Destination: Faith

"Um, OK," I tell her. Quite frankly, until that day I hadn't known a damn thing about the relations between the Keepers and the Seekers. All those religious nuts were pretty much the same to me. "I don't know if you want me to bring you there, though. I mean, unless I'm trying to convert to their religion, which would be a neat trick considering I can't even understand it, they'd pretty much skin me alive."

Aresia smiled mysteriously, the kind of smile that made me excited and creeped out at the same time. "Don't worry," she said. "It's not them that you should fear." This certainly was exciting, I'll admit that, I thought, but thank any appliciable gods that this was going to be over soon.

Anyway, to go to Faith, we'd have to charter a speeder. Usually, that would take a long, long time. Random Field doesn't have many speeder rental places, as no one in their right minds would want to go to anywhere else in this Godforsaken mudball. Since there's not very much demand, the people who run these places can charge as much as they want. And they're all run by dishonest thieving bastards who'd as soon eat their own children as lose one demicredit. (Of course, some of them are Quor, who do eat their own children.) Luckily, I had Aresia on my side. She was able to use her whacked-out mind voodoo and got a speeder for free. I'd bet she could have gotten the guy who ran that place to pay her to take it if she wanted. Of course, she made him forget what he looked like, in case any of the Imps started nosing around here.

So a few hours later, here we were, driving through the ugly, scraggly forest on the edges of Random Field, going to a town by religious fanatics out in the sticks with a Keeper trying to carry out a "diplomatic mission" that the Imps had blockaded the entire planet to stop. Yeah. At first we just kept to ourselves, lost in thought. Aresia was thinking about whatever stuff she's been thinking about all this time when she wasn't ordering me around. I was mainly trying to figure out how I could possibly get out of this mess alive. There didn't look like many options. Still, I'd made it through worse--or at leas that's what I thought at the time.

After a while, Aresia turned to me, turned on her smile, and asked "What led you into this, anyway?"

"What?" I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. "I'm just a bit curious. What led you to become a smuggler? I always think it's worthwhile to understand different kinds of people and hear their stories."

I smirked. "Look, I'm not telling anything about my life to someone who I'm not even going to remember tomorrow. How about I tell you if you tell me how a woman ended up in the Keepers and why she's running around on the Rim with something in her briefcase that the Imps are willing to kill for, heading for a Seeker settlement in the middle of nowhere?"

Her smile broadened. "Fair enough," she said.

1. By now, we were nearing the outskirts of Faith.

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