Edge of Infinity Read Online Free Page B

she really feels it. Some people are like that.
    Dubonnet gets an answer within a few minutes. It’s a form message in legalese but this gist is, We heard you the first time, go now and sin no more.
    “They all can’t be drunk,” Fred says. “Can they?”
    “Can’t they?” says Sheerluck. “You guys have crewed with me long enough to know how fortune smiles on me and mine.”
    “Spoken like a member of the Church of The Four-Leaf Horseshoe,” Glynis says.
    Fred perks right up. “Is that that new casino on Europa?” he asks. Fred loves casinos. Not gambling, just casinos. The jellie offers to look it up for him.
    “Synchronicity is a real thing, it’s got math, ” Sheerluck is saying. Her colour’s starting to get a little bright; so is Glynis’s. I’d rather they don’t give each other ruby-red hell while we’re all still in the jellie. “And the dictionary definition of serendipity is, ‘Chance favours the prepared mind.’”
    “ I’m prepared to go home and log out, who’s prepared to join me?” Dubonnet says before Glynis can sneer openly. I like Glynis, vinegar and all, but sometimes I think she should have been a crab instead of an octopus.
     
     
    O UR PRIVATE QUARTERS are supposed to have no surveillance except for the standard safety monitoring.
    Yeah, we don’t believe that for a nano-second. But if JovOp ever got caught in the act, the unions would eat them alive and poop out the bones to fertilise Europa’s germ farms. So either they’re even better at it than any of us can imagine, or they’re taking a calculated risk. Most sushi claim to believe the former; I’m in the latter camp. I mean, they watch us so much already, they’ve gotta want to look at something else for a change.
    We share the typical octo-crew quarters – eight rooms around a large common area. When Fry was with us, we curtained off part of it for her, but somehow she was always spilling out of it. Her stuff, I mean – we’d find underwear bobbing around in the lavabo, shoes orbiting a lamp (good thing she only needed two), live-paper flapping around the room in the air currents. All the time she’d spent out here and she still couldn’t get the hang of housekeeping in zero gee. It’s the sort of thing that stops being cute pretty quickly when you’ve got full occupancy, plus one. I could tell she was trying, but eventually we had to face the truth: much as we loved her, our resident girl-thing was a slob.
    I thought that was gonna be a problem, but she wasn’t even gone a day before it felt like there was something missing. I’d look around expecting to see some item of clothing or jewellery cruising past, the latest escapee from one of her not-terribly-secure reticules.
     
     
    “S O WHO WANTS to bet that Fry goes octo?” Splat says when we get home.
    “Who’d want to bet she doesn’t?” replies Sheerluck.
    “Not me,” says Glynis, so sour I can feel it in my crop. I’m thinking she’s going to start again with the crab act, pinch, pinch, pinch, but she doesn’t. Instead, she air-swims down to the grotto, sticks to the wall with two arms and folds the rest up so she’s completely hidden. She misses our girl-thing and doesn’t want to talk at the moment, but she also doesn’t want to be completely alone, either. It’s an octo thing – sometimes we want to be alone but not necessarily by ourselves.
    Sheerluck joins me at the fridge and asks, “What do you think? Octo?”
    “I dunno,” I say, and I honestly don’t. It never occurred to me to wonder, but I’m not sure if that’s because I took it for granted she would. I grab a bag of kribble.
    Aunt Chovie notices and gives me those big serious eyes. “You can’t just live on crunchy krill, Arkae.”
    “I’ve got a craving,” I tell her.
    “Me, too,” says Bait. He tries to reach around from behind me and I knot him.
    “Message from Dove,” says Dubonnet just before we start wrestling and puts it on the big