Thread: Interstellar Flight (Mr. M & missedstations)

Very well, Ilena, he said standing with her. She did not make a move to grab her suitcase, and after a moment of realizing this, he bent to take it in hand. Would you come this way, then, please? He gestured toward the door, allowing her to move past him. The hotel bodyguard took a few steps to follow her he was equivalent in size to the mercenary, and the gaze from behind the face-concealing mask came off as malevolent. Taggart wasn't spooked, though he'd dealt with far worse in much harsher conditions. The bodyguard looked great, with the sculpted triangular body and all the rest of it, but muscles didn't do you much good if you didn't use them properly. And besides, they were on the same side, essentially. Don't worry, chief, Taggart said with a smile, patting the broad chest. I've got the baton. You're relieved. And he hurried to catch up to the striking woman before she reached the automatic doors. Out on the street, he unfolded his HALO and put it on again, like sunglasses in reverse, so that he could pull up the map directions back to his docking arm with a few commands muttered under his breath. Vocalizing, even as a whisper, was faster than using the eye-scan cursor. He glanced a moment at Ms. -- at Ilena, and mused that she probably didn't have a need for a HALO, or if she did, she probably had the implants. Ocular nerve inducers to feed the visual information directly to her brain, same with the auditory nerves, probably had a thought discriminator wired through her cerebellum so all she had to do was think a command and it would be read by the computer. The surgery was all nanobots and CAD direction simple enough, and quick, if you could afford the overhead on a proper neruo-tech professional, and that's something he'd never been able to manage. So he went with the basic model, just like everyone else, and beefed it up inside, where it counted. As he led the way through the dusty streets of the habitat, noting how the locals who noticed them gave them a wider berth now than they had when he had been walking up alone, he offered Ilena his arm, as an old-fashioned gentleman would, and spoke to her in a low voice. As far as my previous work goes, one never wants a job to become... messy. But if it does, you simply have to make the best of it. I'm gratified that my efforts to turn lemons into lemonade haven't been ignored, but in a case such as this one, I'm hopeful we'll avoid entanglements in the first place. I'll give you my best advice on a given situation, ma'am, and of course if you wish to proceed into a dangerous situation anyway, I'll follow and protect you the best I can, but if things get messy, as I've said, then I will not hesitate to pull you out, whether or not you're ready to go. You're hiring me to fly you around, look after your safety, and not get in your way, and your safety will take precedence over everything else. He glanced at her and smiled a little. I'm sure you're not accustomed to that sort of approach, but then again, I'd wager that you're not accustomed to any environment where that situation would even come up. He chuckled a moment. Which is my long-winded way of saying, I'll follow your lead wherever you want to go, but if events get out of control, my priority is keeping you safe, no matter your concerns of the moment. That seems the most professional way to go about it. He took a moment to look around the busy streets. This was a hab in prosperity lots of kids, growing up gangly and tall in the lower-than-standard gravity, lots of businesses, street vendors, boisterousness -- compared to so many places he'd been, it was full of activity, full of life, full of success. If only it weren't also full of dust, he'd be quite pleased to spend a little more time here.