I didn’t have time to evaluate it further, because Yani grabbed me by the arm and hauled me right past them and into the hall. Their burning eyes watched me go, and Kurt looked both uncertain and pissed off. Dazed, I rubbed sweat off my face as we retreated to my quarters.
“What—” I started to say, but broke off when Yani shook her head. Right. I pulled a device from a drawer and turned it on.
It immediately lit up red.
Yani’s mouth straightened, and we spent half an hour searching the tiny quarters. We finally found the listening device under Yani’s stool. Lucky for them she wasn’t inclined to farting.
When I inserted it into the deadzone canister the Drolgok had given me as a birthday present, the monitoring device went green.
Yani nodded in satisfaction. “What are they listening to?”
“Piano music,” I said. I would have preferred recorded belches, but apparently it didn’t make the top 100 list. I pushed my hair off my face, as it had, once again, escaped its pins. “Maybe the effing Drakes can use it as an insomnia cure.”
Yani pulled her hat a little lower over her pointed ears and curled her lips back from her teeth in her best approximation of a human smile. “Perfect.”
My general state of malaise only increased my angst. “Where did those guys come from?” I asked.
“They could have loaded an entire troop on board while we were in that room, and we wouldn’t know,” Yani pointed out.
“This mission stinks,” I exploded. “They are very worried about us discovering what they are up to. Why not just fly this cargo to the Nirzks themselves? Why involve us at all?”
“That is an excellent question.” Yani agreed, taking a bite of her now-cold wrap. She chewed while I waited for an answer. Eventually, I took a bite of my own. For the first time in days, food didn’t turn my stomach.
Yani had been thinking while I consumed. So had I.
We exchanged a look.
“We need to know what they’ve got in that storage bay,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. Yes, we do.”
“But they’ll have everything locked down,” I pointed out.
This time, in her effort to mimic my human grin, she showed me all her teeth. They were pointy and impressive and totally blew the cheerful vibe she was no doubt going for.
“No one,” she said, “knows this ship better than me. And we have a secret weapon they are not privy to…”
Yani dashed off to her own quarters before returning.
It turned out that her secret weapon was Sookie.
“I’ve trained her to help me inspect the ship’s wiring and ductwork,” Yani explained. “She can get places I can’t. I found a badly frayed coupling just a few days ago by sending her along the service conduits.”
I peered at what she held in her hand—her datapad, and a little harness with something attached to it.
Acamera.
“But—can you direct her?”
“Oh yes,” Yani stated. “She knows the word for every room on the ship. I just pick the section of conduit or duct I want checked, put her at one end of it, and she’ll follow it to that room.”
The ship had air ducts throughout, of course. Including the ones servicing the aft storage area. My gaze rose to the ten-inch grate on the wall above our heads. Far too small for anyone to crawl into, but no problem for the hedgegopher.
Yani strapped the harness on before she attached the camera to it. Sookie fluffed her pale fur. Had the tips always been so pink?
The Drolgok fiddled with the orientation until the camera sat in the center of the hedgegopher’s chest. “If she lowers her head, it gets blocked,” Yani said. “I’m not usually looking ahead of her. With any luck, it will give us a glimpse of what those Drakes are hiding.”
“It will likely just be a crate,” I theorized.
