"But
I heard him. His voice got weird. It echoed, like he was talking inside a box,
or one of the access tunnels in the ship," Tress insisted.
"Uh
huh." Sh'hari narrowed her eyes at them and gestured for them to step into
a lift, to ride to another level. "And just when were you in an access
tunnel, so you know how it sounds?"
The
other girls laughed.
Tress wrinkled up her nose. That was a stupid question. Everybody knew her father took all the children on tours through what he called off-limits-to-the-point-of-being-paranoid parts of the ship. The parts where the children couldn't have caused any trouble or done any damage unless they took tools with them. So it wasn't really dangerous for them to be there. Her parents and adopted aunts and uncles had explained, in different ways and with different words, that much of the ship was kept off-limits to the children to avoid wondering if someone had touched something they shouldn't have, whenever trouble did happen.
As Security Chief Decker had growled more than once, during his self-defense lessons and what he called "reminding you of the common sense Enlo gave you, so you don't get as stupid as most politicians" lessons, the Defender had a reputation for a strange kind of luck. If something was going to go wrong, in the worst, most messy and embarrassing way, it would if the Defender's crew was involved. No one really minded, once they were out of the mess. The other part of the Defender's weird luck was that they always came out covered in gold or whatever was most valuable in that part of the universe.
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