    Here in Tom Edison Maru ’s basement, many other things were going on as well. This was where the ship’s auxiliary craft—shuttles such as Geanar had been hurrying to get aboard—were based. Miniatures of the giant dome-shaped interstellar craft herself, they nestled into her flattened underside, blending into her outline and contributing the output of their tachyon lasers to her own.
    All along Berdan’s path airlocks holo-decorated with advertising urged him to hire the services of this or that shuttlecraft. He walked right by without noticing a thing.
    Away from the mother ship, the shuttles left behind great inverted bowl-shaped empty docking bays in her underside. The largest of these auxiliary craft, seven of them in all, carried seven smaller craft in the same manner. Each of these tertiary vessels housed seven even smaller