Derek monitors transmissions

Back at Tiana’s suite, Derek was keeping himself busy, console on his lap, searching the databanks from flower shops near Tiana’s home back on Earth in an effort to try and figure out if she had a favorite flower.

Real macho, Derek. You’re pussy-whipped by a woman who doesn’t even know you exist. Literally.

Even though he had been cooped up in Tiana’s suite pretending to be a fixture, waiting on her hand and foot, the time had just flown by. If time does indeed fly when you are having fun, then he must have been having a blast. And why wouldn’t he be enjoying himself? Tiana was incredible. She was beautiful, smart, relaxed and totally transparent in her interactions with him. With Tiana, what he saw is what he got. Even though she thought he was a virtual reality character she was always kind to him. It was the little things she did, such as waiting for him to sit down with her before beginning to eat a meal. She was never derogatory in her interactions with him even though, to her, he was no more than a computer program. Everything from the way she giggled to the way she looked at him first thing in the morning when he performed his ‘wake-up call’ duties for her hinted of deeper feelings than those between a user and a computer program.

At the next port of call, Arcadia 10, he would need to make good on his escape. Even if he was caught, the Galactic Alliance had no jurisdiction there, for Arcadia 10 remained independent and had no extradition treaties with other worlds. In essence, it was a haven for those who dabbled in questionable activities. With his intelligence and skillset he ought to be able to make a good living and a fresh start there.

He would miss this adorable vision of beauty and femininity. He couldn’t get involved with her even if he wanted to, which, after his last experience with an affair of the heart, he certainly didn’t. Not with any woman. In the meantime, though, she sure felt right, but he would have to continue to hold his lust back. He would not break her heart any more than he would allow her to break his, but the niggling fear of losing her versus recapture surfaced to shake his resolve.

Damn, network traffic between here and Earth sure is slow today, he thought.

Derek kept losing his signal regardless of any adjustments he made. It was almost as if someone else was trying to hide a signal within the ship’s com link into the galactic-net. One hidden signal didn’t degrade the speed of the network much, but two, by their very stealth nature, would certainly cause this type of delay.

The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. Derek’s fingers moved like lighting across the console’s keyboard entering a decoding routine to work in conjunction with the encryption routine he had written years earlier for his company’s holographic chambers. He would use both routines in tandem to reverse-engineer and decipher the other transmission competing with his for resources, assuming there was one. If someone was getting in the way of his synthesizing flowers for Tiana, he was going to find out who it was and put them out of commission.

“Computer, execute program and play results.”

As the computer followed his instructions, Derek heard a mechanically scrambled voice transmit over the room’s sound system. Best as he could tell, at least one of the parties in the conversation was on the starship.

“… arrived from the planet. It’s butt-cold down there. Do you have her room number?”

“Yes, she is in room 1005, one of the luxury suites,” a second mechanically scrambled voice responded/ “Remember, it must look like an accident. I cannot risk the law pointing a finger at me.”

“Do not insult me by telling me how to do my job, human. I’ve been doing it since before you were born. Scorpio, out.”

As the conversation ended, Derek’s heart sank. Room 1005 was the very one he was sitting in. Tiana’s room. What was Tiana involved in that someone had hired an assassin to do away with her? Was she a felon? Who was she, really? How stupid could he be to once more fall for a woman with criminal involvements?

Nice girls don’t have contracts taken out on their lives.

What was he to do? He couldn’t judge her guilty without a lot more information. He knew what that felt like. Who was he kidding? Even if she was some kind of criminal, he couldn’t let this Scorpio person kill her. “With information comes responsibility,” he remembered his father instructing him during his teen years. Derek still missed him. By keeping what he had heard to himself and doing nothing, he would be signing her death warrant. His plan was to sneak off the ship on Arcadia 10, and disappear amongst its masses.

But he couldn’t just leave her at the mercy of a killer. Darn nuisance! Darn female!

Escaping into the population of Arcadia 10 was now out of the question. His plans would need to change. The first priority now was to protect Tiana. He would need to find out more about her background and would need to devise a plan for staying close to her after the ship landed on Magellan. He would also need a contingency plan in case he was recaptured. In true Derek form, his multitasking brain began working out all three plans as he established another communication channel to Earth. The flowers would need to wait. He would hack into her Legal-Bot and gather a few facts.