“He didn’t tell you where he is?”
He shrugs again. “Do I look like an admiral?”
Frustrated, I leave the bridge and head for the captain’s cabin. When I hit the intercom buzzer at the door, he doesn’t respond.
I sincerely doubt he’s in there and ignoring me.
But where the frack is he?
He’s not in the mess or galley, and he’s not in Engineering. The active crew quarters and common areas on our ship aren’t that large, so I start working my way through all the spaces where he might be.
No sign of him.
This isreallydamned fishy.
Sure, I could page him, but now my instincts are screaming at me something’sreallyoff, and that paging him will only make it worse.
Any time in my life I’ve ignored this instinct, bad things almost happened to me.
Last time, I nearly ended a jump inside an unplotted asteroid field. Fortunately, I adjusted at the last minute before coming out of the jump, and the captain only screamed at me for about thirty seconds for costing us a week of sub-light travel when the very rattled helmsman informed the captain that I’d just saved our lives.
Needless to say, I left that ship immediately upon reaching port, despite the captain begging me to stay, apologizing, and offering to let me fuck him anytime and as much as I wanted.
No, thank you. If you don’t trust me, no amount of me fucking you is going to make things right again.
Especially after giving me a public ass-reaming as thanks for saving our fucking lives. I have my damn pride. Doesn’t matter that he immediately apologized to me in front of the crew, that behavior was uncalled for.
Especially when we still made our deadline with plenty of time to spare.
I return to my quarters and pull up my console again. Because of what I do, in my quarters I have full duplicate consoles for all the ship’s systems, including sensors, life support, all of that. Our crew doesn’t have ID chips like on military vessels, so I can’t tell who exactly is who, just where people are on board.
I start to scan the vessel and realize there’s not one, but two personnel out at the far end of the cargo area, in one of the auxiliary life pods.
What the…
Upon conducting another head count, I realize we have one more person aboard than our official manifest reads.
That’s…
Shit.
That’shighlyillegal, for starters. It’s also a blatant violation of Maxim Colonies regs. All passengersmustbe declared on the vessel’s official manifest.
That’s when I notice something else that takes me aback. Not only are there two personnel in the life pod, there are other life forms where there shouldn’t be any.
Smaller life forms.
Plus, just to make things even more weird, the captain has engaged a command lock-out of life support systems in the cargo hold. It’s pressurized, temperature-controlled, and contains a sufficient ratio of oxygen to nitrogen, and other gasses, to support the life forms on this vessel.
Air. It’s fuckingair. Climate-controlled air.
Warm,breathableair, when usually the cargo hold is chilled and depressurized to kill off any parasites or other kinds of bacterial life forms that aren’t supposed to be transported out of their home planetary system without proper permitting and containment and quarantine procedures being instituted. It also helps prevent mold or mildew from forming, in case there’s any moisture in there, and it helps ease the burden on the ship’s scrubber system when we’re not close to solar power sources to run it.
That’s SOP.
We’re acargofreighter that was purpose-built to haul mining ore and other large quantities of passive cargo. We aren’t equipped for transporting live animals. We don’t have any quarantine pods on board, either, to safely transport live animals. We don’t even have a crew mascot, like a dog or cat or other small animal, the way some vessels do.
What the unholyfrackis going on, then?
