CHAPTER 3
Walking the halls of the Savannah Runner, Tarkos followed instructions from the vast starship’s deeply impersonal computer. Neelee AIs, he had reliably found, were always very prim about talking with his implants, and usually gave only the minimal information in reply, quite the opposite of the AIs on Kirt or Bright ships. That worked out fine for Tarkos: he neither liked nor trusted AIs. The less they talked to him the better. He requested a map to take him from the meeting room to the starsleeve, and instead the Savannah Runner’s mind gave him just a few bare lines that sprang up in his vision. These minimal directions served him well enough, and without them he would have been helplessly lost in the ship’s fractal, forking hallways.
The map guided him down one transluc
