"Blackened salmon," Serena March said half under her breath, breathing those two magical words like a prayer, like the name of a lover. Her gray eyes, always so startling against the dark skin of her face, were tightly shut. She could see a sweet and flaky, spice-crusted fillet resting on a blue china plate. Next to a big pile of fries, hot from the deep-fryer. Saliva flooded her mouth.
"Excuse me?" Uriah said. His synthesized voice had been cribbed from the old stage and screen actor James Earl Jones. It was deep, mellow, resounding.
Intrusive. The food fantasy crumbled, not even leaving any crumbs behind. She sighed, opened her eyes. "Just talking to myself, Uriah."
"Ah. Pardon me."
This was an exchange she had with the Balding Urchin's main computer several times a day. Immediate response to any spoken order was a necessity, but the constant whats? she got from talking to herself were a real pain. And after 92 days of being cooped up alone in part of a fifteen meter sphere circling the Earth, a girl was bound to start talking to herself. Not to mention having food fantasies. Sex fantasies. Plain old opening a door and stepping outside fantasies.
Beating the computer to a mass of bent wires and cracked boards fantasies.
"We are approaching capture radius of the next major contracted object," Uriah intoned, as if trying to be useful and make up for the interruption.
Serena sat up straighter in the pilot's chair. Over the three months she'd been taking the Urchin through its trial run she'd gained a few pounds. Not from overeating, nobody could gain weight on the freeze-dried flug she had on board. Some of it came from lack of exercise, some from long exposure to zero gee, some from zero gee drugs which made her bloat and retain water. The weight gain had only softened her lean frame, but about a month before she'd gotten fed up with squeezing into her coveralls and just started living in underwear and tee-shirt. The shirt was faded green, and bore the same logo as the billed cap jammed down over her short curls: a stylized planet Earth with the MORE logo superimposed over it.
"How hot is the object?" she asked.
"Pretty hot."
"Great. How long until capture radius?"
)
