“I’ve done it before,” I said, toeing the turf under my boot. I didn’t look at him. Over the last few days I’d come to loathe his smooth vocal delivery and telegenic good looks.
“Sure,” Jann said. “But this time you don’t have anyone trying to shoot that foot off.”
Now I glanced over to him and saw that annoying smirk of his, which was somehow regarded as a winning smile on his home world of Umbria. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Beata Novik, his camerawoman, do her slow perambulation. She was letting that camera cap of hers record everything, the better to be edited down later.
“It’s still early in the day, Jann. There’s still time for someone to get shot,” I said. His smiled faltered slightly. “Now, why don’t you and Beata go bother someone else.”
Kranjic sighed and broke character. “Look, Perry,” he said. “You know that when I go in to edit with this there’s no way you’re not going to look like a jerk. You should just lighten the tone a little, hey? Give me something I can work with. We really want to work the war hero thing, but you’re not giving me much. Come on. You know how this goes. You did advertising back on Earth, for God’s sake.”
I waved him off, irritably. Kranjic looked over to my right at Jane, but didn’t try to get a comment out of her. At some point when I wasn’t looking, he had crossed some sort of line with her and I suspect she ended up scaring the hell out of him. I wondered if there was any video of the moment. “Come on, Beata,” he said. “We need some more footage of Trujillo, anyway.” They wandered off in the direction of the landing craft, looking for one of the more quotable future colony leaders.
Kranjic made me grumpy. This whole trip was making me grumpy. This was ostensibly a research trip for me and Jane and selected colonists, to recon our colony site and to learn more about the planet. What it really was was a press junket with all of us as the stars. It was a waste of time to drag us all to this world just for a photo opportunity, and then drag us all back home. Kranjic was just the most annoying example of the sort of thinking that valued appearance over substance.
I turned to Jane. “I’m not going to miss him when we start this colony.”
“You didn’t read the colonist profiles close enough,” Jane said. “Both he and Beata are part of the Umbrian colonist contingent. He’s coming with us. He and Beata got married to do it because the Umbrians weren’t letting singles colonize.”
“Because married couples are more prepared for colonial life?” I ventured.
“More like couples competing made for better entertainment on that game show of theirs,” Jane said.
“He competed on the show?” I asked.
“He was the emcee,” Jane said. “But rules are rules. It’s entirely a marriage of convenience. Kranjic hasn’t ever had a relationship that’s lasted more than a year, and Beata is a lesbian in any event.”
“I’m terrified you know all this,” I said.
“I was an intelligence officer,” Jane said. “This is easy for me.”
“Anything else I need to know about him?” I asked.
“His plan is to document the first year of the Roanoke colony,” Jane said. “He’s already signed for a weekly show. He’s also got a book deal.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Well, at least now we know how he weaseled his way onto the shuttle.” The first shuttle down to Roanoke was meant to be only the dozen colonist representatives and a few Department of Colonization staffers; there was a near riot when the reporters on the Serra figured out that none of them was invited on the shuttle with the colonists. Kranjic broke the deadlock by offering to put the footage Beata shot into the pool. The rest of the reporters would come down in later shuttles, to do their establishing shots and then to cut to Kranjic’s material. For his sake it was just as well he was going to become a Roanoke colonist; after this some of his more resentful colleagues would be likely to walk him to an air lock.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jane said. “And besides, he was right. This is the first new planet you’ve been on where someone wasn’t trying to kill you. Enjoy it. Come on.” She started walking across the vast expanse of native grasses we had landed on, toward a line of what looked like—but weren’t exactly—trees. For that matter, the native grasses weren’t exactly grasses, either.
Whatever they were precisely, not-grasses and not-trees both, they were a lush and impossible green. The extra-rich atmosphere lay moist and heavy on us. It was late winter in this hemisphere, but where we were on the planet, latitude and prevailing wind patterns conspired to make the temperature pleasantly warm. I was worried what midsummer was going to be like; I expected I was going to be perspiring a lot.
I caught up with Jane, who had stopped to study a tree thing. It didn’t have leaves, it had fur. The fur seemed to be moving; I leaned in closer and saw a colony of tiny creatures bustling about in it.