Although Lou Corlin didn’t really feel comfortable about what he was doing, he felt a level of obligation toward Brenda Redmond which wouldn’t let him give up after the easy routes were exhausted. All the same, the USB stick in his pocket had a weight far beyond its mass.
He wasn’t sure if the walk to Brenda’s apartment would’ve been easier or harder if the corridors had been busy. On one hand, being alone made it easier to dwell on his uneasiness. On the other, he didn’t have to worry about his discomfort being so obvious to everyone else that they wondered what he was up to.
When he got through the airlock into Brenda’s module, she was sitting by the far wall, supervising her children while doing something on a laptop. Lou paused, taking the measure of the situation.
Finally Brenda looked up, met his gaze. Yes, she could spare the time to speak to him.
Why did he feel the need to tiptoe across the module lounge? By conscious will he forced himself to walk normally, the light, bouncy stride of someone accustomed to lunar gravity and comfortable with it.
Brenda kept her voice low. “This is a surprise.”
“Sorry, but some of this stuff is rather sensitive. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you want to talk about in a phone call or a text.”
Yes, Brenda understood. “Give me a minute to get the kids to bed.”
Lou took a seat while Brenda led her children back to their apartment. He’d been here long enough to remember when Brenda was very much the teenage daughter of the Chief Engineer, still not very sure about the idea of being whisked away from her high-school friends in Houston for life up here on the High Frontier.
But then we’ve all done a lot of fast growing up these past few years. If things had gone normally, we’d just be starting to assume adult roles by now. And even when you’re taking an engineering degree and doing ROTC, college isn’t quite the same as actually being out in the working world.
And then Brenda was back, taking a seat close enough they could keep their voices low enough that the ventilation fans would mask their voices, but not so close that anyone running the video tapes would think they were cooking up a fling — and in a public area, anyone with suitable authority could access them. “So what is it?”
“You know what I mean when I talk about darkboards?”
Definite recognition in her expression, mixed with a little alarm. “Aren’t they dangerous?”
“They can be, if you’re not careful. Some of them are a good way to pick up a nasty virus on your computer. But they can also be a good place to find information the government doesn’t want people knowing. And IT does have the tools to sequester data while you’re making sure that it’s clean.”
He was glad he’d taken the opportunity to get the USB stick out of his pocket while he was waiting. There was a trick to pulling out something innocuous at the same time, then palming what you didn’t want seen. Now he just had to pass it to Brenda without being obvious.
She must’ve had classmates who passed notes in class, because she handled it with the deftness of an expert. Lou had never pegged her as someone who’d get into that sort of thing. Given her dour father, he would’ve expected her to be the sort of straight-arrow everyone always thought his geneset was.
Now that the hand-off was done, he couldn’t very well take off right away. Better to carry on a little small talk, keeping their voices down as if it were just out of consideration for the hour. Once they’d made this meeting completely unremarkable, he could head off to his own quarters for the night.