“He was a lottery baby,” Indira said as she squeezed Eflin’s hand in hers.
“Really?” replied Professor Wingut, sitting on the sofa in his office.
“Yes. The last one hundred revs lotto, at the very tail end of it,” Eflin said.
“We have no signal from his identification technology,” replied Wingut.
“PPS?”
“Nothing. He’s not wearing it. And his droid is offline too,” said Wingut.
“So go get him. That’s what you do. Send in a team. It’s what we did when we were agents. When are they landing?” Eflin asked.
“Every available agent is out looking for a physicist that could cause our galaxy and another to collide,” replied Wingut. “Professor Longley is not prepared to pull agents off that search to send to search for Koven.”
“He what? Would you please repeat that? Just want to make sure I heard correctly,” said Eflin with a face as calm as the eye of a hurricane.
“Longley won’t give me any agents.”
“Wrong answer,” replied Eflin.
“I know. I’m headed to 7 tomorrev. Check the last places his comms pinged from. But it’s just me and a couple of benchers that aren’t allowed down on the planet.”
“Not anymore,” replied Eflin. “You’ve got spares on board?”
“Yes.”
“See you tomorrev. And please let Longley know that I will be bringing charges against him as soon as my son is safe at home again. If my boy dies…” Eflin didn’t finish his words.
A few minutes later, Indira was in comms with Tanit.
“What do you mean, missing? He’s on techscale or something all the time, isn’t he?”
“Only while he is wearing his PPS,” Indira replied.
“Is he dead? Are you being polite and can’t tell me that he’s dead? If this is some of your strange historian shit, I need to know,” Tanit demanded as she moved her hands constantly.
“It is not,” replied Indira. She admired the slightly chubby girl with the wide range of permitted emotions. “He is missing. We are going to look for him tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? What’s wrong with today?”
“We’re going with his mission sponsor, Professor Igna Wingut. No one is allowed within one million kilomataars of a planet in quarantine.”
“Legally,” said Tanit. “A-sector? I’ve heard it’s the shit hole of the galaxy. Dangerous.”
“It’s worse than you think.”
Indira gave Tanit the rest of the briefing and answered questions for a few tox.
Less than 200 tox later, Tanit was back in the propulsion laboratory. She took the prototype for the newest FLT cruiser, a sleek mirror-coated vessel that bent space and time and achieved speeds 106X faster than current FLT cruisers. It might have blown up seven times during testing, but Ova was certain they had fixed the problem, and the last two tests had been successful. Still, she was gripping the captain’s console very tightly with one hand as her other hand was soft and lightly gripping the joystick as the composite metal ship rocketed off the planet.
She didn’t have a plan yet, but she had an address, the Grand Temple of Allor.