The Fixer , #3

He stared at her with venom in his dark eyes. That was unusual. He rarely gave anything away. He said, “I’ll take care of it. Meet me at J9 in three days. I’ll have a report then.”
He turned – hailed a horse-drawn cab and was gone.
She watched him go and then turned to walk back into the building. Something caught her attention; she saw something out of the corner of her eye. “What was that computer generated floating billboard doing there?” she thought, and just as quickly it disappeared. “Damn, I knew we should have gone some place less conspicuous. Now everyone will know we’re on to something.” She swung around and entered the building.
Two days later she, (I guess she should have a name) Emily, made her way to the tube station. It’s not like the tube stations people used thirty years before, but a platform where you caught an aerofloat to the next city or station, or planet for that matter. The building looked like one huge ice-sculpture – clear and glistening. You looked at it and waited for a drop of water to fall off the corner. It never did, but you could be mesmerized by the shimmer for days just waiting for the drop.
As she entered, she turned left toward the escelvator. Picture an escalator with an enclosed stair. She you reached the top, the cubicle slid onto the downward side and someone would enter and ride down. The contraption served the whole station; all ten levels.
Emily rode up to level 5 – the interplanetary level. Here she would take an aerofloat to Terris Minora. The city J9 was the capital of the planet and it was there she would meet the fixer.
As she went through customs, she by passed the internal scanner and this garnered evil looks from the people stranded in the interminable lines. Traveling had never become easy again after the terrorists hit the US on 9/11. She was allowed to carry weapons and she did. She had two pistols and a stun-laser ready to fire if the need should arise, but she certainly didn’t want every blinking Joe to know she was carrying. The jacket she was wearing under her long fur was cut so that she could pull a weapon out at any time. “Always armed – never sorry,” was her motto.
Emily continued down the corridor striding along in brown leather leggings with skin tight brown boots showing off her short, but exquisite figure. Her flight left from platform 5D and she wanted to be the last passenger on board. Safe—never sorry!!
“Please prepare for final boarding of Aerofloat 9 to Terris Minora. Boarding is at gate 5D,” sounded the disembodied voice over the speaker.
“Ah, perfect,” she thought and strode the final feet to the gate. Just before she stepped on the floatway to the craft she heard, “Emily, wait! Emily!”
She could have turned at this point and acknowledged the female voice, but instead she hurried onto the spacecraft as the door quickly rolled own behind her.
“I wonder what that was all about,” she thought. “No one knew I was coming here today, not even Josiah.” (Josiah Adam was the director of the agency that Emily worked for and he only knew things when there was a need, and this wasn’t one of those things.) She decided to worry about it only I and when it presented a difficulty.